Digital Commons Network^™

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …

In Shame I Will Find Paradise, Taehee Whang

Theses and Dissertations

As a Korean American non-binary digital artist and designer, my recent explorations have focused on using voice as a medium to articulate nuanced feelings of displacement and the intricate relationships between language, identity, and expression. This journey expands beyond my personal experiences with gender dysphoria, delving into the lives of non-binary and transgender individuals undergoing gender-affirming voice therapy. Through my thesis research, I have developed interactive multimedia installations inspired by dialogues with individuals such as Umico Niwa, who traveled to Korea for voice feminization surgery, and Jeong Yoon Lee from Hyperlink Press, a four-year participant in Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). …

"A Narrative Is A Living Body”: Trans-Relations In Contemporary Transmasculine Fiction, Madison Rougier

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how recent novels are able to expand representations of transgender experiences and promote identification with these characters and their experiences, even if the reader is not trans themself. It begins by delving into a brief history of transgender narrative and the problems associated with these narratives having been primarily in the form of memoir. It then examines how Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country, despite being one of the first instances of a fictional narrative focused on a transgender man, reflects similarly problematic narrative characteristics to those found in memoir. Proposing a concept of trans-relational reading, which promotes identifications …

Serving With Pride: Analyzing Lgbtq+ Personnel Policy In The U.S. Military, Sonja Woolley

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the evolution of LGBTQ+ personnel policies in the U.S. military, analyzing how these changes reflect broader social transformations and the military’s role as both a mirror and catalyst in societal shifts. It traces the historical roots of discriminatory practices against queer and transgender servicemembers, identifying key periods of reform and resistance. Using institutional theory to dissect the mechanisms of policy adaptation, this paper focuses on coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism, which illustrate the complex interplay between external societal pressures, internal demands for legitimacy, and the professionalization of the military. Through detailed case studies, the thesis highlights how …

Keeping And Challenging Familial Attachments: The Bakla Within Contemporary Mainstream Filipino Film, Abraham James A. Mata

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout Filipino television and film, it is difficult to ignore the almost always apparent bakla. The bakla, often portrayed as either an effeminate gay man or a trans woman, largely appears as a side character in many Filipino films. Many depictions of this queer figure in the past have cast them as merely comedic relief or perverted figures. However, within the past two decades of the 21st century, many Filipino films have been produced with a central bakla character. Through an analysis of five mainstream films from the years of 2013-2023, this project is seeking to answer how mainstream depictions …

Queer Frontier: Gender, Sexuality, And Intimacy In Minnesota Before 1900, Tyler J. Amick

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The colonization of Minnesota brought about a sexual revolution that redefined what gender, sexuality, and intimacy meant within Minnesotan society before the turn of the twentieth century. Initial Euro-American forays into Minnesota created a hybridized society where indigenous traditions and Euro-American cultural ideas intermixed. Fur traders and early settlers broadly accepted indigenous customs, and some Euro-Americans even adopted indigenous practices. The most apparent of these practices are indigenous marriage rites. Large numbers of fur traders engaged in marriages à la façons du pays, in the style of the Dakota and Ojibwe. In some instances, these fur traders even engaged in …

The Definition Of A Black Man: The Entanglement Of Race, Sexuality, And Space, Michael Moore

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Black queer men and transmasculine individuals navigate Black heteronormative and White queer spaces in New Orleans. Over the last few decades, articles, including anthropological and sociological, have focused on the relationship between race, gender performance, sexuality, and emotional expression among men such as Christian (2005), which analyzed how Black queer men expressed their masculinity within queer spaces (Christian 2005). This thesis builds on this literature to explore how societal and cultural pressures of masculinity can hinder Black queer men institutionally, socially, and romantically.

