"We Are Certain of Our Own Insanity": Antipsychiatry and the Gay Liberation Movement, 1968–1980

• Published in: Journal of the history of sexuality 2016-01, Vol.25 (1), p.83-113
• Main Author: LEWIS, ABRAM J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activists; Behavior; Community psychiatry; Comparative analysis; Feminism; Gay rights movement; Gay rights movements; Gays & lesbians; Health aspects; History; Homosexuality; Identification and classification; Lesbianism; Male homosexuality; Media coverage; Mens health; Mental disorders; Mental health care; Mental illness; Political activism; Political conventions; Politics; Psychiatrists; Psychiatry; Queer culture; Queer studies; Sexuality; Social activism; Studies
• ISSN: 1043-4070; 1535-3605
• DOI: 10.7560/JHS25104

[...]the DSM campaign of the early 1970s occurred on the heels of an array of critiques developed by antipsychiatric, antiracist, feminist, and antiwar activists during the 1960s, all of which targeted psychiatric constructions of mental illness.9 As historian Michael Staub has argued, the social movement era thus bears note as a period in which "a significant portion of the populace . . . believed madness to be a plausible and sane reaction to insane social conditions, and that psychiatrists served principally as agents of repression. In privileging affective force over ideology, self-loss over identity, and disorder over reform, these works evince a distinctly anarchic vision of the political possibilities of nonnormative gender and sexuality. [...]this vision of an unruly, self- and society-eroding queerness stands in contrast to narratives of this period as a time of gay identity consolidation, a time when gay communities were finally released from their stigmatization as "disordered" and territorialized as a social minority group.