Undergraduate Highly Commended paper in the 2025 National Uehiro Oxford Essay Prize in Practical Ethics. By Artur Littner, University of Lancaster. Drawing and image credits: Artur Littner.
In this essay, I will present a case where a young man (Martin) is seemingly harmed by stigma surrounding male dancers. I will analyse this case using literature on epistemic injustice and link it to a concept of passing. This will allow me to make two important points on a wider scale:
- There are individuals who are hermeneutically dominant but also simultaneously marginalised
- These individuals are uniquely capable of bringing about epistemic justice because their existence challenges stereotypes
This will allow me to conceptualise a form of epistemic justice which encourages individuals to have the courage to give certain testimonies despite the risk of losing credibility. I will argue that ‘epistemic courage’ is a moral duty owed not only to wider social groups, but also to the individual themselves.
Case: We have a young man, Martin, who is a competitive ballroom dancer. He competes regularly in district and national dance competitions and has done this from a young age. Eventually, he and his female dance partner win at the IDTA (dance-governing body) UK Nationals competition, making them the best ballroom dance couple in the UK for their age and category. A huge achievement! But Martin did not tell his peers about this achievement. In fact, his peers do not even know that he is any type of a dancer.
Martin is not the only young man who never publicly acknowledges that he partakes and achieves success in ballroom dancing and other performing arts. Many young, male dancers that I have spoken to have felt like they had a moment of ‘coming out’ to their peers about their participation in it, assuming they hid the fact initially.
What Martin and others are worried about is the stigma surrounding male dancers, which can take many forms. A common one – and the one I will assume is true in Martin’s mind for the purposes of this essay – is a societal belief that men’s bodies should be used for instrumental rather than expressive ends, because to be expressive is to make attempts to be ‘seen’, which is shameful for men and associates them interchangeably with ‘femininity’ or being ‘gay’ (Bassetti, 2013). Presumably, for fear of a stigmatised perception of femininity or homosexuality, young male ballroom dancers, when asked about their hobbies, do not list ‘ballroom dance’ as one of them despite their devotion to it.
But what does this case have to do with epistemic injustice; why is Martin afraid of stigmatised perceptions? Martin would only suffer an injustice, epistemically speaking, if it was known that he was a ballroom dancer, he was judged based on that fact, and on that basis excluded from knowledge or production of knowledge. That in of itself is surely not Martin’s concern. Martin is not really concerned with being seen as a ballroom dancer per se, as that fact is not affecting him as a knower. Rather, Martin is concerned with the judgement aspect that comes with the stigma, i.e. that he is feminine or gay, regardless of whether he is these things. These are factors that will affect Martin negatively as a knower, and put him in a credibility deficit (Fricker, 2007).
To illustrate the above point, imagine the following: It is found out by his ‘masculine’ peers that Martin is a dancer and on that basis his peers make damaging assumptions, e.g. that he is excessively feminine. Martin may therefore fail to be identified as a knower in certain social interactions because he has deviated from the traditional view of manhood, i.e. his audience have assessed that he is feminine, so his assertions on traditionally masculine activities, let’s say fishing, carry less credibility. Martin’s ability to be a participant in the production of knowledge that he wishes to be rests on his being perceived as one who is capable of knowing and making contributions in the first place (Hookway, 2010).
This indicates quite a complex issue. Martin’s present and continued epistemic ‘inclusion’ within his group is contingent on his omission of any statement that would associate him with a different hermeneutical group, in this case the ‘feminine’. I believe that Martin passes to avoid this problem and maintain his ‘knower’ status in his group. Consider a scenario where a young man is traditionally masculine and is therefore assumed not to have an association with the feminine concept of dance (he has passed well). The young man disappears from perception as a dancer, leaving only ones who are feminine being seen as dancers, thereby perpetuating the stigma of dancing and femininity, which ironically reinforces the harmful stereotype of dance being ‘reserved for the feminine’ which Martin fears in the first place (Silvermint, 2018).
