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Interesting article here which cites 2 quotes from postmodern historian Hayden White:
"He (White) defines fetishism as "at once and the same time, a kind of belief, a kind of devotion, and a kind of psychological set or posture" From these three usages of fetish we derive the three senses of the term... : belief in magical fetishes, extravagant or irrational devotion, and pathological displacement of libidinal interest and satisfaction to a fetish... Fetishism here is understood as a fixation on the form of a thing as against its content or on the part of a thing as against the whole."
and
"From the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans tended to fetishize the native peoples with whom they came into contact by viewing them simultaneously as monstrous forms of humanity, and as quintessential objects of desire. Whence the alternative impulses to exterminate and to redeem the native peoples... When a given part of humanity compulsively defines itself as the pure type of mankind in general and defines all other part of the human species as inferior, flawed, degenerate or "savage" I call this an instance of fetishism."
White is providing another understanding of fetishism as a process - where individuals (or cultures) seek to assert control over apparent contradictions by focusing on alternative - and easily consumed representations of those contradictions. This understanding of "fetish" is rather similar to that of the stereotype.
In modern anthropology, fetishism, like animism and totemism, tends to be disfavoured as a universalistic principle. Certainly, no modern researcher would talk about "primitive societies". The dictionary definitions are, in a sense, archaic. These 'definitions' are situated within binary oppositions - rational/irrantional, obsessive/normal, animate/inanimate, normal/deviate - categories themselves which I would suggest are themselves 'archaic' when trying to understand either magic, or sexuality. Look at the way, for instance, that fashion design has playfully 'borrowed' from the fetish scene - and that the fetish scene itself - once 'underground' has, since the mid-60s, become increasingly acceptable. Valerie Steele (Fetish, Fashion, Sex and Power) says that the boundary between the 'normal' and the 'perverse' is in contemporary culture, becoming increasing blurred.
Article by Stewart Home on relationship between fetish 'n' fashion here
reviseF65 - interesting site chronicling the ongoing campaign to abolish "fetishism", "transvestism" and "sadomasochism" as psychiatric diagnoses.
Steele's point about the blurring of boundaries is, IMO, particularly apt if you consider how attitudes to 'having a fetish' have changed - from being a shameful admission of secret deviance to a constituent of personal identity.
"I feel perfectly normal and even - why not - privileged, for knowing how to explore my sexuality in a different and much more intense way than most people do. I'm very happy to have enough capacity to understand my fetish and to enjoy it in a healthy, safe and very peculiar way"."I feel perfectly normal and even - why not - privileged, for knowing how to explore my sexuality in a different and much more intense way than most people do. I'm very happy to have enough capacity to understand my fetish and to enjoy it in a healthy, safe and very peculiar way".
quoted from The so-called "deviant sexualities: Perversion or right to difference? |
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