ABSTRACT
Why revisit Joan Riviere? This chapter explores Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929), an essay that enjoys a unique, if uneasy, status in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism: from Ur-text attuned to the relations among sex, gender and identity to one of the most prominent examples of a silence, shared between psychoanalysis and feminism, in the question of racism in the formations of self and society. Reading “Womanliness as a Masquerade” alongside Riviere’s less well-known “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defence” (1932) and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1986), this chapter attempts a renewed psychoanalytic reading of Riviere as a thinker who draws out attention to the boundary between dream and culture, unconscious and ideology.
