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

Comparing The Social Responses Of Aids And Covid-19 Through Oral History, Elise Lee

Women's and Gender Studies Theses

In the past 40 years, the United States has faced 2 major public health crises: the AIDS epidemic, and the global COVID-19 pandemic. In this project I consider the various aspects of these public health emergencies such as sharing the burden of survival, the role of fear, the bastardization of identity politics, and queerness as a political project. I do this by analyzing oral histories and I argue that we can look at the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic in parallel. During both AIDS and COVID, despite severely lackluster governmental responses, we saw overwhelming amounts of community organizing and …

“Éowyn It Was, And Dernhelm Also”: Reading The ‘Wild Shieldmaiden’ Through A Queer Lens., Sara Brown

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Éowyn we first meet in 'The Two Towers' is a woman who has been traumatised by the loss of her parents at a young age, the recent loss of her cousin Théodred, the apparent weakening of her uncle Théoden, and her inability to escape the lascivious gaze of Wormtongue. Marginalised by her gender and by social expectation, her desire to find purpose in her life as a shieldmaiden is repeatedly thwarted. Seeking to reclaim control over her life and to make her own choices, she rides out with the Rohirrim not as Éowyn, but as Dernhelm.

Past scholars have …

Queer Rural Youth Online: A Digital Ethnography, Joseph Robert Burns

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis is based on digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 within Queer subcommunities on the social media sites Reddit and Twitter (now known as X) and data collected from interviews with Queer rural youth members of these communities. The data reveal that social media use directly influences the lives and actions of Queer rural youth, who use the space to build social connections, shape their personal identities, and seek advice pertaining to their in-person lives and decisions. By using these spaces, Queer rural youth build both bonding and bridging social capital, learn to subvert restrictions to their Internet access, …

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

Ovid's Caeneus As A Queer Hero: Understanding Gender And Gender Variance In The Ancient Mediterranean., Rj Palmer

Theses and Dissertations--Modern and Classical Languages, Literature and Cultures

Caeneus, as written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a notable blend of ancient and Hellenistic versions of the myth. Ovid’s Caeneus can be understood as a transgender man, since he was assigned female at birth, but asks for his gender to be changed by the god Neptune, and goes on to live the rest of his life with the body, appearance, and social roles of a man. Ovid incorporates Caeneus’ trans identity with his use of grammatical gender endings for Caeneus, using masculine gender for Caeneus except when discussing his pre-transition childhood, or when the centaurs address him mockingly while fighting. …

Queering The Ear: Podcast Aesthetics And The Embodied Archive In S-Town, Kira Schukar

English Honors Projects

Despite podcasts’ rising popularity over the last twenty years, literary scholars are only beginning to focus on their affective potential as multimedia texts. In this thesis, I argue that even mainstream podcasts are productively intertwined with queer theories and aesthetics of belonging. Using the 2017 podcast S-Town as my case study, I examine the aural aesthetics of queer failure, temporality, archives, embodiment, and desire as key elements in this complex medium. Putting these theories and aesthetics into practice, I describe my process of research-creation and present a podcast I made about my road trip to Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town’s place …

Bi Design: Strategies For Fiction, Audrey T. Heffers

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

How can bisexuality be represented in fiction in a way that is realistic and nuanced? This article presents five strategies of representing bisexuality in fiction, listed here as Implying, Demonstrating, Describing, Using Explicit Labels, and Having Conversations. These practical approaches highlight craft techniques that writers can implement in their own work. By articulating some of the ways in which bisexuality is already written in fiction, these strategies provide tools for writers to write bisexuality in ways that work against common stereotypes. These strategies are presented through an interdisciplinary lens, primarily relying upon Creative Writing Studies, …

The Blue Girandole & The Grand Hotel: Reconsiderations Of Sodom And Gomorrah In Proust's À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Emma West Alcorn

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The push for diversity in media and literature has resulted in an increase in representation, at least on the surface. While the range of representation may have broadened in terms of subject identity – gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. – the way this diversity has occurred has not necessarily encouraged ethical or allied development. The aim of my thesis is to develop and deploy five methods of feminist critique and analysis of representation in popular media. I begin by laying out the five methodologies, in a manner that allows for the use of these methods on other examples. Then, I …

Do You Wanna Go Dancing?, Anthony Kascak

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The transdisciplinary art work within Do you wanna go dancing? unpacks the experience and perception of my interpersonal relationships, as well as the role that touch and introspection has in my visual arts practice and everyday life. I am interested in pairing the act of looking with the sensation of touching through specific installation and arrangement of intimate imagery, ceramic fragments and frames, and manual or digitally fabricated surfaces. The negotiation of these installations orient the viewer to consider their positionality within space, as well as the extent in which distance, intimacy, and vulnerability fluctuate inside these psychological spaces.