Overlooked Modi Vivendi, Natalia Silva

Masters Theses

Traditional gender roles, performance of heterosexuality, marriage, parenthood, and a large variety of other societal expectations manifest themselves in the domestic realm, both intangibly and spatially. The design of domestic spaces has historically catered towards heteronormative living stereotypes, marginalizing people whose way of living challenges the norm. Even in the present day, designers with non-user clients — developers, investors, real estate firms, etc. — will design with heteronormative households in mind. The rise in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements has allowed for non-heteronormative modi vivendi (ways of living) to be more vocally and visibly present in the sociopolitical and cultural …

Queer Not: Medieval Romance's Toll On Queerness, Kyle Gaydo

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

How does a contemporary audience handle medieval queerness? What, exactly, constitutes medieval queerness, and how does the medieval literary genre of romance impact it? This thesis attempts to grapple with these questions, and many more, utilizing the 13th-century Old French romance Le Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle. Medieval romances are particularly fruitful for this analysis because, on one hand, the genre consistently re/turns to cisheteronormativity, and, on the other, because scholarship generally has not applied queer theory to the study of romance. Silence follows Silence, a young Englishwoman who is raised as a boy to protect her family’s …

“The Urgent Necessity For More Original Creative Works By Transgender And Gender Expansive Artists" Is Not The Title Of My Thesis., Alicia Fireel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a mix of personal reflection, academic research, and an examination of The Girl Crazy Queer and Other Fairy Tales, a play I wrote and performed in October of 2023, co-produced by The University of Louisville’s Department of Theatre Arts and Pandora Productions, a Louisville-based theatre company dedicated to Queer theatre. This thesis and the play mirror each other; both contemplate Queer experiences, Queer histories, Queer trauma, and Queer stories. In the thesis I accomplish this through examining four subjects: myself, my play, the connection between modes of storytelling and aspects of transgender Queerness, and the perils that …

Navigating Place And Gender: A Multicontextual Critical Narrative Inquiry Of Rural Trans* Student Experiences, Jessie Lynn O'Quinn

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The purpose of this critical narrative study was to understand how rural West Virginia trans* students navigate cultural norms of their rural home communities and higher education contexts. An essential part of this critical narrative was to provide rural trans* students with an avenue to share their unique experiences and give them a platform to share their voices. The resulting narratives suggested that the normative tensions rural trans* college students experience across contexts stemmed from negative regional experiences that reinforced traditional gender norms. Negative home contexts and experiences forced students to feel like they had to build walls and distance …

Through Tender Opalescence, Yemi A. Lawrence

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Through Tender Opalescence is an documentary intimately dealing with the possibilities that unfold when one is able to hold space and fall within themselves. Broken up into sections of abstract videos of water paired with poetry, and analysis of the appropriated and re-worked horror films in popular American cinema, this piece attempts to reinterpret popular media and to highlight what that may say about how we as people have come to understand our own gender. This work finds itself being told by an unnamed narrator who has made it a ritual to go by the river to relieve themselves of …

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

Voicing Narrative Through Transatlanticism And Transformation In Historia De La Monja Alférez By Catalina De Erauso, Morgan Schneider

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes various aspects of Catalina de Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez, escrita por ella misma (1829). The first chapter explores notions of interior and exterior as categories that determine not only the protagonist’s movement in space but also their expression of self-identity over the course of the text, focalized through first-person narration. Additionally, the chapter brings to light how the interior narrative parallels Erauso’s desire to share their transformation from nun in a Spanish convent to a soldier in the Americas with picaresque tendencies. Erauso leverages the power of exterior appearances through the self-fashioning of their public …

The Medical Policing Of Transgender And Gender Nonconforming Adults, Gabrielle Hawkins

Student Research Submissions

This research aims to better understand the discriminatory health care experiences of transgender and gender nonconforming adults. Conducted through a non-positivist sociological methodology, a primary objective of this research is to uplift transgender and other gender nonconforming voices through a study of lived, personal health narratives. In open-forum, semi-structured interviews, eight participants were asked questions relating to their health narratives, including questions concerning health care experiences and any encounters with discriminatory behaviors/actions by medical professionals and/or other medical affiliated personnel (i.e., receptionists, community health advisors, pharmacists, etc.). Potential questions ranged in theme (but were not limited to): gender identity, gender …

[Un]Seen, Al Benbow

Honors Projects

[un]seen is a community-centered project and installation that consists of a collection of portraits and statements from underrepresented members of the LGBTQ+ community. Each subject submits their own action item that depends on their identity and response to the question, “what do you wish people understood about the experience of being [your identity]?”

