ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the brilliant Othello scholarship—Paul Yachnin's in particular—which registered the sexed specificity of homicidal dispossessed love and analyzed the protagonist's emotional meltdown over his belief he had lost his wife's love as an instance of commodity fetishism. Searching for a community of listeners who will hear the suffering of lost love's victims has always been, and still remains, arduous work for femicides' feminist critics. The chapter explores different theoretical approaches to dis-affectionate fetishism as it plays out in these cases is offered as a small contribution to the feminist project of altering the normative landscape of assigned sense in matters of the heart. The really puzzling question, however, is how the received cultural script about the potentially fatal consequences of men's dispossessed love of 'their' women still has a purchase in late modernity when women are no longer de jure men's possessions.
