Dehumanization and Objectification

What lies at the heart of humanity's capacity for evil? Any tenable answer to this age-old question must include an explanation of our penchant for objectifying and dehumanizing our fellow human beings. The Objectification Spectrum: Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others draws upon timeless wisdom and gripping historical accounts to propose a new model of objectification. Rather than offering a narrow definition of the term, the author explores objectification as a spectrum of misapprehension running from its mildest form, casual indifference, to its most extreme manifestation, dehumanization. Using vivid examples to clearly demarcate three primary levels of objectification, the author engages in a thoughtful exploration of various dispositional and situational factors contributing to this uniquely human phenomenon. These include narcissism, the ego, death denial, toxic situations, and our perceived boundaries of self, among others.  Rector then gives us reason to hope by orienting his model of objectification into a broader continuum of human capability--one that includes a countervailing enlightenment spectrum. Gleaning insights from classic philosophy, the world's five most prominent religious traditions, and current social science research, he examines the best antidotes humankind has devised thus far to move us from casual concern for our fellow human beings toward interconnectedness and, ultimately, unity consciousness. Broad in scope and deeply penetrating, The Objectification Spectrum advances the conversation about the nature of human evil into personally relevant, potentially transformative territory.

Environmental activist and ardent advocate for children’s rights and well-being, Jamaican laureate of the 2008 Jamaican National Literature awards, Diana McCaulay, published her critically acclaimed debut novel Dog-Heart in 2010. This paper will first focus on the legacy of colonial racism in Jamaica, before addressing the main characters’ quest for identity in a crime-ridden society.

This book seeks to understand the Muslim’s role in a world of sometimes discordant relations festered by attitudes of othering and dehumanisation. It shows that such attitudes, fuelled by hate, impinge upon a conviviality, harmony of existence and mutual understanding between peoples – as reflected in the Qur’ānic paradigm. The book breaks down codified concepts in an accessible way to the uninitiated reader, marrying together sociological constructs with real and illuminating examples from the Qur'an and Prophetic tradition.

Numerous, varied, historical and contemporary examples are used from many different fields to demonstrate key points throughout the book, giving the reader a glimpse into the depth and breadth of history, literature, spirituality, conflict studies and how these concepts have manifested themselves across all these fields in relation to discourses of othering, dehumanisation and empathy. This book calls on us to attempt to see one another without the stereotypes, the walls, the distance both physical and cultural, that mar our perceptions of each other. Inspired by the Prophetic empathy, the book provides guidelines on bridging between communities and suggests direct lessons for the reader to take.

While on the one hand for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the perception of the other founds morality’; on the other, it is the rationalizing of perception by stripping it of empathic responsiveness, becoming an inhuman gaze, that allows ethical failure. Through his ground-breaking analyses of embodied percipience, Merleau-Ponty offers a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, the objectivist, disembodied, unsituated, purely rationalist view which underwrites all inhuman gazes.  Complicating and deepening these analyses, Merleau-Ponty also draws on gestalt theory, elaborating particularly on the roles of perspectivism, wholism and figure-ground structures in the perception of things and of others. It is Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with gestalt theory that informs the key claims of this essay, supported by diverse accounts and analyses of the underlying psychological dimensions and consequences of torture. Specifically, I will argue that while we can theoretically decompose perception in terms of gestalt structures to better understand the mechanisms of perceptual experience in general, we can also understand how it is possible to achieve an inhuman gaze through a rationalizing deconstructive process of perception; rather than ‘making’ others and worlds, these are ‘unmade’ for potentially violent and unethical ends.

The aim of the present study was to examine to what degree different mechanisms of moral disengagement were related to age, gender, bullying, and defending among school children. Three hundred and seventy-two Swedish children ranging in age from 10 to 14 years completed a questionnaire. Findings revealed that boys expressed significantly higher levels of moral justification, euphemistic labeling, diffusion of responsibility, distorting consequences, and victim attribution, as compared with girls. Whereas boys bullied others significantly more often than girls, age was unrelated to bullying. Moral justification and victim attribution were the only dimensions of moral disengagement that significantly related to bullying. Furthermore, younger children and girls were more likely to defend victims. Diffusion of responsibility and victim attribution were significantly and negatively related to defending, while the other dimensions of moral disengagement were unrelated to defending.

