| Title | Transgender, Queer Theory, and Psychoanalysis |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Susan Stryker (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0167.1.28 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/clinical-encounters-in-sexuality-psychoanalytic-practice-and-queer-theory/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Stryker, Susan |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2017-03-07 |
| Long abstract | The inclusion of trans*1 material in this collection of essays on the encounter between psychoanalysis and queer theory neces-sarily raises the question of the relationship of trans* to queer, as well as trans* to psychoanalysis. The five essays that deal explicitly with trans* issues—Gh-erovici, Corbett, Kaplan, Weatherill, and Geldhof and Ver-haeghe—each approach these matters somewhat differently. Weatherill makes only passing, and transphobic, mention of transgender women when he approvingly quotes Germaine Greer’s gratuitously vulgar dismissal of such individuals’ claims to social existence: “just because you lop off your dick doesn’t make you a fucking woman.” For Geldhof and Verhaeghe, trans* positions are “extreme representatives” of a queer social move-ment that seems “to refuse the classical distinction between man and woman.” For Kaplan, “trans” represents a benign albeit limiting investment in fixed gender identities that is counterposed to the supposed fluidity, and desirability, of queer gender expres-sion. Though he does not use the trans* nomenclature, Corbett’s nuanced discussion of “queer childhood” is attuned to those moments “in which the social order of gender is challenged,” and in which a “transforming nexus” of gender mallability is created that allows for gender’s resignification through collec-tive intersubjective fantasies between queer children and their significant others. For Gherovici, transness and homosexuality both address, in nonheteronormative ways, the imperative to assume a psychical position in relation to the question of sexual difference; they are divergent yet equally viable sinthomes, or an-swers to the unavoidable riddle of how the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic registers might be knotted together. |
| Page range | pp. 419–426 |
| Print length | 8 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |