Masquerade

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (39)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.159

   *Life Events and the "Primal Scene"*

   Theoretical move: Through the extended clinical case of W, Fink demonstrates how a fetish object (the boot) condenses and organizes questions of sexual identity, castration anxiety, racial identity-crisis, and the primal scene into a singular signifying structure, showing how homophony and 'verbal bridges' operate as the unconscious logic linking disparate symptomatic formations.

   He later remarked on the element of masquerade involved in the clothing worn by cowboys, saying that it was as if they were all really women, in fact, wearing very tight jeans, high-heeled boots, and wide-brimmed hats.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.220

   **Herstoria**

   Theoretical move: Fink constructs a detailed clinical-biographical portrait of Marilyn Monroe's early life and relational patterns to establish the structural conditions — absent paternal function, unstable identificatory anchors, compulsive fantasy-construction, and hysterical demand for unconditional love — that a Lacanian analysis will later interpret. The passage functions as evidentiary groundwork for a case study in hysteria, desire, and the failure of the Name-of-the-Father.

   she was also described as seemingly eternally available, ready and waiting for men... simultaneously embody for them both the immediate prospect of sex associated with prostitutes and the innocent sweetness of the pure at heart.

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.105

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Formulas of Sexuation**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation emerge from the logic of collectivization: "Woman does not exist" means no universal characteristic grounds a set of all women (giving the *pas-toute*/*not-all*), while "Man" is constituted only insofar as he is subsumed under the phallic function as everyman (∀xФx), with both sides of the formula grounded in mythological (Totem and Taboo / Don Juan) rather than biological or anatomical foundations.

   by calling Don Juan a female fantasy, Lacan seems to be saying that women wish they could be collectivized, perhaps because he thinks this would allow them to be reassured as to their desirability.

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.123

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Subjectivity Is Essentially Untotalizable**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's mature position on "personality" is that it is an essentially polemical, anti-totalizing concept: the illusion of a unified personality is displaced by the recognition that subjectivity is constitutively split, with objet petit a functioning as the structural cause of that division rather than a unifying center.

   Lacan instead emphasizes the mask-like quality of personality, relying on Lévi-Strauss's work to undermine the notion that a psychoanalytic topography could allow us to conceptualize a person as unitary.

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.155

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Love for the Ego-Ideal**

   Theoretical move: Fink elaborates Freud's account of the ego-ideal as a locus of alienation and displaced libido, showing how the choice of a love-object who "embodies" the ideal is structurally narcissistic — a 'cure by love' that nonetheless produces impotence and frigidity, with Lacan's formulation of frigidity as a consequence of feminine identification with the idealized position introduced as a critical extension.

   What if she puts him in the place of her ego-ideal? Is he loved by her then as (a more perfect) father? Is he put on a pedestal while she takes herself to be worthless?

6. #06

   Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.20

   BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > BODIES ON THE COUCH

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the clinical encounter with hysterical and somatic symptoms in a Philadelphia barrio clinic as a launching point to triangulate Butler's theory of gender performativity with Lacan's assertion that "Woman does not exist," arguing that both converge on anti-essentialist grounds while diverging on the question of corporeal reality—a tension made acute by transgender clinical experience.

   Butler's conceptualization of sexual identification as akin to gender parody entailed the paradoxical idea of an imitation devoid of original model in a reframing allowing for a pluralization of gender.

7. #07

   Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.32

   BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > BODY DRESSING

   Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that trans embodiment is not a question of "having" an identity but a strategy of "being," grounded in the death drive as a life-enabling force; she proposes an "ethics of embodied desire" that reframes transition as a creative act of re-birth rather than a pathological or identity-based phenomenon.

   We are all born naked, the rest is drag.

8. #08

   Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.62

   BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > BEING REAL

   Theoretical move: Through two clinical cases (Miranda and Lynn), the passage argues that the sinthome and the logic of disavowal—rather than repression or denial—structure the trans subject's relation to desire, jouissance, and the Sexual Non-Relation: Lynn's performed orgasms stage an impossible fantasy of sexual complementarity precisely as a defiance of castration and the fundamental gap at the heart of sexuality.

   This performance, polished and convincing, shielded her from confronting the absence of true passion, even as it left her longing for something she couldn't put into words.

9. #09

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_70"></span>**fetishism**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces the Lacanian reworking of fetishism: shifting Freud's account from a realist (penis-substitution) to a symbolic-linguistic framework (phallus-substitution), extending disavowal as the constitutive mechanism of perversion in general, and ultimately destabilising Freud's claim that fetishism is an exclusively male perversion by proposing that the real penis can itself function as a fetish for heterosexual women.

