Maddening Queers: Psychiatric Discourses Around 2SLGBTQIA+ Identities in Twentieth Century Canada

Abstract

Much has been written about the history of 2SLGBTQIA+ people and their treatment in psychiatric institutions in parts of the world such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Despite the former two countries being Canada’s main psychiatric influences, little has been written (in academic literature) on the subject within the Canadian context. This thesis aims to help fill in this research gap, using a Foucauldian genealogical method applied to five archives, of which two represent professional psychiatric/psychological and sexological perspectives, and three represent the perspectives and stories of lesbian, gay, transsexual, and ex-mental patient activists. What was found was a sexual-sanist logic, which uses sexuality as a marker of mental illness, and vice versa. Sexual-sanism, specifically, highlights the sexual dimensions of sanism, which is a system of oppression and prejudice levied against psychiatrized people; this includes a host of myths and prejudices which posits the “insane” person as more sexually deviant, dangerous, etc., while also positing sexually deviant and/or “queer” people as more mentally unstable. In this logic, as it applies to the time period of 1962-1991 in Canada, the criteria of observed “inappropriate relating” and “inappropriate re/acting” are used as markers of mental illness. This logic was applied to three separate, but overlapping, threads of discourse, one of which split transgender people into normative “transsexual” and deviant “transvestite” categories; the second of which both criminalised queerness and generated a perverse category of heterosexuality, based on legal policy concerning dangerous sexual offences and psychiatric literature on sexually anomalous males; and the third of which focused on the testimonies of queer (and generally nonnormative) people in psychiatric wards. Suggestions are given for future research through oral history and specific foci in provincial archives and QTBIPOC activist history.