Objectification (Martha Nussbaum)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“It is true, and very much to the point, that women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others – but it is only by asserting one’s humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all, is the core of our struggle.” --Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin, epigraph. |
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"Objectification" (1995) is a text by Martha Nussbaum published in Philosophy & Public Affairs 24 (4): 249–291.
Its epigraph is from Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin.
Seven types of objectification
According to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, a person is objectified if one or more of the following properties are applied to them:
- Instrumentality – treating the person as a tool for another's purposes
- Denial of autonomy – treating the person as lacking in autonomy or self-determination
- Inertness – treating the person as lacking in agency or activity
- Fungibility – treating the person as interchangeable with (other) objects
- Violability – treating the person as lacking in boundary integrity and violable, "as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into."
- Ownership – treating the person as though they can be owned, bought, or sold
- Denial of subjectivity – treating the person as though there is no need for concern for their experiences or feelings
The examples from the arts and entertainment
[1.] His blood beat up in waves of desire. He wanted to come to her, to meet her. She was there, if he could reach her. The reality of her who was just beyond him absorbed him. Blind and destroyed, he pressed forward, nearer, nearer, to receive the consummation of himself, be received within the darkness which should swallow him and yield him up to himself. If he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were supreme, supreme.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
[2.] yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasn't such a tremendous amount of spunk in him
James Joyce, Ulysses
[3.] She even has a sheet over her body, draped and folded into her contours. She doesn't move. She might be dead, Macrae thinks.... Suddenly a desire to violate tears through his body like an electric shock, six thousand volts of violence, sacrilege, the lust to desecrate, destroy. His thumbs unite between the crack of her ass, nails inwards, knuckle hard on knuckle, and plunge up to the palms into her. A submarine scream rises from the deep green of her dreaming, and she snaps towards waking, half-waking, half-dreaming with no sense of self ... and a hard pain stabbing at her entrails ... Isabelle opens her eyes, still not knowing where or what or why, her face jammed up against the cracking plaster ... as Macrae digs deeper dragging another scream from her viscera, and her jerking head cracks hard on the wall, . . . and her palms touch Macrae's hands, still clamped tight around her ass, kneading, working on it, with a violence born of desperation and desire, desire to have her so completely ... that it seems as if he would tear the flesh from her to absorb it, crush it, melt it into his own hands.... And Isabelle ... hears a voice calling out "don't stop; don't stop," a voice called from somewhere deep within her from ages past, ancestral voices from a time the world was young, "don't stop, don't stop." It's nearer now, this atavistic voice, and she realises with surprise that it is coming from her mouth, it is her lips that are moving, it is her voice.
"LaurenceS t. Clair,"I sabellea nd VeroniqueF: ourM onths,F our Cities
[4.] Three pictures of actress Nicollette Sheridan playing at the Chris Evert Pro-Celebrity Tennis Classic, her skirt hiked up to reveal her black underpants. Caption: "Why We Love Tennis." Playboy, April 1995
[5.] At first I used to feel embarrassed about getting a hard-on in the shower. But at the Corry much deliberate excitative soaping of cocks went on, and a number of members had their routine erections there each day. My own, though less regular, were, I think, hoped and looked out for.... This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycle-clips and duffel-coats. And how difficult social distinctions are in the shower. How could I now smile at my enormous African neighbour, who was responding in elephantine manner to my own erection, and yet scowl at the disastrous nearly-boy smirking under the next jet along?
Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library
[6.] She had passed her arm into his, and the other objects in the room, the other pictures, the sofas, the chairs, the tables, the cabinets, the 'important' pieces, supreme in their way, stood out, round them, consciously, for recognition and applause. Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness-quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated, in conversation, at tea, fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs Verver and the Prince fairly 'placed' themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required, aesthetically, by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase. There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped? 'Le compte y est. You've got some good things.'
Henry James, The Golden Bowl
See also
