This panel examines how trans literature and cultural productions engage psychoanalytic theories of lack, castration, and genital change. Through literary analysis and critical theory, papers will surface how gender transition makes palpable forms of desire. Contending with castration across Lacanian and Freudian frameworks, this panel thereby considers how it appears in trans media, culture, and theory and how these cultural objects both challenge and sustain common psychoanalytic accounts.

Castration has long been theorized within psychoanalytic trans studies, such as in Carlson (2010), Gherovici (2017), Salamon (2009), and the 2017 double issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on Psychoanalysis. This panel expands on this previous literature, considering how the term has recently re-emerged with particular significance for theorizing both trans desire (Lovett 2022) and the Right-wing paranoia that undergirds the contemporary fear of “trans terrorism” (Zupančič 2025). Since both trans people and their political opponents are mobilizing castration to imagine trans embodiment, transition, and genital change, this panel is a timely addition for the MLA.

The panel will consist of four 14-minute papers, followed by approximately 20 minutes of unstructured discussion.

Matt Lovett will begin the panel by discussing the 2018 queer horror film Knife + Heart, which centers on an alcoholic woman who produces third-rate gay pornography. One of her stars is murdered by a man during a hookup. As we find out that the murderer was castrated, this talk will walk us through different levels of castration especially in Lacan's 4^th and 5^th seminars (imaginary, symbolic, actual-cum-real) and the valences of its succession that castration takes in "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire." It thus investigates the relationship between castration and desire, taking the movie as an unexpected object-lesson of this articulation.

Following from this, Joshua Falek will read Torrey Peters’ novella Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2017)and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt (2022) to theorize what Falek refers to as gender-affirming violence: fantasies of trans political violence in which harm toward transphobes is imagined to affirm one’s gender, as if transition requires physical violence. As they demonstrate, this fantasy also underlies right-wing paranoia of “trans terrorism,” which assumes that transition engenders violence. Analyzing these fantasies together, through Lacanian psychoanalysis, Falek argues that fantasies of gender-affirming violence are organized by a metonymic slip between transition and castration, wherein transness is figured as a literalization of castration, as a contagious form of lack.

Tapji Garba’s talk will then explore the common invocation of the figure of the Black trans woman in need of rescue from the burdens of theoretical abstraction. The Black trans woman, we are told, is so encumbered by real-world precarity that undertaking any theoretical endeavour concerning her is ethically and politically dubious at best. In responding to this, Garba returns to the theoretical oeuvre of Hortense Spillers, whose insistence on the inescapability of metaphor, myth, and abstraction in her account of the discursive construction of the black woman offers a theoretical practice that doesn’t collapse into a form of redemptive empiricism that seeks to rescue the lost object from the rubble of discourse and instead stages metaphoricity and myth-making as sites of ethical-political experimentation. In taking up Spillers theory of language, Garba suggests that contemporary turns to materialism are a form of castration anxiety, a fantasy of saving the Black trans woman from the scalpels of theoreticians.

Finally, Julien Fischer’s paper considers how trans studies has been oriented by its search for a trans figure who knows everything and lacks nothing. Borne of a defensive battle against trans pathologization, this fantasized, uncastrated trans figure has nevertheless produced a paradox for trans studies, a field caught in the compulsion to repeat its own foundational insistence that each trans person fully knows themselves and that their desire is always and only their own. This paper stakes its wager on the possibility of trans literature to offer a different account of trans life in which trans people are not exempt from the law of castration. It turns to two fictional characters: Darryl Cook, the protagonist of Jackie Ess’s 2021 novel Darryl, and James Hanson, of Imogen Binnie’s 2013 novel Nevada, to consider how each presents an account of trans subjectivity that privileges lack and the failure of knowledge to account for desire.

This panel features a trans man, a nonbinary person, and a trans woman, as well as both Jewish and Black speakers. Beyond this, the panel also reflects a range of institutional positions, including a teaching associate professor, two postdoctoral fellows, and a doctoral candidate.