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Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, each year Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) recognizes an outstanding essay that speaks to the intersections of psychoanalysis and cultural theories of gender and sexuality. The editors are delighted to award the 2019 Symonds Prize to Kathleen Del Mar Miller, MFA, LCSW, for her paper “Working Clinically With the Skin’s Surface: Tattoos, Scars, and Gendered Embodiment.” Miller has an M.F.A. in poetry, has published her poetry widely, practices psychoanalysis with mostly queer and trans adolescents and adults, many of whom are artists, in New York City, and teaches at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.
In choosing a Symonds Prize winner, SGS looks for a paper that challenges psychoanalysis to attend to the forces that shape our ideas of where meaning resides in relation to gender and sexuality and which thereby control the aperture of our enlivened attention and creative thinking about our patients’ experience. From its beginnings, psychoanalysis has privileged a search for latent meaning in depths and disguise, urging us to look past the manifest. But Miller’s paper draws our attention to the most surface, most visible, corporeal level of our patients’ skin, to body modifications in the form of tattoos, piercings, scarification, and trans or gender nonconforming embodiments, and compellingly alerts us to all the rich “cultural, relational, and intrapsychic meanings” there inscribed and invested that are often missed or dismissed as “without unconscious significance,” or “overdetermined or emptied of meaning.”
But skin is far from surface, Miller argues persuasively here, as she draws in theory from the emerging field of somatechnics to help push current psychoanalytic formulations on skin-ego (Anzieu, 1985) and body modification (Lemma, 2010) to consider the “tremendous porosity that exists between our psyche-somas and technology.” Through compelling clinical examples, Miller demonstr