Does the (Fantastic) Transwoman Exist?: A Commentary on the Film A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean Drama directed by Sebastian Lelio, and the Question of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy

We now live in a time when there are different ways of thinking and representing gender, and in this regard, the transsexual subject represents a new kind of subjectivity, that along with other individuals subjected to exclusion, such as autistic or indigenous groups, is oriented by a desire for social change. There are multiple realities that are at stake, and there is a question of how far we can go when we think about what is possible or the human's determination, and this comes to a boiling point on the matter of gender. The attempt to change the nature of how to make meaning also involves the capacity to face difficult questions and to have the courage to tolerate anxiety and frustration without falling back to compliance or destruction. There are new demands being made from LGBTQ groups for a different way of approaching discourse on gender, including demands for recognition, inclusion, and, recently, an apology for a history of willful disregard.

The slow-moving creep of discourses about gender now involves a move from looking at transsexuality towards examining the cisgender reception of trans subjectivities and demands for recognition. In turn, trans communities are making demands from within for education about their own subject position in relation to transsexuality. There is an intensity that belongs to the topic of education, because it is a site to which we bring our own desires, our hatred of dependency and development, and our tacit fantasies of what it takes to change minds. This paper engages with the question of film as one site of education, in which the central question is the viewers' reception. The question of reception is crucial, because clinicians are now beginning to think more deeply about their own work in relation to gender demands, and about their own education in matters of gender. In this paper, I offer a brief reviewing of the film A Fantastic Woman (2017), a passionate melodrama by Sebastian Leilo, a Chilean director, with the quest