Objectification

On the Difference between Sex and Sexism

Susanna Paasonen, Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer, Clarissa Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429534249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología social

This is a concise and accessible introduction into the concept of objectification, one of the most frequently recurring terms in both academic and media debates on the gendered politics of contemporary culture, and core to critiquing the social positions of sex and sexism.

Objectification is an issue of media representation and everyday experiences alike. Central to theories of film spectatorship, beauty fashion and sex, objectification is connected to the harassment and discrimination of women, to the sexualization of culture and the pressing presence of body norms within media. This concise guidebook traces the history of the term's emergence and its use in a variety of contexts such as debates about sexualization and the male gaze, and its mobilization in connection with the body, selfies and pornography, as well as in feminist activism.

It will be an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies or Visual Arts.

1 What counts as objectification?

Kim Kardashian-West is currently one of the most famous women on the planet, and one of the things she is most famous for is objectifying herself (see Figure 1.1). Kardashian has created a massive public archive of images documenting almost every aspect of her everyday life, from professionally-taken glamour shots to seemingly casual selfies shared with some 153 million followers on her Instagram account. Many of those images show off her body, revealing its contours in little or no clothing and modelled in sexy poses. Kardashian’s rise to fame was fuelled by the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–) focusing on her family after a sex tape, released by her then boyfriend in 2007, became the most watched adult video of all time, gaining 150 million online views during its first decade alone. Critics abound. “She has successfully reduced herself to one thing … a vapid sex object” (Khona 2016: np), they say, presenting to the world her “disempowered ‘I am a sex object’ pose” (Mollard, 2016: np). Critics ask her how she feels about “objectifying herself with selfies” (McGahan, 2015: np).

Figure 1.1 Google image search for “Kim Kardashian selfie”, March 2020

If we take a moment to pause and think about it, the idea of “objectifying yourself” is a difficult one. Is it, in fact, possible to objectify yourself? As the opposite of subjects, objects do not have agency or the ability to control how they are seen by people – or, in fact, how they are treated by them. Surely the very fact of actively presenting oneself and offering oneself to be seen in a certain way must mean, from a logical standpoint, that you are not an object? Kim Kardashian is very rich, and influential through her public visibility. She runs several companies and has a great deal of control over her own life and those of other people. Is that what being an object means? The fact that Kardashian’s celebrity career can be said to result from her objectifying herself suggests how complicated this broadly used notion is, as well as how important it is to understand what it means, how it is used and where its different uses stem from. For what does objectification actually mean?

The concept of objectification has passed out of the realm of academic discussion and feminist politics, and into popular public debate. It is more than a common word used to voice concerns about gender oppression in twenty-first century societies, particularly in connection to the ways that women are represented, and represent themselves, across media. The term bundles together issues about appearance, beauty, bodies, sex and social power. Objectification is one of the most frequently used terms in both academic and media debates on the gendered politics of contemporary culture, and ubiquitous as such. Critiques of objectification range from debates on gendered harassment and discrimination to ones focusing on the sexualization of culture and the pressing presence of gendered body norms within media. Objectification is an issue of media representation and everyday experiences alike, and it cuts through feminist inquiry on an international scale as shorthand for sexist practices of representation and gender-based inequalities. The concept has been used to underpin a number of activist initiatives, from the “we are not things” posters held by #MeToo campaigners to the “National Center on Sexual Exploitation” – a conservative US group – whose complaints about the covers of the Cosmopolitan magazine objectifying and demeaning women got the Walmart chain to remove it from checkout counters in 2018. Despite these abundant uses of the term, there is nevertheless surprisingly little consensus as to what qualifies as, or what is meant by, objectification; or how it connects to, and differs from other critical concepts such as sexism or sexualization used for tackling similar concerns. This obscurity is partly due to how the concept is most recurrently used in the context of sexual representation, and as synonymous with the sexual objectification of women.

Setting out to untangle all this, our book uncovers the applications of objectification in feminist scholarship and activism, from 1970s theories of film spectatorship and gendered ways of seeing to anti-pornography discourses and to critiques of body and beauty norms, as carried out under the rubric of sexualization. We are a group of male and female researchers trained in film studies, cultural studies and media studies, queer and straight, working in Australia, Finland and the United Kingdom. We are all strongly committed to feminist approaches to understanding the media and we want to think through the opportunities and the risks that are involved in making critiques of objectification a central part of our attempts to challenge sexist ideologies that devalue and disempower women. We ask, what is at stake in debates connected to objectification, what the possibilities and limitations of the notion are and what other analytical routes are on offer for understanding gender, sexuality and the media. In doing so, we make an argument for the continuing necessity of critiquing sexism, namely discrimination or bias based on someone’s perceived gender, while simultaneously insisting on the importance of sexual agency and the value of sexual representation – not least to those in disenfranchised social positions. In other words, we argue for distinguishing between critiques of sex in the media and those addressing sexism as a social practice. This connects to our further argument on the centrality of sexual agency and sexual subjectivity – that of women, men and people of other genders – as it connects to practices of representation, self-fashioning and relating to other people: it is our concern that this is something that broad critiques of objectification fail to accommodate.

