‘Through a glass darkly’: Dyslexic identity and hermeneutic injustice

Abstract

This thought piece is written by four dyslexic disability scholars who reject dyslexia as an explanatory account. Instead, we adopt Lexism – the othering of dyslexics by normative practices and assumptions of literacy. In asserting a political position and our self-identity, we explore our personal ambivalent experiences of diagnosis. The new concept of Lexism challenges the ‘power intellectual’ wielded by those who define and categorise dyslexics. We treat the ‘diagnosis’ of dyslexia as an expression of both Lexism (normative literacy) and the power intellectual. The purpose is to highlight the often inadequate diagnosis process, through the lens of ‘hermeneutic injustice’, which argues that the nomenclature surrounding dyslexia and other related psychological diagnoses leaves dyslexics disempowered and hampered in recognising instances of injustice. As dyslexic disability scholars, we struggled to understand our dyslexic identity; impaired by hermeneutic injustice, we made sense of our experiences of Lexism with difficulty. The injustice was present but invisible to us. This article focuses on how we came to perceive more clearly.