UCLA

Oppression can take many different forms. The most uncontroversial cases of oppression are violent and legally sanctioned: Indigenous genocide during the colonization of the Americas, chattel slavery in the antebellum United States, secret detention and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay, trans women housed in men’s prison facilities despite widespread physical and sexual assault. We might distinguish between these cases and cases that involve neither physical violence nor the use of law. Consider being excluded from informal educational or networking opportunities, having one’s testimony routinely discounted or dismissed, or incurring contempt or hostility for failing to live up to social norms.

You might doubt that these latter examples have much in common with the cases involving violence and the law. I’ll try to convince you otherwise. I argue that instances of “civilized” oppression share a characteristic practical predicament with the violent and legally sanctioned versions. Contemporary forms of oppression involve the dilemmatic structure of coercion without direct coercive threats. Both material and psychological factors—including threats of penalty, censure, and deprivation, as well as the necessity of keeping oppressive scripts in mind—structure the distinct unfreedom of oppression. I’d like to suggest that a recurrent and constitutive element of contemporary oppression is the option to avoid or mitigate sanctions in the short term by accommodating the unacceptable treatment of social group members. In addition to having few and objectionable options, oppressed agents must repeatedly choose between (1) imminent harm, and (2) avoiding or mitigating harm through complicity in injustice towards oneself and members of one’s social group.

I argue that individual resistance to oppression is a limited strategy. An individual can refuse to accommodate oppression by presenting herself for harm in response to a deliberative dilemma. This may be morally required in the face of mild social disapproval. It’s implausible, however, that the oppressed are morally obligated to expose themselves to serious harm. Given an understanding of oppression as forcing a problematic presentation of options on individuals, resistance might aspire to adding another option. While oppressed individuals face real dilemmas, groups acting together are not constrained in the same way. Collective action eliminates or mitigates the sanctions of refusal to accommodate objectionable treatment. This sets up collective resistance as a form of resistance that avoids complicity and also refuses to accept punishment for noncompliance.

In the rest of the dissertation, I consider how the proposal helps explain an otherwise underdeveloped aspect of epistemic injustice, how it interacts with the main insights of intersectionality, and how to understand the role of identity in oppression and resistance. I go on to to argue that the dilemmatic framework alone fails to capture the specificity of gender oppression in terms of gender identity and its corresponding liberatory possibilities. I consider how a queer and trans feminist understanding of gender and sexual identity helps to illuminate possibilities for collective resistance.