Maxi Wallenhorst | Free Dissociation. A Trans Poetic
06. Jan
6:15 pm, C40.530
Dissociation describes a detachment from the continuity of experience—while driving, having sex or under extreme duress – as reality testing remains intact. It is a common occurrence in contemporary trans literature. In clinical and pop-cultural applications, dissociation is often portrayed as post-traumatic collapse of subjectivity; here, however, it seems to point towards a specifically gendered process of capitalist alienation, an infrastructure of unfeeling. Working through the gender troubles in dissociation's conceptual history, this paper develops dissociation not merely as an individual symptom but as both a conceptual resource and a poetic modality, in proximity to aesthetic modes like deadpan, underperforming, camp. Drawing on Jean Laplanche's psychoanalytic interventions, Marxist-feminist aesthetics, and close readings of contemporary poetry, the paper proposes dissociative poetics as a way to conceptualize gender negatively: against frameworks of both "identity" and "fluidity,” as a process of metabolizing the messy contradictions of social reproduction. Rather than romanticize or repair detachment, the paper argues, free dissociation might name how we collectively mediate alienation.
Maxi Wallenhorst is a PhD candidate and scholarship holder at Leuphana University and writer based in Berlin. Most recently, her work has been published in Berlin Review.
Language: German
An event organized by the Research Initiative The Disruptive Condition.
Contact: Nicolas Schneider (nicolas.schneider@leuphana.de)