Don't Even Go There: How Misogyny Turns On Gaslighting
Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. She was previously a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2011-2013. As an undergraduate student at her hometown university, University of Melbourne, she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science. Manne now works in moral (especially metaethics and moral psychology), social, and feminist philosophy. She frequently writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews. Her book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press) will be published in October 2017.
Gaslighting, according to Manne, may make a woman willing and able not only to disbelieve her former testimony, but even reject the very questions or concerns on which it was premised. Raising the sorts of issues to which a woman's story provided answers (e.g., “Was he abusive?”) is effectively billed as a symptom of rational breakdown (e.g., paranoia, being delusional) or, just as importantly, morally bad character (e.g., ingratitude, being insufficiently forgiving, or self-pityingly “playing the victim.”) Concepts and phrases like “playing the victim” and “fishing for sympathy” make merely raising the specter of moral wrongdoing done to oneself suspect and fraught. Manne will further interrogate, break down, and resist these concepts and beliefs.
Professor Manne’s Athenaeum presentation is one of two keynote addresses for the Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice Conference organized by CMC’s philosophy department with support from the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.