A Present for Eyes: Notes on Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s “Gender Without Identity”
Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini | Gender Without Identity | The Unconscious in Translation | May 2023 | 223 Pages
"If prophetic vision is perfect it is a kind of prison—dictating, rather than simply foretelling, the future."
M. Leona Godin, There Plant Eyes
Now, press your phone against your ear, press until it hurts, and listen, again and again, to the voicemail from a stranger, to the voicemail …. and …. call me …. house … storm… And stare, again as you did before, eyes stippled with dust mites long dead, at centuries-old cursive and try to make out the fourth word of the sixth sentence. Dream of understanding it for the first time, then look again and see the word remaining indistinct. Gender is tethered to this inability to give up on enigma; to the deadness of a clear broadcast. Life, from the very moment it begins, is too much for us to consciously, continuously handle. Uncontrolled fragments, by some means submerged, find a life of their own inside our thoughts, words, and actions. They attract our attention, find ways out into the world, become the fixations of others. This process of translation is ongoing, never finished.
In their 2023 book, Gender Without Identity, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini consider these translational processes as they relate to gender nonconforming children. As practicing psychoanalysts, both authors have met with parents who are anxious about their children becoming queer or trans in the future. These emotionally riled parents seek foreknowledge—maybe advanced warning—from the professionals. But rather than looking to the future, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini turn to the querent’s past and ask: “Why do you want to know?”
Gender Without Identity argues, cogently and empathetically, that gender is an "unfolding and dynamic" experience formed from noisy, oft-unintended signals we receive in early childhood. These signals might not be about ‘gender’ per se, but instead might pertain to family shame, unfulfilled parental dreams, or unacknowledged anger. As overflows from the ‘sexual unconscious’ of our parents and caregivers, these signals are ‘scrambled’ and without a clear meaning for the child. ‘Sexual’ here doesn’t refer directly to ‘adult activities,’ but instead to unconscious fantasies which seek to maintain an inner tension, which seek to keep conflict alive. Unconscious translations of the scrambled signals are later oriented around and against cultural categories which make that inward experience more or less intelligible to others: a supine pliability that is vixen, or a spinal rigidity that is stud.
Rather than calling for a history of gender, writ large or writ just me, the authors seek a technique of ‘reading backwards’ to understand how one’s gender—one’s personal arrangement of these scrambled signals—has accrued over time. The reading itself is marked by the stance of the reader, and the time and context in which the reading is taken. As a result, this is not an etiology of gender identity, and one person's gender cannot provide the data from which we might predict the genders of others. Given the long history of anti-queer and anti-trans ‘conversion’ programs, this is a critical point. To say that a gendered identity or position has a narrative is not to say that professional psychoanalysts or professionally-unhinged zealots can consciously ‘convert’ someone into a particular genre of man or woman. Instead, we—as professionals or inquiring whatevers—might replace panic about what’s to come with curiosity about the meaning of what it is we are becoming.
Admittedly, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s analysis isn't as catchy as Lady Gaga's "Born this Way" or RuPaul's "We're all born naked and the rest is drag." Those conceptions of gender—as biological destiny or endless personal freedom—are perhaps popular because they align with commonplace dreams of total internal cohesion and self-control. The ongoing panic about pronouns, the huff-puff about lawmakers going pee pee, and the far-right media worry-fetishizing the idea of 'mutilated’ children, all indicate that gender is dense, complex, and concerning. As a result, any simplistic understanding of gender is at odds with gender itself. It is angering, for me, maybe for you, to be caught between these popular conceptions of gender—which flatten the complexity of inner life, which seek to smooth out uncertainties and ignore the limits of agency—and even dimmer conservative essentializing. Maybe gender is a voice for anger.
Tiresias is angry, too, but at what he doesn’t know. Tiresias, in my imagination, is coming to the peak of a minor hill, his foot crunching a gravel hiking trail in the Sonoran desert. German tourists are fifty paces behind, and some kind of fly keeps butting heads with this ancient prophet of Thebes when he sees two snakes in his path. Scale to scale, secretion to secretion, the reptiles frot in front of him. On sighting the pair, Tiresias flies into a blind rage, a blindness that is particular to sighted people. He lifts his walking stick and, with a downward swing, aims for the female snake.
It is from inside this moment, when the walking stick is in motion but the snake has not yet been struck, that Saketopoulou and Pellegrini hope to be read. Gender Without Identity began as a co-authored article—“A Feminine Boy: Trauma as Resource for Self-Theorization”—which received the inaugural Tiresias Award from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Created by the IPA's Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee, the Tiresias Award "was conceived to focus on the moment when Tiresias encounters something ambiguous [...] that provokes a violent urge [...]," and to encourage psychoanalysts to act with more patience. In “A Feminine Boy,” the ambiguity at hand is gender ambiguity—embodied by queer, trans, and otherwise other patients seeking psychological help. For decades, many psychoanalysts saw gender and sexual variance as byproducts of trauma which had, in some way or another, mangled the development of an otherwise ‘normal’ person. Psychoanalysts have often experienced something akin to a 'blind rage' when faced with patients whose expression or understanding of gender exceeds the analyst's own ability to tolerate ambiguity, incongruence, or uncertainty. Drawing on the work of Jean Laplanche, Saketopolou and Pellegrini counter that everyone is formed by something excessive, perhaps traumatic: the sexual unconscious of others.
