Publisher's Synopsis
Do the meanings of fetish signs appearing in artworks depend on the senders' intentions? Is the meaning of postfeminist glamour the celebration of femininity that its practitioners tout to counter ersatz macho posturing? How are pregnant father figurations in religion, folk tales, art, and Hollywood related to "feminine writing"? What is to be made of the fetishization of skin occurring all around? And what if men and women have been fetishizing femininity all along, despite orthodox interpretations of fetish signs as stand-ins for a single male body part? To examine and clarify these and other issues involving gender, post colonial, and artistic otherness, this book argues for a more adequate view of performativity than that available from speech-act theory and certain strains of linguistic pragmatics. In drawing simultaneously on Charles Sander Peirce's pragmatic analysis of signs, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic inquiry, and radical feminist thought, the concern of this work is with the ethical and aesthetic import of the psychopragmatics resulting from this intermingling.
