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Female Fetishism
The aura of passivity that has for centuries surrounded female sexuality in popular culture, psychology, and literature has, in recent years, dissipated. And yet fetishism, one of the most intriguing and mysterious forms of sexual expression, is still cast as an almost exclusively male domain. Most psychoanalytic thought, for instance, excludes the very possibility of female fetishism.
The first book on the subject, Female Fetishism engagingly documents women's involvement in this form of sexuality. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen describe a wide array of female fetishisms, from the obsessional behavior of pop fans (and pop performers such as Madonna) to fetishism in advertising to women's involvement in the world of dress clubs and fetish magazines. The authors provide provocative evidence of food fetishism among women, arguing that many eating disorders are best understood from this perspective.
A latter portion of the book includes a discussion of how feminists have treated the political and cultural significance of female fetishism.
The first book on the subject, Female Fetishism engagingly documents women's involvement in this form of sexuality. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen describe a wide array of female fetishisms, from the obsessional behavior of pop fans (and pop performers such as Madonna) to fetishism in advertising to women's involvement in the world of dress clubs and fetish magazines. The authors provide provocative evidence of food fetishism among women, arguing that many eating disorders are best understood from this perspective.
A latter portion of the book includes a discussion of how feminists have treated the political and cultural significance of female fetishism.
304 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1992
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June 11, 2025
Lorraine. Gamman and Merja. Makinen, Female Fetishism (Washington Square, N.Y: New York University Press, 1995).
• Introduction
o When we started to write this book about female fetishism we were surprised that the idea that women do not fetishise was still taken for granted.
o What women are doing inside sexual subcultures; the often bizarre behaviour of some female ‘fans’; as well as women’s obsessive relationship to food; all these phenomena persuaded us that orthodox thinking on the subject of female fetishism was grossly inadequate. THEIR DOMAIN
o Fetish def?
We found so many confused definitions of fetishism that we felt it was inappropriate to employ a single academic model or to rely on any one group of women fetishists to simply tell the ‘truth’ about their experiences.
Our emphasis in this book therefore, on the idea that women can and do fetishise in the sexual sense, employs a model of ‘stages’ of sexual fetishism. We felt we needed to be able to conceptualise different stages (and intensities) of sexual fetishism because not all the female sexual fetishists we found got all of their sexual stimulation from objects. ‘This model helps refine some of Freud’s observations and, of course, is substantiated with reference to many clinical case studies and academic observations about fetishism.
o Survey has orthodox fetishists
So what? Legitimating the idea of women as perverts, by making the case for them as sexual fetishists, may not seem like a grand step forward towards a brave new feminist world.
Our argument is that activities like fetishism that are labelled ‘perverse’ have the capacity to subvert dominant discourses about sexuality, and the social order.
These levels of ‘subversion’ often align sexual fetishism with what is being called ‘Queer’ politics.
AIM: disrupt preconceptions of ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour being associated with any one group.
Sexual diversity is politically important
o Writers on anthropological and commodity fetishism have always acknowledged women as practitioners, but women disappear from debates about sexual fetishism
o Indeed, our examples destabilise the certainty of conceptual thinking which underlies the Freudian model of sexual fetishism.
o In the course of arguing that women’s sexual desire is as ‘active’ as men’s, we couldn’t help but fall over some of the ‘axioms’ about female sexuality laid down by Freud.
Traditional theories of sexual fetishism have usually discussed women as passive objects of fetishism, not its subjects.
SUMMARY FREUD: fetish develops out of an ucs urge to protect the penis due to the young boy’s first realization that his mother does not have one too. Since a woman does not have a penis to protect, why would she need to fetishize? … the phallocentrism of psychoanalysis.
It wasn’t just the Freudians that seemed to us to be blind to this particular female desire. Other psychoanalytic schools, Kleinian for example, also concurred with the idea that women do not fetishise sexually, despite the evidence of their own case studies. This surprised us, because the Kleinian privileging of the breast, and the infant’s anxiety about being separated from the mother, could have provided a further way of explaining sexual fetishism. Yet none of these subsequent analysts thought to challenge ‘penis envy’ (the idea that female sexuality is determined by lack). They simply accommodated ideas about female sexual passivity into their own findings.
In the Lacanian model, once again, fetishism is linked to castration anxiety and it is argued women do not fetishise.
we concluded that in describing women as sexual fetishists, we found ourselves disagreeing and undermining dominant explanations of female sexual desire.
