What we’ve hinted at on Ballardian (ie JG Ballard’s Enlargement Phalloplasty; Why I Want to fuck John Howard), some people have ‘examined’ (ooh, err…nurse!) in a…ahem….’full frontal’ (ooh, vicar!) no-holds barred fashion. I picked up from our stats that a site called Fetish Fish has linked to our Bruce Sterling/JG Ballard interview in a piece on medical fetishes.
“Exactly when the term medical fetish became popular among the BDSM community is hard to determine. However, it is a widely used phrase that has been touched on by authors like J.G. Ballard, romance novelists in the romantic doctor/patient role-play scenario, filmmakers like David Cronenberg, and photographers like Romain Slocombe.
Yet, even among these diverse artists and perhaps not unlike medicine itself, there is an obvious and expansive divide among their specialized medically themed works. Slocombe appears like an ER specialist or ambulance worker as he makes a fetish art out of bandages in his ‘Broken Dolls’ series. In Deviant Desires, Katharine Gates describes his bandages as a medical version of Japanese erotic rope bondage.
Cronenberg is said to describe himself as a ‘Beverly Hills gynaecologist’ and you can see how this arises in many of his films from his use of speculums and references in Dead Ringers (1988) and to the vaginal-looking organic game in eXistenz (1999). Ballard, who is the author of the notorious novel, Crash (1973), which was, not surprisingly, turned into a film by Cronenberg in 1996, is a medical student, and his specialty seems to be forensic psychology and science. “When he is shown some kind of techno-social-medical innovation, he’s always trying to peel it back and understand it from the unconscious urgings that power it.”
All of these artists are avant-garde and just like anything that’s avant-garde or taboo, it eventually moves into the popular imagination. Through these artists, we can certainly see how fetishism plays a role and particularly how medical fetishism may have appeared more prevalently in popular and porn culture since the early seventies.”