Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism

An important contribution to our understanding and interpretation of fetishism and of what fetishism can teach us about sexuality, gender, belief, and knowledge.

Object Lessons begins with the question, What can fetishism teach us? One answer, as this book makes clear, is that fetishism is a form of subject-object relation that informs us about basic strategies of defining, desiring, and knowing subjects and objects in Western culture. More importantly, in the way that it brings together peculiarly modern anxieties―especially those about sexuality, gender, belief, and knowledge―fetishism reveals how our basic categories for interpreting the world have been reduced to binary and mutually exclusive terms. By foregrounding concerns about sexual differences in examining fetishism’s unique intersection of desire and knowledge, Object Lessons seizes on the promises fetishism offers to those who want to call into question the resurgence of conservative and even reactionary drives to lock down absolute definitions of sexual differences through either biological or cultural essentialism.