The Shifting Feminine Statuses among Indigenous Peoples: Rethinking Colonization and Gender Roles among the WeppaWanno People of Mid-Western NigeriaĪUTHORS: Michael O.
Collins (Ed.), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and Politics of Empowerment (pp. Black Feminist thought in the Matrix of Domination. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely.Hill-Collins, P. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence the politics of citation and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning-making. My aim is not to suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied.
Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. 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.
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.
This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker's (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license.
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