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Muriel Dimen penned many introductions to books and panels. In this essay that became the first chapter of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, I follow Dimen's manner of hopscotching among self-reflection, mentoring, and theory building. I riff on Dimen's call for a new genre of psychoanalytic text and read Dimen's 1986 memoir/novel, Surviving Sexual Contradictions, finding Dimen fomenting revolution on the page as in the consulting room, where paradox and contradiction spark innovation in personal, interpersonal, and professional space. I challenge the genre of editor's introduction to put personal narrative to political task (here, the story of my decision to shift the focus of this volume from collected works to collective writing). I place Dimen in conversation with authors whose lens trained on race during the years she pursued gender. In the vulnerability that Dimen bravely forded as she turned to the study of sexual boundary violations in her late work, I find permission to call for psychoanalytic publishing to go tilt-o-whirl in service of revolution in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the online symbol # ("hashtag") as my guide, I conceptualize mania as a psychic space where collective and individual registers of meaning collide at warp speed with the effect of highlighting the uneasy but recursive intertwining of individual and collective object relations. I coin the term ultrapsychic to describe the transpersonal flow of objects between the individual and the collective as brokered by human and non-human meaning-makers in an ultra-broadband society. Ultra-subjectivity highlights the affects, definitional problems and crossed-temporalities that are in play when individuals negotiate in the collective to locate themselves among others in an intersectional matrix. By reviewing the philosophy that gave rise to the hashtag as well as its transformation into a taxonomic symbol, I return to mania's uncanny collectivist quality and explore what happens when people who perceive themselves at-risk use a #cyberobject to risk self-disclosure in the collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By way of a vignette about my childhood mix of British and American accents, I explore how the Mother of the primal scene becomes a nodal point in the recursive iteration of psyche and society that is given voice in the child's mother tongue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper celebrates Muriel Dimen’s unique manner of conceptualizingthe fieldwith regard to the recursive relations she theorized among psychic and social components of sexual subjectivity. Recursion is a structural force in the field that implicates the analyst in the history of fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This special issue ofStudies in Gender and Sexualitytakes up the problem oflookingas viewed from an array of theoretical perspectives on film, clinical interaction, music, literature, and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracy L. Simon's case of Nora and her eloquent discussion of the traumatic dimensions of assisted reproductive technology portray the psychic burden of indebtedness when one's viability depends on an Other from whom one feels psychically and corporeally estranged. Inherent in a claustrophobic drama of indebtedness such as Nora's, be it rendered to the appellation “miracle” child or commanded by a technological marvel, socio-historical and intersubjective fonts of meaning lurk internally as mordant self-satire—all the while held as an intention and contained as viable representatives of meaning in the embodied space that awaits transference. In the first part of this essay, I write while trapped in my reverie (captive to Donald Meltzer'sClaustrumand Ridley Scott's filmAlien). Then, in a calmer tone, I parse the intersubjective and embodied meaning of viability—a quality of therapeutic movement during psychic standstill held gracefully by Simon in her work with Nora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of vignettes that span 30 years, I tackle the desire to be generative, an urge I came in contact with during an intergenerational romance and in the transference with a patient who, like me, struggles with the powerful seduction of flash-frozen desire: you want, but you can't. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given this opportunity to reflect onThe Bonds of Love(Benjamin, 1988) 25 years later, I read Benjamin's text as a bridge between political theory and psychoanalytic practice. In so doing, I hope to recognize Benjamin's profound influence on my thinking about recognition and destruction in collective erotic experience. I suggest that Benjamin opens the door to the investigation oferosin a collective unconscious. Yet, perhaps becauseThe Bonds of Lovepredates the rise of the Internet, aspects of recognition that connote libidinization by an erotic collective are sequestered from intrapsychic phenomena and housed in a protointersubjective realm,the ideal, sustaining a long held psychoanalytic priority on loss and narcissistic injury in subject formation. I champion opening the intrapsychic realm to the fantasmatic collective by discussing Grindr, an iPhone app that provides public space for homoerotic desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality are pleased to award the 2012 Symonds Prize to Shirly Bahar for “Coming Out as Queen: Jewish Identity, Queer Theory, and the Book of Esther.” Here, I introduce Bahar's article, as well as Erin Williams Hyman's “Hedging Against Heritage: Jewish Identity Reconsidered” and Jill Salberg's “Reimagining Yentl While Revisiting Feminism in the Light of Relational Approaches to Gender and Sex.” Taken together, these articles contrast generalized Jewish identity (an essentialist premise iterated in discourse when literary subjects come out as Jewish) with multiplicity that adheres in Jewishness when legible features of the subject such as sexuality and gender are brought into play through coming out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by Kyoko Taniguchi's article (this issue), I deploy the Japanese concept amae to engage the mother as a collective erotic object. Amae also helps me express gratitude to my psychoanalytic mothers for their tireless efforts on behalf of this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following on a discussion of Botticelli's and Guss's (this issue) papers on anal sex and gay psychopolitical erotics, this paper takes up the questions: Do gay men, does anyone, experience their embodiment relationally? Is there an inter-embodiment to match intersubjectivity? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern psychoanalysis differs from the original practice of postmodern writers in a way that highlights the particular demand placed on psychoanalytic theory: to mediate between traditional practice and theoretical innovation. The argument is made here that it is postmodern theory to which relational psychoanalysis turns for auto-critique and to expand the horizons of practice, a process of disciplinary growth that is evident in the roundtable on Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis. This introduction locates the roundtable in a critical moment when postmodern theory, as it becomes an -ism in practice, copes with inevitable and necessary innovation and strives not to jettison the field's operational principles while retaining its critical edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To invite future contributions to the project taking shape in this special issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, I defer making the usual theoretical introductory comments on our topic, What Age is Desire? in preference for what might emerge among the articles as they read and are read, open to elaboration and close wounds, engender desire and spark controversy—as do barfly and passerby eyeing one another at the Glass Coffin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dilemmas and opportunities of interpellation and intelligibility play out also in the sexual domain. In 'Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference,' Stephen Hartman shows how interpellation makes both him and Darren intelligible and therefore anxious: The power of discourse to legitimate desire means that you can lose your legitimacy and fall into abjection if you ever refuse your interpellation. Here Hartman, interpellated by The New York Times announcement of his marriage to another man, desexualizes and abjects his patient by interpellating his desire as a desire to be a married gay guy, a 'good gay' too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short editorial note introduces a panel titled "All About the Mother" that is being presented in its original conference format with papers by Orna Guralnik, Jade McGleughlin, Julie Leavitt, and Stephen Hartman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce this special issue ofStudies in Gender and Sexuality, “Bion: Here, There, and In Between.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Looking Lab: SF views the urban landscape of San Francisco following on our observation that gender has displaced sexuality as the battleground for queer life. We present six short essays from drag queens, queer theorists, activists, and psychoanalysts to frame a broader project for Looking and the City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the occasion of publishing articles by Susanne Chassay and Karen Peoples,Studies in Gender and Sexualityis honored to announce the Susanne Chassay Memorial Paper Award. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor talks about the influential papers of Muriel Dimen on gender and sexuality which is "Inside the Revolution: Power, Sex, and Technique in Freud's "‘Wild' Analysis."

The article introduces various papers published within the issue, including one on the ethical-political aspect of mother-daughter relations, another on psychoanalysis and the papers awarded the Symonds Prize in 2016.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience having legally married to his same-sex partner.