Article
ID: CBB000930181

Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine: Homosexuality, the Kinsey Reports, and the Contested Boundaries of Psychopathology in the United States, 1948--1965 (2008)

unapi
Psychology Mental disorders and diseases Diagnosis Psychiatry Homosexuality Psychiatry Medicine and science, relationships Clinical psychology 20th century United States Kinsey, Alfred C.

Despite the well-documented intensive battle between Alfred Kinsey and American psychiatrists around the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that Kinsey's work, in fact, played a significant role in transforming mental health experts' view of homosexuality starting as far back as the late 1940s and extending all the way through the mid-1960s. After analyzing the way in which Kinsey's work pushed American psychiatrists to re-evaluate their understanding of homosexuality indirectly through the effort of clinical psychologists, I then focus to a greater extent on examples that illustrate how the Kinsey reports directly influenced members of the psychiatric community. In the conclusion, using a Foucauldian conception of discourse, I propose that in order to approach the struggle around the pathological status of homosexuality in the 1950s and the 1960s, thinking in terms of a politics of knowledge is more promising than simply in terms of a politics of diagnosis. Central to the struggle was not merely the matter of medical diagnosis, but larger issues regarding the production of knowledge at an intersection of science and medicine where the parameters of psychopathology were disputed in the context of mid-twentieth-century United States. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Authors & Contributors
Zorzanelli, Rafaela Teixeira
Matsubayashi, Kozo
Daker, Mauricio V.
Okumiya, Kiyohito
Polaris Koi
Henze, Patrick
Journals
History of Psychiatry
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Social History of Medicine
Psychoanalysis and History
Publishers
Oxford University Press
University of Chicago Press
Brill
Indiana University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT
Concepts
Psychiatry
Mental disorders and diseases
Diagnosis
Psychology
Clinical psychology
Homosexuality
People
Morgenthaler, Fritz
Sullivan, Harry Stack
Spitzer, Robert L.
Kraepelin, Emil
Janet, Pierre
George III, King of England
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Ancient
Places
United States
Great Britain
Brazil
Edinburgh
Greece
France
Institutions
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
United States. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA)
American Psychiatric Association
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