Objectification is the human tendency to misapprehend the depth of others, to see them not as integrated wholes of psyche and soma, worthy of respect and even reverence, but more as objects. Societal conventional wisdom is that objectification is a dichotomous variable, suggesting that either one is objectifying others or one is not. However, a new conceptual understanding of objectification proposes it as a continuous variable comprising a spectrum of misapprehension, applicable to many contexts, and engaged in routinely by most people. The proposed " objectification spectrum " runs from casual indifference at the low end, to derivatization in the middle, and finally, to dehumanization at the high end. Each of these demarcation points are defined, differentiated, and explained with examples. It is proposed that a better understanding of objectification, along with its central underlying mechanism, will enhance efforts toward diminishing its influence. W hen most of us hear the word objectification, we tend to think of the exploitation of women for sexual or commercial purposes. A cursory internet search of the question, " What is objectification? " shows an overwhelming preponderance of this particular understanding of the term. This is likely due to half a century of feminist activism successfully heightening societal awareness of the role objectification plays in the oppression of women (

Il presente articolo ruota attorno al concetto di oggettivazione del corpo femminile, alla cui base vi è l'azione che la cultura, la società e i meccanismi di comunicazione attuali come pubblicità, pornografia e le immagini, in generale, che sviliscono il genere femminile, attuano principalmente sulla sessualità. Agendo su di essa, si agisce sul corpo al fine di modellarlo esteticamente ed esteriormente, ma non solo. L'utilizzo che i mass media fanno del corpo femminile, infatti, è atto allo scopo di orientare la figura o il ruolo, mediante una sua falsificata rappresentazione, mantenendo, in tal modo, inalterati gli stereotipi, per poi, concludere con una breve disamina sul rapporto tra oggettivazione del corpo femminile e utilizzo delle tecnologie.

Depuis les premiers échanges avec la Chine et les premiers récits de voyage, la fascination exercée par ce pays sur les voyageurs et les commentateurs français et européens a donné naissance à une multitude de textes décrivant la Chine et les Chinois. Avec sa brillante civilisation et son paganisme, la Chine bouscule le XVIIIe siècle, bouleverse les Lumières et inspire les auteurs de romans.
Au XIXe siècle, tandis que l’Europe se passionne pour l’Asie et que les études chinoises se développent, l’image de la Chine reste en marge de la vague d’exotisme. Influencée par les États-Unis, aux prises avec une forte immigration chinoise, et contrariée dans ses projets coloniaux
en Chine, la France met le racisme scientifique au service de sa politique impérialiste.
À partir de 1840, en écho à la situation politique en Chine, le discours sur les « Jaunes » se cristallise. Les mots pour décrire le Chinois, l’Autre par excellence, se durcissent pour devenir le repoussoir des qualités des Européens. Le discours raciste sur les Chinois, porté par la
littérature de jeunesse et les icônes populaires, banalise l'image du Chinois jaune, fourbe, sadique, copieur. À la fin du XIXe siècle, il représente un danger incarné dans la notion de Péril jaune.
Ce propos diabolisateur, oublié de la critique postcoloniale, fait aujourd'hui partie des représentations communes. Pour le comprendre, nous nous proposons d’extraire les spécificités chinoises du discours générique sur l’Asie et l’Orient, pour examiner qui l’énonce et dans
quelles conditions en terme d’histoire sociale et culturelle.

REFERENCE:
Baril, Alexandre (2018). “Confessing Society, Confessing Cis-tem: Rethinking consent through intimate images of trans* people in the media,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 39, no 2, p. 1-25.

