Margherita Grassi

Misogyny is traditionally understood as hatred against women. Contra this view, Kate Manne (2018) argued that “misogyny” should be defined as a sanction-distributing mechanism that punishes women who violate gender norms and rewards women who comply with them. Here, I argue for a novel approach in characterising “misogyny.” The paper consists of two main parts. In the negative one, I acknowledge the deficiencies of both accounts. Specifically, I focus on the limitations of Manne’s definition. First, I argue that Manne’s reactive reading of misogyny downplays her account’s predictive capacity and aspired extensional scope. Second, I propose that the affective dimension should be given more prominence. Then, I outline the desiderata for an adequate account of “misogyny.” The suggested approach is to integrate the psychological and structural perspectives by (i) incorporating the structural explanation of the phenomenon by definition, and (ii) treating the affective dimension as a core part of misogyny.

This paper develops an original approach for theorising about himpathy by examining the courtrooms’ environment. Kate Manne (2018) defines himpathy as the excessive sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence. While Manne discusses himpathy in connection with the moral and political problem of exonerating narratives and through the lens of testimonial injustice, we want to explore cases in which the testimony of the rape survivor is believed, but nevertheless misinterpreted due to conceptual resources that obscure women’s experience of sexual violence. We argue that the concept of himpathy can be expanded and himpathy can be seen as an instance of hermeneutical injustice in which epistemic and emotional dysfunctions are deeply intertwined and sustained by forms of meta blindness (Medina, 2013) that present the male standpoint as neutral. We then put this insight into practice to analyse how himpathy influences the constitution of testimonial evidence in Italian criminal trials for sexual violence. The aim is to shed proper light on the role of himpathy in presenting biased epistemological stances as impartial in judicial reasoning.