Professors Chris Hutton and Don Kulick will present the chapters they have written for a book of short essays on language, politics and power titled Let’s Stop Talking Bollocks About....

Chris will talk about definition and the legal and social controversies surrounding authority over meaning. Future cultural historians will no doubt remark on the contemporary phase of ‘gotcha’ questioning in western political life, when politicians and activists are asked to define the word woman (though rarely, if at all, the word man), or are required to explain how many sexes or genders there are. One notable feature of these controversies is the novel alignment between conservatives and so-called gender-critical feminists. A second is the resort to law, making judges the uncomfortable arbiters of contentious public meanings, as in the recent UK Supreme Court decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v the Scottish Ministers (2025).The question is: can disputes about meaning be settled by appeals to definition?

Don will discuss the lust for naming among asexuals, which is endlessly generative and which produces identity labels like myrsexual, which asexuals.net explains as “Someone who...is on the asexual spectrum but might feel confused as to where exactly as they can experience multiple asexual identities at once. They can also rapidly fluctuate”. Or aegosexual, “also (previously) known as autochorissexual. This label describes people on the asexual spectrum who have a disconnection between themself and the subject of arousal”. What does the invention and proliferation of such labels mean? What do they tell us about how identity is being articulated at the current moment, the end of the 2020s? 

Chris Hutton is Chair Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He holds a BA in Modern Languages (1980), a DPhil in General Linguistics from the University of Oxford (1988), an MA in Linguistics and Yiddish Studies from Columbia University, New York (1985), and an LLB from Manchester Metropolitan University (2008). He was Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin from 1987-1989 before moving to Hong Kong. His research is concerned with the politics of language and linguistics, particularly in the context of law, and the history of Western linguistics in its relationship with race theory. His most recent book is The People that Never Were (OUP, 2025).

Don Kulick is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Visiting Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His most recent books are two co-edited anthologies: Changing Vulnerability (with Michel Naepels, School of Advanced Research Press, 2026) and Clashing Vulnerabilities: Disability and Conflict (with Simo Vehmas, Routledge, 2026). He is currently directing a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant titled “Out of Sight”, on people who are made to be, or who want to be, invisible.