We’re getting close to the end now. At this point, you understand my views on what dehumanization is and how it works, and you understand my position on the close relationship between dehumanization and racism. But I’ve not explained the relationship between other, nearby, destructive social beliefs and practices—things like sexism, ableism, and transphobia. Often, people lump all of these together under the heading of dehumanization, but in my opinion that’s a big mistake. Sexism works differently than racism, which works differently from ableism, and so on. They each have their own unique dynamics, and blurring the distinctions between them only makes it more difficult to resist them.
I’ve studied racism for a long time, but I’m far from having expert knowledge of sexism, ableism, and transphobia (not to mention all the other “-isms” that I haven’t named). That being said, I think that the theoretical apparatus I’ve developed over the years is helpful both for distinguishing dehumanization from these other phenomena, and distinguishing these phenomena from each other.
Also, I hinted earlier on that there’s more than one kind of dehumanization. Not all dehumanization is of the sort that makes monsters. It’s not always the case that dehumanized people are seen as dangerous, cruel, and malevolent, with greater-than-human powers. I call this demonizing dehumanization, and it’s the kind of dehumanization that I’ve mainly focused on in this book. But there’s also enfeebling dehumanization.
I’ve explained that in my view dehumanized people are seen as both human and subhuman. Sometimes, both sides of this binary are salient, and the dehumanizer can’t but see their victim as a monster. At other times, one or the other of these is in the foreground of awareness, with its counterpart in the background. When this happens, either the person’s subhumanity is most salient or their humanity is. I am reminded of the testimony of a Japanese veteran who committed atrocities in China during World War II, including rape and wanton murder. He told an interviewer that when Japanese soldiers raped Chinese women they thought of them as women, but when they killed them they thought of them as pigs. But no matter which of these configurations dehumanization takes, the dehumanized person is represented in the dehumanizer’s mind as both human and subhuman.
What makes the difference between demonizing dehumanization and enfeebling dehumanization is the presence or absence of physical threat. When people are demonized, they’re seen as both physically threatening and metaphysically threatening. And their metaphysical dangerousness amplifies their physical dangerousness (a werewolf is more dangerous than a wolf, and a vampire that’s morphed into a bat is more dangerous than a normal bat). This turns them into monsters. In contrast, when people get dehumanized in the enfeebling mode, they’re seen as metaphysically threatening but physically innocuous. They may be human sheep, but they’re not monsters.
Today, enfeebling dehumanization is probably less common than it was in the past, and it is probably less common than demonizing dehumanization. There are circumstances, however, that often promote it. One such is military combat, when enemy soldiers (or civilians) are pictured as prey and war as a hunting expedition. This happened in the Vietnam War, when American soldiers went “gook hunting”—that is, going off to kill Vietnamese people for fun.
The monkey is a common enfeebling representation. Traditionally, apes and monkeys were seen as incomplete or defective human beings, or as creatures occupying an intermediate position between animals and humans that could imitate or “ape” humans. European colonists accordingly thought of the people whom they oppressed as ape-like subhumans—mere simulacra of true human beings. The Irish, who were at one time considered a separate race by both their British colonizers and many Americans, were often portrayed as ridiculous apes, as were Black people in the British colonies and in the antebellum United States (the representation of Black people as apes persisted long after the Civil War, but it morphed into the image of the Black man as a predatory ape).
Enfeebling dehumanization is also associated with slavery, because slaveholders have often conceived of enslaved people as livestock or pets. Although not typically regarded as physically weak, enslaved people were often thought of as docile and dependent on their masters. Gender is relevant to the demonizing/enfeebling dichotomy, as well. It’s usually men that are dehumanized as monsters, while women are dehumanized as pets or as farm animals fit for breeding. Enfeebling dehumanization is also a factor when unarmed civilians get attacked by military or paramilitary forces. This was evident in the Darfur genocide of the nearly two thousand. Villagers reported that the attackers shouted out things like, “They called her . . . dog, son of dogs,” and, “We came to kill you and your kids”; “You donkey, you slave; we must get rid of you”; “You blacks are not human. We can do anything we want to you. You cannot live here”; “We kill our cows when they have black calves—we will kill you too”; and “You blacks are like monkeys. You are not human.”1
Dehumanization is often confused with other types of derogatory attitudes. As we have seen, there is a very close relationship between racism and dehumanization. Indeed, you can’t properly understand dehumanization without properly understanding race. But that tight relationship between racism and dehumanization doesn’t apply to the relationship between dehumanization and sexism, ableism, and transphobia, for reasons we can understand by using the theoretical apparatus that helps us understand dehumanization. Let’s start with sexism.
