Julien Fischer

Julien Fischer is a researcher in the fields of psychoanalysis, trans studies, queer theory, and the history of sexology. Julien is a candidate psychoanalyst with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. He holds a PhD in Literature with a certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University, and a BA in Global Gender Studies from the University at Buffalo.

Julien was a recipient of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he taught in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research has been published in Feminist Formations, Psychoanalysis & History, Feminist Theory, and Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly.

Psychoanalysis has long reduced transsexualism to a symptom of psychosis. Against this orthodoxy, recent interventions have argued that this equation is pathologizing, that trans phenomena are more properly theorized with reference to neurosis, or that transition is an aesthetic act of self-creation. Fischer’s project questions such reparative moves by reopening the historical association between transsexualism and the clinics of psychosis. He turns to five accounts of a single case study, first published in 1890, that is referenced in Trans Studies today as the earliest medical autobiography by a trans woman. Contemporary debate has reduced each clinical encounter with the case to the same question — is the subject psychotic, or trans? — as if the two are mutually exclusive.

Far from reclaiming or romanticizing reductionist tropes, Fischer challengesthe demand of Trans Studies to forget psychosis so as to produce a ‘normal’, ‘sane’, or self-knowing trans self. Instead, he inquires into the imbrications of gender and sexuality with the psychical and historiographic distinctions between reality and fantasy, wish and delusion, and neurosis and psychosis. As a contribution to the ICI Focus AutoReduction, his project draws attention to the paradox in which the affirmative production of a self-authorizing trans subject represses its own investment in the very clinical discourses that discipline the boundary between pathology and sanity in the first place.