“The Poetry of Gender”, Presented by Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.

Date: Sunday, October 5th, 2025
Time: 1:30pm – 3:30pm EDT
Location: Zoom
2 CEU credits available
MSPP Member: Free
MITPP Candidate: Free
Non MSPP Member: $50 per individual, $30 per student
RSVP by Thursday, October 2nd, 2025
*Refund will be given if attendance cancellation is made within 24 hours of presentation

Today’s conversations around gender and sexuality draw deeply from the language of psychoanalysis—its concepts, its metaphors, and its ways of shaping thought. Terms like cis and trans, identity and embodiment, form a lexicon shaped by feminist theory and LGBTQ+ movements as well as psychoanalytic insight. While feminism has taught us that gender is socially constructed rather than biologically fixed, the word gender itself carries a much older and layered history—one that speaks to our ongoing attempts to define belonging, difference, and relationality.

From the Latin genus, meaning race, lineage, kind, rank, or species (and eventually, sex) and the Proto-Indo-European root ǵénh “to give birth,” gender has long carried the weight of classification and division. But it also gestures toward a space of poetic imagination. Even today, when we speak of gender, we echo this deep legacy of sorting, naming, and symbolizing identity.

This presentation introduces gender as a form of poetic creation. Through Franz Kafka’s story of a human ape, Virginia Woolf’s novel of a young aristocrat undergoing a gender transformation over centuries, and Paul B. Preciado’s critical address to psychoanalysis—alongside his cinematic reimagining of Orlando as a political biography—we will explore how literature, theory, and clinical practice intersect in shaping the gendered subject.

Learning Objectives:

After attending this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Trace the historical and etymological evolution of the term gender.
   Participants will be able to analyze how the concept of gender has developed from classical roots in Latin and Greek to its current usage in psychoanalytic, feminist, and clinical discourses.
2. Examine literary and theoretical representations of gender transformation.
   Participants will engage critically with works by Kafka, Woolf, and Preciado to understand how gender identity is constructed, disrupted, and reimagined through narrative and symbolic language.
3. Explore the intersections of psychoanalysis, literature, and clinical practice in shaping gendered subjectivity.
   Participants will be able to articulate how psychoanalytic concepts and metaphors inform contemporary understandings of gender, and reflect on their implications for clinical and cultural contexts.

About the Presenter:

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and Sigourney Award recipient. Single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference. With Chris Christian: Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize); with Manya Steinkoler: Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t; Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award), and the Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Gender (forthcoming in 2026).