Lacking a language: Amatonormativity and Hermeneutical Injustice
Esa Diaz-Leon
My main aim in this paper is to argue that the promotion of marriage and the invisibility of alternative relationships in our society lead to a version of “hermeneutical injustice” suffered by single people and those in non-conventional relationship forms. This injustice consists in the fact that they lack the conceptual resources to appropriately conceptualize and communicate their experiences in a way that fully captures their value. I will also suggest that this experience of lacking a language to express their experiences can be similar to the experience of being a foreigner.
Elizabeth Brake (2012) has recently argued that the promotion of marriage discriminates against people who do not organize their personal and affective lives around a central, monogamous, long-term romantic relationship. That is, our cultural, social and legal practices promoting marriage discriminate against people such as the solitudinous, the asexual, the celibate, the polyamorous, and all those who prioritize friendships, urban tribes, and other forms of relationships of care that do not conform to the model of romantic coupledom. In her book, Brake argues that the primacy given to marriage in our cultural, social and legal practices is unjustified, because marriage has no moral or prudential value over and above those alternative relationships of care. She examines several possible features of marriage that could possibly provide a distinctive moral value, such as monogamy, exclusivity, its long-term nature, or its dyadic nature, and she argues that none of these features has intrinsic moral value.
Brake concludes that the moral value of marriage and long-term, monogamous romantic relationships more in general relies on the intrinsic value of relationships of care, which is a basic good in her view. She argues that those alternative forms of relationship, such as friendships, short-term romantic relationships, polyamorous relationships, non-dyadic and non-monogamous relationships, urban tribes, and so on, also share the same value. So if the former deserve any cultural, social and legal protection and benefits, the latter do as well.
Brake also discusses ways in which our cultural practices, norms and expectations promote monogamous, long-term romantic relationships as the ideal form of socialization, and how they exclude, discriminate against and diminish the value of alternative relationships, and individuals whose lifestyles or personal preferences are oriented towards those relationships. In this paper I want to focus on one specific kind of injustice suffered by single people and those who are in non-conventional kinds of relationships, namely, the injustice of not having access to representational and conceptual tools in order to adequately conceptualize, understand, and communicate their experiences, preferences and relationships. I will argue that this is a case of what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls hermeneutical injustice.
Michael Cobb expresses a similar insight: “there are examples of the single everywhere in public, but they are always obscured by the toxic, totalitarian prominence of the couple. The single tends to not have its own language, its own way to be articulate and understood” (2012: 24).
In my view, in order to address this kind of injustice we need to introduce new and improved concepts and other representational resources that can better capture the experiences, preferences and personal narratives of individuals who do not organize their lives around long-term romantic coupledom. That is to say, we need to engage in what Sally Haslanger (2006) calls an ameliorative project, namely, the project of finding out which concepts are the most useful in order to satisfy certain normative criteria, including theoretical, instrumental, moral and political criteria. We might need to revise and improve existent concepts such as love, romantic relationship, friendship, significant other, and so on. I want to argue that these are “thick” concepts that involve both a descriptive and an evaluative component, which are both in need of revision. For instance, regarding the term “significant other”, we should change both the referent, so that the term can also apply to significant individuals other than a romantic partner, and the valence given to these alternative relationships, so that they are given the same value as those more conventional relationships. And we might also need to introduce entirely novel concepts to illuminate aspects of reality that have been obscured by the primacy of the couple.
Fricker characterizes hermeneutical injustice as “a collective hermeneutical gap [that] prevents members of a group from making sense of an experience that is in their interest to render intelligible” (2007: 7). She adds: “Hermeneutical injustice is: the injustice of having some significant area of one’s experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (155). José Medina asks: “What is meant by this hermeneutical activity of “making sense of an experience” that is undermined? Making sense to whom? To oneself? To others? And which others? … It is not the same to try to make sense of one’s experience to oneself, to others within one group or in the same predicament, or to others who do not share the experience in question” (2013: 98). He adds:
We should be careful not to tie too closely people’s hermeneutical capacities to the repertoire of readily available terms and coined concepts, as if oppressed subjects did not have ways of expressing their suffering well before such articulations were available. For example, non-heterosexual subjects had ways of signaling to themselves and to others like them that they were being sexually oppressed long before terms such as “homophobia” and “heterosexism” were in circulation. … It is crucial to develop a hermeneutical sensibility with respect to embryonic and inchoate attempts at communicating about experiences that do not yet have standard formulations. (99)
As I understand him, Medina is suggesting that in addition to the semantic strategy of introducing new labels and making sure they become mainstream tools, there is a prior step, namely, the epistemic strategy of being more sensitive to new emerging meanings and complicated processes of communication. In my view, Medina’s insightful remarks about the LGBT community’s struggle can also be applied to the predicament of members of the single, asexual, celibate, solitudinous, and polyamorous communities.
References:
Brake, Elizabeth (2012) Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law, Oxford University Press.
