Workshop and Roundtable with Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou
Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Beyond—(Re)Thinking Embodiment, Culture, and Trauma
Organizers: Alvaro Lopez, Mina Burnside, and Ben Moore.
Additional speakers at the roundtable: Ben Moore, Lieks Hettinga, Marija Cetinić, Eva Hayward
Date: Wednesday January 17 2024
Location: Utrecht University
Workshop: 13:00-15:00 (exact location upon registration)
Lecture and Roundtable Discussion: 17:00-19:00 (Drift 25, Room 0.02, Utrecht University)
ECTS: (for RMA students and PhD researchers) 1 or 2 ECTS (see below).
Registration: For the workshop and for requesting ECTS, please send an email to both Alvaro Lopez (a.a.lopeznavarro@uva.nl) and Ben Moore (b.p.moore@uva.nl)
Description
The Trans* and Psychoanalytic Perspectives group returns once again in the academic year 2023-2024 with a workshop and roundtable discussions that will bring together Psychoanalysis, trans studies, and a number of other disciplines and fields of study in light of the issues, topics, and problems critically redefining the contemporary world. The critical domain and scope of trans studies and psychoanalysis comprises a number of different—and sometimes diverging—fields of research, theoretical stances, and methodological approaches. From sexuality and embodiment to cultural manifestations, from social and political dynamics to intricate processes of subject formation, trans and psychoanalytic perspectives offer a critical tool to tackle the complexities of the contemporary context. Yet more often than not, these perspectives are perceived as detached from each other, or even oppositional and conflicting. However, unlikely as the trans-psychoanalysis paring may sound, these perspectives have more in common than it would appear at first sight. Moreover, as recent approaches in trans studies and psychoanalysis attest to, their critical perspectives cross paths and enter into conversation with each other, enabling an insightful tool for assessment and analysis of the multiple transformations, situations, and pressing issues of the present moment.
Workshop
Under the rubric of “Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Beyond—Thinking Embodiment, Culture, and Trauma,” the Trans and Psychoanalytic group welcomes queer analyst and NYU professor Ann Pellegrini and Greek Cypriot clinician Avgi Saketopoulou, after the publication of their recent book Gender without Identity. Taking this work—as well as the much-needed critical reflection it proposes in terms of gender, psychoanalysis, and disciplinary boundaries—we invite scholars, researchers, and graduate students, from different fields of research, to enter a transdisciplinary conversation capable of rethinking psychoanalysis, literary studies, media studies, cultural analysis, and beyond.
During the workshop, we will approach the complex crossroads between gender, trauma, and psychoanalysis, beyond traditional and reductionist understanding of the body and the self. We will do this with the help of preparation readings that will be indicated in advance. Participants will also bring with them their own disciplinary backgrounds as well as their own understandings of psychoanalysis and gender, in light of concepts such a trauma, self-narrativization, and self-theorization.
Following this, the roundtable discussion will bring these issues and topics into a transdisciplinary discussion in which scholars from different disciplines will invite participants to rethink trauma, gender, and the self, as a means to transform their own disciplines.
(Further information on the workshop and roundtable discussion will follow soon)
Speakers
Ann Pellegrini is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her books and articles traverse several disciplines and interdisciplines, but one through-line is an abiding interest in exploring how feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated between and across bodies—and with what risks and possibilities for self and others. Another is the work of the aesthetic for disrupting and transforming possibilities for democratic social life.
Avgi Saketopoulou is a Greek Cypriot clinician based in NY after having moved to the United States from Greece and Cyprus. Saketopoulu also teaches at the NYU PostDoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, as well as on the faculties of several other psychoanalytic institutes, such as the William Alanson White Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Center, and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, offering intersectionally-informed courses on psychosexuality and gender.
Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature. His research has focused mainly on modernity, cities, vision, space and architecture in the nineteenth century. Moore is also interested in re-reading discourses of biology and the human in nineteenth-century literature, in light of recent debates around the Anthropocene. Moore’s work is also informed by psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thought in its intersection with literature and critical thinking.
Lieks Hettinga is Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality at Leiden University. Their research is situated at intersections of transgender studies, disability studies, critical race theory, and visual culture. Hettinga’s research examines ways in which artists and activists visualize, represent and/or enact non-normative embodiment, more specifically looking at the intersection of trans and disability visual politics and poetics of the body. Their research interests include trans-crip affinities in critiques of (neo)liberalism and debates about how race and disability underpin and/or trouble contemporary Western consolidations of ‘transgender’ as an identity category.
Marija Cetinić is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a research affiliate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is coordinator of the MA Comparative Literature program and founding member of the research group Sex Negativity. Her essays have appeared in Mediations, Discourse, and the European Journal of English Studies. With Stefa Govaart, she is involved in an ongoing epistolary project, as well as a series of transcribed dialogues on five concepts: Sentence / Essence / Woman / Negation / Sex.
Eva Hayward is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She has also taught at the University of Arizona (USA) and the University of New Mexico (USA). A Fulbright Scholar (Austria), she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University (USA) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Her research focuses on ecology, art, and trans studies.
Workshop Registration and ECTS
This group is a collaboration between ASCA, ICON, NICA, and NOG. RMA and PhD students can obtain up to 2 ECTS: 1 EC for participating in both the workshop and the roundtable event (reading preparation and submitting beforehand three comments or questions for both the workshop and the roundtable discussion), and an extra EC for writing a final essay of about 3.000 words addressing this event’s topics, as well its related fields of research, in relation to contemporary cultural issues. Please state your research school affiliation when you register. More information upon registration. (Please state the number of credits desired upon registration). To join the workshop and request ECTS, please email the organizers Alvaro Lopez (a.a.lopeznavarro@uva.nl) and Ben Moore (b.p.moore@uva.nl).
