Call for Papers AAG 2019: Psychogeography and the maternal
AAG Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, 7-10 April, 2019
Session Organizers: Heidi J. Nast (DePaul University) and Anna Secor (University of Kentucky)
Deadline: 25 October 2018
Little research has been published in Lacanian psycho-geography about the maternal, despite the
fact that it is here where the relational nature of the unconscious resides (c.f. Kingsbury and Pile
2014; Kapoor 2018). For Lacan, human emotional life and relational attachments commence with
the physical trauma of birth and the exceptionally long period of dependency that follows. Unlike
other animals, the human infant has no instinct and can only survive by successfully appealing to a
(m)other. This dyadic relation, especially intense in the first year, consolidates and divides the psyche
into two. It is through this twoness that unconsciousness takes place, riven by contradictory drives
and desires for dissolution, connection, and separation--relational-spatial registers loosely
corresponding to Lacan’s Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. The bodily-psychical vicissitudes that
follow are never-ending and immense, twoness both making bodily egoic integrity and intersubjectivity
difficult (if not impossible) and giving rise to geographical landscapes of conflictual
psychical proportions.
This session invites papers that explore the geographical contradictions of the maternal/unconscious
as these emerge through the psychical registers of the Real, Imaginary, and/or Symbolic. We
especially welcome papers that chart these contradictions under particular or changing material and
geopolitical economic conditions.
Potential paper topics might include the maternal/unconscious in relation to:
• mechanical, virtual, and biogenetic reproduction
• advanced markets that (maternally) provide-for;
• automation that displaces labor (and thereby the maternal);
• fantastical animatronic, digital, and virtual mediations of the maternal/child relation;
• marketized perversions of the maternal/infant relation (infantilization);
• investments in IVF, surrogacy, and/or bio- or genetic engineering;
• reproductive robotic investments;
• undercapitalized (high fertility) versus highly capitalized (low fertility) regions;
• race and sexual difference;
• pregnancy and childbirth;
• space: topological, geopolitical economic, psychical, embodied, lived
• love, anxiety, desire, and power
• relational ontologies and the maternal/infant relation
Please send abstracts (up to 250 words) by October 25, 2018 to the session organizers, along with
your name, institutional affiliation, and PIN number to: Heidi J. Nast [log in to unmask] and
Anna Secor [log in to unmask])
References
Balsam, R. 2012. Women’s bodies in psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Ticeneto Clough, P. 2018. The user unconscious. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fernandez-Alvarez, H. 2018. Will a cyborg steal my jouissance? Unconscious labor and the enjoying
body of the virtual. Working paper available from author.
Kapoor, I. (ed.) 2018. Psychoanalysis and the gl0bal. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Kingsbury, P. and S. Pile (eds.) 2014. Psychoanalytic geographies. London: Ashgate.
Lacan, J. 2014. Anxiety: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, 1962-63. English edn. Edited by J.-
A. Miller. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Lacan, J. 1994. La relation d'objet : 1956-57. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. 1992. The ethics of psychoanalysis: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 1959-60. 1st
US ed. New York: Norton.
Nast, Heidi J. 2018. Big babies. Area. https://rdcu.be/5AKn.
Nast, Heidi J. 2018. Uterine imaginaries, geopolitical economy, and the maternal/unconscious.
Dialogues in Human Geography (in press).
Nast, Heidi J. 2017. Queering the maternal. Society & Space [open access, online] 31 October.
Nast, Heidi J. 2016. Into the arms of dolls. Social and Cultural Geography 18(6): 758-785.
Soler, Colette. 2006. What Lacan said about women. New York: Other Press.
Wong, K. 2012. Why humans give birth to helpless babies. Scientific American blog.
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