Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Envisioning Queer And Trans Educational Futures In Contentious Times: Editors’ Introduction, Kamden Strunk, Antonio Duran, Stephanie Anne Shelton

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

The field of queer and trans studies has significantly grown, becoming interdisciplinary and intersectional, yet facing existential threats. A range of anti-queer and trans legislation, particularly targeting trans youth, and polarized political rhetoric have increased risks and eroded public support. This special issue of the Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education explores queer and trans futures amidst these challenges. Highlighting various scholarly perspectives, it addresses educational disparities, decolonial queer epistemologies, and intersectional frameworks. Growing out of interdisciplinary collaborations and years of conversations, the journal aims to provide a rigorous, open-access platform for innovative, anti-oppressive scholarship, fostering activism, practice, …

Decolonizing Queer Epistemology: Boys Love And Cultural Imaginary From The Global Majority, Roland Sintos Coloma

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

This article aims to decolonize queer epistemology in order to challenge the hegemony of white/eurocentric LGBTQ histories, cultures, and representations as the universal and normalized standard of queer and trans life and sociality. Toward this objective, it analyzes whitestream queer epistemology, and notes its limits that do not account for its inclusions and exclusions, especially in relation to race, geography, and methodological (homo)nationalism. It draws attention to the works of queer and trans theorists, researchers, and educators from the global majority, especially the growing scholarship on LGBTQ education outside of the United States, to point out a significant gap in …

What Is Decolonial Trans* Feminism And What Can It Do For Queer/Trans Bipoc Education Research? Reimagining Knowledge And Identity Through The Convergence Of Decolonial And Trans* Feminism, Omi Salas-Santacruz

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

This paper introduces decolonial trans* feminism, a framework merging decolonial theory with trans* of color feminism to challenge colonial gender oppression. It reimagines knowledge, gender, power, and resistance in educational research for queer/trans BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals by integrating Indigenous metaphysics, diverse self-ontologies, and spiritual dimensions. The asterisk in trans* feminism symbolizes the fluidity of gender identities, challenging rigid boundaries of thought and colonial norms. Emphasizing the Androgynous Whole, the paper explores how different configurations of knowledge inform gender and serve as sites of coalitional resistance. Engaging with Third World Feminists, it calls for a shift to …

“Who All Gon Be There?”: On Blackness, Transness, And K-12 Pedagogies For [Black] Trans Futures, Shea W. Martin

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

Grounded in trans-of-color critique and Black trans studies, this theoretical meditation reckons with the impossibility of Black trans safety, recognition, and futurity within our U.S. K-12 educational landscape. Situated in a “post-Transgender Tipping Point” sociopolitical landscape, I explore how these limitations contribute to Black trans youth’s disparate experiences in today’s schools, particularly with attention to the [in]effectiveness of existing queer and trans pedagogies. In an attempt to locate what is deemed possible for Black trans youth in imagined educational futures, I discuss trends within select K-12 trans pedagogical scholarship through which I explore questions related to authorship, reflexivity, and intersectional …

Curiosity, Passion, & Proximity: Motivations For Attending Safe Zone Trainings, D Chase J. Catalano, Daniel Tillapaugh, Rachel Wagner, Kari Dockendorff, Nina Tissi-Gassoway

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

LGBTQ+ social justice educational interventions (SJEIs), usually named Safe Zone or Ally Training, offer opportunities for knowledge acquisition and reflection. Ideally, they provide components necessary to cultivate allyship through the development of a liberatory consciousness (Love, 2018) through increasing awareness, engaging in analysis, considering actions, and reflecting on accountability. In this instrumental case study (Stake, 2000) focused on 17 graduate students, faculty, and staff at a large, public university in the Mid-Atlantic, we used liberatory consciousness as a conceptual framework to examine motivation for attendance. Three findings emerged: (1) curiosity, (2) passion, and (3) proximity. Implications of these specific factors …

Oppressive Pushout: Examining Differences In Discipline And “Dropout” By Race, Gender, And Sexual Orientation, Danielle N. Aguilar, Taylor Lewis, Jude Paul Matias Dizon, Pearl Lo, Ángel González, Jason C. Garvey, Mario I. Suárez

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

Drawing on well-established insights, our study adds nuance to the discussion regarding school pushout practices by centering race, sexual orientation and gender beyond the binary. By way of descriptive and inferential statistics using the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS:09), our article seeks to disrupt the cisheteronormative discussion regarding exclusionary school discipline and institutionally inflicted pushout that impacts the educational trajectories and opportunities of queer and trans Black, Indigenous, students of color (QT BIPOC). Results from our chi-square analyses revealed significant differences in rates of cutting/skipping class, in-school suspension, suspension or expulsion, and dropping out across our four groups: QT BIPOC …

Placing Student Success And Well-Being At The Center Of The Educational Process: How The Magic City Acceptance Academy Promotes An Ethical And Caring School Culture, D. Keith Gurley, Dwayne White, Matthew Fifolt Dr.

