Gender, Fake Facts, and Truth

Are facts truth? This question lies at the core of the debates on justice and gender. The denial of a verifiable fact is an outright lie and a form of manipulation, but what the fact often misses is that there is a crack between fact and truth because what is cannot be reduced to observation, quantification or discourse. The history of social justice shows that the elevation of selected facts to truth is as mistaken as fake facts, but for different reasons. This chapter explores these polemic issues in conversation with psychoanalytic and philosophical thought. Popular culture and literary works, combined with examples of tourism, set the scene for a discussion on hate speech, fake facts, primal fathers, narcissism, fantasy and capitalist desire. The chapter concludes with examining the problems of reducing truths to facts and the allure of literalism, inviting us to deconstruct the meaning of truth and its relation to justice. This philosophical essay elucidates topics of social justice and knowledge production and can serve as inspiration for tourism scholars and others interested in gender and epistemology.