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)

Fall 2024

All events are in-person only. No need to sign up in advance, unless noted. Everyone is welcome.

To request a text please email at least five days before the session: d.semerene@uva.nl

Sept. 26 2024 - Shame and Shit: The Underside of Queerness?
17h00 at OMHP, room A 008

Misha Kavka, “Queerness and Hontologie, or what can Baby Andy tell us about shame”

In the ‘clinic’ of television, otherwise known as the 1990s/2000s classic Sex and the City, a curious exchange takes place at a baby shower that the urban, single girlfriends reluctantly attend (season 1, episode 10). A beaming mother says of her 11-month-old son, ‘Andy’s a god and I tell him so every day’, leading pragmatic Miranda to do the work of the analyst when she asks Carrie, ‘Thirty years from now, what do you think the chances are that some woman’s going to be able to make Andy happy? I’m gonna go with zero.’ This comic encounter, which imagines a (male) baby propelled by maternal love into a future unhappiness with women, provides the elements to be explored in this paper: babies, a queer trajectory, an overwhelming ego ideal and a vague sense of shame hovering around it all. Although it is not clear whose shame it is, something and someone in this encounter has been exposed. To die of shame in the Real is impossible, says Lacan in Seminar XVII, but this makes it all the more important to engage with hontologie.

In this paper I will refuse the easy way out, namely, to argue that Baby Andy will grow up to be queer because his mother loved him too hard. This argument, an unimaginative reading of Freud if there ever was one, leads to a certain fixation of ‘queer shame’ as internalised homophobia (presumably the mother’s, since she tried to set a good example for heterosexuality by loving Andy so much). Instead of tying queerness to same-sex relations and projecting this into Andy’s future, I will argue the opposite: that Baby Andy is already queer, precisely to the extent that all babies are a field of turbulent being (in Lacan’s sense). In this reading, the mother who props Andy up before the mirror, telling him ‘you’re a god!’, is delineating not just an ideal ego with which the baby must identify for self- coherence, but also a set of ego ideals which will bind him to the (heterosexual) social order of the Other. This is the same as saying that that which escapes signification in the living being of the baby – presumably so much more turbulent than the socialised child or adult – is the objet a reimagined as an unsignifiable but compelling queerness.

As I will argue, shame is both the hontological exposure of the subject’s lack-in-being to the Other and the site from which queerness could be made to speak in the clinic. Green and Vanheule (2024) cite Lacan to claim that the exposure of the ego’s fantasy of unity should be considered a breakthrough in the psychoanalytic treatment, making shame a productive affect. If what is exposed, however, is the queerness of babies that precedes the fantasmatic capture of the ego, then this is equivalent to (re)discovering the queer baby – that is, the baby-as-queer – at the limit point of the Symbolic.

Diego Semerene, “Cathexis of Shit: toward a Lacanian erotics of fecal matter”

In No Archive Will Restore You (2018), Julietta Singh’s baby daughter molds her own excrement into a penis to cover her vagina. In Lucas Rijeneveld’s Discomfort of Evening (2018), a young child refuses to poop after their brother’s tragic death. In Neige Sinno’s autobiographical account of incest, Triste Tigre (2023), it is as a turd that the abusive stepfather shows up at a costume party. In the opening of Camila Sosa Villada’s trans* novel The Queens of Sarmiento Park (2022), a travesti sex worker finds a newborn covered in feces in a swamp and promptly feeds him her industrial- silicone breasts. The shit-covered baby is soothed as he latches on to the milk-less breast. Here we have lactation of a very different kind, which Villada describes as rare, reparatory, and even magical. Travesti lactation is a hallucination. It shows us it isn’t just the materiality of milk that the baby is after, that matter arises through a framing, a gesture, a trace (of memory), which can eclipse the pleasures of its own material gifts. In this talk I argue defecation, its ancillary practices, and associated signifiers (excrement, stench, flatulence, coprophagy), to hold the potential for the hallucinatory qualities Villada sees in travesti lactation. This hallucination is a precondition for a meaningful encounter with another’s body, and one’s own, which blows sense into it, turning the body into (new) parts, and certain body parts, along with the substances they bring forth, into loci of attraction.

