The intelligibility trap: hermeneutical injustice and the institutional afterlife of liberating categories

What happens when concepts designed to remedy epistemic injustice become instruments of epistemic constraint? In Miranda Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice, the creation of a concept such as ‘sexual harassment’ closes a specific gap in collective interpretive resources. This article investigates what happens to liberating categories after they are institutionalized, tracing ‘sexual harassment’ beyond conceptual creation – through legal codification, bureaucratic operationalization, and institutional settlement – to show how the achievement of intelligibility can generate new forms of constraint. Building on the premise that human classifications are constitutive rather than merely representational, the article identifies three interlocking constraining dynamics (i.e. definitional narrowing, subject constitution, and classificatory capture) and terms this overarching dynamic the intelligibility trap. It introduces secondary hermeneutical injustice to name the distinctive wrong arising not from the absence of a concept but from the constraining presence of one simultaneously too narrow and too authoritative. The article further demonstrates that this trap falls disproportionately on those whose marginalization leaves them least equipped to resist the category's institutional scripting. On this basis, I propose a two-level framework: macro-level institutionalization accompanied by ongoing micro-level practices of permeability. The argument extends hermeneutical injustice theory from the epistemological to the ontological.