From reassurance to irrelevance: adolescent psychology and homosexuality in America

American psychology by the 1920s contained a greater capacity for viewing some homosexual experiences as normal than most current historical literature suggests. Developmental psychologists agreed with psychiatrists that adult homosexuality was pathological, but they also agreed that adolescent sexual development included a homosexual phase. Until the late 1960s, developmental texts reassured parents and teachers that homosexual behavior among adolescents was transitory and quite normal. The psychiatric view of homosexuality as pathology came under attack after the middle of the century and eventually was abandoned. The developmental concern with a transitory homosexual phase disappeared gradually. This trend in psychology suggests underlying social and cultural changes.     

Collective action and the politics of affect

The anti-globalisation has shifted away from a politics that aims to uncover and resist neoliberal ideology to one that bypasses and potentially disrupts habits of thinking about neoliberalism. Focusing on mass gatherings such as the Seattle demonstrations in 1999, several scholars suggest that the anti-globalisation movement has embraced a politics of affect that, while potentially increasing the collective's capacity for action, also risks strengthening existing divisions and creating sad passions. In response to these concerns, this article develops an account of the affective politics the World Social Forum has moved to. Drawing on my experiences at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre I describe the Forum as a space in which social movements from around the globe testify to their experiences of struggle. I employ Freireian pedagogical techniques and theories of brain-body connections to develop an account of the way in which testimony and dialogue generate new thinking from which a collective language can emerge. I suggest that the discourse that arises can lead to new ways of being.     

‘You beat ‘em,we feed ‘em!’: Enfolding laughter and pride

In this article I use the affective politics of laughter as an entry point into broadening understandings of the political potentiality of the everyday geographies of pride, centralizing in my analysis a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I look to the ways in which the encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from bodily vitality and survival, feelings of collective belonging, and structural realities and inequalities. Using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold to structure my analysis, I use laughter as a lens to advance an understanding of pride that emphasizes its entanglement with collective affect and its immanent multiplicity as it is embodied through everyday encounters with difference. I emphasize the affective component of laughter's foldings as a means to think through the way vibrational pulls, pushes, tenors and tones work to move bodies toward or away from collectives, spaces, politics, ideas, relationships and ways of living. Exploring pride through the affective politics of laughter is a way to advance understandings of pride as emerging always in relation to collectives, histories, and spaces, rather than as an individual trait. Such a reframing has implications for understanding affective politics as a resource for social justice projects.     

The professionalisation of non-denominational religious education in England: politics,organisation and knowledge

In response to contemporary concerns, and using neglected primary sources, this article explores the professionalisation of teachers of Religious Education (RI/RE) in non-denominational, state-maintained schools in England. It does so from the launch of Religion in Education (1934) and the Institute for Christian Education at Home and Abroad (ICE) (1935) to the founding of the Religious Education Council of England and Wales (1973) and the British Journal of Religious Education (1978). Professionalisation is defined as a collective historical process in terms of three inter-related concepts: (1) professional self-organisation and professional politics; (2) professional knowledge; and (3) initial and continuing professional development. The article sketches the history of non-denominational religious education prior to the focus period, to contextualise the emergence of the professionalising processes under scrutiny. Professional self-organisation and professional politics are explored by reconstructing the origins and history of ICE, which became the principal body offering professional development provision for RI/RE teachers for some 50 years. Professional knowledge is discussed in relation to the content of Religion in Education which was oriented around Christian Idealism and interdenominational networking. Changes in journal name in the 1960s and 1970s reflected uncertainties about the orientation of the subject and shifts in understanding over the nature and character of professional knowledge. The article also explores a particular case of resistance, in the late 1960s, to the prevailing consensus surrounding the nature and purpose of RI/RE, and the representativeness and authority of the pre-eminent professional body of the time. In conclusion, the article examines some implications which may be drawn from this history for the prospects and problems of the professionalisation of RE today.     

