Griffin Hansbury, Psychoanalyst and Author of Feral City 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. 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. Kadji Amin, Author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History Gender without Identity should be required reading for clinicians, gender theorists, and queer and trans studies scholars alike.

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. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini draw on these ideas to offer clinical resources for working with gender complexity and for complexifying (what is seen as) gender normativity.īased 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. Written for readers both in and outside psychoanalysis, Gender Without Identity argues for the ethical urgency of recognizing that wounding experiences and traumatic legacies may be spun into gender. Such “spinning” involves self-theorizations that do not proceed from a centered self, but are nevertheless critical to psychic autonomy. Conceptualizing trauma alongside diverse genders and sexualities is thus not about invalidating transness and queerness, but about illuminating their textures to enable their flourishing. Rooted in the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche and in conversation with bold work in queer and trans studies, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini jettison “core gender identity” to propose, instead, that gender is something all subjects acquire - and that trauma sometimes has a share in that acquisition. Gender Without Identity offers an innovative and at times unsettling theory of gender formation.

Avgi saketopoulou