Join authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini as they discuss their new book, GENDER WITHOUT IDENTITY. They will be in conversation with psychoanalyst Griffin Hansbury. The event will consist of a reading, discussion, Q&A, and signing, followed by a short reception with food and drink.

About GENDER WITHOUT IDENTITY: At a time of unprecedented legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ people, with gender-affirmative care for trans youth being outright banned in a growing number of states, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini offer an innovative and at times unsettling theory of gender formation. Arguing for abandoning the fiction of “core gender identity” and the fantasy that there is something true or authentic about any gender, Saketopoulou and Pellegrini instead propose that gender is something all subjects (not just trans and queer subjects) acquire. Trauma, they daringly argue, sometimes has a share in that acquisition.

Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and in conversation with bold work in queer and trans studies, GENDER WITHOUT IDENTITY argues for the ethical urgency of recognizing that wounding experiences and traumatic legacies may be spun into gender. Such “spinning” involves self-theorizations that do not proceed from a centered self, but are nevertheless critical to psychic autonomy.

Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, who are both practicing psychoanalysts, offer theoretical and clinical resources for working with gender complexity and for complexifying (what is seen as) gender normativity. But, above all, GENDER WITHOUT IDENTITY is an impassioned defense of queer and trans life and flourishing.

Copies of GENDER WITHOUT IDENTITY will be available at the Bureau. To reserve a copy, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com.

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming at YouTube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd.

Avgi Saketopoulou (she/her) is a Cypriot and Greek immigrant and a psychoanalyst based in New York City. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and works extensively with trans children and their families. She is also the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, which was published earlier this year by New York University Press.

Ann Pellegrini (all pronouns) is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their books include “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People, coauthored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico (Beacon Press, 2013). Pellegrini is the founding coeditor of the “Sexual Cultures” series at New York University Press.

Saketopoulou and Pellegrini are the recipients of the first Tiresias Paper Award, from the Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Griffin Hansbury (he/him) is a psychoanalyst in New York City. Under the pen name Jeremiah Moss, he is the author of Feral City and Vanishing New York. His writing on the city has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books.