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Making A Gender Transition In Northwest Arkansas: Issues Of Access And Civil Rights In The Health Care System, April Michele Wallace

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The transgender population in Northwest Arkansas has difficulty in finding quality, accessible healthcare for gender transition-related procedures and for basic medical needs as well. These difficulties stem in part from a complex combination of discrimination, lack of information and training for proper treatment and care. This study takes a look at what is and isn’t available to transgender people in Northwest Arkansas and why they travel to other states and countries to seek healthcare.

Preparedness To Counsel Transgender College Students: Perceptions Of College Mental Health Clinicians, Valerie G. Couture

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to assess the perceived preparedness levels of college mental health clinicians to counsel transgender college students. Multicultural counseling competency is required of professional counselors and transgender individuals are considered to be part of the multicultural population. A survey was completed by college mental health counselors (N = 84) from across the United States. The results showed a moderate amount of preparedness overall with no significant differences based on years of counseling experience nor graduation from a CACREP accredited program. Results did show the participants believed they do have a professional duty to be knowledgeable …

‘Open, And Always, Opening’: Trans- Poetics As A Methodology For (Re)Articulating Gender, The Body, And The Self ‘Beyond Language’, Lizzy Tricano Kaval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poetry is a useful medium for exploring the fluidity and possibilities in language beyond the everyday terms of normative language. For trans- and genderqueer subjects, whose identities cannot be articulated within the linguistic boundaries of binary gender, and whose outward appearance challenges the cultural logic of gendered visibility, poetry becomes a valuable and necessary tool for survival, disruption, activism, and personal and public empowerment. Through syntax, word choice, semantic and non-semantic qualities of language, poetry helps articulate the inexpressible, complex, and unstable gender identities and subject positions, even as they change or multiply. It gives names to felt ideas, which …

Which Side Are You On? : Prosthetic Vaginas, Cross-Dressing Madonnas, And Queer Theology In Virgin Of The Flames And Narcopolis, Nasreen Hannah Khan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Chris Abani describes a scene where his main character Black and Sweet Girl, a transsexual dancer, have intercourse for the first time. Black hesitates as he begins to penetrate her anally because, “he couldn’t become her this way. He knew this thing, this intimacy he craved wasn’t about love, or even sex, but about filling himself.” (275). Black does not want sex, he wants, as Sweet Girl does, to transcend boundaries of gender and the physical dimensions of sex. Similarly Thayil’s narrator Dimple, a castrated biological male prostitute living as a woman, expounds on the nature of sex after a …

Identities Without Origins : Fat/Trans Subjectivity And The Possibilities Of Plurality., Mc Lampe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway to critically analyze the political power and utility of origin stories as they are used within discourses of identity. I specifically examine the dominant cultural and counter-origin stories of transgender and fat bodies and argue that the counter origin stories constructed by both trans and fat studies/activism continue to engage with norms that regulate identity. These regulations create an impossible situation for individuals who are both trans and fat as they are not recognized as intelligible subjects within either category due to their lack of appropriate …

“My Masculinity Is A Little Love Poem To Myself”: Trans*Masculine College Students’ Conceptualizations Of Masculinities, T.J. Jourian

Dissertations

Men and masculinities studies in higher education are gaining prominence within the literature, illuminating how cisgender men understand and grapple with masculinity on college campuses. Additionally, the increased visibility of trans* students has fueled the expanding scholarship and attention to their experiences, often however centering on White gender-conforming trans* students with little if any focus on their multiple and intersecting identities. This phenomenological study seeks to bridge these two areas of literature, by investigating how trans*masculine students understand, define, and adopt a masculine identity, and how that identity is informed by their various intersecting and salient identities. Dominant masculinities function …

“I Am Because We Are”: A Portrait Of Trans* Postsecondary Educators’ Experiences In Higher Education, Symone L. Simmons

Dissertations

Within higher education, trans* students have become more visible and advocacy for them important. To support these claims, scholars have conducted research and produced literature on trans* college students’ identity development and experiences on campuses. However, the lived experiences of trans* educators working in colleges and universities are missing from the literature, consequently from the minds of scholars, practitioners, and administrators alike. Trans* educators experiences are important because they contribute to shifts in higher education conversations around supporting and affirming trans* people on campus. Trans* educators are mentors, advisors, and role-models, teachers, and advocates, and perhaps knowing their journey and …

Jotería-Historias: Theories From The Fringes, Robert Mitchell Gutierrez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By collecting the cultural/historical narratives of gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (GBTQ) Chicanos of Colorado, this research project locates theories in the flesh, or theories of resistance and agency, in the forms of cuentos, pláticas, chismé, mitos, testimonios, and consejos to explicate a queer of color performance of intersectional and decolonial politics. To set the context, several historical and political snapshots of GBTQ Chicano experience over the last 500 years are reviewed to demonstrate how communication about, for, and between GBTQ Chicanos operate in a liminal state (nepantla) where violence, marginalization, and oppression are …

Straight Time And Scandal: Travesti Urban Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Christine L. Woodward

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

São Paulo, Brazil is currently pursuing a project of creative urbanism. Though city rhetoric insists this project is rooted in tolerance of sexual diversity, I suggest that city policy effectively perpetuates normative conceptions of family and respectability. Using data gathered through a series of qualitative interviews with transgender and travesti individuals living in São Paulo, I argue that the straight time of São Paulo’s creative urbanism generates exclusionary temporalities and spatialities in the city that render travestis out of time and out of place. Furthermore, I argue that travestis use their capacity to enact shame through scandals to generate temporalities …

Exploring The Lived Experience Of Male-To-Female Transgender Youth Accessing Trans-Related Healthcare In Los Angeles, Marcel Fomotar

Dissertations

Background: According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (2015), LGBTI individuals delay healthcare treatment because they fear stigmatization or because they believe many healthcare professionals lack knowledge and experience working with LGBTI individuals. The phenomenon of living as a transgender person and accessing trans-related healthcare is understudied.

Aim: To explore the perceived meaning of accessing transgender-related healthcare among transgender youth.

Method: A phenomenological qualitative design grounded on Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology was used to explore the ascribed meaning associated to accessing trans-related healthcare services among transyouth as they experienced and perceived it. A purposive and thematic sample of Male-to-Female transyouth …

Trans Mississippi, Jessi Hotakainen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is the accompanying paper to the documentary thesis Trans Mississippi, which explores the lives of two transgender individuals living in Mississippi. This thesis outlines the theoretical underpinnings, as well as the director's methodology in producing the film and its justification.

What Do You Think I Am?: On Perceiving Unintelligibility In The Nonbinary Gender Experience, James Warwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What does it mean to be “retired from gender,” and what role does such an identity play in daily life? Engaging with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, this project attempts to elucidate the experience of nonbinary – that is, external to the male/female gender binary – gendered individuals, and the ultimate unintelligibility of that experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception allows for an exploration of the social norms and regulations that determine how gender is defined in Western culture; combined with Butler’s significant work on gender and its performativity, phenomenology proves a useful tool for revealing the …