riti aggarwal

“What is objectification? From Simone de Beauvoir to Martha Nussbaum to Catharine MacKinnon, feminist philosophers have long been interested in analysing the concept. Broadly speaking, to objectify a woman is to treat or represent her as a partly or wholly dehumanised, de-mentalised object. There are various ways to do that. Fashion and advertising offer several possibilities for doing so visually. You can represent her as a dazed, passive thing to be fucked, with a vacant expression and glazed eyes, as in many high-end fashion advertising campaigns. Extending this, you can represent her as sexually dominated, with her personal autonomy diminished or removed: bound or gagged, for instance. You can dress her up in animal skins or leopard print and represent her as a kind of wild, highly sexualised animal, something the fashion industry has been particularly fond of doing to black women over the years. You can dress and pose her as a stereotype: the Capable Housewife (in domestic setting, comfortable clothes, tolerant rueful smile), the Brainy Scientist (white coat, stern expression, glasses on end of nose), the Little Girl (kneesocks, pigtails, blowing bubblegum), the Sexy Vamp (cleavage, tongue on front teeth, wink). You can place her in a row with other similarly shaped, similarly adorned women, visually emphasising what they all have in common in looks and dress, so that individuality is rhetorically diminished, and one woman looks replaceable with any other. You can make her just a pair of legs, or breasts, or an arse, focusing the camera on body parts and even omitting the head and face. In all such cases, the thinking mind, personality, autonomy or particular individuality of the woman in the image is downplayed, diminished and ignored, to a greater or lesser extent. She’s ‘objectified’ in the sense she’s made more like an object and less like a fully individuated human being: less rational, less individual, less present, less important for who she actually is. In extreme cases, she can even be used as if or pictured as an inanimate object: a ‘table’ for men’s feet, or as a ‘plate’ for food– as in the Japanese practice of Nyotaimori, using a woman’s naked body as a receptacle for sushi in restaurants.”
― Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

“The stories I used to read where men transformed into women suggested a kind of instantaneous loss—a sudden vacuum where their manhood had once been, both literally and figuratively. But what has happened to me has actually been a slow blossoming, a colonization of myself with myself. The estrogen dissolving under my tongue will enter my bloodstream and slowly disseminate throughout my body, just as the other pills I am taking will shut down production of testosterone in other parts of my body. Sooner or later, my cells will realize that estrogen is now my dominant hormone and begin to soften my skin, to grow my breasts, to thicken my hair.
We are, none of us, a single set of destinies set by the accident of our birth. We can change and be changed. Our bodies know the language they must speak to make us the people we must become.”
― Emily St. James, Woodworking

“Imagine two incidents of theft. In the first case, a bandit takes something valuable from someone else. Deprived of this important source of wealth, the victim and his family live a life of relative destitution, even as the thief and his family flourish, with nary a thought about the crime that served as the basis of their wealth, nor the fate of those they stole from. Eventually the perpetrator and his family forget about the theft altogether and come to view their wealth as legitimate.

In the second case, a bandit also takes something precious from someone else, likewise leaving the victim and his family in a state of relative destitution, even as the robber and his family prosper. But in the second case, the bandit constantly acknowledges that his own prosperity was achieved at the victim’s expense. He explicitly and repeatedly recognizes the state of privation that the victim and his family live in as a result of the crime. He publicly praises the victim at every turn. Yet he nonetheless declines to return the stolen resources. Instead, he continues to actively leverage the seized assets in order to build his own wealth, but incessantly laments the poor state of the victim and his family, and the horror of the crime that was done to them, and insists that someone really ought to do something to help “those people” out.

The second scenario describes the practice of land acknowledgments, which have grown increasingly popular in symbolic capitalist spaces in recent years (while the first scenario depicts how the people who do make land acknowledgments describe those who don’t; I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is worse).

One stated purpose of land acknowledgments is to show respect to those who have been dispossessed. But of course, precisely as a function of that very dispossession, there are almost never people from the affected tribes “in the room” to receive these acknowledgments—particularly in symbolic capitalist spaces (where this practice is most pronounced). Instead, these acknowledgments typically consist of non-Indigenous people virtue signaling exclusively to other non-Indigenous people, who nod along approvingly, leading all in attendance to feel good about how enlightened they are … and then everyone gets on with business as usual.”
― Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

“I loved triggering that momentary reversal of power between us as I drew the limits on how far I would actually go to serve them. More than that, though, I just loved saying no when I could”
― Harron Walker, Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman