You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
AVGI SAKETOPOULOU AND ANN PELLEGRINI'S book Gender Without Identity brings into dialogue psychoanalysis with trans and queer, gender and sexuality (TQGS) studies. For someone like me, working mainly in philosophy and TQGS studies and fascinated by the differing (dis)avowal of identity in these fields, the title of the book sparked my interest—what might it mean, I wondered, for the question of gender identity to be raised instead at the intersection of TQGS studies and psychoanalysis? And what fruits might such a dialogue bear? To be sure, such a confrontation comes at a critical time for both disciplines. As the authors make clear, such a dialogue is essential if psychoanalysis is to transform itself into a discipline that can do justice to its trans and queer patients. Further, some crucial lacunae of scholarly work done on gender, sex, and sexuality are highlighted, and the authors insist that filling in these gaps will require us to take seriously what psychoanalysis has to offer to theorizations of gender and sexuality.
This book successfully steps into such a dialogue between these disciplines, raising rather than answering questions for scholars working on queer and trans studies and opening up a critical political perspective for the future of psychoanalysis. Gender Without Identity's heart piece is its first chapter, a longer version of the previously unpublished Tiresias Prize–winning article titled “A Feminine Boy: Trauma as Resource for Self-Theorization,” initially intended for publication in the prestigious International Journal of Psychoanalysis before its acceptance
was rescinded due to its reckoning with psychoanalysis's failures to do justice to its trans and queer patients. The chapter offers a targeted critique of the resistance psychoanalysis displays toward grappling with the complexities and challenges that trans and queer subjects present for the discipline and simultaneously suggests that theorizations of gender in queer and trans studies