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In this paper the author discusses three works of video art featured in the Technologies of Romance symposium held at the Science Museum, London, in 2018. The author searches within video art, as a genre or medium, within its technical apparatuses and within the three particular works, for contributions to the particular notion of ‘object love’ as drawn from a paper by Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess (2014). The author interprets the three video artists’ works with the aim of gleaning comparative examples that might illustrate or extend the ‘object love’ concept. Mathilde Roman’s book (2016) on the ‘staging’ of video art is an influence on the text, as are two short but profound statements by Walter Benjamin, one from his Theses on a Philosophy of History (1940), another from his essay on Surrealism (1929). History, ‘the past’, museology and ‘object love’ are all woven into the core of the article. As it moves towards its conclusion the author is inspired by the image of an empty, machine-made stocking (a classic symbol of Freudian fetishism) in Elizabeth Price’s video K, in such a way that the article ends by skewing both the idea of ‘object’, and that of ‘love’ in the direction of the fetish, while concluding that the past – just as much as any particular object from or of the past – tends to be subject to fetishisation. Meanwhile, video’s relative immateriality as an art medium, and its current use by artists, is seen as representative of an age of image-based archival practices that, assisted by digital technology, might now divert traditional, object-based processes of the museum – a shift that might be summed up in the phrase ‘screen becomes vitrine’. This shift, from vitrined objects to screened images might then, in turn, have implications for the ‘object love’ that initially interested Geoghegan and Hess and which began the author’s article and this dialogue with the Science Museum. This paper was published in Science Museum Journal's special 'Technologies of Romanc edition, which was based on, and featured several papers from a day-long symposium at the museum to celebrate the launch of my 2018 book 'Technologies of Romance - Part II. Both the symposium event and the spcieal edition of the journal featured my own paper and contributions from leading academics, curators and artists drawn from CSM, ScienceMuseum and beyond.

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love (1924) has been a rich text to explore the possibilities of social critique inherent in formalist novels because of the deep nexus it exhibits between its narrat...

Até que ponto a experiência do leitor de livros juvenis subjuga-se ao esteticismo padrão imposto pela lógica do mercado editorial hegemônico que visa não apenas à obtenção de lucro? A hipótese deste artigo considera que o público consumidor tem sua sensibilidade estética reduzida a uma condição heterônoma. A partir de uma hermenêutica teórico-crítica, fundamentada na filosofia de Theodor Adorno, o objeto de análise é a lista (2014 a 2018) das obras “infantojuvenis” mais vendidas no Brasil, problematizada a partir do conceito de fetichismo da mercadoria cultural. Por meio de uma negação determinada da cultura afirmativa que tece loas a livros de consumo rápido, defende-se que no âmbito da dinâmica contraditória da realidade escolar residem as condições possíveis para se abalar o princípio do valor de troca, imperativo categórico que se sobrepõe à formação estética para a autonomia.

Based on a critical visual analysis of the scopophilia, body fetishism, and commodity culture, I attempt to deconstruct representations of the huge derrières of two actresses in Ghallywood and Nollywood. The analysis pays attention to how cinematographic elements of composition, color, and lighting in selected films the two actresses have starred reinforce the myth of the butt as a signifier of economic and socio/cultural capital. The article raises concerns over whether the hyper-sexualization of West African films points to a transgressive rupture of the industry or a subversive culture of the African ethos of decency.

How a social science of big data would look like? In this article, we exemplify such a social science through a number of cases. We start our discussion with the epistemic qualities of big data. We point out to the fact that contrary to the big data champions, big data is neither new nor a miracle without any error nor reliable and rigorous as assumed by its cheer leaders. Secondly, we identify three types of big data: natural big data, artificial big data and human big data. We present and discuss in what ways they are similar and in what other ways they differ. The assumption of a homogenous big data in fact misleads the relevant discussions. Thirdly, we extended 3 Vs of the big data and add veracity with reference to other researchers and violability which is the current author’s proposal. We explain why the trinity of Vs is insufficient to characterize big data. Instead, a quintinity is proposed. Fourthly, we develop an economic analogy to discuss the notions of data production, data consumption, data colonialism, data activism, data revolution, etc. In this context, undertaking a Marxist approach, we explain what we mean by data fetishism. Fifthly, we reflect on the implications of growing up with big data, offering a new research area which is called as developmental psychology of big data. Finally, we sketch data resistance and the newly proposed notion of omniresistance, i.e. resisting anywhere at any occasion against the big brother watching us anywhere and everywhere.

