Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies

Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies introduces new thinking on non-conforming gender representation, addressing transsexuality as a subjective experience that highlights universal dilemmas related to how we conceive identity and exploring universal questions related to gender: its objects, objections, and obstacles. This book seeks to disassemble prejudicial orientations to the challenges and the everydayness of transsexuality and build new understanding and responses to issues including: medical biases, the problem of authenticity, and the agency of the child.

Oren Gozlen leads an examination of three central pressures: transformation of a medical model, the social experience of becoming transgender, and the question of self-representation through popular culture. The chapters reframe several contemporary dilemmas, such as: authenticity, pathology, normativity, creativity, the place of the clinic as a problem of authority, the unpredictability of sexuality, the struggle with limits of knowledge, a demand for intelligibility and desire for certainty. The contributors consider sociocultural, theoretical, therapeutic, and legal approaches to transsexuality that reveal its inherent instability and fluidity both as concept and as experience. They place transsexuality in tension and transition as a concept, as a subject position, and as a subjectivity.

The book also reflects the way in which political and cultural change affects self and other representations of the transsexual person and their others, asking: how does the subject metabolize the anxieties that relate to these transformations and facilitations? How can the subject respond in contexts of hostility and prohibition? Offering a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration, Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapist as well as psychologists and scholars of gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.

“'The psychoanalytic study of transgender phenomena is currently experiencing a renaissance, with a plethora of revisionist work that simultaneously brings psychoanalytic insight to bear in a non-pathologizing way on the psychical life of transgender people, while allowing transgender experience to contribute to a fundamental reformulation of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Oren Gozlan is a leading voice in this important undertaking, and the work he has assembled in this anthology makes a vital contribution to giving psychonanalysis the 'sex change' it needs.'-Susan Stryker, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona; Co-Editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. "This collection brilliantly display different perspectives in current ideas of transsexuality and gender transitioning, showing the plurality of terms and interpretations that are used in reference to "trans" experiences. The reader will be in touch with a remarkable interdisciplinary approach, that highlights the inevitable tension between the multiplicity of discourses on this topic as well as the contradictions at the inside of each discourse. Rich with highly interesting proposals, contributions go through literary, therapeutic, legal aspects, biopolitics, among others. Last but not least, the reader will be able to face the certain degree of uncertainty that is also a mark of this field. Beyond normative discourses of sexual difference, the book stresses the importance of transition, movement, becoming as well as the importance of the relation with otherness, concerning processes of subjectivation."- Leticia Glocer Fiorini, MD , training and supervising analyst; Past President of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA); author of the Deconstructing the Feminine and Sexual Difference in Debate”

'The psychoanalytic study of transgender phenomena is currently experiencing a renaissance, with a plethora of revisionist work that simultaneously brings psychoanalytic insight to bear in a non-pathologizing way on the psychical life of transgender people, while allowing transgender experience to contribute to a fundamental reformulation of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Oren Gozlan is a leading voice in this important undertaking, and the work he has assembled in this anthology makes a vital contribution to giving psychonanalysis the 'sex change' it needs.'-Susan Stryker, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona; Co-Editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

"This collection brilliantly display different perspectives in current ideas of transsexuality and gender transitioning, showing the plurality of terms and interpretations that are used in reference to "trans" experiences. The reader will be in touch with a remarkable interdisciplinary approach, that highlights the inevitable tension between the multiplicity of discourses on this topic as well as the contradictions at the inside of each discourse. Rich with highly interesting proposals, contributions go through literary, therapeutic, legal aspects, biopolitics, among others. Last but not least, the reader will be able to face the certain degree of uncertainty that is also a mark of this field. Beyond normative discourses of sexual difference, the book stresses the importance of transition, movement, becoming as well as the importance of the relation with otherness, concerning processes of subjectivation."-Leticia Glocer Fiorini, MD, training and supervising analyst; Past President of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA); author of the Deconstructing the Feminine and Sexual Difference in Debate

'The psychoanalytic study of transgender phenomena is currently experiencing a renaissance, with a plethora of revisionist work that simultaneously brings psychoanalytic insight to bear in a non-pathologizing way on the psychical life of transgender people, while allowing transgender experience to contribute to a fundamental reformulation of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Oren Gozlan is a leading voice in this important undertaking, and the work he has assembled in this anthology makes a vital contribution to giving psychonanalysis the 'sex change' it needs.'-Susan Stryker, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona; Co-Editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

"This collection brilliantly display different perspectives in current ideas of transsexuality and gender transitioning, showing the plurality of terms and interpretations that are used in reference to "trans" experiences. The reader will be in touch with a remarkable interdisciplinary approach, that highlights the inevitable tension between the multiplicity of discourses on this topic as well as the contradictions at the inside of each discourse. Rich with highly interesting proposals, contributions go through literary, therapeutic, legal aspects, biopolitics, among others. Last but not least, the reader will be able to face the certain degree of uncertainty that is also a mark of this field. Beyond normative discourses of sexual difference, the book stresses the importance of transition, movement, becoming as well as the importance of the relation with otherness, concerning processes of subjectivation."-Leticia Glocer Fiorini, MD, training and supervising analyst; Past President of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA); author of the Deconstructing the Feminine and Sexual Difference in Debate

Oren Gozlan, PsyD, ABPP, is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto, Canada, and the Gender and Diversity Committee (IPA) Representative for North America, International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization (IPSO). He is a faculty member at the Toronto Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. His book Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach won the American Academy & Board of Psychoanalysis’ annual book prize for books published in 2015.

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