As well as perpetuating stigma, I believe that Martin’s passing contributes to two forms of hermeneutical injustice. One: it implicitly asserts that there is in the first place some fixed set of attributes and behaviours characteristic of women which has been determined by men, obscuring women’s own views of their attributes and characteristics, and two: it labels ‘feminine men’ as ‘gay’ because to be ‘feminine’ is to be seen as attempting to attract the ‘masculine’, which obscures ‘feminine’ men’s understanding of their sexuality because they will be perceived as ‘gay’. Further, because femininity is present in both instances, ultimately it is the traditional term ‘feminine’ which is obscuring in the first place; it points to the fact that women as a “subject group” are described by men who are the “hermeneutically powerful” group, in turn biasing a whole slew of social experiences (Fricker, 2007).
It is very difficult to distinguish Frickerian hermeneutical injustice and Pohlhausian wilful hermeneutical injustice in view of Martin’s actions, or indeed inactions. I argue that Martin, and male dancers more generally, could be doing both, i.e. when Martin interacts with those belonging to hermeneutically dominant groups, it may be that he passes to fit in, anticipating that he would otherwise be misunderstood and lose epistemic credibility. Conversely, when Martin interacts with those belonging to subject groups, i.e. ‘the feminine’, it may be that he passes as a traditionally masculine man because he refuses to be on the same page as ‘the feminine’, as that is the interpretative influence that he associates with a lower epistemic credibility. These two scenarios are consequentially indistinguishable, which makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly where we can ascribe willfulness to Martin’s act of passing. This is supported by the fact that Dotson herself concedes that producing evidence for practices of self-silencing is “difficult” and requires case-by-case analysis of each instance (Dotson, 2011).
Kwong inadvertently supports the idea of Martin living a sort of hermeneutical double-life. Martin is not challenging the close-mindedness of his hearers when he interacts with those belonging to hermeneutically powerful groups (Kwong, 2015). This much is true. But it does not necessarily follow that Martin accepts that close-mindedness for himself even if he never speaks up to challenge it. This is because it could also be true that Martin is open-minded when he is at his dance class, and it is not evident to others there that he accepts close-mindedness outside of that environment – in that sense Martin passes to some extent as both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ depending on the environment. Because of this, it may be that Martin does indeed seek interdependence with the ‘feminine’, just not when he interacts with the hermeneutically dominant. From an optimistic viewpoint, one could argue that he wishes to be interdependent to some extent with both groups but struggles with this because both groups have different hermeneutic resources and tools.
Martin’s wanting to be on both sides and thus inability to ‘pick a side’ is in part a refutation of Pohlhaus’ idea that the marginally situated knower has a more holistic interpretation than the dominantly situated one (Pohlhaus, 2012) – instead, both are equally valid interpretations of the world qua their ability to fill the other’s hermeneutical lacunas and progress towards one complete understanding. Hence, I don’t think the divide between dominant and dominated groups is as clear-cut as portrayed in the literature on epistemic injustice.
In this sense, we should be careful to say that Martin deliberately becomes close-minded to the interpretations of marginally situated groups when he seeks interdependence with the hermeneutically dominant because we could equally turn around and say that Martin deliberately ‘closes’ his mind to hermeneutically dominant groups when he seeks interdependence with marginally situated groups. It’s just that to the former action we attribute ‘epistemic injustice’ and to the latter we attribute ‘epistemic justice’ because there is an imbalance of power between dominant and marginally situated groups. On this point, I want to clarify that I acknowledge that the close-mindedness of dominant groups is not equally as harmful as the close-mindedness of marginally situated groups (Fricker, 2007). The case does remain that dominant groups have a much more expansive hermeneutical ‘toolkit’ with which to understand the world, obscuring the experiences of the marginalised.
So, what are the Martins of the world to do in their predicament? Before attempting to answer this, it is important to explore one more avenue: The case in which Martin unfoundedly polices his own testimony. It may be that Martin’s peers would be perfectly willing to listen to his testimony regarding dance, and may even be awestruck and supportive, but Martin’s fear of stigma “does not hinge on the pernicious ignorance of a would-be audience” in the first place. Rather, it is merely the perceived anticipation of challenge that stops him from speaking out, which makes sense given that Martin has never ‘come out’ as a ballroom dancer and therefore cannot have faced stigma at any point (J. Y. Lee, 2021). On this basis, it would not be unreasonable to assume that he is a victim of anticipatory epistemic injustice. Furthermore, In Lee’s account of anticipatory injustice, individuals such as Martin who suffer from epistemic injustice “also inflict and perpetuate the injustice they experience” (ibid). This is exactly Silvermint’s point from earlier. Because there is not even a would-be perpetrator, there is a case to be made for Martin being simultaneously the perpetrator and victim of the policing of his own testimony.
