Novel Revolts as Crafting of a Self

The psychoanalytic field continues to struggle with the dilemmas of conceptualizing gender and the experience of gender transition, even though gender appears to be very present in its multiple and transitional forms in the realm of the psyche as it manifests through the affective situation of the transference. In this paper, I want to move to an understanding of different situations of transitions that are grounded in gender but that suggest a wider world of experience with the claim that understanding the self is a complicated matter; and while this in itself is obvious to everyone, its complexity still comes as a surprise because of the unconscious. I turn to four memoirs: P. Carl’s Becoming a Man; Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom; Masha Gessen’s “To Be or Not To Be”; and Jane Gallop’s Sexuality, Disability and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus. Each text depicts different notions of transition that suggest a wider world of experience: physicality (age, illness, disability), generation, sexuality, and relationality. In unpacking each narrative as unique figurations of transitioning, I show how each gives us a foothold into a new way of imagining gender. I argue that by reading memoirs the analyst enters a world that is theirs and not theirs. It is a way into an imaginative realm that allows us entrance into conflicts, questions, and representations of being in the world.