As part of the Tiresias prize, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini were guaranteed publication of their paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, founded by Freud himself. During the peer review process, the authors added passages which, "welcom[ed] 'queer' subjects (patients as well as candidates and analysts) who have too often been treated as problems for psychoanalysis [...]" (emphasis in the original). These amendments may seem mild, but, as Saketopoulou and Pellegrini remind us, "psychoanalysis continues to be conservative (seeking to conserve itself rather than be transformed), anxious, and often damning of queerness and gender expansiveness [...]" In response to these additions, IJP editorial leadership withdrew their offer of publication and insinuated that legal actions might be taken if the authors published elsewhere.
Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, with the support of Unconscious in Translation, have taken their chances on elsewhere. Perhaps as a result of this history, and perhaps in alignment with the book’s intellectual project of resisting expectation, Gender Without Identity has an unusual form. After prefaces, akin to open letters, from the authors and IPA representatives, the main paper is presented, followed by another short essay on working with nonbinary patients in psychoanalytic practice. The final section of the book includes a 2003 essay and appendices by psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, as well as an epilogue by Saketopoulou and Pellegrini. The result is less a traditional monograph and more a research folder full of notes, drafts, correspondence, and source materials. It is a munificent encounter, encouraging the reader to think with the authors, rather than convincing the reader through brute quantity of text.
Laplanche’s “Gender, Sex and the Sexual” incisively examines how the three titular terms organize or are organized by one another. A worn, pop feminist take on these terms situates sex on the body, gender in the mind, and sexuality somewhere else. Laplanche counters that the very idea of biological sex, of an empirical foundation upon which to build gender, is itself an attempt to organize gender. Gender, reading Laplanche via Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, can be thought of as a kind of self-relation to the sexual—that which is “multiple, polymorphous” and tied to “auto-erotic” fantasies, or fantasies of self-fulfillment. In his translation of Laplanche, Jonathan House italicizes sexual in order to indicate the difficulty of translating an overdetermined term through German, French, and English. At the same time, the italicization reminds the reader that this sexual is an “englarged sexuality” which encompasses all sorts of bodily sensations, desires, fantasies, and knowledge. While Laplanche himself was a clinician, “Gender, Sex, and the Sexual” concerns itself primarily with theoretical arrangements. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, in essence, direct Laplanche’s thoughts towards the clinic and against the psychoanalytic institution.
Perhaps because of the book’s unconventional format, or because of its reliance on psychoanalytic thought, or because in this moment—when we are asked to consolidate our being behind pragmatic aims—paranoid reading is a necessity, I feel inclined to ask after Tiresias. His name appears throughout the opening sections of Gender Without Identity but is absent from Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s main essays.[1] Despite his name going silent, there is a strong resonance between the arguments of Gender Without Identity and the well-known story of Tiresias—not just as an angry hiker, but as a blind prophet. In Oedipus Rex, Tiresias confronts the royal house of Thebes with the source of its own suffering: King Oedipus has killed his father, Laius, and married his mother, Jocasta. Tiresias’ ability to predict the future, to see the spiritual structure under material things, is an offering from a sympathetic Zeus, whose goddess wife—Hera—blinded the man.
Characters like Tiresias are a trope, M. Leona Godin writes in There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. Sighted people expect blind people to have a transcendent sense—their guilt gift from Zeus,whether it's clairsentience or crystal-clear hearing. Tiresias’ blindness, in other words, is a sighted fantasy, invested in the importance of seeing clearly, and invested with anxiety about losing that capacity. In Oedipus Rex, Tiresias can fathom the depths of the incestuous situation through a compensatory access to something beyond—a finished or determinate structure behind or within the appearance of things. Something lurks behind sight, suggesting that sight is not only a sense of revelation but of concealment. What the eye shows us is not entirely trustworthy.
‘Transvestigations’ are founded on this ocular worry. In a transvestigation, Internet pseudo-sleuths pounce on purportedly ‘mannish’ traits of a famous woman, like Michelle Obama, and attempt to prove the banal, Beauvoirian point that she wasn’t born a woman, but became one. Here, sight is experienced as both knowledge (“She looks like a woman,”) and anxiety (“but something is out of place.”) Others hope that technology—MRIs, genome scans, genital checks—can provide an unquestionable knowledge of gender. They appeal to the objectivity of science—vision from a distance—to properly focus things at the micro or macro level, at the level of evolutionary history or epidemiological scale. If vision, so often done from afar, can be properly harnessed, then its deceptive quality might be constrained. They hope that vision itself may come to align with Tiresias’ something beyond. They hope that a perfect perception of appearances is identical to an infallible sense of essentials. In response to gender, to ambiguity and excess, the eye is disciplined.
