ABSTRACT Paige Sweet’s brilliant paper explores the psychodynamics of gendered racialized enactments and communications within the therapeutic processes of two clinical cases. The discussion of the analyst’s dream material along with the classical writings of rivière and fanon on mascaraed and the mask. The author opens a new terrain in psychoanalytic discourse around the power differential between the known knowns of the analyst and the patient’s experience of the analyst in their work. Culture, class, and the economies of social location become vibrant aspects of the work.

ABSTRACT Stalking is a relatively new crime, with the U.S. state of California becoming the first jurisdiction in the world to develop specific laws about such behaviors in the early 1990s. In turn, the state (including law enforcement) turned to existing research on fixated and obsessed behaviors to develop typologies to better understand this kind of offending, as a means to inform response to stalking. This article focuses on one subtype featured in the literature and, later, adopted in the modern categorization of stalking behaviors—the person experiencing erotomania. We explore the conceptual development of erotomania and the gendered lens through which “lovesickness” was treated in the past. We consider how this perspective influenced contemporary constructions of the condition and, from there, influenced the reproduction of negative gender stereotypes in the stalking profiles used to guide institutional responses in the early criminalization period and, even, into contemporary practice.

ABSTRACT In this article I critique Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), his introduction of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870). Having rightly emphasized the contract as the most important political aspect of masochism, and precisely the feature that psychoanalysis, as a theory of sexuality, could not account for, I argue that Deleuze nonetheless fails to confront the racial contract that renders this masochism white. By failing to confront the racial contract that informs not only the social contract but also the sociality implicit in the masochistic contract, Deleuze idealizes masochism. Drawing from queer of color critique, and especially from the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, I show the ways in which anti-Blackness supplements the masochistic contract in the effort of the sexual parties to reach for that modality of desire that approximates death. Notwithstanding Deleuze’s powerful critique of the complementariness that psychoanalysis wrongly establishes between sadism and masochism, I conclude this article by showing how the racial contract makes it possible for sado-masochism to become complementary in this case.

ABSTRACT Muriel Dimen penned many introductions to books and panels. In this essay that became the first chapter of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, I follow Dimen’s manner of hopscotching among self-reflection, mentoring, and theory building. I riff on Dimen’s call for a new genre of psychoanalytic text and read Dimen’s 1986 memoir/novel, Surviving Sexual Contradictions, finding Dimen fomenting revolution on the page as in the consulting room, where paradox and contradiction spark innovation in personal, interpersonal, and professional space. I challenge the genre of editor’s introduction to put personal narrative to political task (here, the story of my decision to shift the focus of this volume from collected works to collective writing). I place Dimen in conversation with authors whose lens trained on race during the years she pursued gender. In the vulnerability that Dimen bravely forded as she turned to the study of sexual boundary violations in her late work, I find permission to call for psychoanalytic publishing to go tilt-o-whirl in service of revolution in the field.

ABSTRACT In a passing observation made while reading Joan Riviere’s theory of womanliness as masquerade, Judith Butler comments that what is hidden in masquerade is not sexuality, but rage. It’s a provocative glance at how gender and anger converge. But the quickness with which the discussion moves on from this insight suggests that this rage must also be quickly covered over by the discourse of gender. It recalls to my mind Frantz Fanon’s description of the mask, which he uses to describe how Blackness emerges through a splitting produced by the white gaze. The kind of double consciousness that results (captured in his title, Black Skin, White Masks) emphasizes how Blackness is made to exist in relation to whiteness. The anger here resides in the negotiation with these white masks, which, for Fanon, is bound up with masculinity. Although “masks” signify differently for Fanon and feminist theorists, both accounts suggest that anger becomes entangled with gender and race in ways that appear on and through the body. I consider these theories of masks and masquerade alongside two clinical vignettes to ask how anger takes shape in and through racial and gendered formations, as well as to ask how clinical material exposes the limits of these theories. Might gender contain precipitates of anger, especially residues of a relation to a rageful parent? Through a relational lens, I explore the usefulness and limitations of masks and masquerade for identifying disowned anger in the surprising ways it converges a sense of embodiment.

