Gender without Identity: Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou in Conversation with Jenn Joy

Abstract

In this conversation with Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, we discuss their new book Gender without Identity (2023), which focuses on gender as always constructed in relation to social, racial, religious, symbolic and psychic trauma. The conversation expands on their theoretical work in terms of clinical psychoanalytic practice.

Keywords:

• gender
• identity
• psychoanalysis
• trauma
• traumatophilia

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenn Joy

Jenn Joy, PhD, is a candidate at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and taught at Yale University and Rhode Island School of Design. Her books include The Choreographic (MIT Press, 2014), visions (2018), and nonstopping (2023). She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Contributing Editor for BOMB, and serves on the board of Triple Canopy.

Ann Pellegrini, PhD, is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. Their other books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997) and Queer Theory and Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003).

Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD, is a Greek and Cypriot psychoanalyst, and serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In 2021, she co-chaired the first conference in the U.S. on the work of Jean Laplanche, and is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023). She is co-author of Gender Without Identity (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023), and her critical conversations with Dominique Scarfone punctuate his essays in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).