Objectification

On “objectification”: the media avoids showing the heads of fat people because they don’t want to seem to shame them as individuals and end up with a law suit. It’s not about showing bodies without heads in order to remove the subjectivity of the respective fat people. I don’t think the images displayed convey objectification, necessarily, since objectification is (paradoxically enough) a subjective attitude of being prone to treat other people as objects. One has to wait and see whether or not this attitude is present before assuming that it is — otherwise, like most forms of identity politics, you are engaging in objectification yourself (in this case, objectification of the potential onlooker).

I’ve mentioned before the case of Georges Bataille and how he used prostitutes in order to engage in perverse forms of intersubjectivity. Feminists don’t seem to like this guy, but what he was involved in was not “objectification”.