Re-Reading Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade”: Putting Sex and the (trans) Body Back into Question

Abstract

This chapter develops a re-reading of Joan Riviere’s 1929 paper “Womanliness as Masquerade.” My reading holds onto aspects of Rivière’s analysis but expands possibilities for understanding the masquerade as an articulation of the social, something beyond an internalized family drama, and as an embodiment of corporealities that both resist and seek categorizations of sex and gender. To do this, my first move is to go to Lacan (1958a, b) and Butler (Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, 1990; Giving an account of oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005), my reliable and subjective sources of symbolic destabilization and a discursive politics of sex. Alongside that, I set out some of the exclusionary effects traced in cultural analyses of Riviere’s work (Walton, Re-placing race in (White) psychoanalytic discourse: Fournding narratives of feminism. Critical Inquiry, 21(4):775–804, 1995; Vyrgioti, In the closets of fanon and Riviere: Psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory and the psychosocial. In Frosh S (ed) New Voices in Psychosocial Studies, 2019). I then map parallels and divergences between Riviere’s paper, feminist analyses of early childhood education (Blaise, A feminist poststructuralist study of children “doing” gender in an urban kindergarten classroom. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 20:85–108, 2005; Jones, Becoming child/becoming dress’, Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3):289–296, 2013; Davies, Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20:734–741, 2014), and Patricia Gherovici’s contemporary Lacanian theorization of transgenderism (2010). I also share some of my own associations to Riviere’s paper, that seems to have evoked for me a continual coming into being of the sexed body; and suggest that the chapter has implications for the way psychosocial studies might think about unconscious relations in writing and politics, and ways of attending to the subjective location of our analyses and our theories