Gender Without Identity

Based on an award-winning article that was censored before it could be published, Gender without Identity offers nothing less than a revolutionary new psychoanalytic theory of gender. Rejecting the facile notion of a “core gender identity,” Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer a theory of gender that begins with the (at times traumatic) intrusion of the other and is made of culture. At the heart of this book is an ethical affirmation of the self-theorizations through which individuals bind and own this inherited debris. Gender without Identity should be required reading for clinicians, gender theorists, and queer and trans studies scholars alike.

Kadji Amin, Author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History

Gender Without Identity is an important book, a mandate for the next generation of trans studies and a hard-hitting strike against the old ways of psychoanalytically theorizing non-normative genders. With a sense of urgency and thoughtful provocation, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer a startling and lucid roadmap for thinking dynamically about queer childhood and the development of atypical genders. This is the text we need to navigate our current moment of profound gender expansion and the conservative backlash that seeks to repress it.

Griffin Hansbury, Psychoanalyst and Author of Feral City

How might psychoanalysis “let itself be screwed, even find pleasure” in its ongoing and futural engagement with gender in all its dimensions? In Gender Without Identity, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini answer this question with a searching thoughtfulness and an unwavering ethical focus. Crucially, with help from Laplanche’s emphasis on the sexual, the Other, and gender assignment, this book is not only about gender in a limited sense; it is also a trailblazing rewriting of central psychoanalytic tenets, including the nature of trauma, the putative ontological status of identity, and “the deadly meliorism of psychoanalytic treatments that seem more interested in eliminating” presumed pathologies than in facilitating “processes of becoming.” Gender Without Identity will be an enduring classic in the best sense: as a source-object, necessarily other, a cause for (re)translation, both within psychoanalysis and in the disciplines with which it is in generative conversation.

Mitchell Wilson, Editor of The Journal of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC, and a member of the faculty at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia from the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a practicing psychoanalyst. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (coauthored with Janet R. Jakobsen).