Thinking Queerly about Social Contagion

This paper thinks queerly about “social contagion” vis-à-vis postwar theologies of the family. Drawing on archival materials, I trace how the rise of pastoral psychology within the theological academy was, on the one hand, a response to homosexual panic: early issues of Pastoral Psychology reveal persistent anxieties about the family and the figure of the homosexual. On the other hand, its diagnostic vocabularies provided new language to articulate previously inchoate sexual desires. I argue that pastoral psychology—and practical theology more broadly—spread fears and fantasies that reshaped how theology students thought about sex and the family in postwar America, prompting new and unintended political possibilities. Queer/trans contagion moved precisely through the theories and methods meant to quarantine it. This history of pastoral psychology demonstrates how contemporary anxieties surrounding “social contagion” might paradoxically generate the very political movements they aim to inoculate in the name of “family" or "the child."