How I Hacked My Gender and Music Using Psychoanalysis and Accelerationism

Through vignettes from lived experience along with psychoanalytic theorizing and my creative practice as a musician, I appropriate the term “cisteria” to explore cis panics of identity, as well as why transgender people are seen as a civilizational threat by today’s conservative reactionary ideology. Narratively, I explore my relationship to masculinity growing up in the 2000s and 2010s, as well as my observations over the panics around the crisis of masculinity which culminated in the rise in popularity of Jordan Peterson. I use Peterson’s quasi-psychoanalytic work to explain why its understanding of these panics and its proposed solutions fail when contrasted to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I explore how Lacanian psychoanalysis helped me throughout my gender transition by using the concepts of hysterization and subjective destitution. This passage through psychoanalysis opened me up to the notion of creative solutions to make life liveable again. I discuss my artistic practice as pseudo-antigone, which changed the ways I assumed my creativity, my body, and my voice parallel to my transition. This practice was informed by how hyperpop music and accelerationisms theorize and practice a way of articulating a future. The article includes a companion unreleased song that extends these ideas in an auditory form.