Objectification: seven ways of treating a person as a thing (Nussbaum)
Treating a person as a thing, in any of seven separable ways: instrumentality (a tool for your purposes), denial of autonomy, inertness (lacking agency), fungibility (interchangeable), violability (their boundaries don't matter), ownership, and denial of subjectivity (their experience doesn't count). Langton added three: reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing.
What drives it
It turns a vague sense of being used into a checklist you can apply to specific behaviour. Nussbaum's other point matters as much: some of these are harmless inside mutual respect and consent; the damage comes when they define the relationship.
How it shows
Work
Instrumentality: 'I need you on this', and never anything else. Denial of autonomy: decisions about your role made and then announced. Inertness: discussed in the third person while you're in the room. Fungibility: 'anyone can do your job', headcount swapped, contractors cycled without names. Violability: messages at midnight, your calendar overwritten, your desk moved. Ownership: 'my people', the manager who blocks every transfer. Denial of subjectivity: 'how you feel about it isn't relevant'. Silencing: interrupted, or your point repeated by someone else and credited to them. Reduction to appearance: the junior woman asked to 'be in the room' for the client.
Relationships
Ownership and violability show first: the phone checked as of right, who they can see decided for them, 'you're mine'. Denial of autonomy: choices made for them 'because I know you'. Denial of subjectivity: 'you're overreacting' as the answer to any feeling. Fungibility: an ex replaced within weeks by someone of the same type. Count the features: one in a good relationship is a quirk; four that recur is a pattern.
Self
You think 'who else could do this?' about a person rather than a role; you plan around someone's feelings as obstacles; you're irritated when someone you rely on has needs of their own.
What tells it apart
Coercive control: Coercive control is a sustained campaign with surveillance, rules and punishment, and the controlled person is afraid; objectification names a stance that can be careless rather than strategic. Coercive control nearly always shows ownership, violability and denial of autonomy together.
Dehumanisation: animalistic and mechanistic (Haslam): Dehumanisation usually targets a group and shows in how people talk about 'them'; objectification is usually one person in a specific relationship, and the same person may treat everyone else fully humanly.
Boundaries: A boundary problem can be the line not being known or stated; violability means the line is known and treated as not mattering. State it once plainly; if it's crossed again knowingly, it's objectification.
A test
Run the ten features against one specific relationship and note which recur; then state a preference or limit plainly and see whether it's taken into account or worked around.
Questions to carry
- Run against one relationship, which of the ten features keep recurring, and what happens when a limit is stated plainly?
- Whom do I treat as interchangeable or as a tool, and what do I stop noticing about them?
How strong the research is
weak. A philosophical analysis, not a measured scale; the nearest evidence is dehumanisation research and studies showing that power increases instrumental views of others (Gruenfeld and colleagues, 2008).
Where it comes from
Martha Nussbaum, 'Objectification', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1995; Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, 2009
Sources
- Martin Buber, I and Thou (Ich und Du) (1923)
- Martha C. Nussbaum, Objectification (1995)
- Nick Haslam, Dehumanization: An Integrative Review (2006)