Digital networks such as X, Scatboi and Darkfans are rife with pornographic scatological content and role- playing “daddies” giving their lovers diaper checks. And yet, speaking about feces as substance for creativity, pleasure, and analysis, remains taboo. What is it about this under-theorized substance that insists on emerging – in literature, in sex— despite our most visceral attempts at disavowing it as disgusting, useless, or non-existent?

In Seminar 3, Lacan reminds us that babies don’t repress, they express. Repression doesn’t appear until the Oedipus complex disappears, at which point the division between identification and object choice must be staged. I look to the baby’s relationship to feces, and erotic praxes involving fecal matter later in life that harken back to this early moment when the subject was able to revel in shit as material for articulating what he/she couldn’t in any other way. I thus theorize the queer potentiality of fecal matter through the work of Lacan by tracing the creative usages and symbolic meaning of feces in literary and digital cruising worlds

Reading: Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII 

Chapter 13 (The Power of the Impossibles), pp. 180-187 (the chapter intro plus sections 1-2).  

If people want more context, then can start earlier, with Chs. 11 & 12 or just Ch. 12.

Oct.  17 2024 - Guest: Ednei Soares, psychoanalyst/Gender Clinic
17h00 at BG2, room 008

Readings: Patricia Gherovici, “Depathologizing of Trans” and “The Singular Universality of Trans”

As the contemporary debate in trans-care frames transness as a mental health concern, at the Queer Analysis session Ednei Soares will debate his experience at the gender clinic within the scope of problematising the possibilities and limits of de-pathologizing trans within the psychoanalytic framework.

Ednei Soares is a Brazilian psychoanalyst trained at a Lacanian school with 18 years of experience in Europe and South America. He has a PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) and the UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil). Recently his practice has focused on transgender care and on victims of sexual violence and abuse due to their sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.

In his research recent trajectory Ednei Soares discusses claims by trans and queer theory scholars on Freud’s theory of fetishism, focussing on how Freud’s thinking on fetishism allows for non-pathologizing perspectives in contemporary sexuality and gender identity, including trans sexuality. His research draws from different psychoanalytic traditions such as the object-relation approach (D. Winnicott and P. Greenacre) and Jacques Lacan’s.

Nov.  14  2024 - Discussion session
17h00 at BG2, room 012

Reading: Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII (excerpt tba)

Dec. 5 2024 - Discussion session
17h00 at UB, Potgieterzaal

Reading: Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII (excerpt tba)

Queer Analysis 2023-2024

Spring 2024

Tuesday, June 11 2024 at 17:00 

LocationOMHP room C 2.17 (Oudemanhuispoort, 1012 CN Amsterdam)

“Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden: Performing Not-yet Queerness Toward a Utopian Future”, Hee-seung Irene Lee (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

[There is no need to sign up; in-person event]

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden:
Performing Not-yet Queerness Toward a Utopian Future

Hee-seung Irene Lee
Korean Studies
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract

Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (아가씨, 2016) presents a fascinating case of transnational adaptation, inspired by the well-known Neo-Victorian novel, Fingersmith (2002), penned by Welsh writer Sarah Waters. Both the film and its source text narrate the tale of queer lovers navigating a hostile time and place, compelling them to live counter to their desires. Park's adaptation preserves the central dramatic conflict between societal norms and the inherent queer desire gradually unfolding for the two female protagonists. However, the film relocates Waters's original story of lesbian lovers from Victorian England to Korea under Japanese rule in the 1930s.

This paper explores how such a radical spatial and temporal shift, in the name of adaptation, imbues a sense of futurity in interpreting and envisioning the original novel’s retrospective portrayal of immanent queer subjects from a 21st-century perspective. A prominent transformation in transposing the two Victorian heroines troubled with “the love that dare not speak its name” to colonial Korea involves the introduction of two distinct ethnic, national, and cultural identities, in addition to the novel's class division, positioning the film’s heroines at opposite ends of the colonial hierarchy in the beginning. The film’s three-part narrative effectively illustrates how Japanese noble lady Hideko and Korean handmaiden Sook-hee not only cross these divides successfully but audaciously engage with and transcend contextual and psychological obstacles, injecting a generic vitality into this mainstream film.

