A potentially controversial suggestion that women fetishize food, among other things. Hoping to ``dismantle certainties about what constitutes perversity,'' with the ultimate goal of expanding the limits of sexual diversity, British academics Gammon (Cultural Studies and Product Design/Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design) and Makinen (History of Ideas/Middlesex Univ.) review the history of fetishism and describe three types: anthropological, commodity, and sexual. They further posit a fourth type, food fetishism, most clearly linked with the sexual. The authors propose stages, or intensities, for all four categories of fetishism, for which the definitions vary and are theoretically difficult, but have in common a ``process of disavowal...objects in our culture take on meanings that connect them to, or stand in for, other meanings and associations.'' The easiest category to comprehend is the sexual, when an object (such as a shoe) is used instead of a person for sexual pleasure. The authors devote a significant amount of text to ruling out things that are frequently thought of as fetishes, and other things that could be. Despite the widely recognized phallocentric bias of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, they remain at least partially within its framework, even though Freud believed that fetishes grew out of male castration anxiety and thus didn't believe that women had fetishes. The authors maintain that women have always fetishized in a variety of ways, and they provide a persuasive theoretical argument that women fetishize food, pointing to the widespread phenomenon of eating disorders in the Western world. They end with a reading of fetishism that suggests postmodernism has as much to offer to the understanding of women and fetishism as does psychoanalytic theory. Their valiant effort to read women into psychoanalytic theory mixes in postmodern analyses in an attempt to acknowledge the full range of female fetishism. Intriguing and almost—but not quite—persuasive. (13 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-8147-3071-X
Page Count: 236
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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