Hermeneutic Labor in Medicine and Psychiatry

This article by Dr. Awais Aftab has been published on his blog-site Psychiatry at the Margins. It begins:

“Ellie Anderson has discussed the notion of ‘hermeneutic labor’”’ in the context of feminist scholarship in a wonderful paper, ‘Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships Between Women and Men,’ forthcoming in Hypatia.

She writes:

‘… hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of a) understanding one’s own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations, and presenting them in an intelligible fashion to others when deemed appropriate; b) discerning others’ feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations by interpreting their verbal and nonverbal cues, including cases when these are minimally communicative or outright avoidant; and c) comparing and contrasting these multiple sets of feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations for the purposes of conflict resolution. Hermeneutic labor is related to emotional labor because it works on the emotions—and, more broadly, the emotional domain of interpersonal life. Yet it is distinct from emotional labor because it pertains to explicit processes of interpreting emotions (as well as desires, intentions, and motivations) through cognitive processes, such as deliberating and ruminating. Naming ‘hermeneutic labor’ permits us to distinguish its harms from those of related forms of care labor. Indeed, many of the harms that feminists point out in analyses of the undue burden of emotional labor placed on women may actually be describing the harms of hermeneutic labor’ …”

You can read more from here.