Amy Stewart

As a deluge of anti-trans legislation surges across the United States, trans and queer subjects are left uniquely and unevenly haunted by the afterlives of assigning sex. Drawing upon the insights of psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy, and trans and queer studies, this essay develops a reading of how anti-trans lawmaking generates a repetition of the assignment's mark upon the body that, I suggest, threatens the subject's very relation to meaning and the future. In doing so, I argue that the assignment of sex circulates as an undead letter across the landscape of administrative law, repeatedly tethering trans and queer lives to an unchosen and ostensibly immutable past. Attending to the conceptual framework of necropolitics, this essay argues that anti-trans legislation enacts a phenomenon that I describe, in the end, as administrative maiming, a concept which specifies how anti-trans laws leave trans and queer lives purposefully inhibited – indeed wounded – in their efforts to rewrite their relation to the signifiers inscribed at birth.

This article engages with the psychoanalytic works of Julia Kristeva in order to demonstrate how trans and queer experiences are shaped and mobilized by a psychic life of revolt. Reorienting the question of resistance toward the threshold of psychical and social life, the author claims that “intimate revolt,” as conceived in Kristeva’s later writings, is what mobilizes trans and queer subjectivities in a movement of endless regeneration. The article begins with an overview of the theme of revolt in Kristeva’s psychoanalytic thought and stresses three interrelated movements—return, rupture, and rebirth—that together shape and sustain psychical life. Uncovering the exchanges between psychical and social life, the author identifies how inner experiences of revolt mobilize not only a resuscitation of meaning and subjectivity but also a reframing of resistance within Kristeva’s intimate politics. The author then illustrates how this internal logic of revolt unfolds within trans and queer experiences of identity and embodiment. In doing so, the author examines conditions of precarity that threaten the survivability of trans and queer populations, particularly with respect to the psychic life of revolt that makes possible our psychical and corporeal capacities for resistance and renewal. Transitioning from the landscape of precarity to the language of liminality, the author contends that the intimate evolutions of revolt constitute a passage of perpetual rebirth in which meaning and subjectivity may be infinitely refashioned.

In the closing remarks of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud claims that “if a knife does not cut, it cannot be used for healing either,” thereby affirming not only an intimate relationship between the analytic encounter with traumatic phenomena and the capacity for psychical healing, but also the unsettling experience that working-through demands. Advancing Freud’s assertion, this chapter examines how the abject images that constitute Kara Walker’s contemporary artwork enact a visual return to the cultural repressed. Working through Kristeva’s psychoanalytic formulation of intimate revolt as a retrospective interrogation of being and transformation of meaning at the threshold of the psychical and the social, this chapter emphasizes the ethical and political possibilities of Walker’s trauma aesthetic through which pain is redressed and meaning is renewed in a time and space of intimate revolt.

The cryptic figure of the mother, one might say, marks the very birth of psychoanalysis. Elissa Marder’s The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction returns to the primal scene of birth in order to offer scholars a lucid account of the uncanny status of the maternal function – that which bears recurrent anxieties regarding the excluded memory of birth – within psychoanalysis, photography, and literature. Marder’s analysis of what she calls the “mechanical reproductions” of the maternal function within culture and society indicates the limitless milieu within which modern technologies usurp the maternal body in order to contain ostensibly uncontainable anxieties over maternal abjection and loss.

If the severed head exposes us to the intimate and uncanny affects of loss and melancholia, then melancholic artwork offers an aesthetic vision of recapitation through which the future of meaning is inscribed and subjectivity is rebirthed with the hope of forging ahead. Elaine P. Miller’s captivating book, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times, explores precisely the imaginative shapes of working through our individual and cultural neuroses, particularly melancholia and anxiety, such that suffering is neither suppressed nor pulverizing but, rather, engaged through creative activity. Miller provides an illuminating analysis of Kristeva’s corpus, moving through shapes of aesthetic revolt—melancholic, negative, uncanny, sublimatory, and forgiving works of art—that imagine possibilities for reshaping depressive thought, forging ahead, and transforming the “new maladies of the soul” (Kristeva 1995, 9).