Cross-dressing is the wearing of clothes traditionally worn by members of the other sex. It is a practice documented for centuries, and one often linked stereotypically with perversion, fetishism, ...

This paper examines the 'fetishism of numbers' (Gudeman, 1998, p.1) that has taken hold in restructured, market-oriented institutions of higher education. As all areas of academic life have been rendered down to the quantifiable, and university environments have become dominated by the rituals of counting, numbers have been imbued with a potency of almost preternatural proportions. The points of comparison between the power ascribed to the numerical in diverse mystical, magical practices and the overriding significance accorded to numbers in restructured universities are explored. When the near-obsessive focus on numbers is viewed as a form of fetishism, some of the reasons why numbers have been elevated to a position of excessive importance come to the fore, as does the illogical nature of such reasoning. Although numbers have been valorized on account of their ostensible accuracy, transparency, objectivity and impartiality, this study contends that the present-day fetishism of numbers in higher education is neither rational nor practical. Neither does it ensure fairness and accuracy. Instead, it stems from and fosters delusion, deception, inequity and irrationality, vanity and greed.

This internet-based study provided exploratory analyses on 99 asexual and 1919 non-asexual members of the Adult Baby/Diaper Lover (ABDL) community. This study involved the secondary analysis of an ...

It is our contention that the process of higher education could be read as a commodity and in both Marxian and Freudian assumptions, a fetish. Instrumental in this discussion are; Marx’s theorising of the commodity fetish (1867) that deceives by conflating the distinction between use and exchange value, and Freud’s (1927) re-visiting of his theory of fetishism, where he considers the fetish in the context of dealing with separation and loss in everyday life. This paper highlights how the consequence of fetishised behaviour has led to violent outcomes, such as the policy decision to introduce a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF). We argue that the TEF may bring about the death of learning in HE and diminish the role of academic staff. Nevertheless, influenced by Winnicott, Cixous and Biesta, we offer a more hopeful ‘Teaching that is Good Enough Framework’.\ud Keywords: Fetish, Commodity fetish, Higher Education, Teaching, Learning, TEF.

This article foregrounds the ways in which members of the Quantified Self ascribe value and meaning to the data they generate in self-tracking practices. We argue that the widespread idea that what draws self-trackers to numerical data is its perceived power of truth and objectivity—a so-called “data fetishism”—is limiting. Using an ethnographic approach, we describe three ways in which self-trackers attribute meaning to their data-gathering practices which escape this data fetishist critique: self-tracking as a practice of mindfulness, as a means of resistance against social norms, and as a communicative and narrative aid. In light of this active engagement with data, we suggest that it makes more sense to view these practitioners as “ quantifying selves.” We also suggest that such fine-grained accounts of the appeal that data can have, beyond its allure of objectivity, are necessary if we are to achieve a fuller understanding of Big Data culture.

Research and clinical practice tends to focus on the solitary aspect of sexual object fetishism. In the current studies, we explore the interpersonal aspect of sexual object fetishism. Study 1 was an online survey of individuals with self-identified clothing fetishes (N = 57). Results suggested that most participants had engaged in fetish sexual activities with another person and that a majority of participants preferred the fetishised clothing item being worn by another person. Participants were also highly specific when describing the characteristics of their preferred partner for fetish sexual activities, including the relationship to the participant, gender, age and attractiveness. Study 2 was another online survey of participants with self-identified sexual object fetishes (N = 195). The majority of participants reported having engaged in both solitary and partnered fetish behaviour. Solitary fetish activity was, on average, rated as sexually satisfying and partnered fetish activity was, on a...

This article will analyse the use of costume in heterosexual soft-core pictorial pornography. It will focus on the British website onlyallsites.com, which will be positioned as offering a materiality to costume that goes beyond the dressing of the female body. Building on this author’s wider work around clothing and pornography, and previous work on the sociocultural meaning of underwear and fetishism,it will situate its case study within the context of a ‘British erotic’ and emphasize the key role that costume plays in the construction of soft-core pornographic representations.

