Gaslighting—a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel “crazy,” creating a “surreal” interpersonal environment—has captured public attention. Despite the popularity of the term, sociologists have ignored gaslighting, leaving it to be theorized by psychologists. However, this article argues that gaslighting is primarily a sociological rather than a psychological phenomenon. Gaslighting should be understood as rooted in social inequalities, including gender, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships. The theory developed here argues that gaslighting is consequential when perpetrators mobilize gender-based stereotypes and structural and institutional inequalities against victims to manipulate their realities. Using domestic violence as a strategic case study to identify the mechanisms via which gaslighting operates, I reveal how abusers mobilize gendered stereotypes; structural vulnerabilities related to race, nationality, and sexuality; and institutional inequalities against victims to erode their realities. These tactics are gendered in that they rely on the association of femininity with irrationality. Gaslighting offers an opportunity for sociologists to theorize under-recognized, gendered forms of power and their mobilization in interpersonal relationships.

Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into “worthy victims.” Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Legal and therapeutic institutions create a matrix of demands on women’s lives, shaping their practices of survival and performances of self. Through interviews with domestic violence survivors, I show that women engage three strategies of transformation to make themselves credible survivors: (1) extracting domestic violence from their life stories; (2) explaining abuse through “self-esteem;” (3) performing survivorhood through “respectable” motherhood and sexuality. Through these processes, women craft a domestic violence narrative and an institutional performance of survivorhood, both of which allow them to navigate institutional pressures. These therapeutic narratives and performances, however, also rewrite the structural elements of violence into (feminized) accounts of psychological failure and overcoming. Thus, women navigate a paradox when they become survivors: they must tell stories of psychological recovery, even as those stories obfuscate the very infrastructure of violence. It is this disjuncture between individualized narratives of harm and the structural work of survival that I examine in this work. I develop the concept of the “paradox of legibility” to generalize this disjuncture, and to highlight women’s labor of making themselves credible amidst structural and institutional constraints.

No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.

Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjects’ visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that “reflexivity” should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this claim, I draw together the insights of feminist standpoint theory and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology to lay the foundation for a renewed reflexive project that centers epistemic privilege, the idea that positions of structural exclusion provide the best resources for theorizing social power. Reflexive sociology should consider interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion and contradiction, engaging with sites of alternative knowledge and incorporating them into the object of study. This type of reflexivity provides improved resources for relational theory building. I offer support for these theoretical arguments with a historical analysis of knowledge production in the feminist anti-violence movement.