   Lacan's statement, in 1958, that the penis 'takes on the value of a fetish' for heterosexual women raises a number of interesting questions... it undermines the claims (made by both Freud and Lacan) that fetishism is extremely rare among women

10. #10

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_ncx_214"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_page_0245"></span>***W***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the concept of "woman" across Freud and Lacan, arguing that Lacan's key move is to displace the question of femininity from a biological or universal essence to a structural position in the symbolic order defined by the logic of the not-all, feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, and woman as symptom of man.

    Lacan returns to the question of femininity in 1958, in a paper entitled 'Guiding remarks for a congress on feminine sexuality'

11. #11

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_149"></span>**phallus**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the phallus across Lacan's three registers (real, imaginary, symbolic), arguing that Lacan's terminological innovation—distinguishing phallus from penis—clarifies a logic implicit in Freud while elevating the phallus to the status of a privileged signifier that organises both the Oedipus complex and sexual difference, a move that invites both feminist defence and Derridean critique of phallogocentrism.

    the woman's lack of the symbolic phallus is also a kind of possession (S4, 153)

12. #12

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_179"></span>**semblance**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of Lacan's concept of *semblant* (semblance) from a classical appearance/essence opposition, through its connection to the imaginary/symbolic distinction, to its mature formulation in the early 1970s where truth is shown to be continuous with—rather than opposed to—appearance, and where objet petit a, love, and jouissance are all theorized in terms of semblance.

    At first Lacan uses the term to refer to such issues as feminine sexuality, which is characterised by a dimension of masquerade (see Rivière, 1929).

13. #13

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses Jungle/darkside music as a cultural-theoretical site where jouissance, the death drive, and dystopian negativity paradoxically flip into a utopian gesture, while the concept of 'scenius' (collective anonymous production) is posed against individualist celebrity as the structural condition of radical cultural innovation.

    Sylvian's singing voice is the faking of a fake. The almost whinnying quality of Ferry's angst is retained, but transposed into a pure styling devoid of emotional content. It is culture(d), not natural at all; prissy, ultra-affected, and, for that very reason, strangely lacking in affect.

14. #14

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter3.htm_page62"></span>No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Joy Division's depression is not a mood but an ontological-philosophical position that operates beyond the pleasure principle—a Schopenhauerian diagnosis of the Will's obscene undead insatiability—and that what makes it theoretically distinct from ordinary sadness or rock nihilism is the total absence of an object-cause, making it structurally homologous to Lacanian melancholia while functioning as a dangerously seductive half-truth about the human condition.

    the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be, precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures ('a circus complete with all fools'), which they are both no longer capable of performing and which they no longer wish to perform

15. #15

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.

    Sylvian's voice belongs to this masquerade. Even on 'Ghosts', Sylvian's voice does not ask to be taken at face value. It is not a voice that reveals, or even pretends to reveal, it is a voice to hide behind

16. #16

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.40

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > Overture to this Collection

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier (figured as the purloined letter) governs subjects' acts, fates, and very being through its displacement and detour, such that subjects do not possess the letter but are possessed by it—demonstrating the priority of the signifier over the signified and illustrating repetition automatism at the level of intersubjectivity.

    In order to be worthy of the power of this sign she need but remain immobile in its shadow, managing thereby, moreover, like the Queen, to simulate mastery of nonaction

17. #17

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.600

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Signification of the Phallus 685 *Die Bedeutung des Phallus*

    Theoretical move: The phallus functions as the privileged signifier of desire precisely by being veiled—its Aufhebung (disappearance/raising) institutes the subject's Spaltung and governs the differential relations between being/having, demand/desire, and the asymmetrical positions of the sexes under the phallic mark.

    it is in order to be the phallus—that is, the signifier of the Other's desire—that a woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the masquerade.

18. #18

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.633

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *VII. Misrecognitions and Biases*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that feminine sexuality cannot be reduced to phallic mediation or developmental schemas (Jones, Fenichel), but must be understood through the structural interplay of castration, the Other's desire, masquerade, and the specific position of women with respect to the object—culminating in the claim that female homosexuality reveals desire itself as structured around a sublation of the object and a jouissance contiguous with itself rather than subordinated to the phallic signifier.

    I mean that the defense here can be conceptualized, firstly, in the dimension of mascarade that the presence of the Other liberates in the sexual role.

19. #19

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.842

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO "REMARKS ON DANIEL LAGACHE S PRESENTATION: 'PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PERSONALITY STRUCTURE' " > NOTE S T O "TH E SIGNIFICATIO N O F TH E PHALLUS "

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial/translator's notes glossing technical terms, bibliographic references, and translation variants in Lacan's "The Signification of the Phallus," with no sustained theoretical argument of its own.

    There seems to be a problem in the French here... In any case, it seems clear that the protecting has to do with men and the masking with women.

20. #20

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.844

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY "

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes glossing Lacan's "Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality," providing philological, bibliographic, and cross-referential annotations that clarify key Lacanian concepts (phallus as equivalence-function, love as giving what one does not have, sublation) and their debts to Jones, Klein, Horney, Freud, and Seminar VIII.