We argue that acknowledging female fetishism leads to a need for a new psychoanalytic representation of the female erotic. To some extent these demands for a new model of the female erotic, in different subject areas, have been made before.
o WHY NOT USE PSYCH? WHY MAKE WHOLE NEW SCHEMA
In chapter six we discuss all the feminist writing on female fetishism that we could find. Every text we looked at, despite the best intentions, stumbled with Freud and Lacan in the same places, no doubt as a consequence of underlying theoretical formulations about female passivity. So we had to start from scratch and reconsider other case studies which appear to show women as active agents of fetishism, without too much prejudice.
o THEIR NEW THEORY
fetishism involves recognition of
• 1. underlying anxiety about separation from the mother
• 2. an oral component
• 3. the need for a new theoretical representation of female desire.
o Bulimia the fourth type
Could it be that women unconsciously play out these impossible social contradictions upon a body that allows the pleasure of satiation, while simultaneously escaping some of the dangers by vomiting food?
• 1.
o HISTORY
By the nineteenth century the term ‘fetishism’ had entered popular language and was being used more generally by writers to refer to anything reverenced without due reason; ‘Public opinion, the fetish even of the nineteenth century’ (Lowell, 1837). Marx, in an early article “Theft of Wood’ (1842), went on to make the analogy between the tribal fetish made of wood, and the peasant’s right to the forest. He developed this idea further in 1859 when he described commodity fetishism in ‘A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy’, and then more substantially in Capital Volume One, first published in 1867. Krafft Ebing first used the term fetishism in 1886 in a criminal/sexual sense of obsession:'° it was then used by Alfred Binet in 1888 with the sexual connotation we now associate with Freud’s writing. |
WRONG lol
o Anyway survey of types of fetishism
o Anthropological
Portuguese
Pietz
Application: female fans
o Commodity
o Sexual
Freud
Gebhard emphasizes Freud’s use of stages leading up to “orthodox” sexual fetish
Binet KEb
• 2. Perverse Strategies: a Look at Women
o High kink
• 3. Women and Sexual Fetishism
o History of early sexologists and psychiatrists diagnosing women
o Yet these analysts who are arguing theoretically that women rarely fetishise, are doing so in the face of their own case studies of women who are fetishists. Each analyst says their own case study is one in isolation, ‘a rarity’.
o surveys Freud, Klein, Lacan
o Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva
o THEIR THEORY: we hope that the ideas about autonomous female desire we have discussed show how and why women might become fetishists. In addition, by foregrounding those studies (often Kleinian) that explain fetishism by focussing on the oral stage (instead of Freud’s emphasis upon the genital stage) we have been able to include a new dimension to discussions of fetishism: that fetishism occurs also as a consequence of separation anxiety. 117
o All we are saying here is that at this genital stage of the fixation, a new positive theoretical model of female sexuality needs to be designed, to be able to account for the development of female fetishists.
• 4. Bulimia: The Fourth Fetishism?
• 5. Food Fetishism: The Cultural Arguments
• 6. Female Fetishism Conflated: Representations of Fetishism
o POLLOCK MENTIONED!
“woman is fetishized, ie. parts of her body are taken out of context and made to function both as erotic thrills and threatening danger for the male viewer”
o Mulvey
Relate[s] objectification of women’s appearance to the unconscious fetishistic practices of men involved in artistic production. “fragmentation in visual arts” 173
Reads against Berger who makes similar claims
Also reads Fucko surveillance as power
Mulvey’s three looks
• Camera
• Audience
• Characters at each other
• Each linked to gender
• Mulvey suggests that the way men deal with castration anxiety is to turn the woman, or the figure of woman, into a fetish object, because the body of woman is too frightening for men.
• Mellencamp notes that “this is a model of anxiety rather than pleasure” 179
• Mulvey uses voyeurism, scopohilia, fetishism interchangeably.
• Clover argues the concept of the male gaze is not even adequate to explain the experiences of men, let alone women
• The fetishized” woman as a phallic replacement
o Mary Kelly
Argues that mother was prototype fetishist
Mother’s memorabilia as ‘female fetishism,’ aligns with Freud notion of female passage through the Oedipus complex
o Schor, Apter, Garber
o SCHOR
obilising Kofman’s argument that fetishism, a paradigm of undecideability, should be adopted by feminists, Schor argues that feminist criticism in the 1980s adopted a similar strategy, through its readings of ‘bitextuality’.
