Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

the desire of the mother, as one might expect, but over the place of the father in public discourse as speaker, lecturer, writer—that is, as a user of signs rather than a sign-object, an item of exchange. This castrating desire might be understood as the desire to relinquish the status of woman-as-sign in order to appear as a subject within language.
Indeed, the analogy that Riviere draws between the homosexual man and the masked woman is not, in her view, an analogy between male and female homosexuality. Femininity is taken on by a woman who wishes for masculinity but fears the retributive consequences of taking on the public appearance of masculinity. Masculinity is taken on by the male homosexual who, presumably, seeks to hide—not from others, but from himself—an ostensible femininity. The woman takes on a masquerade knowingly in order to conceal her masculinity from the masculine audience she wants to castrate. But the homosexual man is said to exaggerate his heterosexuality (meaning a masculinity that allows him to pass as heterosexual) as a defense unknowingly,
because he cannot acknowledge his own homosexuality (or is it that the analyst would not acknowledge it, if it were his. In other words,
the homosexual man takes unconscious retribution on himself, both desiring and fearing the consequences of castration. The male homosexual does not know his homosexuality, although Ferenczi and
Riviere apparently do.
But does Riviere know the homosexuality of the woman in masquerade that she describes When it comes to the counterpart of the analogy that she herself sets up, the woman who wishes for masculinity is homosexual only in terms of sustaining a masculine identification,
but not in terms of asexual orientation or desire. Invoking Jones’s typology once again, as if it were a phallic shield, she formulates a
“defense” that designates as asexual a class of female homosexuals understood as the masquerading type his first group of homosexual women who, while taking no interest in other women, wish for recognition of their masculinity from men and claim to be the equals of men, or in other words, to be men themselves (37). As in Lacan, the lesbian is
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here signified as an asexual position, as indeed, a position that refuses sexuality. For the earlier analogy with Ferenzci to become complete, it would seem that this description enacts the defense against female homosexuality as sexuality that is nevertheless understood as the reflexive structure of the homosexual man And yet, there is no clearway to read this description of a female homosexuality that is not about asexual desire for women. Riviere would have us believe that this curious typological anomaly cannot be reduced to a repressed female homosexuality or heterosexuality.What is hidden is not sexuality, but rage.
One possible interpretation is that the woman in masquerade wishes for masculinity in order to engage in public discourse with men and as a man as part of a male homoerotic exchange. And precisely because that male homoerotic exchange would signify castration, she fears the same retribution that motivates the defenses of the homosexual man. Indeed, perhaps femininity as masquerade is meant to deflect from male homosexuality—that being the erotic presupposition of hegemonic discourse, the “hommo-sexuality” that Irigaray suggests. In any case, Riviere would have us consider that such women sustain masculine identifications not to occupy a position in asexual exchange, but, rather, to pursue a rivalry that has no sexual object or,
at least, that has none that she will name.
Riviere’s text offers away to reconsider the question What is masked by masquerade Ina key passage that marks a departure from the restricted analysis demarcated by Jones’s classificatory system, she suggests that masquerade is more than the characteristic of an intermediate type that it is central to all “womanliness”:
The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. (This refusal to postulate a femininity that is prior to mimicry and the mask is taken up by Stephen Heath in Joan Riviere and the

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