A cautionary tale: On limiting epistemic oppression

Frontiers

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 24-47

  Dotson, Kristie ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84867346078     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: 15360334     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2012.0008     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Audre Lorde, "To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman," in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton, 2000), 360.
2. These lines are reprinted here by permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
3. This definition of epistemic exclusion relies heavily on Irene Omolola's use of the term. See Irene Omolola Adadevoh, "Women's Epistemic Exclusion and the Question of Equitable and Sustainable Educational Empowerment," Philica (2011): 1-9 (http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=227).
4. For a similar theory of epistemic oppression see Miranda Fricker, "Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege," Canadian Jounral of Philosophy 25 (1998): 191-209.
5. This definition is influenced by Cynthia Townley's definition of agency. See Cynthia Townley, "Trust and the Curse of Cassandra (an Exploration of the Value of Trust)," Philosophy and the Contemporary World 10, no. 2 (2003): 109-10.
6. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
7. Rae Langton, "Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification," in The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129.
8. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 1.
9. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 35.
10. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 42.
11. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 242n5 (emphasis added).
12. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 44-51.
13. Williams is not the only scholar to identify an "inverted epistemology" that follows from delusions of neutrality. See also Charles W. Mills, "'Ideal Theory' as Ideology," Hypatia 20, no. 3 (2005): 165-84.
14. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
15. Charles W. Mills, "White Ignorance," in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).
16. For "knowing and not wanting to know" see Nancy Tuana, "The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance," Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 10.
17. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 44.
18. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 50-51.
19. Jean M. Bartunek and Michael K. Moch, "First-Order, Second-Order, and Third-Order Change and Organization Development Interventions: A Cognitive Approach," Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 23, no. 4 (1987): 487.
20. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 91-98.
21. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 97.
22. Addressing testimonial injustice need not be conceived solely according to individual changes or, in Fricker's case, individual virtues. As Rae Langton suggests in her review of Epistemic Injustice, broad structural changes may be required to address testimonial injustice. For example, the ways tests are administered and graded may need to be changed as a way to train a testimonial virtue, and this, for Langton, is a structural change, not an individualistic one.
23. See Rae Langton, "Review of Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing," Hypatia 25, no. 2 (2010): 463.
24. Regardless of whether one locates necessary corrective actions at the individual or the structural level, the kind of changes needed are first-level changes since the value of credibility is not challenged.
25. Kate Walsh, "Interpreting the Impact of Culture on Structure," Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 40, no. 3 (2004): 306.
26. Bartunek and Moch, "First-Order," 484.
27. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 155.
28. Gaile Pohlhaus, "Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermaneutical Ignorance," Hypatia (2011): 4.
29. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 153 (emphasis in original).
30. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 155 (emphasis in original).
31. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Poltiics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).
32. For similar discussions see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
33. Hazel Carby, "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood," in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. The Centre for Contemprary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982).
34. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights.
35. Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1990), qtd. in Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 150.
36. Brownmiller, In Our Time, qtd. in Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 150.
37. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 150-51.
38. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 151.
39. In outlining hermeneutical resources, Fricker may appear to be assuming that only one prevailing set of hermeneutical resources exists for social discernment. This assumption, of course, is false. Much has been made of alternative epistemologies and counterdiscourses, which serve to produce differing hermeneutical resources. However, the existence of alternative hermeneutical resources does not in itself challenge Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice. What is required for hermeneutical injustice is a lacuna caused by hermeneutical marginalization within the hermeneutical resources upon which one relies. To establish hermeneutical injustice, one need only point to lacunas in operative hermeneutical resources that result from marginalization, regardless of how many sets of collective hermeneutical resources are in operation. I return to this point that there exist multiple sets of hermeneutical resources. In outlining contributory injustice, I illustrate a form of epistemic injustice that is caused by the misuse of a given set of hermeneutical resources.
40. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 7.
41. Langton, "Review," 460, 63.
42. Bartunek and Moch, "First-Order," 486.
43. Bartunek and Moch, "First-Order," 485.
44. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 169-75.
45. Langton, "Review," 463.
46. For good recent essays making this point see Rebecca Mason, "Two Kinds of Unknowing," Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011).
47. Pohlhaus, "Relational Knowing."
