Disavowing Objecthood: Toward a Sexual Ethics of Ambiguity
Veerle van Wijngaarden (Amsterdam)
This paper examines the limits of objectification-based sexual ethics through an analysis of Honey Pot (2021), a film by the Amsterdam-based art collective KIRAC. The film stages an ‘experiment in sexual politics’ in which Jini Jane, a self-identified leftist woman, investigates whether right-wing men are ‘better at sex’. Public controversy focused largely on Sid Lukkassen, a Dutch far-right philosopher who participated and later withdrew his consent to the film’s release. While consent is clearly at stake, I argue that the case reveals a deeper ethical problem: the negotiation – and disavowal – of sexual objecthood.
In Honey Pot, Lukkassen enters the encounter imagining himself as sovereign subject, yet he recoils when confronted with his own vulnerability and object-status under the camera’s gaze. Jane, by contrast, appears in ways that many feminists would describe as objectifying, yet she exercises agency within this position: she sets conditions, communicates boundaries, and directs the encounter. The resulting inversion unsettles dominant feminist frameworks that treat objectification as paradigmatic sexual harm and liberation as the restoration of subjectivity.
Drawing on Ann Cahill’s notion of derivatization, I argue that the central problem is not objecthood as such, but the way subjectivity is constituted through masculine norms of desire. Jane’s agency is real, yet derivatized: intelligible only within masculine frameworks. To theorise this ambivalence, I turn to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and phenomenological accounts of embodiment, which show that subjectivity is always lived as both subject and object, and that agency emerges through this ambiguity.
Finally, I supplement phenomenology with the psychoanalytic notion of disavowal, to explain Lukkassen’s response. His distress reflects a refusal to acknowledge his own objecthood. I conclude by proposing a sexual ethics of ambiguity: one that locates sexual harm not in objectification per se, but in the disavowal of the constitutive dependence of subjectivity on objecthood.
Getting Knight Right: Macdonald’s critique and of the use of ‘good’ in aesthetics
Ellie Robson and Peter West (Warwick and Northeastern University London)
This paper focuses on Helen Knight (1899-1984) and Margaret Macdonald (1903-1956) (both were students of Stebbing at Bedford College and, later, Wittgenstein in Cambridge). More specifically, the paper examines Macdonald’s critique of Knight on aesthetic judgements and the use of the word ‘good’ in art criticism, in her contribution to a 1949 Aristotelian Society symposium. The only scholarly treatment of this philosophical interaction to date is Spinney (2024) who argues that Knight and Macdonald’s views on ‘goodness’ in aesthetics pre-empt Geach and Hare’s respective views on ‘goodness’ in ethics. Spinney is less interested in evaluating Macdonald’s criticisms of Knight - an issue that we take up here. We argue for two interpretative claims. First, that Macdonald mischaracterises Knight’s position. Briefly: Macdonald suggests that, for Knight, an artwork counts as ‘good’ when it satisfies a set of criteria. These criteria (on Macdonald’s reading of Knight) are akin to the ingredients of a cake - a position Macdonald finds absurd. But in fact, we show, Knight's view is more subtle than this and closer to Macdonald’s own. This is perhaps not surprising given that both, in places, claim that the word 'good’ “stands for nothing” and is an “elastic term”. This raises a second question: Why does Macdonald pick out Knight for criticism? This question is compounded by the fact that Knight’s paper had been published thirteen years before the 1949 symposium (and that Knight had left academic philosophy and moved to Australia by this point). We argue that what is really going on is that, through her critique of Knight, Macdonald is also critiquing her former mentor, Wittgenstein. By 1949, Macdonald had left Cambridge (and Wittgenstein) and moved to Oxford, where she worked closely with Gilbert Ryle (for more on that relationship, see Kremer 2022 and Misak 2024). What we find here, we argue, is a recovering-Wittgensteinian (now in Oxford, of all places) critiquing Wittgenstein’s linguistic method, but in the (safer) guise of critiquing another woman (no longer working) in philosophy.
The Three Different Types of Fairness in Sport & Their Bearing on Transgender Inclusion
Katerina Jennings (Oxford)
Debates about fairness in sport, particularly those concerning transgender inclusion, often rely on an imprecise and overextended notion of fairness. This paper argues that many such debates are confused because they fail to distinguish between distinct kinds of fairness that operate within sporting practices. I develop and defend a tripartite account of fairness in sport, distinguishing procedural fairness, internal fairness, and external fairness.
Procedural fairness concerns rule compliance and underwrites the value of winning: victories lose their significance when achieved through cheating. Internal fairness concerns whether a sport’s competitive structure reliably rewards the skills it is designed to test. Crucially, I argue that internal unfairness arises only when two conditions are jointly met: (i) the sport rewards a non-constitutive skill (an internal suboptimality), and (ii) that suboptimality is unevenly distributed, so that only some competitors can exploit it.
External fairness, by contrast, concerns how eligibility rules and participation structures align with broader fairness-relevant social values, such as equality, inclusion, and the just distribution of opportunity and recognition. These considerations are supplementary to sport’s internal logic and explain why eligibility categories, nationality restrictions, and entry caps exist, even when they are not required by internal fairness.
Applying this framework to transgender inclusion in elite sport, I argue that common objections misclassify the issue as one of unfairness. The participation of trans women competing under established eligibility criteria is not procedurally unfair, nor does their inclusion violate internal fairness, since no irrelevant suboptimality is being differentially exploited and no pattern of systematic outcome distortion exists. What remain are disagreements grounded in external values or preferences about the social meaning of sport. Clarifying these distinctions de-moralises the debate and shows that fairness, properly understood, does not oppose inclusion. The real question concerns which external values should guide the future of sport.
Silence under conditions of oppression
Anna Klieber (Cardiff)
In feminist philosophy, silence is usually seen as a sign of something gone wrong, and for good reason: silence arises either because someone is silenced, or because nobody objects to an observed injustice, thus becoming complicit in it.
My goal in this talk is not to challenge either of these perspectives. Instead, I bring together recent literature on how silence can be a communicative force in and of itself with insights on silencing and epistemic injustice: I aim to show the possibility of active silence by the oppressed under conditions of oppression, where that silence is simultaneously a result of silencing but also used in communicative ways not recognisable from the “oppressive outside”: E.g., someone may remain silent in a specific situation, where this may be seen as and count as silencing in one respect – while those who share their experiences of oppression can understand their silence as specifically communicative nonetheless.
In such cases, silence both symbolises an inability to contribute to a broader discourse or concrete discussion, while functioning as a tool to communicate to and among each other. To fully understand this, my account must fulfil at least three conditions:
a) it ought not to discount the oppression experienced;
b) it needs to understand the utilisation and understanding of silence as community-specific; and
c) using silence in this way is an exercise of agency under non-ideal conditions.
Working through a number of examples, I show that paying attention to these nuances can highlight a particular aspect of (regaining) resistant agency. Members of oppressed groups can be silenced in respect to dominant discourses – their contributions are both not adequately understood and they are unable to contribute resources – while those very same silences can have active and distinct meanings within marginalised communities themselves.