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Freud's "Fetishism" and the Lesbian Dildo Debates

1992; Feminist Studies; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3178083

2153-3873

Heather Findlay,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

products (advertisements, erotic fiction, the toys themselves) have consistently drawn from a set of familiar conventions, thus constituting a kind of shared fantasy about lesbian dildo use. Like all fantasy, this one no doubt occludes more than it reveals about the reality of lesbian desire, whatever that may be. My focus, however, is on what the French might call the mise-en-scene of a particular dildo fantasy and its relation to the issues raised in Freud's 1927 essay on fetishism.2 By analyzing the dildo in conjunction with Freud's text, I hope to shed light not only on the dildo debates and the feminist sex wars of which they are a part but also on the (perhaps paradoxical) relevance to lesbians of the psychoanalytic theory of fetishism, a perversion which Freudas a number of his feminist readers have discussed in some de-