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"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh
"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American society encouraged strong bonds between women. As separate sphere ideology took hold, highly-structured female relationships were created and maintained through shared rituals, language, and expectations. The resulting friendships enabled women to build a range of emotional ties with one another. At the same time, an expanding array of gender segregated educational institutions further promoted homosocial networks. Women’s college students built community through their shared experience inhabiting a collective space, forging social circles as well as one-on-one intimate relationships. This thesis examines women’s experiences of friendship within the college setting between 1880 …
The Queer Life Of Lorena Hickok, Samantha D. Leyerle
The Queer Life Of Lorena Hickok, Samantha D. Leyerle
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis explores the life of Lorena Hickok, a remarkable woman whose story has been glossed over throughout history. Hickok was an accomplished journalist and writer, and her life offers a fascinating glimpse into being queer in the early twentieth century. While much has been written about Hickok’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, this thesis aims to go beyond their connection to examine Hickok’s entire life and experiences in greater detail. Through analyzing her work as a writer, as well as her personal correspondence and unpublished autobiography, this thesis illuminates the quiet details of defining moments in history, including the Great …
Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis
Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation theorizes a new mode of reading, narrative side-stepping, that reveals how disabled characters provide a unique opportunity for non-normative narratives. In insisting on the narratological innovations that disability affords, I revise both Lennard Davis’s notion that the novel form valorizes normalcy and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, which claims that disability is a crutch, and that disabled characters are merely metaphors and/or plot devices. I move beyond these theories to focus instead on the more complicated ways that authors represented disability and used disabled characters to critique societal and narrative norms. I think about …
Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman
Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …
İbne, Gey, Lubunya: A Queer Critique Of Lgbti+ Discourses In The New Cinema Of Turkey, Azmi Mert Erdem
İbne, Gey, Lubunya: A Queer Critique Of Lgbti+ Discourses In The New Cinema Of Turkey, Azmi Mert Erdem
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In my thesis, I examine the intersections between liberalism, neoliberal globalism, and LGBTI+ visibility and identity politics, through films that present “openly” non-normative sexualities through cis/transgender male, female, or non-binary characters in the new cinema of Turkey. First, I survey existing scholarship on how liberal capitalism impacts the formation of LGBTI+ subjectivities and identity politics. Furthermore, I trace how non-normative sexualities, practices, and discourses evolved along with socioeconomic and political shifts in the Turkish Republic following the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, I review Turkey’s adoption of neoliberal ideologies in the 1980s and how these ideologies engage with its local, heterogenous gender …
Performing Desire In Times Square: Sailors, Hustlers And Masculinity, Kel R. Karpinski
Performing Desire In Times Square: Sailors, Hustlers And Masculinity, Kel R. Karpinski
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
From WWII to the early 1970s, New York City as a port town created a liminal space extending from the piers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard all the way to Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. In Times Square, through interactions on the street, in bars and in hotel rooms, desire and masculinity become a performance between and for men. The queerness of these performances lies in the fact that they fall outside of the norms of society both as same-sex encounters and because sex work is viewed as “deviant.” Further, these interactions eschew traditional labels and limits of desire and …
Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas
Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging and Kinships in African American Men’s Literature, 1953-1971 builds on the work of women-of-color feminists since the late 1960s and queer-of-color critique in the works of José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Roderic Ferguson, and Nadia Ellis, in order to chronicle the emergence of a queer tradition in mid twentieth century African American men’s literature. Through literary analysis and archival research on marginal figures of African American culture during this period, this dissertation proposes that the black pulp novels of Chester Himes, Robert Deane Pharr, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Iceberg Slim perform a queer critique of and …
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …
"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer
"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In Greenwich Village, a final generation of bohemians contested the rise and trajectory of gay liberation. During the 1930s, this generation blended modernist poetry and sexuality to develop a new manifestation of bohemia. In the postwar period, they transformed modern poetry into the new artistic medium of film that was critical to shaping postwar American art and culture. This wave of bohemia was built on certain modernist principles, including a universalist understanding of sexuality and identity that was different from, and incompatible with, the growth of identity politics in the 1960s. This dissertation argues that this was a last gasp …
For Love And For Justice: Narratives Of Lesbian Activism, Kelly Anderson
For Love And For Justice: Narratives Of Lesbian Activism, Kelly Anderson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores the role of lesbians in the U.S. second wave feminist movement, arguing that the history of women's liberation is more diverse, more intersectional, and more radical than previously documented. The body of this work is five oral histories conducted with lifelong activists and public intellectuals for the Voices of Feminism project at the Sophia Smith Collection: Katherine Acey, former Executive Director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice; Dorothy Allison, author and sex radical; Suzanne Pharr, southern anti-racist organizer and author; Achebe Powell, activist and diversity trainer; and Carmen Vázquez, LGBT activist and founding director of the …