Doing Epistemic (In)justice to Semenya

Abstract

In August 2009, Caster Semenya won the women’s 800m event at the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships in Berlin. This victory became a global news story not because Semenya was a newcomer to athletics who had outperformed an established field – but because of the fact that before the race she had been asked to undergo tests to determine whether or not she was a woman. This article uses a hermeneutics of suspicion to argue that the controversy surrounding Semenya was based on a set of assumptions that, although incorrect, drew on hegemonic understandings of sex and gender that dominate the discourse of sport, and were adopted by the media without question. As a consequence, Semenya became the victim of what Miranda Fricker has termed epistemic injustice – a condition that arises when individuals or experiences are marginalized as a result of the absence of concepts and language that would enable us to articulate reality differently.