Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Setting Up Shop Down South: Gay Visibility And Identity Formation At A New Orleans Bookstore, Katelyn N. Spencer

LSU Master's Theses

Looking specifically at the South’s first gay bookstore, Faubourg Marigny (FM) Books, this thesis will connect the existence of gay literature and space as impetuses of gay community identity within New Orleans. It will use the political, social, and cultural histories of the 1970s through the 2010s to contextualize the gay bookstore as a microcosm of its time and location. In doing so, it will examine how FM Books’ New Orleans location affected its function and its relationship with its community. It will also analyze how the bookstore fit into the city’s history of social tradition and aversion to flagrant …

Queer Bodies: Homoeroticism, Sensuality, And Erotica In Postmodern Fine Art Photography, Rosa Michel Pace

LSU Master's Theses

The queer body– describes the sum of assumptions and biases attributed to queer people, whereby a person’s own queer identity or expression is overshadowed by the generalizations, (mis)perceptions, and stereotypes that society imposes on that individual. Central to the scope of this thesis is the reality whereby the ostracization of queer people involves the association between the very body of the queer person with sexual acts deemed both deviant and immoral by a cis-heteronormative society. Society renders the queer body as pejoratively deviant simply on the basis of its existence alone, where any form of varied gender or sexual expression …

Offerings, Diana C. Patin

LSU Master's Theses

These photographs and writing are a set of offerings, collected as part of an intensive examination of myself and my contentious relationship with self-image. I first established which traits in my personality represent me best. I landed on my fatness, my queerness, my southernness, and my penchant for caring. Then I took a deep dive into each of those four themes with the objective of uncovering both the areas of exaltation and spaces of hurt within them. The images that result are both confrontational and gentle. It is my hope that the uncompromising honesty within these offerings communicates that while …

Neverending Loop, Joseph Nivens

LSU Master's Theses

The intention of NeverEnding Loop is to depict the trauma of queer adolescense contrasted by the shadow of the closet that follows LGBTQ+ children into adulthood. The reality for queer people is that coming out is a process that never ends and a task that can create a lonely existence for those that are different from the norm. The artwork aims to convey the very real and confusing struggle of finding your identity as a queer person existing in a heterosexual world.

NeverEnding Loop explores loops and cycles in short animations, sculptural forms with repeating imagery, and mixed media forms …

Yours Always, Always Yours, Emery Kate Tillman

LSU Master's Theses

The body of artwork discussed in this paper deals with the navigational process of the actualization of my own desires and needs in an intimate capacity specifically relating to my own queer identity. In this paper I will address the use of certain forms throughout the work as well as color and material choices. Yours Always, Always Yours is a thesis project produced as the final requirement of Louisiana State University’s Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art program.

Discursos Contrasexuales: Subversiones Queer, Stephanie Colin

LSU Master's Theses

Judith Butler argues that gender is a performative cultural construction; this analysis is taken to further means of discussion in reference to the revelation of sex and gender as both cultural and social constructions. Sex and gender appear as a result of heteornormative regulations imposed onto social actors, arguing that these constructions are essences naturally attached to the human body. The constructions of the sex/gender system are inflicted by a regulative discourse. In the heterocentric society this discursive control is implemented through social norms which enforce male with masculinity and female with femininity. Through various analyses of contra-hegemonic cultural and …

La Cámara Insurrecta. La Fotografía Como Desobediencia Al Sistema Heteronormativo, Mariana Yanina Olivares

LSU Master's Theses

The heteronormative society establishes a systematic foundation of oppression based on its construction of the sex/gender system. Teresa de Lauretis expresses the heteronormative system as the culprit for the dualistic division; which is reproduced and regulated as natural through technologies of gender. Gender can be deduced as a product of the heterocentric society’s performativity ideal as well as medical, juridical, cinema, cybernetic, and photographic technologies amongst others (Paul Preciado, “Biopolítica del género”). Said devices collaborate in the naturalization of the heterocentric discourse on the basis of the construction and diffusion of gender models. By virtue of this thesis, photography is …

The False Idealization Of Heteronormativity And The Repression Of Queerness, Catherine Lynn Thurmond

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis, entitled “The False Idealization of Heteronormativity and the Repression of Queerness,” I examine heteronormativity as a social structure that is idealized over, and against, queerness. In the first chapter, I define heteronormativity and queerness. “Heteronormativity,” here, is simply a set of standards that dictate what one must do with their gender and sexuality, such as having sexual relations with the opposite sex, getting married, or having children. Heteronormativity is visible, validated, and normalized in society. Conversely, “queerness” refers to the social structures that dictate what one must not do with their gender and sexuality. Thus, queerness is …

Jean Cocteau: Orpheus Narcissus, Gordon Elliott Walker

LSU Master's Theses

Over the course of thirty years, the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau created a singular artistic project he called the Orphic trilogy: Le Sang d’un poète (1930), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament d’Orphée (1959). This trilogy is marked by an Orphic pattern of a poet’s journey into an underworld to confront death. I will show that Cocteau’s invention is to have Orpheus be in love with death, for death to be an attractive and irresistible force to the poet. Simultaneously, Cocteau avails himself of the Narcissus myth, the man in love with his own reflection. Orpheus and Narcissus converge in …