Prospero’s renunciation of his book in The Tempest acknowledges its power as a kind of ‘fetish’. This essay traces the idea of the book as ‘commodity fetish’ and as material text. The argument examines how post-Marxist thought, in a new reading of Louis Althusser, might be used to challenge the Shakespeare of late capitalism. It suggests how a complex reading of the fetish in historiography, combining a history of the material book in Shakespeare, with a theoretical reading of William Pietz, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Stallybrass, sheds light on the First Folio, one of the most famous – and fetishized – books in history.

The New Zealand Internet Party tested key notions of affective media politics. Embracing techno-solutionism and the hacker politics of disruption, Kim Dotcom’s party attempted to mobilize the digital natives through an irreverent politics of lulz. While an electoral failure the party’s political discourse offers insights into affective media ontology. The social character of affective media creates the political conditions for an antagonistic political discourse. In this case affective identification in the master signifier “The Internet” creates a community of enjoyment threatened by the enemy of state surveillance as an agent of rapacious jouissance. The Internet Party’s politics of lulz was cast as a left-wing techno-fix to democracy, but this rhetoric belied a politics of cyberlibertarianism. Dotcom’s political intervention attempted to conflate his private interests as a battle that elevates him to the status of cyberlibertarian super-hero in the mold of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.

Smartphones and other mobile communication devices are promoted with promises of enhancing professional competence and individual freedom in working life, and in work–life balance. However, an emerging stream of research demonstrates that the adoption of such technologies is accompanied by increasing stress, collective control and work intensification. This article provides a discussion of recent research on the effects of smartphone usage in contemporary organizational life. Generally, this research presents a contradiction between, on the one hand, the discourse on technologies as a means to enhance individual autonomy and competence and, on the other hand, the de facto incorporation of technology users in networks of control and an unhealthy work culture of permanent connectivity. Finding inspiration in the work of Slavoj Žižek and his development of psychoanalytical concepts, this article offers an alternative approach to this issue. It does so by reconsidering how to understand employee subjectivity and, specifically, why employees voluntarily embrace company-sponsored smartphones although they are fully aware of the damage that this technology creates in their personal lives.

This essay argues that ‘idolatry’ and the discourse surrounding it played a seminal role in thinking India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – similar to the role played by ‘fetishism’ in ...

This paper approaches "El queso del quechua," the Spanish-language translation of Brazilian writer Glauco Mattoso’s short story "O quitute do quíchua," on the basis of certain central concepts: fetishism, anthropophagy, blindness, coprophagy, and sadomasochist entelechy. It intends to analyze the book itself, released by an Argentine cartonera publishing house, as an object, as well as the story contained within it. Cecilia Palmeiro translated the work, having already published research on the relationship between Mattoso’s work and the consumption of waste. This paper explores the relation between the academy and the cultural field, as well as the presence of a living, acting, mutable, and performative element in Mattoso’s literature.

The recent review on fetishism by Ventriglio, Bhat, Torales and Bhugra contained material based on a hoax in its opening paragraph (i.e., that a British man had been caught having sex with a tractor and had been placed on the country’s Sex Offender Register). If the authors wanted to highlight cases of individuals having sexual (paraphilic) relationships with inanimate objects there are a number in the scientific literature that could have been used rather than unsubstantiated stories in the print media. Scholars and researchers should (i) not believe everything they read in newspapers as facts, (ii) try to verify the source of information from non-peer-reviewed sources, and (iii) should try to use examples from the peer-reviewed scientific literature to highlight relevant case studies rather than resort to the print media.

