Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism

by E.L. McCallum

Object Lessons begins with the question, What can fetishism teach us? One answer, as this book makes clear, is that fetishism is a form of subject-object relation that informs us about basic strategies of defining, desiring, and knowing subjects and objects in Western culture. More importantly, in the way that it brings together peculiarly modern anxieties--especially those about sexuality, gender, belief, and knowledge--fetishism reveals how our basic categories for interpreting the world have been reduced to binary and mutually exclusive terms. By foregrounding concerns about sexual differences in examining fetishism's unique intersection of desire and knowledge, Object Lessons seizes on the promises fetishism offers to those who want to call into question the resurgence of conservative and even reactionary drives to lock down absolute definitions of sexual differences through either biological or cultural essentialism.

195 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1998

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

E. L. McCallum, Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

good survey feminist readings freud
• Introduction
o The definition of fetishism has consistently boiled down to the use of an object to negotiate (usually binary) difference to achieve an immaterial end, whether it be economic gain, cultural prestige, or psychical satisfaction.
o Fetishism has been maligned as a sexual perversion, a symptom of our alienation from each other under capitalism, or an example of irrational, primitive thought.
o Despite the significance of the issues which fetishism engenders, fetishism itself remains relegated to the status of a minor if not aberrant phenomenon” xvi
o The first step is to take fetishism seriously, not as a threat but as a promise
o This study begins with a question: what can fetishism teach us?
o Fetishism has come to mean the sexual fixation on an overvalued object, an interpretation that derives most clearly from Freud’s essay on fetishism.
o The psychoanalytic definition took shape from the sexology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries xvii
o This study
 a strategic analysis of the depiction of fetishism in particular theoretical texts, a study of the conditions and assumptions that undergird how fetishism has been interpreted in Freud’s and psychoanalytical feminist theories. xiv
 Overcome assumptions and see “fetishism as a potential source for productive answers
 Not only think about fetishism but to think through it
 My analysis sprang from observing that fetishism often is used synecdochically to mean any number of things that comprise it: over-valuation, fragmentation, fixation, repudiation of difference, or rigidity xv
• Ch 1 “How to Do Things with Fetishism”
o SUMMARY: close reading of Freud. “there’s quite a lot of potentially productive instability in the way Freud employs the term “penis.”
o FREUDS USE OF THE TERM
 Given the historical lineage of the term, we might expect to find Freud considering fetishism in his works about “primitive” man and the idea of civilization. But there is no discussion of fetishism as such in either Totem and Taboo (1913) or Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). However, fetishism does appear in a number of Freud’s earlier works—most notably in the first essay of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), but also in his analysis of Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1907), his case study of the Rat Man (1909), a 1909 lecture given to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and his essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1910). 2 These are all works which address issues of sexuality, and thus to see fetishism as a late-developed concept is a mistake.
 He emphasizes variation rather than deviation.
 Freud’s texts display a peculiar ambivalence around the formulation of difference, and it is this ambivalence that most interests me
 BOILED DOWN: Fetishism is a dense metaphor for this hermeneutic problem. At a basic level, fetishism is one strategy for negotiating the unsettling otherness of sexual difference through the interpretive act of giving the mother a penis.
 I just do not see Freud using a binary like this
 fetishism is precisely that which is antithetical to language, to the symbolic, to interpretation, insofar as it closes down the inherent openness of language to interpretation.4
o HER THESIS: the dominance of the penis-substitution definition gives fetishism a negative connotation that eclipses the potentially productive aspect of fetishism as a way of holding the contradiction between belief and knowledge together in tension.
o Calls for a sympathetic epistemology 4
o It may seem strange to call fetishism a strategy, since this move takes fetishism out of the context of the unconscious, rationalizing it by relating it to notions of agency, consciousness, and choice.
o Yet Rationality can never shake itself free from desire, from the ucs. So fetishism as an epistemological strategy is good.
o Ok Freud’s thesis
o
o THIS RIVIERE TRANSLATION IS BETTER SHE SAYS
 The normal prototype of all fetishes is the penis of the man, just as the normal prototype of an organ felt to be inferior is the real little penis of the woman, the clitoris. 6
 This penis-substitute theory, read too glibly, invites an interpretation of Freud as a biological determinist or essentialist when he thus portrays the link between penis and fetish, reducing the latter to the former. Yet it is not Freud who is being so reductive….Such a reading narrows the myriad interpretations of ‘penis’ that fetish objects provide to a single, simple, even patently obvious, base 6
 He uses “penis” to describe men’s and women’s genitals.
