‘Healing’ through harm: Examining affect in North American conversion therapies from 1910 to 2000

Andrea’s project examines Canadian and American patients’ and survivors’ lived experiences of the harmful practice of conversion therapy through the twentieth century. It asks how secular medical practitioners utilized and manipulated patients’ emotions as therapeutic tools in clinical contexts. Her analysis focuses on how practitioners in two different national contexts understood and responded to their patients’ lived experiences, emotions, and physical reactions to conversion therapy practices within the confines of their own anti-2SLGBTQ+ biases. Historical medical and scientific texts, newspapers, magazines, oral histories, and patient records reveal that North American conversion therapies have blended medical and cultural narratives and imperatives since the 1910s, with devastating, long-term consequences for patients and survivors of these practices.