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“It does seem true,” Emily Apter writes in the opening chapter of her finely detailed book, “that within contemporary discourse a kind of fetishism of fetishism is in the air” (p. 3). What is satisfying about this particular contribution to the field is the way its author, while discussing topics that have already received much attention—the gaze, male representations of women and of female sexuality, male and female masquerade and cross-dressing—is able both to synthesize existing research and to question and modify received interpretations. Apter is not dogmatic or mechanical in her readings—she never merely applies a popular methodology to a fashionable area of interest—but continually produces new insights at the level of stylistic detail as well as of theory. Covering considerable ground in both French and psychoanalytic literature, Apter does indeed have something fresh to say about contemporary discourse's favorite perversion.
Apter begins by tracing the history of the concept of fetishism through its linguistic, economic, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic variations. While often seemingly gratuitous, the fetish is “partial” (p. 20), that is, at once metonymic and motivated: it stands for something else, as a metonym or meta-name does; but this something else remains meaningfully displaced. Apter recounts the various traditions of the fetish as magical charm, metonym, rhetorical trope, and blason du corps; she defines and offers examples of a “rhetorical fetishism” of literary style (p. 68), and a “gynotextual fetishism” seen “from a woman's point of view” (p. 100). While fetishism, she notes, has traditionally been regarded as an exclusively male perversion, there are examples in 19th-century literature that suggest or anticipate the possibility of a non-gender-based