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January 14, 2004
Trevor, the two images mentioned previously remind me of fetishism. Or more accurately, fantasies of fetishism.
The usual understanding of ‘fetishes’ is connected to Freud's discourse of sexuality. Freud used the term to represent sexual "perversion". Fetishism allows the fetishist to derive sexual pleasure where normative sexual intercourse does not.
The other meaning of fetishism is in Marx's economic discourse of capitalism where it is linked to the aura of ‘commodity fetishism’. This fetishism Marx argued was central to the commodity or consumer culture of industrial capitalism.
The two images previously mentioned are of a woman as a fetished sexual object in a patriarchial culture who is available for men to buy for their pleasure. The two senses of fetishism have come together.
In these two senses fetishism is everywhere in our culture today. There are many types of fetishism, and these coexist and function in different ways. If we use Foucault's terminology highlights the way some of these practices of fetishes are both potentially productive in escaping or subverting the normative/conventional ways of sexually relating, and facilitate the construction of new subjectivities.
An example would be the practitioners of S&M and the ritualized practices of contemporary dungeon slaves their mistresses as athe dominatrix figure, such as Domina Lady MacLaine. So we have
femdom.cartoons
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