Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"There Is Power In Being Out": A Three Article Approach Celebrating The Experiences Of Queer University Leaders, Andrew R. E. Lorenzana

Dissertations

Institutions of higher education were historically built to serve a wealthy, White, straight male student population and the leaders of these institutions still largely reflect these demographics. This project specifically aims to celebrate and amplify the life and career of university administrators who identify within the LGBTQ community. Mainly through the use of a portraiture methodology, this three-article study attempts to examine the ways in which LGBTQ identity and career influence one another.

Worldmaking and narrative will be used as a theoretical frame to help analyze the ways in which the telling of a queer individual’s story makes the world …

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

Using Queer Of Color Theory To Analyze Latinidad, Maria I. Castro-Mendoza

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

Queer of Color Theory (QOCT) has emerged as a new field of study with the rise of LGBTQ+ visibility in the modern day political landscape. QOCT is an extended analysis of queer theory that explicitly and intentionally takes into account race, imperialism, and colonialism. Queer of color theory can be used to create or expand upon an already existing theory, and has roots in Black feminism. Using queer of color theory as a method of analysis, this essay discusses the black and indigenous erasure within the Latinidad movement and seeks to examine those who have been systemically left out of …

Imagining Gender Euphorias, Willow Wind

Honors College

Our society needs to talk about gender, but we aren’t very good at it. Avoiding these discussions has harmful impacts on body image and various health disparities (The Trevor Project, 2020). What if we have better and regular conversations about ways we can positively experience gender? This study’s model of negotiating gender can be used by families and educators seeking affirming exploratory learning opportunities. Insights into meanings of gender euphoria help validate diverse sets of experiences, informing a broader cultural discourse that increasingly questions gender binarism (Griffin, 2020).

This study explores conceptualizations and enactment of gender euphoria across demographics and …

The Sea Calls: A Selkie's Liminal Existence, Frances Avery

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Traditionally, the selkies (or seal people) of Scottish-Irish lore exist between spaces: the land and the sea, human and animal, childbearing and childless. Their existence at sea is voluntary but their existence on land is forced. Once the selkie has left behind its sealskin and both the literal and metaphorical sealskin has been stolen, the selkie becomes subject to human will. The lenses of body, reclamation, violation, and abuse prove that the reason why selkies have faded from popularity is because the lessons are too mature for a young audience. A feminist and queer reading and interpretation of this traditional …

The (In)Visible Woman: A Performative Autoethnographic Exploration Of Queer Femme-Ininity And Queer Isolation, Bri Ozalas

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis is a performative autoethnographic exploration of my experiences existing betwixt-and-between the intersection of queer femme-ininity and isolation. Through a creative, affective rendition of my experiences, I detail and connect the nuances of queerness, femme-ininity, and queer isolation to provide a closer look at understanding queer identity with an absence of connection to the queer community. First, I provide an overview of the main theoretical and methodological approaches, and main concepts I utilize throughout my project. I then provide the intricacies of queer theory, queer intersectionality, and affect theory to provide theoretical explanations of my approach to queer isolation. …

Just Between Us Girls: Discursive Spaces From America's First Gay Magazine To The World's Last Website For Queer Women, 1947-2019, Josie Rush

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Just Between Us Girls charts the diffusion of queer theory outside of the academy, using convergence theory to examine communication technologies like periodicals and the Web to argue for a conception of queer theory that includes discourse between queer women about queerness. In making this argument, this project creates a lineage of discursive spaces by, for, and about queer women, putting content from these spaces in conversation with canonical queer theorists like Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Jack Halberstam. Analyzing and contextualizing discursive spaces like Vice Versa (1947-1948), The Ladder (1956-1972), The Furies (1972-1973), AfterEllen, and Autostraddle demonstrates not …

The Notions Of The "Closet" And The "Secret" In Oscar Wilde's, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Jessica Maria Oliveira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss the notions of the “closet” and “secret” within Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as offer a clear and precise definition of queer theory to assist in elucidating many of the concepts being discussed. Close reading techniques will be utilized to further uncover the metaphoric, symbolic, and otherwise figurative importance of certain aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray and supporting texts. Through Judith Butler’s conceptualization of sex and gender, as well as Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the “secret”, this paper will explicate the intricacies of Wilde’s work and unveil queered aspects …

Looking Beyond Binaries To Avoid Polarization In The Sex Work Debate, Laura Keenan

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

This paper considers both sides of the debate surrounding sex work--the argument for criminalizing sex work and the contention for legalizing sex work--in relationship to policies aimed at combating sex-trafficking in America as well as globally. A queer theory concept of recognizing and removing linguistically created binaries is applied to this debate to offer a more productive perspective on the matter.

Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

“Behind Closet Doors: Horror and Dislocation in the Queer Closet,” is composed of a collection of sculptures, videos, and sound works that are directly associated with themes of horror and anxiety derived from the precarious space of the queer closet as detailed in this thesis of the same name.

