Recently, there has been an explosion of legislation, introduced by the previous Labour Government after 1997, designed to curb ‘hate crime’. This article takes the most recent instance of incitement to hatred on grounds of sexual orientation as its starting point. I discuss the legislation in the context of debates around free speech and artistic autonomy. Making use of post-stucturalist, psychoanalytic and discourse theories I argue that there are conceptual and practical difficulties attached to the regulation of hate speech if analysed through a politics of subversive repetition. I conclude that a better approach is to think about language as reciprocal communication and to develop a politics of sustained engagement with society that ultimately adopts a more voluntary approach to changing popular uses of language.
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