Therefore, Martin’s passing may be due to a false worry as much as it could be a decision made in light of ways in which his peers have behaved in the past. It seems that Martin’s solution for the former scenario is much simpler than the solution for the latter one; Martin could easily get his answer with a little more courage in voicing his testimony. In the latter case, the leap of faith would be considerably greater if Martin suddenly ‘came out’ as a dancer. Still, considering the injustices that he perpetuates in not doing so (including his own), it seems to me that Martin could benefit from developing some epistemic virtue, something like an ‘epistemic courage’ to make that leap of faith.
To consciously develop epistemic courage is to some extent Martin’s responsibility as one who by default passes as a member of the hermeneutically dominant group but has experience of being marginally situated. In fact, the status of ‘passing by default’ puts him and others like him in a unique position to bring about change that could help unify group hermeneutics and level the hermeneutical playing field. This is because if paragon members of hermeneutically dominant groups are open and unashamed about their marginal standpoint then it would serve to illustrate to both groups that there is not an exclusive divide between a dominant and marginalised group, and that a ‘dual-hermeneutic’ is possible and legitimate. Lastly, epistemic courage in this case is not just a duty to a wider group to defeat stereotyping, but also a potential for an individual to openly acknowledge and do justice to their personal identity.
Bibliography:
- Bassetti, Chiara. “Male Dancing Body, Stigma and Normalising Processes. Playing with (Bodily) Signifieds/Ers of Masculinity.” Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques, Université catholique de Louvain (Unité d’anthropologie et de sociologie), 2014
- Dotson, Kristie. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia, vol. 26, no. 2, 2011, pp. 236–57. JSTOR
- Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice : Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central
- Hookway, Christopher. “Some varieties of epistemic injustice: Reflections on Fricker.” Episteme, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 151–163
- Lee, J. Y. “Anticipatory epistemic injustice.” Social Epistemology, vol. 35, no. 6, 2021, pp. 564–576
- Kwong, Jack M. C. “Epistemic Injustice and Open-Mindedness.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 2, 2015, pp. 337–51. JSTOR
- Pohlhaus, Gaile. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of ‘Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.’” Hypatia, vol. 27, no. 4, 2012, pp. 715–35. JSTOR
- Silvermint, Daniel. “PASSING AS PRIVILEGED.” Ergo (Ann Arbor, Mich.), vol. 5, no. 20201214, 2018, pp. 1–43.
This argument presents an interesting and complex area, but part of the described paradigm has been avoided in order to make the sought for point, which becomes centered upon social group biases: If Martin’s reasons for ‘passing’ are to avoid additional demands upon his time, rather than maintaining credibility, the argument as presented fails, as to challenge the issue is to create demands which would require denying, potentially creating enmity. This could fall under the interdependent point, but individual autonomy is required even for persons fully immersed in a social group if the group is to remain what may be considered as socially healthy (membership requirements for tightness of fit within a social group becomes determinative for autonomous conduct.). The exercising of privacy is not always based around dealing with social bias, even though it can generally become categorised in that way.
I think I do agree with you in that exercising privacy is not limited to dealing with social bias. I realise now that the claim I am putting forward is perhaps a bit too strong. But certainly I do think that social bias is a real category for the exercising of privacy, particularly in the case of young men and performing arts which inspired this work. I widened the sphere because I thought that the case could be generalised for contexts where fear of stigma has been a relevant reason for exercising privacy.
If I understand what you mean by Martin’s passing being an efficiency problem (as it would be effortful to have to explain oneself constantly), then I do not fully agree. This is because I have assumed that there will be instances where Martin could speak up in defence of his marginalised identity: E.g. when his friends say something like ‘gay men are usually the best dancers’. In an instance like this, denial (of being gay) is a likely outcome of the demand on Martin, but it’s not clear to me that Martin must have to verbally deny anything, even if his non-denial creates enmity. I would argue that facing that enmity is part of his moral duty.
