FEMININITY 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 reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks 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