Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race

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Psychology Press, 1997 - Art - 190 pages
Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both.

Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud meets Sarah Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative.
 

Contents

introduction THE SEEN OF DIFFERENCE
1817
JEWISHNESS AS GENDER 17
1833
YOU MAKE ME FEEL MIGHTY REAL 49
1865
BLACKNESS
1883
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS 89
1905
BETWEEN MEN 109
1925
WOMANLINESS
1947
THE INCLUDED MIDDLE 149
1965
OEDIPUS REPS 157
1973
WORKS CITED 173
1989
INDEX 185
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About the author (1997)

Ann Pellegrini teaches in the Department of Women's Studies at Barnard College.

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