A few days ago, social media content creator Ángel Gaitán declared on television and prime time: “I am a facha.” He proudly claimed the term, explaining that this was the case if being fascist means “being normal, being Spanish, loving your country, working, doing things for others (…) and I believe that there is a lot more fascists than we thought.” In Spain, what is happening is that we have not used the right word.” That is, it seems that Gaitán and other Spaniards, before their appearance on television, thought that “being facha” was something they should not boast about in certain contexts, but that, after the re-signification of the term proposed by himself, they could begin to raise the flag with the same pride with which he showed the Spanish flag during his speech at prime time. The constitutional question, by the way, which would have been different from the chicken question. This speech left me stunned, confused and almost sad. Does it occur to anyone that in Germany, on a Sunday evening after a natural disaster, a successful person on social media goes on television saying that yes, he is a Nazi, and that Is it a great honor?
Until then, the reappropriation of the terms I knew was what had been done, for example, by African-Americans within Hip-Hop culture at the end of the 20th century with the term Negro (“black”), used disparagingly by European slavers towards African slaves almost from the beginning of human trade across the Atlantic, in the 16th century, through white Americans past and present with religious beliefs supremacists and racists. The idea of the resignification of derogatory epithets by oppressed groups is simple: if I am called a nigger to insult me, I appropriate the term by calling me a nigger and thus it loses its intention to harm me . A closer example of re-appropriating an adjective initially used to offend is what homosexuals have done in our country with the term “faggot” or “dyke.”
