Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.11
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4194-457XDysmorphophobia, clinically known as body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), is a mental disorder in which affected people excessively brood over some perceived flaws in their physical appearance. They continuously think that their body is defective or unattractive in terms of its shape, size, skin colour, complexion despite no clear evidence of it. Epistemic violence refers to the harm exerted upon the individuals or communities through systems of knowledge that distort, erase, silence, or devalue their identities, experiences and ways of knowing. It does not operate through direct physical force; instead, it works through language, education, religion, culture, law, media representation, and other socio-cultural institutions that legitimize certain forms of knowledge while marginalizing others. The concept of epistemological violence is most closely associated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who, in her popular essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?, argues that colonial discourses silence marginalized identities by speaking for them and denying them the authority and space to speak for themselves. Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated contemporary African-American authors whose works foreground the issue of race and expose its dehumanizing, demoralizing, and devastating impact on Black individuals. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, is populated by individuals who suffer from imagined bodily imperfections. Characters such as Pecola Breedlove, Pauline Breedlove, Geraldine, Maureen Peal, Frieda, and Claudia experience dysmorphic tendencies to varying degrees, though the nature and intensity of their experiences differ significantly. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and other relevant thinkers, this research paper explores the functioning of epistemic violence in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It also analyses how dominant epistemic structures are transmitted through family, education, religion, media, and everyday social interactions and subsequently internalized by Black individuals.
Kumar, Brijesh, and Indrani Mukherji. “Dysmorphophobia in The Bluest Eye.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 151-64, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.11.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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