ABSTRACT
Staging Femininities “Womanliness,” wrote psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, “could be assumed and worn as a
mask” (1989 [1929], 38). Furthermore, Riviere argued, there was no difference between “genuine womanliness” and womanly “masquerade”—they were one and the same (38). This radical idea has motivated much constructivist thinking on gender, which underlies the now commonly held notion, at least among feminists, that gender is performative and political (Judith Butler 1990). Femininity as a masquerade is always already enmeshed in power games; it is an ideological tool that can be deployed to empower or disempower those who claim its disguise as their own.
