This text is the first Polish translation of Joan Riviere’s renowned article Womanliness as a Masquerade, first published in 1929 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. The title of the work refers to the dreams of a patient whose story Riviere recounts in the article. In her dreams, figures appear wearing masks to avoid disaster and harm. The titular “womanliness,” according to Riviere, is akin to such a mask—adopted to conceal masculinity and prevent retribution should its presence be (...) revealed. Riviere posits that women desiring masculinity might don a “mask of womanliness” to evade anxiety and potential punishment from men. The text is particularly significant as it blurs the boundary between what could be considered authentic womanliness and masquerade. Riviere further argues that both masquerade and womanliness serve as defensive mechanisms to protect against anxiety and should not be seen as primary forms of sexual enjoyment. This work has resonated profoundly within psychoanalytic and philosophical circles. It influenced Jacques Lacan—both in his early and later teachings—regarding femininity and its connections to castration and the phallus. Sixty years after its publication, the article became a cornerstone of third-wave feminist thought, inspiring scholars like Judith Butler and her poststructuralist perspective on gender performativity. Today, the text continues to be a critical reference not only in feminist, queer, and gender studies but also for philosophical and psychoanalytic inquiries. Thinkers like Alenka Zupančič, exploring the philosophical dimensions of sex, frequently draw upon Riviere's analyses, even when critically engaging with them. (shrink)

The death of Jean Baudrillard in 2007 brought about a resurgence of feminist scholarship on his work. But in all recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for Victoria Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists focus on Baudrillard’s later theory of simulation, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979). In this article I argue that a theory of seduction facilitates the unveiling of a hitherto unnoticed strain of feminist writing that proposes an ongoing challenge to masculine power (...) and politics. This strategy of seduction is one that can be traced through a history of modern feminism, from Joan Rivière’s concept of ‘womanliness’ in ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ to Virginia Woolf’s ‘mulberry tree’ in Three Guineas. (shrink)

Against the ideology of conflict in which uncompromising violence is the winning attribute in the contest for political supremacy and superiority, Plato seeks to balance the oppositions of masculinity and femininity evenly in the single soul, to rethink manliness and allow it to be a disposition developed out of gentleness as well as spiritedness, and allowing men to draw on feminine characteristics to construct a new ideal of human nature. Socrates, we have seen, argues that guardian natures must be both (...) gentle and spirited, and that a harmonious tension between these traits is conducive to the good of the soul and the city. There is no equivalent re-evaluation of womanliness however, no interest in re-evaluating the female role in the generation of children, and no interest in re-assessing the ontological dependencies of form and matter and their relation to reproduction and identity. Plato complicates and allows variations within the logic of gender relations which privilege the male as ideal, but these moves could not remove that structural inequality. Meanwhile, real women continue to be born withsexed bodies on whichgendered meanings are already inscribed (in a variety of different ways as deformed, inchoate, and lacking specificity), providing the ground and matter on which a creative principle gets to work and produces children, ideas and meanings.Ultimately, reason is master of the self in service of which spirit and gentleness are employed, and the inclusion of feminine gentleness into that service is no threat to the dominance of patriarchal hierarchy; both conceptually and empirically, woman and women remain source and resource for the patriarchal order. Reforming gender roles and abolishing the patrilinear genealogy is Plato's well-intentioned aim, but his failure to achieve this is inevitable, I have argued, as long as a specific identity for woman remains untheorised and a maternal genealogy unrecognized. Unless the ideal human being is re-conceptualised, giving a specific identity and value to the different morphologies of male and female humans, ignoring gender will never allow women an equivalentvalue: for, if women may be queens, this necessarily makes men their kings in the ideal republic. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Historical connections Value dualisms and the logic of domination Ecofeminism and animals Environmental racism Ecofeminism and critiques of development Charges of essentialism Mainstream approaches Social ecology and deep ecology Some future hopes for ecofeminism.