The aura of passivity that has for centuries surrounded female sexuality in popular culture, psychology, and literature has, in recent years, dissipated. And yet fetishism, one of the most intriguing and mysterious forms of sexual expression, is still cast as an almost exclusively male domain. Most psychoanalytic thought, for instance, excludes the very possibility of female fetishism. The first book on the subject, Female Fetishism engagingly documents women's involvement in this form of sexuality. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen describe a wide array of female fetishisms, from the obsessional behavior of pop fans (and pop performers such as Madonna) to fetishism in advertising to women's involvement in the world of dress clubs and fetish magazines. The authors provide provocative evidence of food fetishism among women, arguing that many eating disorders are best understood from this perspective. A latter portion of the book includes a discussion of how feminists have treated the political and cultural significance of female fetishism.

In recent years, the Freudian construction of a passive female sexuality has been severely criticised by feminists. This is the first book to tackle the question of female fetishism and to document women's engagement with this form of sexuality. Most psychoanalytic theory excludes the very possibility of the existence of female fetishism. In the face of the wealth of material about fetishistic practices gathered in this book, the authors suggest that Freudian phallocentrism has prevented analysts from seeing the evidence before their eyes.

The aura of passivity that has for centuries surrounded female sexuality in popular culture, psychology, and literature has, in recent years, dissipated. And yet fetishism, one of the most intriguing and mysterious forms of sexual expression, is still cast as an almost exclusively male domain. Most psychoanalytic thought, for instance, excludes the very possibility of female fetishism. The first book on the subject, Female Fetishism engagingly documents women's involvement in this form of sexuality. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen describe a wide array of female fetishisms, from the obsessional behavior of pop fans (and pop performers such as Madonna) to fetishism in advertising to women's involvement in the world of dress clubs and fetish magazines. The authors provide provocative evidence of food fetishism among women, arguing that many eating disorders are best understood from this perspective. A latter portion of the book includes a discussion of how feminists have treated the political and cultural significance of female fetishism.

Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture, and in particular the theme of "female fetishism" in the context of the feminine culture of mourning, collecting, and dressing.

In her latest book, Dr. Louise Kaplan, author of the groundbreaking Female Perversions , explores the fetishism strategy, a psychological defense that aims to tame, subdue, and if necessary, murder human vitalities. Through an exploration of such cultural phenomena as footbinding, reality television, and the construction of robots, Kaplan demonstrates how, in a technology-driven world, an understanding of the fetishism strategy can help to preserve the human dialogue that is the basis of all human relationships. Kaplan writes from the heart as well as from the intellect.

This book examines the historical and philosophical links between commodity culture and cultural fetishism.

Since Ursula Andress's white-bikini debut in Dr No, 'Bond Girls' have been simultaneously celebrated as fashion icons and dismissed as 'eye-candy'. But the visual glamour of the women of James Bond reveals more than the sexual objectification of female beauty. Through the original joint perspectives of body and fashion, this exciting study throws a new, subversive light on Bond Girls. Like Coco Chanel, fashion's 'eternal' mademoiselle, these 'Girls' are synonymous with an unconventional and dynamic femininity that does not play by the rules and refuses to sit still; far from being the passive objects of the male gaze, Bond Girls' active bodies instead disrupt the stable frame of Bond's voyeurism. Starting off with an original re-assessment of the cultural roots of Bond's postwar masculinity, the book argues that Bond Girls emerge from masculine anxieties about the rise of female emancipation after the Second World War and persistent in the present day. Displaying parallels with the politics of race and colonialism, such tensions appear through sartorial practices as diverse as exoticism, power dressing and fetish wear, which reveal complex and often contradictory ideas about the patriarchal and imperial ideologies associated with Bond. Attention to costume, film and gender theory makes Bond Girls: Body, Gender and Fashion essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, media and cultural studies, and for anyone with an interest in Bond.

Clare L. Taylor investigates the problematic question of female fetishism within modernist women's writing, 1890-1950. Drawing on gender and psychoanalytic theory, she re-examines the works of Sarah Grand, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Anaïs Nin in the context of clinical discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis to present an alternative theory of female fetishism, challenging the perspective that denies the existence of the perversion in women.

Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture addresses the conflicted meanings associated with the figure of the action heroine as she has evolved in various media forms since the late 1980s. Jeffrey A. Brown discusses this immensely popular character type, the action heroine, as an example of, and challenge to, existing theories about gender as a performance identity. Her assumption of heroic masculine traits combined with her sexualized physical depiction demonstrates the ambiguous nature of traditional gender expectations and indicates a growing awareness of more aggressive and violent roles for women. The excessive sexual fetishization of action heroines is a central theme throughout. The topic is analyzed as an insight into the transgressive image of the dominatrix, as a reflection of the shift in popular feminism from second-wave politics to third-wave and postfeminist pleasures, and as a form of patriarchal backlash that facilitates a masculine fantasy of controlling strong female characters. Brown interprets the action heroine as a representation of changing gender dynamics that balances the sexual objectification of women with progressive models of female strength. While the primary focus of this study is the action heroine as represented in Hollywood film and television, the book also includes the action heroine's emergence in contemporary popular literature, comic books, cartoons, and video games.

The female body has occupied a central place in the Western imagination, its images pervading poetry and story, mythology and religious doctrine, the visual arts, and scientific treatises. It has inspired both attraction and fear, been perceived as beautiful and unclean, alluring and dangerous, a source of pleasure and nurturing but also a source of evil and destruction. In The Female Body in Western Culture, twenty-three internationally noted scholars and critics, in specially commissioned essays, explore these representations and their consequences for contemporary art and culture. Ranging from Genesis to Gertrude Stein and Angela Carter, from ancient Greek ritual to the Victorian sleeping cure, from images of the Madonna to modern film and Surrealist art, the essays cover a wide spectrum of approaches and subject mailer. They all converge, however, around questions of power and powerlessness, voice and silence, subjecthood and objectification. And they point the way to the new possibilities and displacements of traditional male-female oppositions. Androgyny in a new key? This book demonstrates that a blurring of gender boundaries does not have to deny difference.