Sexuality studies and queer theory have long drawn from psychoanalysis in centralizing sexuality within human experience. Psychoanalysis, for its, part, has benefitted from the work of sexuality studies, beginning with Freud’s interest in the work of Krafft-Ebing and the sexologists. This talk explores this important relationship as well as its tensions which continue today and derive from certain deplorable post-Freudian era practices and conceptualisations by a psychoanalytic field worried about non-conformity and its scandalous ideas. Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the sexual “non-rapport” queers the field of desire and is useful in approaching sexuality as embodying a fundamental “heteros” or otherness that forms of identity, including gender, attempt to bridge. In psychoanalytic terms, desire’s “disquieting disregard for gender and for persons” (Dean 2000) supports queer theory’s suspicion of identity categories and rejection of systems of normativity (Giffney, 2017). This talk proposes that psychoanalysis is challenged, strengthened, and emboldened by cross-disciplinary engagement.

Learning Objectives

1. Identify and appreciate what queer theory is and how queer theory and sexuality studies coincides with psychoanalytic history and its core principles
2. Critically discuss the role and importance of cross-disciplinarity for psychoanalytic practice and thought
3. Assess how Lacanian psychoanalysis contributes to a “queering” as well as a “querying” of the field of sexuality and how this can be useful in considerations of subjectivity today.