Revisiting Joan Riviere

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 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’ and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, 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.