A Conversation on Maternal Impossibility

This event celebrates the range of voices and visions featured in the special issue on Maternal Impossibility for the Journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality (25:3). The issue offers a psychoanalytic, onto-ethical, radical, and political engagement with how war, racialized violence, climate change, geopolitics, and assaults on maternal bodies and mothering practices are registered: in the clinic, in lived maternals, and in the next wave of scholarship and theory. Maternal Impossibility explores what imaginaries might emerge as the maternal converses with the nonhuman, collective relations, the disavowed, the absented and erased, the ancestral realm, speculative futures, and more.

Drawing on their contributions in the issue, panelists Ken Corbett, Gohar Homayounpour, M.E. O’Brien, Tracy Simon and Jamieson Webster will engage with the question of impossibility and the ways in which the maternal is tied to this place. Lacan (1978) describes the Real, that psychic space nearest to the body, as impossible. It is impossible to fully symbolize, it is where the symptom returns, and it is where the traumatic trace of becoming human remains. A space of repudiation, it also never ceases to leave an opening for what is possible.

Bios:

Ken Corbett, Ph.D, Professor, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, and A M**der over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High.

Gohar Homayounpour, Psy.D, is a psychoanalyst and award winning author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also founder and past president. She is a member of the scientific board at the Freud Museum in Vienna, and of the IPA group, Geographies of Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012, MIT) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into many languages. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022, Routledge).

M. E. O’Brien, is a practicing psychotherapist and writer. She received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at New York University. Her second book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, is available through Pluto Press. Her writing has appeared in Social Movement Studies, Work, Employment & Society, Commune, Homintern, Endnotes, Pinko, Parapraxis and Invert. She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan and Turkish. She is a licensed clinical social worker and an analyst in formation. She is in psychoanalytic training at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, an institute in New York City. She also teaches queer studies part time at NYU.

Tracy Simon, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Editor for the journal Studies in Gender & Sexuality, and a Supervisor at Pulsion Institute. Her writing engages with psychoanalysis, gender studies, and maternal subjectivity. She is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City, Part-time Faculty at The New School for Social Research, and Faculty and Executive Board Member of Pulsion Institute. She is the author, most recently, of Disorganization and Sex (Divided, 2022) and the forthcoming On Breathing (Peninsula, 2025).

Host or Publisher Pulsion - IIPPP