EVAN DUNN, MSW, ASW
Fetishist is part of an installation art piece that came out of my semester- long graduate course on the DSM V. The installation consists of texts from the DSMV’s paraphilic disorders mounted to the wall with disruptive aesthetic devices.
In Fetishist the official diagnostic description of fetishism is framed and embellished with the prop shoe to emphasize the contrived and banal quality of the actual DSM V criteria.The ‘on the nose’ intervention onto the text is meant to mirror how the diagnosis itself is rooted in arbitrary socio-historical politics (various committees of mental health professionals cobbling together disorders based on what they deign sexually problematic) rather than scientific research.
A cursory look at the history of the paraphilic disorders reveals a lack of control trials in their development, a lack of transparency regarding why and how the categories of paraphilia were selected/grouped together, and a sinister history of political bias - highlighted by the infamous inclusion of homosexuality (in the same grouping as pedophilia) until 1987. If clinicians wish to work towards a more just and equitable future it is incumbent upon us to first eradicate arbitrary bias and prejudice from our own so- called ‘bible.’
Fetishist
(Mounted Sculpture, 16” x 14” x 3”)
The piece aims to highlight how the influence of the psychiatric industry and carceral state forge discipline onto subjects with non- normative sexual practices. Some of the diagnostic text from the DSM V in Fetishist reads “males with fetishistic disorder may steal and collect their particular fetishistic objects of desire. Such individuals have been arrested and charged for nonsexual antisocial behaviors(e.g., breaking and entering, theft, burglary)that are primarily motivated by the fetishistic disorder.” Here a non-normative sexual practice is somehow conflated with burglary in order to piece together a ‘mental disorder.’
Fetishist is meant to provoke viewers into interrogating their own automatic assumptions about what is sexually normal vs. pathological, who makes these categories, and what functions they ultimately serve in the field of mental health.
www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/evan- dunn-los-angeles-ca/784589