Disability Series, Episode #1 of 4. How and when scientists, doctors, and society started conceiving of the physical and emotional components of same-sex desire as a psychiatric condition of the mind? This was neither an ancient belief nor a postmodern (aka, post-1950) one, and it wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon either. Rather, the classification of same-sex desire as a “disorder” had its roots in the foundations of psychiatry as a profession in the 19th century. Over the last 100+ years, that classification impacted indiv...
Disability Series, Episode #1 of 4. How and when scientists, doctors, and society started conceiving of the physical and emotional components of same-sex desire as a psychiatric condition of the mind? This was neither an ancient belief nor a postmodern (aka, post-1950) one, and it wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon either. Rather, the classification of same-sex desire as a “disorder” had its roots in the foundations of psychiatry as a profession in the 19th century. Over the last 100+ years, that classification impacted individuals all across the world. You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, whose work in the 1920s standardized a form of talk therapy that sought to interpret actions, thoughts, and desires through a particular lens of analysis. “Psychoanalysis,” though short-lived as a psychiatric practice, was certainly part of the longer-term framing of queerness and transness as “mental illness.” But Freud is just the tip of the iceberg. Today we’re digging into the history and relationship between psychiatry and sexuality; the scientific theories of sexuality that helped shape modern ideas about the relations between gender, genitals, desire, and identity; and the consequences of the medicalization of sexuality.
Bibliography
- Adriaens, Pieter R., and Block, Andreas De. Of Maybugs and Men : A History and Philosophy of the Sciences of Homosexuality, University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- James E. Bennett and Chris Brickell, "Surveilling the Mind and Body: Medicalising and De-medicalising Homosexuality in 1970s New Zealand," Medical History 62, no. 2 (2018): 199-216.
- Ross Brooks, “Transforming Sexuality: The Medical Sources of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95) and the Origins of the Theory of Bisexuality,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 67 (2010) 177–216.
- Maurice Casey, “‘I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America’: Esotericism and Queer Sexuality in an Irish Social Circle, 1890s–1920s,” History Workshop Journal, 00 (2025), 1–22.
- Mian Chen, "Homo(sexual) socialist: Psychiatry and homosexuality in China in the Mao and early Deng eras," Gender & History 36 (2024): 657-672.
- Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1894)
- Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature (2000)
- John Stuart Miller, "Trip Away the Gay? LSD's Journey from Antihomosexual Psychiatry to Gay Liberationist Toy, 1955-1980," Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 33, no. 2 (May 2024)
- Lamia Moghnieh, "The Broken Promise of Institutional Psychiatry: Sexuality, Women and Mental Illness in 1950s Lebanon," Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 47 (2023): 82-98
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