Performance Anxieties

by Ann Pellegrini

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 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.

Genres: Theory

Paperback

First published November 7, 1996

Reviews

[gwen]

This was quite good! Not necessarily extremely groundbreaking, but thoughtful and readable. It was very fun to read a book where someone is clearly very excited about Gender Performativity as “the next big thing!” in academic theory.

Most useful for a very intelligent and clear sighted critique of the psychoanalytic tendency to treat sexual difference as The Major (Problematic) Difference, to the exclusion of race. I wonder what it would look like to extend this problematic to class.