FRSS - I Cannot Turn Away from Your Home

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months. 

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Abstract: 

It is the common articulation amongst various transgender communities that the transgender subject’s transition is one valanced by a sense of ‘coming home’ into oneself. Concomitantly, the psychiatric diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ finds itself characterised by the particular feeling of ‘not feeling at home in one’s own body.’ This medicalised mode of thinking gives rise to transness as something that must in some way be cured (even if the cure itself is transition). These precarities leave much to be desired. By mode of counter movement, theorist Patricia Gherovici has hitherto attempted to postulate a way of thinking transness (transgender being) psychoanalytically and beyond pathology. In doing so, she inevitably found herself returned to transness as a reaction to some other force, for she claims that it is a thrust of Lacan’s formulation of the Sinthome; a creative way of making do, a palliative symptom. Her explication produces transness as no more than a device birthed to make life more liveable. Thereby, transness still is not read by-and-on its own terms. Gesturing against both Gherovici and current psychiatric understandings, this paper offers a new way of thinking transness that begins with, and perverts this notion so raised by the psychiatric literature of the possibility of ‘being at home in one’s body.’ It is by thinking through Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as melancholically constituted and Freud’s understanding of ‘character’ as melancholically acquired that I posit a psychoanalytically rooted taxonomy whereby the trans subject’s relationship to gender can be understood as a self-negating melancholic identification; as a certain position of being called to a home into which they were never in the first-place welcome. This postulation gives rise to the possibility of cognising transness beyond its appearance as a secondary phenomenon, and instead, of thinking it as way of being in itself.

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Speaker: 

Sam Bolton is a Clarendon Fund scholar reading for her master’s in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lincoln College, Oxford, whereat her research is turned towards psychoanalysis so as to rethink the possibilities of trans studies qua the vicissitudes of identity and desire. Her prior work has concerned the ways whereby the notion of ‘trans fetishes’ relegates transgender subjects to a field of exile beyond the standard dimensions of desirability.

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Tickets: 

Suggested donation £10-£15. Minimum donation £1. 

The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible. 

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The Freudian Research Seminar Series 

The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. 

Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service. 

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Schedule: 

Wednesday 22 October – Kimberly Lamm, Fashioning the Ego as Home: Black Women Writers and Clothing 

Thursday 27 November – Helen Rose, No Fixed Abode, No Fixed Support? The Weaponization of Homelessness in an Era of Austerity and NHS Decline 

Thursday 11 December – Kazue Niki, Staging the Finale: Freud’s London Garden as a Constructed Space 

Wednesday 28 January – Foram Trivedi, Home-Environmental Tweaks and Functional Independence in Adults with ADHD: A Narrative Review with Psychoanalytic Reflection 

Thursday 26 February – Arjet Pervizi, Renting Within Oneself: A psychoanalytic exploration of home - between rent and ownership, transience, and the fantasy of belonging in the psychoanalytic subject 

Thursday 26 March – Callum Blades, The Unhomely Mind: Conspiracies as a Defence Against Psychic Displacement 

Thursday 23 April – Nisrina Larasati, “Only You Understand Me Completely”: Contemporary Investigation of the Uncanny in AI Therapy Bots 

Thursday 21 May – Sam Bolton, I Cannot Turn Away from Your Home: A Melancholic Reformulation of Transgender Dysphoria 

Thursday 25 June – Anna-Peter Magyarlaki & Eric Harper, Homes, closets and wombs: Psychoanalytic reflections on home-making and homelessness for queer, trans and gender nonconforming people 

Thursday 30 July – Huaiyuan “Susanna” Zhang, The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House: Levinas, Freud, and the Ethical Unhousing of Oedipus