Hermeneutical Resources Beyond The Male/Female Binary: Epistemic Injustice And The Advent Of A Third Categorical Gender

This thesis uses the concepts of epistemic injustice (injustice related to an individual’s relationship with the shared pool of social knowledge) and hermeneutical resources (conceptual tools, primarily based in language, that are used to understand and express lived experience) to examine how well a third categorical gender redresses the harms caused by the male/female binary. The first chapter discusses the ways medicine reproduces cultural norms regarding gender, focusing in particular on the resulting epistemic injustices. The second chapter looks at the ways the advertising and entertainment sectors of the culture industry (a term coined by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1944) distribute hermeneutical resources surrounding gender, along with the new resources becoming available with the emergence of a nonbinary gender category into the public eye. The overall argument of this thesis is that while a third gender category may be beneficial to many who do not identify as male or female, it continues to perpetuate epistemic injustice insofar as it upholds the discursive representation of gender as internally-generated, acontextual, and immutable.