Objectification is the act of turning something living and vibrant and changeable into a thing. It’s one of the key preconditions for an ideology to work. I cannot evaluate my value in patriarchy, or in white supremacy, until I can see myself through its gaze. I have to step outside my experience to look at that selfhood as if it is a static thing. Years of practice of objectification are designed to ease the friction between the self and the systems of which we are a part.
Finally, one day someone will ask you what you want, what you truly desire, whether that’s in bed, or what you want to eat, or what you want to learn, or what you want to create in the time you have left on this earth, and you’ll blank out, right there in the strobe light of that question, because you can’t find it, that answer. It’s not that you know it and you’re hiding; it’s that it’s gone.
The rub here is that ideologies aren’t seamless. It’s not that they knock out all of our internal experience and turn us into robots. It’s that there’s a slippage, an inconsistency, a faulty wiring between us, our sense of what is real and true and what is being represented as worthy and normal by these networks of power. The more in congruence we are with the dominant culture, the less that slippage causes pain. If we aren’t measuring up, it’s harder to stay in contact with our internal experience. Because instead of being a source of wonder, of gratitude that we get to be here at all, our experience is of shame. We leave the self, only to re-enter it and castigate it, thing-ify it, improve it. But what if we can’t make it better, this objectified self? What then?
There are two usual responses to that shame, that certainty that we’re intrinsically flawed. One is conscious, the other is largely unconscious. In the first, we practice monitoring ourselves, policing our behaviors and believing the more we conform to what is expected, the safer we’ll be. In the second, we wall ourselves off from those feelings, desires, aspects of being that we know mark us as deviant, contemptible, disgusting, and undeserving of care. They become our shadow, or we project them onto others, the not me, the ones who are alien, animal, less than human, repositories of all that cannot be tolerated in the self.
But there’s a third approach, and that’s collective resistance and critique. By sharing our experiences of internalized oppression, of how we daily objectify ourselves, we can receive encouragement from others to learn from our collective pain. We can root our personal experience in the wider framework of our particular standpoint—how we are situated, in terms of our identities, our relationships to power, resources, and status, our subjection to oppression, our congruence and distance from the dominant culture. We can stay vulnerable, naming the ways we do violence to ourselves, and how we are encouraged to enact violence on others.
