Project MUSE®: Social Research: An International Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Social Research: An International Quarterly.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 69 (2002) through current issueLatest Articles: Social Research: An International QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®Social Research: An International Quarterly1944-768X0037-783XLatest articles in Social Research: An International Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986463
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the remarkable career of the term "gaslighting" was launched with Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light (1938) that was quickly adapted, twice, into cinema: a 1940 British film and, most famously, the 1944 American version, Gaslight, directed by George Cukor. With Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten in the leading roles, the movie tells the story of a woman who is nearly driven to insanity by a seemingly loving and yet cunningly manipulative husband determined to steal valuable jewels she inherited. In the 1960s the term (now as a verb or in its gerund form, "gaslighting") began its trajectory through popular psychology and psychotherapy to denote an extreme form of mental abuse. By the 2010s it gravitated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallEditor's Introduction2026-03-31text/htmlen-USEditor's Introduction2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®64342026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Hollywood's Gaslight and the Gendered Dynamics of Gaslighting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986464
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our contemporary understanding of the term "gaslighting" has its origins in the 1944 film Gaslight, a gothic melodrama set in Victorian London. Despite its far-away setting and its production almost a century ago, the film has a great deal to tell us about the gendered dynamics of gaslighting. Ingrid Bergman plays a young wife terrorized by a husband who denies her reality and quickly erodes her mental stability, driving her to the brink of psychosis. Viewers, too, become increasingly unsure about what they are seeing and whom they can trust. "Gaslight holds the mysterious, threatening quality of a dark thought on a black night," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promised would-be moviegoers when promoting its new offering
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallHollywood's Gaslight and the Gendered Dynamics of Gaslighting2026-03-31text/htmlen-USHollywood's Gaslight and the Gendered Dynamics of Gaslighting2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®492192026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31"Whether the Women Like It or Not": Reading Protectionist Gender Politics Through the Lens of Gaslight Noir Film
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986465
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the formula, by now, is well established. a think piece uses the term "gaslighting" to describe the Trump administration's most recent act of political, economic, or legal chicanery and pauses for a moment to say where the term comes from. Usually, MGM's 1944 film Gaslight is mentioned, though sometimes the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton on which the film was based gets a shout-out in addition or instead. One think piece that moves well beyond the typical cursory nod to the term's textual origins, however, is the chapter of Bonnie Honig's 2021 collection Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump in which Honig performs the closest close reading of Gaslight in the name of analyzing Trumpian politics I have come
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmall"Whether the Women Like It or Not": Reading Protectionist Gender Politics Through the Lens of Gaslight Noir Film2026-03-31text/htmlen-US"Whether the Women Like It or Not": Reading Protectionist Gender Politics Through the Lens of Gaslight Noir Film2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®786762026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Power Is Two-Faced: Gaslighting in Intimate Relationships
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986466
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when i asked bee,1 a 48-year-old black woman, about her experiences of gaslighting, she explained: "I moved in with [my boyfriend] in 2015, and things were just downhill from there. I guess … it was probably about a year after I moved in with him, it was like one day he just changed, just snapped. It was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Bee is not the only victim of gaslighting I interviewed who described her partner as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." This common descriptor aims to capture the two-sided nature of abusers, who appear charming and loving to outsiders, while people close to them experience cruelty, violence, and control. But the Jekyll and Hyde descriptor also captures the two-sided nature of abuse itself
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallPower Is Two-Faced: Gaslighting in Intimate Relationships2026-03-31text/htmlen-USPower Is Two-Faced: Gaslighting in Intimate Relationships2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®529292026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31From Metapragmatic Gaslighting to Linguistic State of Exception: Donald Trump and the Language Reform of the New Right
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986467
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Words travel. And as they do, they often change their semantic and social meaning. In this article, I track the migration of the word "gaslighting" from the private domain of interpersonal relationships to the public domain of political speechmaking. Commonly applied to the analysis of psychological dynamics, "gaslighting" broadly designates a form of epistemic violence exerted within close dyadic relationships and aimed at destabilizing an individual's memory and perception of events through the presentation of an alternative and unrecognizable reality (Abramson 2014; Camp 2022; Darke et al. 2025; Stern 2007; Sweet 2019). Since Donald Trump's rise to the political stage in 2015, "gaslighting" has been increasingly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallFrom Metapragmatic Gaslighting to Linguistic State of Exception: Donald Trump and the Language Reform of the New Right2026-03-31text/htmlen-USFrom Metapragmatic Gaslighting to Linguistic State of Exception: Donald Trump and the Language Reform of the New Right2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1003802026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Trumpism as Discourse: Gaslighting, Co-Opting, and Boomeranging
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986468
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today, when we say "trumpism," we usually mean the movement Donald Trump has come to lead to disastrous effects for politics and much more. Yet I want to suggest that it is important to consider the idea that Trumpism is also a distinctive discourse that specifically operates for political effect to normalize its extremism (S. Schram 2026).As a discourse, Trumpism most prominently features three verbal maneuvers as characterized in common parlance: gaslighting, coopting, and boomeranging. All three of these discursive practices are forms of what the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein (2000) called "metapragmatics" (see also R. Schram 2022; Donzelli 2023). Silverstein had been a student of Roman Jakobson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallTrumpism as Discourse: Gaslighting, Co-Opting, and Boomeranging2026-03-31text/htmlen-USTrumpism as Discourse: Gaslighting, Co-Opting, and Boomeranging2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1007342026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Reactionary Speech: The Art of Political Gaslighting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986469
