The Sexual Diversity Debate in Brazilian Psychology: Professional Regulation at Stake

So-called “sexual reorientation therapies” represent a challenge to the scientific and professional development of Psychology, and to the exercise and free expression of sexual orientation as a human right. Since 1999 the Brazilian Federal Council of Psychology (CFP) has implemented a ban against the pathologization of homosexuality. The validity of that normative instrument, known as Resolution 01/99, has been contested by moral entrepreneurs within the profession, self-identified as Evangelical Christians, who pose a broader challenge to Psychology, standing as a secular, science-based profession. The controversy created by the challenge to CFP’s positions on homosexuality and on religion extrapolates the domain of Psychology and its regulation as a science and profession, and becomes one more dispute related to sexual politics in Brazil. In this paper we explore the process by which sexual diversity has become a contentious issue for Brazilian Psychology, affecting the politics and regulation of the profession.

Telling a poormanhe can become rich: Reparative therapy in contemporary Poland

This article investigates the practice of sexual reorientation therapy, or reparative therapy (RT), in contemporary Poland. Focusing on three groups – Odwaga (Courage), Pomoc 2002 (Help 2002) and Pascha (Passover) – and informed by interviews with their past participants, it examines the ways in which RT in Poland is gendered, as well as investigating the individualizing and self-responsibilizing understandings of the self it rests on. This article then demonstrates how the neoliberal ideas of selfhood permeate the practice of RT, mobilizing the tropes of individual effort and responsibility for the reorientation of one’s sexual desire, obscuring the inherent inequality on which the practice is based.