Hypatia (2024), 1–22 doi:10.1017/hyp.2024.32
ARTICLE
Concepts and Contexts: Towards a Theory of “Hermeneutical Bastardization” Megan R. F. Drury Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Humanities Building, University Park Campus, Nottingham, UK Email: apyjd3@nottingham.ac.uk (Received 5 May 2022; revised 5 October 2023; accepted 10 October 2023)
Abstract This paper theorizes and defends a process I term “hermeneutical bastardization.” This concept tracks the way in which some hermeneutical injustices arise not from a gap in a shared pool of hermeneutical resources, but from the decontextualization of an advantageous hermeneutical resource into another (typically dominant) hermeneutical domain. This decontextualization bastardizes hermeneutical resources by severing the concept from its original meaning and significance. I focus on the term “trans woman” and examine the way in which dominant epistemic agents rewrite and redefine the concept according to prominent and prevalent pernicious representations. Specifically, once decontextualized, the term “trans woman” denotes an individual who is thoroughly erotic and sexual in nature. Hermeneutical bastardization can illuminate how hermeneutically marginalized groups are reconstructed by other dominant epistemic agents according to these pernicious representations and can be silenced whilst their concepts, or rather their terms, are being utilized in sets of dominant hermeneutical resources in ways that severely diverge from their original intra-communal conceptualization. This type of hermeneutical injustice does not arise from a lacuna in our set of resources, but instead depends on the uptake of a concept’s term and its subsequent decontextualization.
Defining hermeneutical bastardization Various philosophical works have undertaken to expand and enhance the notion of hermeneutical injustice introduced by Fricker (2007) in recent years (Pohlhaus 2012; Medina 2012, 2013, 2017; Barnes 2016; Elzinga 2018; Goetze 2018; Dembroff 2020; Hänel 2020; Jenkins 2020; Federico 2021; Falbo 2022). I am interested in a phenomenon that makes a non-lacuna-based species of hermeneutical injustice possible: hermeneutical bastardization. I elaborate and defend the following definition:
A resource or concept is hermeneutically bastardized when it is displaced from a set of counter-epistemological hermeneutical resources. Subsequently located in a © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2024.32 Published online by Cambridge University Press