Winner of The American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) Book Prize for 2015 Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian approach presents a startling new way to consider psychoanalytic dilemmas of sexual difference and gender through the meeting of arts and the clinic. Informed by a Lacanian perspective that locates transsexuality in the intermediate space between the clinic and culture, Oren Gozlan joins current conversations around the question of sexual difference with the insistence that identity never fully expresses sexuality and, as such, cannot be replaced by gender. The book goes beyond the idea of gender as an experience that gives rise to multiple identities and instead considers identity as split from the outset. This view transforms transsexuality into a particular psychic position, able to encounter the paradoxes of transitional experience and the valence of phantasy and affect that accompany aesthetic conflicts over the nature of beauty and being. Gozlan brings readers into the enigmatic qualities of representation as desire for completion and transformation through notions of tension, difference and aesthetics through examining the artwork of Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois and the role played by confusion in the aesthetics of transformation in literature and memoir. Each chapter of the book presents a productive take on understanding the psychoanalytic demand to sustain and consider the dilemma that the unconscious presents to the knowledge and recognition of gender. Fundamentally, this work understands transsexuality as a creative act, rich with desire and danger, in which thinking of the transsexual body as both an analytic and a subjective object helps us to reveal the creativity of sexuality. Ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers as well as students of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literature studies and philosophy, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning offers a unique insight into psychoanalytic approaches to transsexuality and the question of assuming a position in gender.

Winner of The American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) Book Prize for 2015 Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian approach presents a startling new way to consider psychoanalytic dilemmas of sexual difference and gender through the meeting of arts and the clinic. Informed by a Lacanian perspective that locates transsexuality in the intermediate space between the clinic and culture, Oren Gozlan joins current conversations around the question of sexual difference with the insistence that identity never fully expresses sexuality and, as such, cannot be replaced by gender. The book goes beyond the idea of gender as an experience that gives rise to multiple identities and instead considers identity as split from the outset. This view transforms transsexuality into a particular psychic position, able to encounter the paradoxes of transitional experience and the valence of phantasy and affect that accompany aesthetic conflicts over the nature of beauty and being. Gozlan brings readers into the enigmatic qualities of representation as desire for completion and transformation through notions of tension, difference and aesthetics through examining the artwork of Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois and the role played by confusion in the aesthetics of transformation in literature and memoir. Each chapter of the book presents a productive take on understanding the psychoanalytic demand to sustain and consider the dilemma that the unconscious presents to the knowledge and recognition of gender. Fundamentally, this work understands transsexuality as a creative act, rich with desire and danger, in which thinking of the transsexual body as both an analytic and a subjective object helps us to reveal the creativity of sexuality. Ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers as well as students of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literature studies and philosophy, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning offers a unique insight into psychoanalytic approaches to transsexuality and the question of assuming a position in gender.

Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies introduces new thinking on non-conforming gender representation, addressing transsexuality as a subjective experience that highlights universal dilemmas related to how we conceive identity and exploring universal questions related to gender: its objects, objections, and obstacles. This book seeks to disassemble prejudicial orientations to the challenges and the everydayness of transsexuality and build new understanding and responses to issues including: medical biases, the problem of authenticity, and the agency of the child. Oren Gozlen leads an examination of three central pressures: transformation of a medical model, the social experience of becoming transgender, and the question of self-representation through popular culture. The chapters reframe several contemporary dilemmas, such as: authenticity, pathology, normativity, creativity, the place of the clinic as a problem of authority, the unpredictability of sexuality, the struggle with limits of knowledge, a demand for intelligibility and desire for certainty. The contributors consider sociocultural, theoretical, therapeutic, and legal approaches to transsexuality that reveal its inherent instability and fluidity both as concept and as experience. They place transsexuality in tension and transition as a concept, as a subject position, and as a subjectivity. The book also reflects the way in which political and cultural change affects self and other representations of the transsexual person and their others, asking: how does the subject metabolize the anxieties that relate to these transformations and facilitations? How can the subject respond in contexts of hostility and prohibition? Offering a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration, Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapist as well as psychologists and scholars of gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies introduces new thinking on non-conforming gender representation, addressing transsexuality as a subjective experience that highlights universal dilemmas related to how we conceive identity and exploring universal questions related to gender: its objects, objections, and obstacles. This book seeks to disassemble prejudicial orientations to the challenges and the everydayness of transsexuality and build new understanding and responses to issues including: medical biases, the problem of authenticity, and the agency of the child. Oren Gozlen leads an examination of three central pressures: transformation of a medical model, the social experience of becoming transgender, and the question of self-representation through popular culture. The chapters reframe several contemporary dilemmas, such as: authenticity, pathology, normativity, creativity, the place of the clinic as a problem of authority, the unpredictability of sexuality, the struggle with limits of knowledge, a demand for intelligibility and desire for certainty. The contributors consider sociocultural, theoretical, therapeutic, and legal approaches to transsexuality that reveal its inherent instability and fluidity both as concept and as experience. They place transsexuality in tension and transition as a concept, as a subject position, and as a subjectivity. The book also reflects the way in which political and cultural change affects self and other representations of the transsexual person and their others, asking: how does the subject metabolize the anxieties that relate to these transformations and facilitations? How can the subject respond in contexts of hostility and prohibition? Offering a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration, Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapist as well as psychologists and scholars of gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.