Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York Columbia University Press, 1987; paperback edition, 1999).
15. Freud understood the achievement of femininity to require a double- wave of repression The girl not only has to shift libidinal attachment from the mother to the father, but then displace the desire for the father onto some more acceptable object. For an account that gives an almost mythic cast to Lacan’s theory, see Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman:
Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 143–148, originally published as L’Enigme de la
femme: La femme dans les textes de Freud (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1980).
16. Jacques Lacan, The Meaning of the Phallus in Feminine Sexuality Jacques
Lacan and the École Freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose,
trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York Norton, 1985), pp. 83–85. Hereafter,
page references to this work will appear in the text. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe quin en est pas uni (Paris Éditions de Minuit, p. 131.
18. The feminist literature on masquerade is wide-ranging; the attempt here is restricted to an analysis of masquerade in relation to the problematic of expression and performativity. In other words, the question here is whether masquerade conceals a femininity that might be understood as genuine or authentic, or whether masquerade is the means by which femininity and the contests over its authenticity are produced. Fora fuller discussion of feminist appropriations of masquerade, see Mary Ann
Doane, The Desire to Desire The Woman’s Film of the s (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987); Film and Masquerade Theorizing the
Female Spectator Screen, Vol. 23, Nos. 3–4, September–October pp. 74–87; “Woman’s Stake Filming the Female Body October, Vol. Summer 1981. Gayatri Spivak offers a provocative reading of woman-as- masquerade that draws on Nietzsche and Derrida in Displacement and the Discourse of Woman in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark
Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). See also Mary
Russo’s Female Grotesques Carnival and Theory (Working Paper,
Center for Twentieth-Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, 1985).
19. In the following section of this chapter, Freud and the Melancholia of
Gender,” I attempt to layout the central meaning of melancholia as the
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consequence of a disavowed grief as it applies to the incest taboo which founds sexual positions and gender through instituting certain forms of disavowed losses. Significantly, Lacan’s discussion of the lesbian is continguous within the text to his discussion of frigidity, as if to suggest metonymically that lesbianism constitutes the denial of sexuality. A further reading of the operation of denial in this text is clearly in order. Joan Riviere, Womanliness as a Masquerade in Formations of Fantasy, eds.
Victor Burgin, James Donald, Cora Kaplan (London Methuen, pp. 35–44. The article was first published in The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, Vol. 10, 1929. Hereafter, page references to this work will appear in the text. See also the fine essay by Stephen Heath that follows,
“Joan Riviere and the Masquerade. Fora contemporary refutation of such plain inferences, see Esther
Newton and Shirley Walton, The Misunderstanding Toward a More
Precise Sexual Vocabulary in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole Vance
(Boston: Routledge, 1984), pp. 242–250. Newton and Walton distinguish among erotic identities, erotic roles, and erotic acts and show how radical discontinuities can exist between styles of desire and styles of gender such that erotic preferences cannot be directly inferred from the presentation of an erotic identity in social contexts. Although I find their analysis useful (and brave, I wonder whether such categories are themselves specific to discursive contexts and whether that kind of fragmentation of sexuality into component parts makes sense only as a counterstrategy to refute the reductive unification of these terms. The notion of asexual orientation has been deftly called into question by bell hooks in Feminist Theory From Margin to Center (Boston: South End
Press, 1984). She claims that it is a reification that falsely signals on openness to all members of the sex that is designated as the object of desire.
Although she disputes the term because it puts into question the autonomy of the person described, I would emphasize that orientations themselves are rarely, if ever, fixed. Obviously, they can shift through time and are open to cultural reformulations that are in no sense univocal.
24. Heath, Joan Riviere and the Masquerade pp. 45–61.
25. Stephen Heath points out that the situation that Riviere faced as an intellectual woman in competition for recognition by the psychoanalytic

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