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

Schools and school leaders are well-positioned to create school cultures that are supportive of all students, including students who identify as LGBTQ and those who are perceived as other due to status of race, class, or ability. The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to explore how faculty and staff at the Magic City Acceptance Academy (MCAA) promote an ethical and caring school culture. To guide our thinking and interpretation of research findings, our team relied on two conceptual frameworks, including queer theory and the ethical educational leadership framework ethic of care. Based on inductive coding of focus …

Three Card Spread: Theorizing Queer And Trans Futurity For Tenure-Track Faculty Through Divination Dialogues, Justin A. Gutzwa, Sergio A. Gonzalez

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

This article lies betwixt methodological, conceptual, and empirical scholarship, queering traditional presentations of qualitative research to imagine what a future in the academy could look like for queer and trans faculty if the academy instead prioritized queer and trans joy, thriving, and life. The authors, two queer and trans early-career tenure-track faculty, utilize divination dialogues, or conversations that take place during and following a divinatory practice such as tarot reading, as a liberatory politic of community building and co-theorization on how to actualize our own futures in a colonial, neoliberal academy. In presenting excerpts from the conversation that took place …

"In Some Ways They’Re The People Who Need It The Most": Mobilizing Queer Joy With Sex Ed Teachers In New Brunswick, Canada, Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn

Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education

Teaching about sexuality can be messy. What does it mean to incite queer joy as an educational language in sex education? In this article, we explore how queer joy can be used by teachers as a language to confront this messy work of sex education and teach in more pleasurable, joyful, and inclusive ways. In our analysis, we draw upon the conversations and visual data we created alongside 43 teacher-participants from New Brunswick, Canada in a series of participatory media-making workshops and describe how queer joy informs the artful praxis that transpired in these spaces. In these workshops, we observed …

Sense Make Before Book, Bradley Sinanan

Theses and Dissertations

“Sense Make Before Book” is an Indo-Caribbean turn of phrase which refers to common sense being more important than book smarts. My sister sent me a post the other day on Instagram of an Trinidadian woman using this phrase, saying it was one of Indo-Caribbean origin. I was interested and asked my mom about it. My mom says that when she was younger my grandpa said it often around their house in Princes Town, Trinidad and Tobago. This adage feels charged thinking about the history of indenture and its effects on the Indo-Caribbean diaspora.

The written word of archival history …

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). …

Roots And Webs And Nets And Branches And Bulletin Boards And Banners And Newsletters And Mutual Aid Text Threads And Kin And Caretakers And Porches And Poems Of Today And Spaces Of Survival, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo

Theses and Dissertations

As I welcome Richmond, VA into my family, I find myself needing to make roots and webs and nets and branches that ground me, that place myself as a Black, queer, mixed race, artist, activist, educator, storyteller, and cultural worker in this city. I am called to the streets before I am called to my studio. I question what it means to be a part of an institution that is slowly eating this city up. I become a story collector. I need to know where I am and whose land I now call home.

It Takes A Muscle: Wholes, Holes, And Other Voids, Saar Shemesh

Theses and Dissertations

IT TAKES A MUSCLE¹

In the BELLY of the BEAST, the HUMAN

in the deep end of a SWIMMING POOL

in a GRAVE, looking up/out from within

at the base of a CRATER, ABYSS, PIT

the room as a CRADLE, INCUBATOR

architecture as MOTHER MOULD.²

____________________________

¹ Title is borrowed and abbreviated: Spectral Display, “It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love,” 1982.

² For what American-English delineates as ‘mold,’ British-English uses ‘mould’ and is more specific in its technicality. The former doesn’t distinguish in spelling between mold (fungus) and mold (mould). I’m not particularly a fan of …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Considering Queerness - Actor Training's Issues And Alternatives, Jacob Leblanc

Theses and Dissertations

Educators in academic theatre programs, whether queer or non-queer, trans or cisgender, may not intentionally consider queerness in their pedagogical practices. What follows is an examination of current issues in academia that can affect queer students negatively and disproportionately. Anecdotal evidence is provided to demonstrate different issues that may be present in the classroom experiences of queer students. The Stanislavski system is critiqued through a contemporary, queer lens to locate possible shortcomings in the acting technique when it is applied by queer performers. Queer alternatives to the Stanislavski system are vetted and offered to queer students who might seek something …

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

Heavy Hold: A Physical Score, Alexandra Velozo

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of essays, stories, and fictional interviews that are in conversation with my performance, teaching, and sculpture practice. My research and work considers chronic illness, disability, the historic cultural connection between swamplands and illness, the medical industrial complex, medical theater, the medical gaze, disabled performers, metatactile space, sensory learning, and access.

