To begin, these resources were mainly gathered from the Objectification, Dehumanisation, and Othering Course Guide 2019-20. I've also grabbed salient quotes and other relevant information.
This course introduces leading philosophical accounts of objectification, dehumanisation, and othering, and investigates the degree of overlap between the three notions. We will also examine scepticism about the significance of these notions, looking closely at a number of case-studies in order to assess the plausibility of this kind of scepticism.
- Objectification - Wikipedia
In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person, or sometimes an animal, as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others.
- Sexual Objectification - Wikipedia
Although both males and females can be sexually objectified, the concept is mainly associated with the objectification of women, and is an important idea in many feminist theories and psychological theories derived from them. Sexual objectification of girls and women contributes to gender inequality, and many psychologists associate objectification with a range of physical and mental health risks in women.
- Sexual Objectification - UBC Wiki
Sexual objectification is the act of reducing a person into an object to use and consume sexually. Sexual objectification has been a central idea under debate in feminist politics since the 1970s, starting most notably with Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. Scholars have been arguing for decades about whether sexual objectification is harmful to humanity and whether it contributes to gender inequality.
- Sexualization - Wikipedia
Sexualization (or sexualisation) is to make something sexual in character or quality or to become aware of sexuality, especially in relation to men and women. Sexualization is linked to sexual objectification. According to the American Psychological Association, sexualization occurs when "individuals are regarded as sex objects and evaluated in terms of their physical characteristics and sexiness.
- Male Gaze – Wikipedia
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.
- Category:Feminism
This category has the following 30 subcategories
- What Philosophy Can’t Teach Us About Sexual Objectification, Nancy Bauer, in, How To Do Things With Pornography, 2015
- Book Reviews "How to do things with Pornography"
This same criticism lies at the heart of Bauer’s scholarly critique of Martha Nussbaum’s well known account of objectification. Nussbaum’s listing of the various forms of objectification, carefully distinguishing of one from another, and acknowledgement that some forms of objectification can be delightful, misses the point says Bauer. The concept of objectification, she argues, serves feminists by transforming their understanding of certain experiences. With the concept in hand one can transition from moving through the world uncomfortably to identifying the source of your discomfort.
- Book Reviews "How to do things with Pornography"
- The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 (Introduction)
De Beauvoir’s primary thesis is that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the Other, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her. This distinction is the basis of all de Beauvoir’s later arguments.
- Could It Be Worth Thinking About Kant on Sex and Marriage?, Barbara Herman, 1993.
Kant argues that there is something about what happens in human sexual relations that leads to a condition compromising the moral standing of the partners. The feature of sexual activity that Kant most frequently identified as the source of moral difficulty is the fact that sexual interest in another is not interest in the other as a person.
- Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification
Controversial feminist conclusions that pornography of a certain kind subordinates and silences women, and that women have rights against it. The arguments draw on speech act theory and pragmatics to show how such pornography may be speech that subordinates and silences. It subordinates if it is an illocution that ranks women, deprives women of powers, and legitimates violence and discrimination. It silences if it creates illocutionary disablement, preventing women's words having the intended illocutionary force.
- Autonomy-Denial in Objectification, Langton, Rae, 2005
First, three features should be added to Nussbaum's seven: reduction to body, reduction to appearance, silencing. Second, autonomy-denial involves a plurality of independent modes of treatment: e.g., non-attribution of autonomy, violation of autonomy. Paternalism illustrates non-attribution without violation; sadistic rape illustrates violation without non-attribution. Autonomy-affirming treatment can, paradoxically, be autonomy-denying: attributing autonomy can be a way of violating someone's autonomy, as when enslaved pornography model Lovelace was welcomed as a beacon of freedom.
- Sexual Solipsism, Rae Langton, 1995
Suppose the Cartesian nightmare were false, but I believed it true. The beings beneath my window would be people, but I would treat them as machines. Solipsism would be false, but I would act as though it were true. And my world would be,in a different way, solipsistic. If both worlds are solipsistic, then one aspect of solipsism concerns the world itself, and another concerns an attitude to the world.
- Autonomy-Denial in Objectification, Langton, Rae, 2005
- What is Objectification?, Lina Papadaki, 2010
objectification is a notion that has not yet been adequately defined. It has been used rather vaguely to refer to a broad range of cases involving, in some way or another, the treatment of a person as an object. My purpose in this paper is to offer a plausible understanding of objectification. I do that by focusing on the work of four prominent thinkers: Immanuel Kant, and contemporary feminists Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum. Through drawing on these thinkers' conceptions of objectification, I am finally led to a more complete and coherent understanding of this notion
- Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Catharine MacKinnon, 1987
The subject matter of the speech/essays ranges over rape, privacy and equality in relation to abortion, equality in relation to the cultural survival of Indians, sexual harassment, pornography and women in sport.
