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

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 and Judith Butler, 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. I then map parallels and divergences between Riviere’s paper, feminist analyses of early childhood education and Patricia Gherovici’s contemporary Lacanian theorization of transgenderism. I also share some of my own associations to Riviere’s paper, which 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.