48. See also Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
49. Hortense Spillers, "Interstises: A Small Drama of Words," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Sexuality, ed. Carol Vance (Boston: Routlegde, 1984), 84.
50. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 4.
51. Maria Lugones, "Multiculturalism and Publicity," Hypatia 15, no. 5 (2000): 175-78.
52. For a now-classic essay illustrating this point see, among others, Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
53. Kristie Dotson, "Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing," Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 248.
54. Pohlhaus, "Relational Knowing, 15."
55. Barbara Smith, "Reply to Deborah Chay," New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993): 654-55.
56. Barbara Smith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," in Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, ed. Jacqueline Bobo (Malden: Blackwell 2001).
57. Barbara Smith, "Truth That Never Hurts: Black Lesbians in Fiction in the 1980s," in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne Braxton and Andree McLaughlin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
58. Farah Jasmine Griffin, "That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 2 (2007): 492.
59. Deborah G. Chay, "Rereading Barbara Smith: Black Feminist Criticism and the Category of Experience," New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993): 648-49.
60. Chay, "Rereading Barbara Smith," 648-49.
61. Smith, "Reply to Deborah Chay," 653.
62. Smith, "Reply to Deborah Chay," 653.
63. Smith, "Reply to Deborah Chay," 654-56.
64. Audre Lorde, "Foreword," in Braxton and McLaughlin, Wild Women in the Whirlwind, xi.
65. It is important to note that Chay, in her response to Smith, identifies part of Smith's rejection of her analysis. She makes it clear that it was never her intention to devalue Smith's work. Chay writes, "Barbara Smith's work remains valuable for many of us who are concerned with questions of race, gender, and power in the 1990s."
66. See Deborah G. Chay, "Deborah Chay's Reply," New Literary History 24, no. 3 (1993): 656.
67. Chay, "Rereading Barbara Smith," 656.
68. I have only established the accusation of contributory injustice, not the existence of it in Chay's essay. I use the Smith/Chay exchange here not to personally accuse Chay of perpetuating contributory injustice, but to offer an example that highlights the nature of contributory injustice.
69. Bartunek and Moch, "First-Order," 486, 88.
70. Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3-19.
71. Mariana Ortega, who identifies a similar phenomenon to contributory injustice in her article "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant," advocates for "world-traveling" to address distortions of and disregard for the lives and work of women of color work by lovingly knowingly ignorant white feminist scholars.
72. See Mariana Ortega, "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color," Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 69.
73. Ortega, "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant," 69.
74. Jean M. Bartunek and Michael K. Moch, "Third-Order Organizational Change and the Western Mystical Tradition," Journal of Organizational Change Management 7, no. 1 (1994): 27-28.
75. For other articles that advocate for change that requires more than dialogic engagement, see Maria Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, "Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for 'the Woman's Voice,'" Women's Studies International Forum 6, no. 6 (1983): 573-81.
76. Ortega, "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant".
77. Pohlhaus, "Relational Knowing".
78. Lugones, "Playfulness."
79. Both Rae Langton and Ishani Maitra make the point that testimonial and hermeneutical injustice cannot be easily separated according to individual and structural elements, but rather require a consideration of structural and individual concerns.
80. See Ishani Maitra, "The Nature of Epistemic Injustice," Philosophical Books 51, no. 4 (2010).
81. Langton, "Review."
82. Some might argue that in the Chay/Smith exchange neither interlocutor actually gives the appropriate amount of credibility to the other and that neither is genuinely pursuing a conceptual revolution, but, rather, that both are in the throes of "boomerang perception." For positions that imply this critique see Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
83. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 12.
84. This interpretation is entirely likely, but it does not remove the primary insight here. Addressing epistemic oppression, in all of its forms, is extraordinarily difficult.
85. Maitra, "Nature of Epistemic Injustice," 202.
86. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 41-42.
87. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 42-43.
88. Maitra, "Nature of Epistemic Injustice," 203.
89. This interpretation of Fricker's account of epistemic bad luck is only possible due to the vagueness that surrounds the concept in her book. It is unclear what an "innocent error" amounts to, and it is equally unclear to what "evidence fits the judgment" refers.
90. See Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 41-43.
91. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 152.
92. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 152.
93. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 152.
94. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 152.
95. Nancy Tuana gives examples of hermeneutical lacunas concerning medical conditions of women due to hermeneutical marginalization.
96. See Tuana, "Speculum of Ignorance".
97. Nancy Tuana, "Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance," Hypatia 19, no. 1 (2004).
98. Pohlhaus, "Relational Knowing."
99. For the sake of this paper I grant Fricker the possibility that hermeneutical marginalization is always historical, though I am suspicious of this criterion.
100. It is important to note that I am not advocating that Fricker's account will extend to all sets of hermeneutical resources and somehow taint them all. Such a position is absurd and puts far more importance than is reasonable on the effect of philosophical texts. Fricker's account of epistemic injustice is being offered as an example, whereas if her text were to be allowed to affect a set of collective hermeneutical resources, it would have the effect of obscuring the existence of contributory injustice and would, hence, perpetrate epistemic oppression.
101. Lorde, "To the Poet," 360.