Free Workshop: “Cisteria” at Division 39’s Spring Meeting

Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics

Spring Meeting Pre-Conference Workshop

April 22, 2026 | 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM (EDT) | via Zoom

Free registration available

via Zoom

Register here: https://web.cvent.com/event/dbbe7750-65fb-4912-90af-d22fa43453fa/register
Select “pre-conference workshop only” for FREE registration.

On April 22, we will gather for Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics, a pre-conference workshop that brings together a small group of scholars, clinicians, and artists working at the intersection of psychoanalysis and transgender studies.

This session is offered free of charge and open to all. For those not attending the Spring Meeting, separate registration is required to receive the Zoom link.

A Different Starting Point

This workshop introduces Cisteria! as a collective transpsychoanalytic intervention against contemporary anti-trans panics and the institutional forms that sustain them. Building from the special issue’s framing of transpectres—the caricatured figures that haunt and produce gendered life—and cisteria—a defensive formation that organizes ciscentric anxiety into moral panic—we relocate pathology away from trans subjectivity and toward the architecture of cis power.

Organized by the guest editors of the Cisteria! special issue in Studies in Gender & Sexuality, the workshop brings together a small group of contributors for two curated sequences of focused presentations. Across clinical, theoretical, and creative registers, presenters will offer “unfaithful recalibrations” of psychoanalysis: interventions that may contradict one another, slip across subjectivities, and traverse intrapsychic, relational, and sociopolitical fields. Through a trans threat(psycho)analysis, we refuse respectability politics and demands to prove trans innocence, and instead critically track how cisteria’s dangers circulate through institutions and the textures of contemporary everyday life.

The final portion of the workshop will be devoted to open discussion, inviting participants to reflect on their own institutional locations and to consider how cisteria might function as a practice of reclaiming psychic life through play, feeling, critique, and trans world-making. 

Speakers:

Tavi Bishop
Jess Joseph
Tobias Wiggins
Xiameng Qiao
Myriam Sauer
Vic Kennedy
Simone Atenea Medina Polo

Join Us

The workshop will take place on April 22 from 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM (EDT) via Zoom.

Registration is free. If you are not attending the Spring Meeting, be sure to register specifically for the “pre-conference session” to receive the link.