Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-dkgms Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-14T12:22:48.823Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

White Feminist Gaslighting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2020

Nora Berenstain
Nora Berenstain*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program, University of Tennessee, 801 McClung Tower, Knoxville, Tennessee37996
*
Corresponding Author. nberenst@utk.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Structural 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Fall 2020 , pp. 733 - 758
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arvin, Maile, Tuck, Eve, and Morrill, Angie. 2013. Decolonizing feminism: Challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Feminist Formations 25 (1): 8–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Backhouse, Constance. 2012. Sexual harassment: A feminist phrase that transformed the workplace. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 24 (2): 275–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Carrie. 2004. Race, class, and sexual harassment in the 1970s. Feminist Studies 30 (1): 7–27.Google Scholar
Baker, Carrie. 2007. The women's movement against sexual harassment. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bobo, Kimberly. 2010. Wage theft in America: Why millions of working Americans are not getting paid—and what we can do about it. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Brown, DeNeen L. 2017. She said her boss raped her in a bank vault. Her sexual harassment would make legal history. Washington Post, October 13.Google Scholar
Brown, Tyson. 2012. The intersection and accumulation of racial and gender inequality: Black women's wealth trajectories. Review of Black Political Economy 39 (2): 239–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against our will: Men, women, and rape. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Brownmiller, Susan. 1999. In our time: Memoir of a revolution. New York: Dial Press.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel 1982. 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 Contemporary Cultural Studies. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Chang, Mariko Lin. 2010. Shortchanged: Why women have less wealth and what can be done about it. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367690.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, Vera Liang. 2018. Meet the farmworkers leading the #MeToo fight for workers everywhere. Civil Eats, May 21. https://civileats.com/2018/05/21/meet-the-farmworkers-leading-the-metoo-fight-for-workers-everywhere/Google Scholar
Cole, J. 2018. Service providers’ perspectives on sex trafficking of male minors: Comparing background and trafficking situations of male and female victims. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 35 (4): 423–33.10.1007/s10560-018-0530-zCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2005. Black sexual politics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. 2013. When your brown body is a white wonderland. http://tressiemc.com/2013/08/27/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1994. The marginalization of sexual violence against Black women. NCASA Journal, a publication of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault 2 (1): 1–15.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela. 1983. Women, race, and class. Random House: New York.Google Scholar
Davis, Angelique, and Ernst, Rose. 2019. Racial gaslighting. Politics, Groups, and Identities 7 (9): 761–74 https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2017.1403934.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Emmalon. 2018. On epistemic appropriation. Ethics 128 (4): 702–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2011. Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia 26 (2): 236–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2012. A cautionary tale: On limiting epistemic oppression. Frontiers 33 (1): 24–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2014. Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression. Social Epistemology 28 (2): 115-138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, Kristie. 2019. On the costs of socially relevant philosophy papers: A reflection. Journal of Social Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fair Food Program. 2017. Fair food annual report. https://www.fairfoodprogram.org.Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2006. Powerlessness and social interpretation. Episteme 3 (1-2): 99–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2016. Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance. In The epistemic dimensions of ignorance, eds. Peels, Rik and Blaauw, Martijn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Steven. 2009. Low-wage workers are often cheated, study says. New York Times, September 1.Google Scholar
Gwaltney, John Langston. 1993. Drylongso: A self-portrait of Black America. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Human Rights Watch. 2012. Cultivating fear: The vulnerability of immigrant farmworkers in the US to sexual violence and sexual harassment. https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/05/15/cultivating-fear/vulnerability-immigrant-farmworkers-us-sexual-violence-and-sexual .Google Scholar
