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Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 289-298



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The Evasion of Gender in Freudian Fetishism

Donovan Miyasaki


Introduction

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud rejects the notion of a biologically determined connection of instinct to object, a position which helps him avoid the designation of all variations from heterosexuality as either "degenerate" or "pathological." However, the gender roles and relations commonly attributed to heterosexuality are already implicit in his understanding of sexual instinct and aim. Consequently, even variations from the normal sexual object and aim exemplify, on his interpretation, the clichéd hierarchical opposition of femininity and masculinity. Freud's theory of sexuality thus implies that the erotic bond is inevitably one of domination, and that the only possible human relation is one of subject to object, activity to passivity, whole to part, and owner to property.

My primary intention in this paper is to explore, in Freud's analysis of fetishism, traces of an alternate possibility to oppositional hierarchical gender roles and the negative forms of social relation that rely upon them. While Freud—in keeping with common opinion—characterizes sexual fetishism as a distinctly masculine phenomenon, the text also supports a more interesting interpretation: that the non-pathological fetishist evades the construction of gender in terms of sexual roles and that, consequently, fetishism can serve as a critique of Freud's masculine model of sexual instinct and relation.

1. The Masculinity of Instinct

Freud claims that, regardless of an individual's gender or object-choice, instinct is intrinsically "masculine"—at least in the general sense of "active" as opposed to "passive" (Three Essays 219, note 1). This is trivially true in the sense that instinct actively desires or seeks satisfaction. However, Freud's description of instinct as "masculine" applies in a much more specific sense.

According to Freud, "unpleasurable feelings are connected with an increase and pleasurable feelings with a decrease of stimulus" ("Instincts" 120-21). 1 Because sexual tension involves displeasure, the "aim" of the instinct is "in every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by removing the state of stimulation at the source of instinct" ("Instincts" 122). The sexual "object," on the other hand, is "the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim" ("Instincts" 122). Put simply, object and aim are the means and end of sexual instinct. The object is valuable precisely because it is a means to the end of pleasure.

Consequently, the active and passive roles of instinct and object are embedded in the very nature of pleasure as described by Freud. Because the sexual aim is negatively understood as the removal of displeasure, the instinct's relation to the object can only beactive, and the object's relation to the instinct can only be passive. The instinct does not (and by definition cannot) receive pleasurable sensations from the object. The achieved pleasure of the aim is the instinct's "own" action—the removal of an internal stimulus to the external world through the use (the means) of the object. 2 Although the object qua occasion for the instinct's activity is valuable, the object as such is almost irrelevant. Apart from its utility for the sexual aim, it can only be a source of stimulation and, consequently, of displeasure.

The consequences of Freud's position are troubling. The sexual relation of instinct to object is, strictly speaking, no relation at all. This would seem to suggest that the sexual relation of subjects to one another is, likewise, no relation at all. Although individuals can serve simultaneously as an occasion for each other's pleasure, the satisfaction of one individual is independent of, and incidental to, that of the other as [End Page 289] such. Each individual can only provide pleasure for the other as an object of that other individual's own activity, and not as an active subject. The other is not an object of desire that the subject seeks to incorporate or approach, but instead a painful external stimulus...

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