Cultures of Fetishism (9 page)

Shah. Counting on the fervent religious Islamism and desperate social unrest of the lower classes, he returned and led a religious revolution that led to the defeat of the Shah, who fled to Western Europe.

In 1981, Khomeini issued a decree transforming the nation of Iran into the Islamic Republic of Iran. Soon afterward, due to a dispute over a shared waterway, the Islamic Republic of Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. From the Iranian point of view it was a war of the holy Islamics against the heathens, the Satanic forces of Hussein. This war would last eight years, killing over a million Iranians and leaving many Iranian cities and streets and homes in shambles.

Throughout these chaotic times, from 1979 until 1989 when Khomeini died of a mysterious illness, two things remained constant: the oppression of women of all classes by the Ayatollah’s ruling government, and an unabating effort to eradicate any remaining vestiges of Westernized femininity and female power. The lower-class women, most of them religious Islamics, continued to suffer their husbands’ denigrations, but after 1979 it was the previously liber- ated middle- and upper-class women who suffered the brunt of Khomeini’s fanatical de-Westernization.

Azar Nafisi, an upper-class Westernized college professor whose mother had been one of six women elected to Parliament in 1963, reports the situation in
Reading Lolita in Tehran
.
59
When she returned to Iran with her husband after studying literature in the United States, the laws governing female rights had regressed to what they had been before her grandmother’s time. After the revolution, two women who had risen to the post of cabinet minister were sentenced to death and summarily executed for warring with God and spreading prostitution.

The shah’s SAVAT had been replaced by Khomeini’s “Blood of God” mili- tia, who focused much of their attention on the improprieties of the female population. They drove around the streets in their white Toyotas trying to ensure that women were wearing their veils and chadors properly without a speck of skin showing, were not wearing makeup or fingernail polish, were not walking through the streets with men who were not family members Young women who disobeyed the official Islamic rules were thrown into the patrol cars, “taken to jail, flogged, fined and forced to wash toilets and humiliated.”
60

Nafisi tells the story of what happened to one of her female students. This story captures the essence of what happens to females in a country where the vast majority of men are oppressed and humiliated; men whose only oppor- tunity to survive and advance their careers and obtain food and shelter for their families is to become an Islamic thug, who drive around in a patrol car with a semi-automatic weapon looking for young women who don’t dress or behave like proper Islamic women.

Her student, Sanaz, a very intelligent, pretty, charming girl, did not disobey Islamic strictures. But sometimes she could be obstinate and insist on doing what she wanted—no matter what. She didn’t always listen to the advice of her parents, who lived in terror of the morality squads. She and five

of her girlfriends had gone to a villa by the Caspian Sea for a two-day holiday. The first day they were there they decided to visit a nearby villa, where the fiancé of one of the girls lived.
61

Suddenly, “they”
62
came; the morality squad had jumped over a low garden wall and surprised them. They had had a report of illegal activities and had a search warrant. Finding nothing wrong with the girls’ dress, they searched the house for alchohol, CD’s, and tapes. And, even though they found nothing, “the guards took all of them to a special jail for infractions in matters of morality.”
63

The girls were kept in a small, dark room for forty eight hours and not allowed to sleep. Members of the morality squad would come by periodically and wake them up and insult them. The girls were not allowed to call their parents. They were taken to a hospital where a female gynecologist gave them virginity tests in front of a group of male medical students. Not satisfied with the gynecologist’s verdict of innocence, the guards took them back to jail and gave the girls’ their own tests. Sanaz was too embarrassed to explain what these various tests were. Finally, Sanaz’s parents located the girls and had them set free. But not before the girls were given a summary trial where they were forced to confess to their sins against Islamic Law and each given twenty fifth lashes as punishment. Sanaz, who was wearing a T-shirt under her robe, was given some extra lashes, to make sure she really felt the pain.
64

The nation of Iran, even in the “good old days” under the Shah and his SAVAT secret police, but especially when it was transformed into the Islamic Republic of Iran, created a social order that bred and nurtured the fetishism strategy. Thus a religious belief, a social or political regime can be as much a culture of fetishism as the personal humiliations suffered by an individual, the making of films, the writing of biographies, the training of psychoanalysts, the designing of Reality TV shows that commodify human beings.

With this in mind, I return now to Freud’s “Fetishism.” I go to the three lines immediately preceding “the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small penis, the clitoris.”
65

Referring to a variation of the
coupeur des nattes
that he viewed as “a parallel to fetishism in social psychology,”
66
Freud takes his readers to “the Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated. It seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.”
67
Were husbands and lovers grateful to women for having submitted to being mutilated? How did they demonstrate their gratitude? Did their appreciation help to mitigate the woman’s pain and the torment of having been mutilated?

These unanswered questions stimulated my imagination. I wondered which features of the Chinese social psychology might have inspired a cultivation and nurturing of this custom? I wondered about the feelings of the women who had been subjected to footbinding as children. I wondered about the miseries suffered by the female children who were forced to submit to footbinding.

As a result, I became an impostor-poet. I invented a memoir, purportedly written by a woman who had her feet bound when she was a small child. I gave her the name, A-Hsui. I hoped that writing about A-Hsui’s plight, in this special way of becoming one with her, being her, and being inside her head, would offer some new insights into the cultures that breed and nourish the fetishism strategy.

