In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
Description
A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.
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.
Praise for In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
“In the Shadow of Diagnosis is a wrenching, utterly compelling, beautifully argued book that could not be more urgent or timely. Innovative in multiple ways—in thinking disability and queer theory together, in restoring concern with gender-nonconformity to the history of sexuality, and with a uniquely precious source base that shows how those deemed ‘sick’ spoke back to the diagnosing physicians—Kunzel demonstrates that the encounter between psychiatry and queerness was transformative for both.”
— Dagmar Herzog, author of Cold War Freud and Unlearning Eugenics
“In this fascinating book, Kunzel shows us not only how psychiatry shaped queer and trans identities in fundamental ways, but how queer activism adapted itself to resist psychiatric power by imagining new subjectivities and developing new forms of knowledge. This book challenges us to think about queer history and disability history together and to reexamine psychiatry’s relation to non-normative sexualities in a refreshingly new light.”
— Camille Robcis, Columbia University
“So much about this remarkable book feels serendipitous: A mid-century psychiatrist who required his patients at a government hospital to write down their self-understandings; years later, a government contractor who discovered these records and then delivered them to an idiosyncratic archivist; that archivist then helping those records find their way to an incredibly talented historian who by that point had spent much of her career thinking about the relationship between queer people and carceral spaces. The result of this unlikely series of events is a completely innovative and original study that demonstrates not only the deep entanglement but the mutually constituted nature of psychiatry and queer life in postwar America. It is also one of the most penetrating accounts of queer interiority ever written. This is an astonishing and profound work of history.”
— Margot Canaday, author of Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
"Yale history professor Kunzel (Criminal Intimacy) incisively probes the relationship between psychiatry and queerness in the U.S., from the birth of psychoanalysis in the 19th century to the 1973 removal of homosexuality as a disorder from the DSM and beyond. Kunzel traces how mid-20th-century American psychiatrists fashioned an “optimistic” view of homosexuality as “curable” (partly as a result of “postwar American confidence”), while European “pessimism” tended to frame homosexuality as innate. She further theorizes that the postwar fixation on homosexuality as a threat to “American values” helped elevate psychiatrists’ status, as they became experts on so-called “problems of everyday life.” Anchoring her work in the case files of Washington, D.C., psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Karpman, who from the 1920s through the 1950s insisted his patients record their lives in letters and journals, Kunzel mixes nuanced historical analysis with a revealing window into the experiences of those being treated, including their resistance to narratives of homosexuality and gender variance as conditions to be fixed."
— Publishers Weekly
"This beautifully written, highly recommended book will find readers across a wide spectrum of academic fields, notably the history of science and psychiatry. But general audiences interested in seeing how professionals can correct an industry will enjoy this too."
— Library Journal
"[A] tidy and at times harrowing account of the mistreatment and torment sustained by gay and gender-nonconforming Americans at the hands of the psychiatric establishment. Psychiatrists, Kunzel asserts, were not merely interested in caring for distressed patients or exerting their influence on the culture at large. They also sought to bolster their own power and authority by proclaiming subject-matter expertise regarding homosexuality and enforcing the heterosexual nuclear family as a Cold War-era bulwark against the existential threat of communism."
— NBC News
