GSF Graduate Scholars Colloquium - Transitioning to the Couch

Speaker: Julien Fischer, PhD Candidate Respondent: Veronica Davis RSVP to ls341@duke.edu by Sept. 5 for advance reading materials Over the last thirty years, the field of Transgender Studies has articulated its emergence through a steadfast critique of medicine and its approach to treating gender variance. Given its enmeshment with medicine in the U.S., it is little surprise that psychoanalysis has been included under the purview of the field's critique. What is more, psychoanalysis has tended to pathologize trans phenomena and experience. One consequence of these apparent incompatibilities has been that Transgender Studies tends to either ignore or reject psychoanalytic practice and theory while embracing a self-conscious and selfaware trans narrator as its central object of inquiry. Drawing on the medical genealogy of the trans autobiographical mandate and the work of a small contingent of psychoanalytic Transgender Studies scholars, "Transitioning to the Couch" proposes that revisiting the encounter between Transgender Studies and psychoanalysis harbors the potential to trouble the conundrums of trans pathologization and to move toward the possibility of theorizing the trans person as a divided subject of the unconscious.