[spa] El propósito del presente estudio consiste en pensar el funcionamiento del cine y sus dimensiones políticas a partir de una lectura cruzada de Benjamin y Derrida. En primer lugar, se analizarán algunas lecturas críticas de La obra de arte en la era de su reproductibilidad técnica, con especial acento a los conceptos de aura y fantasmagoría. En segundo lugar, se valorarán los modos en que el cine resulta un aparato con potencial emancipador, para cuestionar planteamientos metafísicos inherentes a su concepción política como su capacidad ideológica de velar o desvelar la realidad o el fetichismo de las imágenes. Finalmente, se recurrirá a los conceptos derridianos de espectro, huella e injerto para hallar en el cinematógrafo un potencial político consistente en la producción de una alteración de la sensibilidad y de nuevas condiciones para la experiencia., [eng] The aim of this study is to think about the political dimensions of cinema and its technical functioning through a cross-reading of Benjamin and Derrida. Firstly, the paper will analyze several critical readings of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, with emphasis on concepts such as aura and phantasmagoria. Secondly, it will tackle the ways in which cinema becomes a machine with emancipatory possibilities. This evaluation will question the metaphysical assumptions inherent to cinema's political conception, such as its ideological ability to veil or unveil reality and the fetishism of filmic images. Finally, the study will invoke the Derridian concepts of specter, trace, and graft, in order to find a political dimension of cinema consisting in the production of an alteration of sensibility and of new conditions of experience. Keywords: Derrida ; Benjamin ; cinema ; specter ; phantasmagoria ; politicization of art

The sexual physical act is related to sexual attraction, sexual fantasy and sexual behaviour. Fetish has been recognised as an attraction to objects with the aim of achieving sexual gratification. There have been historical accounts of fetishism, and the subject has been of significant interest to clinicians especially those who work in the field of managing mental illnesses. There are various types of fetishism. Reported for the first time in the 19th century, the condition is of various subtypes. Of these, fetishistic disorder can be recognised as sexual fantasies, sexual urges and sexual behaviours which cause significant distress or impairment in an individual in social, occupational or other important areas of function. Fetishism may be related to specific body parts, non-living objects or others. In clinical settings, patients with fetishistic disorders are often referred because of having got into trouble with the law. Fetishism needs to be differentiated from paraphilias. Various explanations including psychoanalysis and behavioural theories have been offered to explain the genesis and management of fetishistic disorders. A fetish is attraction to an object. Treatments can include behavioural, cognitive or psychoanalytic strategies. In this review article, a brief overview on the fetish is offered with suggestions for management.

Paraphilia is still not widely known by the public. Lack of information about paraphilia is a serious concern of the Makassar City Government. This is because there are 12 types of paraphilia and some of them are contagious diseases such as fetishism, transvestism, sadomasochism, pedophilia, transsexualism, voyeurism, exhibitionism. There are several paraphilia diseases that are difficult to distinguish. The nature of paraphilia can be seen by society through its given (nature) and caused by environmental influences. In this study, the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) method has been applied to categorize the disease. The dataset used is derived from observations of 250 datasets. The dataset is divided into two, training data (165) and testing data (70). Based on the experiment, the k-NN method has an accuracy of Confusion Matrix of 8l%. On the other hand, the k-NN method is able to classify 12 venereal diseases quite accurately. Thus, this method was good as an alternative method for the classification task. For future research, optimization of the application will be performed to increase the accuracy of kNN.

The recent emergence of e-readers and e-books has b\ud rought the death of the book to the centre of \ud current debates on new media. In this article, we a\ud nalyse alternative narratives that surround the \ud possibility of the disappearance of print books, do\ud minated by fetishism, fears about the end of \ud humanism, and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progre\ud ss. We argue that, in order to comprehend \ud such narratives, we need to inscribe them in the br\ud oader history of media. The emergence of new \ud media, in fact, has often been accompanied by narra\ud tives about the possible disappearance of \ud older media: the introduction of television, for in\ud stance, inspired claims about the forthcoming \ud death of film and radio. As a recurrent narrative s\ud haping the reception of media innovation, the \ud myth of the disappearing medium helps us to make se\ud nse of the transformations that media \ud change provokes in our everyday life.