 The explicit analogy between the normal prototype of the fetish and the normal prototype of an inferior organ—penis is to fetish as woman’s penis is to inferior organ—permits the following: man is to woman as penis is to clitoris as fetish is to inferior organ.
 Freud labels the clitoris as fetish-counterpart a “minderwertigen Organs.” The German for “inferior” or “inferior quality” is “minderwertig,” so the translation is fairly direct; however, what is lost in the translation is the sense of value or worth—in German “wert”—that is literally written into the term. The clitoris-organ has a distinctly lesser value and is compared here to the penis-fetish, which has no particular value. 7
 He’s using latinate words and nouns upon nouns, “a reminder of the inadequacy of the available terminology, as if to signal the inadequacy of available anatomical interpretations.” 8
 He is ambivalent about sexual difference
 THE PENIS MAY NOT BE THE SOLE ANATOMICAL PRESERVE OF ONE GENDER. Thus, the assertion that the fetish in some way relates to or even depends on the penis does not anatomically exclude women from fetishism 9-10
 The point in raising the question of female fetishism is not merely to insert women’s bodies into the text, but to open up the space to examine and interrogate the gendered frameworks that structure our knowledge, and to recognize these frameworks as contingent rather than absolute THESIS
 Fetishism thus offers a third route between autonomy and dependence, two poles which have been traditionally mapped onto masculinity and femininity respectively.
 Unquestioned in Freud’s formulation is the idea that the man’s penis guarantees the ascension to subjectivity…while the woman’s penis only reminds her of her failure to achieve that subjectivity.
 But …what if anyone could potentially have the penis?
 Girl why do we have to buy into this?
o Anyway Freud’s rhetoric of “hastsening,” his “anxiety!”
o At the rhetorical level Freud indulges in the fetishistic move of thinking that the thing he knows is inferior and substituting it with a more satisfactory belief in an illusory object 17
o Slippage between penis and phallus. Fetish is a maternal phallus substitute. …The phallus is not a part of any body, but is a symbolic figure through which an individual may claim a degree of power and authority.” 19 He uses phallus and not penis, faltering in “rigor”
o OP says that’s rly anachronistic tho. He means penis. He’s intending to “avert the shock of saying ‘the woman’s penis,’ holding off till the end of the article its explicit articulation” 19
o ENACTING THE FETISH: on the level of rhetoric, this phallus is lost in Freud’s definition of the fetish prototype, since he resorts in the final sentence to the man’s penis. 20 The phallus is the fetish object
o Grosz’s reading seems to simplify things by clarifying that when we discuss fetishism, we are into the realm of signification.
o like Freud, Grosz ends up slipping between the terms, despite her recourse to Lacan’s distinction.
o Freud’s fetish in fact threatens heterosexuality’s claim to naturalness
o OP ARGUING these terms, penis, phallus, and fetish, are not simple substitutions
o Both in the lecture on fetishism and in his description of the etiology of fetishism, what comes first is the mother’s penis, not the man’s. AFFIRM PRIORITY OF THE MOTHER’s PENIS IN BOTH FREUD’S TEXT AND THE FETISHIST’S FANTASY
o What counts is not whether something is real or not, but the effect it has.
o The fetish is thus not merely another term in the chain of substitutions, equivalent with either the penis or the phallus; it must be something different. In order to function as a substitute, the fetish must be understood as neither penis (in the ambiguous Freudian sense) nor phallus (in the symbolic Lacanian sense). The fetish falls short of “the real thing” even as it provides the paradigm for the excess of “the Thing.”
o The fetish renders the difference between the penis and phallus visible, precisely because it is supposed to substitute.
o T he difference between the mother and the man is a difference of power 29
o Ostensibly, we have no choice but to submit to one side or the other. Fetishism, however, provides a third option that is neither one nor the other.
o TLDR CHAPTER SUMMARY: It is precisely the exchangeability of the phallus or penis that—rather than contributing to sexual indifference, as if anyone could take it on and be the same—renders it a strategic means for marking sexual difference. Such an interpretation may seem impossible or utopic, but I suggest that a careful reading of Freud provides just such an understanding. 31
o Why Women might become fetishists
 Femininity purportedly only comes about through identification with the mother, and with the presupposition that the child is already similar and that the child knows who the mother is. Fetishism comes about through identification with the mother that willfully revises who that mother is, making the mother like the child while also maintaining a sense of the mother’s difference. If we have only a binary heterosexual view of sexual difference, then there is no possible way of perceiving the struggle of a girl’s identification with her mother—her search for autonomy—as anything but rebellion against the imposition of her gender. This paradigm reinforces the sense of femininity as inferiority. If we understand fetishism to be a different strategy for interpreting sexual difference, we open up the possibility for better describing the girl’s development of a sexual and autonomous self as something other than simply rebellion. A fetishistic girl, for example, might endow her mother with a penis in order to claim a strong femininity for herself, or she might use fetishism in order to set her mother up as a nonfeminine model to emulate

