Gender Without Identity: Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini

In Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023), psychoanalysts Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini challenge the argument widely embraced by rights activists and many members of the LGBTQ+ community that gender identity is innate and immutable. Saketopoulou and 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 presents a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.
This discussion was recorded on September 28, 2023 at Barnard College. Co-sponsored by BCRW and Barnard Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.