What Am I, a Piece of Meat? Synecdochical Utterances Targeting Women

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 7 (1) (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In a September 2004 interview, Donald Trump agreed with Howard Stern’s statement that his daughter Ivanka is “a piece of ass.” This utterance is a synecdochical utterance targeting women, by which I mean that its form is such that a term for an anatomical part is predicated of, or could be used by a speaker to refer to, a woman. I propound a theory of what SUTW speakers do in undertaking an SUTW on which the SUTW speaker prompts the hearer to engage in a certain derogatory pattern of associational thinking—that is, taking a “perspective” in Elisabeth Camp’s sense—on the female subject. This perspective is one that reduces her to the bodily part in question—that is, fragments her and biologizes her. Essentially, the hearer thinks of the woman as a “piece of meat.”

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,757

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-03-03

Downloads
58 (#372,758)

6 months
10 (#427,773)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Amanda McMullen
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Studies in the way of words.Herbert Paul Grice - 1989 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.John Rogers Searle - 1969 - Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.Kate Manne - 2017 - Oxford University Press.
Scorekeeping in a language game.David Lewis - 1979 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1):339--359.

View all 19 references / Add more references