Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans
Patricia Gherovici
by Patricia Gherovici (2025)
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Synopsis
Patricia Gherovici's Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans (2025) is a short but theoretically dense pamphlet that proposes four new clinical-conceptual tools—realness, beauty, laughter, and the swerve (clinamen)—explicitly modeled on Lacan's four fundamental concepts from Seminar XI, in order to reframe transgender experience within Lacanian psychoanalysis. The book's central argument is that trans embodiment does not represent a crossing of gender boundaries but rather a confrontation with the frontier of death itself, one that opens onto life; the "wrong body" myth is accordingly displaced in favor of a structural account in which the body is never naturally owned but always assembled through identification, desire, and the creative supplementation of lack. Drawing on clinical vignettes (Miranda, Lynn, Terrence) alongside Freud's Schreber case, pre-Socratic atomism, ballroom culture, and fashion testimony, Gherovici argues that trans subjects negotiate the Lacanian Real—not just social reality—and that their strategies of self-transformation are best understood through the sinthome rather than through pathology or identity-politics frameworks. The book stages a sustained dialogue between Butler's gender performativity and Lacan's anti-essentialism, ultimately arguing that while both converge in rejecting biological essentialism, Lacan's Real provides the sharper instrument for clinical work because it names the constitutive impossibility—the sexual non-relation—that no performance can paper over. The pamphlet concludes that corporeal transformation alone is insufficient and that an ego scriptor, a writing-self, must intervene to constitute the body through inscription, making the sinthome a creative and livable solution rather than a pathological remnant.
Distinctive contribution
What Bodies to Wear contributes that no comparable text in the Lacanian corpus does in quite the same way is its construction of a clinically grounded, four-concept apparatus—realness, beauty, laughter, clinamen—explicitly homologous with Lacan's four fundamental concepts, but oriented specifically toward trans-identified analysands. Earlier work in this space (including Gherovici's own Transgender Psychoanalysis, 2017, and Please Select Your Gender, 2010) engaged with trans experience through existing Lacanian categories; here, Gherovici makes the bolder move of proposing that clinical work with trans subjects generates genuinely new conceptual resources that expand Lacanian theory rather than merely applying it. The clinamen in particular—the Lucretian atomic swerve mediated through Michel Serres and Lacan's own deployment of it in Seminar XI—is developed into a "clinic of the clinamen" that theorizes trauma, repetition, and transformation as sites of turbulence where chance disrupts unconscious determinism, reframing transition as a creative re-knotting of the Borromean registers rather than a symptom requiring resolution.
A second distinctive contribution is the book's triangulation of aesthetics, ethics, and the Real through the concept of beauty. By reading Schreber's feminization through Catherine Malabou's plasticity and Lacan's reading of Antigone's sublime beauty as a "barrier" against the Real's fundamental horror, Gherovici argues that the trans "drive to beauty" is not primarily Imaginary (mere appearance or passing) but accesses an ethical-Real dimension: when a trans subject says "I am beautiful," the weight falls on "I am," a demand for ontological recognition. This moves the clinical and political debate away from visibility and representation and toward a properly Lacanian ethics of desire, connecting trans experience to the broader Lacanian claim that desire must be sustained even at the cost of social illegibility.
