ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, engaging the work of relational analysts who write in the interstices of clinical psychoanalysis and the social, with post-colonial race theory, academic scholarship on gender, and queer activist writing to discuss the author’s work with DeShawn, a seriously psychiatrically ill girly-boy. The clinical material illustrates the centrality of thinking intersectionally in our work with patients, and argues for the importance of considering the interdigitations among class, race and gender. Theorizing gender as a category of experience that can be appropriated towards multiple psychic ends, the chapter focuses on how race and class are interimplicated with gender. The author proposes that adopting an intersectional approach to think about how one identity category can inflate others can help us navigate the space between pathology and difference. The author details DeShawn’s daily life and treatment in the inpatient unit, tracking familial, racial, and class trauma. The chapter notes important lessons learned on how race presses on gender, on how class inflects masculine femininities, and on how embodiment can offer itself as a site for trauma’s elaborations.
