Undoing Epistemic Injustice. One presentation at a time.
Reclaiming the Power of Knowing and Being
I can’t believe it. I’ve achieved one of my childhood dreams: being seen as a sex therapist. I presented at the 2025 AASECT conference in Las Vegas. For so long, I carried doubt about whether I belonged there—whether the self I embodied, the stories I told, and the insights I offered were worthy of that stage. Much of my embodied experience in academia has been shaped by hyper-vigilance, by a nervous watchfulness, and by a gnawing sense of not enoughness. Beneath the celebration of my achievement, there still lives the shaking of my voice, the restless tremor in my hands, and a stubborn reluctance to meet the eyes of my audience—even an audience that I know, or hope, shares my values.
To call this only “trauma” would be to misname it. To reduce these sensations to individual injury erases the systems of power that have shaped them. I have come to see them, instead, as the echoes of epistemic injustice—of a world that presumes to tell me what I am allowed to know, what counts as knowledge, and whose voices matter in public spaces.
What Is Epistemic Injustice, and Why Does It Matter Here?
Epistemic injustice, as Miranda Fricker frames it, describes the ways people are harmed in their capacity as knowers. It happens when you’re disbelieved not because of what you say but because of who you are. It happens when your embodied insights, your cultural or gendered ways of knowing, are dismissed as irrational or unscientific. It happens when the systems that claim to be about “truth” systematically refuse your testimony.
When I look back, I see how epistemic injustice has been the silent architecture of my professional life. It lives in the double-take someone does when they realize the “expert” on stage is gender-queer and brown, or in the subtle pause after I share an idea in a room that was not designed for me. It lives in the well-meaning but insidious question, “Where did you learn this?,” which often means, “Who gave you permission to know this?” It lives in the academic voice that has been prized over the embodied voice, as if the knowing of my own body—its shivers, its joys, its tender memories—has no place in the conference hall.
Han’s Psychopolitics and the Neoliberal Gaze
Reading Byung-Chul Han has helped me put words to the feeling of being constantly watched and measured—especially in the realm of professional achievement. In The Burnout Society and Infocracy, Han describes how modern power no longer confines us in rigid structures of discipline. Instead, it operates through a subtle compulsion to self-optimize and self-surveil. We become “achievement-subjects,” turning even our most intimate experiences into data to be evaluated, improved, and sold back to us.
Han’s “psychopolitics” resonates with the ways I have learned to monitor and modulate my own knowing. The drive to prove oneself as “objective,” “scientific,” and “unbiased” can be a way of internalizing the demand for epistemic legitimacy in a world that devalues certain bodies. The demand for me to be “neutral” in my teaching and research is a demand for me to split myself from my communities, to pretend that my knowledge can be abstracted from my brown skin, my queer voice, my embodied history.
The Tyranny of Transparency: When “Knowledge” Is a Trap
Han argues that we live under an “information regime,” where transparency becomes both the promise and the prison. Digital infrastructures promise openness and access, but what they often produce is a perpetual state of surveillance. In this regime, as he writes in Infocracy, “People do not feel that they are under surveillance. They feel free. Paradoxically, it is the feeling of freedom that secures the rule of the regime.” The algorithmic systems that shape our institutions do not merely collect information—they decide which voices are “trustworthy,” whose data is “reliable,” and whose experiences are worthy of care.
This is the violence of epistemic injustice in the age of Big Data. My voice as a therapist (relational, sex, or otherwise), as a brown queer person, is not just overshadowed by algorithmic biases—it is systematically disqualified by them. As Alan Rubel and colleagues argue in Algorithms and Autonomy, algorithmic systems can reinforce the erasure of marginalized knowers when they prioritize efficiency and predictive control over the messy, relational truths of lived experience .
Undoing the Epistemic Cage
To stand on a stage and speak—while my heart hammers and my voice trembles—is to refuse the quiet death of epistemic injustice. It is to insist that my ways of knowing, born of the friction between my body and the world, are not a deficit but a wellspring of wisdom.
I think of the embodied trembling in my voice as a testament to the complexity of knowing in a world that has tried to simplify me. My fragmented knowing—born from the collisions of gender, race, sexuality, and disability—is not a weakness. It is a map of a world that does not yet exist, a world where knowledge is not defined by proximity to whiteness, maleness, or capitalist productivity.
Undoing epistemic injustice means reclaiming this fragmentation as a form of power. It means rejecting the imperative to perform “wholeness” and embracing instead the radical possibility of partial, relational, situated knowing. It means seeing knowledge not as a commodity to be hoarded or a credential to be granted by distant institutions, but as a practice of mutual care and collective survival.
Reimagining the Space of Knowing: From Performance to Sanctuary
In my practice as a sex therapist, I strive to make room for the ways my clients know themselves—ways that have often been silenced or dismissed by mainstream discourses of psychology. When a trans client shares the feeling of gender euphoria in their body, or when a survivor reclaims pleasure as a birthright, these are not just “feelings.” They are knowledge—epistemologies that do not require external validation. Undoing epistemic injustice in my work means resisting the urge to turn these knowings into data points for institutional consumption. It means creating sanctuaries of slowness and silence, where knowledge can emerge without the demand for transparency or productivity. It means honoring the gaps, the stutters, the untranslatable truths that refuse to be flattened by the neoliberal gaze.
Epistemic Justice as a Practice of Freedom
When I stood at that conference in Las Vegas, I realized that the shaking in my hands was not just fear. It was also a refusal—a refusal to let the systems of surveillance and productivity define the legitimacy of my knowledge. It was a trembling born of defiance, a subtle revolution against the empire of smooth, seamless presentations that leave no room for the messiness of truth.
In that moment, I claimed the epistemic space that has so often been denied to me. I claimed the right to be an “unreliable narrator” in the eyes of those who want knowledge to be linear, hierarchical, and devoid of affect. I claimed the right to be a fragment, to be partial, to be a body that knows in ways that cannot be captured by data or diagrams.
A Final Note to Myself—and to You
I am still learning to let my body speak alongside my mind. I am still learning to trust the shaky voice, the trembling hand, the knowledge that emerges in the quiet between words. Undoing epistemic injustice is not a single act. It is an ongoing practice of turning towards my own knowing and towards the knowings of those whose voices have been too long silenced. This is what I want to carry forward from that conference stage: the understanding that undoing epistemic injustice is not about perfecting my performance. It is about refusing to perform at all, and instead creating spaces where we can listen deeply, speak vulnerably, and honor the knowledge that grows from the soil of our collective experiences.
Because in the end, the truth that matters most is not the one that wins awards or citations—it is the one that reconnects us to ourselves and to each other. And in that reconnection, in that refusal to be invisible, we begin to undo the quiet violence of epistemic injustice—and to imagine new worlds of knowing, together.