    L'alterite du sexe (The difference between the sexes) could instead be rendered as 'Sexual difference,' 'Sexual alterity,' or even 'The alterity of the fairer sex.'

21. #21

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.202

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses clinical material and the figure of Don Juan to argue that feminine jouissance is structurally distinct from masculine desire: whereas man's anxiety is tied to the (–φ) and the lost object, woman's relation to jouissance is mediated by the desire of the Other rather than by lack, making her "truer and more real." Women's masochism is consequently reframed as a male fantasy, and the male "imposture" is contrasted with the female "masquerade."

    In the woman's, if something corresponds to this, then it's the masquerade, as we already said in its time in reference to Joan Riviere's article, but that's something altogether different.

22. #22

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.277

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

    I ask you to refer to my former Seminars by underlining, after Joan Riviere, the specific function of what she calls the womanly masquerade. Simply put, woman has to take her jouissance down a peg.

23. #23

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots from the narcissistic field of love (where the Other is structurally absent) to the partial drive's circular movement as the proper mechanism through which the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — distinguishing narcissistic self-love from the drive's heterogeneous, gap-bearing circularity, and using the scopic drive as the exemplary case.

    Masquerade has another meaning in the human domain, and that is precisely to play not at the imaginary, but at the symbolic, level.

24. #24

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the narcissistic field of love (where the Other cannot be represented) from the circularity of the partial drive, arguing that it is precisely through the drive's circular movement around the objet a that the subject attains the dimension of the big Other — a move that also introduces the concept of 'masquerade' as operating at the symbolic rather than imaginary level.

    they spring from a term that I have not introduced, but of which one female psycho-analyst has pin-pointed the feminine sexual attitude—the term masquerade.

25. #25

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and Klein bottle to theorize jouissance as structurally analogous to the symptom, arguing that orgasm is merely one privileged surface-point of jouissance rather than its essence; this allows him to critique "psychoanalytic mysticism" around female orgasm, reframe aphanisis as the fading of the subject (not desire), and follow Jones's account of the father-daughter couple to argue that feminine sexuality resolves into the woman taking the place of the objet petit a.

    this something that one wishes to preserve at the cost of a renunciation is precisely what one loses. For, what has diffuse erotic charm... have to do with the essence of femininity, if not very precisely what Madame Joan Riviere pinpointed as womanliness as a masquerade

26. #26

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.434

    **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

    by wanting to present herself as having what she knows perfectly well she doesn't have, at issue is something that for her has a completely different value, which I have called the value of masquerade. She makes a mask of her femininity.

27. #27

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.243

    THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from jouissance by showing that desire is fundamentally structured by signifiers (not reducible to imaginary relations or need), and uses Joan Riviere's case of 'womanliness as masquerade' to demonstrate that the subject's relation to the phallus — whether as theft, mask, or sign of being — reveals the constitutive splitting of the subject between existence and signifying representation, grounding the unconscious.

    Joan Riviere's article, 'Womanliness as a Masquerade'... she would adopt a mask, particularly in her professional activities in relation to men... playing a game of coquettishness... to deceive those who might take offence at what, in her, was presenting fundamentally as aggression

28. #28

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.212

    Notes > Chapter 5

    Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus for Chapter 5 does substantive theoretical work in three areas: (1) critiquing evolutionary reductions of comedy and language to advantage/sense; (2) elaborating the Lacanian thesis that the signifier murders the thing, making desire born from impossibility; and (3) developing the claim that the phallus is the singular Bedeutung of signification itself—not potency but imposture.

    the fundamental psychoanalytic gesture involves identifying the privilege of the phallus with imposture rather than with potency.

29. #29

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.176

    POWERS OF HORROR > THOSE FEMALES WHO CAN WRECK THE INFINITE > THE PHALLUS\* VOYEUR

    Theoretical move: Kristeva reads Céline's voyeuristic idealization of the feminine body as the staging of an "absolute phallus" — a phallic jouissance attached to unaltered, pre-symbolic femininity — whereby the male subject's position is constituted as the waste cut off the phallus, structuring a fantasy in which Woman replaces reason as the law-giving instance.

    The end of religion is no doubt worship of Woman, and also penal colony.

30. #30

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.185

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that the Lacanian-Copjecian claim that affects are never repressed (only displaced) rests on a conflation of two distinct French terms—*honte* (shame as felt feeling, *Empfindung*) and *pudeur* (shame as affective structure/formation, *Affektbildung*)—and that properly distinguishing them undermines the standard Lacanian position and opens space for the existence of unconscious affects.

    disrupting the masquerade by calling its bluff (and ending up empty-handed in the process). Immodestly and tactlessly tossing aside the crowns of kings and the gavels of judges reveals the near nothingness of mere mortals.

