2023-24 Saturday Seminar Series

Saturday Seminar Series

Co-Sponsored by the Sexuality and Gender Initiative

Gender, Trauma, and Other Queer Becomings

Presented by

Ann Pellegrini, Ph.D.

Discussant: Paige Sweet, LP

Including a live supervision with

Candidate: Danielle Drori, Ph.D.

Date: 3.2.24
Time: 10:30AM-1PM
Location: Zoom
CE:2.5
Cost: $75

This seminar draws on the speaker’s 2023 co-authored book Gender Without Identity to push back against the ways clinical debates over transness and queerness typically unfold: either trans people and queer people have deviated from the correct path of straightness and cis-ness (a “warped-that-way” approach) or people are born trans and born queer in the same way they are born straight and born cis (a “born-that-way” approach). The only possible claims psychoanalysis has been able to muster in defense of LGBTQ+ existence are that queer people’s gender identifications and erotic attractions are in some way innate or “core.” From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, such arguments are overly simplistic, because they overlook the fact that all psychic formations, normative and non-, arise out of complex psychic processes.

As against appeals to “core gender identity,” Pellegrini instead argues that all gender experience is a complex acquisition, that none is “natural” or inborn. Trauma, they propose, may even play a role in the development of both normative and non-normative genders and sexualities. Moreover, they will offer an anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic way to understand the relationship between trauma and transness, and between trauma and queerness.

Drawing on clinical materials and relying on the work of Jean Laplanche as well as on recent work in queer and trans studies, Pellegrini offers a psychoanalytic framework that can hold the complexity of thinking about trans and queer life without tipping into pathologization and attempts at cure.

Ann Pellegrini, Ph.D. is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their books include: Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen); and Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz). Pellegrini is the founding co-editor of the “Sexual Cultures” series at New York University Press. Their most recent book — entitled Gender Without Identity and co-authored with Avgi Saketopoulou – was published by the Unconscious in Translation Press, in June 2023. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are the recipients of the first annual Tiresias Paper Award (2021), from the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Paige Sweet is a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She has Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is a former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. She holds faculty positions at the Bard Prison Initiative and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. At the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, she is Chair of the Sexuality and Gender Initiative and Co-Chair of the Colloquium Committee. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Inquiry, Parallax, ARIEL.. In 2023, she was awarded the Studies in Gender and Sexuality Symonds Prize for her essay, “Mask Up: Identifying Anger in Gender and Racial Formations.” “An Apprenticeship in Not Knowing” will be published in the forthcoming anthology, Autotheory and Its Others (Punctum 2024).

Danielle Drori, Ph.D is a candidate in the Licensure Qualification Program at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She holds a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature and a Doctoral Degree in Jewish Studies from New York University. She has taught courses on literary theory and modern Jewish thought at New York University, Oxford University, the City College of New York, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she is currently Associate Faculty. Her scholarship and personal essays can be found in both academic and popular publications, including Prooftexts and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work and Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for LCSW, LMSW, LCAT, LMHC and Licensed Psychologists.