Search results
Anecdotal evidence of the testimonies of patients who received treatments for sexual deviations and medical attitudes towards them are scattered in the recorded accounts of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersex and queer/questioning (GLBTIQ) people. This book examines the plight of men who were institutionalised in British mental hospitals to receive 'treatment' for homosexuality and transvestism, and the perceptions and actions of the men and women who nursed them. It explores why the majority of the nurses followed orders in administering the treatment - in spite of the zero success-rate in 'straightening out' queer men - but also why a small number surreptitiously defied their superiors by engaging in fascinating subversive behaviours. The book is specifically about the treatments developed for sexual deviations in the UK. Transvestism was also treated fairly widely; however, not to the same extent as homosexuality. After an examination of the oppression and suppression of the sexual deviant, the introduction of aversion therapies for sexual deviance is considered. During the 1930s-1950s, mental health care witnessed a spirit of 'therapeutic optimism' as new somatic treatments and therapies were introduced in mental hospitals. The book also examines the impact these had on the role of mental nurses and explores how such treatments may have essentially normalised nurses to implement painful and distressing 'therapeutic' interventions . The book interprets the testimonies of these 'subversive nurses'. Finally, it explores the inception of 'nurse therapists' and discusses their role in administering aversion therapy.
’ (‘because he thought himself very badly brought up, | very badly educated with regard to his nature, | and also to conceal his identity’), ll. 3178–3180. Discussion of Silence's re-naming and the importance of ‘jonglerie’ in the poem can be found in R. Howard Bloch, ‘Silence and Holes: The Roman de Silence and the Art of the Trouvère’, Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 81–99; Cooper, ‘Elle and L’, 341–360; Gallagher, ‘Modernity’, 31–42; Perret ‘‘Travesties et transsexuelles’, 328–340; and Loren Ringer, ‘Exchange, Identity and Transvestism in Le Roman de Silence
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
representing slippages between them’. 3 In this respect the werewolf can be read as what Marjorie Garber, in the context of transvestism, has called a ‘third term’. For Garber, women dressed as men and vice versa are usually subsumed to one sex or the other by critical discourse, when in fact they operate as a third category in their own right. She explains: The ‘third’ is that which questions binary thinking and
perception in relation to the use of aversion therapy to ‘cure’ homosexuality and transvestism. 1 ‘Curing queers’ In this way, it seeks to offer fresh insight into both patients’ and nurses’ perspectives on these treatments. It uses testimonies of patients and nurses to explore the subject in ways that have not been attempted before, and to texture more broadly focused histories of these treatments and this period. This echoes recent moves towards micro-histories particularly when looking at sexuality and nursing, as a way of framing and answering questions about
those feelings in terms of homosexual or heterosexual transvestism.6 Over the next ten years, the US national picture changed from one of no significant institutional support for transsexual endocrinology, therapy, and surgery to a situation where by 1975 about twenty major medical centres were offering treatment and some thousand transsexuals had been provided with surgery.7 Though the early focus was on what are now termed trans women (then called REAY (Sex in the Archives) PRINT.indd 132 08/08/2018 15:44 the diaries of louis graydon sullivan ale
surgery to treat what they considered to be a psychiatric condition. In a 1957 article in the main Scandinavian psychiatric journal, psychiatrist Per Anchersen argued that ‘it would be unjustifiable not to do everything possible to help him to a satisfactory psycho-social adjustment’, writing about so-called ‘male transvestites’, ignoring the patients’ identities and preferred pronouns (Anchersen, 1957 ). The task of the psychiatrist was ‘To help the transvestites, not to cure genuine transvestism’, he wrote, referring to the older term for transsexuality
conflict with her or his gender role enters a treatment programme for transsexuals, he argues, but is also the result of a historical development. His historical analysis of this transformation was based on his reading of the secondary histories of ‘sexual inversion’, hermaphroditism and transvestism.2 Here I hope to present a more profound analysis of that very transformation based on hermaphrodite case histories. I hope to demonstrate, that what was once a social, moral and sometimes legal conflict concerning a person inscribed as male or female whose physical sex
ideal was threatened by the concept of effeminacy and transvestism. Indeed, many simply yielded to the prevailing attitude of heterosexual domesticity, which was promoted within the film. Albert Holliday recalls how the pressure of this ‘propaganda’ largely influenced his decision to get married: It seemed that every film I watched and book I read made marriage look like such an attractive option. Maybe I was brainwashed [. . .] I didn’t want to be lonely and there were a lot of questions from my family regarding me getting married [. . .] I had met a girl at art