ABSTRACT
Maternal fetishism—the problematic assayed—may be drafted iconoclastically in this vein as a female perversion defined by the mother's objectification of the child, or as a form of maternal gratification adjudged perverse by a society rife with anxiety over child abuse. Predicated on fetishism tout court, maternal fetishism is conceptually forged from practices of erotic objectification in which animate subjects forge a sexual relation to inanimate objects or live part-objects. Any new theory of maternal fetishism worth the name reverts to the phantasm of a body-in-pieces as support of the supra-phallic mother. Mary Kelly's art installation Post-Partum Document, completed in 1976, offers an interesting example of how maternal desire may be represented without recourse to the Christian iconography of the pieta or the oceanic spectacle of the mother's body. Maurice Ravel's opera, Colette's libretto, and Klein's interpretation of them are all utterly "perverse" in the strong sense in which that word functions in association with a mise-en-scene of maternal fetishism.
