Reading Love and Transgender Subjectivity in Lacan’s Four Discourses
Loading...
Authors
Bennett, Christopher Jeffrey
Date
2025-03-05 , 2025-03-05
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Trans Studies , Lacanian Psychoanalysis , Love , Discourse , Decolonial Theory , Subjectivity
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation uses psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s four discourses to trace the figuration of anti-colonial trans subjectivities in three literary texts, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang’s Small Beauty (2016), Arielle Twist’s Disintegrate/Dissociate (2019), and Kama La Mackerel’s Zom-Fam (2020). The dissertation focuses on an encounter with the text that situates the reader as the Hysteric and the text as the Analyst. Its main contention is that colonialism operates on the level of the University’s Discourse and, in doing so, attempts to engender a psychotic structure within the human subject. While Lacan’s theories of love are pessimistic on the surface, they ultimately help to tease out the differences between the ‘imaginary’ love of colonialism and ‘real’ love that transforms the subject by undoing the ego. This dissertation synthesizes recent strains of thought within psychoanalytic approaches to oppression including: the work of Patricia Gherovici and other Lacanian analysts who thoroughly reject Catherine Millot’s argument that trans desires and identifications are psychotic; theorizations of the aesthetic that consider ‘transsexuality’ as a psychic phenomenon by analysts like Oren Gozlan and postcolonial scholars such as Dina Georgis; Sheldon George and Kaplana Seshadri-Crooks’ revisions of Lacanian theory to think ‘race’ as an object of desire; and approaches to Lacan developed by Fanon and Hortense Spillers that take seriously the possibility of real love.