Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand

Abstract

In this age of feminism and poststructuralism I shall surprise no one by asserting that theory has a body and that that body like all bodies is sexed. The widespread use of the epithet phallocentric to qualify conceptual systems which place the phallus and the values it represents in a hegemonic position implicitly recognizes that sexual morphology informs the most apparently disembodied theories. In the past few years I have begun to explore the ways in which feminist modes of reading might be grounded in representations of the female body. My concern is not to counter phallocentrism by gynocentrism, rather to speculate on the modes of reading that might be derived from representations of the female body, a sexual body whose polycenteredness has been repeatedly emphasized by feminist theoreticians (Irigaray 1977). Specifically I have been concerned with the appropriation of psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. paranoia in Schor 1981) to ends for which they were not originally intended. In what follows I move from a striking representation of the female body in works by George Sand to the elaboration of a textual strategy specifically geared to taking this seemingly aberrant representation into account. Thus the writer's fetishism becomes the critic's, fetishism on fetishism we might say.

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