Suchergebnisse

L'oppression épistémique désigne une exclusion épistémique persistante qui empêche ou limite la contribution d'une personne à la production des savoirs. On hésite à parler d'« oppression épistémique », et cela tient peut-être à la prémisse voulant que les formes épistémiques de l'oppression se ramènent en général à ses formes politiques et sociales. L'auteure convient que de nombreuses formes d'exclusion qui compromettent la capacité d'une personne à contribuer à la production des savoirs peuvent être ramenées à des formes d'oppression politique et sociale, mais il existe néanmoins des formes distinctes et irréductibles d'oppression épistémique. Elle soutient ainsi que la différence fondamentale entre les formes réductibles et irréductibles d'oppression épistémique réside dans le type de résistance à laquelle on fait face dans chaque cas, c'est-à-dire le pouvoir épistémique ou les caractéristiques des systèmes épistémologiques. La distinction entre les formes réductibles et irréductibles d'oppression épistémique permet de mieux comprendre les enjeux que soulève l'emploi de cette expression et la pertinence d'y recourir.

It's not that we haven't always been here, since there was a here. It is that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not totally erased, and our fingertips upon the handles of history have been called the random brushings of birds. (Lorde 1990, ix)Because… [racialized peoples'] dehumanization has not been successful, conceiving of self and others and their exercise of themselves both against dehumanization and toward liberatory possibilities has meant living double lives backed up by peopled ways of living, acting, perceiving, thinking familiar with the interstitial, liminal, and with breaking up with, delinking from, colonial modernity. (Lugones, this issue, 20; my emphasis)We are not born women of color. We become women of color. To become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each other's histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse allowing mythologies to replace knowing about one another…. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other's company. (Alexander 2002, 91; italics in original)

Too often, identifying practices of silencing is a seemingly impossible exercise. Here I claim that attempting to give a conceptual reading of the epistemic violence present when silencing occurs can help distinguish the different ways members of oppressed groups are silenced with respect to testimony. I offer an account of epistemic violence as the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges. Ultimately, I illustrate that by focusing on the ways in which hearers fail to meet speaker dependency in a linguistic exchange, efforts can be made to demarcate the different types of silencing people face when attempting to testify from oppressed positions in society.

In this paper, we analyze the recent public scandal involving Nafissatou Diallo and Dominique Strauss‐Kahn to offer an account of the role affectability imbalances play in process‐based invisibility. Process‐based invisibilities, in this paper, refer to predictable narrative gaps within public narratives that can be aptly described as disappearances. We demonstrate that compromised, complex social identities, maladjusted webs of reciprocity, and a failure to fully appreciate basic affectability in large part cause affectability imbalances. Ultimately, we claim that affectability imbalances and the three imbricated conditions that facilitate such imbalances—complex social identities, reciprocity, and basic affectability—are integral features of process‐based invisibility.