Immediate and violent backlash from the audience unfurled as soon as Paul B. Preciado, scholar, writer and philosopher, began to articulate the monsters which psychoanalysis has made of all of us by confining us to binary boxes, intolerant of ambiguous manifestations of the infinitesimal shades which intrinsically comprise our gender and sexuality. The reaction was so unhinged, he was only able to get through a quarter of his speech before he was told his time was up, but not before being subjected to mocking snickers, boos, and hostile silences, as well as this comment, audible from the rostrum: “We shouldn’t allow him to speak, he’s Hitler” (Preciado, 2020, p. 11). Preciado was invited to give this speech in November of 2019 to 3,500 psychoanalysts in Paris who had gathered as part of the 49 th Study Day of the École de Cause Freudienne on the theme of “Women in Psychoanalysis”, knowing full well that he is a trans man and a prolific gender activist. In a continued act of fortitude and in response to misleading fragments of the lecture being reposted worldwide, he proceeded to publish the entirety of the lecture under the title of, “Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts” (2020).
This event and its reverberations have stunningly illuminated and consolidated what has been invisible about my own lived experiences and observations. Holding deep gratitude toward Paul B. Preciado, whom I have never had the honor of meeting, I dedicate this autoethnographic essay to him. As an androgynous, non-binary person attempting to live and speak my subjective truths that are intrinsically at odds with the prescriptions of the oppressive, hypernormative heteropatriarchy, I have also been exposed to various versions of being told my time was up. In reaching for freedom to exist in all of the queer grays which constitute who I am, I have been obstructed by the socioculturally-appointed proprietors of power who paradoxically, Preciado writes, “are as imprisoned as they whose movements are hobbled by the knotted ropes” (p. 28). I was surrounded by said proprietors in psychoanalytic communities from the beginning of my life, born in Topeka, Kansas, where my father was engaged in his psychiatry residency at Menninger. I learned very young that as a female-presenting person, I would be treated like a prescriptive object, only allowed to exist if I conformed to the presumed gender and sex-based expectations and projections. There was neither spaciousness to exhibit the full range of what it meant to be a human outside of the severely limited gender parameters designated to me, nor fostering of a uniquely applicable understanding of my evolving gender identity. Preciado dedicated, “Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts” to Judith Butler, which indicates a shared sense of liberation which they/she has offered to the world regarding their seminal paradigms around gender and sexuality. Preciado pays it forward, as I am attempting to do here and elsewhere.
Growing up and traversing the broader society epitomized these same knotted ropes. I privately came to define myself as a “wild animal” because that is how I have been responded to when I have stepped outside of the normative regimes in voice, appearance, or action. Discovering Mary Oliver’s (1986), “Wild Geese” poem later in life offered validation: “You don’t have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles in the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”. Because some of what I love includes equal value, respect and freedom for all humans, acts which advocate for these ends within hierarchically-organized systems have often been met with threat-induced backlash analogous to the audience response to Preciado.
Psychoanalysis, when utilized responsibly and fairly, has much to offer in navigating the complexities and multiplicities of humanity, and helping people to process and transcend painful hardships toward greater aliveness. This is why I chose to immerse in its abundance, primarily through curation of independent group study with selected psychoanalytic scholars, which has and continues to feed and grow my soul. However, when I have taken my desires to learn and teach to institutional settings, I found myself at times painted as a controversial object when I attempted to advocate for vulnerable people based on their socioculturally oppressed gender identities. Within these hierarchies constituted by a small but pivotal subset of individuals, there sometimes appeared to be a greater commitment to clinging to power than behaving respectfully toward women, trans, and non-binary individuals, particularly those representing multiple intersectional identities. Preciado describes this juncture where non-dualistic subject meets colonial system, leading to mutation and othering of the self. He also explains that he transitioned to a different gender as a way out of the cage that he had been living in as a female lesbian. He acknowledges that he was well aware that he would be entering another cage, at least this time of his own initiative. In other words, both the encaged as well as the encagers become socially constructed monsters.
I can imagine that Preciado’s willingness to share vulnerably in a public space a subject so personal to him was fueled by fervent determination to repair problematic systemic dynamics and give voice to marginalized peoples, which aligns with my impetus to do the same. One of my recent projects involved interviewing American psychoanalytic practitioners and academicians, most of whom represent subordinated sociocultural gender identities, for a special journal issue on academic freedom of expression. My intent was to illuminate the differential experiences these ambassadors have with freedom itself, given their socially presenting identities. How fortunate I feel to have collaborated in this intimate way with such brilliant, sensitive, self-possessed, talented individuals. It wasn’t until I clicked “submit” of the first draft on the journal website that palpable tension came flooding in. Widely discussed in the interviews were the negative reactions that implicitly resulted from sharing their ideas simply as who they are. Transgressing norms by being and living something other than what is contained within boxed parameters and outing what has been forced into invisibility by patriarchal structures is a risky, tedious and exhausting business. And it always involves anticipatory anxiety, consciously registered or not, about the potential reactions of others. I can only attempt to empathize with what Preciado must have felt before, during, and after his speech that day. But I wonder how many of the audience members or those who saw reposted snippets attempted to accurately appreciate his subjective experiences? I would venture to guess only a small fraction, because he had been othered as a monster, and therefore placed as a receptacle for people’s unmetabolized psychic shards and bad objects.
These projections and places of captivity exist in large part because those who are granted cultural power often prefer not to explore their own gray areas, and therefore are unable to be open to the same in others. To do so endangers their monistic dominance status. It also risks putting them in contact with sequestered reservoirs of psychic pain, guilt and loss. I maintain, however, that choices to take roads less or never traveled can always be made, and have found queering to represent a facilitative space for those choices (Koshkarian, 2023). To partake in queering, one must be able and interested to hold ambiguity, uncertainty, and an oppositional relationship with normativity. The journey constitutes questioning mainstream assumptions about the expansive nature of being human and shepherding congruent relational emergence of iterations and reiterations of the self. Identity evolution, including that related to gender and sexuality, is naturally fluid and ongoing, if we are afforded loving, egalitarian room in which to flourish. A big if, in the context of a society that perpetually places people into binary boxes. Let us not underestimate the consequences: “Violence is wreaked by the sexual, gender and racial norms” (Preciado, p. 96). These norms mutate humans into monsters. Colonial society, and institutional psychoanalysis by extension, places us in a do or die dilemma: comply with the white, heteropatriarchal parameters of the prescribed cages, or come out with all of the shades of our subjectivity and risk being treated like an animal who has gotten loose at the zoo. Some of the confines of the coop I have been coerced into due to gender prescriptions include imperatives to put other people’s comfort and aims before my own; organizing around existing power structures; defining, expressing and living myself reductively and dualistically; and disavowing my own authority while never questioning that of others. This has been all the more disorienting for me because my gender and sexuality are non-binary. I believe all of us are non-binary. But no matter whether a person defines themself as woman, trans, or non-binary, it is cruel and unethical to restrict their freedoms and safety to access all ways of presenting as and being human. Or to pathologize and punish them when they don’t comply with the expected norms. May we all take initiative to break free from our cages, to transition to living as the multi-faceted animals that we are. Let’s keep working together to mutate all of the monsters back into full-fledged, emancipated beings
Cited works
Koshkarian, L. (2023). The precarity of misogyny: queering as emancipation of the gendered female body. Psychoanalytic Social Work, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15228878.2023.2248378.
Oliver, M. (1986). Dream work. Washington, D.C.: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Preciado, P.B. (2020). Can the monster speak? South Pasadena: Semiotext€.