Mapping objectification

We start by considering the ways in which objectification has been discussed in academic writing. Across its different applications in film and media studies, gender studies, sociology, law, and beyond, objectification means treating and dehumanizing a person as a thing, instrument or object. However, this shared starting point masks a range of complex differences in the way that the term has been employed in diverse contexts, from conditions of slavery to the glossy imageries of advertising – phenomena that are strikingly distinct, involve incompatible relations and dynamics of power and yield drastically different social effects. In her analysis of the understanding of objectification within feminist inquiry, philosopher Martha Nussbaum (1995: 256–7) defines it as “a question of treating one thing as another. One is treating as an object what is really not an object, what is in fact, a human being”. Nussbaum (1995: 251) argues that objectification remains a slippery concept that can be interpreted in at least seven different ways, “none of which implies any of the others”:

1. Instrumentality: The objectifier treats the object as a tool of their other purposes.
2. Denial of autonomy: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination.
3. Inertness: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity.
4. Fungibility: The objectifier treats the object as interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types.
5. Violability: The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.
6. Ownership: The objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.
7. Denial of subjectivity: The objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account (Nussbaum, 1995: 257).

As Nussbaum points out, just because something is an object does not mean it is seen as worthless or disposable. Some objects – such as paper coffee cups – are, but others – such as art and antiques – definitely are not. So even from the start it is not clear exactly what “objecthood” means. On the one hand, Nussbaum identifies all seven forms of objectification as morally objectionable in blurring and violating the boundaries of objects and human subjects. On the other hand, none of this is absolute, given the ambiguities involved: a child, for example, is not granted full individual autonomy, but this is not necessarily morally problematic, given children’s cognitive and affective limitations of understanding and independently acting out in the world. We might momentarily instrumentalize an intimate partner, relying on them to provide something for us. They may never even know that this has happened, so that it has no impact on their lives. Alternatively, they may not mind doing us a favour. They may be pleased to be of help, or they may like us to eye them as desirable sexual objects.

Importantly – objectification is not automatically about gender, even though debates on objectification do almost exclusively cluster on issues having to do with the representation of women. Both men and women can be objectified and sexualized, across all of the domains noted above. For example, it makes sense to say that people of all genders are objectified in capitalist, neo-liberal societies, even though they are not similarly objectified in different, differently sexist and patriarchal cultures. In referring to the process of rendering people into things, the notion of objectification is akin to Georg Lukács’s concern with reification as a process where people become thing-like in their behaviours and functions while man-made objects gain certain liveness within commodity fetishism (see Pitkin, 1987). For Lukács, building on Karl Marx, reification was a product of capitalism and hence entailed a broad logic of instrumentality and alienation that did not follow the divides of gender. It is therefore possible to critique the logics of neoliberalism as a dominant economical and ideological social framework within which the value of individuals is seen as dependent on their individual productivity – or, as in the case of Kim Kardashian, on their sheer visibility. As individuals compete on free markets, they come to understand and to craft themselves into commodities in order to find employment as well as to be valued in their other social relations and attachments. In this framework, neoliberalism is seen as that which makes people make themselves into objects while also commodifying intimate relations as exchanges of human goods and services. Kardashian’s self-branding exercises, both individually and together with her similarly famous partner, the rapper Kanye West, are symbolic of success within such markets of neoliberalism.

We can even argue that the very act of representing somebody, in any way – photographing them, say, or recording their voice or shooting their movements on video – also objectifies them in the sense of rendering a person subject of consumption through visual or auditory means. Images of their bodies can be reproduced, contemplated, edited or watched in slow motion; their voice can be replayed, or broken down into sounds to be recomposed at will; their representations can be used for promotional or advertising purposes. This does not mean that the bodies represented are automatically or causally rendered as objects of sexual availability, or that all gendered practices of representation involve the making of sexual objects. Things are more complex.

