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“Psychoanalysis will need to let itself be screwed.”
—Gender Without Identity, p. xvi
Gender Without Identity attends to the personal, structural, theoretical, and clinical dimensions of psychoanalysis, providing an enriching framework for thinking about gender across the various faces of the discipline. Authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini wrote the book following a suite of intellectual-cum-legal disputes regarding the publication of their article, “A Feminine Boy: Normative Investments and Reparative Fantasy at the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Religion,” in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP). The paper, the winner of the first Tiresias Award from the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee at the International Psychoanalytical Association, had been accepted by the journal and, following a series of edits, was set to be published. The authors’ round of edits provoked a negative response from the IJP due to the overtly political nature of the work and the clear stance it was taking on queer and trans issues in psychoanalysis. The authors, legally barred from publishing the paper elsewhere, create a home for the article by expanding it into a book that is part of a series in Unconscious in Translation, which publishes translations of and texts related to the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche.
In light of this series of events, we can understand the structure of and polemical tone running through the book as a response to a psychoanalytic field that refuses the screwing which is perhaps its due. Here, to screw can be taken in the broader sense of anything which opens us up to alterity, what Oliver Davis and Tim Dean describe as the other-dimensional nature of sex.1 It is in the gape, spot, stain, left behind by the intrusion and extrusion of something which is other—here, in the form of interventions from trans studies, queer theory, Black feminism, and other psychoanalytically-adjacent fields—that something new can take form, out
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