Domesticating Fantasy: S/M Fetishism, Suburban Fiction, and Coover’s Spanking the Maid

Abstract

If you type the word fetish into your Internet browser, you are sure to be rewarded by a long list of hits promising photos, streaming video, and sometimes even fiction. For the naive researcher, such a list of sites might seem like a wealth of information, testament to the wide proliferation of meaning accorded the concept of fetishism within postmodernity. Yet visiting these sites is not likely to yield an encounter with the variety of fetishes favoured by contemporary theory. You will rarely find billboards, West African totems, or locks of baby hair as the subject of Web sites devoted to fetishism. Instead, what you are likely to encounter is a profusion of images associated with theatricalized S/M¹ practices (whips, chains, leather boots, etc.) that posit a remarkably stable referent for the word fetish in the sexual register. If fetishism seems to enjoy increased cultural currency as a result of the World Wide Web, its connotative power is tightly bound to a vocabulary of sexualized images even narrower in scope, perhaps, than those established by Krafft-Ebing or Freud.

The roads are getting so super-paved and big and light and loaded with BIG MACS and HOWARD JOHNSONS that the only time people are forced into danger or reality is when they die. Death is the only reality we’ve got left in our nicey-nicey-clean-ice-cream-TV society so we’d better worship it. S & M sex.

—Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School