hey! your madness tag has been really enlightening in a lot of ways, but as a lot of the text is a bit dense for me, i was wondering if you could explain what exactly “epistemic injustice” is. thank you so much for the help in advance!
Of course, thanks for asking!
Epistemic injustice is a concept developed by Miranda Fricker. In short, it describes "injustice done to someone as a knower." It could alternatively be called "knowledge-legitimacy/access injustice" but we use epistemology because it's a smooth shorthand! 'Epistemology' as a whole is just the study of knowledge (and the politcs around it.)
Back to epistemic injustice. There are two primary subtypes that Fricker talks about: hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice. If you're trans and/or disabled, there's a nearly 100% likelihood you've experienced each of these at some point, probably many times.
Hermeneutical injustice is injustice in the area of interpretation and communication. In practice, this looks like growing up without the language to describe your identity and experiences –– before I knew I was trans, I was simply an incorrect-girl. A queer person without access to the language of queerness is a casualty of epistemic injustice. A disabled person who is diagnostically gatekept is also a casualty, oftentimes on a more explicitly structural/medical/legal level. In short, hermeneutical injustice denies us self-realization, the language to understand our lived experiences.
Testimonial injustice, on the other hand, occurs in relation to how we speak, or stay silent. It happens in the doctor's office, when you know that your diagnosis means the doctor's not going to believe your distress. It's when you know you're abusable, because your testimony is not deemed trustworthy or legitimate. Testimonial injustice presupposes that we are incapable of telling [our own] stories. Our testimony is invalid (adjective) because we are (noun).
let me know if this makes sense, hope it helps!
