DREAMING TRANS: METHOD, SEX, AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

A THREE-PART SEMINAR WITH TOBIAS WIGGINS

Tuesday March 10, 4:30 – 6:30 | Seminar: T4T methodologies

Tuesday March 24, 5:30 – 8:00 | Screening: Desire Lines (2024): Trans/Sexuality 

Tuesday April 7, 4:30 – 6:30 | Seminar: Transphobic Countertransference

Registration required. To register, complete this form.

Who can attend: Open to all; particularly welcoming Two-Spirit, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people; scholars in Transgender Studies; those interested in psychoanalysis; faculty; graduate students; and advanced undergraduate students. 

Trans is a fever dream. Erupting at the edges of overheated fantasy, in contemporary scenes of moral panic the figure of the trans//sexual haunts the collective psyche, used as a political scapegoat or release valve for anxieties about sex, embodiment, and cohesion of the nation-state. What does it mean to think with trans livability amongst a social imaginary that insists, if not simply on trans destruction, then on their absorption of antagonisms and disavowed affects? Further, if we take seriously the psychoanalytic dream’s capacity to compromise, to wish, to overdetermine, and to leak jouissance, then what becomes possible for the trans dreamer within this field? Our conversations will unfold across three sites of inquiry, each holding the tension between trans-fantasy and the political fantasy of transness. The first seminar traverses possibilities in T4T methodologies, or trans-specific approaches to research. The second seminar examines transmasculine sexuality in film, the archive, and the bathhouse with a screening and discussion of the hybrid film Desire Lines (2024). The third seminar turns to the unconscious life of transphobia through an examination of transphobic countertransference. By thinking trans together, this participatory series insists on opposing cisteria through the sustained practice of collective psychic movement and play. 

Tobias Wiggins (he/him) is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University (AU) currently living in Treaty 7, Mohkinstsis, colonially known as Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. His research specializations include transgender mental health and sexuality, psychoanalysis, research-creation, queer visual culture, and cisgender psychology. Broadly, Wiggins’ work aims to address the continued pathologization of gender diversity and advocate for trans-competent care. He is the director of the TransLab, an interdisciplinary research hub that supports the production and dissemination of qualitative, theoretical, and arts-based research in Transgender Studies. At AU, he coordinates the University Certificate in Gender & Social Justice Counselling, which applies intersectional feminist and social justice theory to a wide variety of helping professions. Dr. Wiggins’ recent scholarly outputs include contributions to significant anthologies like The Queerness of Psychoanalysis (2024), Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care (2023), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities (2020); journals including Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2022), The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (2021), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2020); as well as well as community-based publication projects and digital storytelling.