ABSTRACT War metaphors are ubiquitous in feminism-related discourse, portraying activists as warriors against patriarchy. Recent research in critical discourse analysis shows positive and negative implications of using war metaphors in relation to political matters. The use of empowerment language reveals a subversive position taken by feminists in the construction of its own narrative. Building on Judith Butler’s idea of ethical violence, we examine the subversive position in feminist discourse as a form of response against the violent ethos that inhabits the symbolic construction of genders. This view is contrasted with Žižekian–Lacanian approaches to understand violence of exclusion as an effect of the Lacanian Real imposing a limit to the symbolic. The notion of sexuation and difference between gender and sex is analyzed from Butler´s and Lacanian perspectives. We distinguish between feminism and the Lacanian logic of the feminine, emphasizing the importance of situating the victim/warrior signifiers in terms of the function they fulfill for a speaking being. In the final section we propose an orientation toward devictimization of women in feminist discourse, in the spirit of recognition of the singularity and incompleteness of the subject in line with the logic of the Lacanian not-all.

ABSTRACT In the current atmosphere of Hindu nationalist majoritarianism in India, LGBTQ activisms are increasingly being restructured through their allegiance with, or resistance to, a progressively violent imagination of a Hindu India. Within a larger climate of shrinking public freedoms, LGBTQ activisms have made some gains toward inclusive citizenship, and this has led to a false and dangerous correlation that claims Hindu nationalism is queer-friendly. As such, some LGBTQ activists promote “homonationalist” visions of a Hindu nationalist India. These narratives of “homonationalism” mete out violence against many other LGBTQ activists and communities that cannot or will not be interpellated into the Hindu nation. Reflecting on fieldwork with LGBTQ communities, in this article I demonstrate how the psychic life of homonationalism in India is rooted in postcolonial anxieties of defining an “authentic” national subjectivity. Building on theories on the politics of belonging and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I draw parallels between nationalist attachments to Hindu identity and homonationalist attachments to gay identity. In doing so, I argue that an anxious attachment to LGBTQ identity is at the root of homonationalist aspirations of belonging to a (Hindu) nation.

ABSTRACT This article draws on standpoint theory, social psychology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Perversion is understood here as an insult aimed at controlling the (sexual) freedom of women, especially women conducting academic research on nonconforming sexualities. The author recounts the moral panic that accompanied her supervision of a Ph.D. on female domination in heterosexual BDSM. This dissertation was defended several years ago and is now published, thus allowing a retrospective reading. The candidate was rapidly identified with her research object by other professors and students in the psychology department, which aroused strong emotional reactions when she performed as Mistress Tarna in a Berlin dungeon. The author analyzes the consequences of this moral panic on the supervision of this academic work and questions the place of affect in both ethnographic fieldwork and the interactions between a Ph.D. supervisor and student.

ABSTRACT This introductory paper outlines the clinical, ethical, and personal reasons that led to the preparation of this French-based issue on perversion. In traditional French psychoanalysis, perversion is conceived of as an autonomous psychopathological structure, with a special emphasis placed on narcissistic fragility, nullification of the other, and nonhegemonic sexual practices deemed as the abolishment of sex and generational differences. The author questions the relevance of perversion as a fixed category and proposes an inclusive approach that takes into account social, cultural, intrapsychic, and countertransference parameters. Finally, he overviews each article included in this special issue and highlights the epistemological diversity of the authors’ positions, thus promoting the paradigm of complexity, which is understood as heterogeneous hybrid thinking, noncompliant to dialectical synthesis.

ABSTRACT This personal narrative essay examines the way erasure occurs alongside representation in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry. The author reflects on his experience seeing the film when it was first released, as a young transmasculine person. He describes multiple forms of erasure: his own, the exclusion of Philip DeVine from the film’s narrative, and even of Brandon Teena’s trans masculinity. The author considers the impact of the film on his own life and the way erasure in the film relates to the contemporary political climate in the United States.