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.
Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into 'resources' to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into 'labor' in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual architectures. They can portray intentionally produced structural harms as 'tragic' and unforeseeable acts of fate (Ruíz, forthcoming). They can revision deliberate genocides as the inevitable and irreversible costs of the march toward 'progress' in the linear hierarchy of civilizations. Colonial epistemologies
In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition.
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