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.
Thanks to the generosity of a donor who prefers to remain anonymous, the editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality are delighted to present our inaugural Kirin Award to Sal Daña, for “Body as Estuary: Mixed Being, Being Mixed.” Daña is an artist and candidate in Psychoanalysis at the Institute of Expressive Analysis and Art Therapy at Pratt Institute.
With this new award, Studies in Gender and Sexuality will recognize an outstanding paper by a clinician and/or academic working in the areas of psychoanalysis and social justice on topics centered around gender and sexuality in dynamic intersectional contexts. The figure of the Kirin is an intentional symbolic presence. A highly revered East Asian mythological creature who signifies the arrival of new knowledge and wisdom, the Kirin—part deer, part dragon, fire-wrapped yet symbolizing peace, serenity, and enlightenment, embodying the features of multiple animals at once—reflects our search for papers that exemplify a vision of a future that resonates with its values and complexity.
While we received many compelling essays, Daña’s paper stood out. It brings together psychoanalysis and oceanological studies to explore how the “choreography of the estuary,” a coastal water body that combined river and ocean waters in a continuum of flux, can “offer another way into embodiment and the psychic life of people who are ‘mixed.’” In the waters of the paper, queer and mestize theory mix with the psychoanalytic to imagine how multiple identity positions might be held in a “unified yet chaotic sense of mixedness” that asks binary-imposing forces to recognize flow and motion in place of static otherness and to move beyond particular definitions of racial or ethnic purity.
Like many early-career clinicians, Daña is interested in generating a new and more supple psychoanalytic theory and practice to work from. They ask, “If psychoanalysis is something these identities may still be crashing up against, how do we approach them with care?