Amanda Fernbach
Related: masculinity - fetish
The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction: The Cyborg and the Console Cowboy
One significant aspect of contemporary technofetishism is the intensification of our cultural lust for new technologies. We see such "technolust" celebrated in Wired magazine’s regular "Fetish" spot; this covers a range of new products from technical gadgets such as the MindDrive—a sensor sleeve that slips onto the index finger for those game players who tire of holding a joystick—to new and more manly ways of consuming ginseng. As Tim Barkow writes, "Brewing up tea as a boon to your manhood just too femme? At last there’s a means of getting your daily dose of ginseng that’s as butch as the root’s reputation...." --http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/81/fernbach81art.htmFantasies of Fetishism
"Amanda Fernbach takes on a truly impressive range of discourses and themes - historical, cultural, psychoanalytic, and literary – and significantly advances the study of fetishism as a cultural symptomology." - Professor Emily Apter, Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA
"The author has brought together a great deal of thinking that challenges or expands traditional Freudian theory of fetishism and, in effect, thereby creates a new master theory to use in her history. I respect and approve of such bold work." - Professor John Maynard, School of English, New York University
"There is no doubt that this book is a major achievement in opening up new directions for psychoanalytic cultural criticism and studies of contemporary technoculture." - Zoe Sofoulis, Department of Cultural Inquiry, University of Western Sydney
"This book provides a genuinely original contribution to cultural criticism. The way Fernbach educates as she entertains is a rare and welcome achievement." - Dr Rosalyn Diprose, School of Philosophy, University of New South Wales --http://www.fantasiesoffetishism.com/
Books
- Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-human
Amanda Fernbach [Amazon UK]
At the dawn of the 21st century, Western culture is marked by various fantasies that imagine our future selves and their forms of embodiment. These fantasies form part of a rapidly growing discourse about the future of the human form, the disappearing boundary between the human and the technological and the cultural consequences of greater human-technological integration. This book is about those cultural fantasies of fetishism, the different forms they take and the various ways in which the transformative processes they depict can reaffirm accepted definitions of identity or reconfigure them in an entirely new fashion. This book argues that the orthodox interpretation of "classical" fetishism is not and never has been up to the task of explaining all cultural fetishisms. It identifies several forms of fetishism - decadent fetishism, magical fetishism, matrix fetishism and immortality fetishism - and accounts for its sometimes radical and productive edge. Ranging widely over texts and cultures, Amanda Fernbach applies these concepts of fetishism to topics in cultural studies, such as sexual difference, queer identities, computer culture and the "post-human" and also to her objects of study: cross-cultural dressers, techno-fetishists, cyberspace cowboys, cyborgs, geekgirls and SM/fetish cultures. This book argues that fetishism can contest postmodern malaise and provide utopian tools for a post-human existance. It urges that we embrace the new fetishism emerging from the fringes of the fetish scene and that we begin to classify fetishism in a manner that does justice to its multiplicity.your Amazon recommendations
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