What Does reify Mean
The Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), in its dictionary, includes two meanings of the term reify . The first meaning refers to transforming an abstract thing into something concrete .
Suppose a novelist writes: "The old man took the sadness in his hands and threw it violently on the floor, making it explode . " As you can see, what the author does in this sentence is to objectify sadness , turning it into an element that can be taken with the hands and can even be broken.
The RAE also indicates that reification is the action that consists of reducing a human being to the condition of a thing . This is the most common use of the concept today, since it is often spoken of the objectification of women.
Objectifying a woman implies seeing her as a sexual object . That is, it is stripped of its multiple attributes and qualities and is considered simply as a means of obtaining pleasure.
According to feminism , the media often contribute to objectify women. Showing naked or scantily clad girls on television shows or advertisements, to mention one possibility, is often singled out as a form of objectification.
For Marxism , on the other hand, reification or reification appears when a person is taken as if he were an object . Social ties, in this framework, are also objectified when they become consumer ties.
Marxist thinkers maintain that human labor was reified by being turned into merchandise . It can be said that workers, in a similar way, are reified by working as operators on an assembly line.