Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Not Sanitized For Your Protection: Aids And The Politics Of Trash, Emma Banks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metaphors of waste are particularly potent when enlisted to describe and justify the segregation and subjugation of marginalized communities. For, as discard studies scholars have shown, waste is not merely about trash; it is about power (Liboiron and Lepawsky). Maintaining power necessitates hierarchical categorization, whereby the needs and desires of some people are prioritized over those of others, to frequently catastrophic effect.

At the turn of the 21st century, AIDS patients and allies needed no such explanation of what it meant to be relegated to the fringes and designated as waste. Thrown to the proverbial curb of society, PWAs (people …

Preservando La Playa Del Pueblo, Tasha A. Sandoval

Capstones

After more than 80 years, the only queer beach in New York City, the People’s Beach at Jacob Riis, is in danger. In 2022, the city announced the demolition of the Neponsit Hospital, a long-abandoned structure that shelters the beach from the street, creating a sense of privacy and safety. Can Riis Beach live on as a safe and joyous utopia for queer communities without the presence of the hospital buildings? Some beach-goers are campaigning to ensure that whatever replaces the hospital space centers the queer community and preserves the beach’s queer history, including the legacy of Ms. Colombia, a …

De La Discriminación A La Descriminalización: El Camino De Las Mujeres Transgénero De Queens Por Sus Derechos Laborales Como Trabajadoras Sexuales, Bruce Gil, Sara Herschander, Juanita Ramos

Capstones

Una mirada a la legislación propuesta que despenalizaría el trabajo sexual en la ciudad de Nueva York a través de las historias de las trabajadoras sexuales inmigrantes transgénero que se están organizando en Queens, Nueva York.

http://trabajadorxssexuales.tilda.ws

'Once Famous In An Odd Way': Curiosity And Queerness In Late 19th-Century American Male Impersonation, S.C. Lucier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis depicts the emergence of one particular iteration of the popular female actor within 19^th century performance, the male impersonator, and identifies the ways in which this theatrical expression was related to and affected by similar amusements of the period. Public amusements of this period include a diversity of experiential entertainment that was primarily geared toward working and lower-middle class males. Included in these types of illegitimate theater is the variety hall. Male impersonators were the height of theatrical fashion not only in New York City, which is the focused landscape of this paper, but this type of …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Undocumented Survivors Of Domestic Violence Struggle To Get Resources In New York City, Florence Mafomemeh

Capstones

Many undocumented survivors of domestic violence in New York City struggle to gain access to resources they need to survive due to their undocumented status. City officials tell them that help is available at the Family Justice Centers located in all five boroughs. But some undocumented survivors say they don’t get all the help they need. These victims and survivors bring with them the scars of abuse from their exes, to seek help from the city.

Link to full project:

https://florence-mafomemeh.weebly.com/capstone.html

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 …

Secret And Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode To The Art Of Cruising, Terrence T. Hunt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cruising is a practice that connects people looking for casual sex through a series of gestures, behaviors and codes that signal one’s sexual orientation and interest. These cruising behaviors and codes are changing because of advances in technology, because of cruising’s sudden exposure to the wider community through media, and evolving cultural values that no longer demand gay sex be kept secret. Cruising is in the public consciousness like never before. This project, a short film entitled Secret and Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode to the Art of Cruising, investigates, records and pays homage to the cultural practices of …

An Alliance Of Ladies: Power, Public Affairs, And Class Construction In Early National New York City, Alisa J. Wade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation studies elite women’s political consciousness in New York City between 1783 and 1815, contextualizing women’s position within the city’s social strata and the rise of market capitalism in the post-Revolutionary era. In a period of deferential politics, women within the leadership class played a unique role in remodeling the structure of republican government and determining who belonged within it. Building on the foundation of learned femininity, they constructed the etiquette that undergirded men’s political careers and oversaw the marriage market. They mediated divisions between new merchant capital and more established landed wealth, reinforcing dynastic stability. Moreover, they were …

Queen Of The Underworld: The Biography Of Sophie Lyons (1848-1924), Barbara M. Gray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sophie Lyons was a nineteenth-century American pickpocket, blackmailer, con-woman, and bank robber. She was raised in New York City's underworld, by Jewish immigrant parents who were criminals that trained their children to pick pockets and shoplift. "Pretty Sophie" possessed a rare combination of skill at thievery, intellect, guts and beauty and became the woman Herbert Ashbury described in Gangs of New York as, "the most notorious confidence woman America has ever produced." Newspapers around the world chronicled Sophie's exploits for more than sixty years, because her life read like a novel. Her mentor was another forgotten woman who held a …