Transsexuality And The Art Of Transitioning

Winner of The American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) Book Prize for 2015 Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian approach presents a startling new way to consider psychoanalytic dilemmas of sexual difference and gender through the meeting of arts and the clinic. Informed by a Lacanian perspective that locates transsexuality in the intermediate space between the clinic and culture, Oren Gozlan joins current conversations around the question of sexual difference with the insistence that identity never fully expresses sexuality and, as such, cannot be replaced by gender. The book goes beyond the idea of gender as an experience that gives rise to multiple identities and instead considers identity as split from the outset. This view transforms transsexuality into a particular psychic position, able to encounter the paradoxes of transitional experience and the valence of phantasy and affect that accompany aesthetic conflicts over the nature of beauty and being. Gozlan brings readers into the enigmatic qualities of representation as desire for completion and transformation through notions of tension, difference and aesthetics through examining the artwork of Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois and the role played by confusion in the aesthetics of transformation in literature and memoir. Each chapter of the book presents a productive take on understanding the psychoanalytic demand to sustain and consider the dilemma that the unconscious presents to the knowledge and recognition of gender. Fundamentally, this work understands transsexuality as a creative act, rich with desire and danger, in which thinking of the transsexual body as both an analytic and a subjective object helps us to reveal the creativity of sexuality. Ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers as well as students of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literature studies and philosophy, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning offers a unique insight into psychoanalytic approaches to transsexuality and the question of assuming a position in gender.

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.

Winner of The American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) Book Prize for 2015 Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian approach presents a startling new way to consider psychoanalytic dilemmas of sexual difference and gender through the meeting of arts and the clinic. Informed by a Lacanian perspective that locates transsexuality in the intermediate space between the clinic and culture, Oren Gozlan joins current conversations around the question of sexual difference with the insistence that identity never fully expresses sexuality and, as such, cannot be replaced by gender. The book goes beyond the idea of gender as an experience that gives rise to multiple identities and instead considers identity as split from the outset. This view transforms transsexuality into a particular psychic position, able to encounter the paradoxes of transitional experience and the valence of phantasy and affect that accompany aesthetic conflicts over the nature of beauty and being. Gozlan brings readers into the enigmatic qualities of representation as desire for completion and transformation through notions of tension, difference and aesthetics through examining the artwork of Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois and the role played by confusion in the aesthetics of transformation in literature and memoir. Each chapter of the book presents a productive take on understanding the psychoanalytic demand to sustain and consider the dilemma that the unconscious presents to the knowledge and recognition of gender. Fundamentally, this work understands transsexuality as a creative act, rich with desire and danger, in which thinking of the transsexual body as both an analytic and a subjective object helps us to reveal the creativity of sexuality. Ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers as well as students of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literature studies and philosophy, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning offers a unique insight into psychoanalytic approaches to transsexuality and the question of assuming a position in gender.

An educational and inspirational book that offers practical guidance for art therapists working with transgender and gender-expansive youth and their families. It provides art therapy goals, recommended treatments and coping skills to use with this client group. Each chapter looks at how art therapy can address a different concern or aspect of the experience, such as transitioning, bullying, and recognizing or building a support system. It includes detailed case studies and cutting-edge art therapy interventions, which help young people to express the emotions surrounding the discovery of gender identity, the transition process, and self-care.

Transgender Migrations brings together a top-notch collection of emerging and established scholars to examine the way that the term "migration" can be used not only to look at the way trans bodies migrate from one gender to the (an?) other, but the way that trans people migrate in the larger geopolitical contexts of immigration reform, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the increased policing of national borders. The book centers trans-ing experiences, identities, and politics, and treats these identities as inextricably intertwined with other social identities, institutions, and discourses of sexuality, nationality, race and ethnicity, globalization, colonialism, and terrorism. The chapter authors explore not only the movement of bodies in, through, and across spaces and borders, but also chart the metamorphoses of these bodies in relation to migration and mobility. Transgender Migrations takes the theory documented in The Transgender Studies Reader and blows it up to a global scale. It is the logical next step for scholarship in this dynamic, emerging field.

Leading activist and essayist Brynn Tannehill tells you everything you ever wanted to know about transgender issues but were afraid to ask. The book aims to break down deeply held misconceptions about trans people across all aspects of life, from politics, law and culture, through to science, religion and mental health, to provide readers with a deeper understanding of what it means to be trans. The book walks the reader through transgender issues, starting with "What does transgender mean?" before moving on to more complex topics including growing up trans, dating and sex, medical and mental health, and debates around gender and feminism. Brynn also challenges deliberately deceptive information about transgender people being put out into the public sphere. Transphobic myths are debunked and biased research, bad statistics and bad science are carefully and clearly refuted. This important and engaging book enables any reader to become informed the most critical public conversations around transgender people, and become a better ally as a result.

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies. In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of transsexuality. Showing how transsexuality's somatic transitions are spurred and enabled by the formal transitions of narrative, Prosser uncovers a narrative tradition for transsexual bodies. Sex change is a plot--and thus appropriately transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading the transssexual plot through transsexuals' own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality. His book suggests transsexuality, with its extraordinary conjunctions of body and narrative, as an identity story that transitions across the body/language divide that currently stalls poststucturalist thought. The form and approach of Second Skins works to cross other important and parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 30 photographic portraits of transsexuals-- poignant attempts by transsexuals to present themselves unmediated to the world except by the camera. And the author does not shy from exposure himself. Interjecting the personal into his theoretical discussion and close textual work throughout the book, Prosser reads and writes his own body, his purpose in that stylistic crossing to stake out transsexuality--and hence this very book--as his own body's narrative.

An extraordinary memoir of transition and transgender politics and culture “Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation.” In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics. Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive. Revealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.