Suchergebnisse

Cis feminist theorists sometimes employ rhetorical moves to claim innocence while abdicating responsibility for engaging with trans scholarship and theory as well as structural transmisogyny. I suggest that it is helpful to understand this phenomenon using a conception of cis feminist moves to innocence. These rhetorical moves enable cisgender feminists to falsely position their failure to engage with both trans scholarship and structures of transmisogyny as epistemically virtuous.

AbstractStructural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This article examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Miranda Fricker's discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration (Fricker 2007). Fricker's work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color's epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker's whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism.