EVENT DETAILS

Regina Kunzel, lecture: "In Treatment: Psychiatry and the Archives of Modern Sexuality"

In the mid-twentieth-century U.S., psychiatrists were among the most powerful arbiters of judgment and authority over sexual and gender difference. This talk explores the encounter of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis and examines the role of psychiatric scrutiny and stigma in the making of modern sexuality. Focusing on the archive of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C., Kunzel reflects on its meaning and challenges to queer history.

Regina Kunzel is the Doris Stevens Chair and Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (2008). Criminal Intimacy was awarded the American Historical Association’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize. Kunzel is also the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (1993).

For more information: https://www.humanities.uci.edu/commons/ To request reasonable accommodations, please contact Jasmine Robledo (robledj1@uci.edu) or 949-824-4523.

Sponsored by the UC Irvine Medical Humanities Initiative, UC Irvine ADVANCE Program for Equity and Diversity, and the
Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies.