Free Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan Page B

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