(TRANS—) SEXUALITIES 

+ 

PSYCHOANALYSIS SUMMER SCHOOL  

June 8-12, 2026 

University of Amsterdam 

 

seminars 

with Nadia Bou Ali (American University of Beirut), Pedro Ambra (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo) 

  

lectures and performances 

by Elena Comay del Junco (University of Connecticut), Basyma Saad (artist), Shiv Kotecha (poet), Wendy Lotterman (University of Oslo), Liola Mattheis (Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur) 

  

workshops 

with Misha Kavka (University of Amsterdam), Marija Cetinic (University of Amsterdam), Diego Semerene (University of Amsterdam) 

  

  

Desire—what makes the signifying structure move. 

Demand turns into desire because the (m)other attends to it. 

To reach the sense of desire, demand needs to be interpreted. 

Once contaminated by signifiers, need stricto sensu is left behind. 

After need is satisfied, desire persists—indestructible. 

 

* 

 

(Trans—) in parenthesis with dash: the terrain of the latent, always already, the non-obvious. What traverses, compromises, confounds. What denounces the defensive fiction that identity is. 

(Trans—) in parenthesis with dash: what hesitates, what demurs, what insists. 

(Trans—) in parenthesis with dash: beyond evidence; capacious even when stunted. 

 

  

The (Trans–) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School is an intensive five-day series of seminars, lectures, theory workshops, roundtables, performances, dialogues and close-reading sessions at the intersection of trans theory and psychoanalysis. Our aim is to stage encounters between fields that tend to be in conflict. Such encounters might be, like desire, irresolvable. 

Following Leo Bersani’s maxim that queer theorists are Lacanians without knowing it (and vice versa), we seek forms for inhabiting this contradiction. The summer school sessions will take up canonical psychoanalytic texts alongside contemporary theoretical scholarship and literature. We encourage applications from graduate students, scholars, practicing or training psychoanalysts, and artists with a research background or interest in psychoanalysis and trans theory.  

 

This year’s iteration of the (Trans–) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School will be structured around three major concepts at the intersection of trans-ness and psychoanalysis—desire, demand, need—and will focus on Lacan’s Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation. 

 

At the University of Amsterdam, psychoanalysis is explored through trans and queer frameworks via the Sex Negativity and Queer Analysis research groups following a series of conceptual strands. We Have Never Had Sex thinks sex as a labor of or an encounter with negativity. Desire for Trans explores the multiplicity of forms a subject’s investment in trans-ness can take by asking: Who desires trans-ness and how? What are the singular ways trans subjects are marked by desire? The Queerness of Babies explores the figure of the baby as a screen for society’s anxieties and comforts, projections and pleasures. Un/savory Sub/stances looks at the erotic potential of bodily waste deemed repulsive. Automated Intimacies explores technified forms of the libidinal drive and the automation of intimate relations, asking what kind of opening repetition can be. 

 

 

Schedule 

 

Monday June 8–Friday June 12, from 9:30 to 17:30 

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands 

 

 

The Public Lectures 

  

The summer school will also offer two public lectures, by Dr. Nadia Bou Ali and Dr. Pedro Ambra. These will be open to the public as well as available for credit to students enrolled at a Dutch university at 1 EC via NICA . 

 

 

Scholars and Mentors 

 

Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and director of the Critical Humanities Program for the Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut. She is the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex and Politics (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Extimacy: Encounters Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (Northwestern UP, 2024), as well as of the book series Psychoanalytic Acts (Edinburgh UP). She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh UP, 2020). Her forthcoming book is entitled Structure and Form (Verso, 2026). Her works have been translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic. She has a private psychoanalytic practice and is a member of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, Bay Area San Francisco. 

 

Pedro Eduardo Silva Ambra is professor of Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) and a faculty member of Social Psychology at the University of São Paulo (USP) specializing in psychoanalysis, gender studies, and the social marking of difference. He is the author of O ser sexual e seus outros: gênero, autorização e nomeação em Lacan (2022), L’être sexué chez Lacan: normativité, genre et autorisation (2020), and O que é um homem? Psicanálise e história da masculinidade no Ocidente (2015). He has edited collections on erotic subversion, masculinity, and political challenges to psychoanalysis, including As subversões do erótico (2022), Cartografias da Masculinidade (2021), and Provocações para a Psicanálise no Brasil: racismo, políticas identitárias, violências e colonialismo (2021). Ambra is also an associate researcher at the Centre de Recherches Psychanalyse, Médecine et Société (CRPMS) at Université Paris-Cité and a member of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. 

 

Marija Cetinic works as Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, coordinates the MA Comparative Literature, and is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is a founding member of the research group Sex Negativity and runs the seminar series We Have Never Had Sex. At Sandberg Institute, she teaches in the MA Critical Studies. At Perdu, center for poetry and experiment, she is a member of the programming collective. Her current research is on negativity and feminisation. Cetinic is the co-founder of The (Trans--)Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School. 

 

Elena Comay del Junco is a writer and philosophy professor. Her work has appeared in The Point, Post45, Texte zur Kunst, and Bæst. She recently published a translation of Ibn Sīnā’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (2025) and a chapbook, “Second Nature” (2023). She is currently editing and translating a tenth-century Arabic poem on cosmology, and her book Innervation Tasks is forthcoming with La Barba Metafísica. She lives in New York. 

 

Misha Kavka is a professor of cross-media culture at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the research group Queer Analysis at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She has published widely on gender, sexuality, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film and media technologies. She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Reality TV (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), and the co-editor of volumes and special issues on reality television, gothic culture, feminist theory and psychoanalysis. Kavka is the co-founder of The (Trans--)Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School. 

 

Shiv Kotecha is a writer and editor living in New York. He is the author of four books of poetry: The Switch (Wonder, 2018), EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015), Outfits (Troll Thread, 2012), and Paint the Rock (Troll Thread, 2011). His writing appears in publications including 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, Cultured, frieze, The Nation, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. For the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, he co-edits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of experimental arts writing, and teaches writing at New York University and in the MFA program at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. 

 

Wendy Lotterman is a postdoctoral researcher in literature at the University of Oslo, the senior editor of Parapraxis, and the author of A Reaction to Someone Coming In (Futurepoem, 2023). 

  

Liola Mattheis is a theorist and poet based in Berlin. As a doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, she examines analogies between individual and species development in Freudo-Marxism. Questions of natural history and ‘primitive’ accumulation link this to her interests in trans materialism and critical childhood studies. 

 

Basyma Saad is an artist and writer born in Beirut. Her work explores notions of mourning, spontaneity, and surplus, through film, performance, and sculpture, alongside essays and fiction. Basyma’s work has been presented and screened at MoMA, The Poetry Project, CPH:DOX, and other places. Her writing appears in n+1, The New Inquiry, Protean, Spike Art, Jadaliyya, FailedArchitecture, X-TRA, and The Funambulist. She is currently working on a book of prose and poetry.  

  

Diego Semerene is Assistant Professor of Queer and Transgender Media at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the Queer Analysis Research Group at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Semerene is a film critic for Slant Magazine. Recent academic publications include “The Trans Gender Subject of Fashion,” for the International Journal of Fashion Studies (2024) and “Travesti Baby” for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2026). Semerene is the co-founder of The (Trans-)Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School.