Main themes
- Trans embodiment as confrontation with death and the Real rather than gender-border crossing
- The 'wrong body' myth displaced by Lacanian structural accounts of identification and lack
- Four new clinical concepts (realness, beauty, laughter, clinamen) as expansions of Lacan's fundamental concepts
- The sinthome as creative solution and livable re-knotting of the Borromean registers for trans subjects
- Fashion and dress as first-order semiotic and libidinal practices of trans identity-formation
- Butler's performativity and Lacan's anti-essentialism: convergence and divergence on corporeal reality
- Beauty as ethical-Real dimension (Antigone's sublime) rather than Imaginary passing or appearance
- Laughter, Democritus's 'den,' and the objet petit a as a mode of traversing racist/paranoid fantasy
- The Lucretian clinamen as a materialist figure for trauma, chance, and psychic transformation
- The ego scriptor: inscription and writing as constitutive of the trans body beyond corporeal transformation alone
Chapter outline
- Bodies on the Couch — p.11-29
- Body Dressing — p.30-37
- Four Lacanian Takes to Rethink the Trans Experience (Introduction) — p.38-40
- Realness / Being Real — p.41-74
- Beauty / The Drive to Beauty — p.75-88
- Laughter — p.89-99
- Swerve / Real Encounters / The Body I Wrote — p.100-120
Chapter summaries
Bodies on the Couch *(p.11-29)*
The opening chapter grounds the book's theoretical project in clinical practice, beginning with Gherovici's experience treating Puerto Rican patients in a Philadelphia barrio clinic whose hysterical somatic symptoms—seizures, dissociation, ataques de nervios—reprised the very phenomena that gave rise to psychoanalysis. The chapter uses this clinical starting point to raise the book's central question: what does it mean to inhabit a body, and how does the body's mediated or absent presence alter the analytic process? The pandemic's normalization of remote treatment sharpens this inquiry, as does the growing visibility of trans-identified analysands whose embodied self-narratives challenge both the analytic frame and psychoanalytic theory.
The chapter stages a productive tension between Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity—elaborated across Gender Trouble (1990) and revisited in Who is Afraid of Gender? (2024)—and Lacan's claim that 'Woman does not exist.' Both, Gherovici argues, converge on anti-essentialist grounds: neither posits a biological substrate beneath gender. Yet they diverge crucially on the question of corporeal reality. Butler's framework risks absorbing the body entirely into performance and cultural inscription, while Lacan insists on a remainder—the Real—that resists symbolization. The chapter introduces a trans analysand's insistence that 'my mind is sound; the problem is my body,' and reads it against Miquel Missé's critique of the 'wrong body' myth, arguing that psychoanalysis must offer a more nuanced account of body ownership than either the medical transition narrative or a purely performative framework allows.
The Lacanian mirror stage provides the theoretical pivot: the body is never naturally 'owned' but is always a fragile, externally mediated construction assembled through identification with an idealized image. The chapter invokes Joyce's 'Joycean body' as an early instance of the book's broader argument—that trans embodiment reveals a structural feature of all subjectivity rather than a pathological deviation from it. This positions the chapter as both clinical autobiography and theoretical prolegomenon, establishing the stakes for the four conceptual 'takes' that follow.
Key concepts: Mirror Stage, Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Identification, Symptom Notable examples: Puerto Rican syndrome / ataques de nervios (Philadelphia barrio clinic); Trans woman analysand: 'The problem is my body'; Miquel Missé, The Myth of the Wrong Body
Body Dressing *(p.30-37)*
This chapter interrupts the theoretical argument with ethnographic-testimonial material drawn from trans individuals' accounts of fashion and dress, using it to elaborate the book's governing metaphor: the body as something worn, a garment that can be tailored, altered, or replaced. Gherovici cites testimonies from trans women Sophia Hernandez, Corey Rae, and Margot Stacy, who describe the transformative function of sartorial choices—from concealment and experimentation to celebration and authentic expression. The chapter treats fashion as a 'language through which trans persons experiment, explore, and ultimately express themselves,' and notes RuPaul's formulation ('We are all born naked; the rest is drag') as a generalization of this structure to all subjects.
Rather than treating fashion as superficial or as a mere epiphenomenon of deeper identity claims, the chapter argues that dress functions as a primary site of identification and desire—a first-order libidinal practice. This prepares the theoretical ground for the four concepts to follow, particularly realness and beauty, by showing that the relationship between the trans subject and their body is always already mediated by images, garments, surfaces, and cultural ideals. Fashion, in this light, is not cosmetic but constitutive: it is the domain in which the body is first made 'presentable,' first given form as an ego-ideal. The chapter also foregrounds the affective stakes of this process—joy, creative energy, liberation—which will later be rethought through the death drive and the ethics of desire.
Key concepts: Identification, Imaginary, Masquerade, Desire, Ego Notable examples: Sophia Hernandez, Corey Rae, Margot Stacy (fashion testimonies); RuPaul: 'We are all born naked; the rest is drag'
Four Lacanian Takes to Rethink the Trans Experience (Introduction) *(p.38-40)*
This brief but programmatic section announces the book's structural conceit: taking Lacan's 1964 seminar presentation of the four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) as its explicit model, Gherovici proposes four concepts derived from her clinical work with trans-identified analysands that expand Lacan's central insights. The four concepts are realness (developing Lacan's Real), beauty (explored through Schreber's paranoia and Malabou's plasticity), laughter (grounded in Democritus and the Lacanian 'nothing'), and the swerve or clinamen (the Lucretian atomic deviation reconceived as a clinic of transformation).
