Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, And The Reclamation Of Disease,
2010
CUNY Graduate Center
Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, And The Reclamation Of Disease, Marty Melissa Fink
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Through a theoretical and archival analysis of HIV/AIDS literature, this dissertation argues that the AIDS crisis is not an isolated incident that is now "over," but a striking culmination of a long history of understanding illness through narratives of queer sexual decline and national outsiderhood. Literary representations of HIV/AIDS can be read as a means of resistance to the stigmatization of people of color, women, immigrants, and queers, debunking the narratives that vilify these subjects as threats to national security and health. In drawing connections between illness, history, and the African diaspora, my work adopts a queer theoretical approach to …
Reconstructing Sex: Women Having Sex With Women,
2010
Wilfrid Laurier University
Reconstructing Sex: Women Having Sex With Women, Alixandra Holtby
Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)
This study examines the experience of exclusion from the dominant understandings of sex for women who have sex with women, including queer, pansexual, bisexual, and lesbian women. Using ideas of the constructed nature of sex, particularly the use of sexual scripts (Simon & Gagnon, 1973), as well as the (hetero)sexist context in which these scripts are formed, qualitative interviews with 11 queer, pansexual, bisexual, and lesbian women were analyzed regarding their development of their understandings of what constitutes sex, their expectations and experiences of sex, their negotiation of desire and sexual identity, and their perspectives on sex between women and …
