What Is Gaslighting?
Gaslighting refers to acts of manipulation that are meant to create victims doubt their reality for the idea about their perpetrators. While anyone can experience the debilitating mental effects of gaslighting, marginalized folks can experience it in a very way that adds additional disproportionate harm. In fact, gaslighting can act as a tool of oppression against folks marginalized by various aspects of their identity like race, gender, disability, etc.
Way to Recognize Gaslighting
In her research paper published in 2019, Dr. Paige Sweet developed a theory of gaslighting through 18 months of fieldwork, including archival reviews of feminist activism, interviews, and participant observation. Sweet explains that gaslighting is established as an interpersonal weapon rooted in power differentials, gender-based biases, systemic oppression, etc. As an example, Sweet describes how gaslighting presents itself within the case of an older man and a working-class BIPOC individual in academia and explains how the perpetrator of such harm may even be in denial. This study demonstrates “how men’s relative cultural and economic capital, combined with their access to “rationality” and institutional credibility, set the conditions for gaslighting. For victims with intersecting social marginalities associated with race, ability, and status, these dynamics are especially dangerous.”
Misogyny and Gaslighting
While gaslighting will be a tactic of oppression by all genders, it’s often accustomed enact misogyny. In her 2019 paper, Professor Cynthia Stark argues that manipulative gaslighting utilizes such tactics as sidestepping and displacing to create folks doubt their testimony by enacting misogyny.Stark defines misogyny as an attribute of social systems during which folks who fail to fits patriarchal expectations are subject to hostility, which disproportionately harms marginalized genders.
Drawing on recent events, Professor Stark outlines 5 ways whereby an accusation against a person is also displaced by manipulative gaslighting:
- Denial-They denies that they gave done anything wrong. This is done to alter the victim’s perception of reality
- Dismissal by claiming that the victim lied or is an opportunist, as illustrated by the case of a lot of sexual assaults against powerful people who were convicted of crimes against women supported physical evidence, but conservatives resorted to claiming that his victims were lying, motivated by the prospect of cashing in on their accusations
- Minimizing harm to the victim
if it can’t be disproven, with replies like “I was only joking, where is your sense of humor?” or “Why are you so uptight?” or “Wow, you sound sort of a man-hater.” - Victim-blaming by insinuating they brought harm on themselves, with questions like “Why were you at that place ?” “Why were you drinking?” “Why were you wearing a brief skirt?” etc.
- Empathy, as men who cause harm, receive excessive sympathy, as within the case of Brock Turner, a white student convicted of sex offense whose “father lamented that the conviction had ruined his son’s appetite and deprived him of his happy-go-lucky demeanor.”
Such public examples constitute psychological oppression as collective gaslighting makes marginalized genders doubt their perception of harm at the hands of misogyny, which only reinforces subordination by men.
Given how gaslighting often insinuates that the victim is guilty, it’s easy to determine how much feedback is also internalized by marginalized genders.
Racial Gaslighting
In their 2019 paper, Professor Angelique Davis and Dr. Rose Ernst define racial gaslighting as “the political, social, economic and cultural process that perpetuates and normalizes a supremacist reality through pathologizing people who resist” and racial spectacles as “narratives that obfuscate the existence of a supremacist state organization.”
An example of this can be tone policing, whereby white folks with greater power chastise the communication kind of BIPOC folks opposing their oppression.
Whistle-Blower Gaslighting
Given how gaslighting operates through the employment of power to disproportionately harm marginalized genders and BIPOC folks, it’s easy to imagine how this plays call at the workplace, especially in institutions.
Whistle-blower gaslighting is described as “a situation where the whistle-blower doubts her perceptions, competence, and psychological state. These outcomes are accomplished when the institution enables reprisals, explains them away, and so pronounces that the whistle-blower is irrationally overreacting to normal everyday interactions. Over time, these strategies trap the whistle-blower in a very maze of enforced helplessness.”
Folks who are marginalized by gender, race, ability, etc. are at greater risk of adverse psychological state outcomes as a result of gaslighting given how power in institutions continues to be monopolized by cisgender able-bodied individuals.
-by Shinjini Chatterjee