Gendered objects

We are interested in why sexuality – and heterosexuality in particular – has remained so key to debates on objectification to the point of this being the primary framework within which the term is deployed. Any kind of a person, or animal, can be objectified in the sense of being stripped of autonomy and volition, and being treated as an instrument for the gain of others. The ownership of people as slaves in the United States relied on the objectification of Africans and African-Americans as property rather than people, and as instruments whose lives could be terminated at their owners’ will. Such dehumanization is an ultimate reminder of what objectification can mean in terms of denying autonomy and agency to human beings. In this book, we are primarily concerned about objectification as it is used in feminist critique, this being the primary, predominant framework within which the term continues to be deployed.

Ann Cahill argues traces feminist conceptualizations of objectification back to the work of Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s, who saw the identification of women with the passive materiality of their bodies – their apparent thingness – as a primary tactic of gender-based othering. Sexuality, she points out, has since been understood as being key to the formation of women as objects:

Much of feminist theory has been committed to the claim that the sexual objectification of women is harmful, degrading, and oppressive. To be viewed as a sex object is to be regarded as less than a full human person, to be debased and reduced to mere flesh. The male gaze – which is male primarily in its effect, not necessarily in its origin, in that women can also adopt it – defines and constrains women, assesses their beauty, and in doing so dehumanizes them.

(Cahill, 2011: 84)

What is mainly meant with objectification in feminist critiques is the reduction of women to their physical attributes and heterosexual attractiveness in ways that mitigate their individuality and agency. This is a very real kind of objectification, yet one that hardly compares with the conditions and practices of slavery. Despite the dramatic disparity between these two examples, both connections and equations between the two were drawn in 1970s and 1980s radical feminist writings critiquing women’s position within patriarchy and using pornography as key example of the systematic oppression and the enslavement of women. Nussbaum (1995: 249) associates the overall popularity and resonance of the notion of objectification in discussions of gender relations with the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon built on a broader conceptualization of heterosexuality as entailing the sexual objectification, commodification, and the consequent dehumanization of women by men. This meant understanding pornography as a means of silencing women by making them into things, objects and commodities (Langton, 2009: 10): MacKinnon (1996: 33–7) saw pornographic representations of non-consent as comparable to images of lynchings and genocide as violent expressions of hate. A binary gender divide premised on heterosexual power dynamics cuts through much of this feminist work. As we show in Chapter 3, within this “body politics”, sexuality becomes the terrain of power and domination while objectification becomes a process of world-building that “creates reality and types of beings” (Cahill, 2011: 4).

Feminist critiques of objectification have not then been simply concerned with gender stereotypes, or the ways in which men and women are expected to perform different roles in patriarchal societies. Rather, they have attempted to show the processes by which women are cast as lesser to and as subservient to men, as well as how the facts of being represented – depicted, acknowledged and spoken for – are distributed differently for men and for women, giving further rise to gender asymmetry. Much of this has to do with the dynamics of heterosexuality and cultural representations thereof.

As Nussbaum’s work shows us, there is however no necessary link between objectification and sexual representation. Research across academic disciplines has addressed a number of contexts in which people are treated as objects in ways that do not involve being sexualized – as in the case of trafficked farm labour, for example. Conversely, people can be and perform sexinesss and contribute to sexual representations without losing their agency – or, at least, we argue this to be the case. Sexism, we further argue, is a different concern from both sexual depiction and sexiness, despite the ease with which these notions are routinely conflated. Sexism is an operation of power that crafts out, and supports unequal social relations by allocating bodies coded as feminine – independent of whether these bodies are cis- or transgender, considered genetically or anatomically female or not – with particular forms of agency, vulnerability and assumed sexual availability. People can be represented as sexually attractive or as engaged in sexual activities, and they can represent themselves as sexually attractive and as engaged in sexual activities without becoming someone else’s tools lacking in agency, becoming interchangeable, or being owned. Such depictions are not reducible to any single set of meanings, nor are they simply similar to one another.

Yet the fact remains that different groups of people are assigned different kinds of roles in practices of representation, these roles building on, possibly further fuelling or challenging social hierarchies and relations of power, as drawn along the axes of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, size, and a plethora of other differences. Different people then fail to be similarly treated: some are seen as being more important and valuable than others, and such differences need...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1. What counts as objectification?
• 2. Male gaze and the politics of representation
• 3. Radical feminism and the objectification of women
• 4. Sex objects and sexual subjects
• 5. Measuring objectification
• 6. What to do with sexualized culture?
• 7. Beyond the binary
• 8. Disturbingly lively objects
• References
• Index