Sexual and gender diversity in the psy disciplines: haunting conflicts in contemporary Chile

Ojeda, Tomás (2021) Sexual and gender diversity in the psy disciplines: haunting conflicts in contemporary Chile. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis constitutes a novel interrogation into the ‘turn to diversity’ that critically explores the articulation of a growing field of expertise on sexual and gender diversity within the psy disciplines, bringing feminist, queer and sexual-dissident theories of diversity together with psychosocial studies. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this project analyses the psychic life of diversity in Chile and examines psychology’s political place in the production of diversity as a means for regulating sexuality and gender. In doing so, this thesis explores how sexual and gender diversity has been taken up by psy professionals working with LGBTI people in three different cities in Chile, and the work that is done by those uses in the spaces of the clinic, activism and social research, asking in what ways these uses are also expressive of broader psychosocial processes. To that end, it firstly explores the affective labour involved in producing the notion of the ‘field of sexual and gender diversity’, and critically attends to diversity’s temporal politics and its investments in progress. Secondly, this study examines the different ways in which ‘gender diversity’ is produced as a sensitive issue in clinical practice and diversity training courses. It discusses the work that sensitivity does in shaping a particular way of knowing the diverse other that reproduces medical gatekeeping practices and forms of gender panic. Lastly, the analysis delves into the interviewees’ ambivalent attachments to diversity and critically addresses their references to ‘sexual dissidence’ as a means for troubling diversity’s comforting politics and domesticated aesthetics. Overall, this work provides an empirical contribution to a little-studied area of inquiry within the psy disciplines, one that focuses on diversity’s conflictual nature and its multiple lives, suggesting an original research path into the recent history of Chile and its haunting presence in the present.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2021 Tomás Ojeda
Library of Congress subject classification:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Sets:	Departments > Gender Institute
Supervisor:	Hemmings, Clare and Sabsay, Leticia
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4373

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