Contractualism,Person-Affecting Wrongness and the Non-identity Problem

A number of theorists have argued that Scanlon's contractualist theory both "gets around" and "solves" the non-identity problem. They argue that it gets around the problem because hypothetical deliberation on general moral principles excludes the considerations that lead to the problem. They argue that it solves the problem because violating a contractualist moral principle in one's treatment of another wrongs that particular other, grounding a person-affecting moral claim. In this paper, I agree with the first claim but note that all it shows is that the act is impersonally wrong. I then dispute the second claim. On Scanlon's contractualist view, one wrongs a particular other if one treats the other in a way that is unjustifiable to that other on reasons she could not reasonably reject. We should think of person-affecting wronging in terms of the reasons had by the actual agent and the actual person affected by the agent's action. In non-identity cases, interpersonal justifiability is therefore shaped both by the reason to reject the treatment provided by the bad suffered and the reason to affirm the treatment provided by the goods had as a result of existing. I argue it would be reasonable for the actual person to find the treatment justifiable, and so I conclude that Scanlon's contractualist metaethics does not provide a narrow person-affecting solution to the non-identity problem on its own terms. I conclude that the two claims represent a tension within Scanlon's contractualist theory itself.     

Gay rights,the devil and the end times: public religion and the enchantment of the homosexuality debate in Zambia

This article contributes to the understanding of the role of religion in the public and political controversies about homosexuality in Africa. As a case study it investigates the heated public debate in Zambia following a February 2012 visit by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who emphasised the need for the country to recognise the human rights of homosexuals. The focus is on a particular Christian discourse in this debate, in which the international pressure to recognise gay rights is considered a sign of the end times, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN and other international organisations are associated with the Antichrist and the Devil. Here, the debate about homosexuality becomes eschatologically enchanted through millennialist thought. Building on discussions about public religion and religion and politics in Africa, this article avoids popular explanations in terms of fundamentalist religion and African homophobia, but rather highlights the political significance of this discourse in a postcolonial African context.     

Talking about Homosexuality: The Views of Mainline Protestant Clergy

Homosexuality is one of the most divisive issues within mainline Protestantism today. In this article we portray the many sides of mainline Protestantism's debates about homosexuality through the lens of statements clergy made about the issue in early 2000. In interviews with 62 mainline Protestant clergy across the United States, 40 volunteered their views on homosexuality without being prompted. We describe the frames through which clergy understand and articulate issues related to homosexuality in the midst of contentious denominational debate about the subject. The majority of clergy who discussed homosexuality focused on the issue in their churches instead of in society at large, and in their denominations rather than in their own congregations. Moreover, virtually none of the clergy interviewed took hard and fast stands on the issue of homosexuality. Most approach the issue in a pragmatic, rather than prophetic, way. Our interviews also show that pastors who choose to speak on homosexuality tend to frame the issue in terms of the diffuse notion of "homosexuality," rather than talking about gay men and lesbians as people.     

The Return of the Dissociated: Discussion

Psychoanalysis and politics intersect variously. Some psychoanalytic writings have critiqued society, whereas others have applied socially critical insights about class and race to illuminate transference—countertransference enactments and other clinical matters. The hegemonic politics of psychoanalysis, less intentional but equally influential, define maturity and mental health by idealizing of some psychological and behavioral traits and some clinical stances (especially authoritarianism), and by demonizing of certain categories of persons (notably nonheterosexuals and people of color), certain types of practice (e.g., social work), and certain sorts of ideas (e.g., that clinical and theoretical practices are political practices, too). One way to redress these problems is to reclaim the marginal—homosexuality and queerness, affect's presence in politics, and the political in the psychical (in which instance, the concept of multiple self-states may be useful). Any such effort requires recognizing and articulating one's own subject-position, that is, one's own class, race, gender, or sexual location.     

DSM-III and the revolution in the classification of mental illness

A revolution occurred within the psychiatric profession in the early 1980s that rapidly transformed the theory and practice of mental health in the United States. In a very short period of time, mental illnesses were transformed from broad, etiologically defined entities that were continuous with normality to symptom-based, categorical diseases. The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) was responsible for this change. The paradigm shift in mental health diagnosis in the DSM-III was neither a product of growing scientific knowledge nor of increasing medicalization. Instead, its symptom-based diagnoses reflect a growing standardization of psychiatric diagnoses. This standardization was the product of many factors, including: (1) professional politics within the mental health community, (2) increased government involvement in mental health research and policymaking, (3) mounting pressure on psychiatrists from health insurers to demonstrate the effectiveness of their practices, and (4) the necessity of pharmaceutical companies to market their products to treat specific diseases. This article endeavors to explain the origins of DSM-III, the political struggles that generated it, and its long-term consequences for clinical diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in the United States.     