OP thinks sand’s exampels aren’t fetishes but sado-basochistic exampels of typical ‘bruised-lips- syndrome associated with representations in romance fiction
o APTER
She argues that, whereas nineteenth century psychopathology stops at the masculine examples of fetishism, the fiction goes on to illustrate female examples of fetishists.
Fashion and Maupassant
o GARBER
Opens w Schor’s question: is appropriating fetish for girls penis envy?
Yes: phallus envy is penis envy. It’s a tautological question for her
OP thinks she’s confused fetishism with exhibitionism
o OP Hates conflation
• Ch 7 PostModern
o Baudrillard
• Introduction
o When we started to write this book about female fetishism we were surprised that the idea that women do not fetishise was still taken for granted.
o What women are doing inside sexual subcultures; the often bizarre behaviour of some female ‘fans’; as well as women’s obsessive relationship to food; all these phenomena persuaded us that orthodox thinking on the subject of female fetishism was grossly inadequate. THEIR DOMAIN
o Fetish def?
We found so many confused definitions of fetishism that we felt it was inappropriate to employ a single academic model or to rely on any one group of women fetishists to simply tell the ‘truth’ about their experiences.
Our emphasis in this book therefore, on the idea that women can and do fetishise in the sexual sense, employs a model of ‘stages’ of sexual fetishism. We felt we needed to be able to conceptualise different stages (and intensities) of sexual fetishism because not all the female sexual fetishists we found got all of their sexual stimulation from objects. ‘This model helps refine some of Freud’s observations and, of course, is substantiated with reference to many clinical case studies and academic observations about fetishism.
o Survey has orthodox fetishists
So what? Legitimating the idea of women as perverts, by making the case for them as sexual fetishists, may not seem like a grand step forward towards a brave new feminist world.
Our argument is that activities like fetishism that are labelled ‘perverse’ have the capacity to subvert dominant discourses about sexuality, and the social order.
These levels of ‘subversion’ often align sexual fetishism with what is being called ‘Queer’ politics.
AIM: disrupt preconceptions of ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour being associated with any one group.
Sexual diversity is politically important
o Writers on anthropological and commodity fetishism have always acknowledged women as practitioners, but women disappear from debates about sexual fetishism
o Indeed, our examples destabilise the certainty of conceptual thinking which underlies the Freudian model of sexual fetishism.
o In the course of arguing that women’s sexual desire is as ‘active’ as men’s, we couldn’t help but fall over some of the ‘axioms’ about female sexuality laid down by Freud.
Traditional theories of sexual fetishism have usually discussed women as passive objects of fetishism, not its subjects.
SUMMARY FREUD: fetish develops out of an ucs urge to protect the penis due to the young boy’s first realization that his mother does not have one too. Since a woman does not have a penis to protect, why would she need to fetishize? … the phallocentrism of psychoanalysis.
It wasn’t just the Freudians that seemed to us to be blind to this particular female desire. Other psychoanalytic schools, Kleinian for example, also concurred with the idea that women do not fetishise sexually, despite the evidence of their own case studies. This surprised us, because the Kleinian privileging of the breast, and the infant’s anxiety about being separated from the mother, could have provided a further way of explaining sexual fetishism. Yet none of these subsequent analysts thought to challenge ‘penis envy’ (the idea that female sexuality is determined by lack). They simply accommodated ideas about female sexual passivity into their own findings.
In the Lacanian model, once again, fetishism is linked to castration anxiety and it is argued women do not fetishise.
we concluded that in describing women as sexual fetishists, we found ourselves disagreeing and undermining dominant explanations of female sexual desire.
We argue that acknowledging female fetishism leads to a need for a new psychoanalytic representation of the female erotic. To some extent these demands for a new model of the female erotic, in different subject areas, have been made before.
o WHY NOT USE PSYCH? WHY MAKE WHOLE NEW SCHEMA
In chapter six we discuss all the feminist writing on female fetishism that we could find. Every text we looked at, despite the best intentions, stumbled with Freud and Lacan in the same places, no doubt as a consequence of underlying theoretical formulations about female passivity. So we had to start from scratch and reconsider other case studies which appear to show women as active agents of fetishism, without too much prejudice.
o THEIR NEW THEORY
fetishism involves recognition of
• 1. underlying anxiety about separation from the mother
• 2. an oral component
• 3. the need for a new theoretical representation of female desire.
o Bulimia the fourth type
Could it be that women unconsciously play out these impossible social contradictions upon a body that allows the pleasure of satiation, while simultaneously escaping some of the dangers by vomiting food?
