This initial reading might indicate something of my affective response to the paper: surprised recognition; excitement at its subversive potential; anger at the naturalisation of sex and the reiteration of Ernest Jones’ language of female ‘types’; irritation at the qualification of flippancy as ‘inappropriate’ to an academic context; and a sense of claustrophobia at being pulled into an internalising account that apparently eviscerates the social. However, despite the predominance of negativity in my response, Riviere’s paper still somehow allures and intrigues me. It should also be read, as others have suggested (e.g. Butler, 1990; Bower, 2019), as a performative enactment of the psychical dynamic she is describing. The opening paragraph eulogising Jones’ work can be read as a parody of her patient’s unconscious reassurance of her male colleagues. It is also possible, Bower has suggested, that elements of her account are a coded critique of Jones’ failings as her analyst (2019: 121). From this perspective the paper is not just a neatly bounded example of submission to the contemporary psychoanalytic milieu, but perhaps also something a little more subversive.
This chapter develops a re-reading that holds onto aspects of Riviere’s interpretation but expands possibilities for understanding the masquerade as an articulation of the social, something beyond an internalised family drama, and as an embodiment of corporealities that both resist and seek categorisations of sex and gender. To do this, my first move is to go to Lacan (1958/2017; 1958/2006) and Butler (1990; 2005), my reliable and subjective sources of symbolic destabilisation and a discursive politics of sex. Alongside that, I set out some of the exclusionary effects traced in cultural analyses of Riviere’s work (Walton, 1995; Vyrgioti, 2019). I then map parallels and divergences between Riviere’s paper, feminist analyses of early childhood education (Blaise, 2005; Jones, 2013; Davies 2014) and Patricia Gherovici’s contemporary Lacanian theorisation of transgenderism (2010). I also share some of my own associations to the paper, that seem 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.