Objectification as negotiation: reexamining the agency of targets

ABSTRACT

Why and under what conditions do individuals participate in their own physical objectification? Literature across disciplines acknowledges such conditions exist but has limited capacity to specify when and how a person might participate in her own objectification. This article argues that a target of objectification, under certain conditions, can accept objectification in pursuit of another goal. This conception is counterintuitive given that existing approaches sometimes treat the targets of objectification as lacking agency. However, by obscuring this agency such accounts further the same objectification they highlight as problematic. This article offers a positive model of objectified targets’ agency. This model, called “Negotiated Objectification,” serves as an analytical tool that scholars can leverage in feminist academic debates over objectification. The utility of the model is illustrated using three examples: FEMEN’s topless protests; the politics of the Muslim headscarf; and women’s body writing in support of the Israel Defense Forces. The article concludes by considering the implications of women’s agency in each case for debates over the role of agents under objectification.

KEYWORDS:

• Consent
• FEMEN
• feminism
• gender
• objectification

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers, Emanuela Buscemi, Annelle Sheline, Mary Nugent, Hannah Lantos, Negar Razavi, Dillon Tatum and Brett Remkus Britt for their helpful feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Scott Weiner is a political scientist who obtained his PhD from George Washington University in 2016. From 2013–14, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the American University in Kuwait, where he completed doctoral field work. He has held grants from the US government and the Project on Middle East Political Science. His research focuses on state formation, kinship politics and gender in the Middle East with a particular focus on the states of the Arabian Peninsula.

Notes

1. Some of these studies used sample sizes as small as twenty-eight subjects.

2. A 2014 study linking objectification to PTSD symptoms and psychological trauma, for example, did not ask subjects whether they had grown up in a war zone or were combat veterans – both of which covary strongly with trauma. See Miles-McLean et al. (2014).

3. With regard to clothing, relevant characteristics include those that augment characteristics of the body, for example exposure, coverage, thickness or material. Other stylistic elements may be the subject of judgment, but objectification refers to a judgment ultimately about the body itself.

4. While this model does not elaborate on the specific role of the state, I acknowledge its importance as an actor shaping social contexts, and being shaped by them (see Hansonn et al. 2014). To demonstrate the utility of a model downplaying the state, the cases I examine all have transnational aspects.

5. See “Topless Femen Protesters Arrested in Paris,” 2014, New York Daily News, April 22, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/topless-femen-protesters-arrested-paris-gallery-1.1764557; “Topless Femen Protestors Arrested in Crimea,” 2014, France 24, March 6, http://www.france24.com/en/20140306-femen-activists-crimea-arrested-after-topless-anti-putin-protest-ukraine/; “Femen Activists Arrested over Topless Protest in Tunisia,” 2013, EuroNews, May 29, http://www.euronews.com/2013/05/29/femen-activists-arrested-over-topless-protest-in-tunisia/.

6. See Mahmood (2005, 16). For more on the agency of religious Muslim women, see Rinaldo (2014).

7. https://www.facebook.com/StillStandingWithIDF, accessed December 29, 2014.

8. One picture features a sticky note near a woman’s genital area reading, “[t]his tunnel was made in Israel,” a reference to Hamas-made tunnels under the Gaza-Israel and Gaza-Egypt borders. For more on gender in military conflict, see Mann (2014).