In the Closets of Fanon and Riviere: Psychoanalysis, Postcolonial Theory and the Psychosocial

Abstract

Marita Vyrgioti makes what she calls a ‘guerrilla gesture’ to establish a critical engagement with psychoanalysis through juxtaposing two psychoanalytically infused texts that develop the economy of the ‘mask’ from the perspective of female homosexual desire. She argues that Joan Riviere’s (1927) case study in her paper Womanliness as Masquerade and Mayotte Capecia’s autobiographical novel Je Suis Martiniquaise, which Frantz Fanon (1952) draws on in his work Black Skin, White Masks, are two examples of queer voices lost and secreted in coloniality. Vyrgioti then addresses the implications of this silencing for queer lives in relation to the naturalisation of a heterosexual, heteronormative, patriarchal, colonial order and argues that it is among the tasks of psychosocial thinking and writing to consider what it means ethically to unmask and conjure up the queer desires of coloniality that have as yet stayed out of sight.