22: Realism and Other Romances feat. Grace Lavery

Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick welcome writer and academic Grace Lavery to discuss her new book Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques. They discuss Grace’s relationship to psychoanalysis; her uses of Freud and Freudianism for both theoretical and pragmatic political purposes and in service of bodily freedom; her interpretation of Freudian concepts like penis envy and the castration complex; her writing in both Pleasure and Efficacy and her memoir Please Miss on changing sexes as an empirical fact; the stakes of calling things “real” or “authentic” versus dismissing them as fake, try-hard, or otherwise affected; the tensions between queer theory and transgender studies and her notion of “egg theory”; sex, pleasure, desire, and shame; her eminently useful idea of “romances of intractability”; Eve Sedgwick’s, Judith Butler’s, and Lauren Berlant’s later-in-life turns towards transmasculinity; and Grace’s work as activist and advocate in both US and UK contexts.
Grace’s book Pleasure and Efficacy is here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691243924/pleasure-and-efficacy
Her memoir, Please Miss, is here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/grace-lavery/please-miss/9781541620643/?lens=seal-press
The recent piece of hers we refer to in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), “Gender Criticism Versus Gender Abolition: On Three Recent Books” is here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/
Other texts referenced in the episode include:
Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “White Glasses”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay”
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”
Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”
Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”
Freud, “On Humor”
Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”
D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII)
LaPlanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives
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