This project was initially born out of research into the commodification of LGBTQ+ identities, and the realization that corporations tend to market to members of the LGBTQ+ community who they believe have the most spending power: white, cisgender, able-bodied, upper class, gay men, and therefore most often …

The Effect Of Transgender Salience On Judgement Of Gender Perception, Gabriella Markovich

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Two studies were performed to examine the effect of salient awareness of transgender individuals on the choices of individuals on dating apps. This study posited that transgender individuals may represent a threat to the sexual and romantic identities of others, and that being reminded of transgender individuals’ existence on dating apps would cause participants to take longer to choose who to connect with, connect with fewer individuals, and make lower judgements of the individuals’ gender and attractiveness. Participant reaction time, choice in potential partners (swipe choices), gender perception, and ratings of attractiveness were compared across a control and threat condition. …

The Act Of Seeing And Being Seen: Visual Explorations Of Queerness And Memory In Alison Bechdel’S Fun Home, Vanessa Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

In the autobiographical illustrated novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses various art styles and comic techniques to examine her father’s life as a closeted gay man and his tragic suicide, as well as her own childhood and experience with homosexuality. This thesis explores how Bechdel uses the medium of the graphic novel to showcase different visual perspectives and ways of bearing witness to the past, memory, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, showing how they converge to create the story of how one generation’s model of queer identity can impact and shape the next. Bechdel presents multiple points-of-view in her exploration …

“Mirrors Can Give Us Space To Imagine…” Representations Of Gender And Sexuality In Bbc’S Dracula (2020), Riana S. Slyter

Theses and Dissertations

What follows discusses how BBC’s Dracula uses character representations, scripted dialogue, and narrative to challenge and perpetuate the dominant ideologies of our society. Dracula exposes the tensions in the growing cultural acceptance of, but also increased resistance to, the fluidity of gender and sexuality in contemporary western culture. I contextualize representations of women and queer characters in Dracula with the broader issues of gender and sexuality in our current socio-political environment. Queer horror looks at Dracula as a text that arouses cultural anxieties concerning sexuality, while also attempting to illustrate fear within queer communities and subcultures. In many ways, the …

Tale As Old As...Feminism? The (Re)Making Of Beauty And The Beast, Cara Doreen Hardman

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I investigate Disney's positioning of the live-action Beauty and the Beast as feminist. Up to this point, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast has both been hailed as presenting audiences with an empowered princess and criticized for the Beast's aggressive behavior and the positioning of Belle as a woman meant to propel the Beast's story forward. I provide an assessment of the gender politics depicted in Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast, and I problematize the tendency to classify texts as either entirely feminist or utterly antifeminist. As a whole, this thesis provides an in-depth analysis of …

God Is Gay, Ordando Prieto, Ordando Prieto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The major life of The Christ are well known among Christians and have been depicted throughout art history and contemporary media.

The juxtaposition using gay pornography is meant to question the ideologies of homosexuality. The choice life events and fetishes are to juxtapose terminology and show possible sexual innuendos.

