Fetish - Fashion, Sex & Power - Valerie Steele

I’m sure that the world of publishing is awash with fetish. Books and magazines about fetish are themselves fetish objects, even before you pay attention to the objects they refer to. I don’t know where this book stands in the great scheme of Fetish publications but it is probably considered one of the more essential because it deals with fashion, which interests many of us, and because it is well-illustrated. It also looks at fetish through the perspectives of theory and ideology which may not be so attractive, but which at least suggests that fetish is something important and cultural. For a long time in the 20th Century Fetish was the “answer” to what we now generally call transgender, a way of explaining, isolating and maybe designing a “cure” for it. Trans was a compulsion, a deviation, a relapse into more primitive or less civilized ways of existing. It was also antisocial. Somewhere in the back end of the 18th century the Enlightenment had proclaimed trans as retrograde. Then, as the world opened up fetish began to express power. Oh, I could go on with unpicking the theories but Valerie Steele does it well enough, especially in her first and last chapters. She celebrates trans as part of fashion and deviant culture. She does take issue with people who get very ideological about fashion and dressing (This was published when transvestism was the word for trans and dressing its focus). At the very least she says that the whole subject is more complicated in reality than ideas of an assault on women or a subjection to capitalist systems. The key word in her title is “Power” and that pleases me because I think that almost everything in society and politics comes down to power and who exercises it. You may, like me, be interested in fetish but not convinced that we need to concentrate so very hard on it. It’s possible to learn a language (and that’s what fetish is in many ways, a dialogue which defines us through interaction) without knowing its linguistic structure. I’ve been to fetish clubs and specialist nights and had sex with individuals who were aroused by the fetishistic clothes I deliberately wore. I have also in my time had a slave. What I conclude from much of my trans life is that I can be a fetish or seem to be constructed out of fetishes when the desire is there in my beholder. Which can be delightful. And for much of the time I’ll leave it there, thankyou. A good quote from the book, which you may find useful, comes from Robert Stoller,- “A fetish is a story masquerading as an object” If we are in any sense an object then our story is what gives us power and meaning.