Diagnosing the Other: Race, Psychiatry, and U.S. Empire

This session examines how U.S. empire forged fluid yet powerful technologies of the pathologization of its “deviant,” “disordered,” “dysgenic,” and/or “insane” non-white or non-normative citizens and imperial subjects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. U.S. medical authority, however, was not total. We see Filipino physicians and popular movements contesting the clinical and legal parameters of defining insanity in colonial society. We also explore the contradictions of U.S. empire through the nativist fervor of eugenicists at home and its expansionist and transoceanic projects throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Lastly, this panel looks at how the logics of behavioral pathologization and intervention—a rising profession at the time—created a spectrum of eugenic-dysgenic movement of institutionalized people who had previously lived at the US-Mexico borderlands. It was not just the geospatial movement that concerned these interventionists, but also patients’ and family members’ minute and errant bodily shifts that signaled national degeneration.