Page 124 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

118 CULTURAL STUDIES

I fetishize two things in my life: clothing, especially old clothing, clothing with a
past, and photographs. And it was not until recently that I understood that my
desires for each were closely woven together. My story feminizes the fetish. 3
But according to Freud’s work on fetishism, the fetish is solely the prerogative of
men: while women are often hysterics, they are almost never fetishists. As Emily
Apter has pointed out, ‘despite his [Freud’s] admission at the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society in 1909 that ‘all women…are clothing fetishists’, Freud
typically supplied a male agent to the perversion by associating it with male
homosexuality and coprophilic pleasure. 4 In her essay, ‘Splitting hairs: female
fetishism and postpartum sentimentality in Maupassant’s fiction’, Apter seeks to
undo a gender-biased reading of fetishism. She finds the fetish objects of women
spilling out of the drawers of turn-of-the-century French literature (Guy de
Maupassant), the history of French psychiatry (Gaëtan Gatian de Clérembault, a
psychoanalyst who was Lacan’s teacher and who is famous for his photographs
of Algerian women wrapped in excessive drapery), and even in the work of the
contemporary American artist Mary Kelly (who collected and framed her son’s
nappies, cotton T-shirts, his early gifts of flowers and bugs and his first
writings). While sniffing out traces of female fetishism, Apter comes across
special boxes and bureaus and albums and other private places enshrouded with
veils, fabrics and fur—mostly belonging to women—whose sole purpose is to
preserve the relics of departed loved ones. The stories of loss range from spoiled
love to death to merely growing up. Inside these feminine spaces we find letters,
pressed flowers, locks of hair, nail clippings, pieces of clothing. The fetish
objects (from the trivial to the exquisite) are most often passed down and
gathered by the women of the family, ‘by hook or crook’ (a translation of à-bric-
à-brac) in a continual process of ‘acquisition and exchange’—which can be met
with heated emotions (ranging from intense love to harboured jealousy to
violence) between sisters, mothers and daughters. 5 Apter points out that this
‘bric-a-brac-cluttered world’ has been largely overlooked, even when it reaches a
space of ‘manic collectomania’ because it has been naturalized as part of
feminine culture. Apter’s examples of female fetishes, taken from literature and
art, are often visual, sometimes olfactory, but the majority of them relate to a
sense of touch.
My ‘bric-a-brac-cluttered world’ is also haptic. My fingers are beckoned by a
baby dress of white cotton and white eyelet, an abandoned pink baby blanket
woven with pink and green satin ribbons, a once white wedding veil yellowed
crisp, Grandfather’s old camel mohair coat eaten by moths, a tiny but heavy
glass-beaded bag (royal blue, deep rose, white and gold) cinched with a silk
cord, tiny shoes of soft worn mildewed leather pressed flat by storage and
polished powder blue. These are the things that clutter and fill the recesses of my
home, my memories, my body.

Cultural Studies 11(1) 1997:111–137© 1997 Routledge 0950–2386