ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a look at the fetish, an iconic element of sexuality in visual culture, and introduces a theoretical framework for understanding fetishism in contemporary advertising. Advertising has become a complex societal institution, blending seamlessly into the visual landscape, invoking a range of social, cultural, and ethical issues formerly reserved for the political sphere, and implicating itself in almost all information transfer. Advertising provides a shared common experience for a majority of the world's inhabitants, and a reference point for conversation and interaction. Two compelling print advertisements provide a point of departure, highlighting the way photography reifies objects in a fetish-like manner and how advertising capitalizes on cultural stereotypes about fetishism. The chapter discusses the roles that ontological aspects of visuality and identity perform in marketing communications. Beyond a strict paradigmatic view of the fetish, basic concepts of fetish objects from psychoanalysis and anthropology contribute to our analysis.
