Spring Meeting Pre-Conference Workshop: Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics
April 22, 8:30am - 12:00pm
via Zoom
This pre-conference workshop is being offered for free to all who are interested. If you are NOT attending the Spring Meeting, but would still like to attend, you can register here to receive the Zoom link. NOTE: If you are registering for Spring Meeting, this session will already be included in your registration and available via the mobile app and event website. You only need to register here if you are not registering for the Spring Meeting.
Description:
This workshop introduces Cisteria! as a collective transpsychoanalytic intervention against contemporary anti-trans panics and the institutional forms that sustain them. Building from the special issue’s framing of transpectres—the caricatured figures that haunt and produce gendered life—and cisteria—a defensive formation that organizes ciscentric anxiety into moral panic—we relocate pathology away from trans subjectivity and toward the architecture of cis power.
Organized by the guest editors of the Cisteria! special issue in Studies in Gender & Sexuality, the workshop brings together a small group of contributors for two curated sequences of focused presentations. Across clinical, theoretical, and creative registers, presenters will offer “unfaithful recalibrations” of psychoanalysis: interventions that may contradict one another, slip across subjectivities, and traverse intrapsychic, relational, and sociopolitical fields. Through a trans threat(psycho)analysis, we refuse respectability politics and demands to prove trans innocence, and instead critically track how cisteria’s dangers circulate through institutions and the textures of contemporary everyday life.
The final portion of the workshop will be devoted to open discussion, inviting participants to reflect on their own institutional locations and to consider how cisteria might function as a practice of reclaiming psychic life through play, feeling, critique, and trans world-making.
Speakers:
Tavi Bishop
Jess Joseph
Tobias Wiggins
Xiameng Qiao
Myriam Sauer
Vic Kennedy
Simone Atenea Medina Polo
Tavi Bishop is the pseudonym of a clinical psychologist in trans health, focused on sex, sexuality, and gender affirming collaborative care, living in the United States within ongoing histories of Indigenous dispossession. In addition to their clinical practice, they supervise, consult, and work to improve systems of care. They are grateful to those who invite them into their lives through psychotherapy and to colleagues who share expertise, energy, and memes. Although drawn to psychoanalysis by a class they had not intended to take and the compelling light of theory, it is colleagues whose warmth and ardor challenge and remake it that keep them from walking away.
Jess Joseph (they|she) is a clinical psychologist, living and practicing in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Their patients are very important to them. Jess organizes with the Philadelphia Treatment Not Trauma Coalition, which focuses on anti-carceral responses to psychic/emotional crises and struggles. She likes to write and teach about racialized and gendered body bits, ways to reduce trans and nonbinary gatekeeping in this hellscape of a mental health industrial complex, and how to resist violent treatment practices for those with eating conflicts. Jess likes to spend time with their wife, friends, and sisters. Otherwise, they’re usually knitting or taking their dogs on a hike.
Tobias Wiggins (he/him) is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University (AU) currently living in Treaty 7, Mohkinstsis, colonially known as Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. His research specializations include transgender mental health and sexuality, psychoanalysis, research-creation, queer visual culture, and cisgender psychology. He is the director of the TransLab, an interdisciplinary research hub that supports the production and dissemination of qualitative, theoretical, and arts-based research in Transgender Studies. At AU, he coordinates the University Certificate in Gender & Social Justice Counselling, which applies intersectional feminist and social justice theory to a wide variety of helping professions. Wiggins’ recent scholarly outputs include contributions to significant anthologies like The Queerness of Psychoanalysis (2024), Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care (2023), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities (2020); journals including Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2022), The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (2021), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2020).
Xiaomeng (Jo) Qiao is a psychoanalyst-in-training and a doctoral student currently living in the United Kingdom. His work examines how psychoanalysis engages with lived experiences of absence, longing, and recognition, particularly in relation to gender and queerness. He has published on themes including Chinese culture, artificial intelligence, and the “dead mother,” with essays appearing in psychoanalytic journals as well as venues such as TAP and ROOM. Alongside his academic and clinical training, Xiaomeng develops creative projects, including fictions, games, and music, that bring psychoanalytic thought into dialogue with wider cultural life. His current research investigates how marginal voices and practices of survival shape psychoanalysis as both a theory and a living practice.
Myriam Sauer is an associate researcher (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Latin America Institute of Freie Universität Berlin, as well as a writer. She has published one novel, Passage durch den reißenden Strom (A Torrential Passage; 2023, Querverlag), and co-edited The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge 2024, alongside Vanessa Sinclair and Elisabeth Punzi). She will co-edit Radicalizing Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Tools and Theories for Resistance (with Elizabeth Punzi, Routledge, 2027), and she will publish her second novel, Der Fall (The Fall) on minoritarian resistance to totalitarian systems of control, in 2027 (Querverlag). She has published scholarly articles and chapters on questions of gender formation, sexuality and desire at the intersections of psychoanalysis, philosophy and sociology.
Vic J. Kennedy (they, them, theirs) is a Black american gender studies scholar and reproductive justice advocate based in Atlanta, Georgia. Originally raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Vic credits the american Southeast as their political, educational, spiritual, and organizational home. They hold both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and they aspire to one day pursue a Juris Doctorate. They currently work as a Healthline Coordinator at Access Reproductive Care Southeast, a Black and queer led abortion fund. Their topics of interest include Black gender ontology, gender abolition, healthcare access for transgender patients, and restorative justice.
Simone Atenea Medina Polo is a psychoanalytic philosopher and interdisciplinary artist based out of amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). Atenea has published articles and book chapters in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Marxism with collaborators and editors such as Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Julie Reshe, Vanessa Sinclair, Todd McGowan, and Duane Rousselle. As an artist, Atenea has released multiple experimental pop music albums as pseudo-antigone, including her album Melancholic Melodrama which tells a quasi-fiction of the subjective destitution of an insecure artist who severed her own humanity in a Faustian bargain to become a TMZ-level pop star disaster.
