Julien Fischer | The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate

Julien Fischer’s The Lure of Origins rethinks how the field of Trans Studies has sought to correct the history of trans pathologization through its embrace of the seeming truth and authenticity of trans autobiography. In this talk, Fischer delves into the sexological archive to offer a history of a case study that is referenced in Trans Studies as an autobiography of a trans woman, and to consider how this case study arrives in the present as trans. Join Fischer as he questions what he calls “the trans autobiographical mandate,”  which endows first-person narrative with the promise of authentically representing trans people’s lives, and as he moves toward the possibility of reading and writing the self without the imperative to deliver a verifiable self-knowledge or an absolute truth.

About the Speaker

Julien Fischer is a recipient of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center and a Lecturer in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. He teaches and writes about feminist and queer theory, trans studies, psychoanalysis, the history of sexology, and genres of self-writing. Julien is a candidate analyst and a member at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.