31. #31

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.186

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's Seminar VII account of beauty and *pudeur* (shame) as parallel defensive veils over the Real of death-tinged sexuality to argue that Lacanian metapsychology implicitly allows for unconscious affect, a position the passage then bridges to Damasio's neuroscientific three-stage model (nonconscious emotion → nonconscious feeling → conscious feeling) as a framework for resolving Lacan's underdeveloped affect theory.

    The masquerades of such fantasy-supported sexuality wrap titillating films of spectral images and meanings around a repulsively rotten core of senseless filth.

32. #32

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.145

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

    Theoretical move: By reading Henry James's *The Golden Bowl* and *The Wings of the Dove* through a Lacanian lens, Žižek argues that the network of protective lies ultimately serves to maintain the big Other's ignorance—keeping up social appearances—and that this "ethics of the unspoken" constitutes a false ethics, while "female masochism" is unmasked as a male fantasy rather than an attribute of feminine nature.

    it can also be read as manipulation with a feminine secret, as her awareness that the shadow of an illicit mystery enhances the attraction a woman exerts on men. This logic of 'feminine mystery' is totally foreign to Kate from Wings

33. #33

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici

    **STRANGE BEDFELLOWS** > **46** Strange bedfellows

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the biologization of homosexuality and transgender identity from Ulrichs through Hirschfeld and Steinach, then pivots via Foucault to argue that psychoanalytic categories are not merely referenced but foundational to any theorization of transsexuality and sexuality.

    these men had 'a woman's mind trapped in a man's body' (anima muliebris corpore virili inclusa). This phrase reverberates in modern-day presentations of transgender identity

34. #34

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.78

    **FROM TRANCE TO TRANS IN LACAN'S REVISIONS OF HYSTERIA**

    Theoretical move: By reading Karl Abraham's early case of a gender-variant patient through Lacanian categories, the passage argues that jouissance—not anatomy—determines sexual positioning, and that hysteria (exemplified by Dora's case) is the founding clinical site through which psychoanalysis opens the question of sexuality, identification, and the drive as irreducibly enigmatic.

    the blunt display of virility or the excesses of machismo also express femininity as a masquerade.

35. #35

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.96

    **THE SWEET SCIENCE OF TRANSITION**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that being "outside sex" (hors-sex) is not a marker of psychosis but a structural feature of hysteria, and that trans men analysands often exhibit a hysterical structure characterised by an irreducible indecision about sexual positioning, dissatisfied desire, and a defensive strategy against castration — thereby relocating the clinical question of trans identity from foreclosure to neurosis.

    the manner in which Leslie reports this observation seems to imply that femininity is mostly a strategy of deceit

36. #36

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.108

    **PORTRAITS IN A TWO-WAY MIRROR**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that Lacanian castration—understood as a structural relation to lack rather than an anatomical fact—is indispensable for the psychoanalytic treatment of trans persons, because it reveals that gender-crossing symptoms are not evasions of sexual difference but heightened engagements with it; the clinical vignette of Amanda illustrates how masquerade, anxiety, and the phallus function together around the impossibility of sexual identity.

    Masculinity implies the pretense of 'having' the phallus and femininity the pretense of not having the phallus while 'being' the phallus... even when the positions are not symmetric, there is an element of deception in both masculinity and femininity.

37. #37

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.175

    **BODY TROUBLE** > **Born This Way**

    Theoretical move: Gherovici argues that the transgender request is fundamentally structured around the Real of the death drive and the limits of mortal existence, not merely around sex/gender binaries; using Lacan's sinthome, the drive, and the mirror stage, she shows that gender transition is a "new birth" in which art and desire confront the border between life and death.

    Lady Gaga burns the usual divides imposed by gender norms; under the call sign 'fashion is my freedom,' she once showed up in drag as her male alter-ego, Jo Calderone, upsetting some, delighting others, always surprising with her gender theatrics.

38. #38

    Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.198

    **INDEX** > **186** Index

    Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Gherovici's book on transgender psychoanalysis; it is bibliographic/reference material with no standalone theoretical argument, though it surfaces the book's key conceptual vocabulary through index entries.

    masquerade 96–7

39. #39

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.65

    Contradictions that Matter > Sexual Division, a Problem in Ontology

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sexual division maps onto an ontological asymmetry between masculinity as belief (reliance on the phallus as signifying support to repress castration) and femininity as pretense (masquerade as constitutive deception), and further that this same ontological minus—the bar between signifier and signified transposed into the signifier itself—grounds Lacan's theory of the subject of the unconscious as a "with-without" inherent to the signifying order, moving beyond Saussurean structuralism.

    femininity (or womanliness) as such is nothing but this susceptibility to wear femininity as a mask…The essence of femininity is to pretend to be a woman.