The Handmaiden’s dislocation of queer desire bolsters cinema's capacity to reintroduce the openness of a future into the historical past when envisaging the un(der)represented desires in their hidden potentialities. With a focus on the film’s desire to reshape the colonial past, which is steeped in violent patriarchal macromania and capitalist greed and its anticipation of what might be possible, this paper investigates how The Handmaiden embodies and performs the nexus of queerness, which José Muñoz describes as "the rejection of here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world" (Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2009, p.1). The film, by seamlessly integrating different cultural and historical visages and nuances, challenges conventional representations of queer subjects under a single identity and presents the futurity of queerness as a positive excess between history and possibility.
Hee-seung Irene Lee is a Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Auckland. Irene completed her PhD in Film, Television, and Media Studies from the same university and has been teaching and researching contemporary Korean cinema and media, East Asian popular culture, screen adaptation, film theory, and critical theory.

Thursday, June 6 2024 at 18:00 - Discussion Session

Location: OMHP room A 1.18C (Oudemanhuispoort, 1012 CN Amsterdam)

Text: Tim Dean’s “Lacan and Queer theory”

[There is no need to sign up; in-person event. If you have no access to the text please email d.semerene@uva.nl requesting it by June 3]

 

Friday, May 24th at 3pm

Location: Bushuis room F 1.14 (Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam)

READING EVA HAYWARD

Eva Hayward (Utrecht University) in conversation with Diego Semerene (University of Amsterdam)

In Eva Hayward’s work, cutting is generative. “To cut is not necessarily about castration but an attempt to recast the self through the cut body,” she tells us. Castration in psychoanalysis, of course, does not need to be literal. In fact, it must not in order for the cut to allow for proliferation of meaning. That is, a castration of enjoyment; an opening for elaboration, which makes analysis interminable. Trans, for Hayward, is a hitch, a hyphen, a suction cup, a virus, a threshold, poised to attach and alter. And “human-to-human sex has always been bestial (…).” In this event Hayward will be in conversation with Diego Semerene in an intimate dialogue covering the provocative, poetic layers that traverse Hayward’s oeuvre—trans substances, trans pedagogies, trans writing, trans desire, trans-animalities, the power of the cut and the limits of language—as well as reflections on Dutch sex. The dialogue will be followed by Q&A and drinks.

Eva Hayward is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She has also taught at the University of Arizona (USA) and the University of New Mexico (USA). A Fulbright Scholar (Austria), she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University (USA) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Her research focuses on ecology, art, and trans studies.

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor in Queer and Transgender Media at the University of Amsterdam. Previous teaching appointments include Brown University (USA) and The American University of Paris (France). Research areas: trans theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and fashion studies. 

Suggested readings:

Eva Hayward, “Erotic Animal (inspired by Edi Dubien’s paintings),” Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2020), 1-7.

Eva Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves"

Women's Studies Quarterly, Fall - Winter, 2008, Vol. 36, No. 3/4, Trans- (Fall - Winter, 2008), pp. 64-85.

Eva Hayward, "Spider City Sex." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 20: 3 (2010), 225-251.

The first reading (“Erotic Animal”) is the only one that is not widely available online for you to download. You may email d.semerene@uva.nl by May 20th to receive “Erotic Animal.” 

RMA and PhD Students in the Netherlands are able to receive 1 Credit for attending and participating in the event. In that case the suggested readings are required. Students who’d like to receive credit must sign up for the event by sending an email to d.semerene@uva.nl with the following info: name, student number, program/university, university email address, at which point you will receive a PDF for “Erotic Animal.” The hard deadline to sign up for the event for credit is May 20th. 

This is an in-person only event. No streaming and no recording. Only those seeking NICA credit need to sign up.

