Gender Without Identity
Join authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini as they discuss their new book, Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, spring 2023). Rooted in the metapsychology of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and in conversation with bold work in queer and trans studies, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer an innovative and at times unsettling theory of gender formation. They jettison “core gender identity” to propose, instead, that gender is something all subjects acquire -- and that trauma sometimes has a share in that acquisition. Gender Without Identity argues for the ethical urgency of recognizing that wounding experiences and traumatic legacies may be spun into gender. Such “spinning” involves self-theorizations that do not proceed from a centered self, but are nevertheless critical to psychic autonomy. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, who are both practicing psychoanalysts, draw on these ideas to offer theoretical and clinical resources for working with gender complexity and for complexifying (what is seen as) gender normativity.
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Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek immigrant, and a practicing psychoanalyst. A member of the faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, she teaches in several other training programs. Avgi's work has received several awards including the annual JAPA essay prize, and she is the 2022 recipient of the Scholarship Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychoanalysis. Her interview on relational theory is part of Freud Museum's (Vienna) permanent collection. Avgi is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023).
Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. They are the author/co-author of three books: 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 (NYU 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 has also co-edited two anthologies and is founding co-editor of the “Sexual Cultures” series at NYU Press.
Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are the recipients of the first Tiresias Paper Award, from the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association, for their co-written essay “A Feminine Boy: Normative Investments and Reparative Fantasy at the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Religion.”