Global Gender Justice and Epistemic Oppression: A Response to an Epistemic Dilemma

Corwin Aragon

doi:10.5206/fpq/2019.2.7294

Abstract

Critiques of Western feminists’ attempts to extend claims about gender injustice to the global context highlighted a dilemma facing Western feminists, what I call the global gender justice dilemma. In response to this dilemma, Alison M. Jaggar argues that Western feminists should turn our attention away from trying to resolve it and, instead, toward examination of our own complicity in the processes that produce injustice. I suggest that this kind of approach is helpful in responding to an additional dilemma that confronts the Western feminist, namely the epistemic dilemma. Western feminists can speak for women of the global South and run the risk of distorting those women’s experience and further silencing their voices, or we can refuse to speak and abdicate our responsibilities to address injustice. I argue that we should address this dilemma not by trying to resolve it but by examining our role in the reproduction of epistemically unjust practices. To explain this response, I offer a preliminary account of epistemic injustice as epistemic oppression. I conclude by claiming that our own epistemic complicity in epistemically oppressive social practices is a weighty reason for us to work to transform those practices.

Highlights

Crisis and dilemma have confronted feminist philosophy at a number of stages
I suggest that there is a parallel epistemic dilemma, highlighted most prominently in Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (1991), that creates barriers to conceptualizing and working toward global gender justice. To address this epistemic dilemma, I argue that Western feminists need to examine our epistemic relationships to the women for whom we speak, utilizing the concept of epistemic injustice to locate our own complicity in global epistemic injustices
Responding to the Epistemic Dilemma With this sketch of epistemic oppression in hand, we can return to the epistemic dilemma I discussed above

Summary

Introduction

Crisis and dilemma have confronted feminist philosophy at a number of stages. The rapid and revolutionary development of feminist philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s shaped philosophical projects that would face serious challenges to their central categories of analysis. In addition to mapping the dilemma confronting Western feminists, argued for an alternative approach to developing philosophical work on global gender justice. I suggest that there is a parallel epistemic dilemma, highlighted most prominently in Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (1991), that creates barriers to conceptualizing and working toward global gender justice To address this epistemic dilemma, I argue that Western feminists need to examine our epistemic relationships to the women for whom we speak, utilizing the concept of epistemic injustice to locate our own complicity in global epistemic injustices. In Jaggar’s call to examine our complicity in injustice, in Young’s theorizing about social connection, in my own work on structural responsibility, and in my and Jaggar’s coauthored work on structural complicity, the theoretical frameworks that we utilize do not adequately address the ways in which social epistemic practices systematically harm members of oppressed groups. Is deeply informed by, and indebted to, Cudd’s work but departs from her conception in the articulation of the conditions of oppression

The violation of equal moral respect condition

The violation of equal epistemic respect condition

Conclusion