WK10 Reading LGBT Psychosocial Theory and Practice in the UK

• Lesbian and gay scholarship began in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• Homosexuality


  Viewed as sinful, immoral and criminal in the nineteenth century, but presented as an inborn, normal variation by Havelock Ellis and others
• The development of an affirmative lesbian and gay psychology in the US outpaced that in the UK in the second half of the twentieth century
• June Hopkins


  • British-based clinical psychologist who published a groundbreaking paper on the lesbian personality in the 1960s, offering an affirmative psychological perspective on lesbians
• Terms used by Hopkins to describe the lesbian personality


  • More independent
  • More resilient
  • More reserved
  • More dominant
  • More bohemian
  • More self-sufficient
  • More composed
• Hopkins was one of very few British psychologists studying lesbians and gay men from an affirmative perspective in the 1960s and 1970s
• Rorschach protocol


  Used as a diagnostic tool to "detect" homosexuality
• After Hopkins' papers were published, there was a significant lull in lesbian and gay psychological output until the 1980s
• John Hart and Diane Richardson

  • Critical of the male bias in the literature on homosexuality, and careful to distinguish the differences in the experience of homosexual women and men
  • Emphasised the importance of placing homosexuality in a social context, and of acknowledging the political implications of theories of homosexuality
• Richardson's call for reflexivity in research on homosexuality


  Professionals should cease to see themselves as neutral technicians and instead recognize their role as moral agents
• Hart's view on therapy and counselling for lesbian and gay clients


  It is difficult to see how the conditions for successful therapy can be achieved by therapists who personally hold pathological models of homosexuality or who are anxious about their own sexuality
• Richardson and Hart's alternative theory of the development and maintenance of a homosexual identity


  • Emphasised personal choice, the possibility of change throughout the life span, and the meanings of homosexuality for the individual
  • Placed homosexuality firmly within a political arena, in contrast to the work they reviewed which theorised homosexuality as if it were apart from moral debates
• Golombok, Spencer and Rutter's study on the psychosocial experiences of the children of lesbian mothers was a landmark publication in research on lesbian and gay parenting
• Golombok and Tasker's longitudinal study of children in lesbian families was the first of its kind to be published
• In 1986, a paper in the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society called attention to lesbian and gay psychology as a neglected area of British research
• Compared to the US, there was a lack of British research on heterosexuals' attitudes toward homosexuals in the mid-1980s
• Celia Kitzinger's research on lesbian identities


  • Rejected the hierarchal, liberal-humanistic models of lesbian and gay identity formation developed by psychologists in the US
  • Offered a social constructionist account of lesbian identities
• 1. methodological study

  A study of lesbian identities (Kitzinger and Stainton-Rogers, 1985)
• Kitzinger's research focused specifically on lesbians and highlighted differences between lesbians and heterosexual women, and between lesbians and gay men (Rothblum, 2004)
• Social constructionist approach to identity


  Concerned with how people construct, negotiate and interpret their experience - the focus is on people's accounts per se, rather than on inspecting them for what they reveal about underlying emotions, thoughts and feelings, or on assessing their truth-value
• Kitzinger's five distinct accounts of lesbian identity


  • Personal fulfillment
  • True love
  • Personal sexual orientation
  • Political/feminist
  • Personal inadequacy
• Kitzinger explicitly acknowledged that the political/feminist lesbian account is "the account on which I have relied most heavily in constructing my own account of lesbianism and as such constitutes the context from within which I assess and discuss the other four accounts" (Kitzinger, 1986, p. 164)
• Kitzinger's critique of affirmative lesbian and gay psychology


  She was critical of the liberal-humanistic and positivist-empiricist frameworks underlying much affirmative lesbian and gay psychology, and concepts such as "homophobia" and "internalised homophobia"
• Kitzinger called for a radical, feminist, critical, social constructionist lesbian and gay psychology that deconstructed the ideologies underlying research in this area, and the "mystique surrounding social science itself" (p. 188)
• Kitzinger's critique of the concept of homophobia


  It "depoliticises lesbian and gay oppression by suggesting that it comes from the personal inadequacy of particular individuals suffering from a diagnosable phobia"
• Kitzinger's critique of the concept of internalised homophobia


  If some people are unhappy about being lesbian or gay, this is a perfectly reasonable response to oppression. "Internalised" homophobia shifts the focus of concern away from the oppressor and back onto the victims of oppression
• In 1990, the official publication of the British Psychological Society, The Psychologist, published a paper by Celia Kitzinger (1990a) that drew attention to the rampant heterosexism in British psychology and how it affects lesbian and gay staff and students in psychology departments
• The European Association of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Psychologists was established in 1992
• Homosexuality was removed from the International Classification of Diseases in 1993, two decades after the removal of homosexuality per se from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)
• In 1994, Charles Neal founded the Association for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Psychologies (ALGBP-UK), which affiliated to ALGP-Europe
• The Lesbian and Gay Psychology Section was finally established within the BPS in 1998, after nearly a decade of campaigning and three rejected proposals
• The Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review is the only LGBT psychology journal published in the UK
• In the UK, counselling and therapy are not part of the remit of social workers, and there is an important distinction between the National Health Service (NHS) and the private (and voluntary) sector
• There is little in the way of professional infrastructure specifically for counsellors and psychotherapists working with lesbian and gay clients in the UK
• Some LGBT psychology in the UK is essentialist, positivist-empiricist, quantitative and liberal, while a significant proportion is constructionist, discursive, qualitative, and critical
• Debates about essentialism versus social constructionism are a feature of LGBT psychology in the UK
• LGBT psychological research in the UK looks epistemologically and methodologically much like social psychology and could loosely be described as social psychological in nature
• LGBT psychology in the UK is also closely associated with qualitative methods
• Much LGBT psychology in the UK fits firmly in the canon of critical psychology
• LGBT psychology in the UK


  • Theoretical differences map onto methodological differences
  • Positivist/essentialist work mostly based on quantitative data
  • Constructionist work mostly based on qualitative data