The War on Sex
David M. Halperin is W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality in the English Department at the University of Michigan and the author, most recently, of
Trevor Hoppe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and author of
David M. Halperin is W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality in the English Department at the University of Michigan and the author, most recently, of
Trevor Hoppe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and author of
Sex Panic, Psychiatry, and the Expansion of the Carceral State
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Published:March 2017
This essay examines the development and codification of one of the many sexual psychopath laws passed in the mid-twentieth-century United States, the Miller Sexual Psychopath Law. By reading and analyzing the congressional discussion, expert testimony, and debates on the bill, this chapter tracks the ways in which the criminalization of the sexual psychopath was mediated and effectively erased as criminalization through the discourse of medicine. Finally, it considers the investments of early gay activists in challenging psychiatric authority and overthrowing the medical model of homosexuality that underwrote laws like the Miller Law.
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