BOOK REVIEW

Gender Without Identity by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini

Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s book Gender Without Identity (2023) brings into dialogue psychoanalysis with trans and queer, gender and sexuality (TQGS) studies. For someone like me, working mainly in philosophy and TQGS studies and fascinated by the differing (dis)avowal of identity in these fields, the title of the book sparked my interest—what might it mean, I wondered, for the question of gender identity to be raised instead at the intersection of TQGS studies and psychoanalysis? And what fruits might such a dialogue bear? To be sure, such a confrontation comes at a critical time for both disciplines. As the authors make clear, such a dialogue is essential if psychoanalysis is to transform itself into a discipline that can do justice to its trans and queer patients. Further, some crucial lacunae of scholarly work done on gender, sex, and sexuality are highlighted, and the authors insist that filling in these gaps will require us to take seriously what psychoanalysis has to offer to theorizations of gender and sexuality.

This book successfully steps into such a dialogue between these disciplines, raising rather than answering questions for scholars working on queer and trans studies and opening up a critical political perspective for the future of psychoanalysis. Gender Without Identity’s heart piece is its first chapter, a longer version of the previously unpublished Tiresias Prize–winning article titled “A Feminine Boy: Trauma as Resource for Self-Theorization,” initially intended for publication in the prestigious International Journal of Psychoanalysis before its acceptance was rescinded due to its reckoning with psychoanalysis’s failures to do justice to its trans and queer patients. The chapter offers a targeted critique of the resistance psychoanalysis displays toward grappling with the complexities and challenges that trans and queer subjects present for the discipline and simultaneously suggests that theorizations of gender in queer and trans studies are potentially insufficient.

For one, the authors take issue with the prevalent understanding of nonnormative genders employed in psychoanalysis, understood as having developmentally gone astray through traumatic experiences or the “wrong” forms of socialization. Such an understanding naturally gives way to the idea that if such trauma and socialization may be reversed, nonnormative genders may be “brought back into normality” through the “right” forms of conversion therapies and thereby “cured.” The authors counter such an understanding—one they hold to be widespread in psychoanalysis—by pointing out how such a conception of gender subscribes to a heteronormative understanding of the gender binary, relegating trans and queer subjects to the margins. Due to this marginalization, psychoanalysis has consistently failed to assume and afford the same psychic complexity to its nonnormatively gendered patients versus normatively gendered ones. The conceptualization of gender the authors centrally contend with is one where nonnormative gender is roughly described as something “one is born with,” something fundamentally immutable, nonpathological, and therefore needing no therapeutic treatment. Such “born this way” conceptualizations allow for asserting a given core gender identity and hold much power in political discourse. This is due to them allowing for the assertion that those who are trans and queer are born that way, that their identities are not a product of trauma and therefore pathological and curable through the proper treatment. While criticisms of “born this way” conceptualizations are increasingly more widespread in TQGS studies (see, for instance, Fausto-Sterling (2000); Bennett (2014); Draz (2017); Bey (2021)), their purported political viability makes them attractive and pervasive, especially among queer and trans people themselves, affording them much traction in academic and public life.

The authors find both these conceptualizations unsatisfying and ask, What might it mean to instead theorize trauma as an integral part of the ontogenesis of gender (not just nonnormative genders, but all genders!), and what might the implications of such a hypothesis be on the couch and in the world? They argue for a different way of understanding gender, one that takes seriously the developmental impact of trauma on the subject’s formation of their gender and sexuality, without the necessity of implying that some genders are a deviation from a normal developmental teleology of gender. In short, then, the authors aim to show that “trauma produces more than misery, even as misery is neither to be denied nor diminished” and that “trauma might have a share in the constitution of queer and trans life” (viii). Gender is reconceptualized as a form of self-theorization or “autopoiesis” in the face of the trauma of “being breached by the other, by otherness” (ix), trauma that is ubiquitous and a fundamental part of the becoming of any subject. Still, such experiences are painful and challenging, and gender, or better, one’s gendered sense of self is an aspect of self theorizations that contend with different familial and societal impositions of gender, race, religion, disability, as well as intergenerational transmission of trauma. Crucially, these processes of gender ontogenesis do not merely extend to subjects with nonnormative genders and sexualities but to all subjects—heteronormative gender and sexuality hereby are self-theorized to the same extent as nonnormative genders and sexualities.

Such a focus on ontogenesis—that is, of the becoming of certain genders and sexualities—is concerned with the agency and autonomy that becoming trans and nonbinary and becoming queer and gay necessitates. The authors put this point eloquently when they write that “[a]s long as the subject is able to modify what was handed down to them intergenerationally, gender is not pathology. To say this differently, no gender is unspoiled by trauma or uncontaminated by parental conflict. It is what the child does with those experiences (of trauma, intergenerational transport, etc.), how they are ‘spun into gender,’ and whether such spinning acquires some autonomy from the original intrusion that determines whether one’s gender will feel viable, whether it will acquire the density of feeling like one’s own” (29­–30). By bringing the psychoanalytic concept of enigma to bear, gender is conceptualized as something spun out of one’s trauma but also developed as a new aspect of the self, something belonging to the subject.