T
h r e e

F
ootbinding and the
C
ultures of

F
etishism that
B
reed
I
t

So much has been written on fans and paper, Every word is soaked in blood
1

—“Song of Female Writing,”
Nu shu
*

T
he first few times I came to Freud’s lines on the mutilation of the Chinese women’s feet, I tried to imagine what it might be like, for me and for her, if a woman who had been subjected to this mutilation had come to me for psychotherapy. But eventually I realized that could not have happened. First of all, the woman would have had to question the fetishistic demands of her social order and then question her own motives for submitting to these demands. She would need to consider how she participates in perpetuating the practice of footbinding.

From early childhood she would have been told that the smaller her feet, the more she would be revered by her husband. As a child, before she achieved any of the promised advantages of her bound and mutilated feet, she might have had moments of rebellion, complaining, and crying. Occasionally she might have removed her bindings to get some relief from her pain. But after marriage, active rebellion would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible. Why would a woman, whose bound feet had brought her the promised husband, want to question the way things were? As with men who rarely question their fetishes until some time after they come to analysis for help with their job problems, insomnia, violent outbursts, or miserable marriages, a fetishized woman might begin to question her condition

*
Nu shu
is literally “female writing.” According to Ping, (pp.160–61) it is a language created by women, a secret script passed down by Chinese women for centuries. It is a syllabic representation of a local Hunan dialect.

only if she came to a psychoanalyst for some other distress: the inability to find the right kind of man, loss of her husband’s veneration and attention, headaches, insomnia, phobias, depression, or a miserable marriage. Of course, the major obstacle would be that during the centuries when all upper- class and middle-class little girls had their feet bound—by their mothers or grandmothers who also had bound feet, or by emissaries of the mother, servants whose feet were usually unbound so that they could serve their masters and mistresses—there was no psychoanalysis or anything like the psychotherapies we have today. In fact, it would have been impossible for such a treatment to have existed in the traditional Chinese culture, where centuries-old dictums discouraged sharing private thoughts and feelings, where putting emotions, feelings, and fantasies into words in the presence of a stranger would not have been acceptable.
2

There is a tradition in China that, like psychoanalysis, encourages moving away from the external or material world in order to delve into the internal domain of thought and reflection. However, even within that tradition, silence, meditation, and introspection would be valued at the expense of revealing these thoughts directly to another human being. Even writing directly in a per- sonal memoir would have been unacceptable.
3
But some forms of writing, such as writing on fans and writing on one’s body, are secret ways, women’s ways, of expressing otherwise forbidden fantasies, feelings, and thoughts.
4

Soon after I began to notice the fetishistic structure of Freud’s paper on fetishism, I read some books on footbinding. And what I learned from these readings made me even more determined to write for a woman who could not write for herself.

Footbinding is believed to have originated in China, in the twenty-first century
BC
. At that time it was confined to concubines and dancing girls and a ruler’s mistresses. The practice was infrequent among commoners and fairly localized, until the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644
AD
), when it began to spread all over China.
5
Footbinding became a widespread enthusi- asm in the late Ming period and reached its peak in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), during the mid-seventeenth century, when its popularity seemed to be a response to cultural crises arising during that time.
6
Feminist scholars attribute this crisis to the apparent increase in gender ambiguity in the previous century, which then stimulated a generalized anxiety about the erosion of a clearly defined place of women, and with it a male fear of woman’s competition for supremacy, a fear that she might subvert the patriarchal order.
7

As gender and class hierarchies were shaken up, they encouraged the spread of Neo-Confucianism. Footbinding then became an expression of the contradictions inherent in Neo-Confusionism, whose slogan was “maintain
li
(reason of the cosmos)” and “eliminate
yu
(human desire).”
8

It is sometimes said that Zhu Xi, the founder of Neo-Confucianism, intro- duced footbinding as an efficient method of keeping women in their place. By hampering women from moving around freely, he hoped to eliminate
yu
and keep women chaste. This story, true or not, reflects these fundamental

contradictions. Footbinding was designed to keep women chaste to meet the teachings of the Neo-Confucianist edict against human desire. And yet footbinding was highly eroticized. Critics of the practice of footbinding have frequently observed that the binding of women’s feet embodied “China’s oscillation between two extremes: neo-Confucian moral restraint to eliminate desires,” while everywhere a person was surrounded with “indulgence in extravagance, expenditure and sensual pleasures, particularly in food and sex.”
9
The dual nature of footbinding is a reflection of China’s oscillation between reason and indulgence, high moral purification and a corrupting of

the flesh.

I was reminded here of Foster’s essay on the fetishistic structure of the seventeenth-century “Pronk” still-lifes. You may recall that these images also reflected similar contradictions in Dutch culture. While very different in religious outlook and economic structure from the culture of seventeenth- century China, the contradictions in Dutch culture arose out of similar circumstances, as a consequence of conflicts over the dictates of religious fundamentalism and economic excess, extravagance, affluence, and financial speculation. Foster said this conflict reminded him of the contradictions in the Reaganomics of his day. Certainly that conflict has come back to life in a more virulent form in our own Bushomic era, in which the contradictions between the high moral stance of religious fundamentalism and the program of increasing the affluence of the already affluent and supporting the financial extravagances of the rich are plainly evident.