Toward A Working Theory Of Queer Hypermedia: An Analysis Of Queer Textual Structures In Gone Home And What Remains Of Edith Finch, Cat Boers

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In this project, I analyze two video games, Gone Home (Fullbright Company 2013) and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow 2017), through a queer theoretical framework, focusing on three specific features of the games: 1) their status as open world games, 2) the agency given to players in interactions with objects, and 3) how ambiguous player-character identity is used to create a sense of estrangement in the player. I use these features to argue for a specifically queer theoretical approach to hypermedia, which is attentive to the process of how players create an identity for themselves within the game …

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

Performing (Female) Masculinity In The Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World: An Analysis Of The Mujer Varonil In Gender And Genre, Nathaniel L. Redekopp

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

The following dissertation on the trope of the mujer varonil^[1] employs bibliographical research in literary criticism and historiography to identify and describe socio-historic attitudes about gender. In particular, this dissertation examines gender as communicated by texts that use the mujer varonil, or “masculine woman”, characterization to either praise or vilify exceptional female subjects in ways that highlight normative limits for masculine and feminine gender expression. Four texts are examined: a male author writes each and each represents a literary genre that was significant in early modern Spain and Spanish America. These genres are the hagiography, the relación, the …

The Child To Come: Life After The Human Catastrophe By Rebekah Sheldon, Nathan Tebokkel

The Goose

Review of Rebekah Sheldon's The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe.

Teaching Critical Looking: Pedagogical Approaches To Using Comics As Queer Theory, Ashley Manchester

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Given the challenging depth of queer theoretical concepts, this article argues that one of the most effective ways to teach the complexities of queer theory is by utilizing comics in the classroom. I focus on how college-level instructors can use the content, form, and history of comics to teach students how to enact and do queer theory. By reading and making comics, students learn concrete and theoretical tools for combatting oppressive discourses and modes of meaning making. Teaching comics as queer theory promotes both innovative critical thinking and critical looking skills by centralizing both the rich history of queer comics …

Homonationalism: From Critique To Diagnosis, Or, We Are All Homonational Now, C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten

“Between That Earth And That Sky”: The Idealized Horizon Of Willa Cather’S My Ántonia, Miriam A. Gonzales

Anthós

Since its 1918 publication, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia has been lauded for Cather’s masterful description of the Nebraska prairie landscape; since the mid-1980s, this text has also been the subject of countless queer theoretical analyses, many of which focus on what their authors perceive as an obstructed romantic connection between the novel’s two main characters, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda. While these two subjects may not initially seem correlative, a more recent—and unrelated—critical essay illuminates a new way of examining Cather’s attention to setting. When we view My Ántonia in conjunction with José Esteban Muñoz’s “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics …

Queering The Library Of Congress, Carlos R. Fernandez

Works of the FIU Libraries

This poster will attempt to apply the techniques used in Queer Theory to explore library and information science’s use and misuse of library classification systems; and to examine how “queering” these philosophical categories can not only improve libraries, but also help change social constructs.

For millennia, philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, have used and expounded upon categories and systems of classification. Their purpose is to make research and the retrieval of information easier. Unfortunately, the rules used to categorize and catalog make information retrieval more challenging for some, due to social constructs such as heteronormality.

The importance of this …

A Queer Vegan Manifesto, Rasmus R. Simonsen

Rasmus R Simonsen, PhD

What does it mean for a person to declare her or his veganism to the world? How does the transition from one diet to another impact one’s sense of self? Veganism challenges the foundational character of how we “act out” our selves—not least of all in the context of sexuality and gender. In my paper, I am thus interested in the potential of veganism to disrupt the “natural” bond between gender formations and the consumption of animal products, as this relates to social and cultural genealogies. Consequently, I will explore a queer form of veganism that affirms the radical impact …

My, Is That Cyborg A Little Bit Queer?, Esperanza Miyake

Journal of International Women's Studies

This piece of work is a response to the following question: ‘Critically assess the importance, or otherwise, of Donna Haraway’s “manifesto” for early twenty-first century feminists’. Based on Stein and Plummer’s outline of queer theory in their essay, “I can’t even think straight”: “Queer” Theory and the Missing Sexual Revolution in Sociology (Stein and Plummer 1996). This piece compares and contrasts different aspects of queer theory (sociological, ideological, political and ontological) with Haraway’s ‘manifesto’ in order to investigate the possibilities of a cyberqueer theory: to ‘queer’ (as a verb) the ‘cyborg’. Whilst attempting to interrelate both the notion of the …

Imperial Performativity: The Life, Transgressions, And Writings Of Isabelle Eberhardt Under The Lens Of Queer Theory, Kelsey Deforest

Undergraduate Research Awards

An examination of Isabelle Eberhardt's life and writings with regard to gender norms and imperialist expectations in French-controlled Algeria. The PDF includes the author's entry submission essay for the 2011 Undergraduate Research Awards.

When Men Are Harmed: Feminism, Queer Theory, And Torture At Abu Ghraib, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article I explore the assertions of "anti-imperialist" feminist scholars who critique "imperial feminism" for its support of the war on terror (WOT). I bring into this analysis the proposition by queer theorists that feminist reliance on male/ female subordination has the potential to not only obscure harm in times of war but also to perpetuate it. As a case study, I focus on the Abu Ghraib prison photos that depict, in part, female soldiers torturing male Iraqi prisoners. In conducting this analysis, I reveal the analytical limitations of dominance and cultural feminists, particularly with regard to male harm …