Fetishism and the use-value of women’s bodies
It has been suggested that the fetishisation of the female body in industrialised nations coincided with the growth in the production of commodities around mid-nineteenth century.[i] A review of fetishisation from a Surrealist perspective supports this assertion.[ii] One could make the case that the commodification of the female body did not begin with the advent of commodity fetishism – a point addressed not only from a Marxist perspective of production, but from Appadurai’s construal of the fetish as arising from people’s motivations for using things[iii] that can be traced back to ancient times and have endured throughout the Enlightenment project of rationalisation.[iv] Pels and Bohme make the clear distinction between commodity fetishism and cultural fetishism.[v]
However, a practical example of how both commodity and cultural fetishism lies in womenswear. Stockings – or pantyhose – gained popularity during at a time of shifting attitudes towards women’s dress. During the 1920s, as hemlines for women’s dresses began to creep upwards, hose, though largely inessential, satisfied social ideas of decorum and conveniently concealed the imperfections of the flesh now on show. As the fashion world of the 1920s changed, encouraged by the emergence of the New Woman and a backlash against constrictions upon the female body, the intimate wear business also was transformed. Women cast off corsets, bustles, girdles and petticoats, but wearing stockings meant they still had to contend with garter straps to keep them up, one of the many problems of the irrational nature of women’s wear.
Concealment of the body is motivated by beauty, social respectability and conformity. Panti-Legs, a pair of panties bonded with stockings, were invented in 1959,[vi] and with the advent of spandex during the 1960s they became a widespread symbol of feminine sex appeal and glamour, and a sign of respectability for ladies concerned about the baring of legs in public, and with reining in the body. The flimsiness of the material, however, is as thin as the gesture of wearing them.
This process of ‘world-making’[vii], then, is designed to limit bodies and proscribe to the performance of repetitive behaviour, their sense of self compromised and given over to normalising mechanisms, grounded in cultural topography. The cultural production of women’s bodies acts as the frame of reference for their representation in mythology, literature, which function as the channels through which ideas circulate.
The body as currency is negated as an actual human body,[viii] marking its differentiation and materiality as a negation of exploitation, in the same way commodity fetishism, under Marx, is negated as an exploitation of labour. At the same time, the exchange-value (the commodity), is affirmed, not only through the perpetuation of forms of discrimination, but also through the qualified aspects of the medium of representation, be it an artistic portrayal of a nude in a museum, or nude of glamour girls in magazines. It is further affirmed by sexual difference and economic asymmetry. A negation of the exploitative nature of the sexual differentiation of bodies, in Marxist terminology, constitutes a negation of the abstract human labour and social power relations inherent in the use-value of the commodity – in this case, the female body.
For Marx, this meant the obliteration of a ‘genesis’ between the sexes, being in fact, the source of unequal relations, an instance of alienation, with ‘man’ becoming like the goods and services he produces. Here, women’s bodies are the goods and services. In certain contexts, the body itself could be described as a commodity fetish, with a concomitant use-value: the body is of use and of interest to others.
The disjuncture between being and utility makes the act of ‘uncovering’[ix] an important form of analysis, one converging with feminist criticism. In some feminist critiques against androcentrism, this disjuncture is identified as the patriarchy – the monolith of power, unyielding, against all appearances, to legislative and civic reform.
But could it be that this fetish character is in fact produced by the gesture that simultaneously reveals it? Does the emancipated consciousness display traits of the fetishism that it reveals? Is there an uncomfortable link to the object, one which is in fact supposed to be eliminated and surpassed in the analysis? The fetishistic mechanisms that dwell within the very systems that leave themselves open to criticism, cannot be easily stamped out. A fetish, after all, cannot be destroyed. Fetishism, idolatry and the cult of appearance continue unabated. Think back to Bitch, featured in the article Language and Embodiment. This is the power things have over us.
Why does this matter to feminism? It is not only because Marx, and later Foucault (1975) speak of the use-value of bodies, the universal medium of circulation and the form of appearance through which everything communicates with everything else; it is because they speak to the social relations that drive production and exchange, a necessary feature of the socio-cultural sphere in capitalist societies. Marxist fetishism is the metaphorical formula not for a relationship to things, but to their appearances (as commodities), whereby the fetish is the mechanism that not only manipulates the desires of individuals or groups of people, but that acts as the gauge between: natural and machinery; godliness and matter; the incontrovertible and the questionable. What the fetish reveals is our deepest ‘anthropological humiliation’ in that the certainty of a ‘precarious’ existence comes through the medium of things, part of a traffic in commodities (bodies), arguably of the greatest insecurities in the histories of civilisations.[x]
References and Additional Reading
[i] Jon Stratton (1996) The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 87
[ii] Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 113-143
[iii] Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
[iv] See Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944. Whilst they do not mention fetishism per se, other than in the Marxian sense, they discuss the idea of delusion vis-à-vis lived experience.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and New York: Verso Books)
[v] Peter Pels ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy’, Border Fetishism: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91-121
Hartmut Böhme (2004) Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity (Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2014)
[vi] In 1959, at the request of his wife, who pregnant at the time, and was inconvenienced by having to accommodate her garter and stockings to her expanding belly, informed her husband, (Allen Gant Sr.) that as she could not be seen in public without hosiery, they would be making no further outings until she was delivered of her child.
‘How would it be if we made a pair of panties and fastened the stockings to it?’ he is said to have asked his wife, thus hailing the birth of the ‘Panti-Legs.’
Joseph Caputo, ‘50 Years of the Pantyhose’, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 July 2009. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/50-years-of-pantyhose-33062523/#xo8ZvgUYjWWtEpPp.99> [ 29 May 2018]
[vii] Bourdieu’s term (1989), as before. Bourdieu is primarily concerned with the question of class, not the question of women and automata.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power,’ Sociological Theory 7:1, (1989), pp. 14-25 (p. 16).
[viii] The body as currency appears here as a link to fetishism, both from a commodity use-value perspective, and in the idea of the uncanny, which relates to parts of the body being displaced, and not the body as a whole.
[ix] Heidegger The Concept of Time (1924)
Heidegger, Martin (1924), The Concept of Time: The First Draft of Being and Time, transl. Ingo Farin, Alex Skinner (London and New York: Continuum, 2011)
[x] Bohme, 2004
