In-person only, no need to sign up.

13h00

On Destitution and Dereliction: Trans* After Trans

Jack Halberstam (David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University)

In my book Trans*: A Quick and Quirky History of Gender Variance, I used the term “trans*” to describe a form of trans politics that pivots away from recognition and inclusion and points towards new understandings of the body, transitivity, being/un-being and an emergent politics of solidarity. Anyway, I begin there in order to put pressure on the category of trans and I offer today to destitute trans as it functions as a reference point for bodily change on the one hand but simultaneously as a steadying of the ontologies that threatened to be undone by its emergence on the other. If destitution names a set of insurrectionary movements that seek, in the words of Kieran Aarons and Idris Robinson, “to tear down, dismantle, and cancel prevailing political representations and institutions, without proposing others to replace them,” then what might this look like in terms of a trans politics of representation? My new work has been committed to the scene of dismantling, to the spectacle of coming undone, to the unraveling of binary forms and to anarchitectural orientations to being, self, body. Anarchitecture, Gordon Matta Clark wrote in an exhibition description in the early 1970’s, means “working with absence” and “opening spaces to redistribute mass” and “emphasizing internal structures through extraction.” How might these relations to space and absence describe a very different trans orientation? This talk ranges through trans theories of ontology and reads new ideas about being and having in relation to abstract trans art.

15h15

“The wandering, this song of us two": Tales of counterTrans*ferential fantasies and unthinkable anxieties among psychoanalysts

Beatriz Santos (Université Paris Cité France, psychoanalyst)

The talk aims to examine the idea of countertransference as well as  to describe its impact on clinical cases concerning nonconforming gender patients and cisgender analysts. Recent developments on the notion of countertransference allow for a more suitable analysis of transphobia among professionals. Patrick Guyomard's idea of analysts taking responsibility for transferential events seems particularly relevant in respect to clinical cases that also reflect societal changes. It works as an invitation to explore countertransferential responses in their relationship with the analyst's desire for trans.

Bio

Beatriz Santos, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and associate professor at the Center for Research in Psychoanalysis, Medicine, and Society (CRPMS), Université Paris Cité France. She is the co-editor of the series “Figures of the Unconscious” for Leuven University Press and is a member of the editorial board of the French Journal Recherches en Psychanalyse among other publications. Recent works include the volume "Pulsion de mort. Destruction et créations, co edited with M. David-Ménard (Hermann ) and the articles "The Psychoanalyst’s Couch as a Safe Space: Gender and Psychoanalysis in France Today” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry) and “Language and Vulnerability. A Lacanian Analysis of Respect” (Frontiers in Psychology) with Laurie Laufer. 

Readings to follow, contact d.semerene@uva.nl

Credits 1 ECTS: must attend the entire symposium; sign up for credit before March 11; Readings to follow; Contact: d.semerene@uva.nl