The section also importantly reframes the clinical stakes: trans experience, Gherovici argues, does not involve crossing a gender boundary but confronting the frontier of death, which in turn opens onto life. This reframing moves the clinical and theoretical discussion away from identity categories and toward a Lacanian ethics of desire and the death drive. The body is reconceptualized as a 'border'—not a geopolitical line requiring a passport but a constitutive seam that marks the edge of being, marked by class, race, ethnicity, and the gender marker on identification documents.
Key concepts: Real, Death Drive, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Clinamen, Void, Clinical Structures
Realness / Being Real *(p.41-74)*
This is the book's longest and conceptually richest section, spanning from an initial theoretical triangulation of Heidegger, Butler, and Lacan through extended clinical vignettes. The section opens by contrasting Heidegger's notion of truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) with Butler's performativity, arguing that the trans concept of 'realness'—originating in New York City drag ball culture and popularized by the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning—offers a bridge between these positions that neither can achieve alone. Realness acknowledges that gender is simultaneously constructed and deeply felt, performed and experienced, external and internal. Crucially, it is not equivalent to 'passing' but names a survival-oriented strategy of navigating cisnormative space.
Lacan's Real is then developed at length as the theoretical anchor. Drawing on Television ('truth holds onto the real'), Seminar XI, and Seminar XXII, Gherovici defines the Real as that which resists signification—'that which never ceases to write itself' yet escapes comprehension—and argues that realness as a concept in trans culture occupies an analogous liminal space between the Real and ordinary reality. The sinthome is introduced here as the clinical framework: rather than mere passing or flight from the Real, the trans subject's realness can function as a singular creative solution to existential impasse, a livable engagement with what cannot be fully symbolized.
Two clinical vignettes anchor the argument. Miranda, a trans woman artist, found her sinthome in drawing on mylar—a translucent, indestructible plastic film that became both material and medium for her art, sustaining her in the way Lacan theorized Joyce's writing sustained him. Lynn, a trans woman scientist in her early forties, presents a more complex clinical picture: her performed orgasms, faked for her lovers, are analyzed as addressed not to her partners but to her mother ('Mother, can't you see I'm faking it?'). Lynn's case illustrates the logic of disavowal and the fading of the objet petit a, her depression traced to the loss of the object-cause of desire. Her analytic turning point arrives through a dream and a moment of laughter when she declares 'my life is like my boobs, fake'—allowing Gherovici to reply 'So what?' and for Lynn to grasp that truth has the structure of fiction. The veil, the phallus, and metonymic displacement are thus shown to be constitutive of truth rather than opposed to it.
Key concepts: Real, Sinthome, Realness, Objet petit a, Disavowal, Sexual Non-Relation, Jouissance, Fantasy Notable examples: Paris Is Burning (1990, Jennie Livingston); Janet Mock, Redefining Realness; Miranda (clinical vignette: mylar art as sinthome); Lynn (clinical vignette: faked orgasms, fading objet a)
Beauty / The Drive to Beauty *(p.75-88)*
The beauty section opens with Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's hypnopompic conviction that it would be 'beautiful' (recht schön) to succumb to sexual intercourse as a woman, arguing that Schreber's transsexual transformation is fundamentally an aesthetic ambition. Gherovici reads beauty here as a sublimatory mechanism through which Schreber negotiates the psychotic foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father: his 'unmanning' (Entmannung), initially experienced as persecutory divine violence, becomes tolerable—even valorized—through its aestheticization. Beauty functions as an 'aesthetic defense,' converting a process of loss into one of transcendence and allowing Schreber to reconcile with the inevitability of feminization by reframing it as an idealized aesthetic state.