• Ch 2 “The Travesty of Clothes Fetishism”
o SUMMARY: recent feminist appropriations of Freud’s formulation of fetishism. In fact he never said that women cannot be fetishists: indeed he asserted in a 1909 lecture that “all women are clothes fetishists.”… I show how fetishism in feminist theory challenges the tendency to think of categories of racial, class, and sexual differences as sets of binaries. Fetishism as useful tool for complicating narrow assumptions about difference, partly because its interpretation has been dominated by the idea that fetishism is used to avoid confronting difference
o KB;
 Ebing seems satisfied with the idea that fetishism emerges through the random coincidence of an object and a person’s attention to that object. But why would such coincidental juxtaposition make such a powerful impact? The only answer that logically presents itself is that there must be some pathological disposition in the person.
 Calls him originator of term fetishism???
o BLOCH
 Bloch’s sweeping description of “all the woman’s stimuli” as fetishes,
o QTD FREUD
 “for them clothes take the place of parts of the body” 52
 PARTIAL REPRESSION
o For Schor, … fetishism is intersubjective in nature. 66
 Her point rmr: anyone with an ego is subject to it being split, whether boy or girl
 Fetishism is determined by a particular relation to an object, not by the specific object.
 BISEXTUALITY
 Schor’s appropriation of fetishism is continually and insistently gendered, despite the fact that her initial grounds for introducing the possibility of fetishism for women are founded on the assertion that the splitting of the ego is not a gender-restricted phenoema 71-2
 This gendering of fetishism is consistently accompanied by a move to generalize fetishism
 Yet fetishism is not merely ambivalence or undecidability
o The very usefulness of fetishism as a strategy lies with how it undermines the rigid matrix of binary sexual difference through indeterminacy THESIS
o Don’t reinscribe fetishism!!!
o Reading Schor and Sand suggests that, pace Freud, there is more at stake in female fetishism than just an inappropriate preoccupation with clothes. Schor’s elaboration of female fetishism as travesty pushes us beyond Freud’s assertion that “all women are clothes fetishists” to foreground the mechanisms of identification and identity-construction that operate through and partially constitute sexual difference, and which also, like fetishism, involve the unconscious. The shift in analyzing fetishism through the notion of travesty in this chapter rather than the notion of prototype in the first chapter marks a change in emphasis from an object's relation to another object—the prototype to the finished product, the substitute for the thing substituted—to a subject’s relation to other subjects through objects.
o GROSZ
 Grosz argues that the masculinized woman, in her disavowal of her own castration, takes on a phallicized object outside her own body, just as the fetishist does. The sexual object, however, is another woman, a narcissistically invested feminine woman who “displaces the value of the phallus onto her own body, taken as a whole” 82
 Desire for feminine women not accounted for
 There is no room in Grosz’ paradigm for the butch to be the object of desire 84
 Implicit in this move is the residual notion that only men can fetishize—the definition of men can at most be expanded to include men or the masculine women who act like them. We are snapped back to a grid of binary sexual difference, where masculine desire is a redundancy and feminine desire an oxymoron.
o Teresa de Lauretis
 sees negative fetishism at work in Grosz
 She is dissatisfied with the influence of Sarah Kofman’s generalized and Derridean notion of fetishism on Schor’s thinking. As in her complaint about Grosz, here too the fault lies with the fact that the interpretation of fetishism “does not allow her to go very far either in the subverting of the Freudian orthodoxy or in the specification of a female fetishism” 87
 Herclaim?
