GASLIGHTING / Vol. 93, No. 1 (Spring 2026)
- Mar 30
- 5 min read
The 1944 film Gaslight, from which contemporary use of the term “gaslighting” originates, provides key insights into the gendered dynamics of gaslighting. A gothic melodrama set in Victorian London, the film depicts a young bride terrorized by her new husband, increasingly unable to trust her own perception and pushed to the brink of psychosis. Watching the film, viewers experience a perceptual uncertainty similar to that endured by the gaslit heroine. Gaslight shows us how patriarchal norms enable gaslighting and how gaslighting is embedded within a broader culture of gendered violence.
Because the term “gaslighting” is in the relatively unusual etymological position of deriving from the title of a specific narrative source text (Gaslight), understanding the nuances of that narrative can help us understand the nuances of contemporary political gaslighting. One component of the Trump administration’s gaslighting tactics that has yet to be read through the lens of the Gaslight plot is its manipulative deployment of the language of “protection,” “rescue,” and “care” to infantilize and actively harm its constituents, especially women. In this essay, I compare this deployment to the analogous protectionist gaslighting that takes place not only in Gaslight but also in the powerful, underexplored subgenre of films that arose in Gaslight’s immediate wake: gaslight noir.
Victims often describe gaslighting as having a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” quality. In this essay, I explore victims’ descriptions of the two-faced nature of gaslighting, showing how they come to feel caught between two irreconcilable realities in gaslighting relationships. They describe gaslighting as creating a fracture between themselves and their broader social environments; they describe feeling that their gaslighter was able to identify something true about them and wrap it up in lies; and they describe their sense of self becoming “lost.” I argue that these findings should push us to think about how broader systems of power and inequality, like intimate experiences of gaslighting, also have a two-faced nature.
Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump has emphasized the urgency of a linguistic reform: To “make America great again” it is imperative to abolish periphrastic circumlocutions and embrace a firm stance against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Yet this call for semantic transparency and performative effectiveness has been paralleled by the frequent deployment of indirectness and sophisticated forms of discursive manipulation, which I call metapragmatic gaslighting. Drawing on a corpus of statements, interventions, and interviews by President Trump, this article examines the basic principles of the language reform of the New Right and describes how metapragmatic gaslighting preludes to establishing a linguistic state of exception. Characterized by the suspension of shared norms for the use and interpretation of utterances, this emerging regime of pragmatic unaccountability materializes an ultrareactionary and hypercapitalist linguistic order.
While “Trumpism” usually means the movement Donald Trump has come to lead to great political effect, it also is a term that best describes a metapragmatic discourse Trump and his acolytes have come to use to normalize their extremism. Trumpism as a discourse relies on three primary verbal maneuvers: gaslighting, co-opting, and boomeranging. Gaslighting, the most commonly referred to maneuver, is deflecting criticism by saying that the problem is something other than what the critic alleged. Co-opting is adopting the language of your critics so that you are the one with the just cause and they are the ones deserving of condemnation. Boomeranging is sending criticism directed at you right back at your critics. This article examines, by way of examples, how the effectiveness of gaslighting is enhanced when combined with co-opting and boomeranging to normalize extremism to the point that now it is furthering authoritarian rule under Trump.
This article proposes that we think of reactionary rhetoric as the art of political gaslighting. Revisiting the thought of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman, philosopher, and political theorist Edmund Burke, the article extrapolates a conception of conservatism as inherently oriented toward a rhetoric of denialism, demonization, and victimhood. I argue that reactionary rhetoric bears a striking similarity to what trauma psychologists call DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. I close with a discussion of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk’s remarks on race as a case study in political gaslighting.
This article examines racial gaslighting, whereby racially minoritized people are told that their experiences of White racism are really patterns born of their own making or, at the very least, a combination of factors that are beyond the control of White powerholders. Several examples are discussed, including the deployment of a falsified image of Martin Luther King Jr., the perversion of civil rights language to equate White success with merit, and the use of statistical techniques to erase evidence of racist inequity. A common factor in each example is the significance of the racist status quo, which amplifies, legitimizes, and benefits from the gaslighting.
Judges sometimes deceive the public as to how they will rule—or how they have ruled—in important cases. To be confirmed to our highest courts, they often hide or downplay their moral and political commitments, despite being nominated specifically for those commitments. To justify their rulings, they couch their reasoning in antiseptic legal terms, even when we have excellent cause to see such reasoning as pretextual. This essay argues that such forms of judicial deceit are disturbingly common, deeply harmful, and appropriately understood as a form of gaslighting.
In the 1990s, some 400 million people across Eastern Europe lived through an economic collapse deeper than the Great Depression. Yet, while families lost jobs, pensions, and even years of life expectancy, Western institutions and commentators insisted things were “getting better.” This article calls that denial what it was: collective gaslighting. By massaging statistics, celebrating televisions and cars, and blaming cultural “deficiencies,” experts erased the trauma of entire societies. Revisiting the transition through the eyes of those who endured it reveals not a triumphant march to democracy but a politics of memory and denial whose consequences still shape Western society today.
Gaslighting and conspiracization mark two convergent crises of interpretation in the digital age. Gaslighting manipulates perception by denying intent; conspiracization overreads intent, recoding critique’s idioms as proof of hidden design. The problem is not confined to misinformation but emerges instead where the forms and tones of critique themselves become objects of suspicion. Examining catchphrases like historian Yuval Noah Harari’s “hackable animals” and the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset,” this article shows how speculative foresight discourse is reframed online as elite confession. Empirical analysis of Amazon’s “also bought” metadata networks reveals how conspiracy bestsellers cluster with critical texts, generating ambient legitimacy within digital infrastructures. Conspiracization thus emerges as critique’s mimetic double: borrowing its style while stripping its reflexivity. The task is to recalibrate suspicion—distinguishing between practices that illuminate complexity and those that collapse it into plot.