Trapped in the In-Between: Epistemic Injustice and the Model Minority Stereotype in the Asian American Experience

The model minority stereotype confers material benefits to Asian Americans. However, it is also the cause of them experiencing epistemic injustice and harms that affect them not only as knowers, but as persons. In this thesis, I offer a new perspective on Miranda Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice by looking at the experience of Asian Americans socially constructed as the ‘model minority’. Scholars have expanded, critiqued, and nuanced Miranda Fricker’s seminal concept of epistemic injustice. My thesis adds to this literature by analyzing the wider set of harms associated with the model minority stereotype. The model minority is, on one level, a “positive” stereotype. I argue, however, that its internalization that informs Asian American identity, leads to subtle forms of intrapersonal epistemic injustices due to the interactive, looping, and self-reinforcing nature of stereotypes influencing social constructions not picked up by Fricker. Furthermore, due to the dynamics of intrapersonal epistemic injustice being entangled with material benefits, Asian Americans are simultaneously accepted and othered and become “truncated subjects” with limited (and controlled) epistemic agency that is domain specific and perpetuates broader social injustices. Additionally, living as a truncated subject contributes to further epistemic, ethical, practical, ontological, and affective harms. The interactive nature of epistemic injustice also leads to group-level epistemic injustice and the harms of persistent unknowability and persistent hypervisibility/invisibility, respectively. These group-level injustices and harms force Asian Americans into a liminal space where their social identity is dependent on the racial contexts they find themselves in amidst white supremacy and anti-Blackness. However, I conclude on a constructive note. My argument is that because of their troubled construction and liminal identity, Asian Americans, can develop what I call liminal consciousness that can serve as avenues of resistance.