Sex,Lies & Embodiment

'Phrases I would like to strike from the English language: “speaking my truth” and “my journey.”'

—Katya Zamolodchikova, in conversation with Trixie Mattel, I Like to Watch (2019)

'If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.'

—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999 [1990]), p. 180.

Contemporary neoliberal culture frequently calls upon us to be our ‘most authentic selves’. We are encouraged to align our exterior appearance with our interior world to ensure that these elements correspond with our supposedly coherent and legible ‘identities’. As Kadji Amin (2023) writes, there now exists a “kaleidoscopic” taxonomy of gender and sexual categories that we are urged to map onto our feelings and desires. If we are not ‘speaking our truth’, are we ‘living a lie’?

Media, cultural, medical and legal discourses have historically positioned queer and trans identities and bodies as deceptive, pretended, fraudulent. Yet as certain gender and sexual positionings have gained degrees of social acceptability through political and legislative forms of recognition and media visibility, other forms of nonnormative embodiment have been weaponised to regulate and restrict bodily autonomy. Likewise, various psy-disciplines are ostensibly invested in (or mistaken for) the pursuit of an underlying or inner truth: whether the excavation of a repressed psychic trauma, the accurate categorization of our pathological type, or the correct identification of symptoms and their corresponding medical regimen. Indeed, popular culture and particularly social media discourses construct therapy as *the* primary way to heal from ‘the lies we tell ourselves’ and learn to ‘show the world our real selves’.

Those of us interested in fiction, narrative, and stories might wish to interrogate the abiding value of lies and lying. Meanwhile psychoanalytic approaches trouble the extent to which we can ‘know ourselves’, drawing attention to the vital roles of incoherence, illegibility, and lack in how we talk about and understand ourselves. Psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies offer frameworks to investigate subjectivity as a social, political, and psychic practice, frameworks which call into question the boundaries between self/other, known/unknown, and conscious/unconscious. With the emergence of ‘trans’ as a mode of subjectivity and trans theoretical approaches for rethinking how subjects are inscribed, we also encounter a welcome and renewed scrutiny of categories of identity such as ‘cis’, ‘man’, and ‘woman’. If, more than thirty years on, we are to take seriously Butler’s critique of gender – that calls to embody a “true gender identity” obfuscate the processes by which identity is produced and policed – then perhaps fake genders, false sex, and wrong bodies demand our attention.

This upcoming section of Works in Progress in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, investigates sexed, gendered, and therefore also racialized, embodiments that remain mere facsimiles, require falsehood, or reject validity as a marker of success. We invite essays and other written works in various stages of completion that address ideas relating to Sex, Lies & Embodiment. Examples of how to respond may include:

· Problematising neoliberal logics of deception and authenticity, especially in trans narratives.

· Examining the effects of intentionally and/or strategically lying about sex/gender/sexuality – and their relationship to other categories of identity - in order to navigate systems of power such as gender identity clinics or border controls.

· Psychoanalytic readings of drag in the neoliberal era, revis(it)ing Joan Riviere’s “Femininity as Masquerade”

· Discussions of:

o Psychoanalytic clinical encounters with lying and deception

o Prosecutions of sexual offences on the basis of gender deception

o Processes of racialisation and histories of racial passing

o Forms of bodily misalignment not (yet) understood as needing the expression of an inner truth: e.g. body integrity disorder or body dysmorphia.

o Body modification, and how this relates to ideas of beauty and ugliness.

o The confident lies and hallucinations of AI in relation to the surveillance and identification of sex/gender/race

o Sex, lies & embodiment in film, television, visual art, and literature.

o Conspiracy theories and ideas of ‘gender ideology’

· Responses to ideas relating to sex, lies & embodiment in psychoanalytic works, including but not limited to those by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Particia Gherovici, Susie Orbach, Jacqueline Rose, Alenka Zupančič, Judith Roof, and Judith Butler.

· Reviews of relevant scholarly books relating to Sex, Lies & Embodiment.

We encourage submissions from postgraduates, early career researchers, and clinical practitioners. Work in Progress submissions can be of varying stages of completion, format, and length (with a suggested wordcount of 2-6k words). All submissions will undergo a peer-review process. We welcome creative and experimental responses to this call.

If you are interested in participating in this Work in Progress special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, please submit an abstract (200 words max) by October 31st 2024 by filling out this form: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=B8tSwU5hu0qBivA1z6ka...

Upon acceptance of your proposed submission on the basis of your abstract, you will be asked to submit your full-length piece by 28th February 2025. This submission will undergo a double blind peer-review process (for more details visit the journal’s website), with submission of the final manuscript on 30th June 2025. For details of how to format your submission and referencing guidelines, please visit the journal’s website. The special issue will be published in 2026. For any questions and further information, please email both sabine.sharp@manchester.ac.uk and james.l.slattery@manchester.ac.uk