The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption

by Jon Stratton

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the construction and representation of the body has been deeply implicated in the development of capitalist economies. Stratton reveals how the ideologies of state power and gender politics become literally embodied, through an analysis of literature, art and film.
Using the accounts of commodity and sexual fetishism outlined by Marx and Freud, Stratton traces the complex relationship between desire and consumption. Man-made female bodies, from the animated doll in E.T.A. Hoffman's famous story, The Sandman, to the 1974 horror movie, The Stepford Wives, have exerted a strong hold over the modern imagination, oscillating between disgust and desire. As well as the changing image of the beautiful female body, Stratton looks at the more recent commodification of male bodies as presented in fashion magazines and by film stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In this powerful and insightful study, Jon Stratton looks at mannequins, gynoids, replicants and robots as indices of how we view modern bodies in a complex triangulation between simulation, spectacularisation and death.

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1996

About the author

Jon Stratton is Adjunct Professor in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. He has worked at universities in the UK and Australia and held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1998. His areas of interest include Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies and Media Studies. He is the sole author of eleven books and has co-edited two. In 2002 he published Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music. His most recent books included Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (edited with Nabeel Zuberi, 2014), and When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (2014).

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm reading this for class (Rhetoric of Pop Culture). Psychoanalyzing the marketing of sex, I guess, just isn't my thing. Phallus, penis, objectification, penis envy, phallus, power, control, blah. Not really a feel good book, especially if you are a woman. It's not terrible...