Effecting science, affecting medicine

Homosexuality, the Kinsey reports, and the contested boundaries of psychopathology in the United States, 1948-1965

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4801042
AutoresHoward Chiang (0000-0002-3658-3565, Princeton University, autor de correspondencia), Howard Hsueh‐hao Chiang
Año2008
Volumen44
Número4
Páginas300-318
Fecha de publicación2008-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-5061 • E-ISSN: 1520-6696
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/jhbs.20343
PMID18831516
OpenAlexW2037501830
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas75

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. (c) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Battle · Context (archaeology) · Homosexuality · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychopathology · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Psychology