Outrage Epistemology: Affective Excess as a Way of Knowing in Feminist Scholarship

Abstract

Dominant paradigms of epistemology conventionally separate the rational from the emotional. In contradistinction to those views, we build on a rich tradition of scholarship about feminist anger to make the claim that outrage, in particular, has epistemic value. We understand feminist outrage—especially in the sense of a gross or malicious wrong or injury to principle—as a source of knowing, rather than an obstacle to it. Though the epistemic usefulness of anger has long been recognized among feminists, particularly Black feminists and other feminists of color, the disciplining of feminist outrage in the scholarly publication process invites our attention and demands our response. We define outrage epistemology as a way of knowing through felt, reflective awareness of injustice.

Keywords:

• Affect
• epistemic injustice
• epistemology
• feminist research
• outrage

Notes

1 Veronica Ivy (2017, 2019) has usefully theorized epistemic violence as an extension of epistemic injustice. See also Alcoff (2010), Fricker (2007), Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus (2017), Langton (2010), Maitra (2010), Pham (2019), and Pohlhaus (2012).

2 Incidentally, that chapter of the book is a reprint of an article we published earlier, and the article’s reviewers did not have the same inclinations as the book reader. Anyone interested in our unsanitized argument against Halberstam can find it in Spencer and Kulbaga (2018).

3 We choose not to cite these works in the traditional sense because we hesitate to boost the citation count of books that blithely contribute to and celebrate the proliferation of rape culture. Yes, we are still outraged about these books.

4 The British tradition of media and communication scholarship is, for instance, more open to expressions of emotion than much U.S.-centric communication publication outlets. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.

5 On the horrors of neoliberalism, see also Springer’s (2016) brilliant “Fuck Neoliberalism,” an essay that enacts our vision of outrage quite delightfully.