(TRANS–) SEXUALITIES + PSYCHOANALYSIS SUMMER SCHOOL 2025

June 2-6, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

 

with Patricia Gherovici, Antonios Poulios, Alara Adilow, hannah baer, Rosie Stockton, Maxi Wallenhorst, Misha Kavka, Marija Cetinic, Diego Semerene

 

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

 

The body for/in psychoanalysis: not a collection of organs working in synchrony. A necessarily dysfunctional body—even in its best-case iteration. The subject has a body, the subject is not a body. The subject has a body and speaks with it. This is the subject’s dis-function. 

 

The (Trans–) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School is an intensive five-day series of lectures, seminars, workshops, roundtables, performances, and mentorship sessions at the intersection of trans theory and psychoanalysis. Our aim is to stage encounters between fields that tend to be at odds with one another, making psychoanalytic scholars and practicing psychoanalysts, particularly of the Lacanian-Freudian tradition, enter into conversation with trans and queer theorists. 

 

Following Leo Bersani’s maxim that queer theorists are Lacanians without knowing it (and vice versa), we seek forms for making such ‘not knowing’ known. The summer school sessions will consist of writing workshops and lectures, poetry readings and the close-reading of canonical psychoanalytic texts alongside contemporary theoretical scholarship and literature. We encourage applications from graduate students, scholars, practicing or training analysts, and artists with a background in or curiosity about psychoanalysis and trans theory.

 

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 paradigms. We Have Never Had Sex thinks sex as a site 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 mechanisms that keep sexual desire for trans-ness from becoming love? And 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. Bareback Now asks after the contemporary function of this practice. The (Trans–) Sexualities Summer School opens up the work of our research groups to an international audience.

 

This year’s iteration of the (Trans–) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School will collectively engage with critical concepts at the intersection of transness and psychoanalysis: difference (sexual, gender, class, racial); object (of demand, need, desire); structure (psychosis, neurosis, perversion).

 

Schedule: 

Monday June 2--Friday June 6, from 10:00 to 18:00

Location: University of Amsterdam

 

Scholars and Mentors

 

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. Her most recent publication is the pamphlet Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans (Everyday Analysis: 2025). ​Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press: 2003), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference ​(Routledge: 2017). She edited Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Routledge: 2023), and the Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Gender forthcoming in 2026.

 

Antonios Poulios is a clinical psychologist MSc, PhD and a psychoanalyst. He works in private practice and is also adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Crete, Greece. Additionally, he is consultant to AIDS Action Europe, scientific associate of the Greek Association of People Living with HIV “Positive Voice” and member of the training committee of Orlando LGBT+ "Mental Health without Stigma". He was awarded the international prize for outstanding contribution in the intersectional approach of sexuality from psychoanalytic and cultural perspective of the Alexandra and Martyn Symonds Foundation by the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality for 2022.

 

Alara Adilow, named 'literary talent of 2024' by de Volkskrant, is a Dutch poet of Somali descent. Her poetry collection Myths and Stoplights (Uitgeverij Prometheus, 2022) was awarded the Herman de Coninck Prize and the C. Buddingh's Prize. The collection was also shortlisted for the Grote Poëzie Prize in 2023. Adilow is currently working on her debut novel, which will be published by De Bezige Bij in 2025 under the title Kijk es naar al dit licht.

 

hannah baer is a writer based in New York. She is the author of the memoir Trans Girl Suicide Museum. Her forthcoming book, The Life of the Party, arrives in 2027 with MCD.

 

Rosie Stockton is the author of Fuel (nightboat books 2025) and Permanent Volta (nightboat books 2021), recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize judged by Brian Teare. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They are currently a PhD Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. Next to dance dramaturgy, translation, and art writing, Maxi works on dissociative poetics in capitalism. Recently, Maxi’s essays have appeared in e-flux journal and in Elif Saydam’s Two Cents (Mousse, 2022). In progress: A transvestite romance set in a half-allegorical ’20s Berlin.

 

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 and feminist theory.

 

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.

 

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’s research interests lie at the intersection of fashion studies, trans theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Recent publications include “The Trans Gender Subject of Fashion,” for the International Journal of Fashion Studies (2024) and “Embarrassing Subjects, Undisplayable Objects: Of Impossible Encounters Between Trans and Cis That Have Nonetheless Taken Place” (2024) for the Un/engendering the Collections project by the Dutch Research Center for Material Culture/Wereld Museum.

 

Application procedure (closed)

 

1. Applicants are asked to submit their CV and a Statement of Interest (350 words maximum) as one PDF file to tsp.summerschool@gmail.com by April 1, 2025.
2. Selected participants will be notified by April 15, 2025.
3. Participants will be asked to pay the registration fee by April 30, 2025.