Miranda Young

Intelligibility is often seen as a paradigmatic goal for overcoming epistemic oppression. Understanding oppression helps to undo structures of ignorance and to create the grounds for moral, political, and legal arguments that protect marginalized people from being silenced. This is especially crucial for those who experience sexual and gendered violence, as they often struggle both to understand their own experiences and to make others understand them. In this paper, I argue that social epistemologists and feminist standpoint theorists often focus in an unvariegated way on intelligibility, inadvertently reinforcing reliance on carceral structures—systems that tend to reproduce harm and violence for survivors. This concern is particularly relevant in feminist anti-rape politics, where the pressure to make experiences legible often intersects with calls for carceral solutions, which fail to address the root causes of harm and maintain cultures of sexual and gender violence. To remedy this, I propose a new epistemological framework that preserves the importance of intelligibility while challenging carceral reliance. Instead of focusing solely on comprehension, I suggest approaching intelligibility as a process of navigating layers of social legibility, allowing for alternatives that better support survivors and resist carceral thinking.

The Existentialist philosophers, Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, argue that the human condition is existentially free, and following this phenomenology, the individual has a responsibility to act on her freedom and hold herself accountable for the choices that she makes. This is a view that human beings are constituted by their subjectivity: the unique combination of their situation and their choices within their situation. I argue that the existential imperative contributes to a cultural master narrative - a term used by philosopher Hilde Lindermann Nelson that is often oppressively imposed upon sexual assault survivors. I further argue that the survivor’s construction of counterstory, or personal narrative, allows the survivor to meet the existential imperative in a non-oppressive way, in addition to challenge cultural master narratives. The production of counterstories, when presented to a larger audience, has the potential to alter master narratives so they are more inclusive and diverse.