Abstract

This article examines a series of early works made by the British artist Rose English in relation to the psychoanalytic logic of sexual fetishism, interpreted here as a privileged mode of perversity in which certain objects or body parts become animated and overvalued with a special erotic power. Focused on English’s graduate degree show production A Divertissement (1973), at Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Department, and her performance Quadrille (1975), which took place during the open dressage competitions at the Southampton Show, I consider English’s invocation of the history of ballet and dressage, and the intersections with fantasies surrounding class, gender, sexuality, and national identity. By addressing exchanges of consumption, desire, and pleasure, I argue that English gestures towards ambivalence rather than overtly political intent, strategically employing humour and irony in her parodic appropriation of these forms of spectacular entertainment. The article also builds on the deconstruction of Freudian fetishism in feminist theory. I assert that by employing carnivalesque strategies of excess and jouissance, English both compounds and revises the androcentric structure of the fetish, in addition to unsettling the stability of gendered and sexual constructs.