Title: Notes on a Relationship: Fetish Object, Femininity, Historian
Abstract: For the theoretically informed historian working with the emergence of feminine subjects in the modern west the culture that developed in response to industrial modernization and was largely structured around consumerism as an economic and symbolic activity the concept of the commodity fetish contains enormous critical potential. Significantly, it is a double figure: working through what the fetish is can offer insights both into the complexities of historical subjects, and the complexities of our own historical methodologies our ways of conceptualizing the project of writing history. Attention to the quality of the fetish as a conceptual entity, for example, contains the potential to shift understandings of agency, that eternally vexing question for theoretically informed historians. It also allows feminist historians to think materiality in productive ways, and to make connections between materiality and agency that will not only info~m the history that is produced, but perhaps more crucially, and perhaps more excitingly how it is written. This, then, is a reflection on some of the methodological and, ultimately, epistemological considerations that can be pulled out of the very writing of the commodity fetish, and the recognition that these considerations can never be split from their application to historical texts or subjects.