Nel fondo scuro e misterioso. Euforia e cupio dissolvi nel melodramma contemporaneo

In the eighty years that separate the advent of psychoanalysis from that of gender studies, countless times the melodramatic representation of gender identity has pendularly crossed the viscous space that separates euphoria and dysphoria, the two primary emotions connected to self-perception, which, like all emotions, are a mediation between affect and cultural signification, between instinct and cognition. Analyzing some contemporary texts, within that peculiar form of mythopoeia which is the melodramatic construction of a charac-ter, we will investigate how the elements of an entropic euphoriathat turn the construction of one's own identity and pro-creation into a re-creation (in the double sense of a careless suspension and a profound reconstruction of oneself) always meet the elements of a sym-metrical and consubstantial, sometimes dysphoric,desire for de(con)struction, anesthesia, an-nihilation (cupio dissolvi).