Rethinking the Rhetorical Epistemics of Gaslighting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clint G Graves ◽  
Leland G Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Epistemic Rhetoric ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Dysfunctional Communication ◽  
Knowledge Claims

Abstract Gaslighting is defined as a dysfunctional communication dynamic in which one interlocutor attempts to destabilize another’s sense of reality. In this article, we advance a model of gaslighting based in an epistemic rhetoric perspective. Our model directs attention to the rhetorics used to justify competing knowledge claims, as opposed to philosophical models that tend to rely on objective truth-value. We probe the discursive manifestations of gaslighting in logocentric, ethotic, or pathemic terms. We then apply our model to explain sexist and racist gaslighting that derives power from normatively instantiated discourses of rape culture and White supremacy. Specifically, our analysis identifies the appeal structures used to legitimate such gaslighting in response to disclosures of sexual violence and testimony about racial injustice.

How Art Works

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Winner
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Truth Value

This book is an examination of what psychologists have discovered about how art works—what it does to us, how we experience art, how we react to it emotionally, how we judge it, and what we learn from it. The questions investigate include the following: What makes us call something art? Do we experience “real” emotions from the arts? Do aesthetic judgments have any objective truth value? Does learning to play music raise a child’s IQ? Is modern art something my kid could do? Is achieving greatness in an art form just a matter of hard work? Philosophers have grappled with these questions for centuries, and laypeople have often puzzled about them too and offered their own views. But now psychologists have begun to explore these questions empirically, and have made many fascinating discoveries using the methods of social science (interviews, experimentation, data collection, statistical analysis).

The Injustices of Rape

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O. Jacquet
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of ◽  
Male Supremacy

From 1950 to 1980, activists in the black freedom and women's liberation movements mounted significant campaigns in response to the injustices of rape. These activists challenged the dominant legal and social discourses of the day and redefined the political agenda on sexual violence for over three decades. How activists framed sexual violence--as either racial injustice, gender injustice, or both--was based in their respective frameworks of oppression. The dominant discourse of the black freedom movement constructed rape primarily as the product of racism and white supremacy, whereas the dominant discourse of women's liberation constructed rape as the result of sexism and male supremacy. In The Injustices of Rape, Catherine O. Jacquet is the first to examine these two movement responses together, explaining when and why they were in conflict, when and why they converged, and how activists both upheld and challenged them. Throughout, she uses the history of antirape activism to reveal the difficulty of challenging deeply ingrained racist and sexist ideologies, the unevenness of reform, and the necessity of an intersectional analysis to combat social injustice.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Graybill
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
New Approach

The Hebrew Bible contains many accounts of rape and sexual violence. Feminist approaches to these stories remain dominated by Phyllis Trible’s 1984 book Texts of Terror. This chapter and book offer a new approach, drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory and offering new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen 34), Tamar (2 Sam 13), Lot’s daughters (Gen 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam 11), Hagar (Gen 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam 1 and 2), and the Levite’s concubine (Judg 19). In place of “texts of terror,” this chapter opens the possibility of reading after terror. The approach offered here also engages contemporary activism against sexual violence and rape culture, bringing them to bear on biblical studies.

Transforming Campus Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Diane Crocker ◽  
Marcus A. Sibley
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Institutional Responses ◽  
Dominant Narratives

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence. While rape culture is not simple, institutional responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause–effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Susan B Marine ◽  
Ruth Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Dominant Narratives

This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence and how people’s understanding of rape culture has limited their ability to change it. Although rape culture is not simple, individuals’ responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause-effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and share how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally, it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

The Global Racial Order

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-210
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa
Keyword(s):  
Differential Diagnosis ◽  
Social Status ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Group ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
East Asians ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World

Chapter 7 offers a differential diagnosis of global racial injustice. Against Charles W. Mills’s theory that we live under global white supremacy, the chapter argues that the white racial group no longer dominates all other racial groups in the world. In particular, those raced as yellow by global society—roughly, East Asians and their descendants—are no longer dominated by racial whites and whiteness. More than this, the supreme political and social status enjoyed by whites over all other racial groups is also waning. The chapter therefore argues that our global racial order is best understood as a system of “partitioned white primacy.” In this system, racial whites exert racial primacy over racial reds, browns, and blacks; but the system is partitioned, because whites do not exert such primacy over those raced as yellow. Moreover, such primacy as whites do exert over other racial groups is less than supremacy, and it is even now being challenged. The chapter then shows how such primacy still suppresses resistance and thereby makes all unfree.

The Film Kids 25 Years On: A Qualitative Study of Rape Culture and Representations of Sexual Violence in Skateboarding

Young ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 110330882096645
Author(s):  
Indigo Willing
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Sexual Coercion ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
25Th Anniversary ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Male Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Theories

This article examines the 1995 fictional feature film Kids, which locates its story in skateboarding culture. The film reached its 25th anniversary in 2020; it is directed by Larry Clark and written by Harmony Korine, both recognizable figures in skateboarding, and it featured a cast of youth from the New York skateboarding scene. The research analyses narrative content that depicts sexual coercion and rape. Contemporary social and feminist theories of sexual violence, rape culture and media on the film inform the analysis. The discussion points to how the characters that the boys play embody forms of hegemonic masculinity, pointing to the social and cultural dimensions of male power and how sexual violence can be an element of that. The article also presents an occasion to reflect on such issues in skateboarding culture more widely, with emerging insights that can be useful to studies of other male-dominated youth cultures, lifestyle sports and subcultures.

When Women Become the War Zone: the Use of Sexual Violence in Myanmar’s Military Operations

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-63
Author(s):  
Sophie Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
War Zone ◽  
Existing Data

This article draws together existing data and research on the organisation and structure of the Myanmar military (‘Tatmadaw’) and its use of sexual violence in military operations. It argues that from this data, a pattern emerges of rape-permissive military doctrines being employed by the same type of Tatmadaw units across multiple military operations, over many decades and sites. Unpacking each aspect of this posited pattern reveals an endemic rape culture within the Myanmar military that seems to be repeatedly utilised for strategic purposes in counter-insurgency operations. Investigating the potential origins of this rape-permissive culture, the article argues that Tatmadaw recruiting, training and deployment processes cultivate sexual violence as a permissible form of violence that is then tolerated by the Tatmadaw high command, most likely due to its efficacy in achieving its military strategies.

Organizing so Black Lives Matter

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Cole ◽  
Audrey Grace
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Faculty Member ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Education ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Racial Injustice

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to respond to racial injustice and white supremacy, within the context of ongoing Black Lives Matter activism against police brutality through public protests.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors consider the work of organizing institutions of higher education so that Black Lives Matter.FindingsThe authors offer a number of practical insights and suggestions in order to deal with racial injustice and white supremacy and better support Black faculty, staff and students on college campuses.Originality/valueIn addressing issues of racial injustice and white supremacy on college campuses, the authors bring together our experiences and perspectives as diversity officer and faculty member, respectively.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document