From impertinence to impostorism. An analysis of gaslighting as positional injustice

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reading of gaslighting and impostorism as relational effects of what will be termed positional injustice: a form of harm that simultaneously undermines a subject’s epistemic and affective self-trust by systematically placing them in a position of testimonial invalidation. Drawing on a microfiction structured in three scenes (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), the article examines some of the ways in which emotional silencing and cognitive disauthorization are articulated through everyday family practices that shape fragmented subjectivities, trapped between the desire to speak and the mandate to care. The article argues that the concept of positional injustice makes it possible to depathologize subjective phenomena that are usually understood as intrapsychic disorders, while providing a fertile framework for critically examining the ways in which relational harm becomes embodied and perpetuated through normalized patterns of interaction. The methodology employed is grounded in developments within narrativism and the affective turn, thereby foregrounding singular and situated forms of knowledge. Ultimately, the proposal seeks to challenge the frameworks of intelligibility that determine who is entitled to speak, what may be said, and under what conditions a person will be believed or silenced.