Commodities play an integral role in the creation and maintenance of personas - to such a degree that they begin to take on characteristics of labor, provenance, and politics, such as distressed clothing or fair trade labels. This essay proposes that we have begun to freight our commodities with their own personas and imagined subjecthoods, and that this shift is foreshadowed in the transformation of artistic practices in the late twentieth century.Two theories on the status of contemporary artworks have come to recent prominence - David Joselit’s “Painting Beside Itself,” which argues that artworks need image not just their status as commodities but rather their circulation and [social] networks, and Isabelle Graw’s claim that artworks are being reconsidered as imaginary “quasi-subjects.” Thus, artworks are being equated with persons, not by their looks but by their actions. This new apprehension of objects finds its own roots in American sculptural debates of minimalism in the late 1960’s, where theorists resorted to ascribing subjectivities to objects to account for the relentless anthropomorphism of even those works which attempted to fully excise the human form.Proponents of “quasi-subjecthood” argue from two tacks: the object either is a subject of its own, or is propped on the “ghostly presence” of its maker. I believe this indicates two predominant characterizations of commodities: full subjects, or signs of an absent maker. Both arguments flirt with a fetishism that, in giving personas and personalities to objects, threatens to erase the social conditions in which each object is made. However, there may be a way in which these imaginaries can be harnessed as prosthetics for our communities. This essay explores possible avenues for artists and critics to create ethical objects for societies of art.

Be Kind Rewind, as spoken by the film's title, one may understand the trick that hides behind as Rewind is also associated with the same consonance Remind telling us a film that shares the collective memory of the public. The concept of the Society of Spectacle is brought forward by Guy Debord in 1970s, which he sheds lights on the class alienation, commodification of cultural products, Debord (7) as well as the role of mass media's metamorphosis in staging the so called "reality" on TV, is considered to be a mainstream channel in 1970s-1980s for people to obtain the news and enjoy entertainment. With this concept, we draw the central theme of discussing this with the film Be Kind Rewind in which it stages how the antique video rental store is forced to be demolished and the adventure that the new generation helps renew the product and share the collective memory, going back to the theme of commodity fetishism that Jappe (16) put forward. From the view point of Theodor Adorno, "in psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggeration" and for film as a product, it also echoes with the idea of fetishism that stated by Wall (22). Here, the conflict of urbanization and modern development makes it an echo to the concept of the spectacle of making the class alienated through the commodification process of video rental store and also alienates the old people from the rapid development of the modern city. With the revival of reshooting the film with no budget, it connects closely to the concept of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction that Walter Benjamin put forward that the unique existence of the work of the art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence, according to Benjamin (3). Most importantly, while we watch this film, the real life example that happens in Hong Kong media industry would be Asia Television Limited (ATV) that they stage their "Rescue Our ATV Show" in order to save their company by attracting the "potential investors". While this case connects with the aforementioned film, we can see actually what happen in real life is the opposite. Nostalgia turns into a ridicule. From Jameson (15), postmodernism that the modernist engagement with art and culture is lost in the recycling of things, past full of sentiments, but devoid of the critique, reflections. The television under such circumstance is not limited to provide information and showing the greatest entertainment programme but becomes a spectacle to ask for money yet not in a glamourous and commoditized manner. In light of this, this research is going to explore how mechanical reproduction alienates our society from the real life and how commodification of cultural product especially in Hong Kong TV industry make themselves become the spectacle in this day and age by carrying out content and textual analysis of the above mentioned cases. It would offer a theoretical contribution in which society of spectacle not only brings the success of TV industry but also actually polarizes the TV industry into the "mass" product and only through exposing its weakness to the audiences as to save the reputation and attract upcoming investors.

This paper aims to look into the future of Filipino culture in the face of culture industry through the investigation and critique of the popular literature today. The researcher tries to contextualize the fetishism of music in Adorno’s The Culture Industry and the role of the mass media in the proliferation of the prevalent type of reading materials that they call “literature” but does not qualify to be called as such. This paper will be divided into four parts: introduction of culture industry and the role of mass media, the fetish character of music, the fetish character of literature, and conclusion. Keywords Culture Industry, Fetishism, Filipino Culture, Filipino Pop Literature

Smart growth is a comprehensive version of spatial planning that can guide sustainable development and tackle negative social and environmental consequences of urbanization. In this paper we explore how an integration of spatial planning and place branding strategies can further the concept of smart growth and improve its chance at implementation. A review of the parallel evolutions of place branding and smart growth shows their shared interest in comprehensive visions, sensitivity for narratives of place and self, and the proposed embedding in participatory governance. The concept of layered and segmenatary commodification offers a novel perspective on value creation in smart growth and helps to develop new forms of smart growth, that combine and integrate elements of spatial planning and place branding.

