Fall 2024 Colloquium - Reg Kunzel

Larned Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

Title: In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life

Abstract: Beginning in the mid-20th century, psychiatrists diagnosed homosexuality and gender variance as mental disorders that they claimed to be able to treat and “cure.”  That stigmatizing diagnosis sanctioned larger structures of discrimination and cast a stigmatizing pall over queer and trans people for decades. It also granted psychiatrists tremendous authority, underwriting their collaborations with the US state and strengthening its carceral apparatus.  Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files, Kunzel explores the significance of the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people.