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

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 (SUTW), 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 (reduces her to a part) and biologizes her (characterizes her as mere living tissue). Essentially, the hearer thinks of the woman as a “piece of meat.”