LGBTQ STUDY GROUP of the William Alanson White Institute invites you to a conversation with

Willa N. France, J.D.

Gender Identity as Fetish

Part 1: Creating a Gender—Clinical Material

Wednesday January 10, 2024

08:30 – 10:00 PM (EST)

Description:

Trauma infuses us, from our first beginnings. Jean Laplanche articulates our fundamental anthropological situation—the asymmetry of caregiver and infant; the barrage of messages addressed to us as infants and children—enigmatic, intromitted, introjected, translatable and untranslatable. And so our socialization begins. It is hard to imagine a more significant trauma than our family’s and civil and religious authorities’ assignment of our genders—based on a genital binary. We are authorized to inhabit the identities of but one half of humanity, the other foreclosed. It is, in the Western world at least, a Universal Gender Trauma. Binaries seem so natural; definitional categories that can become concrete, then reified, then essential for identity—a kind of bedrock of difference—serving both to express and defend who we are. Difference and disavowal are a familiar pair, the very foundation of fetishism. And when the anxiety of difference, of ambiguity, becomes overwhelming, the mere presence of a different other can feel like an assault calling for defensive measures, personal and social. Through a clinical example we will see how one transwoman navigated such traumas and came to create and inhabit her gender. At first an identity held tightly but over a number of years more loosely and lightly.

Speaker’s bio:

Transwoman Willa N. France (she/her/hers) began her physical transition in 2004 at the age of 55. Her early careers are in naval architecture and marine engineering and then law dating back to 1972. She has completed her fourth year candidacy in the William Alanson White Institute’s psychoanalytic training program, LQP tract, and will continue for another to complete patient hour requirements. Willa was born in Wisconsin to parents who raised mink. At an early age, her family moved several times throughout the west before settling on the Oregon coast, their livelihood always based on mink ranching. She has lived with her wife of almost 51 years, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, in East Harlem, New York for nearly 40 years. They have one son, a wonderful daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. Willa has written poetry for many years and self-published a novel in verse in 2007 titled Incunabulum (ISBN 0741443759).  Her transition story, Desiderium, remains, not surprisingly, a work in process.

For inquiries regarding The WAWI LGBTQ Study Group please contact co-chairs who wish you a Happy New Year.

Esin Egit: e.egit@wawhite.org

Willa France: poetadmiral@earthlink.net