people really need to stop using gaslighting as a term to describe systemic oppression holy shit it’s a term specifically to describe interpersonal abuse not a way to analyse society
just to clarify: a politician lying to you is not ‘gaslighting’, mass media not giving a group which you belong to representation is not ‘gaslighting’, gaslighting is a person who forces you to question your own perception of reality and makes you unable to trust your own thought processes and memory
I can see where you are coming from and I definitely see some people misinterpreting gaslighting to simply mean ‘lying’ and misapplying the term gaslighting. But I also think there are people out there who fully understand the term gaslighting, look at society and notice it happening on a bigger than interpersonal scale.
When communities rise in defiance of police brutality and are then told again and again that the police brutality was a ‘reprisal’ to their violence and that they are bringing this all on themselves that if only they stopped rising up the brutality would stop. When transphobia pushes trans people to the edge of suicide and at the same time tells them that transness is solely to blame for their suicidal thoughts because transness is inherently defined by tragedy.
These and other processes of oppression of persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, aimed at making targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity meet the definition of a large scale form of gaslighting.
Media representations that support this process can definitely be seen as parts of a gaslighting process, an experience where almost everyone in society is constantly telling you that your experiences of oppression are not real, that you must have imagined it, that society never did that to you, that you liked it anyway,that you’re just looking for excuses for your own failures, that if you just stopped accusing people of oppression it would all go away. Like, I’m no expert but I think that’s gaslighting.
QueerAnarchism 