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Gender Without Identity’s fraught pathway to publication reminds us that there is still much resistance to queerness in psychoanalysis. To queer patients, queer analysts, queer candidates, and psychoanalytic thinking that challenges the prevailing paradigms when it comes to sex and gender. Queer voices and ideas still face repressive forces.
Drs. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini make it clear from the first lines of the preface that “We didn’t set out to write a book. We were forced to by repression” (pp. vii). The focus of this book, the chapter called “A Feminine Boy: Trauma as Resource for Self-Theorization,” was originally a paper that in 2021 won the first Tiresias Award, selected by the International Psychoanalytical Association’s (IPA) inaugural Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee (S&GDSCo). From the outset, the S&GDSCo had an agreement with the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP) that any paper given the Tiresias award would have a path to submission and possible publication (pp. x). The details of how and why this got derailed for this first award-winning paper even after initially being approved for publication in the IJP are detailed in the book. A powerful introduction to Chapter 1 by the inaugural chair of the S&GDSCo, Dr. Marco Posadas, recounts the award’s namesake myth of Tiresias, where difference sparks violence but eventually forges new space and understanding for things different or unrecognizable. Posadas emphasizes that the historic struggle still endures and speaks to the regrettable irony that after winning this award, Drs. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s paper was subject to the very violence the award was intended to denounce and overcome.
Anyone interested in learning about or staking a claim in this struggle – to be explicit, one that takes up the ongoing issue of queer and trans people; patients, analysts, and candidates alike, being repressed or outright rejected from formal integration into the world of psychoanalysis – shou