Objectification and dehumanisation

Posted by Tanos on Tue 28 Jun 05, 12:01 AM

I was reading through some of my posts on bondage.com, and I thought I'd save this one from a couple of years ago, since I'm revisiting these themes as I update The Slave Register: many people talk about objectification, but I think that dehumanisation (or even depersonalisation) is the better name for my button in this area.

If a sub is (temporarily) dehumanised during a scene, she isn't able to appeal to the dom's humanity or to reason with him, to escape or avoid what's going to happen. (Isn't it interesting that we talk about "reasoning" with someone? It's the faculty of "reason" that marks out humans from other animals, and one of the things which is denied when a dehumanised captive isn't allowed to make decisions or even asked their opinion about what will happen to them.) So I think I like using dehumanisation in scenes because it accentuates the power imbalance.

There are many ways of doing this, and levels of complexity.

Even simple gagging is at one end of this continuum, since there's no chance the sub might be able to "talk her way out" of the situation. (Any agreed "oh, shit I need to tell you something" signals aside, the only way she can communicate is by facial expressions, imploring eyes and whimpering sounds, which just ads to the dehumanisation because that's what your puppy has too.)

More complex scenes can involve a "social" context where such communication is clearly not allowed. So a prison-like scene would fall into that category, with impersonal treatment, stripped down clothing or nudity, restraint, and short, specific commands - all things which in our society say "your opinion doesn't matter, you are just here to obey."

On a larger scale, there's even a thread of this in things like The Slave Register, which allows submissives to be referred to by an official number rather than a name, and where the language of the system is chosen to stress slaves and submissives as properties to be numbered, measured, classified and catalogued. (And yes, I was aware of Foucault when I set it up that way )

Edited Tue 28 Jun 05, 12:54 AM by Tanos