The Accident of Gender

From Continuity to Contiguity: A Response to the Fraught Temporality of Gender

“…In this essay I have argued that through the idealization of authenticity, continuity, and alignment, and their ensuing normativities, transsexuality can only be conceived as a space of loss or lack of a fullness of being that, we fantasize, is socially granted to the cisgender subject. This position fails to consider transsexuality as a potential third space, both found and created, that could open possibilities of desire and love beyond having or being (Gozlan, 2008). Transsexuality, I argue, holds the potential to shape gender as a "good enough" (Winnicott, 1971) placeholder through which sexuality ceases to be conceived as natural or predetermined but rather, and in this sense more aligned with psychoanalytic understandings, as a disorienting and disruptive force, without prefixed origin or destiny, that both exceeds and reshapes the orderings of culture.…”

Adolescent Ruthlessness and the Transitioning Of The Analyst’s Mind

“…In contemporary cultural life, the visibility of transgender and nonbinary subjectivities in media, education, advertising, and military affairs, for example, is part of a larger cultural revolution reorienting our interest in transformations of identity, sociality, and modes of self-fashioning. A similar move may be slowly occurring theoretically in psychoanalytic societies, where gender is conceptualized in terms broader than anatomical differences: as a phantasmic mechanism of binding and unbinding the drives (Verhaeghe 2001; Gozlan 2008, 2015), as a symptom and sinthome (Gozlan 2008; Gherovici 2010), or as performance (Butler 1990). These developments, however, also bring into view cultural anxieties and fantasy formations emerging from challenges to normative understandings of sexual identity.…”

“…A similar move may be slowly occurring theoretically in psychoanalytic societies, where gender is conceptualized in terms broader than anatomical differences: as a phantasmic mechanism of binding and unbinding the drives (Verhaeghe 2001;Gozlan 2008Gozlan , 2015, as a symptom and sinthome (Gozlan 2008;Gherovici 2010), or as performance (Butler 1990). These developments, however, also bring into view cultural anxieties and fantasy formations emerging from challenges to normative understandings of sexual identity.…”

“…We cannot know the cause for our convictions of gender. All the analyst has access to is the patient’s fantasy of gender, and what this suggests is that there is something about gender that is exclusive to the subject, something shaped by “accidental identifications made of failures of communications and cover-ups to fill in the gaps of desire” (Gozlan 2008, p. 560). Like the undetected grain in a pearl, the origins of gender include an element of unknowability: The limits of the fantasies that give rise to gender are impossible to delineate.…”

De la transidentité du patient au vacillement identitaire du clinicien

“…Le survol de la littérature psychanalytique francophone et internationale permet de déceler un contretransfert équivoque vis-à-vis des individus aux identifications de genre atypiques. Cette posture est dénoncée comme normative, voire transphobe aussi bien par les activistes ou chercheur/se/s trans' (Califia, 2003 ;Espineira, 2015 ;Preciado, 2008) que par certain/e/s psychanalystes contemporain/e/s (Gozlan, 2008(Gozlan, , 2018Saketopoulou, 2014 ;Ayouch, 2015 ;Barkai, 2017 ;Hansbury, 2017). Pour notre part, nous avons choisi de nous extraire de la position sans doute plus confortable de critique de la posture des autres analystes, préférant nous focaliser sur nos propres difficultés et vacillements identitaires dans le cadre de notre travail en institution avec des adultes transgenres.…”