Psychic Need
Description
The need to transition, the need to migrate, the need to code switch: what is the relationship between material and psychic need? How does the former map–or fail or refuse to map–onto the latter and with what effects? If political impulses towards isolationism construe migration and gender transition as an incursion or a threat, how can we understand the need to trespass as a social, rather than threatening, one? Construing border-crossing as a question either of cosmopolitan expectations of access or as a material necessity motivated by persecution fails to account for a non-entitled, non-hostile, and non-exigent need to trespass the boundaries of an other (e.g. a State). Using a language of rights to describe the intervening space of decision and its relation to sociality misses the way that this kind of need is both socially coerced and relationally generative.
At a moment of accelerating violence against needs that have been made grounds for political persecution as well as liberal projects such as the provisional granting of asylum, how does need show the ways in which social breakdown signifies psychically? And when psychic breakdown becomes inextricable from the social, what new needs emerge?
This panel invites interrogations of the way that “need” has functioned with and against the logic of problem-solving. What “problems,” for example, does the migrant who migrates or the trans person who transitions solve, not for themselves, but for the categories and discourses that reflect on them? Drawing on psychoanalysis, trans studies, Global South Studies, diasporic and im/migration studies, de- and anti-colonialism, and more, we seek approaches that offer new methods of conceptualizing the relationship between psychic, social, and material need.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez is an independent scholar, psychotherapist, and the author of Bottoms Up: Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance (NYU Press, 2024). Her current research explores how trans joy and gender euphoria can emerge in the therapeutic relationship as protective counterweights to trauma and instability.
Speaker Bio
David Yagüe González (Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University, and Ph.D. in Angloamerican Studies, Complutense University of Madrid) is a lecturer at the Global Languages department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked as a Teaching Assistant at the Romance Languages and Literatures department at Harvard University and his main research areas are Latinx literature, gender studies with a focus on queer studies, and African American literature.
Speaker Bio
Esperanza Onoria Santos is a graduate student in the American Studies PhD program at Rutgers University- Newark. She was awarded the presidential fellowship at RU-N as part of her studies. She is developing a dissertation that examines the lives, livelihoods and agency of trans Latinas within the United States post 1990 in order to articulate a contemporary Trans Latina Feminism.
Speaker Bio
Andrzej Baginski is an Assistant Professor of Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. Hisvbook manuscript in progress is titled Fictions of Proximity: Environments of Fantasy Along the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Amalle Dublon’s writing has appeared in GLQ, Movement Research Performance Journal, Artpapers, TDR, and Art in America. They co-organize I Wanna Be With You Everywhere, a serial cross-disability arts gathering, and their artwork has been exhibited at Artists Space (New York), Museum MMK (Frankfurt), ARGOS Arts (Brussels), and Dazibao (Montreal). Amalle has a PhD in Literature from Duke University, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the New School.
Speaker Bio
Williston Chase teaches humanities at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California. He researches how cultural expression across the Americas relies on and/or resists philosophical reflection, drawing on tensions between Latin American Studies, Black Studies, and European intellectual history. His current project, The Stakes of American Thinking, investigates the philosophy of history in technocratic articulations of republican politics in 19th century Chile by way of Black Critical Theory.
Speaker Bio
I am Sieun Cha, a PhD student of Comparative Literature at Emory University. I graduated from Comparative Literature and Culture with high honors (BA) and pursued English Language and Literature (MA) at Yonsei University, where I wrote a master’s thesis titled “Trans-species Love Stories: (Eco-)Hospitality, Transing and Care in the Anthropocene”. "Unlimited Hospitality in the Anthropocene" will be published in Arts and Poetics of the (In)Hospitable by Palgrave in 2026.