On psychoanalysis, history, and trans negativity

Psychoanalysis and trans studies have been uneasy bedfellows for decades. In this introduction, I explore the historically contested relationship between the two fields and chart the recent efflorescence of scholarship emerging at their intersection through the concept of trans negativity. As I discuss, contemporary political and clinical moral panics about gender variance figure into a longer history of both psychological classification and feminist theorization via the novel midcentury distinction between sex and gender. While psychoanalysis is well-known to have served as one site of transphobic pathologization via concepts like psychosis, it has also been a resource for a variety of feminist, queer, and trans theoretical efforts to contest essentializing investments in hetero- and cis-normativity. In this introduction, I am particularly interested in considering how recent scholarship at the intersection of these two fields is attempting to move beyond positivistic, affirmationist models of gender identity toward a theorization of the negativistic underside of trans existence in trans-antagonistic times. As all of the articles in this special issue show, psychoanalysis still has much to offer when it comes to elaborating the psycho-political life of (trans) negativity.