{"title":"Practice, Not Performance: Will Psychoanalysis Take up Sovereignty, Solidarity, and the Expansiveness of Bodies in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision?","authors":"helen DeVinney, Lara Sheehi","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2166316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2166316","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The special issue editor, helen DeVinney, and journal editor, Lara Sheehi, engage in a conversation exploring their own relationship, their lived experience of solidarity, and the development of the special issue in response to the Dobbs decision, specifically speaking to what they hoped to achieve with the issue and what they hoped to resist, as well as thoughts about what this issue as a whole has to say to psychoanalysis as a field and the challenge that is issued in the embodied, passionate voices of the authors.","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":"45138579","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":"Letter in Support of Lara Sheehi","authors":"Katie Gentile","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2179299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2179299","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"44268805","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":"From “Polymorphous Perversity” to Polysexuality: A Note on Psychoanalytic Ideologies and the Critique of Hegemonic Normativity","authors":"B. Barratt","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2133521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2133521","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The psychological and sociopolitical significance of Freud’s 1905 assertion of polymorphous perversity and originary bisexuality as being the source of all human sexual expression is explored. The way in which normative sexual development involves a trajectory of loss of our capacities for sensual pleasure is discussed. The notion of humans as all having “polysexual potential” is introduced, and it is argued that appreciating polysexuality as a central feature of our condition has emancipatory value and is thus preferable to the pejoratively toned terminology that Freud deployed.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45453941","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 “Ethical Turn” in Psychoanalysis: A Skeptical View","authors":"S. Botticelli","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2133522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2133522","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the last decade there has been a great outburst of ethics upon the psychoanalytic scene, with the appearance of several books and many scholarly articles making a claim for a central role for ethics in our theorizing and practice. One might ask, Why now? In attempting to answer this question, the author considers the position of psychoanalytic therapists as “implicated subjects” (from Rothberg) within the neoliberal political economy, aware of our passive participation in causing widespread harm. Discomfort with this awareness has provoked strenuous assertions of our goodness, which are undercut, however, by some serious ethical lapses. These include our investment as private practitioners in a manner of service delivery that has contributed to a crisis of public access to mental health care; the lack of accountability for harm caused to LGBTQ people by decades of homophobic theorizing and practice; and the concentration of power in our professional organizations.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45320980","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":"Self(ie)-Recognition: Authenticity, Passing, and Trans Embodied Imaginaries","authors":"Teddy G. Goetz","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2133525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2133525","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Coming out as trans involves the melancholic, ambivalent loss of intentionally forsaken objects and illusions. Creating replacement fantasies for one’s gender expression requires navigating tensions between trying to visualize one’s authentic internal truth in the mirror (self-recognition) and seeking the affirmation and safety associated with external recognition, often referred to as passing. Ascribing to hegemonic binary gender norms can increase one’s legibility, but may impair self-recognition and one’s ability to form intimate connections with others, due to erasure of the authentic self. This can be particularly salient for nonbinary individuals, for whom passing necessitates choosing a least harmful form of misrecognition. I explored these themes in ethnographic interviews with 28 transgender, nonbinary, and/or gender-expansive individuals about their faces. Participants (binary and nonbinary) overwhelmingly fantasized about having facial features more stereotypically incongruent with their assigned-gender-at-birth (e.g., assigned-female-at-birth seeking angular jaw and cheekbones). They found the presence of such elements in their faces affirming or imagined a lack thereof to promote misrecognition. Paradoxically, these same persons were dissatisfied when such hypermasculinity or hyperfemininity was projected onto their faces by digital filters, due to loss of self-recognition.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45204746","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 Dilemma of Therapist Self-Disclosure in Transgender Group Therapy","authors":"C. M. Kelly","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2133520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2133520","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Therapist self-disclosure can be a powerful yet highly personal tool in clinical work. Specifically for LGBTQ+ patients, the therapist’s self-disclosure of LGBTQ+ identity may foster empowerment and build the alliance. It may also risk misattunement and erasure. The therapist remaining silent may center the patient’s experience; it may also model the therapist’s internalized oppression. This is further complicated by the group setting and format, as well as the therapist’s own stage of identity development in both professional and personal spheres. This dilemma is considered through a case presentation of a trans student support group I led as a queer therapist during my doctoral training. The case and subsequent reflection question the need for a binary, fixed perspective on therapist-self disclosure, as identity and relationship are not static but ever-changing.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44249373","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 Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry","authors":"Sheila L. Cavanagh","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2133523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2133523","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article brings the feminist psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to a reading of Kimberley Pierce’s landmark film Boys Don’t Cry. While many transgender studies scholars have critiqued the film from an intersectional lens, few have engaged important questions relevant to a transgender gaze from a feminist psychoanalytic angle. Feminist psychoanalytic theory offers insight into the gaze, the mirror, gender, sexual difference, temporality, trauma, and memory of relevance not only to cisgender women but to transgender subjects irrespective of gender identity. Ettinger’s formulation of the Other Sexual Difference (OSD) provides a way to understand elements of trans- experience that are not visible, yet significant to subjectivity. I contend that there is a correspondence between what Ettinger calls the matrixial gaze and the transgender gaze operating in the film that helps us to understand the interhuman dimensions of looking irreducible to identity. Both feminist psychoanalytic theory and transgender studies are concerned not only with gender but with elements of being that are not ocular and are too often eclipsed in phallic and white cisgender representational practices.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47343119","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":"Apophenic Reading and the Politics of Psychoanalysis","authors":"Beckett Warzer","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2097476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2097476","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding how phenomena like parapraxes, fantasies, and dreams are indices of unconscious processes. In this way it is a particularly suspicious undertaking, linking surface clues to what, by definition, cannot be known. This essay attends to the suspicious and skeptical registers of psychoanalysis to sense a resonance between what is made visible and invisible in the making of “nation” and “human.” There is a secret history of psychoanalysis, in which it is bound up with political agitation, socialist movements, and skepticism of human exceptionalism. What about the suspicious method of psychoanalysis is threatening not only to psychic but to political repression? By tarrying in this secret history, and the strange, symptomatic ambivalences in psychoanalytic texts, this article suggests that the politically serviceable roots of psychoanalysis could be returned from their repression in the present day, to answer to contemporary abolitionist projects.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41847521","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":"Introduction: 2022 Symonds Prize","authors":"M. Sheehy","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2097471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2097471","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, each year Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) recognizes an outstanding essay that speaks to the intersections of psychoanalysis and cultural theories of gender and sexuality. The editors are delighted to award the 2022 Symonds Prize to Urvashi Agarwal for her paper “An Appeal for Mourning” and to Antonios Poulios for his paper “Chemsex: Reintroducing Sexuality in the Pleasure and Pain of the Infans.”","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41757917","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":"An Appeal for Mourning","authors":"Urvashi Agarwal","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2022.2097474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2022.2097474","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This writing is a personal essay that attempts to describe the experience of a woman therapist in her work with women patients. The therapist’s struggle in her work, primarily of holding onto her own subjectivity, of keeping her mind alive, and her fear of losing her own subjectivity, among other feelings, are all understood as being representative of the continuous and often violent attacks on female subjectivity and desire in the patriarchal culture of a country like India. This essay makes an attempt to add another layer of meaning to the therapist’s struggle and to the dynamics that exist between her and her female patients. It is an appeal for mourning, for a personal and collective mourning of the losses that women carry, often unconsciously, of their minds, subjectivity, and desire, seen here to be as a result of the discrimination and violence against women present in the culture.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45587451","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}