For anyone who is interested in gender theory! NYC-based queer psychoanalysts, Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, present their book Gender Without Identity. This will be a short book talk by the authors followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Gender Without Identity offers an innovative and at times unsettling theory of gender formation. Rooted in the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche and in conversation with bold work in queer and trans studies, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini jettison “core gender identity” to propose, instead, that gender is something all subjects acquire – and that trauma sometimes has a share in that acquisition. Conceptualizing trauma alongside diverse genders and sexualities is thus not about invalidating transness and queerness, but about illuminating their textures to enable their flourishing.

Written for readers both in and outside psychoanalysis, Gender Without Identity argues for the ethical urgency of recognizing that wounding experiences and traumatic legacies may be spun into gender. Such “spinning” involves self-theorizations that do not proceed from a centered self, but are nevertheless critical to psychic autonomy. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini draw on these ideas to offer clinical resources for working with gender complexity and for complexifying (what is seen as) gender normativity.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. They have written extensively about religion, sexuality, and U.S. public life and about the queer possibilities of psychoanalysis.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she also trained, and teaches in other psychoanalytic institutes. Her published work has received several psychoanalytic awards while her interview on relational psychoanalysis is in the permanent collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna. Dr. Saketopoulou’s monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia is published by the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press.