“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.”
Riviere, J., “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (10), 1929, p.305
At a time when the debates which stir society emphasize how much femininity is made of many and diverse figures, these words issued from the English psychoanalyst have lost none of their lustre. By making femininity and masquerade equivalent, she indicates that the former is not a given and if, according to Freud, the little girl “turned into a little woman”, she does so only through wearing a mask. For all that,femininity is not made superficial but becomes a construction in the singular. The mask of femininity is thus a mask of nothing, encountered in this empty space of the non-existence of Woman, and if there is something “artificial” in this mask it is in the first sense of the term, of what is not natural butself-made, a singular contrivance. This is exactly what Joan Riviere testified to since her words are derived from the case she has built, her own, which she has disguised to make it public.