A JurisTalk seminar with Dr. Trish Salah (Queen’s University).

In a moment of unprecedented transgender visibility, dominant representations of transsexuals remains haunted by narratives of pathology and images of criminality and violence. The lived experience of transsexuals remain similarly constrained by the normative force of the clinic, and simultaneous pressures to enrol as rights-bearing subjects while contending with the criminalization of various aspects of our lives.

In this talk, Dr. Trish Salah contends that contemporary understandings of (trans) sexuation and of gender identity, are substantially enriched by turning our psychoanalytic imaginations to the creative writing of trans authors. Such texts offer rich if ambivalent resources for representing the relationship of sexuality, psychoanalysis, the clinic and the law. What’s more, trans literary texts provide analytic and imaginative resources not only for depathologizing accounts of trans sexuation, but for disclosing the function of juridical and clinical accounts of desire and identity in forming national and racial normativities.