This article will apply a psychoanalytical reading to suburbia, claiming that boredom is the trigger of abjection. The focus will be on the theories of Julia Kristeva, and the short story “Attractive Modern Homes,” by Elizabeth Bowen, the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, and Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch. The first section will examine boredom as a modern phenomenon, developed from the ennui of the cities as a coping mechanism for suburbia. This article will suggest that boredom itself cannot be perceived as a state. Instead, it is only when an event penetrates boredom that this state can be recognized and radicalized. These events will be explored as examples of Kristeva's “primal repressions.” The second section will explore the abject and the emergence of the Real, focusing on moments of abjection in the sources. Within these, the abject is portrayed as a pantomime of death, bound to the confrontation with mortality. However, there can be no escape from the symbolic order, and the conventions of suburbia are maintained. The final section will study the fetishism of language, resulting in isolation from self.

Georges Bataille's first text, “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” is in many ways not quite part of his oeuvre. Virtually unknown until after the author's death, its religiosity is generally considered an aberration in the context of his other writings. Yet traces of this text and the sentiment that inspired it can be found in an undercurrent of silent mourning that runs through many of his early articles on art and literature. Against the strong presence of the eye in the conceptual universe that Bataille constructs during the interwar period, this essay delineates a metaphorical order that centers on the ear, revealing an enduring sense of what can be described as a non-sacrificial, melancholy fetishism, in contrast with the orgiastic exuberance of sacrifice that dominates his work.

A boy with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) presented with a fetish for and the subsequent stealing of female undergarments. He was predominantly inattentive and had been a slow learner. Psychological tests showed that he had significant cognitive and inattention problems without significant hyperactivity, and was at risk of dyslexia as well as conduct disorder.

Pfizer, manufacturer of the erectile dysfunction prescription treatment Viagra, has been a staple in the pharmaceutical advertising arena since broadcast versions of such ads became legally permissible in the United States in 1997. Given that the patent for Viagra is soon set to expire, it is important that research take a look back in an attempt to contextualize the brand’s place in shaping medicinal marketing culture. Of particular interest is the period beginning in 2014, when Viagra’s most unconventional campaign yet began using a tactic that was the first of its kind for the pharmaceutical industry. By removing the actual consumer of the medication from these ads (males), Viagra has paved the way for pharmaceutical advertising to target the medicinal partner. This manuscript reviews the first use of the medicinal partner in the pharmaceutical advertising sector, conducting a textual analysis of Viagra’s use of this mediated relationship. The medicinal partner is the pharmaceutical industry’s attempt to target a patient’s social circle in an effort to promote a discourse that suggests a medicinal remedy for a problem. This analysis describes how social meaning and relationships underlie the market transaction of obtaining a prescription, as has been previously established through the processes of medicalization and pharmaceutical fetishism. These advertisements create belief in the larger sense, meaning Pfizer is infiltrating upon the patient’s process of choice and consumption of medicinal remedies. Viagra is simultaneously encouraging male consumers to celebrate the brand while using female ambassadors to influence the decision to request medicinal intervention.

South African higher education institutions have been grappling with the challenges of transformation and decolonisation as a result of the 2015–2016 student protests calling into focus issue of access (both formal and epistemological), belonging, social justice, transformation and others. One of the key sites for this struggle for transformation has been curriculum and the notion of relevance in responding to the development of social reality. Political Science as a discipline has increasingly been confronted with an ‘existential crisis’ with scholars in the field asking critical questions on whether the discipline has reached a point of irrelevance to social reality. Three key critiques of political science as a discipline are discussed in this article – firstly, the critique that political science is obsessed with what has been termed ‘methodological fetishism’ in being unable to embrace new knowledge. Secondly, that political science tends to construct universal theories and concepts that assume global homogeneity and de-emphasise the importance of context and locality in knowledge, knowledge production and its experiences. Thirdly, and the central point of this article, the social disconnection between political science as a field and its [in]ability to make a socio-economic contribution to society. This article suggests that genopolitics allows us to critically reflect on and respond to the above notions of relevance in political science by looking at the role of genes played in political behaviour and genetic dispositions to see and analyses how people, communities and societies behave in the ways that illuminate our understanding of social reality.

