2022 Distinguished Annual Lecture by Regina Kunzel

In Treatment: Psychiatry and the Archives of Modern Sexuality

This talk explores the encounter of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the mid-20th-century U.S. and examines the role of psychiatric scrutiny and stigma in the making of modern sexuality.  Focusing on the archive of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, DC, Kunzel reflects on its meaning and challenges to queer history. 

Regina Kunzel

Regina Kunzel is the Larned Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Kunzel’s research focuses on histories of gender and sexuality, carcerality, and on the twined histories of sexual deviance and normalcy. Kunzel’s publications include Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993), and articles on queer history, transgender studies, disability studies, the history of prison sexual culture, single pregnancy, and gender and professionalization. Kunzel’s current project explores the encounter of LGBT/queer people with psychiatry in the twentieth-century United States.