ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections between shame, state sovereignty, and epistemic injustice. For decades, the legitimacy of the Irish state depended on controlling shamed bodies: unmarried women and children shamed by their poverty, race, disability, or association with sexual transgression. The late twentieth/early twenty-first century has seen victim-survivors speaking publicly about their experiences and demanding justice. In response, the state offers a legal architecture of investigation and redress. In this chapter we map shame’s implication in these legal responses to historical institutional abuse and explore the epistemic injustices they produce. We show how the state deploys an economy of shame to insulate itself from the possibility of loss of sovereignty that true shame entails. Under the banner of “state shame” the state employs narrow legalist strategies (e.g. limited inquiries, adversarial interrogation, and a focus on monetary redress) to control and minimize victim-survivors’ ability to tell the truth and receive accountability and redress. Drawing on the work of Fricker (and Dotson and Pohlhaus), we suggest that the state is perpetrating an epistemic injustice against victim-survivors; the legal responses to institutional abuse enact a refusal to listen (testimonial injustice) or to alter the conditions on which victim-survivors can be heard (hermeneutical injustice). Epistemic injustice, then, is a symptom of the state’s prioritization of its sovereignty in national moments of supposed transition and change.