Rethinking homosexuality: what it teaches us about psychoanalysis

This presentation, written ten years after the American Psychoanalytic Association adopted a nondiscrimination policy with regard to sexual orientation, discusses the evolving relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality. The paper is in three sections: (1) the process of policy change and the overturning of injustice; (2) the excursion after Freud's death into analytic bias and extreme pathologizing of homosexuality, the struggle to overcome those distortions, and the lessons to be learned from this history; and (3) the search, in the coming decade, for new understanding of homosexuality and all aspects of sexuality.     

Coming out of the Hasidic closet: Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the fashioning of homosexual-Jewish identity

This essay inaugurates the historical study of the modern homosexual Jewish experience before Stonewall. I begin with a historiographic introduction to the emerging subfield of gay Jewish history. I then turn to reintroduce Jiri Langer, a homosexual and Hasidic writer affiliated with the interwar "Prague circle" (and friend of Franz Kafka and Max Brod) into the purview of modern Jewish Studies. I take up two questions: first, how Langer reconciled his homosexual and Orthodox religious identity; and second, why Langer"s homosexuality became exigent as a Jewish question at this particular historical moment. In his key text, Die Erotik der Kabbala, Langer engages with the dominant interwar debates on homosexuality, but most directly with the work of Hans Blüher, the major theoretician of the German Wandervogelbewegung. In the course of correcting Blüher's antisemitic claims about Jews and homosexuality, Langer managed to delineate a specifically homosexual Jewish identity by renegotiating the relationship between homosexuality and Judaism and by adumbrating a history of "gay" Jews. I contextualize this long-neglected text within Langer's fascinating biography; the debates in the early homosexual rights movement; the particular cultural features of the "Prague circle" in which Langer wrote; and the dislocation and devastation of Langer's beloved eastern-European Hasidic communities caused by World War I—communities that Langer experienced as deeply homoerotic.     

The catechism of the citizen: politics,law and religion in,after, with and against Rousseau

As a way of thinking through the bleakness of the political present through which we are all too precipitously moving, this essay attempts to demonstrate the interconnections between three concepts: politics, law and religion. By way of a detailed reading of Rousseau, I try to show how any conception of legitimate politics and law requires a conception of religion at its base and as its basis. In my view, this is highly problematic and in the conclusion an argument is presented for a politics of the supreme fiction, which attempts to show how poetry might take the place of religion.

Between the cup of principle and the lip of practice: ethnic minorities and American psychology, 1966-1980

By 1980, the previously held dichotomy of Black and White racial identity in America had yielded to a mosaic of red, yellow, brown, black, and white. During the 1960s and 1970s, identity, and thus psychological knowledge, were articulated and differentiated in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and class in unprecedented ways. In this article, the author contextualizes efforts to make mainstream American psychology more receptive to ethnic minorities between 1966 and 1980. Advocacy and activism by ethnic minority psychologists forced American mainstream psychology to yield a place at the table to non-White, non-European individuals. He emphasizes the recruitment and retention of ethnic minority graduate students and faculty, and concludes that many individual psychologists were important in forcing changes in these areas.     

Subculture Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Assessment of the Concept for Understanding Deviance

Subcultures attract attention in culture, society, and the media because they have been theorized as not merely distinct from, but also in opposition to, the dominant culture. In the United States and the United Kingdom the concept of subculture has been a major explanatory tool for sociology and criminology to understand deviant behavior. For nearly a hundred years the concept has been at the center of academic struggle for superiority between rival paradigmatic approaches, which have employed different theoretical explanations. In this article I critically assess the origins and politics of the way the concept of subculture has been applied primarily to youth cultures in terms of the relationship between agency and constraint.     

