"Scratching the Itch: American Wound Culture" with Leonie Kratzenstein, 07/02 - GLAM Lecture

So-called conversion therapy, a practice that intends to ‘cure’ queer sexualities, remains legal in more than fifty percent of the United States in 2026 and continues to be practiced by religious and private institutions throughout the nation. Whereas previous psychological and sociological studies have focused on the consequences of these harmful practices in the individual, the cultural dimension of conversion camps is rarely discussed. For my project, I have identified a corpus of contemporary texts on conversion practices that consists of cross-medial productions on the subject, which are just now gaining cultural visibility, among them memoirs, films, novels, and documentaries. My qualitative exploration of ritualized affect in these texts will specifically examine how queer conversion stories can be both enablers of kinship as well as breeding grounds for sensationalism and entertainment, as they perhaps consciously tap into an American “wound culture.”