In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life

by Regina G. Kunzel

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.

Genres: History, Queer, Nonfiction, Gender, LGBT, Psychology, Sexuality

239 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2024

Reviews

[Archie Hamerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently handled, but terribly harrowing stuff. Convincing account of how psychiatry comes to overtake sexology as the dominant regime claiming knowledge of sexual non normative, by and large because it claims to offer what sexology never did: a cure. While sexology was content to catalogue and find somatic raisons d’etre for the homosexual, mid century psychiatry capitalised on the American post war panic about dissident elements to promise — in terms of typically American positivity — to cure the homosexual. What follows this initial explanation are a catalogue of these ‘cures’, a harrowing read to be sure. Three points strike me at the end as being especially strong 1. Kunzel is correct to cautiously address what Love calls ‘affirmative historiography’, the temptation to document queer transgression so as to celebrate the overcoming of hegemonic discrimination, at the expense of actually covering that same discrimination; and yet Kunzel is also very good at even/handedly showing how the subjects of psychiatric power ‘disidentify’ to use Munoz’s term, finding a queer community in the very hospitals they were contained within 2. The stressing on how psychiatric diagnosis was a racialised and classed thing: for the same sexual behaviours, the white man may be sent to a shrink while the black man arrested; as such the diagnostic model for what a curable homosexual — as opposed to a criminal sexual offender — looked like was skewed from its instantiation 3. The note late in the book, on how to secure a ‘normal’ homosexuality, one that could attain rights and legal presence, gender non conformity was penalised, cordoned off from sexuality; it strikes me that this is the mid century seed of what becomes that nasty strain of LGB without the T thought we’re now dealing with.

[Ellen Moth · Rating 5 out of 5]

really crazy that i kept crying through this book like really crazy like

[Melody Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is detailed and has wonderful insights. I just struggled with it due to the big blocks of text and how it runs together without smooth transitions .
Still as a resource it is good for information. Just hard to glean from writing style. I considered trying to see if it was available in audio format, which it wasn't, just for ease to read.
would love to see an audio book version or an updated format which is easier to read.