Of Disease and Identity: Scientific Internationalism, Sexual Modernity, and the (De)pathologization of Homosexuality in China (1978-2001)

• In Event: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - II: Sexual and Gender Deviance in and Beyond Biomedicine

Abstract

Science studies scholars have extensively examined the history between homosexuality and American mental health profession, such as anti-psychiatry movement (Lewis 2015), changes of psy-biopower after depathologization (Das 2016), ex-gay science (Waidzunas 2015), and seminal work around AIDS (Epstein 1996). However, we know little about how such entanglements are transposed and instantiated in non-American contexts, especially considering the global hegemony of American biomedicine and gayness. This project looks at the ghosts of the U.S. psychosis, homosexuality, in post-socialist China. As part of my dissertation project on the circulation and creolization of psychosexual diagnosis, expertise, and technologies, this paper examines the depathogization of homosexuality in China. Based on oral history conducted with psychiatrists and activists involved in depathologization, I find that some closeted psychiatrists used disease status to protect homosexual patients from criminalization and treated homosexuality to experiment their own homoerotic desire. Nevertheless, nascent gay activists disregarded such internal complexity and asserted depathologization as the normalization path to modern sexual identification. The activist successful evocation of the scientific and moral authority of WHO’s ICD and U.S. pro-gay research reflects the shifting foundation of clinical authority from state-sanctioned political psychiatry to global epistemic community. On the other hand, the ideal of scientific internationalism also sparked backlash deeming homosexuality as an imperialist threat to socialist hygiene. By unveiling how (de)pathologization became the locus for articulating postsocialist psychiatric authority and sexual modernity, this project sheds lights on the transpacifically-mediated afterlife of homosexuality and psychiatry.

Author

• Suisui Wang, Indiana University