Gender without Identity, by Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou.  The Unconscious in Translation Press. 2023.  160 pp.

Among the many accounts of Tiresias in Greek mythology, I first heard the version where Hera and Zeus are arguing about who experiences greater sexual pleasure, with Hera insisting that men do. Tiresias, having been turned into a woman for seven years as a punishment for killing a pair of copulating snakes, seems well-suited to settle the dispute. Apollodorus notes that Tiresias answered: “Of ten parts a man enjoys one only; / But a woman enjoys the full ten parts in her heart.”1 Hera, enraged at being wrong, strikes Tiresias blind. Zeus takes pity on him, but because one God cannot undo the actions of another, Zeus gives him the gift of prophecy as a compensation. This reconciling of ostensible oppositions (punishment—recompense) seems apt for Tiresias as a figure that embodies male and female, mortality and immortality, blindness and insight. Put differently, Tiresias exposes a zone in which so-called opposing terms become indiscernible from one another.

Tiresias is a familiar character in Greek tragedies. Perhaps most famously, he appears as a seer in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, where he's called upon to answer Oedipus' question about why a plague has beset Thebes. In typical Tiresias fashion, he answers

cryptically, telling Oedipus that he is the criminal he seeks. Here, Tiresias speaks less as a prophet and more as one who knows a history that Oedipus doesn't know he knows. But we could say that, in this scene, Tiresias interprets the plague as Oedipus's symptom.

Recalling these ancient tales, it's apt that the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) named their annual prize the Tiresias Paper Award, honoring and gesturing to forgotten—and disavowed—histories and figures associated with minoritarian gender and sexual experiences. As recounted in the Preface to Gender Without Identity, Ann Pellegrini