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At The Edges Of Queer: Navigating Ambiguity In Identity, Community, And Politics, Madeline Mccray Batzli
At The Edges Of Queer: Navigating Ambiguity In Identity, Community, And Politics, Madeline Mccray Batzli
Honors Papers
When queer took the world of AIDS activism and the academy by storm in the late 20th century, activists and academics leapt to understand and define this reclaimed word and predict its trajectory. Some academics claimed that queer would avoid obsolescence, remaining an anti-assimilationist beacon for activists, while others worried that lumping anyone with non-normative sexualities or lifestyle practices under the same umbrella would inaccurately homogenize disparate groups and detract from specific causes. This study aims to understand the meanings of the word queer among students at Oberlin College today, over a quarter century after the beginning of the word’s …
"This Is A Closed Space For Queer Identifying Folx": Queer Spaces On Campus, Tory Adna Sparks
"This Is A Closed Space For Queer Identifying Folx": Queer Spaces On Campus, Tory Adna Sparks
Honors Papers
Using data from 27 interviews conducted in Fall 2016, I will show how students at Oberlin College construct queer-only spaces as sites for the formation of their queer identities. This is done through three discourses: the rhetoric of safe spaces, the ambiguity of queer as an identity label, and the positioning of a space as open or closed based on self-identification. Thus, in entering a space in which participation is contingent upon self-identification with the category “queer” (as it pertains to non-heterosexual and/or non-cis identity), students at Oberlin College are co-producing their queer identities while simultaneously forming “queer spaces.” This …
Without Closets: A Queer And Feminist Re-Imagining Of Narratives Of Queer Experience, Julia Golda Harris
Without Closets: A Queer And Feminist Re-Imagining Of Narratives Of Queer Experience, Julia Golda Harris
Honors Papers
This project employs a queer and feminist lens to critique the prominence of the coming-out narrative in discourses surrounding queer life experiences, and configures alternative ways of thinking about these experiences. I conducted on-campus interviews with queer-identifying women about their identities and experiences with visibility and disclosure. I investigate in this project both the role that the coming-out narrative plays in shaping these stories and the radical possibilities embedded within these stories for new types of narrative. Guided by queer theory's complicated relationship with the notion of identity, I define and employ the concept of "queer alignment" as an alternative …