King, Deborah. 1988. Multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness: The context of a Black feminist ideology. Signs 14 (1): 42–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipsitz, Raina. 2017. Sexual harassment law was shaped by the battles of Black women. The Nation, October.Google Scholar
Lockhart, P. R. 2017. Women of color in low-wage jobs are being overlooked in the #MeToo moment. Vox, December. https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/19/16620918/sexual-harassment-low-wages-minority-women.Google Scholar
Mackinnon, Catherine. 1979. Sexual harassment of working women: A case of sex discrimination. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Mason, Rebecca. 2011. Two kinds of unknowing. Hypatia 26 (2): 294–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
May, Vivian M. 2014. “Speaking into the void”? Intersectionality critiques and epistemic backlash. Hypatia 29 (1): 94–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKinnon, Rachel. 2017. Allies behaving badly: Gaslighting as epistemic injustice. In Routledge handbook on epistemic injustice, eds. Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr., Kidd, Ian James, and Medina, José. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Medina, José. 2013. Epistemologies of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, Charles. 2007. White ignorance. In Race and epistemologies of ignorance, ed. Sullivan, Shannon and Tuana, Nancy. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra. 1988. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review 30 (Autumn): 61–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ortega, Mariana. 2006. On being lovingly, knowingly ignorant: White feminism and women of color. Hypatia 21 (3): 56–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parkinson, Justin. 2016. The Significance of Sarah Baartman. BBC News Magazine, Jan 7. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35240987.Google Scholar
Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. 2012. Relational knowing and epistemic injustice: Toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance. Hypatia 27 (4): 715–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr. 2017. Gaslighting, echoing, and gathering; or why collective epistemic resistance is not a “witch hunt.” Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice Conference. Claremont McKenna College, September 23.Google Scholar
Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black body. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Ruíz, Elena Flores. 2012. Theorizing multiple oppressions through colonial history: Cultural alterity and Latin American feminisms. APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 11 (2): 5–9.Google Scholar
Ruíz, Elena Flores. 2014. Musing: Spectral phenomenologies: Dwelling poetically in professional philosophy. Hypatia 29 (1): 196–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruíz, Elena Flores, 2019a. The secret life of violence. In Frantz Fanon and emancipatory social theory, ed. Byrd, Dustin. Boston: Brill Press.Google Scholar
Ruíz, Elena Flores. 2019b. Between hermeneutic violence and alphabets of survival. In Theories of the flesh: Latinx and Latin American feminisms, transformation, and resistance, ed. Pitts, Andrea, Ortega, Mariana, and Medina, José. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ruíz, Elena Flores. 2020. Cultural gaslighting. Hypatia 35 (4): https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.33CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruíz, Elena Flores. Unpublished. Structural violence.Google Scholar
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. 1999. Black Venus: Sexualized savages, primal fears, and primitive narratives in French. Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spillers, Hortense. 1984. Interstices: A small drama of words. In Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality, ed. S, Carole. Vance. Boston: Routledge.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. 2016. We aren't here to learn what we already know. Avidly: A channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 13. http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/13/we-arent-here-to-learn-what-we-know-we-already-know/.Google Scholar
Tremain, Shelley. 2016. Knowing disability, differently. In The routledge handbook on epistemic injustice, ed. Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., and Pohlhaus, G. Jr. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tremain, Shelley. 2017. Foucault and feminist philosophy of disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waugh, Irma Morales. 2010. Examining the sexual harassment experiences of Mexican immigrant farmworking women. Violence against Women 16 (3): 237–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1900. Lynch law in America. In Words of fire: An anthology of African-American feminist thought, ed. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Wohl, Jessica. 2014. Survey: Almost 90% of fast-food workers allege wage theft. Chicago Tribune, April 1.Google Scholar
Young, Cate. 2014. This is what I mean when I say “white feminism.” January 10. https://www.cate-young.com/battymamzelle/2014/01/This-Is-What-I-Mean-When-I-Say-White-Feminism.html.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Jean. 2016. The agonizing collision of love and slavery. Npr.org, April 16. http://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/471619275/the-agonizing-collision-of-love-and-slavery-in-thomas-jefferson.Google Scholar