These seven works of art are mixed media paintings; made up using works from art history, gay pornography, photographs I have taken, and drawing and painting by myself. The exhibition is an alternative perspective of the major components of Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ. These events include: The Nativity, The Baptism, The …

The Fragility Of White Masculinity: An Exploration Of The White, Heterosexual Male Fantasy Of Gender In Horror, Allison D. Clark

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

William Blake's Satan As A Hermaphrodite, Genevieve E. Hartsock

Art & Art History ETDs

Depictions of Satan had started off with a grotesque and monstrous figure, but depictions of and attitudes towards the character shifted with the publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, although the aesthetics of the figure shifted, I argue that William Blake’s renderings of Satan continue the tradition of rendering them as monstrous and grotesque in a new way, in that Blake renders Satan as a hermaphrodite. Attitudes towards hermaphrodites has shifted over time, but the attitude of regarding them as unnatural or monstrous harkens back to ancient Greece, and these attitudes were only furthered with time and the advent …

The Evolution Of Title Ix And Transgender Rights- A Comparative Study Of Title Ix Debates With Recommendations For Integrating Transgender Rights Into Title Ix Legislation, Jaymie Bianca

Senior Theses and Projects

This project views Title IX through a lens pertaining to transgender rights. It examines the historic adaptation and expansion of Title IX, and how it historically has not expanded to include transgender individuals. The project pays particular attention to the difference between the definitions of sex and gender, the bathroom and athletic debates in relation to transgender rights, and includes recommendations in order to properly include transgender individuals in Title IX legislation.

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

To Build A Space: A Reading Of Bodies, Temporality, And Urban Colonization, Delaney Tax

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Abstract

Historical and modern urban planning theory often focuses on an idealized body and subject, shaped by race, gender, and sexuality, that exists within the city. This passively and actively divides space into thresholds impenetrable by bodies othered by social and political ideologies. This project looks at the realities of colonial urban planning and the gendered, raced, and queered implications forced onto bodies and communities through the built environment. This investigation examines the frameworks present in colonial urban theory that engender meaning and knowledges onto bodies as they move through the cityscape. Exploring modes of in/access and power along built …

Mexican Modernism’S Other: The Contemporáneos, Gender, And National Identity, 1920–1940, Joseph S. Shaikewitz

Theses and Dissertations

In postrevolutionary Mexico, a group of artists known as the Contemporáneos redefined the parameters of modernism through personal expressions of otherness and difference. This thesis examines works by artists including Abraham Ángel, Julio Castellanos, María Izquierdo, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano in relation to shifting discourses surrounding gender and national identity.

"And All Were Welcome": An Analysis Of The Transgender Child In Contemporary Picture Books, Isaac Prestwich

Pomona Senior Theses

This paper constitutes an interrogation of children’s picture books that feature trans and gender non-conforming child protagonists. In these books, the audience, presumed to be a child, whose experience of the narrative is mediated through the adult or older figure reading the picture book, is brought to empathize and identify with the book’s characters, whether they be the protagonist themselves, or those auxiliary figures who surround the main character. My goal is to identify consistent themes across the genre, as well as within the field of critical childhood studies, particularly as they pertain to the rhetorical value of the Child, …

Representations Of Domestic Workers In Modern Arabic Fiction, Samaher Aldhamen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I have examined the representations of domestic workers in a number of Arabic mid-century and contemporary novels, using feminism and intersectionality as my overarching framework. I employed several scholarships of feminism such as Marxist and postcolonial feminism to examine the discourse on working-class women. The initial assumption of this study is that there is a noticeable invisibility of domestic workers in Arabic novels. If these characters manage to find their way into a text, they are typically ahistorical figures whose subjectivity is not centered.

Among the Arabic novels I have examined, I found that the tradition of …

Marriage Maintenance, Miscategorization, And New Manifestations: How People Are Reinforcing And Disrupting Gender And Sexual Inequalities In Married Life, Daniel John Bartholomay

Theses and Dissertations

This research positions marriage as an institution that has historically served to privilege men, masculinity and heterosexuality. Overall, this project is intended to advance our understanding of gender and sexual inequalities in the realms of marriage and family by examining the lived experiences of married people. It draws on data from 41 in-depth interviews conducted with married people living in Wisconsin, many of whom identify as part of the LGBT+ community. Using qualitative social science methods, this research speaks to unanswered questions regarding the capacity of a more gender-fluid society to reshape key social institutions (like marriage) in ways that …