Auto-objects – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

People objectified by themselves who thereby become subjects with the power to objectify others.

Expanded explanation

An auto-object is a person who has turned themselves into an object, and gains from doing so the standing to objectify others. Objectification usually describes something done to a person by someone else. Marsh names the case where a person does it to themselves first, accepting their own reduction to an object within a hierarchy, and is admitted in exchange to the position of subject over those below. The definition captures a trade at the heart of hierarchical endogroups: submit to being objectified by those above, and receive the power to objectify those beneath. It is the personal mechanism by which a chain of domination reproduces itself, each rank objectifying itself upward to earn the right to objectify downward.

In Heather Marsh’s words

The definition itself carries the mechanism.

“people objectified by themselves who thereby become subjects with the power to objectify others”
Abstracting Divinity

Examples

Submit up, dominate down: A person who accepts their own objectification by a superior earns, in exchange, the standing to objectify those below them.
The reproducing chain: Each rank in a hierarchy objectifies itself upward to gain the power to objectify downward, which is how domination propagates.

How others use it

Objectification is a major theme in feminist theory and ethics, usually the treatment of a person as a thing by others, with self-objectification studied as internalising an external objectifying gaze. Marsh's auto-object adds the transactional twist specific to her account of hierarchy: self-objectification is not only internalised harm but the price of admission to a position of power over others.