Table Of ContentFEMININITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer.
This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femi-
ninity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience.
Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and
artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory
speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and polit-
ical landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes.
This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psycho-
logical discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity
from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to
queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine
might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar,
Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and
the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and
psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger.
Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an
indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and
anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.
Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning film-maker and theorist, best
known for her iconic documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower. She is the author of
Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film, Black and White and The Nasty Woman
and the Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema, editor of Embodied Encounters and
co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable.
Ben Tyrer is a film theorist and lecturer. He is the author of works on cin-
ema, psychoanalysis and philosophy and is the co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the
Unrepresentable.
‘This new and highly readable collection of psychoanalytic essays, which is edited
by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer, provides a timely look at the mean-
ings of femininity and women’s desire as articulated in cinema through a range of
stimulating and thought-provoking case studies and discussions. The book, which
contains chapters from some notable authors in the field of feminist film scholarship
and artistic and clinical practice (including Elizabeth Cowie, Bracha L. Ettinger,
Vicky Lebeau and Caroline Bainbridge), deploys the ideas of Freud, Lacan, Klein,
Riviere, Horney, Deutsch and Irigaray in order to unpack the complexities of
the relationships between femininity, psychoanalysis and difference that will be of
great interest to students and researchers who continue to tussle with the meanings
of femininity in the contemporary cultural arena of cinema and beyond. The col-
lection covers a lot of ground – revisiting older debates about the feminist politics
of visual pleasure but adds a new layer of complexity to those earlier discussions
by relating them to psychosocial and cultural concerns in contemporary contexts
where the vexed relationship between intersectionality and psychoanalysis often
comes to the fore. In so doing, the collection demonstrates its cultural and political
relevance by paying attention to the unconscious dynamics of representation and
to the raced and classed dimensions of cinematic experience and its relationship to
wider processes of power and ideology.’
Candida Yates, Professor of Culture and Communication,
Bournemouth University, UK
‘This collective effort to think and rethink the psychoanalytic take on femininity
could not come at a more appropriate time. Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema,
Culture, Theory pursues different facets of this question in a formidably interesting
way, following a wide range of authors and critical approaches. A truly engaged
and engaging volume.’
Alenka Zupančič, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences
and Arts, author of What Is Sex?
FEMININITY AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Cinema, Culture, Theory
Edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska
and Ben Tyrer
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2019 selection and editorial matter, Agnieszka Piotrowska and
Ben Tyrer; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Piotrowska, Agnieszka, editor. | Tyrer, Ben, editor.
Title: Femininity and psychoanalysis : cinema, culture, theory /
[edited by] Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004237 (print) | LCCN 2019006437
(ebook) | ISBN 9781315144054 (Master eBook) | ISBN
9781138500921 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138500938 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Femininity. | Femininity in motion pictures. |
Femininity in literature.
Classification: LCC BF175.5.F45 (ebook) | LCC BF175.5.F45 F47
2019 (print) | DDC 155.3/33—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004237
ISBN: 978-1-138-50092-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-50093-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14405-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
For our mothers and for our sons.
CONTENTS
List of contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer
1 The certainties of difference and their difficulty:
desire and the symptom 8
Elizabeth Cowie
2 Her skin against the rocks, the rocks against the sky:
revisiting Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) after
Morley’s The Falling (2014) and Freud’s fable of
female hysteria 37
Davina Quinlivan
3 Growing up girl in the ’hood: vulnerability, violence
and the girl-gang state of mind in Bande de Filles/Girlhood 48
Caroline Bainbridge
4 Revisiting Joan Riviere 66
Vicky Lebeau
5 Supplementary jouissance and feminine sexual rapport 78
Bracha L. Ettinger
viii Contents
6 Self-recreation through the uncanny encounter: reading
the feminine close-up in cinema 109
Nava Dushi and Igor Rodin
7 River’s edge: the ebb and flow of feminine ex-sistence 122
Allister Mactaggart
8 Under Her Skin: on Woman without body and body
without Woman 138
Ben Tyrer
9 Desire, commitment and the transformative power
of touch: the posthuman femme fatale in Under the Skin 160
Agnieszka Piotrowska and Joseph Jenner
10 AnnaMarilyn: queer tales of femininity 177
Wendy Leeks
11 Tiresias: Bracha L. Ettinger and the transgression
with-in-to the Feminine 204
Sheila L. Cavanagh
12 A specimen of a commentary on Lacan’s ‘L’étourdit’ 217
A. R. Price
13 A #MeToo moment in communist Poland: a short story 241
Agnieszka Piotrowska
14 VuLNeRaBILITies 252
Pia Hylén
Index 255
CONTRIBUTORS
Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at Roehampton
University. Her publications include The Cinema of Lars von Trier (Wallflower
Press, 2007), A Feminine Cinematics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Television and
Psychoanalysis: Media and the Inner World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-
curated special editions of the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and Free
Associations. Caroline is film editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and
she co-edits Routledge’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture’ book series. She is a
founding member of the BPC Scholar Steering Group and a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts.
Sheila L. Cavanagh is a Professor at York University, former co-editor of the jour-
nal Somatechnics and outgoing chair of the Sexuality Studies Association (Canada).
She edited a special double-issue on psychoanalysis in Transgender Studies Quarterly
(2017) and co-edited Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Cavanagh wrote Queering Bathrooms (University of Toronto Press, 2010), a GLBT
Indie Book Award finalist, and Sexing the Teacher (University of British Columbia
Press, 2007), awarded honourable mention by the Canadian Women’s Studies
Association. Her scholarship appears in a range of psychoanalytic, gender and
cultural studies journals.
Elizabeth Cowie is Professor Emeritus in Film Studies at the University of Kent,
Canterbury. She was co-founder and co-editor in the 1970s of m/f, a journal of
feminist theory, and author of Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis
(Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). She has subsequently written on film noir, the hor-
ror of the horror film and on the cinematic dream-work. In Recording Reality,
Desiring the Real (Minnesota University Press, 2011) she addressed documentary
film as the serious, as spectacle and as an art of the real. Recent essays include
‘Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape’, in the online journal Media Fields
