Overview

Winner of the 2024 Silver Medal for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Offers a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations Gender Without Identity challenges the argument widely embraced by rights activists and many members of the LGBTQ+ community that gender identity is innate and immutable. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini chart another path towards the flourishing of queer and trans life. Positing that the idea of an innate core gender identity is simplistic, problematic, and, even, potentially harmful to LGBTQ+ people, they instead argue that gender is something all subjects acquire. Trauma, they provocatively propose, sometimes has a share in that acquisition. In their way of thinking, lived trauma as well as structural and intergenerationally transmitted traumatic debris may become a resource for transness and queerness. Such a suggestion importantly counters conservative accounts that identify trauma as disrupting or “warping” some putatively “normal” gender. Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in queer and trans of color critique, and in the authors’ extensive clinical experience with queer and trans people, Gender Without Identity offers a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.

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9781479836123

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Reviews

"Based on an award-winning article that was censored before it could be published, Gender without Identity offers nothing less than a revolutionary new psychoanalytic theory of gender. Rejecting the facile notion of a ""core gender identity,"" Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer a theory of gender that begins with the (at times traumatic) intrusion of the other and is made of culture. At the heart of this book is an ethical affirmation of the self-theorizations through which individuals bind and own this inherited debris. Gender without Identity should be required reading for clinicians, gender theorists, and queer and trans studies scholars alike. -- Kadji Amin, Author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History Gender Without Identity is an important book, a mandate for the next generation of trans studies and a hard-hitting strike against the old ways of psychoanalytically theorizing non-normative genders. With a sense of urgency and thoughtful provocation, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer a startling and lucid roadmap for thinking dynamically about queer childhood and the development of atypical genders. This is the text we need to navigate our current moment of profound gender expansion and the conservative backlash that seeks to repress it. -- Griffin Hansbury, Psychoanalyst and Author of Feral City How might psychoanalysis ""let itself be screwed, even find pleasure"" in its ongoing and futural engagement with gender in all its dimensions? In Gender Without Identity, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini answer this question with a searching thoughtfulness and an unwavering ethical focus. Crucially, with help from Laplanche's emphasis on the sexual, the Other, and gender assignment, this book is not only about gender in a limited sense; it is also a trailblazing rewriting of central psychoanalytic tenets, including the nature of trauma, the putative ontological status of identity, and ""the deadly meliorism of psychoanalytic treatments that seem more interested in eliminating"" presumed pathologies than in facilitating ""processes of becoming."" Gender Without Identity will be an enduring classic in the best sense: as a source-object, necessarily other, a cause for (re)translation, both within psychoanalysis and in the disciplines with which it is in generative conversation. -- Mitchell Wilson, Editor of The Journal of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis"

"""Based on an award-winning article that was censored before it could be published, Gender without Identity offers nothing less than a revolutionary new psychoanalytic theory of gender. Rejecting the facile notion of a ""core gender identity,"" Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer a theory of gender that begins with the (at times traumatic) intrusion of the other and is made of culture. At the heart of this book is an ethical affirmation of the self-theorizations through which individuals bind and own this inherited debris. Gender without Identity should be required reading for clinicians, gender theorists, and queer and trans studies scholars alike."" -- Kadji Amin, Author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History ""Gender Without Identity is an important book, a mandate for the next generation of trans studies and a hard-hitting strike against the old ways of psychoanalytically theorizing non-normative genders. With a sense of urgency and thoughtful provocation, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer a startling and lucid roadmap for thinking dynamically about queer childhood and the development of atypical genders. This is the text we need to navigate our current moment of profound gender expansion and the conservative backlash that seeks to repress it."" -- Griffin Hansbury, Psychoanalyst and Author of Feral City ""How might psychoanalysis ""let itself be screwed, even find pleasure"" in its ongoing and futural engagement with gender in all its dimensions? In Gender Without Identity, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini answer this question with a searching thoughtfulness and an unwavering ethical focus. Crucially, with help from Laplanche's emphasis on the sexual, the Other, and gender assignment, this book is not only about gender in a limited sense; it is also a trailblazing rewriting of central psychoanalytic tenets, including the nature of trauma, the putative ontological status of identity, and ""the deadly meliorism of psychoanalytic treatments that seem more interested in eliminating"" presumed pathologies than in facilitating ""processes of becoming."" Gender Without Identity will be an enduring classic in the best sense: as a source-object, necessarily other, a cause for (re)translation, both within psychoanalysis and in the disciplines with which it is in generative conversation."" -- Mitchell Wilson, Editor of The Journal of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis"

Author Information

Avgi Saketopoulou (Author) Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche. Ann Pellegrini (Author) Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen).

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