Persistent Pathologies: The Odd Coupling of Alcoholism and Homosexuality in the Discourses of Twentieth Century Science (2006)
Morales, Michele Elaine (Author)
University of Michigan
Boyd, Carol J.
Halperin, David M.
Edition Details: Advisor: Boyd, Carol J.; David M. Halperin
Physical Details: 216 pp.
Language: English
Persistent Pathologies tracks the association between homosexuality and alcoholism in research produced by four scientific disciplines throughout the twentieth century: psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and epidemiology. It examines the constancy of the claim that gay, lesbian and bisexual people experience higher rates of alcohol problems than their heterosexual counterparts. Despite various approaches across different historical contexts, and often against data suggesting otherwise, scientists have maintained, and perpetually revitalized, a correlation between homosexuality and substance abuse. 'Alcoholism,' as the term is now understood in scientific writing, first appeared in research on homosexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Alcoholism and homosexuality were further drawn together by the psychoanalytic theory suggesting latent homosexuality as the single etiological cause of alcohol disorders. American psychologists tested this theory on treatment populations of alcoholics at mid-century. Not finding a clear association, they shifted attention to 'overt' homosexuals as more likely to evidence alcohol problems, and by the early 1970s, alcoholism emerged as a particular problem for the gay community. In the debates over the inclusion of homosexuality within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Diseases , activists and researchers argued that while some percentage of the gay population suffered from mental disorders, this could not be true of the population as a whole. Following this logic, scientists turned their attention to the prevalence of psychopathology among the gay population, producing research which furthered, rather than disrupted, the longstanding correlation between homosexuality and alcohol addiction. Examined from a historical perspective, the continuity of the alcohol-homosexuality association evidences the presence of a larger, and largely subterranean, structuring frame persistently linking homosexuality to disease, while conversely protecting heterosexuality from any linkage to risk or bad health. Persistent Pathologies draws together the history of addiction and historical studies in sexuality, using a theoretical framework from cultural studies, queer theory, the history of sexuality, and the philosophy of science to investigate the effects of depathologization on what homosexuality has come to mean in the discourses of health science. This thesis argues that current conceptions of risk and health used in the health sciences continue to contain homosexuality within a sickness model.
...MoreDescription “Examines the constancy of the claim that gay, lesbian and bisexual people experience higher rates of alcohol problems than their heterosexual counterparts.” Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/07 (2007). UMI pub. no. 3224705.
Similar Citations
Book
Minton, Henry L.;
(2002)
Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America
(/isis/citation/CBB000201485/)
Thesis
Roska, Claudia L.;
(2013)
Margaret “Marty” Mann's Public Health Message: Transforming Drunkards into Deserving Patients, 1904--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB001562888/)
Article
Dunne, Stephen;
(2014)
Figurational Sociology and the Rhetoric of Post-Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001420225/)
Article
Goodwin, C. James;
(2014)
Walter Miles and His Research on Low Dose Alcohol (1914--1924): Shifting The Emphasis from Intoxication to Impairment
(/isis/citation/CBB001550681/)
Thesis
Nelson, Nicole Christine;
(2011)
Capturing Complexity: Experimental Systems and Epistemic Scaffolds in Animal Behavior Genetics
(/isis/citation/CBB001567338/)
Article
Spurlock, John C.;
(2002)
From Reassurance to Irrelevance: Adolescent Psychology and Homosexuality in America
(/isis/citation/CBB000201133/)
Article
Chiang, Howard Hsueh-Hao;
(2008)
Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine: Homosexuality, the Kinsey Reports, and the Contested Boundaries of Psychopathology in the United States, 1948--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB000930181/)
Article
Katherine Hubbard;
(2017)
Queer Signs: The Women of the British Projective Test Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB757899023/)
Article
Aaron Lahl;
Patrick Henze;
(2020)
Developing Homosexuality: Fritz Morgenthaler, Junction Points and Psychoanalytic Theory
(/isis/citation/CBB304045330/)
Article
Chris Brickell;
(2021)
Psychiatry, psychology and homosexual prisoners in New Zealand, 1910–1960
(/isis/citation/CBB182591572/)
Thesis
Whidden, Rachel Faron Avon;
(2005)
Miraculous Rhetoric: Making the Improbable Probable
(/isis/citation/CBB001560607/)
Article
Egloff, Rainer;
(2014)
Gedankenverkehr, Kreuzung und Verdichtung
(/isis/citation/CBB001421013/)
Article
Rawls, Anne Warfield;
(2013)
The Early Years, 1939--1953: Garfinkel at North Carolina, Harvard and Princeton
(/isis/citation/CBB001200929/)
Book
Rembis, Michael A.;
(2011)
Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890--1960
(/isis/citation/CBB001212457/)
Book
Neil McLaughlin;
(2023)
Erich Fromm and Global Public Sociology
(/isis/citation/CBB702579581/)
Article
Jessica Pykett;
Mark Paterson;
(2022)
Stressing the ‘body electric’: History and psychology of the techno-ecologies of work stress
(/isis/citation/CBB933468112/)
Thesis
Knoblauch, Joy Ruth;
(2012)
Going Soft: Architecture and the Human Sciences in Search of New Institutional Forms (1963--1974)
(/isis/citation/CBB001567384/)
Book
Steven J. Taylor;
Alice Brumby;
(2019)
Healthy Minds in the Twentieth Century: In and Beyond the Asylum
(/isis/citation/CBB174872268/)
Article
Glick, Megan H.;
(2011)
Of Sodomy and Cannibalism: Dehumanisation, Embodiment and the Rhetorics of Same-Sex and Cross-Species Contagion
(/isis/citation/CBB001212657/)
Book
Roger Backhouse;
Philippe Fontaine;
(2014)
A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB228335499/)
Be the first to comment!