Saturday, April 20th 2024, 1-2:30pm, Live online

In this presentation, which draws on their co-authored book Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023), psychoanalysts Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini challenge the argument widely embraced by rights activists and many members of the LGBTQ+ community that gender identity is innate and immutable. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini chart another path towards the flourishing of queer and trans life. Positing that the idea of an innate core gender identity is simplistic, problematic, and, even, potentially harmful to LGBTQ+ people, they instead argue that gender is something all subjects acquire. Trauma, they provocatively propose, sometimes has a share in that acquisition. In their way of thinking, lived trauma as well as structural and intergenerationally transmitted traumatic debris may become a resource for transness and queerness. Such a suggestion importantly counters conservative accounts that identify trauma as disrupting or “warping” some putatively “normal” gender. Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in queer and trans of color critique, and in the authors’ extensive clinical experience with queer and trans people, Gender Without Identity presents a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychologist and a psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she trained. Her published work has received numerous awards, among them the annual JAPA prize, the Roughton award, the Ruth Stein prize, and Div 39’s scholarship award. In 2021 she co-chaired the conference “Laplanche in the States: the Sexual and the Cultural”, the first US conference dedicated to the work of Laplanche. Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, was published in 2023 by New York University Press.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen (New York University Press, 2003); and “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico (Beacon Press, 2013). Pellegrini is the founding co-editor of the “Sexual Cultures” series at NYU Press.

Saketopoulou and Pellegrini received the first Tiresias Paper Award from the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association for their co-written work in 2021. A revised version of that work forms the heart of their co-authored book, Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).