Queer Analysis is a research unit dedicated to investigating queer objects, subjects, encounters and practices as they contribute to and resonate with contemporary culture. Tracing our roots to the intersection of queer theory and psychoanalysis alongside the intensification of LGBTQ+ activism since the 1990s, we embrace various understandings of ‘queer’ to open up analysis of the conditions for living out non-normative genders and sexualities today.

In particular, we pursue a core interest in the question of desire – its theories, mediations and symptoms as testaments to the destabilizing effects and affects of the technological zeitgeist. We understand psychoanalysis to be the language we have for approaching desire rigorously and take queerness to be a generative mode of building, engaging, enacting, creating and consuming cultures. What do queer subjects want and what is wanted of queerness? How are such desires created, mobilized, sustained and stilled? By practicing ‘queer analysis’, our aim is to seek out (in)appropriate modes of analysis for studying the question of desire through a queer/ing lens.

Queer Analysis aims to forge a creative space where scholars drawn to psychoanalytic and queer theory’ logics and methods can do work. We believe in their imbrication and in the urgency of their interpellation in order to think through the questions of our time. While our framework is psychoanalytic, we are interested in a range of interdisciplinary discourses and practices that can enter into conversation with psychoanalysis in their approach to desiring practices and media technologies. 

With an eye to elucidating, mapping and innovating (in)appropriate methodologies, the Queer Analysis research unit will begin by tethering our work to the following axes:

• The child as a desiring subject and figure of queer desire
• Trans* desires relating to theory, practice and activism
• Automated intimacies reflecting desire in/of/for technologies of repetition, predictable pleasures and instant gratification

We invite interdisciplinary scholars, analysts and graduate students interested in the engagement of gender and sexuality studies through a queer theoretical and/or psychoanalytic perspective to join us for lectures, reading groups, workshops, symposia, and tutorials.

If you would like to join the research group please contact Prof. dr. Misha Kavka (m.kavka@uva.nl) and dr. Diego Semerene (d.semerene@uva.nl)

Queer Analysis

Fall 2023: Automated Intimacies or the Erotics of Repetition

 

Discussion Session 1: 

Wednesday, Oct. 11  - 18h

PC Hoofthuis (Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam): Room 5.60

Text to be discussed: 

Freud, S., “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”, SE XII, (147-156)

https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/201/articles/1914FreudRemembering.pdf

Diego: Intro with Couvert, Le Bébé Analysant

Freud, S., “Lecture XVIII: Fixation to Traumas—the Unconscious”, SE XVI, (p. 273-285.)

http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/360/Freud.pdf

Discussion Session 2:

Wednesday, Nov. 8 - 18h

PC Hoofthuis: room 5.60

Text to be discussed: 

Freud, S., “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, SE XXIII (211-253)

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Analysis_Terminable_Interminable.pdf

Discussion Session 3:

Wednesday, Dec. 6 - 18h

PC Hoofthuis:  room 5.60

Text to be discussed: 

Lacan, J., “The Unconcious and Repetition” (Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”

https://www.docdroid.net/sBWNGMh/four-fundamentals-pdf#page=5

 

Programme Spring 2023

Reading Discussion: Raw Sex

(in-person event, no registration needed, email d.semerene@uva.nl for PDF of the text)

Tuesday, May 16, 2023, 17.30 – 19.30 , BG2 room 0.12

https://www.uva.nl/locaties/binnenstad/bg-2.html

As usual, we will discuss a text thematically linked to an upcoming symposium. This will be Tim Dean’s “Representing Raw Sex,” from his book Unlimited Intimacies (attached).

Bareback Now symposium

(in-person event, no registration needed)
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
13.00 – 17.00, followed by drinks 

Doelenzaal room at the Singel University Library

https://www.uva.nl/locaties/binnenstad/universiteitsbibliotheek.html

Bareback has taken on multiple theoretical contours since being anointed as a legitimate object of academic analysis in Tim Dean’s 2009 seminal work, Unlimited Intimacy. Bareback has been approached as a subculture, an ideology, an attitude, a metaphor, a literality, a punk practice, a snuff politics, a mode of cultural transmission, a register of jouissance, a breeding ground for fantasies: in short, as a drive, a philosophy, a pedagogy, a poetics. The Bareback Now symposium aims to consider this complex field in its shifting manifestations and ancillary praxes, from chemsex to pigsex, from virility narratives to fantasies of subversion, from a normative to a radical practice and (possibly) back again. What is the contemporary function of this practice that has become all but the default position in many a queer sex scene? What has (be)come of barebacking in a context of omnipresent antiretrovirals and pre-exposure prophylaxis, but also of new forms of intimacy risks?

speakers

Antonios Poulios (psychoanalyst/University of Crete)
Misha Kavka (University of Amsterdam)
Elliot Evans (University of Birmingham)
Gary Needham (University of Liverpool)

For more info: d.semerene@uva.nl

Tuesday, March 14, 17.00 – 19.00, room 5.19 in the PCHoofthuis
https://www.uva.nl/locaties/binnenstad/pc-hoofthuis.html 
Discussion Session: Sheila L. Cavanagh, “Transpsychoanalytics” (in person only)

Friday, March 24, 24 March, 13.00 – 17.00, room D 0.08 in OMHP

https://www.uva.nl/locaties/binnenstad/oudemanhuispoort.html

DESIRE for TRANS symposium 

(in person only)

Speakers:

Eva Hayward (Utrecht University)
“Phobia into Fetish: Transmutations” 

Adnan Hossain (Utrecht University)
“The eternal pining for an elusive lover:  Ambivalence, contradiction and men who desire hijras”

Marija Cetinic (University of Amsterdam)
"There is no Object worse than a Woman"

Eliza Steinbock (University of Maastricht)
"T4T: Historically Speaking"

 

Programme 2022

Tuesday, Sept. 20 at 6pm
Discussion (Lacan’s The Meaning of the Phallus)
Potgieterzaal room in UB (ground floor) (Singel 421-427, 1012 WP Amsterdam)

Friday, Sept. 30, 2-6pm
The Queerness of Babies symposium
Roeterseiland - building JK - 305B (Valckenierstraat 65-67 1018 XE Amsterdam)

Sign up: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-queerness-of-babies-symposium-tickets-414848361617

Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 6pm
Discussion (Marie Couvert, “The Baby and the Drive”; Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”)
Belle van Zuylen in UB (first floor)  (Singel 421-427, 1012 WP Amsterdam)

Friday, Nov. 11 at 4pm
Talk: Eve Watson (Dublin-based psychoanalyst), Reflections on the Encounters between Psychoanalysis and Queer Theory 
OMHP, room C 1.17 (Oudemanhuispoort 4-6 1012 CN Amsterdam)

Friday, Nov. 25 at 4pm
Discussion (Eve Watson and Noreen Giffney, Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice & Queer Theory [excerpt])
BG2, room 0.12 (Turfdraagsterpad15-17 1012 XT Amsterdam)