Pain Dismissal and the Limits of Epistemic Injustice

This project aims to identify and explain a phenomenon I call pain-related motivational deficit , which occurs when there is proper uptake of the epistemic contributions of a pain utterance, but defective uptake of the motivational contributions of a pain utterance. I argue that the normalization of fibroid pain in Black women, and of menstrual pain more broadly, causes a pain-related motivational deficit to be unfairly assigned to utterances about these pain experiences. I show that current ways of thinking about epistemic injustice cannot adequately explain these cases.