Friday, April 26 at 3:30pm - Discussion Session

OMHP room D 1.18 A (Oudemanhuispoort, 1012 CN Amsterdam)

Text: Freud’s Anna O. case history  (pages 21-45):

https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf

[There is no need to sign up; in-person event]

Desire for Trans symposium – 2024

Friday, March 15 at 13h

13h00 – 15h00: room D 1.09.T in OMHP (Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, 1012 CNAmsterdam)

15h00 – 18h00: room 3.01 in University Theater (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, 1012 CP Amsterdam)

Jack Halberstam (Columbia University)

Beatriz Santos (Université Paris Cité France, psychoanalyst)

performance by Relaxking from the drag king House of Løstbois

In-person only, no need to sign up.

Credits 1 ECTS: must attend the entire symposium; sign up for credit before March 11; Readings to follow; Contact: d.semerene@uva.nl

13h00

On Destitution and Dereliction: Trans* After Trans

Jack Halberstam (David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University)

In my book Trans*: A Quick and Quirky History of Gender Variance, I used the term “trans*” to describe a form of trans politics that pivots away from recognition and inclusion and points towards new understandings of the body, transitivity, being/un-being and an emergent politics of solidarity. Anyway, I begin there in order to put pressure on the category of trans and I offer today to destitute trans as it functions as a reference point for bodily change on the one hand but simultaneously as a steadying of the ontologies that threatened to be undone by its emergence on the other. If destitution names a set of insurrectionary movements that seek, in the words of Kieran Aarons and Idris Robinson, “to tear down, dismantle, and cancel prevailing political representations and institutions, without proposing others to replace them,” then what might this look like in terms of a trans politics of representation? My new work has been committed to the scene of dismantling, to the spectacle of coming undone, to the unraveling of binary forms and to anarchitectural orientations to being, self, body. Anarchitecture, Gordon Matta Clark wrote in an exhibition description in the early 1970’s, means “working with absence” and “opening spaces to redistribute mass” and “emphasizing internal structures through extraction.” How might these relations to space and absence describe a very different trans orientation? This talk ranges through trans theories of ontology and reads new ideas about being and having in relation to abstract trans art.

15h15

“The wandering, this song of us two": Tales of counterTrans*ferential fantasies and unthinkable anxieties among psychoanalysts

Beatriz Santos (Université Paris Cité France, psychoanalyst)

The talk aims to examine the idea of countertransference as well as  to describe its impact on clinical cases concerning nonconforming gender patients and cisgender analysts. Recent developments on the notion of countertransference allow for a more suitable analysis of transphobia among professionals. Patrick Guyomard's idea of analysts taking responsibility for transferential events seems particularly relevant in respect to clinical cases that also reflect societal changes. It works as an invitation to explore countertransferential responses in their relationship with the analyst's desire for trans.

Bio

Beatriz Santos, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and associate professor at the Center for Research in Psychoanalysis, Medicine, and Society (CRPMS), Université Paris Cité France. She is the co-editor of the series “Figures of the Unconscious” for Leuven University Press and is a member of the editorial board of the French Journal Recherches en Psychanalyse among other publications. Recent works include the volume "Pulsion de mort. Destruction et créations, co edited with M. David-Ménard (Hermann ) and the articles "The Psychoanalyst’s Couch as a Safe Space: Gender and Psychoanalysis in France Today” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry) and “Language and Vulnerability. A Lacanian Analysis of Respect” (Frontiers in Psychology) with Laurie Laufer. 

Wednesday, March 13, 18h00

The Queerness of Fetuses

Luca Greco (Université de Lorraine)

Doelenzaal in the UB (Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam)

Inspired by queer linguistic approach and ethnographic and multimodal analysis of videorecorded prenatal ultrasound examinations, my study on sex announcements in ultrasound examinations and in gender reveal parties discerns the sequence of actions and utterances that identify and announce in a spectacular way intelligible signs of sexed specification of the fetuses. At a first glance, I have noted that sex could not be delivered solely through the linguistic form « it’s a girl »/ « it’s a boy ». Indeed, it is systematically followed by proof sequences in which the attributes of the categories are rendered visible and intelligible as « a proof of the sex » preceded announced. In gender reveal parties, we assist to a paroxysm of this method: the sex is not announced per se, it is shown directly by its prototypical features materialized by blue or pink confetti reiterating a gendered binary order. 