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the shooting of charlie kirk, the right-wing political activist summarily dispatched via bolt-action rifle fire on the campus of Utah Valley University in September 2025, will go down as a catalytic moment in America's tragic and long-feared descent into political fascism. Kirk had been visiting UVU's campus as part of his "American Comeback Tour," in which the tenacious proselytizer sought to recruit impressionable young college students to the conservative cause through his signature spectacle of public "debate." News of Kirk's death and footage of his grisly killing instantly went viral, jarring the country and much of the world. Although gun violence in the United States had for decades become a daily
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallReactionary Speech: The Art of Political Gaslighting2026-03-31text/htmlen-USReactionary Speech: The Art of Political Gaslighting2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®813572026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Racial Gaslighting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986470
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in this article i explore the multiple forms of gaslighting that characterize contemporary discussions of race inequity, especially in the field of education. I begin by outlining the specific notion of racial gaslighting and then look at the various forms it takes, ranging from the crude and obvious simple denial of apparently blatant unfairness to the more sophisticated but no less egregious use of scientific language and statistical techniques to repackage the world in ways that are more palatable to White racist sensitivities. Despite the variety of forms racial gaslighting takes, the phenomenon is always supported by the wider context of unequal power relations in society. Although the concept of gaslighting
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallRacial Gaslighting2026-03-31text/htmlen-USRacial Gaslighting2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®910512026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Judicial Gaslighting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986471
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legal philosopher ronald dworkin famously criticized certain us judicial confirmation hearings for misrepresenting the true nature of constitutional adjudication. According to Dworkin, judges and lawyers "instinctively" and correctly interpret various vague or open-ended bits of constitutional text as expressing moral principles (1997, 3). Yet "[judicial] nominees and legislators [who question them while considering their nominations] all pretend that hard constitutional cases can be decided in a morally neutral way" (6). Giving up the game—acknowledging the central role of moral judgment in deciding these cases—"would be suicidal for the nominee and embarrassing for his questioners" (6). Nominees therefore
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallJudicial Gaslighting2026-03-31text/htmlen-USJudicial Gaslighting2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®672902026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Lies, Damn Lies, and Transition: The Gaslighting of Eastern Europe
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986472
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statistics are not supposed to provoke tears. yet during a series of online lectures that my coauthor and I delivered in 2021 and 2022, I watched audiences from Poland, the Czech Republic, and former East Germany respond to graphs of the 1990s with visible anger, disbelief, and grief. For them, the charts were not abstractions but confirmations of what their families had endured: the sudden disappearance of jobs, the collapse of industries, the premature deaths of neighbors and friends. What unsettled them most was not only the reminder of loss but also the validation of experiences they had been taught to doubt.For nearly a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, over 400 million people in Eastern Europe
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallLies, Damn Lies, and Transition: The Gaslighting of Eastern Europe2026-03-31text/htmlen-USLies, Damn Lies, and Transition: The Gaslighting of Eastern Europe2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1004502026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Conspiracization: Critique, Gaslighting, and the Infrastructures of Suspicion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986473
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In January 2020, just weeks before the global outbreak of COVID-19, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos to deliver a warning. The timing was uncanny: a meditation on control delivered on the eve of a global lockdown. Addressing a room of political and economic elites, Harari sketched a world increasingly governed by algorithms, biometric surveillance, and predictive control. "We are now hackable animals," he declared, before adding: "There will be two classes: the exploited and the useless. It is better to be exploited than useless." The line was meant as provocation. But almost overnight, it began circulating online as something else entirely—not as critique, but
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallConspiracization: Critique, Gaslighting, and the Infrastructures of Suspicion2026-03-31text/htmlen-USConspiracization: Critique, Gaslighting, and the Infrastructures of Suspicion2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®645342026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986474
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aurora donzelli is a linguistic anthropologist working on Indonesia, Italy, and the US. Her research focuses on how political reforms and socioeconomic transformations reverberate on everyday communicative practices. She is the recipient of research grants as principal investigator from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. After teaching at Sarah Lawrence College for over a decade, she joined the University of Bologna in 2020.kristen r. ghodsee is a professor of Russian and East European studies and a member of the graduate groups in anthropology and history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of 12 books, and her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2026-03-31text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®60112026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Endangered Scholars Worldwide
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986475
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Attacks on higher education communities are occurring at an alarming rate worldwide, threatening the safety and well-being of scholars, students, and academic staff, as well as the autonomy of higher education institutions. While we continue to publish regular updates in Social Research: An International Quarterly, in response to a global increase in threats to academic freedom, Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) has expanded its presence as an online publication under the auspices of the New University in Exile Consortium (https://www.newuniversityinexileconsortium.org), sharing frequent updates on news and developing cases in contribution to the Consortium's efforts to create a supportive intellectual community
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/644/image/coversmallEndangered Scholars Worldwide2026-03-31text/htmlen-USEndangered Scholars Worldwide2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®94332026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31