In a fetishistic relationship, the active imagining subject displaces and recodes the desired object's normal function with one of personal sexualized purpose. In this transformation from autonomous object to dependent fetish, the object of desire loses all meaning outside that imposed by the desiring subject. Freud defined the fetish as the following:
the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim. . . . What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality . . . . (19)The fetish is thereby a pure construction, mediated through external perception. The fetishized object is in a displaced perverted metonymic relationship; though in itself a detached fragment which stands in as a substitute for the larger, more traditional object of sexual desire, i.e. a sexual partner, it ultimately becomes the object of desire in and of itself.
This subjugated condition becomes further problematized when the fetishized "object" is not just an inanimate object, but another living human being — Woman — an
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Rather than understanding the vulva in feminist theoretician Luce Irigaray's positive terms of "two lips in continuous contact," the castration complex constructs the female genitals as "the horror of nothing to see," i.e. as a gaping wound (Irigaray 24, 26). To counteract this fear, men must enact a
complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous . . . This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. (Mulvey 21)
The entirety of the female body is thereby relegated to a single part of the male body. Rather than simply investing an object with properties of sexual desire and thereby turning it into a fetish, Mulvey's extension of Freud's theory inverts the process of fetishization so that a desiring body is itself turned into an object.
Contemporary artist Kara Walker addresses this relationship between the fetish and Woman. As part of her larger project of exposing the misrepresentations of African-Americans, Walker uses the image of the black woman as a key figure in her parodies of the ante-bellum South. An example of this is in a detail from The End of Uncle Tom (1995), which portrays a group of three women and a child sucking on each other's breasts.
By choosing to depict sexual practices outside the standard heterosexual narrative, Walker pulls the viewer/voyeur into her work, piquing interest, only to disturb the viewer through his/her own desire to look at such images. At the same time, her imaging technique is neither obscene nor aggressive, but deceptively "proper" and passive. She creates mural-sized narratives out of black cut-paper, which she pastes onto white gallery walls. The images imitate the genteel "low art" craft practice of silhouetting, thus placing the work in dialogue with a socially accepted practice in order to critique the deviancy that lies just beneath the surface of this standard mask.
Just as the fetish drains an object of any outside meaning, the silhouettes drain the depicted images of any realistic individuality. Like a fetish object, the silhouettes are substitutes for the "real"; they cannot be mistaken for or confused with real human beings. The women in the piece cannot be identified individually, but rather only as outlines of or signifiers for ante-bellum African-American women. Moreover, just as the fetish stems from a tension between what is seen and what is hidden, so too do the silhouettes function: like a little boy trying to look up his mother's skirt, the viewer must try to look at Walker's images, never really allowed to grasp a definitive look. The black-out quality of the silhouettes subsumes and hides any ultimate clarification. This passive-aggressive thrust of the combined content and technique underscores the importance of the fetish at stake.
By adopting a fetishistic style for her images, Walker alludes back to the original anxiety that is inherent in the fetish itself. While the fetish is able to pacify the fear of castration, Walker's images underscore the fear of blackness that pervades white American society. Normally, the fetish provides its subject with reassurance; for example, when white men have a fetish for black women they enact a power dynamic over the latter as the exotic Other. Walker's images, however, provide no such easy plenitude. Even as they titillate, they continue to disrupt. According to Walker:
Confronting the viewer with the contradictory desires and interpretations that s/he cannot bear to acknowledge, my work reveals images that I too am shocked to encounter in the dark alleys of my imagination. You may be seduced, you may be outraged. Therein lay the unspeakable trappings of our visual codes. ("Response" 49)
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| Kara Walker, The Means to an End . . . A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (detail), 1995. | ||
In The End of Uncle Tom, for example, not only are the adult women involved in "deviant" sexual behavior, but their sucking at each other's breasts mirrors the image of the child suckling on the mother's breast. The inclusion of the former orality thereby pollutes and perverts the latter as well; the breast's function and appeal as the source of nourishment is conflated into its fetishistic, sexual role, thereby tainting the very institution of motherhood — an institution that is traditionally held sacred outside of any black-white distinction.
Walker returns to such problematized imagery in The Means to an End . . . A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995). As in the "Uncle Tom" works, Walker again turns to images from a pre-Civil War South. Although this work is actually an etching rather than a cut-paper silhouette, it imitates the style and effect of the silhouettes. In a section of this work, Walker depicts a white child hanging off and sucking on the breast of a black woman. Not only does the boy appear too old to need breast-feeding, he appears far too young for sexual interaction; the image thus turns from one of motherly import to sexual transgression. The silhouetted style blurs and fuses his body with hers, turning the white child into the black woman's phallus. She literally becomes the "phallic mother," not simply in the sense of motherly power, but of sexual dominance. The fetish here is disruptive to the standard white male power narrative. Walker identifies the white male desire to possess the black female body and turns it into an object; here, however, the woman ends up holding the power over the diminutive white male body. Walker's version of the fetish does not, however, cure the fear, but rather, heightens it; all the while, the viewer remains piqued and cannot turn away despite knowing that prolonging the look will prolong the discord.
Walker constructs fetishistic images in order to deconstruct them. She acknowledges the appeal of such images while also challenging them. Rather than continuing to suppress the fetish, a practice that ultimately allows it to persist covertly, Walker drags it out into the open, thereby enabling an investigation and critique of the status quo.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1975. 19-21.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." This Sex Which Is Not One. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. 23-33.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. 14-26.
Walker, Kara. "The Debate Continues: Kara Walker's Response." International Review of African-American Art. V.15 no.2, 1998. 44-5.