Introduction: 2023 Symonds Prize

Thanks to 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 2023 Symonds Prize to Paige Sweet, Ph.D., for their paper “Mask Up: Identifying Anger in Gendered and Racial Formulations.” Sweet is a psychoanalyst in New York City and holds faculty positions at the Bard Prison Initiative and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and is currently chair of the Sexuality and Gender Initiative and co-chair of the Colloquium Committee at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Sweet’s paper looks at the ways that anger can be present otherwise than overtly in clinical space, as in the dreamspace, “disowned and creatively deployed,” in masked form and in masquerade that can make possible a “space between knowing and not knowing anger.” Sweet asks us to consider, and to listen for, how the body, voice, language, and movement come into play as anger circulates and is hidden in response to gendered and racialized experience. The analyst, Sweet suggests, can work productively with the mask itself, rather than searching or waiting for a “truer” truth, or “more primary” affect, to be “unmasked,” and offers two clinical examples, along with conversation with Fanon, Riviere, Butler, and Pellegrini, among others, which illuminate ways of working with the anger that can lurk and be expressed in gendered masquerade and racial masking.

Annie Lee Jones, in her discussion, questions whether there are different possibilities open for the direct or masked expressions of anger for a racialized body than for a gendered one, and argues for attunement to the different ways anger may be “licensed” or interpreted in relation to them. Clearly, there is much territory here that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing must continue to explore.

We hope you enjoy this a