• the paternal phallus can no longer be the only thing threatened with loss. Instead, its privilege must be disrupted, and some other phallus or fetish must take its place and provide a different anchor for meaning.
• not a different relation to the phallus, but a different sort of “phallus” altogether.
• OP IS AGREEING
• this depiction of the masculine woman opens the possibility of understanding her in completely different terms, as struggling to assert her own identity according to a standard other than femininity. This more complex framework can help us understand how subjects come to achieve their own identity in a way analogous to how the classical fetishist finds sexual satisfaction: by negotiating conflicting interpretations and directives to arrive ultimately at an interpretation they are comfortable with. This interpretation may be unusual, creative, or deviant, but it provides a position that alleviates a subject’s sense of dissonance in the world, even if this position is one that generates systemic paradoxes, relocating the sense of dissonance away from the subject and onto socially shared systems of meaning.
• Her interpretation of her body may indeed be grounded in ambivalence and disavowal, but her ambivalence may not necessarily be anchored in a perception of her body as female. She might vacillate between seeing her body as masculine/not masculine, or male/not-male, or androgynous/monstrous.” It all depends on how she manages to libidinally or narcissistically invest in her body; this does not correlate to an expression of femininity.
For de Lauretis, it makes no sense for the girl child to fear penile castration.
She argues that “the phallus—as representative of the penis—is not an
essential component of the female subject’s body image; what is essen-
tial is what the mother desires” (241). She adds that psychoanalysis had
blindly presumed that only the phallus would be the object of the
mother’s desire. Thus, she deflects a potentially damaging objection: if
what is essential is what the mother desires, and the mother desires the
phallus, then the phallus is an essential component of the female sub-
ject’s body image.
If the daughter senses “the mother’s narcissis-
tic wish for a feminine body (in the daughter as in herself),” and feels
that she cannot live up to this feminine ideal, then she produces a fan-
tasy of castration, “refiguring a lack of penis as what was first and fore-
most a lack of a lovable body”
what is disavowed must be the loss of something of which her
body has knowledge, pain, and pleasure; something toward
which she has instinctual aims. That something is not, cannot be,
a penis but is most likely to be her body itself (body image and
body-ego) although the symbolic structure of castration rewrites
that loss as lack of a penis. (288)
 OP IS GOING BACK THO. Teresa argues Lesbians don’t have knwoeldge of penis. OP says they do: the clit
• A masculine woman, who knows her body as having a penis, might employ fetishism as she negotiates the conflict between her interpretation of her body and the one imposed from the outside; she illustrates how we do not need to adhere to dominant norms in order to achieve a meaningful identity and to function in the world
• This Freudian inference about penises (which is really an inference about clitorises) illuminates another trouble spot in de Lauretis’s formulation: why would the girl necessarily take her whole body as this object, rather than, as the boy supposedly does, some particular part?
• DRAWBACK OF de LAURETIS
• there is no real, directly accessible anatomy; rather, the subject constitutes her sense of her body through the imaginary.
• THE FUCKING PITFALL: Like Freud’s clothes fetishist, de Lauretis’s masculine woman seems to use fetishes to guarantee to her partner that she has what any woman has. A normative model is, of course, inescapable; de Lauretis points this out herself from the first chapter. Her elucidation of a perverse theory of sexuality in Freud’s work, as one that provides a negative foundat