The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society's Psychoanalytic Studies Program present
Eel-Sexing Before Psychoanalysis
Grace Lavery, UC Berkeley
Registration Required
Description:
After the discovery of the mysterious “Syrski organ” in 1874, a young Sigmund Freud became fascinated by its enigmatic anatomy: it contained cells for the production of both male and female gametes, in a species in which hermaphrodism had otherwise not been observed. Outraged by the apparently primary “bisexuality” (as he called it) of zoological matter, Freud traveled to Trieste in 1876, in order to assist in the search for a purely male eel gonad, a search that produced Freud’s first published work, but no male gonad, and dispirited the young Freud to such a degree that he returned to Vienna to study human physiology, declining to publish any more research for eight years, when he published the (equally catastrophic) “On Coca.” The figure of the lack of male gonads in eels forms a basis, I argue, for Freud’s notoriously troubled and troubling account of the phallus, itself a kind of moral anatomy, as the missing object for which a penis must, and can never, substitute. The syrski organ continues to haunt psychoanalysis as a figure of sexual consubstantiality, a fear that Freud’s emphatic theories of sexual difference cannot fully foreclose.
Biography:
Grace Lavery is Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her work addresses the history and theory of interpretation under capitalism, with a focus on the ascription of sexual meaning to flesh. Embarking from the psychoanalytic insight that flesh is both meaningless and the means by which meaning becomes possible, she has studied rarefied and complex construals of flesh in a set of highly-specific historical circumstances: the late-Victorian obsession with Japanese effeminacy (in her first book, Quaint, Exquisite); the emergence of the transsexual as a focal point for modern ideas about bodily technique (in her second scholarly monograph, Pleasure and Efficacy); the rigorous making and unmaking of the modern heterosexual in the postwar sitcom (in her third scholarly monograph, Closures); and in the post-2016 period’s cinematic, literary, and metaphysical narratives of demonic possession (in my fourth, Personal Demons). She also works creatively in prose as an author of autobiographical writing, generic and stylistic pastiche, and fiction, exploring alongside her critical work the generic and formal frameworks within which the body becomes writable. Her first memoir, Please Miss, was published by Seal in 2022----through revisions and rotations of a central set of metaphors and images, the book explores the various meanings ascribed to the ghastly, whitened face of a circus clown, a figure through which conflictual determinations of racialization, sexual aversion, and subjectivation converge.
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