Shiloh Whitney: “Anger Gaslighting and Affective Injustice” (Hybrid Seminar 9 Nov)

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The Shame & Medicine Project, & Dept of Social & Political Sciences, Philosophy, & Anthropology seminar series (University of Exeter).

Hybrid Seminar with Prof. Shiloh Whitney (Fordham University)
“Anger Gaslighting and Affective Injustice”
9 November, 15:30 (UK time)

Registration:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shiloh-whitney-seminar-online-tickets-439606634277

Prof. Shiloh Whitney, Fordham University
“Anger Gaslighting and Affective Injustice.”

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.

Bio: Shiloh Whitney is 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.

Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/shiloh-whitney-seminar-online-tickets-439606634277

About this event
The seminar is jointly sponsored by the Wellcome Trust funded Shame and Medicine Project, and the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology seminar series at the University of Exeter. If you have any questions, please contact [email protected]. This event was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust [217879/Z/19/Z].