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.

Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century. The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar. By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyzes thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested. Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of COVID-19.

The increase in the number of non-binary children and adults in our society raises important treatment questions as well as much controversy. It seems essential that analysts and candidates grapple with the challenges this change in society presents. As we struggle in our psychoanalytic societies to diversify our membership and broaden our understanding of difference, this collection offers an opportunity for further discussion and study of one of the most important issues of our time. The opening essay by editor Shari Thurer provides a clear overview of recent cultural changes and the evolution of thinking about gender identification by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Next is an autobiographical essay by long-term non-binary individual Robin Haas plus a clinical reflection on Haas' contribution by Rita Teusch. A recent account of an individual becoming non-binary from Francesca Spence is followed by the reactions of their parents, L. Harry Spence and Robin Ely. After that are psychoanalytic thoughts about the body and gender by Malkah Notman and reflections on gender from Dan Jacobs. The book ends with an extensive bibliography on the subjects of transsexuality and non-binary gender by Oren Gozlan. Beyond the Binary: Essays on Gender introduces readers to current ideas about gender fluidity and choice, as well as giving voice to those who have chosen to be non-binary. This is a must-read for all practising clinicians that will help broaden their perspective on this growing issue. This is the fourth publication sponsored by the Library Committee of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the first published by Phoenix.

Temporality in Qualitative Inquiry explores the relationship between time and qualitative research and unpacks some of the conceptual, methodological, practical, and pragmatic areas of qualitative inquiry related to time and temporality. This book advances the understanding and re-evaluation of research practice by examining the passage of time, temporal feeling, and conceptualising of time/temporality in research practice with participants. It provides theoretical and practical insights into how to navigate the concepts of time and temporality in qualitative inquiry. With authors from across the globe and from an array of social sciences including cultural studies, education, health, management and business, psychology, sociology, and sport and exercise, the book explores theoretical, methodological, and practical discussions of time and temporality in order to unpack and elicit meaning and understanding. The editors champion the call for the existence of slow and quick qualitative methodologies and methods. As such, this book is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in qualitative inquiry, and in disciplines such as education, health research, management, psychology, sociology, and communication studies. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003083504-3

Transcending the sex and gender dichotomy, rethinking sexual difference, transgenerational trauma, the decolonization of gender, non-Western identity politics, trans*/feminist debates, embodiment, and queer trans* psychoanalysis, these specially commissioned essays renew our understanding of conventionally held notions of sexual difference. Looking at the intersections between psychoanalysis, feminism, and transgender discourses, these essays think beyond the normative, bi-gender, Oedipal, and phallic premises of classical psychoanalysis while offering new perspectives on gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. From Freud to Lacan, Kristeva, and Laplanche, from misogyny to the #MeToo movement, this collection brings a timely corrective that historicizes our moment and opens up creative debate. Written for professionals, scholars, and students alike, this book will also appeal to psychoanalysts, psychologists, and anyone in the fields of literature, film and media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and social work who wishes to grapple with the theoretical challenges posed by gender, identity, sexual embodiment, and gender politics.

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing. Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices.

Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time that trans, in the form of what was then termed transvestism and transsexuality, seemed to be so ascendant? Was there transness before transsexuality was named in the 1950s and transgender emerged in the 1990s? Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices. Arguing for the complexity of a trans past and present, Trans America will be a groundbreaking work for the trans community, as well as anyone interested in the history of medicine, sexuality, psychology and psychiatry.

This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting. Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, in addition to using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects. Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with the topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies.

The Liminal Chrysalis: Imagining Reproduction and Parenting Futures Beyond the Binary is an edited collection that works to identify and deconstruct many of the countless binaries that operate within the realms of parenting and reproduction. Weaving poetry, speculative fiction, and autobiography with interviews, critical analysis, and research, the authors take as their starting place that there is magical potential and possibility in the ambiguous, disorienting spaces of the in-between and the beyond. The collection challenges the constructedness of binaries connected to sex, gender, sexuality, and parenting roles, as well as the cis-, hetero-, repro-, trans-, and amatonormativities which pervasively circulate and inform how we think about parenting and reproductive life. The collection amplifies the voices of non-binary authors among others, and tells stories of menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, fertility preservation, parenthood, and activism in the face of violent binaries and reproductive injustices.

Due to the increase in transgender characters in scripted television and film in the 2010s, trans visibility has been presented as a relatively new phenomenon that has positively shifted the cis society’s acceptance of the trans community. This book counters this claim to assert that such representations actually present limited and harmful characterizations, as they have for decades. To do so, this book analyzes transgender narratives in scripted visual media from the 1960s to 2010s across a variety of genres, including independent and mainstream films and television dramatic series and sitcoms, judging not the veracity of such representations per se but dissecting their transphobia as a constant despite relevant shifts that have improved their veracity and variety. Already ingrained with their own ideological expectations, genres shift the framing of the trans character, particularly the relevance of their gender difference for cisgender characters and society. The popularity of trans characters within certain genres also provides a historical lineage that is examined against the progression of transgender rights activism and corresponding transphobic falsehoods, concluding that this popular medium continues to offer a limited and narrow conception of gender, the variability of the transgender experience, and the range of transgender identities.