Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

These are two very dissimilar books on similar topics. Fetishism, which accompanies an exhibition touring England, is a sloppy attempt to link the West African tradition of "power object" fetishism with 20th-century surrealism and Western sexual fetishes. The book's four dense essays perfectly reflect the overwrought quality of the artwork in the show. The best part of the book is a brief history of African power figure sculpture accompanied by a section of fine colorplates displaying these eerie aboriginal works. Other essays, covering surrealist fetishism and evidence of the broader acceptance of alternative sexuality in contemporary art, fall flat with excessive intellectualizing and overreliance on Freudian theory. These selections of artwork lack focus, and the reader is left unconvinced that any continuum exists between the anonymous carvers of West Africa and today's sexually frank culture. Steele, who teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology, ably describes the connections between fetishism and fashion by assembling evidence from the last 200 years of Western social and psychological history. In a detached, tactful, and nonproselytizing tone, she catalogs such variations in sexual expression as tight-lacing, shoe fetishes, transvestism, and "leathersex." Steele quotes from pornography as well as ostensibly more legitimate academic writings and lists in her bibliography such titles as the American Journal of Psychiatry, Bizarre Shoes and Boots, and the Natural Rubber Company Catalogue. In all, her short book is a worthwhile purchase for larger libraries not already owning David Kunzle's more thorough 1982 study, Fashion and Fetishism.‘Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.