Lara Schiebli: 'The Epistemology of #BelieveWomen'
I attempt to reconstrue the demand expressed in the popular feminist slogan and hashtag #BelieveWomen using feminist epistemology. Before outlining my proposal, I consider existing proposals regarding how to understand #BelieveWomen (Bolinger 2021, Ferzan 2021, Goldberg 2022) and find that they insufficiently capture what it means to #BelieveWomen.
I argue that we ought to understand the slogan as demanding the audience to believe first-personal disclosures of experiences of sexual violence and that interpretations short of this fail to satisfy the activist goals of #BelieveWomen. I contextualise the demands of #BelieveWomen in the wider scholarship regarding epistemic injustice and analyse whether the demand should be (exclusively) understood as a proposed remedy or amelioration of epistemic injustice experienced by survivors of sexual violence.
