Among Us: Reading and Writing with Muriel Dimen

Muriel Dimen penned many introductions to books and panels. In this essay that became the first chapter of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, I follow Dimen’s manner of hopscotching among self-reflection, mentoring, and theory building. I riff on Dimen’s call for a new genre of psychoanalytic text and read Dimen’s 1986 memoir/novel, Surviving Sexual Contradictions, finding Dimen fomenting revolution on the page as in the consulting room, where paradox and contradiction spark innovation in personal, interpersonal, and professional space. I challenge the genre of editor’s introduction to put personal narrative to political task (here, the story of my decision to shift the focus of this volume from collected works to collective writing). I place Dimen in conversation with authors whose lens trained on race during the years she pursued gender. In the vulnerability that Dimen bravely forded as she turned to the study of sexual boundary violations in her late work, I find permission to call for psychoanalytic publishing to go tilt-o-whirl in service of revolution in the field.