{"title":"Is Perversion a Perverted Category? Introduction to the Special Issue","authors":"Nicolas Evzonas","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211907","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introductory paper outlines the clinical, ethical, and personal reasons that led to the preparation of this French-based issue on perversion. In traditional French psychoanalysis, perversion is conceived of as an autonomous psychopathological structure, with a special emphasis placed on narcissistic fragility, nullification of the other, and nonhegemonic sexual practices deemed as the abolishment of sex and generational differences. The author questions the relevance of perversion as a fixed category and proposes an inclusive approach that takes into account social, cultural, intrapsychic, and countertransference parameters. Finally, he overviews each article included in this special issue and highlights the epistemological diversity of the authors’ positions, thus promoting the paradigm of complexity, which is understood as heterogeneous hybrid thinking, noncompliant to dialectical synthesis.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44520112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erasure Through Representation in Boys Don’t Cry","authors":"J. Groeneboer, H. Swank","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211912","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This personal narrative essay examines the way erasure occurs alongside representation in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry. The author reflects on his experience seeing the film when it was first released, as a young transmasculine person. He describes multiple forms of erasure: his own, the exclusion of Philip DeVine from the film’s narrative, and even of Brandon Teena’s trans masculinity. The author considers the impact of the film on his own life and the way erasure in the film relates to the contemporary political climate in the United States.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44429912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dorian Gray’s Perverted Portraits and Mirrors","authors":"Philippe Givre","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211910","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray draws us into a narcissistic maze rife with phenomena of transitivism and imaginary confusion, such as Lacan described with respect to the mirror stage. Phenomena of reversal into the opposite and turning around are also very present in the story, causing an endless rotation of places, giving a paradoxical impression; these are indications of a perverse way of functioning in which the characters, swept up into this narcissistic universe, will sometimes take comfort in the illusion of being in the position of the “always-and-forever-irresistible-child,” and sometimes find themselves banished from that position and relegated to that of the “child-who-is-always-and-forever-shamed, humiliated, nullified.” This kind of overdeveloped specular ego is rooted in the “mirror function” of an idealized and complicit maternal gaze, which nevertheless alternates with a horrifying maternal gaze, the violence of sight being linked here with the eruption of a deadly maternal gaze.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59875716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"a shared fate (face)","authors":"Trish Salah","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2204802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2204802","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT If today the idea of the multiverse is ”everywhere” and “everything” and “all at once,” then in the overlay of physics and comic books, it seems we are never far from an unconscious that knows no “no,” nor time, nor contradiction. Or, if neither biology nor nation manifests destiny, how does the feeling of fatedness haunt, or give retroactive continuity to, the bad futures we make of our lives, deaths, one another’s? What then of that shadowy feeling that falls across aspirations, like memory, but something older and farther away, something promised that remains intimately obscure?","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49476586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hysterical Solidarity: An Embodied Reflection on Contemporary Sexual and Reproductive Rights Concerns in the United States","authors":"Brianna Suslovic","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2161284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2161284","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay provides a reflection on anger, chronic pain, illness, and identity. Using hysteria as a point of conceptual departure, the author makes use of psychoanalytic theory and the author’s lived experience to identify and expand upon the feminist potential for anger in this political moment. By contributing an embodied perspective to psychoanalytic notions of trauma and hysteria, the author approaches the question of reproductive justice through a personal and theoretical lens that offers a road map for political action.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49429262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Mountains into Molehills: A Lexicon-in-Process","authors":"K. Downey","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2159707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2159707","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT To make a mountain out of a molehill is to wrestle with the scale and form of a feeling. It’s a loaded, gendered idiom, referring to behaviors deemed over-reactive (read: histrionic, hysterical). This lexicon lays out the most generative metaphors that have emerged from the intersections between my art making and nearly a decade of psychoanalysis. These metaphors come from both inside and outside of me—they are synonyms for how figure and ground are co-constitutive. Much like my experiences of being trans, a lexicon is always fruitfully in-process, its language both containing and slippery. This lexicon is also a list of apparitions. As soon as I grab an idea by its name or phrase, it disappears.