This essay uses the historical framework of late twentieth-century advertising to understand issues of characterization in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. Given DeLillo’s prior career as a copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather, as well as a large body of scholarship that analyzes his novels in relationship to issues of political economy and American culture, this essay seeks to not only deepen an understanding of the historical issues that surround DeLillo’s work, but also the political implications of his writing. What is at stake in this project is the treatment of White Noise not only as a realistic “view of life in contemporary America” on par with Jean Baudrillard’s America (Wilcox 3246), but as a rebuke of the commodity fetishism central to the capitalist mode of production.

Розглянуто модні тенденції в субкультурах, які впливають на молодіжний стиль. Досліджено різноманітність елементів, використаних для створення нового костюма, який складається зі змішаних стилів. Перші тенденції простежуються у творчості Ів Сен-Лорана, таким чином елементи стилю субкультури стали найвідомішими завдяки високій моді. У середині ХХ ст. відбулися найважливіші зміни: перехідний період до постіндустріального суспільства, невирішені питання кордонів між чоловічою та жіночою модою, колективна ідентичність, модний фетишизм тощо., The aim of this paper is to explore an impact of fashion on the spread of fetishism of youth subcultures though the fashionable trends. The author considers a permanent tendency in setting fashionable boundaries and destroying ones.Research methodology. This study is based on the analysis of fashion and cultural practices, the latest papers on the subject have been reviewed.Results. The author explores the metaphorical meaning of a costume, which gives non-verbal information and is an example of modern fetishism. Practically, fashion is barrier of inaccessibility. It is a very attractive social phenomenon. In this case the lifestyle becomes the direct embodiment of its tool and clothes. Clothes have a clear meaning in the youth space. Thus, current fashion takes forces for creating tendencies, fetishes, and words. While the traditional functional capabilities by things are losing popularity, more attention is given to ideas, freaks, additional meaning of a costume.Novelty. An attempt is made in this paper to show alternative ways of studying the subcultures by using such an aspect as fashionable tendencies. The role of fashion in designing different styles is indicated. This material gives an idea of the influence of fashionable tendencies on the spread of a costume of subcultures.The practical significance. Ukrainian educators, officials, common people may find the information contained in this article useful for developing a new strategy of education, tolerance attitude, youth policy.

In the introduction to their book on Hollywood cinema, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner focus on the relationship between film and social history. Stressing the discourses that structure both cinema and society, they emphasize the connections between the systems of filmic and social representation. The reading of Blue Velvet as an allegory is particularly interesting in light of Jochen Schulte-Sasse's definition of postmodern art as no longer overcoming the separateness of art and life. The attempt to locate an extra-narrative typological framework recuperates the functional significance of this film for this particular set of (re)viewers. In addition to exposing the fetishization of woman in cinema, Blue Velvet is itself a filmic fetish that unconsciously inscribes and parodies psychological/cinematic fetishism throughout the film. The film has been described by reviewer Pauline Kael as "David Lynch's unconscious", and, indeed, it seems quite consciously to foreground issues of memory and forgetfulness, origin and loss.

This chapter outlines the growth of the value of the autism diagnosis in the U.S. from an economic and comparative perspective. The existing international literature on the economics of autism almost exclusively concerns medical and therapeutic costs, estimates of loss of productivity of caregivers, supported employment, and residential care, rather than the dynamic construction of value. In contrast, this chapter focuses on how the economics of autism are linked to the changing concept of autism. The chapter illustrates how the economics of autism goes beyond dollars and their flows to the analysis of how financial interests help constitute not just costs but forms of knowledge. Topics covered include: the rise of therapeutic specializations, the survival of which requires a steady stream of new autism diagnoses; special education litigation, which disproportionately involves cases of autism; and the role of family wealth in diagnosis. These topics help to demonstrate that the concept of autism, as way of organizing a wide-ranging spectrum of individual skills and challenges, has taken on an unanticipated and often masked economic power. The final section of the chapter theorizes autism as a new sacred object, fetishized in the interests of an emerging “autism industrial complex.”

