/lit/ - Literature

In its broadest (and most conceptually rigorous) formulation, 'objectification' refers to the process by which the full spectrum of a person's humanity is collapsed into a specific mode or category, such that their personhood can be more easily operationalized within some broader, exterior pursuit. A feminist interpretation of objectification refers specifically to the societal-scale reduction of women's subjectivity into immanent bodies, subordinated by (and contingent upon) male desire. In popular discourse, this paradigm of objectification grasps feminine sexuality as essentially modal in character: a register than can be activated or deactivated (sexualized and desexualized) at the will of a motivated observer. Under this paradigm, the female body is conceived as a smooth surface, a blank slate upon which male desire is projected. Aside from reaffirming archetypal notions of essentialized female passivity, this discourse has the unfortunate side effect of rendering abject substantial regions of the female body; politically problematized no-man's lands, constantly threatening to betray the integrity of a woman's self hood to the gaze of the male exploiter. This internal contradiction serves as a motor for escalating biopolitical panic: see the frentic disavowal, dissimimulation, mitigation, and masking of formerly public female sex characteristics. The removal of breasts, the removal of hips, the erasure of buttocks: a seemingly familiar campaign of censorship, enacted not out of puritanical shame or evangelical bias, but conducted under the auspices of their ostensible ideological opposites: feminists seeking their own empowerment! The cruel reality is that though sexualization (and thus objectification) may be projected from without, it also emerges from within: a woman's post-pubescent body having evolved to signal health, to capture the attention of prospective mates. Far from being a blank slate, the female body's sexualization is (at least partially) intrinsic; to the (usually repressed) horror of feminists, nature itself is complicit in the act of objectification. And to the detriment of all, men and women alike, a conflict between a political project of erasure and dissimulation, and nature itself, can only result in the progressive scarification of the female body.