Mansplaining is part of the digital discourse, and the vicious behaviour it portrays is now well-known and often discussed. Despite this, scholarly attention hasn’t yet matched the increased visibility of this phenomenon. With few exceptions (Manne, 2020; Johnson, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 6(4), 3, 2020 Dular, Feminist Philosophical Quarterly, 7(1), 1, 2021), most debates so far have been solely reactive, triggered in response to cases brought to the public attention by high-profile figures. Predictably, this has led to a hasty and often inaccurate appreciation of this phenomenon, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been underestimated both in its severity and extension. With this problem in mind, this paper develops a fully fledged account of mansplaining as violation of a norm of cooperative conversation. Because this violation, we argue, occurs when one treats their interlocutor as less epistemically worthy than they really are, the role of mansplaining as a tool of epistemic oppression, and thereby its importance for feminist critical theorisation, is finally brought to light.
