Queering Lesbian Fetishism in Pynchon’s V

Abstract

It has been almost thirty years since Sarah Kofman’s ground-breaking suggestion that Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Freud, in Glas, opened up the possibility of female fetishism (“Ça Cloche” 133). Since that time, although debates about female fetishism have evolved through several distinct stages, political oscillation has remained the order of the day in efforts to feminize a perversion widely understood, in psychoanalytic terms, to be reserved for men. Naomi Schor’s suspicion, in 1985, that female fetishism might be only the “latest and most subtle form of penis envy” (371) raised important questions about the value of claiming fetishistic practices for feminist politics— questions that largely defined the earliest attempts to define female fetishism in theoretical and literary terms. Throughout the 1990s, Elizabeth Grosz, Marjorie Garber, Emily Apter, Teresa de Lauretis, and Anne McClintock, among others, reiterated Schor’s hesitation about the topic, and none were able to dispel completely the shadow of her inaugural doubt. Proponents of female fetishism in this first wave of revisionist theory appear to have kept Baudrillard’s famous warning about fetish discourse, and its ability to “turn against those who use it” (For a Critique 90), firmly in mind.

Freud thinks the foot may be a substitute for the penis,

but I am here to tell him that the penis

is no substitute for the foot.

—Geoff Nicholson, Footsucker