histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, the history of psychiatry, and the history of incarceration. She is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality and Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945.
Kunzel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life, and reported the following:
Page 99 of In the Shadow of Diagnosis considers queer people’s resistance to psychiatric authority and treatment in the mid-20th-century U.S., and to psychiatrists’ insistence that homosexuality was a treatable mental illness in particular. It features evidence from the archival collection that inspired and enabled the book: a rich and remarkable set of previously unexamined case files from Saint Elizabeths Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C., in which psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman asked his patients to write autobiographies, journals, responses to questionnaires, and reviews of psychiatric texts. Page 99 includes one of my favorite lines drawn from one of those files. Frustrated by a lesbian who expressed “her profound skepticism with respect to all psychoanalytic findings and her intense resistance to all forms of psychic therapy,” Karpman acknowledged that “actually she does not want therapy. What she wants is either a social revolution which will permit her neurosis to be accepted, or a secret means of securing sexual gratification.”Learn more about In the Shadow of Diagnosis at the University of Chicago Press website.
Page 99 highlights gratifying stories of queer resilience and resistance. But to focus on resistance alone would require that we read the historical record very selectively and ignore evidence of the deep effects of stigma on queer and gender-nonconforming people that I explore beyond this page. The history of the encounter of queer people with psychiatry offers up resistance, to be sure. But it should not surprise us that for many, psychiatric thinking and treatment instilled, compounded, and consolidated a sense of stigma and shame. Others engaged psychiatry in more ambivalent and complex ways. One of the book’s challenging claims is that while psychiatry’s capture of queerness was far from complete, it is impossible to conceive of modern queer life sealed off from the influence of psychiatric thinking or stripped entirely clean of its assumptions.
Page 99 doesn’t shed light on another big claim of the book: that psychiatrists’ claim to expertise over homosexuality and gender variance underwrote the expansion of their power and authority at mid-century, used to broker some of their most important and strategic collaborations with the state. And so a story often told within the confines of the history of medicine or the history of the oppression of gay men and lesbians is also a story about American state and carceral power. In this history, (putatively) therapeutic and carceral spaces, practices, and logics blend and blur.
The Page 99 Test: Criminal Intimacy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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