Join us for a confrontation with sex, gender, and desire at the limits of psychoanalysis. Freud posed the question of “what does woman want.” and came to an impasse with the question of the girl’s Oedipus Complex. Lacan resolved the question of sexual difference in his late seminar on feminine jouissance – at which point he entered into the absolute difference of the desire of the analyst and the trans-ference. Several psychoanalysts from Lacan’s school took up the challenge of a new approach to sex, developing the concept of the hyster or matrix as as supplement to the phallic indexing of the symbolic. Guattari offered “trans” as a general psychoanalytic concept of an emergent paradigm, including some of the first essays championing the politics of transsexuality and transgender in the 60s and 70s. The question of the TRANS brings forth a future politics of the subject beyond identity in the form of desiring production.

Texts:

Lacan – Seminar 20: Feminine Sexuality
Guattari – Psychoanalysis and Transversality
Millot – Horsexe
Irigaray – Speculum of the Other Woman
Ettinger – Matrixial Borderspace
Foque – There Are Two Sexes