We are excited to welcome to Exeter Shiloh Whitney, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, to give a seminar on “Anger Gaslighting and Affective Injustice” on Wednesday 9th November 2022 at 15.30 GMT.
The seminar is jointly sponsored by the Shame and Medicine Project and the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology seminar series at the University of Exeter.
REGISTER: online or in-person.
CONTACT a.waterson@exeter.ac.uk FOR A RECORDING OF THE SEMINAR.
ABSTRACT
If gaslighting makes its target doubt herself, anger gaslighting makes its target doubt herself about the aptness of her anger. In this paper, I analyze the case of anger gaslighting, demonstrating what’s unjust about it and why it matters. Scholarship on gaslighting in feminist philosophy has tended to analyze gaslighting as an epistemic injustice (an injustice that concerns knowledge and credibility). Focusing on anger gaslighting as a paradigm case, I argue that gaslighting can be an affective injustice (an injustice that concerns emotions and affective influence). But my study of anger gaslighting also produces concepts for studying affective injustices beyond gaslighting, that concern emotions beyond anger. I’ll apply these Kate Manne’s notion of “himpathy” and a few other examples as proof of concept, creating conceptual tools to enable discussion of this important and under-theorized uniquely affective dimension of injustice.
Shiloh Whitney Bio
Dr. Shiloh Whitney an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. As a critical phenomenologist and feminist philosopher leading efforts to theorize affective injustice and emotional labor, her research lies at the intersection of Feminist Philosophy, Critical Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Affect and Emotions.
Her current book project develops an ameliorative concept of emotional labor, building the theoretical framework of affective economies and affective injustice that expanding intersectional feminist usage of the term requires.
Her critical phenomenology project engages with French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Fanon as well as with contemporary scholarship in critical phenomenology both to develop a critical phenomenology of affect and uniquely affective forms of injustice, and to build a theory of the role of affect in critical phenomenological method.
Her work can be found in Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Chiasmi International, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and PhaenEx, among others. Look for her contribution in the Northwestern University Press edited collection 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, as well as Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives.
