Stanford Humanities Center
Join us for a lecture by Cornell University's Kate Manne as part of our series titled "All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years," which features ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities.
Gaslighting is often glossed as an interpersonal practice involving manipulating the victim into feeling "crazy." In this talk, Professor Manne will moot various desiderata for an adequate account of gaslighting, and argue for a broader account of the phenomenon—and, ultimately, a definition of gaslighting which allows that it can (a) be a political and cultural practice rather than an interpersonal one, (b) proceed by making victims feel negative moral emotions (such as guilty or ashamed) for deviating from the gaslighter's prescribed narrative, and (c) be defined functionally as a process which, roughly, makes the target feel defective for so doing. She will close by considering practices that encourage fruitful disagreement as an antidote to gaslighting.
About the Speaker
Kate Manne has been an associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2011–2013), did her graduate work at MIT (2006–2011), and was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne (2001–2005), where she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science. She is the author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.
