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In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life

Date
-
Location
Lane History Corner 307

Professor Regina Kunzel (Yale University) will be presenting her most recent book In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (UChicago Press, 2024). See the abstract below for more information. 

Refreshments will be offered!

Abstract: In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

Bio: Regina Kunzel is Larned Professor of History and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Kunzel is an historian of the modern United States with interests in histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, the history of psychiatry, and the history of incarceration. Kunzel’s book Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (UChicago Press, 2008), was awarded the AHA’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality’s Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize.  Kunzel is also the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale UP, 1993).