- On Being Objective and Being Objectified, Sally Haslanger, 1993,
Catharine MacKinnon has argued that the stance of objectivity is a male stance and, more specifically, a stance of objectification: “to look at the world objectively is to objectify it.” This chapter develops an interpretation of MacKinnon's account of gender and objectification to determine how objectivity is relevant. The chapter argues that there are epistemic norms that, under conditions of injustice, help sustain the position of the dominant. The chapter concludes, however, that these are norms of “assumed objectivity” that, although common, are not what genuine objectivity recommends.
- Sexual Objectification, Ethics 127: 27-49. Timo Jütten, 2016
I develop an imposition account of sexual objectification that provides such an explanation and, therefore, should be preferred over the instrumentalization account. It draws on a contrast between imposition and self-presentation and explains why sexual objectification, understood as the imposition of sex object status on women, is harmful and wrong.
- Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification, Rae Langton, 2000
Philosophy leaves everything as it is, or so it has been said. Feminists do not leave everything as it is. We are always interfering, always fighting for something, always wanting things to be otherwise and better — even in philosophy itself. But if philosophy leaves everything as it is, shouldn't feminists leave philosophy as it is? If philosophy leaves everything as it is, then it cannot hurt women, and it cannot help women. To be sure, if philosophy leaves everything as it is, it leaves oppression as it is, but one should no more hope otherwise than one should hope for the stones to cry out for justice.
- Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Second Edition*), Routledge, chapters 4 and 5
As Cheryl Gilkes contends, “Black women’s assertiveness and their use of every expression of racism to launch multiple assaults against the entire fabric of inequality have been a consistent, multifaceted threat to the status quo. As punishment, Black women have been assaulted with a variety of negative images” (1983a, 294). Portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas helps justify U.S. Black women’s oppression. Challenging these controlling images has long been a core theme in Black feminist thought
- Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics, Ann Cahill chapters 1 & 2.
In some philosophical circles, particularly those engaged with questions of sex, gender, and identity, a somewhat remarkable shift has occurred. The modern model of the autonomous, rational, disembodied self has been rejected; in its place stands a self marked by its own materiality, a self always and already embedded in a web of contexts and relationships.
The body, as the site of difference and intersection, has been recognized as central to the processes of becoming that mark human subjects, rather than as a peripheral and sometimes obstructionist force that the disembodied soul or will must control. Flesh no longer stands in for passivity, or a regrettable association with the non-human world, but constitutes an openness to the other, a medium of transformation, and yes, a vulnerability without which subjects cannot come into being.
- Paradoxes of Dehumanization, Social Theory and Practice. David Livingstone Smith
There is nothing novel in the assertion that dehumanization is a psychological lubricant for the machinery of violence. In fact, this is something of a truism. However, the phenomenon of dehumanization presents some difficult explanatory problems. The most salient and perplexing of these is the problem of providing a satisfactory explanation of how it is possible to conceive of other human beings — beings that are, in all fundamental respects, indistinguishable from oneself — as not really human at all, but as organisms that are more akin to rats, lice, snakes, or cockroaches. Understandably, some will regard this flagrantly implausible, because it seems so remote from commonsensical ideas about how human minds work.
- Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others David Livingstone Smith (npr)
Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More than seventy million people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.
- Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny Kate Manne
an exploration of misogyny in public life and politics. It argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women. Rather, it's primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the "bad" women who challenge male dominance. And it's compatible with rewarding "the good ones," and singling out other women to serve as warnings to those who are out of order. It's also common for women to serve as scapegoats, be burned as witches, and treated as pariahs.
- The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy, Mari Mikkola
The book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a distinctly feminist perspective. It asks: what makes social group based oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? And what grounds the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women? In thinking about these normative issues, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman and toward feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women and to defend feminism’s critical claims.
- Testimonial Injustice, Pornography, and Silencing Aidan McGlynn
According to Miranda Fricker (2007), a testimonial injustice occurs when someone is not given the credibility they deserve when testifying, due to prejudices about their identity held by their audience. In this paper, I will develop two criticisms of Fricker’s defence of an interpretation of Catharine MacKinnon’s (1994: 9) claim that pornography silences women that conceives of the silencing in question as an extreme form of testimonial injustice.
- What’s Wrong with Epistemic Injustice? Harm, Vice, Objectification, Misrecognition Matthew Congdon
a preliminary strategy for locating epistemic injustice on the normative map presents itself in the form of the question: what background ethical commitments do we assume when we critique epistemic injustice as, precisely, unjust? However, a cursory glance at the literature reveals the complexities involved in answering this question. In the short period since the publication of Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice , a range of normative approaches to the distinctive wrongfulness of unjust epistemic practices have been adopted, with Fricker herself synthesizing multiple traditions, including Kantian, virtue- theoretic, and social contract elements within her own account.
- An Introduction to Feminism, Lorna Finlayson
There are two main ways of interpreting the question, ‘What is feminism?’ The first is to interpret it as asking what the general flavour of the thing is – what is its content? What is it about? What does it stand for? But another, equally important, question to ask is the question of what sort of thing feminism is, in a more basic sense. All sorts of objects can have ‘content’, or be ‘about’ something – books, films, utterances, gestures. What kind of thing is feminism?
- What’s Wrong With the (Female) Nude? A Feminist Perspective on Art and Pornography A. W. Eaton
I aim to explain why the female nude — by which I mean the genre of artistic representations that take the unclothed female body as their primary subject matter — has been a target of feminist criticism for nearly a century.
- Pornography and Dehumanization: The Essentialist Dimension, Eleonore Neufeld
The objective of this paper is to shed light on one central mechanism through which pornography dehumanizes women. I will show that pornography essentializes women — roughly, that it represents them as belonging to certain kinds, breeds, or species whose behaviour is constrained by laws governing the kind—and that the essentialist picture of women depicted in pornography is one key element of its dehumanizing machinery.
a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
- The Beauvoir Series
The Beauvoir Series is a seven-volume collaborative project involving an international team of scholars in philosophy and French language and literature. The series will provide scholarly editions in English of Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical texts, including some only recently discovered, and ranging from her early writings as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne through her later essays on existentialist ethics and finally to a preface written in the last year of her life.
- Feminist Writings (2015)
- Political Writings (2012)
- “The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings (2011)
- Wartime Diary (2009)
- Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27 (2006)
- Philosophical Writings (2004)
- The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 (Introduction)
De Beauvoir’s primary thesis is that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the Other, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her. This distinction is the basis of all de Beauvoir’s later arguments.
- Gregory B. Sadler – Simone de Beauvoir - 20th Century Philosophy - I've found this playlist useful in digesting de Beauvoir's philosophy, including The Second Sex.
Nancy Bauer is an American philosopher specializing in feminist philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, and the work of Simone de Beauvoir. [...] Her interests include methodology in philosophy, feminism, metaphysics, social/political/moral philosophy, philosophy of language, phenomenology, and philosophy in film.
- Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences Tufts
- Publications
- First Philosophy, The Second Sex, and the Third Wave. 1999
- The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, And: Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex', And: Beauvoir and The Second Sex : Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism, And: Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Review). 1999
- Simone de Beauvoir. Philosophy, and Feminism. 2001
- Must We Read Simone de Beauvoir? 2004
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. 2011
- How to Do Things With Pornography. 2015
- Interview on 5 Questions Podcast
an American philosopher [...] has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights. She also holds associate appointments in classics, divinity, and political science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program.
- Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago
- Major Works
- The Fragility of Goodness (1986)
- Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997)
- Sex and Social Justice (1998)
- Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004)
- Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006)
- From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010).
an Australian and British professor of philosophy. [...] She has published widely on Immanuel Kant's philosophy, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is also well known for her work on pornography and objectification.
- Kantian humility : our ignorance of things in themselves. (2001)
- Sexual solipsism : philosophical essays on pornography and objectification. Oxford University Press. (2009)
- Speech acts and unspeakable acts. Philosophy & Public Affairs. (Autumn 1993)
- Pornography: a liberal's unfinished business. (January 1999)
- Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game (September 1999)
best known for her analysis of pornography, although her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 40 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US Constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
- Complete Works
- Woman Hating
- Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
- Intercourse
- Letters From a War Zone
- Life & Death: Unapologetic Writing on the Continuing War Against Women
- Pornography: Men Possessing Women
- Right-wing Women
- Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation
- Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
- Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
- In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
an American radical feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. [...] an expert on international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women's rights and sexual abuse and exploitation, including sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography.
- Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979)
- Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)
- Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988)
- Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)
- Only Words (1993)
- In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (1997)
- Sex Equality. University Casebook Series (2001)
- Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. (2004)
- Women's Lives, Men's Laws. (2005)
- Legal Feminism in Theory and Practice. Resling. (2005)
- Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues (2006)
- Sex Equality (2007)
- Traite, Prostitution, Inégalité. (2014)
- Sex Equality Controversies: The Formosa Lectures (2015)
- Sex Equality (3rd edition). University Casebook Series. (2016)
- Butterfly Politics. (2017)
- Gender in Constitutional Law (2018)
- Women's Lives in Men's Courts: Briefs for Change. (2022)
- John Rector
- The Objectification Spectrum part 1 (Oxford University Press, July 2014)
- The Objectification Spectrum part 2 (Oxford University Press, July 2014)
- "Leaving Plato's Cave: Understanding and Transcending Our Objectification of Others" (July 29, 2016)