Based on an award-winning article that was censored before it could be published, Gender Without Identity — the text about which this evening’s discussion will revolve — offers a revolutionary new psychoanalytic theory of gender. In this text, which is rooted in the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche and in conversation with bold work in queer and trans studies, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini jettison ‘core gender identity’ to propose, instead, that gender is something all subjects acquire — and that trauma sometimes has a share in that acquisition. Conceptualizing trauma alongside diverse genders and sexualities is thus not about invalidating transness and queerness, but about illuminating their textures to enable their flourishing. This discussion — which, like the book itself, addresses both those within and those outside psychoanalysis — considers the book’s argument for the ethical urgency of recognizing that wounding experiences and traumatic legacies may be spun into gender. Such ‘spinning’ involves self-theorizations that do not proceed from a centred self, but are nevertheless critical to psychic autonomy. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini draw on these ideas to offer clinical resources for working with gender complexity and for complexifying (what is seen as) gender normativity.
In English
With
Ann Pellegrini
Avgi Saketopoulou
Moderated by Marta Aleksandrowicz and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Organized by
ICI Berlin
The recording is available in the ICI Library archive only.