This study aims at analyzing Hemingway's selected novels and short stories in order to discover their common ground in terms of the masochistic properties. The overriding questions concerning this paper will center on the multiple ways in which Hemingway's sexual fluidity contribute to the formation of the masochistic behavior in his writings and also the degree to which masochistic properties contributed to the aesthetic and literal values of his writings. This paper concentrates on the specific elements of masochism which pertain most to the texts, including symbiosis/separation dichotomy (closely related to the theme of humiliation), fetishism, pain, violence and death. The author wishes to unveil the oft-hidden submissive and feminine characteristics of the masculine characters that abound in Hemingway’s writings.

What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whosesatisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in theworld of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizationalfetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasimagicalfascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about. We offer severalcontributions. First, we demonstrate the pertinence of (primarily anthropological) theories of the fetish toorganizational sensemaking. Second, we describe a distinctive process of organizational market sensemakingthat is sensuous, magical, and analogical. Third, we offer a subtle critique of commercial ethnography, apopular research practice that aims to bring ‘real’ consumers to life inside the firm.

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Theophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subver...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the mountains of western North Carolina in the 1970s and early 1980s, summer Saturday nights brought out square dancers and doggers. Absent of specialized shoes or frilly petticoated outfits, the dancers only needed an empty barn, a bluegrass band, a caller, and an even number of couples to take the floor. A young Belgian man from Wisconsin discovered the region's barn dances that night. He had grown up on polkas and had come to the mountains as an engineer for a new industrial plant. The band learned "Roll Out the Barrel" for him and the man learned every complicated figure the caller sang out. He met a woman there whose family had lived in the mountains since the 1780s. They married, had a daughter, and together they attended the dances each summer. Returning home at one in the morning, they arrived at their 1960s suburban house located one mile up a steep mountain. Everyone put on pajamas while he pulled out his chrome-plated electric waffle maker, and before bed he made a breakfast feast for all. Too late for dinner, too early for breakfast, exhausted and energized from music, dancing, and late night adventures, the family added scrambled eggs, syrup, bacon and leftovers to the waffle supper. Were they Appalachian waffles? Does such a thing exist in the popular consciousness? Were they Belgian waffles? They were not what is marketed under the name today--not thick, not covered with whipped cream, not made on a machine stamped with the word. Buttermilk, some cornmeal, and fresh butter turned out crispy, light, and perfectly thin waffles that restored body and soul after a long night of Appalachian dancing and music. The satisfied family tumbled into bed in the wee hours of the night. For Christmas mornings, the same family crawled out of bed well before dawn, in the dark of the cold night. They had to get ready to go to the woman's mother's house for country breakfast. Some years there was a pretense of calling it "Christmas brunch," but the fancy phrase obscured the fact that if you were not there in line with your plate by 7:45 a.m., you missed out. For the family that lived more than thirty minutes away from their destination, quickly exploring a few treasures from Santa, packing gifts, and donning Christmas finery under warm winter coats before piling into the car for the long drive meant early mornings indeed. Upon reaching the bright lights of the house and navigating the driveway packed with relatives' vehicles, the sleepy family piled into the kitchen. Heat wafting from the stove collided with cold mountain air streaming from the porch. The stove had cast iron skillets and dutch ovens covering every eye--eggs scrambling, bacon crackling, grits simmering, and chicken frying. Gravy was nearby; biscuits were in the oven; ham was already on the table. Family members brought homemade jellies, jams, honey, and cane syrup. Coconut cakes, fruitcakes, divinity, fudge, and other holiday candies and desserts sat ready. The chickens were store-bought and the stove was electric in the 1970s, but little else had changed in the preparation of the fried chicken. Was it Appalachian fried chicken? It was not thickly coated in crunchy layers, not always divided into perfectly sized pieces, not what one finds in restaurants or cookbooks today. Yet buttermilk, a little cornmeal, and lard turned out crispy, juicy, and perfectly cooked pieces that celebrated the season as thoroughly as the tree, stockings, and hymns. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Recently, I was asked to join a discussion on authenticity and nostalgia in southern food studies. My task was to talk about Appalachian chicken and waffles. The previous two paragraphs are as close as I can come to a personal engagement with the dish; my father is the Belgian polka/square dance aficionado, and my grandmother on my mother's side hosted those Christmas feasts, though try as I might I cannot conjure a night where the post-square dance waffles and the pre-dawn chicken trek coincided to make a single dish. …