This scene calls into question, perhaps, something about shifting registers of words, space and touch; about intellect and the body; and perhaps about gender, sex and anxiety. It evokes shame, for me, and unknowably for the student. It came to my mind when I was reading Riviere’s (1929) ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’. I’d heard of the paper long before I read it – Have you read it? – And was taken aback by the intensity of my response to aspects of her argument; and by its resonance with my own early work; and then by the flow of images or associations that continued to come to me, following my reading, or, perhaps, following my decision to write about my response. Sometimes a decision, like the cut at the end of a session in Lacanian analysis, can provoke a new flow of affect and ideas.
Perhaps one reason why Riviere’s paper still resonates, for me at least, is its juxtaposition of alluringly radical, passionate insight with more conservatively reductive strands of thought. Riviere presents a case study of an intellectual woman patient whose experience perhaps resonates with her own, as patient and colleague of both Ernest Jones and Sigmund Freud (Bower, 2018). She speculates that her patient exemplifies a ‘type’ of woman, publicly successful but with a need to compensate for their – our – potentially threatening embodiment of a masculine mode of being. This compensation is the womanly masquerade: the subject’s adornment in features that might mitigate a painful instability associated with a performance of manhood. Riviere notes in these women behaviour that distracts or covers over their competence and knowledge: coquettish flirting, distinctively feminine dress, pretending ignorance in relations with men, ‘inappropriate’ flippancy or joking in academic contexts, and pleasure in heterosexual intercourse, despite frequent homosexual dreams and identifications (Riviere, 1929: 304–8). Alongside these mitigations of masculinity, Riviere describes her patient’s rivalry with other women’s achievements, in appearance and housekeeping, but also, perhaps contrarily, in intellectual prowess.