Ms Amanda de Clifford
Amanda is a postgraduate student in English where she is completing her Masters dissertation on consumerism, sexual desire and the feminine subject, from psychoanalytic and materialist perspectives. Her study includes investigations of particular sites of consumption, among these the women's sex emporium, women's fashion retail, and Sexpo, an annual trade fair of sex paraphernalia.
Chasing the Nylon
In this paper, I look at some of the ways that the female body is fashioned as phallic. I argue that there is a cultural desire to attach a prosthetic penis to the feminine subject, and this desire is played out in the world of fashion and consumption. I follow the feminine subject into Venuss Envy, a women's emporium in inner city Melbourne. She who shops tries on a nurse's uniform, bunny ears and leopard print underpants. She submerges herself within a dazzling array of fetish objects, touching latex, feather and fur, purchasing a jewel encrusted tiara and a pair of kitten heels. What does this shopper see in these objects, and what do they say about the production of the feminine subject within the logic of capital? What is she pursuing in these sexualized costumes, and is she wishing to cover a lack? Do we find here a desire to fulfill a lack via shopping? Do we find in Venuss Envy examples of what Slavoj Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal? In "The Sublime Object of Ideology", Zizek considers the Freudian notion of the phallic mother, a figure articulated by the following statement: "I know that mother has not got a phallus, but still...(I believe she has got one)". Chasing the Nylon illustrates how nuances of the phallic mother are laced throughout the realm of fashion and fetish.
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