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In this paper I would like to argue that the recent movie Carol, directed by Todd Haynes (based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt”), provides an excellent illustration of two important dimension of gender oppression, as well as the materials for a possible solution to them. These two dimensions of gender oppression, which have been painstakingly emphasized by feminist philosophers, are the following: (i) there is a distinctive kind of injustice that consists in the fact that there is a lacuna regarding the conceptual resources that are available in order to conceptualize and communicate some experiences and narratives of people in situation of oppression, known as hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007); and (ii) there has been a history of objectification of the female body within the history of western visual arts (as argued by Eaton 2012), and in particular in the representation of women in the mainstream movie industry, which can be explained in terms of a series of objectifying features that many representations of female bodies in Western visual arts share (as Eaton explains, drawing from Nussbaum 1995).