Lacan's reading of Schreber is deployed to show that the drive to become 'the' woman (not 'a' woman) is a structural stabilization strategy: 'unable to be the phallus the mother is missing, there remained the solution of being the woman that men are missing.' This logic—which can be varied as 'being the woman God lacks' or 'being the phallus the mother lacks'—is then extended to transgender experience more broadly, with Malabou's concept of plasticity introduced to theorize trans self-fashioning as a 'plastic drive' that works against nature (in Hegel's sense) and that Butler's performativity already implicitly acknowledges.
The subsection 'The Drive to Beauty' extends the analysis beyond Schreber by arguing that the trans pursuit of beauty is not reducible to the Imaginary register of passing or societal conformity. Drawing on Lacan's reading of Antigone in Seminar VII, Gherovici argues that Antigone's 'unbearable splendor' names a beauty that transcends the Imaginary and takes on an ethical-Real dimension: it is a 'barrier' that forbids access to fundamental horror, a limit to reckless jouissance, and an intermediary site between two deaths. The trans demand to be seen as beautiful is thus interpreted as ultimately a demand for ontological recognition—the stress in 'I am beautiful' falls on 'I am' rather than 'beautiful.' Plasticity, Freudian libidinal mobility, and viscosity are also threaded through to explain why analytic work with trans subjects requires loosening rigidified libidinal attachments.
Key concepts: Psychosis, Jouissance, Phallus, The big Other, Symbolic Castration, Masquerade, Feminine Sexuality, Fantasy Notable examples: Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (Freud's case / Lacan's reading); Antigone (Lacan, Seminar VII); Angelina Jolie / Caitlyn Jenner (drive to beauty in relation to death); Catherine Malabou, plasticity
Laughter *(p.89-99)*
This section develops the third conceptual 'take' through a sustained genealogy of Democritus as the 'laughing philosopher.' Beginning with Horace's formulation—'had Democritus lived, he would have laughed at the folly of mankind'—and tracing representations of his laughter across Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, and others, Gherovici arrives at Democritus's neologism 'den': a malapropism of ouden (nothing) that subtracts the negation, yielding 'less than nothing' or a 'nothing without the no.' This concept, Gherovici argues (developing work from her earlier essay 'Laughing about Nothing'), anticipates Lacan's objet petit a—an atom of non-negating negation that is neither something nor nothing, a 'stowaway' (clandestine/clamdestine) in the void.
The clinical pivot comes through the case of Mercedes, a patient whose paranoid fantasy centered on a Jewish woman at her yoga studio who she believed was stealing her enjoyment—the paradigmatic structure of racist fantasy as analyzed through Lacan's theory of jouissance (the Other as thief of jouissance). Gherovici's therapeutic intervention uses humor: renaming Mercedes's perceived adversaries 'la horda de las gordas' (the horde of fat ladies) produces a moment of shared laughter that punctures the paranoid construction. Laughter functions here as a clinical tool that exposes the subject's own jouissance as the source of the 'theft' she had projected onto the Other, thereby enabling partial traversal of the fantasy and reconnection with desire in its imperfect, 'messy' form. Democritus's laughter-at-nothing thus becomes a model for the analytic moment in which the subject's fantasy structure briefly collapses into the void from which new desire can emerge.
Key concepts: Objet petit a, Jouissance, Fantasy, Void, The big Other, Realness Notable examples: Democritus (laughing philosopher); Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, ter Brugghen (portrait tradition); Mercedes (clinical vignette: racist fantasy at yoga studio); Lacan, Television: 'Not the whole truth'
Swerve / Real Encounters / The Body I Wrote *(p.100-120)*
The fourth and final conceptual section develops the clinamen—Lucretius's infinitesimal atomic swerve—as both a theoretical figure and a clinical framework. Gherovici reads the clinamen through Michel Serres's interpretation of Lucretius (turbulence, deviation as the birth of everything) and Lacan's appropriation of it in Seminar XI via the Aristotelian distinction between tuché (the contingent encounter with the Real) and automaton (the network of signifying repetition). The clinamen is positioned as a rupture that introduces chance into unconscious determinism, stands in contrast to repetition, and reconceptualizes trauma as a 'change of course' rather than a fixation. Importantly, Gherovici traces a trajectory from the early Lacan (symptom as metaphor, meaning to be decoded) to the late Lacan of Seminar XXIII (sinthome as knot, jouissance as operative concept), arguing that this shift maps onto the transition from symptom to sinthome in clinical practice with trans subjects: not decoding but re-knotting.
