(investigating a cow's tongue)
Now what of the little girl, she who is, in Freudian terms, always already castrated, thus impervious to all threats of castration? How does she respond to the evidence of sexual difference, which entails or presupposes her inferiority? A careful reading of Freud's writings on female sexual development strongly suggests that many little and big girls are engaged in a rebellion against the "fact" of castration every bit as energetic as the fetishist's. Indeed, if one takes as one of the hallmarks of fetishism the split in the ego (Ichspaltung) to which the fetish bears testimony, then it becomes possible to speak...of female fetishism, for the little girl's ego can be split along the very same fault lines as the little boy's.
Naomi Schor "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand"
Like Barthes's punctum or Lacan's point technique, the superfluous, perplexing, derailing detail operates as the object of one's love, apprehension, hunger, or repulsion. It is the detail that affords a point of entry into the aesthetics of textual appropriation, an aperture or rent proceeding from a small, fixed image. Spots, tattoos, bloodstains, stigmas, scars, abrasions, hairy patches, stained clothing, worn keepsakes, fingered relics--these emerge as those details that stand out as dark symbolic concentrates in the visual field of fetishistic description.
Emily Apter Feminizing the Fetish
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