Pluck out your eyes all you want, Oedipus, but you’ll still be a fool. A predetermined future doesn’t exist. Instead, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini argue there is only a 'process of closure' through which we try to translate all those noisy, unforgettable signals. "The closure [...] is always incomplete [...] which helps to explain why so many of these concepts (such as race and gender) can feel hard to pin down, resisting language and crumbling when examined closely, betraying their unstable foundations." Each appearance of gender, which is to say each appearance in our lives of those fuzzy unconscious signals, breaks up and splits into multiple messages. In this regard, the psychoanalytic thinking of Gender Without Identity is against certain kinds of gender science—both biomedical and ‘conversion’ types—which obsesses over repeatable results, objective observation, and predictable outcomes. Tiresias-as-prophet is a counterpoint, a hope of not being troubled by fractious and noisy appearances. Perhaps Tiresias’ blindness itself is symptomatic of a fantasy of being without gender, of being without the ambiguity which gender necessitates. Reading this way, the angry, hiking Tiresias, who is overcome by an anger he does not understand, has more potential to engage the world with honesty than does the all-knowing prophet. There is no objective history to one’s gender, and no means of forecasting that of oneself or others. "It is not for us to play prophet [...] Neither, dear reader, should you."
The authors don't know what's coming, you and I don't know what's coming, and neither does Ory. Ory—a twelve year-old who was brought to Saketopoulou's psychoanalytic practice for treatment—is the emotional core of Gender Without Identity. Ory's parents were frustrated, angered by his "girly" voice, mannerisms, and interests. Living in an Orthodox Jewish community, Ory's family feared the shame and marginalization that he might bring to the family. After several weeks of extremely polite, emotionally distant sessions with Saketopoulou, Ory finally opens up, telling her about his secret bag of fabric samples. The samples provide Ory with tactile pleasure, and he leads Saketopoulou around the room, instructing her on how to touch, how to feel the textures around her. From there, Ory begins to share his love of orchids and his deep knowledge of their care. Ory knows, in a sense, how things work, the logic of how to perpetuate something that, at times, seems incomprehensible to those around him—a plant. His touch, not his eyes, guide him into an alternative sense of the world. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini describe Ory's pleasures as a way of narrating his progress in the consulting room, and as examples of the kinds of interests which displeased his parents. Perhaps, along Saketopoulou and Pellegrini’s intended signal, a kind of noise has piggybacked: a wish that Ory himself might know, might be able to guide Saketopoulou as clinician, and both authors as theorists. Ory as a closed-eyed Tiresias, shouting out, “I see it now, now that I don’t see!”
For any still-feminine former boy, it's difficult to follow Saketopoulou and Pellegrini when they leave the consulting room to ask, in abstract, how boys like Ory become boys like Ory, and why that becoming so troubles their parents, parents who were instrumental in that becoming. It’s difficult to leave his pleasures behind. We former boys, too, want Ory to know, so that we ourselves might know, maybe all know together. If Gender Without Identity provides insight into how we come to flounce and prance our way to pleasure and pain, the book is unable to reassure us of that pleasure or answer for that pain.
No longer wishing to know the future is no easy task. It's an impossible acceptance of negativity, a rejection of the idea that knowledge and fixity are givens. Lee Edelman—author of the queer pessimist touchstone No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive—offers that, "none of us can avoid the recuperative impulse; it's impossible [...] to follow the path of negativity without encountering the negative's inevitable reversion to positivity, either as a result of our psychic resistance to it or as the result of the resistance inherent in the referential aspect of language." [2] In an interview with Omid Bagherli, he admits, "I don't exempt myself from the resistance to negativity, either [...] we can neither realize negativity nor escape it." The challenge for Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, and especially for Gender Without Identity, is that many simply do not wish to see the chaos which is appearances, to accept Freud’s old warning: we are not masters of our own houses. They would rather close their eyes and know.
[1] There is a very obvious and undeniable explanation for this: the main essays were written before the Tiresias Prize was awarded, and before the introductory sections were penned. I am not suggesting here that Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are (consciously or unconsciously) hiding or excluding Tiresias from the main essays, but instead suggesting that the book’s format might allow us to use Tiresias as a lens, as a tool for bringing into and out of focus certain elements of the text.
[2] Omid Bagherli, “An Interview with Lee Edelman,” Postmodern Culture 33, nos. 2-3 (2023). https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/931363