KEYWORDS:
Transgender — Media — Hyper-visibility — Nudity — Objectification — Sexualization — Cisgenderism/Transphobia — Consent — Sexual Violence — Law — Auto-Ethnography

ABSTRACT:
Despite feminist redefinitions of sexual consent that highlight its renewable, affirmative, retractable nature, legal consent to the public distribution of any type of image requires only a single, irrevocable instance of consent. I argue that it is problematic to consider consent to publicly distribute intimate nude images in the same way as consent to sharing other images. What if consent to the public distribution of intimate images were redefined according to feminist understandings of sexual consent? Using the example of trans* people and inspired by Foucault’s work on confessing, I argue that we live in a “confessing society” that leads us to believe that disclosure of our selves is liberating and a transphobic/cisgenderist “confessing cis-tem” that, together, push trans* people to show their naked bodies/souls to satisfy public curiosity. Adopting a feminist, transactivist approach and an auto-ethnographic methodology based on my experience as a trans man who “accepted” media requests to discuss private details of my transition and have intimate images taken of my body for which my consent cannot be retracted, I present two arguments. First, for some trans* people, certain aspects of the confessing cis-tem, including social and media pressures, should be considered factors that can bias consent. Second, I call for a redefinition of consent to the distribution of intimate images: whether consent was given in biased circumstances or not, it should be possible to withdraw it, as with sexual consent. If you can reconsider being intimate with just one person, the same should be true of exposing your nudity to an audience.

Othering is the construction and identification of the self or in-group and the other or out-group in mutual, unequal opposition by attributing relative inferiority and/or radical alienness to the other/out-group. The notion of othering spread from feminist theory and post-colonial studies to other areas of the humanities and social sciences, but is originally rooted in Hegel's dialectic of identification and distantiation in the encounter of the self with some other in his "Master-Slave dialectic". In this paper, after reviewing the philosophical and psychological background of othering, I distinguish two kinds of othering, "crude" and "sophisticated", that differ in the logical form of their underlying arguments. The essential difference is that the former is merely self-other distantiating, while the latter – as in Hegel's dialectic – partially depends on self-other identification. While crude othering is closer to the paradigmatic notion of othering, sophisticated othering is closer to Hegel's, but so is quasi-othering, which is nearly identical in form to sophisticated othering, but which misses the defining feature of othering – attributing relative inferiority and/or radical alienness. Because Hegel’s dialectic applies to any encounter of an interpreting self with some other, sophisticated or quasi-othering is at least potentially a very common occurrence in the interpretation of others, especially of those who do not belong to the in-group. However, although othering is usually undesirable, the Hegelian varieties can provide a "mirror", which can be used as a tool to improve understanding of both the other and the interpreting self, and the malignant aspects of othering can be avoided through charity.

Martha Nussbaum attempts to improve the clarity of the obscure talk of feminists and conservatives about objectification in connection with sexual matters. Her discussion is a substantial improvement. However, it is inconsistent and opaque, and she continues to apply the pejorative term ‘objectification’ to activities which she herself admits are morally unproblematic and which may even be a joyous part of life. I explain the deficiencies in Nussbaum’s discussion, including the fact that she does not notice the one way of objectification that seems inherently problematic, and I show that casual sex, prostitution and pornography are normally not morally problematic even while they exhibit some of Nussbaum’s ways of objectification. The term ‘objectification’ should be eschewed because it is a barrier to clear thinking.

The image of the non-Orthodox in Camblak's work is unequivocally negative. Behind the abusive rhetoric lie patterns well known to social psychology. One can easily recognize the author's dehumanizing attitude, which reveals the meaning of many elements of Camblak's narrative in The Martyrdom of John the New. The concept of dehumanization is useful for the study of the attitude of medieval literate elites towards minorities. Although at its core it concerns cognitive phenomena it immediately makes us think about their behavioral implications.

As an imperial Greek author of both cultural and stylistic interest, Aretaeus deserves to be more widely read. His most riveting disease descriptions bring before our eyes the spectacle of the human body in extreme states of suffering and dehumanization. These descriptions achieve a degree of visual immediacy and emotional impact unparalleled among ancient medical writers. This essay considers them as examples of ekphrastic rhetoric, designed to create enargeia. To create immediacy and intensify impact, Aretaeus deploys a set of techniques that invite the reader’s active engagement with the spectacle he describes. This engagement has the potential to generate a corporeal response that destabilizes the boundary between the body of the reader and the body in the text. The modern concept of “empathy” is perhaps too anodyne to convey the complexity of the response involved.

Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World(2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression.

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in  Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal; 10(2), July 2015, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright Lisa Perrott
Pages 119-140. doi:10.1177/1746847715593697

Reification, fetishism, alienation, mastery, and control – these are some of the key concepts of modernity that have been battered and beaten by postmoderns and nonmoderns alike, with Bruno Latour, a nonmodern, discarding them most recently. Critical of this approach, which creates a rift between moderns and nonmoderns, the author engages in dialogue with modern thinkers – particularly Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Stanley Pullberg – with a view to recycling and redefining the concept of reification from a nonmodern perspective. Marxian scholars associate reification with an attitude of detachment and passivity. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Luvale-speaking region of northwest Zambia, Africa, the author seeks to convert the negative and asymmetrical Marxian reading of reification, which places subjects above objects, to a positive symmetry. Marx explained the capitalist economy through the lens of religion. Reversing the direction of symmetrical comparison, the author considers the northwestern Zambian universe of ancestors and their different mahamba manifestations in the form of spiritual beings, diseased bodies and material objects through the lens of Marxian concepts, mainly reification and fetishism. Three aspects of reification understood as a human universal come to light: first, reification and animation entail each other both in the realms of materiality (human bodies and material objects) and immateriality (concepts and spirits), being best perceived as a form of fetishism. Reifacts are fetishes and fetishes are reifacts. Second, because fetishes are animated and do things, reification is a form of engagement with the world, a means to action and a tool for transformation. Third and last, and without contradiction, reification entails engagement and detachment, action and withdrawal, control and surrender. There is much to gain from recycling the old concept of reification. In a non-partisan symmetrical perspective, the redefinition of reification as fetishism yields a new, positive understanding of the place of material and immaterial things in social life and the ways in which we humans apprehend the world and implicate those things  in our projects and struggles. Reification is not an impediment to action but a condition for action.

Based on the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel of the same name. Guy Montag is a fireman who lives in a lonely, isolated society where books have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public. It is the duty of firemen to burn any books on sight or said collections that have been reported by informants. People in this society, including Montag's wife, are drugged into compliance and get their information from wall-length television screens.

This study examines the process of sexual objectification of Afro-American women in rap music, and its social impact.
Via Fredrickson’s objectification theory, I illustrate how misogynistic videos and lyrics reduce women to mere objects for men’s ownership, use and abuse. I will also focus on the origins of Hip-Hop movement, its growth and development, stressing the importance of the cultural roots of racial discrimination. In order to address this topic, I will mainly refer to Murray Forman and Mark Neal’s book That’s the Joint.
Although Forman and Neal do a very good job in addressing hip-hop’s origins and evolution, giving an important contribute to the subject, That’s The Joint fail at covering women’s objectification lineage. Thus, to better understand how in the US negatives prejudices have led to stereotypy black culture and consequently sexualize coloured women, I will turn to Afro-American slave narratives especially Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully’s Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Using Gwendolyn Pough’s Check It While I Wreck It, I therefore illustrate how slaves used literature to claim back their own femininity, how this process has contributed to hip-hop culture, and how it has changed it. I will try, thus, to make a comparison between past and present texts and cultures.
A short introduction to the legacy of African-American’s language will illustrate some peculiar aspect of misogynist lyrics in rap music. This will lead me to the analysis of phenomena like female exposure and sexploitation in rap music and videos. I will go on to analyse how hip-hop original message of change and progress has been assimilated and successively altered in culture industry. I will illustrate how the massive commercialization of hip-hop has affected white society imaginary. I will analyse both rap videos and lyrics so as to understand the reasons of exaggerate misogyny, also trying to understand why female rappers have accepted and endorsed their own objectification.
Video distribution in the mainstream market has dehumanized coloured women, turning them into hypersexual objects easily accessible to man. Drawing on Sut Jhally’s documentary Dreamworlds 3, I will focus on the social impact of persistent exposure to misogynous objectification on American women and men.