The authors are navigating fraught political terrain, and the stakes of their claim are high—but so, they argue, is the potential payoff for psychoanalysis and TQGS studies. Resisting the idea of there being something bedrock about gender identity should grant psychoanalysis the chance for “discussing more openly and with less shame that gender, all gender, is both delightfully stranger and more savagely violent than our theories can imagine” (xxiv), thereby opening the door for trans and queer patients. Further, they hold that the reconceptualization of gender and sexuality also points in fruitful new directions for theorizing gender in TGQS studies, while acknowledging many TQGS scholars’ disinterest and plain antagonism to psychoanalysis due to its history of rampant homo- and transphobia and heteronormativity.

Should theorists working in TQGS studies return to psychoanalytic work? Is this bridging work imperative and worthwhile, and what makes it so? Two reasons come to my mind. First, the authors’ astute reckoning with the processes of becoming trans and becoming queer and their turn toward the psyche of gendered subjects more generally points to the importance and potential of thinking not just about the ontology but also the ontogenesis of gender—a question neglected in much of TQGS studies. How do trans subjects, queer subjects, come into being? Also, how do they come into being not as a self-contained potentiality that unfolds itself autonomously over a lifetime but always in and through dynamic relation to the other? Second, by focusing on the ontogenesis of gender, the authors bring sexuality back into the conversation on gender and sex by taking sexuality as central to the gendered becomings of subjects.

While the authors make a strong case for reevaluating the relevance of psychoanalysis in light of recent trans and queer-affirming directions it has taken, I remain still weary of some of their approaches. For instance, the authors claim that psychoanalysis is necessary for understanding the ins and outs of the individual life and the self. Thus, they write that “psychoanalysis, perhaps more than any other discourse, is capable of navigating nuance and offering depth to think about how gender and sexuality accrue their psychic density, how they come undone and get redone” (161). But we are left with no more argument for such a claim. Plausibly, psychoanalysis will sometimes offer a potentially helpful hermeneutical tool kit for understanding the gendered self-theorizations—aspects of the psyche—of subjects. But why should we assume that psychoanalysis will be most beneficial in providing insights into understanding how our psyche works? While the psychoanalytic approach helpfully redirects one’s focus toward understanding the psyche, worries about the theoretical baggage of psychoanalysis remain, as the authors still bring some psychoanalytic concepts and developmental ideas to bear (such as the “infantile sexual” or “sexual unconscious” of the parent that comes to bear on the child’s development) with which we might wish for more legitimization and critical engagement. As someone not always convinced by the theoretical tool kit of psychoanalysis, I find myself wondering why I should accept such a way of thinking and explaining at all, apart from acknowledging that such concepts present contingent ways of theoretically understanding certain phenomena about ourselves as humans and have proven to be useful hermeneutical tools in therapeutic contexts. Maybe the theoretical psychoanalytic approach of the book is potentially worth engaging in more for the questions it raises than for the answers it offers, although those answers might sometimes be (contingently) helpful in the treatment room for elucidating a patient’s self-theorizations. But this is less a critique of the book than questions and skepticism that might helpfully be brought to bear in future work.

One thing I immensely enjoyed and that makes this book an indispensable read is how it models a form of theorizing done at the messy edge of praxis. In the second chapter, “On Taking Sides: Clinical Encounters with Nonbinary Genders,” the authors contend with what it might mean to affirm patients’ self-theorizations of their genders and sexualities. They argue that certain purported questions, such as whether analysts should accept their clients’ self-pronounced pronouns, are not theoretical questions to be debated but affirmations of making possible future self-theorizations of their patients. It is not a theoretical but an ethical stance the analyst must take toward their patients. This affords the patient what the authors call the “dignity of belief” by taking their self-theorizations seriously and allows for the development of an “ethos of deep care for queer and trans life” (161). Such theorizing, stemming from deep practical engagement with human others, can helpfully redirect our gaze toward what matters in theorizing and speaks to the authors’ commitment that psychoanalysis, as theory and praxis, be transformed. Their work evidences that it is not just about enriching psychoanalysis with insight from TQGS studies but about turning the process of psychoanalysis on itself, letting it step into an analytic process with other disciplines. If such a transformation of psychoanalysis is on the horizon, then I believe TQGS studies should turn toward such transformative processes sooner rather than later.

References:

• Bennett, Jeffrey, “‘Born this way”: Queer Vernacular and the Politics of Origins,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11, no 3 (June 23, 2014): 211–230.
• Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2021.
• Draz, Marie. “Born This Way? Time and the Coloniality of Gender”. JSP: Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2017): 372–384.
• Saketopoulou, Avgi, and Ann Pellegrini. Gender Without Identity. New York.