Cobb, Michael (2012) Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, New York University Press.
Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press.
Haslanger, Sally (2006) “What Good Are Our Intuitions? Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Sup. Vol. 80(1), pp. 89-118.
Medina, José (2013) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, Oxford University Press.
Elizabeth Brake (2012) has recently argued that the promotion of marriage discriminates against people who do not organize their personal and affective lives around a central, monogamous, long-term romantic relationship. That is, our cultural, social and legal practices promoting marriage discriminate against people such as the solitudinous, the asexual, the celibate, the polyamorous, and all those who prioritize friendships, urban tribes, and other forms of relationships of care that do not conform to the model of romantic coupledom. In her book, Brake argues that the primacy given to marriage in our cultural, social and legal practices is unjustified, because marriage has no moral or prudential value over and above those alternative relationships of care. She examines several possible features of marriage that could possibly provide a distinctive moral value, such as monogamy, exclusivity, its long-term nature, or its dyadic nature, and she argues that none of these features has intrinsic moral value.
Brake concludes that the moral value of marriage and long-term, monogamous romantic relationships more in general relies on the intrinsic value of relationships of care, which is a basic good in her view. She argues that those alternative forms of relationship, such as friendships, short-term romantic relationships, polyamorous relationships, non-dyadic and non-monogamous relationships, urban tribes, and so on, also share the same value. So if the former deserve any cultural, social and legal protection and benefits, the latter do as well.
Brake also discusses ways in which our cultural practices, norms and expectations promote monogamous, long-term romantic relationships as the ideal form of socialization, and how they exclude, discriminate against and diminish the value of alternative relationships, and individuals whose lifestyles or personal preferences are oriented towards those relationships. In this paper I want to focus on one specific kind of injustice suffered by single people and those who are in non-conventional kinds of relationships, namely, the injustice of not having access to representational and conceptual tools in order to adequately conceptualize, understand, and communicate their experiences, preferences and relationships. I will argue that this is a case of what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls hermeneutical injustice.
Michael Cobb expresses a similar insight: “there are examples of the single everywhere in public, but they are always obscured by the toxic, totalitarian prominence of the couple. The single tends to not have its own language, its own way to be articulate and understood” (2012: 24).
In my view, in order to address this kind of injustice we need to introduce new and improved concepts and other representational resources that can better capture the experiences, preferences and personal narratives of individuals who do not organize their lives around long-term romantic coupledom. That is to say, we need to engage in what Sally Haslanger (2006) calls an ameliorative project, namely, the project of finding out which concepts are the most useful in order to satisfy certain normative criteria, including theoretical, instrumental, moral and political criteria. We might need to revise and improve existent concepts such as love, romantic relationship, friendship, significant other, and so on. I want to argue that these are “thick” concepts that involve both a descriptive and an evaluative component, which are both in need of revision. For instance, regarding the term “significant other”, we should change both the referent, so that the term can also apply to significant individuals other than a romantic partner, and the valence given to these alternative relationships, so that they are given the same value as those more conventional relationships. And we might also need to introduce entirely novel concepts to illuminate aspects of reality that have been obscured by the primacy of the couple.
Fricker characterizes hermeneutical injustice as “a collective hermeneutical gap [that] prevents members of a group from making sense of an experience that is in their interest to render intelligible” (2007: 7). She adds: “Hermeneutical injustice is: the injustice of having some significant area of one’s experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (155). José Medina asks: “What is meant by this hermeneutical activity of “making sense of an experience” that is undermined? Making sense to whom? To oneself? To others? And which others? … It is not the same to try to make sense of one’s experience to oneself, to others within one group or in the same predicament, or to others who do not share the experience in question” (2013: 98). He adds:
We should be careful not to tie too closely people’s hermeneutical capacities to the repertoire of readily available terms and coined concepts, as if oppressed subjects did not have ways of expressing their suffering well before such articulations were available. For example, non-heterosexual subjects had ways of signaling to themselves and to others like them that they were being sexually oppressed long before terms such as “homophobia” and “heterosexism” were in circulation. … It is crucial to develop a hermeneutical sensibility with respect to embryonic and inchoate attempts at communicating about experiences that do not yet have standard formulations. (99)
As I understand him, Medina is suggesting that in addition to the semantic strategy of introducing new labels and making sure they become mainstream tools, there is a prior step, namely, the epistemic strategy of being more sensitive to new emerging meanings and complicated processes of communication. In my view, Medina’s insightful remarks about the LGBT community’s struggle can also be applied to the predicament of members of the single, asexual, celibate, solitudinous, and polyamorous communities.
References:
Brake, Elizabeth (2012) Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law, Oxford University Press.
Cobb, Michael (2012) Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, New York University Press.
Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press.
Haslanger, Sally (2006) “What Good Are Our Intuitions? Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Sup. Vol. 80(1), pp. 89-118.
Medina, José (2013) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, Oxford University Press.