• 1.
o HISTORY
By the nineteenth century the term ‘fetishism’ had entered popular language and was being used more generally by writers to refer to anything reverenced without due reason; ‘Public opinion, the fetish even of the nineteenth century’ (Lowell, 1837). Marx, in an early article “Theft of Wood’ (1842), went on to make the analogy between the tribal fetish made of wood, and the peasant’s right to the forest. He developed this idea further in 1859 when he described commodity fetishism in ‘A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy’, and then more substantially in Capital Volume One, first published in 1867. Krafft Ebing first used the term fetishism in 1886 in a criminal/sexual sense of obsession:'° it was then used by Alfred Binet in 1888 with the sexual connotation we now associate with Freud’s writing. |
WRONG lol
o Anyway survey of types of fetishism
o Anthropological
Portuguese
Pietz
Application: female fans
o Commodity
o Sexual
Freud
Gebhard emphasizes Freud’s use of stages leading up to “orthodox” sexual fetish
Binet KEb
• 2. Perverse Strategies: a Look at Women
o High kink
• 3. Women and Sexual Fetishism
o History of early sexologists and psychiatrists diagnosing women
o Yet these analysts who are arguing theoretically that women rarely fetishise, are doing so in the face of their own case studies of women who are fetishists. Each analyst says their own case study is one in isolation, ‘a rarity’.
o surveys Freud, Klein, Lacan
o Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva
o THEIR THEORY: we hope that the ideas about autonomous female desire we have discussed show how and why women might become fetishists. In addition, by foregrounding those studies (often Kleinian) that explain fetishism by focussing on the oral stage (instead of Freud’s emphasis upon the genital stage) we have been able to include a new dimension to discussions of fetishism: that fetishism occurs also as a consequence of separation anxiety. 117
o All we are saying here is that at this genital stage of the fixation, a new positive theoretical model of female sexuality needs to be designed, to be able to account for the development of female fetishists.
• 4. Bulimia: The Fourth Fetishism?
• 5. Food Fetishism: The Cultural Arguments
• 6. Female Fetishism Conflated: Representations of Fetishism
o POLLOCK MENTIONED!
“woman is fetishized, ie. parts of her body are taken out of context and made to function both as erotic thrills and threatening danger for the male viewer”
o Mulvey
Relate[s] objectification of women’s appearance to the unconscious fetishistic practices of men involved in artistic production. “fragmentation in visual arts” 173
Reads against Berger who makes similar claims
Also reads Fucko surveillance as power
Mulvey’s three looks
• Camera
• Audience
• Characters at each other
• Each linked to gender
• Mulvey suggests that the way men deal with castration anxiety is to turn the woman, or the figure of woman, into a fetish object, because the body of woman is too frightening for men.
• Mellencamp notes that “this is a model of anxiety rather than pleasure” 179
• Mulvey uses voyeurism, scopohilia, fetishism interchangeably.
• Clover argues the concept of the male gaze is not even adequate to explain the experiences of men, let alone women
• The fetishized” woman as a phallic replacement
o Mary Kelly
Argues that mother was prototype fetishist
Mother’s memorabilia as ‘female fetishism,’ aligns with Freud notion of female passage through the Oedipus complex
o Schor, Apter, Garber
o SCHOR
obilising Kofman’s argument that fetishism, a paradigm of undecideability, should be adopted by feminists, Schor argues that feminist criticism in the 1980s adopted a similar strategy, through its readings of ‘bitextuality’.
OP thinks sand’s exampels aren’t fetishes but sado-basochistic exampels of typical ‘bruised-lips- syndrome associated with representations in romance fiction
o APTER
She argues that, whereas nineteenth century psychopathology stops at the masculine examples of fetishism, the fiction goes on to illustrate female examples of fetishists.
Fashion and Maupassant
o GARBER
Opens w Schor’s question: is appropriating fetish for girls penis envy?
Yes: phallus envy is penis envy. It’s a tautological question for her
OP thinks she’s confused fetishism with exhibitionism
o OP Hates conflation
• Ch 7 PostModern
o Baudrillard
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