The …

A Rethinking Of Gray Asexuality: What Do We Learn From An Undefinable Identity?, Jason M. Gurevitch

Honors Theses

Gray-Asexuality offers us a paradox in understanding sexuality, since while it is posed as a middle ground between Asexual and Allosexual, it is also solidly a category of Asexuality. This poses the question of when does someone become Asexual and if they are ever interested in sex why are they not just Allosexual? While understandings of Asexuality that have excluded the Gray-Asexuality can ignore this question, including it requires asking this question, which not only requires defining Asexuality, but also more importantly requires a naming of what normative sexuality is. Within these contexts people who are Gray-Asexual engage in a …

Phantom Limb: An Exploration Of Queer Manner In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Tales, Casey Michelle O'Reilly

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The term “phantom limb” is used to describe the phenomenal tingling sensation that occurs in the nerve endings of an amputated limb; though the limb is no longer physically attached to the body, the person experiences pain and physical sensation in the space the limb once occupied. Though the body part has been removed, it haunts both the body and the brain. It is through this metaphor that I am interested in investigating the connection between the disembodied and the embodied.

The disembodied connects to the embodied through the loss or lack of a bodily form; the embodied, therefore, links …

Feeling As Knowing: Trans Phenomenology And Epistemic Justice, B. Lee Aultman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional …

The View From Here: Toward A Sissy Critique, Tyler Monson

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation situates 20th- and 21st-century American literary studies within a post-civil rights context that recognizes how narratives of U.S. exceptionalism have been employed in service of U.S. empire through the recognition of some groups of difference over others. I argue that always at each moment of inclusion, the nation-state invokes a rubric of militarized masculinity to ensure and expand its normative power, to increase legitimate violence, to gain new administrative capacities, and to advance U.S. economic and militaristic strength. My term militarized masculinity sounds out an ideology of exceptionalism that transcends the literal boundaries of military spaces and bodies …

Some-Ness In No-When: Queer Temporalities In The Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In my research, I question why heteronormative society is afraid of the elements of horror films that are inherently queer. My focus is on temporal understandings of horror through the concepts of queer time, as theorized by Jack Halberstam and the theory of the abject, as presented by Julia Kristeva. I examine the relationship between queer time and heteronormative time. The abject serves as the return of time without identity or defined by binaries. Queer time is the time that will destroy heteronormative time’s conception of itself. This then relates to the horror that is created by the queering of …

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 …

Punishing Assemblages: A Queer, Decolonizing Theory Of The American Prison, Liam Hopkins

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Bodies Of Resistance: On (Not) Naming Gender In The Medieval West, Alexander V. Baldassano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the genres of historiography, romance, hagiography, Chaucerian poetry, and court transcripts. While there are no extant manuscripts depicting transgender-like people’s accounts of themselves, literature of the Middle Ages is replete with fictionalized depictions of ambiguously or transgressively gendered individuals who are meant to symbolize or represent something other than themselves. By investigating how a variety of genres depicts sensationalized and transgressively gendered embodiments, I examine the presentation of transgender-like subjectivity as a manipulation of rhetoric. Viviane Namaste critiques theory such as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, claiming that it reduces the transvestite figure to a rhetorical trope …

Weird Modernisms, Alison Nikki Sperling

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation theorizes “the Weird” as a pervasive theme across literary Modernism. Drawing from early versions of weirdness in the pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954) and from the magazine’s most famous writer, H.P. Lovecraft, I demonstrate that the weird must not be limited to tentacular horrors present in supernatural fiction of the period. Instead, I argue weirdness is a category bound to non-normative experiences of material embodiment. Drawing from feminist materialisms, queer theory, disability studies, and nonhuman theories, this project develops a concept of the Weird that is more expansive and ultimately more ethically engaged with otherness and bodily difference. …

Granite And Rainbow: Queer Authority And Authorship In T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, And Virginia Woolf, Heejoung Shin

Theses and Dissertations

“Granite and Rainbow” argues that queerness is an essential condition for normative creativity to properly function in literary Modernism. Specifically, for the three modernist authors I explore in this project, queerness is at the heart of their literary performances: the private, bawdy, scintillatingly homoerotic Eliot feigning an impersonal, cerebral voice in public; the wounded, traumatized, feminine Yeats desiring for a compelling, masculine mask; and the scared and unsatisfiable Woolf whose strong desire for the maternal and a female tradition of writing is almost always cut short by her simultaneously antithetical craving for a male tradition of writing. This dissertation approaches …

Reading Queerly In The High School Classroom: Exploring A Gay And Lesbian Literature Course, Kirsten Helmer