The 'Real Encounters' subsection deepens the theoretical apparatus by connecting the void of Lucretian atomism—'den,' the nothing that has as much existence as a thing—to Lacan's materialism of jouissance: 'Lacan deepened our understanding of materialism by making jouissance his ontology.' The Borromean knot's logic is rehearsed: if one ring (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) is untied, the whole structure collapses; the sinthome intervenes as a fourth term to re-link them. Gherovici argues that Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the paradigm case (as in Seminar XXIII), and that the same logic applies to trans subjects whose corporeal transformations can function as sinthomes—creative re-knotting—rather than symptoms.
The final clinical vignette, Terrence, a white trans man in his mid-thirties who sought analysis not for trans-related issues but because he could not finish his doctoral dissertation, provides the richest case study. His compulsive avoidance strategies—cleaning, cooking, dating-app cycling, gym sessions—are read as a structural impasse: an inability to come to terms with endings. The analysis reveals that Terrence's academic ambition had become his mother's desire rather than his own, and that his trans identity, far from being the presenting problem, had been the most generative dimension of his self-transformation. The concept of the ego scriptor emerges here: it is insufficient to transform the body through surgery or hormones; a writing-self must intervene to constitute the body through inscription. This is Gherovici's most original clinical formulation—the idea that the sinthome for trans subjects must pass through a textual, inscriptive act that re-knots the three registers when corporeal transformation alone fails to do so.
Key concepts: Clinamen, Sinthome, Borromean Knot, Real, Repetition, Jouissance, Death Drive, Symbolic, Unconscious, Trauma Notable examples: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura; Michel Serres on clinamen and turbulence; Lacan, Seminar XI (tuché / automaton); Lacan, Seminar XXIII (Joyce's sinthome); James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Terrence (clinical vignette: trans man, doctoral dissertation, ego scriptor)
Main interlocutors
- Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)
- Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII (The Sinthome)
- Jacques Lacan, Écrits
- Jacques Lacan, Television
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
- Judith Butler, Who is Afraid of Gender?
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
- Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
- Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
- Michel Serres
- Catherine Malabou (plasticity)
- Mladen Dolar
- Barbara Cassin
- Alain Badiou
- Miquel Missé, The Myth of the Wrong Body
- Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw
- Paul B. Preciado, In An Apartment On Uranus
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project / fashion essays)
- Jacqueline Rose
- Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
- Plato, Symposium
Position in the corpus
Bodies to Wear sits at the intersection of several overlapping zones within the Lacanian secondary literature. Its closest neighbors are Gherovici's own prior monographs—Please Select Your Gender (2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (2017)—of which it is a condensed and theoretically updated companion piece, explicitly noting that there will be 'some overlap' with the earlier analyses (endnote 3). Readers approaching trans psychoanalysis for the first time should read Transgender Psychoanalysis first, as Bodies to Wear presupposes familiarity with Gherovici's earlier clinical arguments and the basic Lacanian apparatus. The pamphlet also shares substantial ground with the literature on the sinthome and late Lacan—particularly commentaries on Seminar XXIII—and should be read alongside that body of work; it diverges, however, from purely textual exegesis by grounding the sinthome in a clinical 'clinic of the clinamen' that has no direct precedent in the existing commentary literature.\n\nWithin the broader corpus of Lacanian approaches to gender and sexuality, Bodies to Wear occupies a distinctive position relative to works by Colette Soler on feminine sexuality, Marie-Hélène Brousse on the push-to-the-woman, and the Lacanian feminist tradition running through Jacqueline Rose. It engages Butler's gender theory more directly and sympathetically than much of the Lacanian literature, finding convergence rather than simple opposition, while refusing Butler's suspension of the Real. For readers working on Lacan and ethics, the chapter on beauty and Antigone connects to standard readings of Seminar VII; for readers interested in Lacan and materialist philosophy, the clinamen sections provide an unusually detailed engagement with Lucretius and Serres. The pamphlet format means arguments are sometimes compressed rather than fully elaborated, making it best read as a supplement to—rather than a substitute for—Gherovici's longer works and the primary Lacanian seminars it cites.