Emmett Harsin Drager, “Too Much Mother: Transsexual Etiology, Gender Clinics, and the Pathologization of the Racialized Family”
Monday, April 18th, at 4pm (Zoom Link)
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, universities across the country operated gender clinics for the study and treatment of so-called gender deviance. At UCLA’s Gender Identity Research Clinic, Dr. Robert J. Stoller was preoccupied with identifying a cause (and therefore, treatment) of transsexuality. Stoller argued that transsexuality was the result of an overbearing mother who did not allow her child to differentiate. In this talk, Emmett Harsin Drager uncovers the connections between the etiological theory of “too much mother” and ideas about gender deviance and the racialized family. Harsin Drager’s archival research exposes how in the early days of university gender research, there were many patients who made their way to the clinics via state psychiatric hospitals and/or the criminal justice system. These patients, often people of color, provided the foundation for early theories of transsexual etiology. Their stories foreground how psychiatric detention and unfreedom were necessary conditions for the production of modern sex and gender.
Emmett Harsin Drager is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Their dissertation, “To Be Seen: Transsexuals and the Gender Clinics” is about the history and trajectory of trans therapeutics in the US. Their writing can be found in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
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