Associations: the womanly masquerade
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- A memory of passing a senior academic in my university buildingwhen I was doing my PhD. Severe, grey haired, trouser suited, earnest. I’m struck by her bright pink lipstick.
- An image of a female lecturer whose seminars I’m observing for my PhD on gendered and classed exclusions in university curricula, lightly interjecting flippant asides, as if her thoughts momentarily leapt out of the classroom; in contrast with a male participant’s laboured, scholarly wit.
- A twinge of surprise, gratification, envy: but that’s what I wrote about
Riviere suggests these mitigations and rivalries indicate a fault-line, a painful vulnerability in an apparently stable subjectivity; and notes that for her patient gratification in heterosexual intercourse ‘was of the nature of a reassurance and restitution of something lost, not pure enjoyment’ (307). This feminine masquerade disguised an ‘abyss of anxiety’; and threats to its coherence had brought on the depressive illness that led her to analysis (312). Riviere’s analysis here points to an emptiness within sexed subjectivity, suggesting, she says, that there is no line to be drawn between ‘genuine’ womanliness and ‘masquerade’ (306). For a moment there appears to be a possibility of radical subversion, a denaturalisation of the categories of sex, gender and the body.