Gender Identity: Critical Interrogations of a Stalemated Concept
NO CE CREDIT
***This session will NOT be recorded***
Date: January 28, 1:00 PM Eastern Time
This presentation brings together trans studies scholar, Kadji Amin, and practicing psychoanalysts, Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, to critically interrogate gender identity.
For Amin, gender identity is conceptually designed to gatekeep medical transition. Emerging at the precise moment in which it became technically possible to alter sex, he argues, gender identity placed technologies of transitioning in the hands of doctors and psychologists, impeding patients’ bodily self-determination. One effect was that only trans people who were deemed respectable were allowed to transition, effectively excluding transfeminine sex workers whose transition desires were seen as sexually perverse. Another effect was framing transition as a project of class uplift that sought to “rehabilitate” trans sex workers.
Pellegrini explains what Michel Foucault means when he writes that in the history of the modern west, we have been called to elaborate ourselves in relation to capital T Truths about ourselves. For them, identity claims about gender are one such example. Of course, not everyone’s truth claims get the same degree of traction or respect in social worlds- or in our consulting rooms. Still, they argue, an affirming approach to trans and queer identities is not enough: what if notions like “core gender identity” cannot ultimately save us and may even lock us into cramped ways of being and becoming a subject?
For Saketopoulou, gender identity is not just an impoverished but a dangerous concept that nests many ticking bombs into clinical practice and in policy discussions around transness. Not only does gender identity problematically disaggregate gender from sexuality, it makes gender certainty and gender stability a condition of transitioning. Licensing a series of detection and diagnostic mechanisms that are inclusion-appearing but are in essence oppressive and abusive, it sets up clinicians (but also legislators) to understand “detransitioning” as an error.
The three talks will be followed by a short exchange between the speakers, before opening it up to a Q&A with the audience.
Presenters:
Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and a 2023-4 fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. Amin is a materialist theorist of gender and sexuality. His research brings empirical scholarship on the history of sexuality to bear on trans and queer theory. Amin’s book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. He is currently at work on a second book titled, “Trans Materialism without Gender Identity.”
Ann Pellegrini, Ph.D., is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen); and “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico). Honors and awards include the Freud Fulbright Visiting Scholarship to the Freud Museum Vienna, and the first annual Tiresias Paper Award, which they and Avgi Saketopoulou received for their co-written essay, “A feminine boy: normative investments and reparative fantasy at the intersections of gender, race, and religion.” A revised version of that essay is the first chapter in Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s co-authored book Gender Without Identity.
Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in NYC. On faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, she is twice the recipient of JAPA's annual essay prize (2014, 2023). In 2021 she co-chaired, with Jonathan House, the first US-based conference on the work of Jean Laplanche. Avgi is the author of "Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia" (NYU press, 2023) and co-author with Ann Pellegrini of "Gender Without Identity" (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). Her critical conversations with Dominique Scarfone appear in the volume "The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche" (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).
