Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human

At the dawn of the new millennium, Western culture is marked by various fantasies that imagine our future selves and their forms of embodiment. These fantasies are part of a rapidly growing cultural discourse about the future of the human body; the ever more illusive boundary between the human, the animal, and the technological; and the cultural consequences of greater human-technological integration.

Amanda Fernbach argues that classic fetishism, as outlined by Sigmund Freud, never has been up to the task of explaining all cultural fetishisms. Exploring decadent, magical, matrix, and immortality fetishism, she shows how fetishism in all of its modes is an important conceptual tool for contesting postmodern malaise and for providing utopian tools for a post-human existence. Examining a wide range of texts and scenes, she argues that we should examine the new forms of fetishism emerging from the fringes of the pop culture scene in order to understand their complexities as they move into broader cultural contexts. She skillfully deploys these concepts of fetishisms in discussing topics such as sexual difference, queer identities, computer culture and the "post-human" as well as applying them to her objects of study: cross-cultural dressers, technofetishists, cyberspace cowboys, cyborgs, geekgirls, and SM/fetish culture.