Becoming Who You Are

Authors

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6, titled “Becoming Who You Are: Hermeneutical Breakthroughs, Transformative Experience, and Epistemic Empowerment,” addresses the process of epistemic empowerment by connecting the literature on epistemic injustice to the literature on transformative experience. In contrast to the predominant focus on the implications of transformative experience for rational choice and decision theory, this chapter focuses on some of the normative, justice-oriented aspects of transformative experience by turning to the philosophically neglected intersection of gender and neurodiversity. This chapter argues that accessing an autism diagnosis constitutes a hermeneutical breakthrough that is the source of a transformative experience for previously undiagnosed Autistic women, and that accessing a diagnosis is a matter of both epistemic and social justice. After some terminological clarifications, this chapter begins by showing how hermeneutical breakthroughs give rise to transformative experience and epistemic empowerment, and how hermeneutical breakthroughs can impact Autistic women’s social, economic, and mental well-being. It then shows how hermeneutical injustice can preempt hermeneutical breakthroughs, which involve hermeneutical representativeness and improved self-understanding. This chapter identifies a new type of epistemic injustice, which it terms existential hermeneutical injustice, which specifically affects a person’s sense of identity or who they take themselves to be, by preventing a person from knowing and becoming who they are. Finally, the chapter shows that moving toward hermeneutical justice, so that Autistic women may access a diagnosis and become who they are, requires attending to the gender biases that pervade both the social and the medical spheres.

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