Spring Meeting Pre-Conference Workshop: Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics

April 22, 8:30am - 12:00pm

via Zoom

This pre-conference workshop is being offered for free to all who are interested.  If you are NOT attending the Spring Meeting, but would still like to attend, you can register here to receive the Zoom link.  NOTE:  If you are registering for Spring Meeting, this session will already be included in your registration and available via the mobile app and event website.  You only need to register here if you are not registering for the Spring Meeting.

Description:

This workshop introduces Cisteria! as a collective transpsychoanalytic intervention against contemporary anti-trans panics and the institutional forms that sustain them. Drawing from the Cisteria! special issue, contributors explore transpectres and cisteria as defensive formations that relocate pathology away from trans subjectivity and toward ciscentric power. Through brief clinical, theoretical, and creative interventions, the workshop offers “unfaithful recalibrations” of psychoanalysis and invites participants to consider how psychic life might be reclaimed from institutions through play, critique, and trans world-making.

Speakers:

Tavi Bishop
Jess Joseph
Tobias Wiggins
Xiameng Qiao
Myriam Sauer
Vic Kennedy
Atenea Medina Polo

Xiaomeng (Jo) Qiao – bio forthcoming 

Simone Atenea Medina Polo is a psychoanalytic philosopher and interdisciplinary artist based out of amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). Atenea has published articles and book chapters in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Marxism with collaborators and editors such as Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Julie Reshe, Vanessa Sinclair, Todd McGowan, and Duane Rousselle. As an artist, Atenea has released multiple experimental pop music albums as pseudo-antigone, including her album Melancholic Melodrama which tells a quasi-fiction of the subjective destitution of an insecure artist who severed her own humanity in a Faustian bargain to become a TMZ-level pop star disaster.

Vic J. Kennedy (they, them, theirs) is a Black american gender studies scholar and reproductive justice advocate based in Atlanta, Georgia. Originally raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Vic credits the american Southeast as their political, educational, spiritual, and organizational home. They hold both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and they aspire to one day pursue a Juris Doctorate. They currently work as a Healthline Coordinator at Access Reproductive Care Southeast, a Black and queer led abortion fund. Their topics of interest include Black gender ontology, gender abolition, healthcare access for transgender patients, and restorative justice.

Myriam Sauer is an associate researcher (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Latin America Institute of Freie Universität Berlin, as well as a writer. She has published one novel, Passage durch den reißenden Strom (A Torrential Passage; 2023, Querverlag), and co-edited The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge 2024, alongside Vanessa Sinclair and Elisabeth Punzi). She will co-edit Radicalizing Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Tools and Theories for Resistance (with Elizabeth Punzi, Routledge, 2027), and she will publish her second novel, Der Fall (The Fall) on minoritarian resistance to totalitarian systems of control, in 2027 (Querverlag). She has published scholarly articles and chapters on questions of gender formation, sexuality and desire at the intersections of psychoanalysis, philosophy and sociology.