Diego Semerene
Diego Semerene (University of Amsterdam)
Desire for Trans-ness
A video recording of this lecture will be available after the event.
In this lecture I sketch out a theory of desire and subjectivity with trans-ness at its core as I sketch out the body as the most ancestral of all media. Here the subject is seen to emerge in the very gap—or constitutive friction—between their fictitious claims of cisgender coherence and the destabilizing pull toward trans-ness that perpetually threatens such claims to crumble. And how pleasurable, how overwhelmingly pleasurable, it is when they do! As subjects try to tie up what is hellbent on spreading itself out, trans-ness is, then, exposed not as an identity per se, nor a marginal mode of embodiment or enjoyment, but as the very center of the development and maintenance of cisgender life. Following a queer psychoanalytic and self-ethnographic approach that recognizes the researcher as erotically implicated in their object of analysis, I structure the talk around three (cinematic, literary, and sartorial) media objects: Saim Sadiq’s film Joyland (Pakistan, 2022, 127 min.), Camila Sosa Villada’s novel Las Malas (2019) and the work of fashion designer Iris van Herpen.
Diego Semerene is Assistant Professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the Queer Analysis Research Group at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Semerene’s research interests lie at the intersection of trans studies, psychoanalysis and fashion theory. Recent publications include “The Trans Gender Subject of Fashion,” for the International Journal of Fashion Studies (2024) and “Embarrassing Subjects, Undisplayable Objects: Of Impossible Encounters Between Trans and Cis That Have Nonetheless Taken Place” (2024) for the Un/engendering the Collections project by the Dutch Research Center for Material Culture/Wereld Museum: https://www.materialculture.nl/en/embarrassing-subjects-undisplayable-objects