HSTM Events

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.

Abstract: Between 1400 and 1600, English readers gained increasing access to practical medical and scientific knowledge, first in vernacular manuscript collections, and later in inexpensive, printed books. As I argue in my first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, engagement with this knowledge—much of it very old—in recipes, prognostications, almanacs, and other pragmatic texts, encouraged English readers to see themselves as adjudicators and even progenitors of knowledge in their own right. This talk, however, drawn from the final chapter of the book, illustrates how Elizabethan readers reinterpreted the contents of fifteenth-century manuscripts to invent an “English” history of medicine and science and to argue for the supremacy of English ingenuity. While the democratization of medical and scientific knowledge in manuscripts and printed books did encourage an emergent culture of scientific curiosity among English readers, in this talk I argue that these same books also became sources for those who would use nature to define categories of exclusion.