Overview

"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."

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9780226830193

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Reviews

“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 *

Author Information

Regina Kunzel is the Larned Professor of History and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Kunzel is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality, also published by the University of Chicago Press.  

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