Deviancy, Sexuality and the Psy-Disciplines at the University of Toronto

University pedagogy enabled theorization about sexual deviancy to pass as selfevident knowledge in postwar Canada.By integrating psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytical textbooks into several programs after the Second World War, the University of Toronto became a unique source of local accreditation for these disciplines' professed knowledge about homosexuality.Clinical education at the university's medical school similarly modelled racist and ableist intake procedures ostensibly evaluating specific homosexuals' capacity to benefit from psychoanalysis.This, coupled with the extensive circulation of psy-disciplinary discourse among students, demonstrates the University of Toronto's local influence as a site of legitimation for medicalized, 'rehabilitative' authority over marginalized communities.This approach would consistently be considered progressive and effective by university-educated, middle-class Canadians throughout the 1940s-1970s.The extensive embrace of 'rehabilitative' ideals in postwar Canada would impact both state violence and the resistance strategies of activist organizations like the University of Toronto Homophile Association. Introduction: Sex, Deviancy and the Academy in Postwar TorontoTo date, we have completed treatment on twelve cases, with the youngest subject being a 15-year-old male prostitute from a correctional institution.All had Kinsey ratings of at least '4'.The technician is a first-year graduate student who has no special skills in operant conditioning but who does have a high degree of interest in this field.1 -James Chapel, 1970.________________________________________________________________________ By 1970, a Canadian graduate student with a "high degree of interest" in aversive conditioning could administer shock stimuli from a 7 ½ volt battery to a 15-year-old in the interest of altering their sexuality.The fact that this was not an exceptional state of affairs -that James Chapel felt secure in arguing that the technician's interest outweighed their lack of specific skill, that Chapel's department had unquestioned license to conduct these therapies on institutionalized youth in the first place-indicates the success of a transnational, scholarly campaign to establish the benevolence, rigour and utility of psychiatric knowledge about homosexuality. 2 The presentation of this paper to the 1 James Chapel, "Behaviour Modification Techniques in Children and Adolescents," Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 15, no. 3 (1970): 317. 2 This campaign was not particular to Canada and is best described as a transnational phenomenon as it pervaded several countries in the postwar period and manifested in myriad forms within them.While an investigation of how Canadian universities were components of global scholarly networks would be extremely historically pertinent, I have not been well-positioned to conduct this (necessarily archival) research in the context of the pandemic.What claims I do make about how professional and academic circles functioned transnationally at this time are largely derived from the approach of Tamson Pietsch, "Many Rhodes: travelling scholarships and imperial citizenship in the British academic world, 1880-1940," History of Education 40, no.6 (2011): 736-738, as well as global histories of sexual research like Chiara Beccalossi, "Optimizing and Normalizing the Population Through Hormone Therapies in Italian Science, c.1926-1950,"The British Journal for the History of Science 53, no.

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