‘Gird Your Loins! The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!’
‘Gird Your Loins! The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!’ is out now in ‘The Queerness of Psychoanalysis’ edited by @renderingunconscious, Punzi, & Sauer. What a dream to be published in such a monumental anthology alongside so many brilliant trans & queer psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians including Avgi Saketopoulou, Griffin Hansbury, Lara Sheehi, Molly Merton, M.E. O'Brien and more. My contribution provides an unapologetic appraisal of the shape of quotidian transphobia within clinical psychoanalysis. This piece of writing has truly been a long time coming, shaped by various experiences I’ve had venturing along the outskirts of “psychoanalysis proper,” or its clinical and professional domains. This type of excavation is only possible if others are willing to carve out a space for our uncensored voices, and I have been incredibly fortunate to find such colleagues along the way.
The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage.
Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing.
Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices.
