Against Knowing: The Rhetorical Structure of Epistemic Violence

ABSTRACT Philosophers have theorized epistemic violence as a form of harm committed against people primarily in their capacities as knowers. In this essay, we apply a modal materialist perspective to understand epistemic violence as a rhetorical process that is made possible through binary, hierarchy, and perfecting tendencies of language. Taken together, such tendencies form a script in which interlocutors are divided into “rational” actors, who are legitimated to define knowledge in particular contexts, pitted against “irrational” actors, who are made enemies of knowledge and excluded from knowledge-creating processes. We then apply this script in a reading of two narratives about transphobia by philosopher Veronica Ivy that discuss forms of epistemic violence. We show how such violence is underwritten by our script at the rhetorical level, concluding with three counter-rhetorical strategies to epistemic violence: fomenting empathy, dislodging supremacist power structures, and practicing radical listening.