A Pragmatic Account of Demands for Recognition

Members of communities that are systematically marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or any other identifier find themselves faced with pervasive societal messages that call their humanity into question. These messages may either be explicit, as in the case of a discriminatory law, or implicit, as in the case of a stereotypical media trope. In response to these messages, they often feel compelled to explicitly affirm their worth as human beings, with the intention of altering societal attitudes and practices. Affirmative statements may also target the self-image of marginalized people. Catch phrases like girl power, girls rule, and the future is female, are frequently used by women's rights advocates, with the intention of building selfconfidence among women and girls. These communicative strategies often amount to what is referred to in some strands of contemporary political theory as demands for recognition, that is, demands to be reconstituted socially in the eyes of the "other." The communicative strategies of group empowerment efforts are not universally well-received, and while some of the backlash comes from consciously prejudiced individuals who believe these statements of worth to be false, many critics do not fundamentally disagree with the statements but rather find them to be offensive, ineffective, or contextually inappropriate. In this paper, I integrate pragmatic theories-particularly Neo-Gricean theories of Conversational Logic and Speech Act Theoryand political theories of recognition to explain why and how demands for recognition by marginalized groups may be ignored, misconstrued, or rejected by the dominant groups at which they are addressed. I identify two main factors that impede the successful self-advocacy of marginalized groups. First, differing conceptions of a politics of recognition lead to different judgments of implicated meaning Second, a lack of recognition means that marginalized people often speak from a position of reduced credibility; their actions, including speech acts, are subject to bias-induced perceptual distortions that compromise their potential as illocutionary agents.