How are we to understand the historical relationship between queerness and disability? How might queer history illuminate disability history and vice versa? Drawing from her new project on the encounter of LGBT/queer people with psychiatry, Kunzel explores the possibilities of bringing together histories of disability and queerness, both for conceptions of sexual and gender difference during the height of psychiatric authority in the mid twentieth century and for the activist assault on that authority in the 1960s and 1970s.
Regina Kunzel is an historian of gender and sexuality in the 20th-century U.S ., with interdisciplinary interests in American Studies and LGBTQ studies. Her research focuses on the twined histories of difference and normalcy, the regulatory force of carceral institutions, and relationships between expert discourses and the self-representations of historical subjects.