ABSTRACT
The starting point of the essay is ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, a 1929 paper by the lay psychoanalyst Joan Riviere that provoked a series of important debates within feminist film theory in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. It draws on Riviere’s interpretation of a dream – involving a vivid image of a woman’s bare arms – produced by the client she describes in her paper, alongside several published comments on Riviere herself (on her personality as much as her work) by Ernest Jones, Stephen Heath, and Lisa Appignanesi. A cultural-historical analysis of the trope of bare arms and its classed, gendered (and to a lesser degree its racialised) meanings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century follows, focussing inter alia on Édouard Manet’s painting ‘The Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ and the written and photographic collaborations of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick.
