Género, opresión e injusticia hermenéutica: aportes críticos de mujeres mexicanas con discapacidad psicosocial frente al trastorno límite de la personalidad

Abstract

This article critically interprets the borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis from a social epistemology perspective. This qualitative empirical study was conducted in Mexico following an activist research approach based on the reconstruction of life stories. Participants' accounts reveal the mechanisms by which psychiatric knowledge reproduces gender biases, embedded in androcentric and sanist power structures that pathologize women's distress arising from conditions of violence and precarity. I argue that BPD is an illustrative case of hermeneutical injustice, understood as a structural failure of understanding that strips trauma and its responses of their sociopolitical meaning, thus limiting the possibility of interpreting those responses as forms of agency, resistance, or survival by women in oppressive contexts. Finally, I conclude that understanding these dynamics requires shifting clinical focus toward listening to women as legitimate producers of knowledge about their own suffering.