Unholy Ghosts: Vanishing, Recognition, and Disidentification

In considering the invaluable contributions of Ann Pellegrini and Marty A. Cooper, I focus my reply on a throughline of three emergent themes: vanishing, recognition, and disidentification. Drawing on the clinical material presented by Cooper and me, I outline a friction between the Relational conceptualizations of recognition/depersonalization and José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of disidentification (1999), which positions drag performance as moving beyond the terms of recognition. I further elaborate on peculiarity as a site where social toxicity permeates queerness, and I reflect on the colonial impulses of “exceptionalism” (Pellegrini, Citation2026) that I confront as a peculiar psychoanalyst writing about and reading drag performance. I conclude with reflections on meeting one’s own Unholy Ghosts—an illumination made possible by the “sparkle” (Cooper, Citation2026) and collective insights that Cooper and Pellegrini have offered me.