This paper develops an original approach for theorising about himpathy by examining the courtrooms’ environment. Kate Manne (2018) defines himpathy as the excessive sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence. While Manne discusses himpathy in connection with the moral and political problem of exonerating narratives and through the lens of testimonial injustice, we want to explore cases in which the testimony of the rape survivor is believed, but nevertheless misinterpreted due to conceptual resources that obscure (...) women’s experience of sexual violence. We argue that the concept of himpathy can be expanded and himpathy can be seen as an instance of hermeneutical injustice in which epistemic and emotional dysfunctions are deeply intertwined and sustained by forms of meta blindness (Medina, 2013) that present the male standpoint as neutral. We then put this insight into practice to analyse how himpathy influences the constitution of testimonial evidence in Italian criminal trials for sexual violence. The aim is to shed proper light on the role of himpathy in presenting biased epistemological stances as impartial in judicial reasoning. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...) ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

Emotions can get things right and serve us in many productive ways. They can also get things wrong and harm our epistemic or practical endeavors. While this is equally true of political and nonpolitical emotions, assessing the appropriateness of political emotions is a particularly contested endeavor. In our paper, we explore political emotions from a meta-normative perspective. Building on existing discussions on the fittingness and appropriateness of emotions in general and distinctive types of political emotions in particular, we investigate which (...) different standards of appropriateness political emotions have qua being political. We develop a novel taxonomy that distinguishes the focus-, target-, subject-, and aim-appropriateness of political emotions. As we argue, our focus-based account of fittingness allows us to assess the fittingness of political emotions from a first-personal perspective by reflecting on the question of whether the emotion adequately mirrors what really matters to the emoters. While the standard of target-appropriateness assesses whether the target of the emotion has the right scope, the standard of subject-appropriateness allows us to assess whether the emotion adequately mirrors one’s group membership. The standard of aim-appropriateness, finally, assesses the political legitimacy of political emotions based on one’s underlying understanding of the political itself. (shrink)