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44624632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Troubling (Un)Happiness: Finding Pathways Toward Liberatory Embodiment","authors":"Tara Alexé Lasheen, M. Dadlani","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2161278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2161278","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper, we aim to trouble the territory of affect, specifically happiness, as a site of social reproduction in order to understand the liberatory possibilities that unhappiness offers. We follow the body through various paths of reproduction and explore the implications of a happiness imperative in the context of the body. What does it mean to be a happy body and what does that happiness serve? As two cis women who occupy multiple diverging positionalities, we offer a meditation on what it means to embody and to reject a reproduced happiness through our personal narratives. With a focus on race, body size, age, pregnancy, and queerness, we explore the possible pathways toward claiming the body and moving toward defiance and freedom. We close with reflections on how a reconsideration of (un)happiness and (un)happy bodies can influence a more liberatory psychoanalysis.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44639792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trick Mirrors: The Shape-Shifting of White CIS-Women as Survivors / Perpetrators / Comrades in the Fight for Bodily Autonomy","authors":"helen DeVinney","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2166314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2166314","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The editor of this special issue, focused on the sequelae of the Dobbs decision, first offers an imaginative and embodied exploration of a dream that served as an organizing theory and call to action for the issue itself. The paper explores the author’s whiteness as it relates to her own body’s trauma and her work to understand instances of sexual violence through lenses of systemic oppression; the author links the way cis white women are variable allies in the fight for bodily autonomy, noting that the specific ways cis white women take up space regarding sexual assault, as well as abortion, crowd out out voices of those who experience more direct and intersectional violence. This reflection and accountability have largely shaped her commitment to seeing psychoanalysis decouple from coloniality and embrace its revolutionary roots, working to help folks locate pathology in systemic oppression and organizing macrosystems, as opposed to individuals. The paper challenges readers to resist the seductiveness of thinking about the Dobbs decision as impacting “women,” vaguely, and instead to think about those specifically gendered, racialized, disabled, queer, fat, and foreign bodies that will be most impacted by the violence and implied potential breadth of Dobbs.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48371479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Irresistible Lure of the Fetus, or Why Abortion Has Everything to Do with the Colonizing Temporalities of Anti-Blackness, “Human” Exceptionalism, and the Climate Crisis","authors":"Katie Gentile","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2161275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2161275","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As the climate crisis escalates, the political discourse of the United States has doubled down to focus not on the environment at large, but on that of the uterus. This paper argues that the fetal body is operating as a magical fetish object upon which to displace growing annihilation anxieties while attempting to colonize the future. As the fetus embodies projected climate vulnerability, policing the fantasized purity of the uterus becomes a displaced antidote to the horrors of environmental destruction. Integrating psychoanalysis with concepts from anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, I contend that this fetal fetish functions as a colonizing temporal system of affect regulation used to buttress an anxious and violently defensive white, cisgender, able-bodied, heteromasculinity. Cloaked in the pretext of fetal protectionism, racially and economically stratified reproductive violence is a literal scorched Earth policy fortifying white, heteropatriarchal “human” exceptionalism.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48215642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Institutional) Re/production","authors":"Z. Nicolazzo","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2161281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2161281","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reproduction as a social construct moves through people and institutions. As a result, people who are trapped in cycles of institutional violence may oftentimes be complicit in their furtherance, albeit without intent, malice, or blame. In some ways, those of us who are fetishized, commodified, and/or exoticized by institutional harm cannot help but be caught up in cyclical patterns of institutional harm. In this article, I detail my own personal narrative of this cycle, engaging memory work as a mode through which to remember and retell how institutional reproduction presses upon trans women. I then engage notions of freedom dreaming as one potential practice for imagining otherwises, elsewheres, and henceforwards unmarked by such reproductions.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47848820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}