There are several texts in feminist theory that talk about what the authors call the “dehumanization” of women. In that literature, dehumanization is often equated with objectification—roughly, conceiving of women as things rather than as subjects and agents. One of the most powerful pieces of writing on the dehumanization of women is Catharine MacKinnon’s searing essay “Are Women Human?”:
If women were human would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York’s brothels? Would we be sexual and reproductive slaves? Would we be bred, worked without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn’t enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died (if we survived his funeral pyre), sold for sex because we are not valued for anything else? Would we be sold into marriage to priests to atone for our family’s sins or to improve our family’s earthly prospects? Would we, when allowed to work for pay, be made to work at the most menial jobs and exploited at barely starvation level? Would our genitals be sliced out to “cleanse” us (our body parts are dirt?), to control us, to mark us and define our cultures? Would we be trafficked as things for sexual use and entertainment worldwide in whatever form current technology makes possible? Would we be kept from learning to read and write?2
MacKinnon’s catalog of abuses and degradations is horrific, but it doesn’t suggest that women are dehumanized in the sense that I mean when I talk about dehumanization. On my account, women aren’t dehumanized as such. In other words, when women are dehumanized, it’s not because they’re women. It’s because of how they’re racialized.
Let me explain why I see it this way. When people racialize another group of people, they have to do two things. First, they’ve got to attribute a racial essence to every member of the group—one that’s not shared by any other group. And second, this essence has to be seen as transmitted by descent, and when that group of people is dehumanized, their imagined racial essence becomes an imagined subhuman essence that’s transmitted by descent from one generation to the next. The logic of dehumanization is such that if your parents are subhuman, then you’re subhuman too.
Sexism can’t work that way because gender isn’t normally understood as being transmitted by descent. Like races, genders are considered to be natural kinds in our ordinary folk taxonomies. And because they’re natural kinds, they’re supposed to have essences. But it can’t be that gender essences are imagined to be transmitted down the bloodline by descent, like racial essences are. In other words, nobody thinks that a person is female because her parents were female. This feature sets gender apart from race and sub-humanity. How then should the sexist mindset be understood? I don’t know, but my best guess is that sexists conceive of women as having a malformed human essence. Being female is seen as a chronic, unrectifiable disability. Of course, women can be dehumanized as well, but they are not dehumanized because they are women. When they are dehumanized it’s because they belong to a racialized group that’s conceived by others as less than human.
This brings us to the topic of ableism: the derogation of people with disabilities because of their disability. Derogatory attitudes toward people with disabilities are extremely varied—in part because disabilities are extremely varied—and a good analysis of ableism needs to be correspondingly complex. Addressing this topic in the detail that it deserves would require a book all its own. There are some general characteristics, however, that distinguish ableism from dehumanization on one hand, and from racism, sexism, and transphobia on the other.
Unlike the case with gender, it’s in principle possible for disabled people to be dehumanized as such, although this is probably quite rare if it occurs at all. This is possible because, unlike gender, some disabilities can be transmitted by descent (or are believed to be transmitted by descent). However, it is more common for ableism to be a mirror image of dehumanization. Dehumanized people are seen as human on the outside but subhuman on the inside. But in some cases of disability, this relation is flipped. If the external appearance of the disabled person departs significantly from what is regarded as normal, others don’t automatically respond to them as human beings, despite being aware that they are human. The upshot is that disabled people are often experienced as metaphysically threatening. They are regarded as impure, unnatural, and as violations of the natural order—objects of defensive mockery, horrified fascination, and, all too often, discrimination, exploitation, and violence.
Finally, transphobia: In the prevalent folk theory of gender, each of us has a gender essence that, because it is an essence, is unalterable. And contrary to the distinction between gender (a social category) and sex (a biological category), it is a prevalent folk theoretical assumption that a person’s gender is a manifestation of their sex. As a result, in our culture, many people insist that it’s impossible for a person to change their gender. Once male, always a man. Once female, always a woman.
Because gender essences aren’t thought of as being transmitted by descent, this means that transgender people can’t be dehumanized in my sense of the word. But they can be (and are) nevertheless experienced as metaphysically threatening. Consider a transgender woman—a person who identifies as a woman, but was assigned the sex “male” at birth and raised as a boy. Now, let’s consider two scenarios. In one, the transgender woman has recognizably masculine characteristics as well as recognizably feminine ones, and these elicit mixed responses in others. They respond to her both as a man and as a woman. She’s experienced as straddling two distinct natural kinds, and is therefore felt to be metaphysically threatening. In the second scenario, the transgender woman does not have observably masculine characteristics. In this case too, though, she may be experienced as metaphysically threatening by people who know (but don’t see) that she is transgender.
Transphobic attitudes are further removed from dehumanization than at least some ableist attitudes are, because there is a tendency to regard some disabled people as nonhuman, but the transgender person’s humanity isn’t in question. It’s her gender that is. And to those people wedded to an essentialist conception of gender, she is experienced as a transgressive affront to the natural order. She then becomes the target of violence from those who wish to put her in what people regard as her “natural” gendered place.