Expressions of sexuality and gender at the interface between crime and madness: moralizing conceptions in the treatment of the "criminally insane" patient

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how expressions of sexuality and gender emerge in the legal proceedings that determine the fate of individuals at the interface between crime and madness. The text explores the criminal proceedings against persons in mental distress that have committed crimes, or so-called "criminally insane" patients, and who are subject to security measures. Using genealogy as the methodological approach, the article analyzes the conditions underlying the source and emergence of the "abnormal", a figure produced and scrutinized by forensic medical discourse. Six court briefs were analyzed, focusing especially on the psychiatric reports pertaining to non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgender persons that were subjected to security measures. Analysis of the textual corpus indicates that the theoretical and conceptual basis for the assumptions in the security measures focuses on the forensic psychiatric report. The analysis of the forensic medical discourse points to a moral judgment of the expressions of sexuality and gender in the criminally insane patient, considered "deviant". Finally, the article signals alternatives for the production of new treatment modalities for the criminally insane patient, seeking to supplant the presumption of danger to society as a purportedly scientific concept, reviewing non-imputability as a legal device that violates the inalienable rights of individuals at the interface between crime and madness.