Nanotechnology, Contingency and Finitude

It is argued that the social significance of nanotechnologies should be understood in terms of the politics and ethics of uncertainty. This means that the uncertainties surrounding the present and future development of nanotechnologies should not be interpreted, first and foremost, in terms of concepts of risk. It is argued that risk, as a way of managing uncertain futures, has a particular historical genealogy, and as such implies a specific politics and ethics. It is proposed, instead, that the concepts of contingency and of finitude must be central to any understanding of the ethical significance of nanotechnologies, as these concepts can be used to understand the basis of recent work in science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge more widely, which details the multi-dimensional social nature of technological uncertainty.

Heidegger in the township

Imagine Heidegger in a township. Imagine you are able to translate his concept of ‘care’ to ‘the people’. Would they agree that in their ordinary experience people care? I argue not and contend that, instead, they would choose the term ‘struggle’. I analyse experiential aspects of ordinary life in the context of the township, which involves a significant part of people around the world, in order to argue that, at least in such contexts, it is a more common experience for people to struggle than to care. In this way I hope to show how a phenomenological analysis of everyday life experience such as Heidegger's can contribute to the understanding of contextual issues, but also how a context can induce the introduction of new concepts of thinking.     

Alfred Schutz's Influence on American Sociologists and Sociology

Alfred Schutz's influence on American sociologists and sociology in the 1960s and 1970s is traced through the examination of the work of two of his students, Helmut Wagner and Peter Berger, and of Harold Garfinkel with whom he met and corresponded over a number of years. The circumstances of Schutz's own academic situation, particularly the short period of his academic career in the United States and his location at the New School, are examined to consider how and in what ways he was constrained from exerting an even wider influence. The two major areas of influence in American sociology that are examined are the sociology of knowledge and the early development of ethnomethodology.     

The Movement of May 1968 and Theology in Latin America

Latin American liberation theology has almost never seen itself as an expression of or in direct relation to the international student movements of May 1968. Nevertheless, from today's perspective, one can say that what was called liberation theology was a web of relationships of many movements and events. It was undoubtedly part of the enormous worldwide movements of the 1960s, interacting with the various expressions of struggle for cultural and political liberation that manifested themselves in many different forms in different parts of the world. The same can be said about feminist liberation theology in Latin America, which emerged a few years later. Latin American feminist theology, however, unlike liberation theology, has never been concerned with making a claim of originality, nor has it struggled to be recognized as a typical Latin American way of thinking and movement. It is part of the tradition of the liberating spirit of the past and the present in its different forms, including the legacy of 1968.     

Edited correspondence on the status of homosexuality in DSM-III

In 1973, after a prolonged period of social agitation and professional conflict, the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its official listing of psychiatric disorders (DSM-II). In its place a new classification for homosexuals distressed over their orientation was to be included in DSM-II. Four years later an acrimonious dispute surfaced over the status of homosexuality in the revised APA nomenclature of disorders (DSM-III). The edited correspondence of the participants in this dispute is presented here as a way of revealing the lingering conflict over homosexuality within American psychiatry.     

Psychology and the politics of same-sex desire in the United States: an analysis of three cases

Psychological science has assumed an increasingly explicit role in public policies related to same-sex desire in the United States. In this article, we present a historical analysis of the relationship between policy discourse and scientific discourse on homosexuality produced within U.S. psychology over the 20th and early 21st centuries through the lens of three cases: Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and Perry v. Schwarzenegger (2010). Our analysis suggests that, for the majority of its disciplinary history, psychology produced knowledge that supported a status quo of legal and cultural subordination for same-sex-attracted individuals. The discipline's shift in understanding of homosexuality, reflected in a 1975 policy statement of the American Psychological Association, reversed this relationship and opened up space for advocacy for social and political change regarding homosexuality. Our analysis of policy decisions rendered by the courts reveals the increasingly important role psychological science has assumed in challenging the legal subordination of same-sex-attracted individuals, though the basis upon which psychological science has sought to inform policy remains limited. We conclude with a critical discussion of the type of knowledge claims psychologists have traditionally used to advocate for gay and lesbian rights, suggesting the vitality of a narrative approach which can reveal the meaning individuals make of legal subordination and political exclusion.