It is not a sympathetic portrait, but it also not a flattened or neocolonial one in which Ugandans are denied the ability to create and resist their own apparatuses of oppression.
Implicit in Waidzunas’s argument, I believe, is an assertion that to understand the contemporary transnational politics of sexuality, we must recognize how sexuality articulates itself in the context of intersecting forms of inequality, including global White supremacy, post-colonialism, and patriarchy. The major parallel to the US-based discourse is how Uganda’s institutional heterosexism turns upon definitions of homosexuality that are created through the alchemy of science and culture. Resisting the somewhat reductionist thesis about the “Gay International” and the American Left’s similarly reductionist claims that Africans “learned” homophobia from Christian missionaries and conservative activists, Waidzunas finds that Ugandans have produced their own ideologies about homosexuality. Waidzunas finds that Ugandans have not simply imported Western heterosexism. But especially important is the book’s final chapter, in which Waidzunas travels to Africa to explain how the US war over ex-gay therapy has influenced Uganda’s efforts to outlaw and eradicate homosexuality. There are many commendable parts of the book, including Waidzunas’s careful tracing of the American Psychological Association’s task force that in 2009 came out expressly against SOCEs and his portrait of Robert Spitzer, a profoundly influential psychiatrist who played a complicated and shifting role in virtually all major stages of the story Waidzunas tells. In other words, in drawing the line at what counts as straight – and, therefore, what does not count as straight – these scientists and activists were also differentiating between what a person says they are and what they really are. At stake in these debates, Waidzunas shows, is not just whether or not SOCEs do the work they claim to do indeed, these scientists and activists were waging a kind of war over what “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” actually are. These testimonies were routinely deemed unreliable and invalid, particularly when compared to assessments of sexual desire that were purportedly more accurate, including phallometric testing. At the same time, this meant discrediting the subjective testimonies of ex-gays who believed that such therapies enabled them to become heterosexual and live the life they wanted. In this case, those who supported affirmative therapies for gays and lesbians (as opposed to SOCEs) considered the subjective experiences of those traumatized by ex-gay therapy to be an unassailable form of evidence. Sometimes, for example, this meant privileging the individual testimonies of those who had undergone SOCEs as evidence of harm. Their practices, he finds, were often scientifically arbitrary but politically functional. Instead, Waidzunas maps decades of intermingling among activists and scientists who worked within – and sometimes around – the political economy of psychology to leverage knowledge and evidence in their favor.
WHY AM I GAY SCIENCE PRO
He finds that the historic debates in psychology over whether or not SOCEs were ethical and/or effective is hardly a pro vs. Such “treatments” include aversion therapies and electromagnetic stimulation, they have produced results that are deeply contentious. Waidzunas skillfully wields the critical tools of sociology of science and interdisciplinary science studies to uncover the choreographed maneuvering of those who advocated for or against the use of so-called ex-gay therapies, that is, efforts to transform individuals with homosexual desires and attractions into heterosexuals. In doing so, he makes an incredibly important argument about scientific knowledge production, activism, and rights that should affect the way we think about the usually fraught relationship between sexual politics and science. In doing so, he renders psychology and psychiatry’s disciplinary practices into a dynamic landscape of norms, social actors, controversies, alliances, botched studies, and watershed moments that extend far beyond the laboratory or clinic and that blur the traditional boundaries between scientists and the “lay” public. how psychologists routinely assess the troubled history of their discipline, including the recent torture scandal outlined in the infamous Hoffman Report), Waidzunas approaches psychology and its auxiliary disciplines obliquely and as an outsider. Rather than treat the history of sexual orientation change efforts (SOCEs) from an intradisciplinary perspective (e.g.
In The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality (2015), Temple University (USA) sociologist Tom Waidzunas interrogates the psychology of sexuality in ways that most psychologists are incapable or unwilling to do.