Cultural Gaslighting

Abstract

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socioeconomic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting—commonly understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit—stochastically, as chance-driven, interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012a; Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations.

White Feminist Gaslighting

“…Ruíz offers a deeper critique of Fricker's framing of hermeneutic harms in terms of “epistemic bad luck” based on the nonaccidental nature of the colonial violence that was required in order for the register in which Fricker speaks to be legible in an epistemological landscape governed by cultural imperialism. She writes, “From an anti-colonial perspective, there's simply no such thing as a ‘serious hermeneutical disadvantage’ that does not inflict epistemic injustice, unless of course you come from a tradition that a) thinks you can opt in or out of hermeneutical practices as a matter of choice, b) deploys ‘extant’ (undestroyed) hermeneutical resources as the baseline for interpretive understanding, and c) feels free to deploy an arbitrary understanding of ‘hermeneutic’ that takes away the pre-structural hermeneutical commitment to history—something that might come in handy for thinking about how history structures the present conditions of knowledge production” (Ruíz 2020, 19).…”

“…Elena Ruíz further conceives of gaslighting as something that occurs not only at structural scales but at a prestructural one as well (Ruíz 2012; 2014; 2020). In “Theorizing Multiple Oppressions through Colonial History,” Ruíz shows how European colonization disrupted precolonial ways of knowing in what is now identified as Latin America and tracks how colonial lineages create public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify settler epistemologies as the only legitimate form of knowledge (Ruíz 2012).…”

“…7 The colonial meta-epistemological framework that Ruíz identifies is just what is needed in order to make sense of white feminist methodologies and epistemology. Ruíz notes, for instance (Ruíz 2020), that Anglo-analytic accounts of epistemic injustice, such as Fricker's, depend for their intelligibility on a colonial epistemic framework that is capable of recognizing only certain subjects as knowers (Fricker 2007). Because of this kind of dependence, white feminism remains what Ruíz terms "a lifeline of colonialism" (Ruíz 2019a, 232).…”

On Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice: Editor's Introduction

“…It's a curating strategy designed to epistemically derail resistance to colonial domination, so that acts of cultural genocide and dispossession will continue without interruption. She describes it as “a settler conceptual ruse that diverts critical attention away from structural epistemic oppressions that continue to underwrite the colonial project” (2020, 689).…”

“…The violence required to maintain white supremacy is part of a long-term strategy of settler dispossession developed by white Anglo-European settlers to permanently take control of Native Amerindian homelands. Cultural gaslighting, she argues, has an epistemic, world-building function: “to produce totalizing and abusive ambients—languages, stories, buildings, practices, rituals, forms, and documents—that work to destroy resistance to settler cultural authority as natural claims to Indigenous land” (2020, 696). These ambients include “settler moves to innocence,” which enable settlers and their descendants to keep stolen lands and accumulated wealth without feeling guilty or responsible (Tuck and Yang 2012).…”