Queer Relationality

Speaker: Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP

As a field that names the discovery of sexuality as among its principal contributions but that has, for the past forty years, become primarily focused on such non-sexual topics as attachment, relationality, and personality disorders, psychoanalysis has lately found itself on the defensive as a younger generation of clinicians accuses it of abandoning sex, and with it, the radical emancipatory project that psychoanalysis once promised. According to this emerging body of work, psychoanalysis has betrayed its founding sexual radicalism by giving in to a culture of normativity that pathologizes perversion, privileges mature relationships over pleasure, and prioritizes the ego’s control over the body’s anarchic ecstasy. How do we understand this clash between clinical psychoanalysis and a growing contemporary interest in queer and critical theories? As someone whose training is in psychoanalysis as well as academic queer theory, Dr. Ashtor views current uses of queerness to be simplistic and sensationalist. Instead, she will draw on queer theory’s expansive tradition to introduce the concept of queer relationality which aims to rethink relationality with enlarged sexuality at its center.