Freud, Fabric, Fetish

Author: Hamlyn, Anne

Source: Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, 1 March 2003 , pp. 8-26(19)

Publisher: Berg Publishers

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Abstract:

"Freud, Fabric, Fetish" explores the nature of the relation between women and cloth in everyday life, visual culture and psychoanalytic theory. The article proposes that the sensory connection that we all (both male and female) have to cloth cannot be adequately expressed in language. This, it is argued in psychoanalytic terms, is because the unique "language" of fabric straddles the pre-linguistic or Imaginary and the social/linguistic codes that make up the Symbolic order. Fabric is, further, shown to complicate assumptions about sexual difference because it is inevitably caught up in the persistent undecidability of the fetishistic fantasy. This uncertainty in the fabric-as-fetish becomes evident in selected examples from film and the visual arts.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.2752/147597503778053117

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