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In this article, I offer an account of an unjust epistemic practice―namely, epistemic appropriation―that harms marginalized knowers through the course of conceptual dissemination and intercommunal uptake. The harm of epistemic appropriation is twofold. First, while epistemic resources developed within the margins gain uptake with dominant audiences, those resources are overtly detached from the marginalized knowers responsible for their production. Second, epistemic resources developed within, but detached from, the margins are utilized in dominant discourses in ways that disproportionately benefit the powerful.

This paper will connect literature on epistemic injustice with literature on victims and perpetrators, to argue that in addition to considering the credibility deficit suffered by many victims, we should also consider the credibility excess accorded to many perpetrators. Epistemic injustice, as discussed by Miranda Fricker, considers ways in which someone might be wronged in their capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice occurs when there is a credibility deficit as a result of identity-prejudicial stereotypes. However, criticisms of Fricker have pointed out that credibility is part of a more complex system that includes both deficits and excesses. I will use these points to argue that we should look closer at sources of credibility excess in cases of sexual assault. This means that in addition to considering sources of victim blaming by looking at ways in which “ideal” victims are constructed, we also need to consider ways in which “ideal” perpetrators are constructed.

Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and the need for additional labor created by the default skepticism of the privileged. I explore the connections between epistemic exploitation and the two varieties of epistemic injustice that Fricker (2007) identifies, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. I situate epistemic exploitation within Dotson’s (2012; 2014) framework of epistemic oppression, and I address the role that epistemic exploitation plays in maintaining active ignorance and upholding dominant epistemic frameworks.

Miranda Fricker maintains that testimonial injustice is a matter of credibility deficit, not excess. In this article, I argue that this restricted characterízation of testimonial injustice is too narrow. I introduce a type of identity-prejudicial credibility excess that harms its targets qua knowers and transmitters of knowledge. I show how positive stereotyping and prejudicially inflated credibility assessments contribute to the continued epistemic oppression of marginalized knowers. In particular, I examine harms such as typecasting, compulsory representation, and epistemic exploitation and consider what hearers are obligated to do in response to these injustices. I argue that because epistemic harms to rnarginatized knowers also arise from prejudicially inflated assessments of their credibility, the virtue of testimonial justice must be revised to remedy them.

À l’automne 2013, au moment de la controversée Charte des valeurs visant à interdire aux fonctionnaires le port de signes religieux dits ostentatoires, des femmes et des féministes se sont organisées. Pendant que certaines se regroupaient sous des bannières faisant de la laïcité la seule garante de l’égalité des sexes, des féministes se sont saisies d’espaces de parole alternatifs pour dénoncer le déni des droits fondamentaux et la stigmatisation des femmes issues de minorités. Si l’analyse des intersections entre racisme et sexisme fait partie intégrante du champ des études féministes depuis la fin des années 1960, le contexte politique récent ramène à l’avant-plan ces questions difficiles et nous force à les revoir sous un éclairage nouveau. Qui est le sujet-femme dont parle le féminisme? Qui fait partie de ce «Nous» et quelles femmes en sont implicitement tenues à la marge? Est-ce que les revendications au cœur du féminisme actuel représentent bien les préoccupations profondes des femmes minorisées, racisées? Compte tenu de l’effervescence que connaît le féminisme ces derniers temps, il était devenu incontournable de rassembler dans un même ouvrage ces réflexions sur le thème des femmes racisées, une première dans le monde francophone. Avec des textes de Leïla Benhadjoudja, Sonia Ben Soltane, Ryoa Chung, Julie Cunningham, Naïma Hamrouni, Gaëlle Kingué Élonguélé, Chantal Maillé, Ida Ngueng Feze, Geneviève Pagé, Sandrine Ricci, Karine Rosso et Diahara Traoré. Avec la participation de Alia Al-Saji, Alexa Conradi, Viviane Michel, Maria Nengeh Mensah et Geneviève Rail.

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.

This paper defends a contextualist approach to epistemic injustice according to which instances of such injustice should be looked at as temporally extended phenomena (having developmental and historical trajectories) and socially extended phenomena (being rooted in patterns of social relations). Within this contextualist framework, credibility excesses appear as a form of undeserved epistemic privilege that is crucially relevant for matters of testimonial justice. While drawing on Miranda Fricker's proportional view of epistemic justice, I take issue with its lack of attention to the role that credibility excesses play in testimonial injustices. I depart from Fricker's view of the relation between credibility excesses and credibility deficits, and I offer an alternative account of the contributions that undeserved epistemic privileges make to epistemic injustices. Then, through the detailed analysis of To kill a mockingbird, I elucidate the crucial role played by the social imaginary in creating and sustaining epistemic injustices, developing an analysis of the kind of social blindness produced by an oppressive social imaginary that establishes unjust patterns of credibility excesses and deficits.

This essay serves as both a response and embellishment of Marilyn Frye's now classic essay " Oppression." It is meant to pick up where this essay left off and to make connections between oppression, as Frye defines it, and the privileges that result from institutional structures. This essay tries to clarify one meaning of privilege that is lost in philosophical discussions of injustice. I develop a distinction between unearned privileges and earned advantages. Clarifying the meaning of privilege as unearned structural advantage makes visible the role white privilege plays in maintaining complex systems of domination such as racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism. Using a critical reading of both Frye and Young's accounts of oppression as a springboard, I develop a definition of privilege as a particular class of unearned advantages. -/- I distinguish my account of privilege from standard legal and philosophical definitions of privilege. The general distinction I make between privileges and advantages rests on three interrelated claims: that benefits granted by privilege are always unearned and conferred systemically to members of dominant social groups; that privileges granted to members of dominant groups solely on the basis of their membership in these groups is never justifiable; and, that privileges have an unconditional value that can be explained not only in terms of immunities, but also in terms of additional benefits