Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France. Cornell UP, 1991. Pp.  xviii. 273. Index.

The last few years have witnessed an unprecedented succession of critical re-takes on Freudian fetishism across the fields of cultural studies, feminist theory, film studies, literary theory, queer theory, and visual culture. From within this gamut of critical re-readings, two tendencies have emerged. In broad terms, we can usefully differentiate historicizing re-contextualizing emphases, analyzing and describing fetishism's larger post-Enlightenment cultural stage, its cast of social and institutional actors, from rereadings of fetishism which analyze and expand interplays between the psychic and physical, fantasy and corporeality, desire and knowledge, subject and object in rethinking desire and sexuality. While overlaps and convergences abound, it is hardly surprising that the two tendencies articulate quite sharply distinct critical narratives about fetishism. While historicizing critics tend to resituate a still recognizable “Freud on fetishism”1 in broader and thicker (cultural, disciplinary, historical) contexts,2 that same “Freud on fetishism” becomes virtually unrecognizable, yet powerfully and resourcefully adaptable, in the work of contemporary feminisms and/or lesbian and gay studies. Here, by drawing on suggestive structural components, or contradictions, in Freud's text—particularly in the areas of disavowal, psychic investment in the material, and the fetishist's (pleasure in) ambivalence before the orthodox Freudian options—critics have read Freud against the grain. They have opened up critically transformative readings which account for non-heteronormative sexual desires, practices, and identifications otherwise illegible within—or abjected from—the available conception of desire, sexuality, and identity in psychoanalytic terms.3

Apter's Feminizing the Fetish not only imaginatively renegotiates elements of both tendencies of recent research, the historicizing and rearticulating of fetishism; she also enticingly, and energetically, extends the range a