The anti-democratic harms of mansplaining

Abstract

Speaker: Dr Laura Montanaro, University of Essex The neologism ‘mansplaining’ captures an insidious dynamic in which men explain things to women that women already understand, assuming that by virtue of being a woman she lacks the man’s knowledge. Given its cultural popularity, it has started to receive some attention in contemporary scholarship, identifying its epistemic harms. My purpose is to consider mansplaining and its harms from the perspective of democratic theory – that domain in which the central questions at stake are those concerning political voice. I argue that mansplaining is a kind of speech act committed against others of lower social status. It poses several anti-democratic harms: to women’s voice, cutting off an essential avenue for political participation, and dampening political efficacy; to women’s equal recognition not only as knowers but also as moral agents; and to deliberation, damaging the capacities of people to sway one another through speech.