I also don’t think that Martin’s epistemic courage always results in the sort of interdependence that costs autonomy. But I agree that I paint a picture of Martin as constantly yearning for interdependence. In my case, Martin’s interdependence with others hinges on silence about opposing interpretations that he is aware of. So, in a radical sense, Martin is not truly interdependent with anyone until he realises his own capacity to project hermeneutics. If this is the case, autonomy does follow from membership requirements (knowledge of differing group hermeneutics). I hope I have not misunderstood your points. Do let me know if I have talked past you.
Depending upon the objective of the article the claim was not too strong! The interpretation given here was that the focus created the objective, and, it would be necessary to recognize that to gain further benefits.
The meaning applied here to what is termed by you an efficiency problem, but not in the limited sense of your response, further indicates where our understanding differs. To explain: As is unstated but important, to attain a standard which provides national recognition in most areas requires a great deal of personal commitment and time. A singular focus seems to be often required but rarely available. The meaning presented by me was focused singularly upon the time demands created for individuals by social groups. e.g. Martin is good at dancing, we are arranging a social event, Martin would be the ideal person to help in his spare time. To refuse such requests would be likely to create emotional responses from within the social group especially if it were widely known Martin had great skills in that area which were untapped by the group. This could rather be seen as a type of group on group issue rather than an individual one. For instance where the individuals division of attention is seen as providing more reward to another group, resulting in a lesser value being applied to an individual by the group feeling less valued by them. In such a circumstance there would exist an ethical/moral demand to help the group perceiving themselves as less valued. But that argued for moral meaning could well be limited to the group expressing it, depending upon the basis of the groups membership criteria and issue in question.
As described degrees of interdependence for Martin has been limited to two areas, his requirements for work and his dedication to dancing. His family and any life outside those spheres is clearly being avoided to maintain the focus of the article. When considering those wider social groupings in the context of the article and debate an illumination can occur of the same sort as the silence mentioned, which may be revealing of the nature, necessity, and use of such silences.
It is my preference to use words understood generally, so I will first refer to the value mix and value prioritisation, rather than any more scientific/philosophical term. Again obviously, the value prioritisation within the value mix between the two groups subject of this debate in Martins life will probably differ significantly. So if Martins work is a required element; assuring the consideration of something like methodological individualism and similar, may be valuable in the hermeneutics mix in identifying the variety of responses deployed within that work social group, where the benefits of Martins artistic nature may not be valued beyond the immediate physical presentation of that art. (there is certainly a large silent space in the value of Martins art on his knowledge and character, adding value to him across the social groups he may be involved with, which requires consideration).
Finally and importantly, how the different value mixes producing the differing views become perceived – as prejudice or a knowledge deficit created by a tight focus in a particular area – will depend upon the interpreter rather than the material presented. And that is where privacy appears to be most legitimately, beneficially, and morally deployed, but often misinterpreted, because it is the issues embedded there which may become used for a variety of reasons by others. Perhaps: Hubert Dreyfus and Rabinow’s – Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics – a copy of which I retain but still have yet to read, could provide useful material.
To my understanding, you are highlighting that Martin’s confession might place unwanted moral burden on him to ‘deliver’ in his various social groups. Secondly, you are saying that the interpreter is in charge of testimony, and so silence is preferable to being pigeonholed/categorised.
On the first point: If Martin withheld information to be impartial then isn’t that a fundamentally isolating action? Shouldn’t Martin’s goal be to try and be as partial as possible across all of his social domains? Sure, that might be stressful or time-consuming, but it would shape him into more of a person in the communal sense. Secondly, why should Martin care for whether he has control over his own testimony? You rightly say that even silence will be read as a testimony by some groups. At that point, isn’t it more valuable for Martin simply to express his point of view when the situation arises, without being worried about how he is going to be perceived (for he will be perceived no matter what he does or doesn’t do)?
As a tentative answer, I think there is a middle path between openness and privacy. While I would argue that openness is an important part of becoming a person and shaping political discourse, I don’t think that all privacy should be shrugged off and replaced by arbitrary confession. That would be an alienating demand. What I would instead advocate for is a tentative openness – express yourself THROUGH other’s discourses, particularly where you don’t see the content pertaining to your own experiences. This doesn’t require expositing one’s own position arbitrarily, or making a statement, but simply speaking out in defence of oneself. It’s a form of dignity or upholding decency, especially where silence would condone injustice.
Let me know what you think.