FRSS - Fashioning the Ego as Home: Black Women Writers and Clothing

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months. 

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Abstract: 

As the current political climate in the United States demonstrates, psychically, the nation is still in the throes of Reconstruction (1865-1877), the historical period when the postbellum hope for equality was abandoned with the election of Andrew Jackson and torn asunder by racist terrorism and sexual violence. While this tearing continues into the present, it could provoke scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis to think about how Black women have fashioned ways to be ‘at home’ in their bodies despite the pervasive and violently enforced assumption that the national home is not theirs to inhabit. This paper, which draws from my current book project, “Words and Clothes: Literary Self-Fashioning and the Gendered Legacies of Enslavement,” demonstrates that fashion, a material and aesthetic practice that is often overlooked, is a prominent feature of Black women’s writing in the United States and offers significant clues for better understanding a history in which Black women have worked with clothing to craft psychic spaces in which they can, despite and because of racism and sexism, hold images of their bodies as their own subjective possessions.

Freudian psychoanalysis has a term for this image of the body—the ego. Therefore, I bring Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id (1923) to bear on the work of Black women writers and show that clothing, proximate to the body but not identical with it, serves as material for projecting surfaces and crafting “interior” spaces in which Black women have composed singular relationships to their own subjectivities. To make this argument, I focus on the work of the dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley and her memoir Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), which was published at the height of Reconstruction. Keckley’s memoir narrates her years working as the head modiste (an early iteration of the fashion designer) for Mabel Todd Lincoln and therefore reveals how clothing, race, gender, and sexuality were stitched together when the national home was torn by war. I aim to show that Behind the Scenes inaugurates a tradition in which Black women writers represent clothing in literary narratives to reveal the fashioning of an ego form that both contains subjectivity and defends against the racist and sexual assaults that make their bodies transparent passageways for others’ demands.

I am particularly interested in what clothing can express about Black women’s experiences that has been difficult if not impossible to say in a culture premised on their servitude and silence. Therefore, I argue that the psychoanalytic account of listening for affect that comes out of Freud’s attention to the ‘cap of hearing’ in The Ego and the Id, as well as the work of Melanie Klein and W.R. Bion, can be brought into dialogue with Keckley’s memoir and the tradition it inaugurates. In turn, I argue that Keckley’s memoir encourages psychoanalytic thinkers to listen to overlooked cultural practices such as fashion to hear stories in which people have fabricated “homes” that can hold their subjective relationships with their bodies and keep them their own.

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Speaker: 

Kimberly Lamm is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her research brings together Anglophone literature, contemporary art, visual culture, and feminist theory, and she has a particular interest

in the feminist engagement with psychoanalysis and aesthetic practices such as fashion that challenge the devaluation of femininity. She is the author of Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester University Press) and Riddles of the Sphinx, a BFI Classics book devoted to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s avant-garde feminist film from 1977.

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Tickets: 

Suggested donation £10-£15. 
Minimum donation £1. 

The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible. 

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The Freudian Research Seminar Series 

The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. 

Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service. 

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Schedule: 

Wednesday 22 October – Kimberly Lamm, Fashioning the Ego as Home: Black Women Writers and Clothing 

Thursday 27 November – Helen Rose, No Fixed Abode, No Fixed Support? The Weaponization of Homelessness in an Era of Austerity and NHS Decline 

Thursday 11 December – Kazue Niki, Staging the Finale: Freud’s London Garden as a Constructed Space 

Wednesday 28 January – Foram Trivedi, Home-Environmental Tweaks and Functional Independence in Adults with ADHD: A Narrative Review with Psychoanalytic Reflection 

Thursday 26 February – Arjet Pervizi, Renting Within Oneself: A psychoanalytic exploration of home - between rent and ownership, transience, and the fantasy of belonging in the psychoanalytic subject 

Thursday 26 March – Callum Blades, The Unhomely Mind: Conspiracies as a Defence Against Psychic Displacement 

Thursday 23 April – Nisrina Larasati, “Only You Understand Me Completely”: Contemporary Investigation of the Uncanny in AI Therapy Bots 

Thursday 21 May – Sam Bolton, I Cannot Turn Away from Your Home: A Melancholic Reformulation of Transgender Dysphoria 

Thursday 25 June – Anna-Peter Magyarlaki & Eric Harper, Homes, closets and wombs: Psychoanalytic reflections on home-making and homelessness for queer, trans and gender nonconforming people 

Thursday 30 July – Huaiyuan “Susanna” Zhang, The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House: Levinas, Freud, and the Ethical Unhousing of Oedipus