Session 1, Without/Beyond: Sexuality, Consent, Gender, Identity

This talk offers a counterintuitive approach to think about gender as not rooted in a core gender identity but as a part of psychic life that is already infiltrated by trauma, by the other, and by culture.

Readings: Introduction and Chapter 1, Sexuality Beyond Consent; Introduction and (additional reading) Chapter 1, Gender Without Identity

Dr Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. They are the author/co-author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; Love and Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; You Can Tell Just By Looking; 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People; and Gender Without Identity. She and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou are the receipients of the first Tiresias Paper Award, from IPA’s sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee for their co-written essay “A Feminine Boy: Normative investments and Reparative fantasy at the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Religion.”

Dr 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. Her published work has received numerous prizes, including the annual JAPA Essay Prize and the Ralph Roughton Award. She is the 2022 recipient of the Scholarship Award from the division of psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association (Div. 39) and, with Ann Pellegrini, the recipient of the first Tiresias Essay Prize, from the International Psychoanalytic Associations’ committee on sexual and gender diversity. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is part of the permanent collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna and in 2021 she co-chaired the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche. Her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, is forthcoming in February 2023 from the Sexual Cultures series, NYU Press.