At a time when psychoanalysis is struggling to think about race, what does it look like if we dare to engage race not from the perspective of identity, but of eroticism? And what if, to push things further, we take up not “respectable” or palatable sexuality that does the work of “racial uplift” (Musser) but tend to sexuality that tangles violence, trauma, and the gnarled history of slavery with arousal and excitement?

In this presentation, Avgi Saketopoulou turns to the work of Gary Fisher, a black gay man who died of AIDS in the 1980s, whose posthumously published notebook is filled with fantasies of racial abjection in the hands of, or under the boot of, a white man. When first published, Fisher’s writing shocked academics theorizing race, leaving them “speechless” (Reid-Pharr); but its subsequent engagement produced a series of important and fresh theorizations that psychoanalysis has yet to take up. What can psychoanalysis learn from Fisher and from those who wrote about him that exceeds what we think we already know about trauma, racialization, and the workings of the sexual unconscious? Bringing together Jean Laplanche, queer of color critique, and Black feminisms, Saketopoulou offers a series of challenging propositions that may help us expand our capacity to think clinically with and about race and interracial erotics.

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TIME: 7:30 to 9:30PM

LOCATION: Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
Room 210 of The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 W 13th St, NY NY 10011

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Continuing Education Hours: 2
The Manhattan Institute is a NY State approved provider of continuing education hours for: LCSW, LMSW, LCAT, LMHC and Licensed Psychologists.

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D. is an immigrant from Cyprus and from Greece and a psychoanalyst practicing in NY. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and her publications have received numerous prizes, including twice the annual prize of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Ralph Roughton Award, the Ruth Stein Prize, and the Symonds Prize. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna). Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023) braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity, which includes a re-worked version of the essay for which they received the IPA’s First Tiresias Prize. Her thinking also appears in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche. She is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Currents of Sadism: Insurgency, Psychoanalysis, and Confusional Aesthetics.