The hypothesis I would like to show and to test to the audience of my communication is the following one: the systematicity of these ethno-methods mobilized in an obsessive way by participants – proof sequences testing the truth of the sex announcement - reveals a sort of queer panic vis a vis the fetuses. I will argue that fetuses by their intrinsic anatomical and sexual indeterminacy – the “real sex” as the healthcare providers told me on the fieldwork is given just at the birth – are deeply queer and could be considered as the paradigm of queer subjectivity. Moreover, a focus on how both fetal anatomy and ultrasound images are treated as texts and how signs of gendered categorization are read by healthcare providers and future parents pushes me to consider the bodies of fetuses as textual materials, i.e. fetal literacies, to be deciphered and read. Their textuality as it emerges in social interactions I videorecorded in a French Maternity Serve shows the postmodern potentiality at work on fetuses subjectivity and the necessity to querying fetal bodies. 

Tuesday, March 5, 17h00

Discussion Session

BG2, room 012 (Turfdraagsterpad 15-17, 1012 XT Amsterdam)

Text: Freud, S. (1915). “Drives and Their Vicissitudes” pp. 109-141. In: J. Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV. London: Vintage, 2001

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

[There is no need to sign up; in-person event]

Breath of Life, Kiss of Death: on Breathing and Olfaction | 28 February 2024

Presentation by Berjanet Jazani (London-based Iranian psychoanalyst) organized by the Queer Analysis Group | Respondent: Catherine Lord | 28 February 2024 at 18h

UB the Belle van Zuylen

Our living being, which depends from moment to moment on breathing, is essentially marked by language and this fact gives other dimensions to the act of breathing. In religions and in literature breathing has been accorded a status beyond its physiological essentiality. In Judaism and Christianity, smell and breath play an important role in portraying and making the distinction between heaven and hell and, more generally, between what is pleasant and what is unpleasant.

Breathing is living and claiming life. It is intimate: lovers breathe each other’s air. The language of breathing is sexualised, and yet it is associated with a higher being. Respiration and hence smell are woven into our descriptions of our lived experience to an extent that would often surprise us if pointed out – the words of our descriptions become ‘smelly’. From the bad breath of the devil to the sweet breath of a lover, our speaking being is marked by breathing.

Breath is associated with mortality (the power of life and birth/rebirth) and sexuality (inhaling magical air with fertilizing power) as well as the soul and joy of being in a human subject. Is the first breath not a claim of life? Can we not see the infant’s first breath as the first step to independence from the caregiver, away from the dependence implied by the other essential needs, such as food, touch, warmth.

On this occasion, we will be elaborating the most fundamental aspect of olfaction, which is breathing, through the lens of psychoanalysis. What does breathing really mean for our living being, which is both mortal and sexualised? How are we marked by the language of breathing and vice-versa, how is our breathing marked by the signifier?

Berjanet Jazani is a medical doctor, practising psychoanalyst and author in London. She is the president of the College of Psychoanalysts UK (CP -UK), chef editor of Analytic Agora (the journal of The Academy of Psychoanalysis), analyst member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR), and the author of 'Lacanian Psychoanalysis from Clinic to Culture',  'Lacan, Mortality, Life and Language: Clinical and Cultural Explorations'. Her upcoming books include: 'How Does Analysis Work?' & 'The Perfume of Soul from Freud to Lacan: A Critical Reading of Smelling, Breathing and Subjectivity'.

Suggested readings for this talk are the following:

Freud, S. (1915). Drives and Their Vicissitudes. pp. 109-141. In: J. Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV. London: Vintage, 2001

Jazani, B. (2021). Lacan, Mortality, Life and Language: Clinical and Cultural Explorations. London: Routledge

Jones, E. (1951). Essays In Applied Psychoanalysis, Vol II. London: Hogarth

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)