Sexualisation

ABSTRACT

One person treats another as a sexual being by responding to their actual or perceived sexual properties. I develop an account of sexualisation to examine this phenomenon, especially as it relates to wrongful treatment such as sexual harassment. On the account proposed here, one person sexualises another when they foreground that person’s sexual properties. Some property of a person is foregrounded when it is introduced to the score of the encounter, following David Lewis’s conception of a conversational score. Having developed a concept of sexualisation, I argue that unwanted sexualisation is wrong because it contradicts a person’s self-presentation. Unwanted sexualisation is a particularly serious instance of this due to cultural norms surrounding sex and the practice of unwanted sexualisation.

KEYWORDS:

• ethics
• feminism
• foregrounding
• self-presentation
• sex
• sexual harassment

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Tasneem Alsayyed, Chris Bennett, Natasha McKeever, and Rosa Vince for their invaluable feedback on previous drafts of this work. I would also like to thank colleagues at the IDEA Centre Research Fortnight 2022 Workshops at the University of Leeds for their generous comments, and Julian Dodd for his assistance and support as I revised this piece. This paper was significantly improved by feedback from three anonymous reviewers and two editors for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, for which I am very grateful. I am also indebted to the Feminism Reading Group at the University of Sheffield, the forum through which, several years ago, I first encountered and discussed many of the philosophical works on which I draw in this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We might also think of foregrounding some property as raising this property to salience. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this framing.

2 Many properties of a person are backgrounded simply because they do not come up in the conversation. For example, suppose that I am discussing work with a colleague. In this conversation, my family relationships are backgrounded by default because neither party raises these to salience by commenting on them. If my colleague does ask me about my family, they will only contradict my self-presentation if I have a preference to background my family relationships.

3 Lewis (1979: 345) uses the term ‘acceptability’ while McGowan (2019) uses the term ‘permissibility’. They have in mind a notion of what is conversationally appropriate, rather than an ethical notion of permissibility (McGowan 2019: 111).

4 For one view of how these body parts and acts come to be considered sexual by default, see my ‘What Makes an Attack Sexual?’ (Morgan 2021: 523–28).

5 I discuss sexualisation as a concept distinct from sexual objectification. However, my discussion here shows that there are significant similarities between unwanted sexualisation and sexual objectification; denial of autonomy and instrumentalisation also form part of Martha Nussbaum’s (1995) concept of objectification as developed by Rae Langton (2009). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer on this point.

6 Discussing Jennifer Hornsby’s (1995: 134, 136) concept of ‘reciprocity’, Kristie Dotson (2011: 237–38) argues that ‘Speakers require audiences to “meet” their effort “halfway” in a linguistic exchange’ and that ‘the success of a speaker’s attempt to communicate ultimately depends upon audiences’. Following Hornsby and Dotson, I argue here that successful self-presentation relies on the cooperation of others, requiring minimally that others do not foreground that which one seeks to background. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer on this point.

7 See also Hanna Gunn's (2018: 11–16) account of 'programmatic social-epistemic agency', which she defines as ‘our ability to be self-authoring in the roles that we can occupy within the social-epistemic domain of our lives … and the degree to which we can be effective in these roles’, and which depends on the ‘cooperation’ of others.

8 Lucido responded that he was ‘not talking about anything sexual’ and was instead ‘geeked up about the boys coming there’ (Egan and Gray 2020a). He later claimed that his comments were taken out of context and that he was misquoted (Egan and Gray 2020b). This case was also covered in national and international press (BBC News 2020; CBS News 2020), and by Donahue (2020) herself.

9 An anonymous editor raises an exception: Suppose that a person’s self-presentation consists so completely in serving others that she would balk at the idea that she has value for her own sake. Her interlocutor responds by arguing that she is valuable in her own right and thereby contradicts her self-presentation. In this very unusual case, contradicting a person’s self-presentation does not instrumentalise them, so I must propose that contradicting a person’s self-presentation without good reason ordinarily instrumentalises them, although it does not necessarily do so.

10 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for revealing a complexity in this case. When the jerk performs the bad behaviour, he introduces this to the score of his encounter(s) with others and so foregrounds it, making it a part of his self-presentation. It does not therefore seem to contradict his self-presentation when his friends bring this up. In response, I suggest that his performing this bad behaviour on the night out introduces it to the score of his encounter(s) at that time but does not thereby add it to the score of his later encounter with his friends the following morning. Hence, we can make sense of the claim that the jerk’s friends contradict his self-presentation by foregrounding his bad behaviour, even though he foregrounded it himself on the previous night.

11 I am grateful to Jamie Dow and an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

12 The extent to which unwanted sexualisation threatens is likely to depend on contextual features of each case. As an anonymous reviewer notes, street-based sexual harassment targeting a lone individual is perhaps more likely to be threatening than a careless comment made by a friend, even though the latter case involves additional wrongs such as a breach of trust. This also applies to the features that I consider below: the extent of subjective suffering and discriminatory wrongs will differ between cases. Unwanted sexualisation includes a diverse range of cases, and my account aims to accommodate this complexity.

13 Many disabled people also suffer the reverse, of being overlooked as sexual beings and desexualised against their will (Lintott and Irvin 2016: 300; Santos and Santos 2018). I leave a discussion of unwanted desexualisation for future work, but my account is well equipped to say something about this phenomenon. When individuals are disproportionately desexualised against their will, their self-presentation is contradicted: they seek to foreground some sexual aspect of themselves, or to have sexual aspects of themselves foregrounded to the same extent as a person without a disability, but find that others background this.