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how teaching an English literature curriculum centered on the stories, experiences, cultures, histories, and politics of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) people constitutes a meaningful site for teaching and learning in a high school classroom. The dissertation offers insights on how the teaching of LGBTQI-themed texts in English language arts classes can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and conceptual tools of queer theory to critical literacies teaching. The project follows principles of critical qualitative research and employs an ethnographic case study approach with the purpose of transforming educational …

“What Happens On The Other Side Of The Strai(Gh)T? Clandestine Migrations And Queer Racialized Desire In Juan Bonilla’S Neopicaresque Novel Los Príncipes Nubios (2003).”, Gema Pérez-Sánchez

Gema Pérez-Sánchez

No abstract provided.

Finding The "T" In Lgbtq: Esl Educator Perceptions Of Transgender And Non-Binary Gender Topics In The Language Classroom, Teresa Lynn Witcher

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

While there is a “T” in the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ), the focus in both academia and the real world often shifts solely to sexuality. Even though the real world discussion of sexuality (and perhaps academia’s as well) is also much lacking in both attention to all sexualities (not simply heterosexual and homosexual), there is also a distinct lack of awareness about subtleties all along both the sexuality and gender spectrums. Although sexuality can depend on gender to some extent, particularly where limiting prefixes related to the preference for a specific binary gender (such as …

Sex: The Zine, Chapman University

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and art about sexuality and gender identity, including sexual fluidity, bisexuality, masturbation and self-care, sex-positive feminism, and gender stereotyping.

The Ordinary Trip: Heteronormativity And Homophobia In Young Adult Literature From 1969 To 2009, Laurie Barth Walczak

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines books published for and marketed toward teen readers as cultural products and artifacts with the potential and the power to help shape young readers' ideas and understandings of the world, culture, and society around them in order to identify and investigate hegemonic forces or ideological apparatuses at play in young adult literature. From among the earliest young adult novels with characters who depict diverse gender and sexual identities, such as John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth Trip. in 1969, to the most contemporary, including Nick Burd's The Vast Fields of Ordinary in 2009, the …

El Espacio Torcido En La Narrativa Mexicana De Temática Homosexual: 1977-1997, Juan Carlos Rocha Osornio

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines how the narratives of Raúl Rodríguez Cetina, Luis Zapata, Mario Bellatin, and Gerardo Guiza Lemus recreate what I call Espacio Torcido (Queer Space) in which they aim (some more than others) at questioning and deconstructing the values of the heteronormative system: ambiguity, pleasure, rupture, and the quest for legitimacy compose this space. While each author takes a different approach, it can be said that they all participate in the construction of the history of the gay community in Mexico as seen in the latter part of the XX century: 1977-1997. In particular, this study looks at how …

"Nudge A Mexican And She Or He Will Break Out With A Story": Complicating Mexican Immigrant Masculinities Through Counternarrative Storytelling, Berenice Villela

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore Latino masculinities and contest their uniformity through transforming an oral history conducted with my father into a collection of short stories. Following storytelling traditions of Latino/Mexican culture, I converted an oral history interviews with my dad into a collection of short stories. From these short stories I extracted themes relating to the micro and macro manifestations of gender policing. Drawing from Judith Butler's Theory of performativity and Gloria Anzaldua's theory of Borderland identities, I rethink masculinity and offer Jose Esteban Munoz's theory of disidentification. With these theories in conversation, I analyze the themes of the …

Investigating Trait Attribution Through Gendered Avatar Play: An Analysis Of The Sims 3, Erika M. Behrmann

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigates whether the life-simulation videogame, The Sims 3, enables the deconstruction of the gender binary. The Sims 3 permits its players the capability to attribute similar traits to male or female avatars. In doing so, players can experiment with taboo trait attributions and potentially defy a male-female binary. A group of 82 The Sims 3 players was surveyed to determine their overall male and female Sims trait selections during gameplay. Participants were questioned on how their trait selection related to their personal identities. Results indicated that players tend to select traits that maintain a gender binary. This …

The Man In The Text: Desire, Masculinity, And The Development Of Poe's Detective Fiction, Peter J. Goodwin

Peter J Goodwin

This article finds the kernel of Poe's detective fiction in his investigations into the construction of "gentlemanliness" that he began at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. As precursors to Poe's tales of ratiocination, "The Man That Was Used Up" and "The Man of the Crowd" train the reader not to expect a satisfying conclusion to the mystery surrounding masculinity that the author has woven. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the homoerotic desire to apprehend an integral masculine subject ends in frustration bordering on the absurd. In thus undermining the American ideal of masculinity as unified, integral, impenetrable, and fraternal, Poe …