Alex King's lecture in Skinner Hall explained her understanding of cultural appropration's harm. Photo by Artemis Chen '25.
By Kiera McLaughlin ’26
Staff Writer
On Wednesday, Sept. 28, Alex King, associate professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University, gave a lecture on cultural appropriation. The Mount Holyoke Department of Philosophy hosted her lecture, “Cornrows and a Qipao: Cultural Appropriation and Objectifying the Other,” which was open to Mount Holyoke students and faculty. During the lecture, King focused on her thesis, telling the audience how “cultural appropriation is wrong — generally speaking — when and because it objectifies the appropriatees.”
The room in Skinner Hall was packed with students and professors, including Professor Katia Vavova, associate professor and the chair of the philosophy department. King began by providing a definition of cultural appropriation. In King’s words, cultural appropriation “is — roughly — when a member of one cultural group adopts … an object, style, etc. from a different cultural group.”
King explained that this definition isn’t foolproof because in theory, an oppressed culture would be able to appropriate, but as she explained, one can’t appropriate “upwards.” An oppressed culture can take as much as they want from the dominant culture without losing any autonomy, unlike when a dominant culture takes from an oppressed group. In the end, an oppressed group appropriating “upwards,” as King justified, is basically assimilation. In response to this this concept, Vavova said, “It’s usually the oppressed groups are the ones that are being objectified. And often being in a position of power makes it quite hard to objectify you or to reduce you to something less than you are,” she continued, “I think that was one of [King’s] strongest points.”
As her talk continued, King illustrated the “three types of existing accounts” of cultural appropriation. The first was “Cultural property accounts: What makes cultural appropriation wrong is that it is a form of stealing others’ cultural property.” Throughout her explanations, King clarified that Americans rely on a Western colonialist idea of property, and asked questions like, “How do you define cultural ownership?”
King’s second account of cultural appropriation is “Reaction-based accounts: What makes cultural appropriation wrong is some reaction from the appropriatees.” She shared examples comparing how much offense someone takes to appropriative actions, or how they object, or if they give reasons with their objection. King asked the audience questions like: If someone doesn’t object [to appropriation] does that make it okay? Do people have to provide reasons? When they do provide reasons, does it become more about the reasons and less about the objectification itself? Later in the lecture, King returned to the idea of reaction-based wrongness and questioned why the wrongness of appropriation is based on how loud and intense the appropriatee objections are.
Finally, she focused on “Oppression-based accounts: What makes cultural appropriation wrong is that it exacerbates or manifests oppression,” which she identified as appropriation that “causes economic harm or … exacerbates inequalities.” King followed with questions like: What if someone is alone? Do their actions not affect others? She suggested that this claim is consequentialist and that it’s not clear enough when it comes to what’s wrong about cultural appropriation.
After these explanations, King introduced her proposal that “cultural appropriation is wrong when and because it objectifies the appropriatees.” Through this statement, she provided what objectification entails: reducing someone or something to one definition, style or meaning and by doing so giving them less autonomy. She explained that objectification is to use someone for their culture and style because the objectifier thinks it’s “cool” or “exotic.” King analyzed how people use different cultural aesthetics to express themselves, and how most of the time they don’t take into account the meaning behind those objects, styles, and traditions. She described how people take on aesthetics to advertise parts of themselves, but when someone takes from another culture, that person should be careful about what they’re expressing.
When asked about King’s definitions of self-expressions and stealing aesthetics from other cultures, Vavova said, “I think like the way we speak [and] the way we decorate ourselves in our homes … are kinds of self expression. … That can open up the risk, not just of objectification, but of other kinds of wrongs of stealing.”
At the end of King’s lecture, before she turned the floor to the students and professors, King brought up some “underappreciated” cultural appropriation accounts. For example, how “appropriative [acts] can change over time,” which she turned into a prompt for the audience, asking questions like: Can you objectify extinct cultures? Or ones that have changed over time? She also addressed the connections between cultural appropriation and its relationship with commodification. She revealed that “commodification makes cultural objects into symbols of the cool [and] exotic,” and explained that it’s in the economy’s best interest to reduce objects to those core symbols. King’s final point was that appropriation can go beyond racial and ethnic ties, including categories such as queer culture and social and economic class. She told the audience, “Unfortunately, but realistically … all kinds of people can be objectified.”
As soon as King’s lecture finished, many of the attending students and professors offered comments or questions about her studies. When she opened the discussion, some students shared their own experiences with King and the rest of the audience. Instead of asking clarifying questions, professors and students alike questioned King’s claims and research. The audience used the Q&A segment to debate King’s lecture with her. When talking about the philosophy lecture style and King’s approach to the lecture, Vavova said “It had both like, what’s good about a philosophy lecture and this sort of intellectual curiosity, like questioning, criticizing, but for the purpose of understanding not for the purposes of tearing down, and the sort of very personal open sharing of experience that happens a lot on campus, but in a way within that structure, it was extra cool.”