Cissexism And Precarity Perform Trans Subjectivities, Kevin Jenkins

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Precarity is not experienced by all. Rather, as Judith Butler (2009) notes, it is the extreme state of precariousness—a heightened exposure to institutional and social violence imposed on marginalized populations such as people of color, non-white immigrants, people of non-Christian faiths, and LGBTQ+ people. Nor does precarity impact the people in these groups evenly.

The three digital artworks in this series highlight some of the ways in which trans people navigate precarity and are performed by it. The lifetime suicide attempt rate for trans and gender non-conforming people averages at 41% with the highest rate at 46% reported by trans …

Chupa Chuparosas Y Chupacabras, Ruben U. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

A Rascuache Nahual that uses therianthropy on the border between the US and Mexico border.

Paul By Paul By Paul, Paul Finch

Theses and Dissertations

In 2020 flamboyant fashion is associated with queer performativity. Psychologist Alan Downs and queer theorist madison moore understand this to be a response to a culture that is hostile to sexual behaviour and gender expression that falls outside a rigid binary. I study the history of flamboyant aesthetics and camp sensibilities from an intersectional perspective, and locate designers and artists who have produced clothes in ways that materialize the political implications of fashion. As a studio-based artist, I employ traditional sewing techniques, digital technologies, and performance to create clothes and new media works that demonstrate a circular understanding of time, …

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …

(And I Can't Stress This Enough) In My Mouth: Extradiegetic Affect As Material, C. Klockner

Theses and Dissertations

(and i can’t stress this enough) in my mouth: Extradiegetic Affect as Material is a non-linear exploration into the structures of feeling that exist in relation to cinema in its role as a technology for generating subjectivity. In the development of this research, a proposal of cinema’s likeness to the ecological circulation of microplastics is drawn in order to illustrate cinema’s materiality and nearly invisible ubiquity. The notion of extradiegetic affect is outlined as a post-cinematic condition in which lived experience becomes secondary to cinematic representation and which, simultaneously, becomes directly shaped by engaging with these representations.

“The Ground On Which I Stand” Healing Queer Trauma Through Performance: Crafting A Solo Performance Through The Investigation Of Ritual Poetic Drama Within The African Continuum, Ashley W. Grantham

Theses and Dissertations

“The Ground On Which I Stand”

Healing Queer Trauma through Performance:

Crafting a Solo Performance through the investigation of Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum.

By: Ashley W. Grantham

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Performance Pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia Commonwealth University

April 16^th, 2019

Thesis Adjudicator: Dr. Tawnya Pettiford-Wates

Committee: Dr. Keith Byron Kirk, Director of Graduate Studies and Karen Kopryanski, Head of Voice and Speech

How does this method of Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum, by extension, solo performance, …

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Trans-Inclusive Design, Erin White

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The choices web designers make impact the online and offline experiences of real people who are transgender, non-binary, or gender-variant—choices that can affirm or exclude, uplift or annoy, help or harm. This article shines light on the decisions web professionals make every day and offers specific ideas for how to make content, images, forms, databases, IA, privacy, and algorithms trans-inclusive.

Gender-Inclusive Library Workgroup Report, Erin White, Donna E. Coghill, M. Teresa Doherty, Liam Palmer, Steve Barkley

VCU Libraries Task Force Reports

The Gender-Inclusive Workgroup explored how VCU Libraries can better serve trans and gender-nonconforming users and staff. The group’s recommendations cover library spaces, staff, systems, services, and culture. Key recommendations include highlighting existing all-gender restrooms; building more gender-inclusive restrooms; expanding availability of menstrual products and disposal bins; continuing support for name-of-use changes in library systems; minimizing display of legal name in library systems; offering ongoing staff training in gender-inclusive language and customer service; and encouraging staff to share pronouns. The workgroup also recommends pursuing a culture of shared learning and inclusive thinking, with a reminder that gender identity is one facet …

Of The Crickets, Kathryn Lien

Theses and Dissertations

Of the Crickets imagines the overlapping worlds of ethical ecological solutions to climate changed sustenance and the potential for collective excellence in female exclusive environments. Using garments, furniture, site-specific installation and directed performance, the project harnesses social and material sensitivity to mine solutions for idealized living.

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigured found objects shape scenes of everyday life, questioning the structural histories that go into defining an identity. Engaging in a multidisciplinary approach of making, my work reimagines the function of ornamentation and its relationship to the body. I approach new materials and found objects with the eye of a jeweler, highlighting and exploiting the subtle, and often invisible, links between material histories and their connection to identity. Material debris patinated with age like skillets, baseballs, and furniture are used to penetrate normative structures around identity, gender, and sexual desire. Using adornment as a support in my installations I propose …