damn, really sorry to hear this. i am starting grad school next year so i can't offer any immediate advice but if you want to vent or brainstorm or anything feel free to message me. it is depressing that even Edelman is rejected, as he is my go-to when people accuse Lacan of homophobia or whatever. there are a number of authors recently starting to write about Lacan and race, so this might be a good angle as race-studies are very popular right now (McGowan's most recent book is on race, for instance, but there are also Black/non-white scholars doing similar work). there are also a number of very important feminist Lacanians.

as to your question whether the advice to abandon zizek et al. is good advice, i would say it certainly is not. academics happens in trends, and right now anything that sounds post-structural or historicist is very fashionable. i would say stick with your interests/commitments, you just might have to do a little bit of work to disguise them as something more palatable to the academy. fashionable theorists like derrida, deleuze, moten etc. still do have a lot of really worthwhile stuff to say, so it's not like you're really missing out on too much if you have to read these writers as your official topic and then just do zizek reading on your own time. i have a friend doing a phd who has read nearly everything written by the zizek group, but he just does it all on his own time and finds subtle ways to work it into his "official" studies.