Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Gender

PART 1: DOING AND UNDOING GENDER

Introduction

Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler

Section A. Gender as Symptom?

1)    Fixation: Freud’s Polymorphously Perverse Concept

Elissa Marder

2)    Oedipal Masculinity, Repudiated Femininity, and the Daughter Position: Notes on Domination and Difference

Jessica Benjamin

3)    Lacanian Gender Trouble

Darian Leader

4)    Queer Ethics of the Psychoanalytic Drive: ‘A Quiet Place of Resistance’

Eve Watson

5)    How Did We Get Here? A Genealogy of Heteronormativity in Psychoanalysis

Jorge N. Reitter

6)    Is Psychoanalysis a Homosexual Invention?

Lionel Le Corre

7)    Queer Approaches and Psychoanalytic Tact

Fabrice Bourlez

8)    Sex, Gender, Agency: Performativity vs. Psychoanalysis

Ilan Kapoor

Section B. Gender Beyond Identity

9)    The Bedrock of Sexual Difference?

Isabelle Alfandary

10) Psychoanalysis in Flux: Asexuality and Art Beyond the Human

Maria Markiewicz

11) Phallicization and Its Discontents: Asexuality as Inconvenience in Culture and Clinic

Kevin Murphy

12) Perversions and the Unethical Side of Sexuality

Sergio Benvenuto

13) Gender Binary versus Gender Multiplicity

Dana Amir

14) Sex and the Drive

Nadia Bou Ali

Section C. Trans-cending Gender

15) Transgender in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Sheila L. Cavanagh

16) No There There: The Void at the Core of Gender

Rafael Kalaf Cossi

17) Small Steps, Giant Leaps: Trans Woman and the Ethical Act

Ciara Cremin

18) Gender Polymorphism and Psychoanalysis: Another Royal Road to the Unconscious

Marco Posadas

19) Me? I’m Afraid of Gender and Psychoanalysis

Jeremy Clark

20) Refracted Time, Gender, and the Analyst’s Trans Becomings

Nicolas Evzonas

PART 2: REGENERATING GENDER

Section A. Gender and Cultural Difference

21) ‘Our uprising is about a commitment to life’ Resurrecting the Erotic: Towards an Ethics of Life through the Subversive Feminist Revolt in Iran

Gohar Homayounpour

22) Introducing Solange Faladé: Race and Jouissance

Sinan Richards

23) Femininity as Resistance to Biopolitics: Immigration, Globalization and the Crisis of Sexed Identity

Alireza Taheri

24) Womanliness: Between Two Continents

Ceren Korulsan

25) Psychoanalysis and the Creation of Gender-Sex Categories: The Argentine Example

Verónica Garibotto

26) The Paradoxes of the Construction of Jewish Masculinity

Sophie Mendelsohn

27) African Oedipus Beyond the Imaginary: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Gender

Martine Fourré

28) Japan by Jacques Lacan, Lituraterre by Haruki Murakami: An Other Orient-ation

Astrid Lac

Section B. Gender Benders: Race, Technology, Climate Catastrophe, Death

29) Climate Catastrophe in the Land of the Fetal Fetish, Where only the Uterine Environment Matters

Katie Gentile

30) Femininity and Race: The Libido in Freud and Lacan

Sheldon George

31) ‘A Real Black Aesthetic’: On the Clinical Stakes of Blackness, Gender, and Sexuality in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

Linette Park

32) Love as Decognition: Beyond Badiou’s Difference

Eddy Wang

33) Hysteria, the Witch, and the Goddess: Resurrection of the Trinitarian Feminine Beyond Repression and Repudiation

Jill Gentile

34) Breaking Limits: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Gender, Sex, and Technology

Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco

35) Feminine Love and Cutting Words    

Genevieve Morel

Section C. The End of Gender?

36) Sexual Difference and Gender Diversity in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Leticia Glocer Fiorini

37) Psychoanalysis and Art: The Challenges of the New Subjectivities

Priscilla Echeverría

38) Dreams of Women: Where Feminism Began—On the Couch

Silvia Lippi

39) The Writer-Son’s Desire to Become a Woman

Arka Chattopadhyay

40) Family Abolition and the Family Problem

Michelle O’Brien

41) Warm Encounter: A Second Chance for Gender

Oren Gozlan

Biography

Patricia Gherovici, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is a Sigourney Award and three-time Gradiva Award–winning author of eight books, including Please Select Your Gender (2010), Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017), and Bodies to Wear (2025).

Manya Steinkoler, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York. The books she has co-edited include Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy (with Patricia Gherovici, 2017; 2025), On Psychoanalysis and Violence (with Vanessa Sinclair, 2019), and Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (with Patricia Gherovici, 2023).

“At a moment when ‘gender’ is under political attack, psychoanalysis is often dismissed as part of the problem—too old, too binary, too anxious. This Handbook insists otherwise. Bringing together a superb array of international clinicians and theorists, it shows how psychoanalysis can illuminate gender’s volatility, resist authoritarian simplifications, and defend lived complexity while attentive to unconscious life.”

Jamieson Webster, PhD, psychoanalyst and author of Disorganization & Sex

“This superbly thorough and timely collection addresses the riddle of the Sphynx at the source of psychoanalysis: What is a human subject? To engender the Subject is both to give birth and to give meaning. Who is this infant? The answer is a hypothesis and the Subject is a reply.”

David Lichtenstein, PhD, psychoanalyst and psychologist