The Site Bank Charges Reclaimed

Bank Charges Reclaimed is a headline that could go across some financial papers, as more and more people are claiming back unfair bank charges, Bank Charges reclaimed include ones from many banks and building societies. To reclaim is to bring a word back to a more acceptable course. This can have wider implications in the fields of discourse, and is often described in terms of personal or socio-political empowerment. To reclaim something is the political process and strategy consisting in re-evaluating and re-appropriating terms that in the dominant culture are used to oppress minorities. Similar to the ' gay pride ' movement, this process differs because of its provocative elements: derogatory terms come to acquire positive meaning in the tight circle of the literati, while they keep their negative connotations outside of it. Michel Foucault discusses this idea as a 'reverse discourse' in his History of Sexuality: Volume I. The use of these terms by people who are not members of that group tends to remain viewed as strongly derogatory, with one notable exception being "military brat" (but only when "brat" is prefixed by "military" or a specific branch of military service). One of the older examples of successful reclaiming is the term "Jesuit" to refer to members of the Society of Jesus: originally a derogatory term referring to people who too readily invoked the name of Jesus, over time members of the Society adopted the term for themselves and the word came to refer exclusively to them, and only in a positive or neutral sense.