Care of appearance

1. Does "care of appearance" mean "women taking care of their beauty, i.e. women trying to look beautiful and sexy"?

2. Does "her intellectual work was dominated by her identification with her father" mean "her professional job was under the influence of her relationship with her father"?

3. Does "over whom she had rivalrous feelings of superiority, although she also feared his retribution" mean "she had rivalry with her father over superiority (she had a fight of power with her father) although she feared that her father would punish her for this rivalry"?

4. Does "the public performance of the lecture being a display of phallic power which symbolically castrated him" mean "the woman's job activities (her performances) were a display of her phallic power which was symbolically equivalent to the castration of her father"?

5. Does "to allay her anxiety at his fantasised retribution" mean "to heal her anxiety of the fact that she would probably be punished by her father"?

6. Does "to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it" mean "to prevent from the punishment that she expects to receive from her father if her father finds out that she possesses masculinity"?

Context:

The psychoanalytic text that is used to discuss the relation between femininity and the masquerade is Joan Rivière’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, 1929. In her essay, Rivière puzzles over how to classify professional women who combine the fulfilment of their professional duties with a normative feminine development, i.e. wife, mother, housewife, nurturing, care of appearance. A patient, who was a woman of this type, presented her with some discoveries. After giving a lecture/public performance, the woman would experience severe anxiety which led her to seek out compliments from some man/men at the close of proceedings to reassure her of both her professional performance and of her sexual attractiveness. As a Kleinian analyst, Rivière maintained that while the woman’s infantile rivalry was with both parents, her intellectual work was dominated by her identification with her father, over whom she had rivalrous feelings of superiority, although she also feared his retribution, the public performance of the lecture being a display of phallic power which symbolically castrated him. Her flirting with colleagues and adopting an ultra-feminine pose after the event was to allay her anxiety at his fantasised retribution. Rivière’s conclusion is that the ‘womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’ (Art and Psychoanalysis by Maria Walsh).