In the Shadow of Diagnosis

"Regina Kunzel here draws upon previously unseen case files to argue for a much subtler understanding of how 20th-century LGBTQ Americans conceived of themselves and the diagnoses they received from psychiatrists, showing the ways in which they assimilated, accommodated, challenged, rejected, and rearticulated the judgment that they were sick. She argues that, as central as psychiatry was to LGBTQ identity, the discipline's own expanding claims to authority were anchored in its assertion of expertise over gender and sexual difference. That is, shrinks told people they were sick; but in both acquiescing to and resisting this diagnosis, those people showed that shrinks were powerful"--