Studies on dehumanization demonstrated that denying certain human characteristics might serve as a strategy for moral disengagement. Meat consumption—especially in the times of cruel animal farming—is related to the exclusion of animals from the human scope of justice. In the present research, it was hypothesized that the conception of human uniqueness (denying animals certain psychological characteristics) might be a strategy of meat-eaters’ moral disengagement. Three studies compared the extent to which vegetarians and omnivores attribute psychological characteristics to humans versus animals. In Study 1, vegetarian participants ascribed more secondary (uniquely human) emotions to animals than did the omnivores; however, there were no differences in primary (animalistic) emotions. Study 2 showed that omnivores distinguish human characteristics from animalistic ones more sharply than vegetarians do, while both groups do not differ in distinguishing human characteristics from mechanistic ones. Study 3 confirmed the results by showing that omnivores ascribed less secondary emotions to traditionally edible animals than to the non-edible species, while vegetarians did not differentiate these animals. These results support the claim that the lay conceptions of ‘human uniqueness’ are strategies of moral disengagement.

Research has shown that sexualized people are perceived as possessing fewer traits of a human being. Most scholars have argued that these effects are driven by revealing clothing, with targets wearing swimsuits or lingerie being perceived as possessing less mind and less humanness in comparison with nonsexualized targets. However, revealing clothing in these studies was often confounded with other sexualizing factors, such as posture suggestiveness, and, so, the aspects which lead people to perceive women in object-like ways remain unclear. This article begins to fill this gap by examining the role of two key sexualizing factors, namely revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness, on objectification-related traits. After exposure to a picture of a woman, 223 participants were asked to indicate the extent to which this woman possessed warmth, competence, and morality. For competence and warmth, we found an interaction between revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness: Posture suggestiveness caused less attribution of warmth and competence to women wearing revealing clothing, but not for women wearing less revealing clothing. For morality, we found that women in suggestive (vs. nonsuggestive) postures were perceived as possessing less morality, regardless of the type of clothing. The implications of these findings for the field are discussed.

Any social and political arrangement depends on acceptance. If a substantial part of a people does not accept the authority of its rulers, then those can only remain in power by means of force, and even that use of force needs to be accepted to be effective. Gramsci called this acceptance of the socio-political status quo “hegemony”. Every stable state relies primarily on hegemony as a source of control. Hegemony works through the dissemination of values and beliefs that create acceptance and that serve the interests of the state and/or the ruling elite (the “hegemones”). Hegemony is most efficient if it remains invisible. A key hegemonic belief is the idea that there is no alternative to the current socio-political status quo or that the way things are is “natural”. The current hegemony – that is, the set of values and beliefs that bolster the current socio-political status quo – is a hegemony of psychopathy: it promotes “cultural psychopathy” and destroys empathy and compassion, thus threatening everything that makes us human.
The hegemony of psychopathy is responsible for massive human suffering. It must be fought and replaced with a counter-hegemonic set of values and beliefs that promote compassion and care. Fighting hegemony requires fighting the “pillars” that support it. Most important among these are the mass media and culture industry, and mainstream economics. The former is responsible for a continuous stream of hegemonic propaganda; the latter – among others – for providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the false belief that there is no alternative. This essay closes off with some considerations on tactics and strategy in the struggle against the hegemony of psychopathy, but does not – and cannot – offer any concrete advice.

Instead of asking what evil is, let us see where evil takes us. Does it take us to the realm of morality or the realm of ontology? Based on many conversations on the topic of witchcraft held during ethnographic fieldwork in northwest Zambia, Africa—conversations in which witchcraft is presented from the perspective of the bewitched—the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of morality feels lacking and out of place. This is an ontological realm where humans metamorphose into wild animals, beasts, even monsters. In addition, based on the same conversations on the topic of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, the idea of evil as excess with an ontological weight should be taken a step further: the shift from the moral to the ontological gives rise to highly systematic, often ritualized processes of interpersonal predation that lead, if not curbed, to suffering and death. In the movement from bad to evil, the process of systematic dehumanization of one by another is unleashed, reducing humans to the conditions of predators and prey. The movement from morality to ontology is also a movement from morality to absolute violence. In northwest Zambia, and elsewhere in Africa, four experiential themes recur in accounts of witchcraft from the perspective of the bewitched: dehumanization, intrusion, depletion, and annihilation in the form of consumption. These accounts of witchcraft help us better understand the highly systematic and ritualized process of bewitching as well as other extreme forms of interpersonal violence.

As an imperial Greek author of both cultural and stylistic interest, Aretaeus deserves to be more widely read. His most riveting disease descriptions bring before our eyes the spectacle of the human body in extreme states of suffering and dehumanization. These descriptions achieve a degree of visual immediacy and emotional impact unparalleled among ancient medical writers. This essay considers them as examples of ekphrastic rhetoric, designed to create enargeia. To intensify immediacy and impact, Aretaeus deploys a set of techniques that invite the reader’s active engagement with the spectacle he describes. This engagement has the potential to generate a corporeal response that destabilizes the boundary between the body of the reader and the body in the text. The modern concept of “empathy” is perhaps too anodyne to convey the complexity of the response involved.

From holy to base and comic, and then to degenerate and utterly worthless, fit for nothing but extinction: few examples show the extreme flexibility, adaptability and changing fortunes of concepts as well as that of the parasite. What’s more, this strange historical trajectory has turned the parasite into a key term for understanding the exclusionary mechanisms at the heart of modern Western societies, coming to function as a name for a class of beings not entitled to the same basic rights as others. While such mechanisms have historically found their clearest expression in totalitarian regimes, there is no doubt that milder versions are at work in even the most advanced liberal democracies, helping create and secure their borders through separating inside from outside, as well as marking that which is spatially located inside the borders, but which is thought not to properly belong. This article will argue that reconceptualising the parasite is a necessary step if one wants to disrupt and move beyond the workings of such a logic of exclusion and dehumanization.

Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: that of human existence. The overwhelming presence of human simulacra in the form of mannequins, puppets and masks expresses the author's will to highlight human insignificance. But when Ligotti's characters end up desiring to become those puppets, the curse of humanity (having been born) turns to a cynical joke. The author cleverly turns objects of nightmare into objects of desire, thus giving another dimension to existential horror. Similarly, some of Ligotti's short stories feature humanised objects, representing another way for the author to deny man's superiority.
My paper offers to explore the strategy of desire in the context of Ligotti's horror writing: how is desire always related to an escape from the human condition? How can objectification, and the loss of humanity that stems from it, be part of conscious desire? To what extent is this desire satisfied?
This interpretation of desire can also be associated to Ligotti's own literary quest: the author’s deep desire to repeatedly explore the tragedy of humanity. The short story form offers Ligotti the ideal medium for this never-ending need to express his ontological perspective. But does the repetition offered by the short format entail a recurrent fulfilment of desire or a necessary frustration?

Jean Améry’s autobiographical account of torture at the hands of the Gestapo provides the most striking, if also the most harrowing, example of how the body resurfaces in conscious awareness due to pain and how such experiences often reveal an ambiguity in one’s embodied identity. Torture appears to be objectification in the extreme: it is the defilement of one’s bodily integrity by another. Suffering takes on a different dimension in such a context so that one’s transformation into crude flesh is a product of both one’s extreme physical anguish and one’s complete vulnerability and maltreatment at the hands of another. And yet, remarkably, Améry’s story is not without positive lessons. Despite the enormity of his suffering, his testimony also shows just how robust the body's unique ‘mineness’ is. The radical otherness of one’s body is always attenuated, even in such extremes, so that the brute materiality of one’s own living body is never quite a total reality: that is, it is never utterly alien. In addition, he goes on to suggest a way in which one might reclaim one’s embodiment, though this may have unsettling implications.