conventions of feminine behaviour are felt with the intensity of some sort of trauma. In other words, there’s a memory of something you haven’t experienced directly… LT: Being a woman is a memory I haven’t had. It’s a cultural memory. It’s extremely interesting that you pick this up because I think the way in which we’re constructed as men and women is pretty violent. It’s active, it’s constant…. I remember reading about one of the early transsexuals who would say that it was very hard work being a girl, making sure that he did all of the right things… PN: The idea that a gendered identity takes work connects with some of the things Judith Butler has been writing about recently. She talks, for example, of gender as something ‘tenuously constituted in time’ through ‘a stylized repetition of acts’. LT: Absolutely. I wonder if she also read people like Garfinkel, Sacks, and Goffman. Because that was their point, that this wasn’t something simple, that doing gender was hard work. PN: Perhaps this is where we get some sort of connection between gender and being haunted by memories which come from somewhere else? I mean it’s your mother being feminine that you remember. Similarly, in The Madame Realism Complex, ‘Paige suffers mainly from reminiscences’, a phrase which refers us directly to Freud on hysteria. How did this psychoanalytic theme develop in your thinking? LT: I came to Freud because a number of people in my extended family were being analysed in the fifties. Later, when I went to college in the mid-sixties I saw a psychotherapist who was a Freudian, not an analyst but who was taught by Freudians. I think my first way in was through practice, and then I began reading some Freud and arguing with my male psychotherapist about penis envy. Reading Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was extremely important for me. And then there was film theory—Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and others. PN: May I ask, in parenthesis, how you came upon the Madame Realism persona? Why ‘Realism’? LT: She’s not a persona. In 1983, I got a phone call from somebody asking me to contribute to a Surrealist magazine. I thought that that was idiotic, I thought people going around thinking they’re Surrealists is crazy. Then I began thinking about Meret Oppenheim whom I’d interviewed in Paris in ’73, then in New York in ’78. I thought about how she had talked about being only twenty-one when she made the Fur Tea-Cup and Saucer, and how Max Ernst was her lover and she left him because she didn’t want to be influenced by him. There was the problem of young women in the