Abstract
This article engages with the psychoanalytic works of Julia Kristeva in order to demonstrate how trans and queer experiences are shaped and mobilized by a psychic life of revolt. Reorienting the question of resistance toward the threshold of psychical and social life, the author claims that “intimate revolt,” as conceived in Kristeva's later writings, is what mobilizes trans and queer subjectivities in a movement of endless regeneration. The article begins with an overview of the theme of revolt in Kristeva's psychoanalytic thought and stresses three interrelated movements—return, rupture, and rebirth—that together shape and sustain psychical life. Uncovering the exchanges between psychical and social life, the author identifies how inner experiences of revolt mobilize not only a resuscitation of meaning and subjectivity but also a reframing of resistance within Kristeva's intimate politics. The author then illustrates how this internal logic of revolt unfolds within trans and queer experiences of identity and embodiment. In doing so, the author examines conditions of precarity that threaten the survivability of trans and queer populations, particularly with respect to the psychic life of revolt that makes possible our psychical and corporeal capacities for resistance and renewal. Transitioning from the landscape of precarity to the language of liminality, the author contends that the intimate evolutions of revolt constitute a passage of perpetual rebirth in which meaning and subjectivity may be infinitely refashioned.
