UpcomIng Talks by EPIC Members

27.11.24

TITLE: Carmita Wood in her own words: Shame, loneliness, and epistemic injustice at a speak-out on sexual harassment in Ithaca in 1975. 

ABSTRACT: On the 4th of May 1975, the recently-formed feminist labor collective, Working Women United, held a speak-out on sexual harassment, a phrase its founding members had coined to formalize and tie together a broad category of harm which was sexual in nature, but stopped short of rape or serious assault. One speaker, Carmita Wood, had prompted the creation of the group by taking her experiences of prolonged harassment by a renowned Cornell scientist to a feminist academic, Lin Farley; their need to find a distinct terminology for what had happened were rooted in part in Wood’s failed attempts at communicating her reasons for leaving her job to a Department of Labor unemployment board. For many if not most scholars of epistemic injustice (and a smaller number of scholars of sexual harassment and second-wave feminism), her story is at least partially familiar, forming a central spur of Miranda Fricker’s famous – and much elaborated and contested – 2007 analysis of hermeneutic injustice. Amid sustained and ongoing discussions over what Wood ‘knew’ about her experience, however, there has been far less attention paid to what she said – and how she felt – at the time. In the transcript of the speak-out, Wood and her fellow speakers frequently made sense of their experiences – and the epistemic problems of understanding and speaking about them – through the interconnecting prisms of aloneness and shame. Going back to the stories they told and how they told them, I take that as a starting point for a wider consideration of how shame, loneliness, and epistemic injustice interrelate, and how they might be fruitfully theorized – and historicized – alongside one another.