Reading into the theory of Abjection encouraged me to think about how women’s bodies are fetishised and I started to wonder, do most men have mommy issues and that which we abject, do men fetishise?
Fundamental to any understanding of the presentation of femininity, is the realisation that the quality of being feminine holds connotations of characteristics, such as delicacy, gentleness and sensitivity. It is these attributes that are frequently associated with women, which can often be portrayed as negative, containing undertones associated with weakness. As femininity is a social construct, the presentation of femininity could, in theory be projected onto a male, as men can too possess feminine qualities.
Julia Kristeva in her essay, ‘Powers of Horror’, provides us with a hypothesis for analysis of the way in which we perceive representations of women. Establishing the definition of Abjection and where it derived from is essential to the understanding female sexuality. Kristeva suggests that abjection is something we must experience during our psychosexual development and before ‘the mirror stage’, (An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis,6) a concept which Lacan identified as the establishment of the recognition of the boundaries between self and other or human and animal. From Kristeva’s psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is done to the part of ourselves that we exclude: the mother. We must abject our mother in order to build an identity. Kristeva identifies abjection as something which, ‘preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be’.(Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 10)
In Kristeva’s view, the image of a woman’s body, because of it’s maternal functions, acknowledges its ‘debt to nature’ (ibid, 102) and is consequently more likely to signify the abject as it symbolises our natural and inevitable progression towards death. The principal example of a reaction to the abject is the human corpse, which is a traumatic reminder of our own relevance and impending death. Kristeva argues that when one is reminded of their own mortality, it disturbs the sense of oneself ‘primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.’ (ibid,12,13) Here, Kristeva is claiming that the abject body is rejected by society and when it is revealed, society is horrified.
Problems arise when it is noted that the abject itself provides a stark contrast to that of Freud’s theory of the fetish. As sexuality and fetishism are inextricably linked, we first need to define the concept of the fetish, what is it and who decides? In psychoanalytic terms, Fetish is described as ‘The displacement of desire and fantasy onto alternative objects or body parts’ (Felluga, D.F, Critical theory: The key concepts, 106). He also identified in his 1928 essay ‘Fetishism’ (Freud, S, 1961. Fetishism) that the ‘fetishist is able at one and the same time to believe in his fantasy and to recognise that it is nothing but a fantasy’. (ibid) With regards to the difference between sexuality and fetishism, Freud concentrates on the distinction between a sexual object and a sexual goal (Freud, S, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,”The Sexual Aberrations.”); identifying that a sexual object is the object that sparks desire while the sexual goal is the actual act itself which one desires to perform with the sexualised object. With sexuality being the natural capacity for sexual feelings and a fetish being the displacement of those sexual feelings, the fetishisation of a being is to deliberately make them the object of one’s sexual desires. Consequently, it is impossible for a fetish to exist without sexuality.
I haven’t really come to a conclusion regarding the questions I posed, however this would be an interesting topic to explore further.