Overcoming Objectification

<p>Objectification is a foundational concept in feminist theory used to analyze such disparate social phenomena as sex work representation of women's bodies and sexual harassment. However there has been an increasing trend among scholars of rejecting and re-evaluating the philosophical assumptions which underpin it. In this work Cahill suggests an abandonment of the notion of objectification on the basis of its dependence on a Kantian ideal of personhood. Such an ideal fails to recognize sufficiently the role the body plays in personhood and thus results in an implicit vilification of the body and sexuality. The problem with the phenomena associated with objectification is not that they render women objects and therefore not-persons but rather that they construct feminine subjectivity and sexuality as wholly derivative of masculine subjectivity and sexuality. Women in other words are not objectified as much as they are derivatized turned into a mere reflection or projection of the other. Cahill argues for an ethics of materiality based upon a recognition of difference thus working toward an ethics of sexuality that is decidedly ­and simultaneously ­incarnate and intersubjective. </p>