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

Trans Artists Group 2020, Zinhle Ngema

Capstones

This report acts as my final product towards my MA in Social Journalism. My community focus for the degree program was Black Transgender women in the US. In this report, I discuss the community, their needs, their strengths, obstacles, and the ways in which I attempted to serve them. The report will show the work I did, the feedback received, as well as the ways in which engagement journalism helped me achieve my goals and objectives during a global pandemic, with the help of qualitative and quantitative metrics.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HjIw4fEXr_l4JFl_tX1geemTPAtmVu-f?usp=sharing

Through The Devil's Mirror: The Villain And The Sinthomosexual As Manifestations Of The Death Drive, Andrew Markus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) offers a model for reading queer sexuality and societal place very much in line with that which begins to emerge in early Gothic literature, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796). The Gothic villain aligns with Edelman’s sinthomosexual to illustrate a pattern of victimization and retaliation which results in both the villain and sinthomosexual’s persistent abjection from the social order. However, a close reading of Lewis’s narrative for its depiction of psychological trauma rooted in sexual expression suggests that this queer negativity is not the sum total of …

Social Determinants Of Discrimination And Access To Health Care Among Transgender Women In Oregon, Jonathan Garcia, Richard A. Crosby

Health, Behavior & Society Faculty Publications

Purpose: Transgender women in the United States experience health disparities and limited access to gender-affirming health services. This study describes the social determinants of health that shape access to health services for transgender women in Oregon, a state with a high tally of gender-affirming policies.

Methods: We conducted qualitative interviews with 25 transgender women between 18 and 39 years of age. Interviews explored the social, economic, cultural, and legal factors that shape access to health. A Qualtrics survey captured sociodemographic characteristics. We identified facilitators and barriers to accessing gender-affirming services using thematic analysis of qualitative data.

Results: Our participants perceived …

When Are You Going To Catch Up With Me? Shu Lea Cheang With Alexandra Juhasz, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

“Digital nomad” Shu Lea Cheang and friend and critic Alexandra Juhasz consider the reasons for and implications of the censorship of Cheang’s 2017 film FLUIDØ, particularly as it connects to their shared concerns in AIDS activism, feminism, pornography, and queer media. They consider changing norms, politics, and film practices in relation to technology and the body. They debate how we might know, and what we might need, from feminist-queer pornography given feminist-queer engagements with our bodies and ever more common cyborgian existences. Their informal chat opens a window onto the interconnections and adaptations that live between friends, sex, technology, …

Navigating The Athletic Terrain For Transgender Athletes: Identity, Policy, And The Future, Lia M. Bevins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Transgender athletes face scrutiny because they do not fit within the traditional and constructed bounds of male and female. The objective of this study was to discover how to provide advocacy to this marginalized population amidst discriminating policies and transphobic environments. The research included a survey of high school coaches from thirty schools throughout Tennessee along with interviews with five transgender athletes from across the United States. All five athletes reported that leaders were the most impactful allies in their lives and can be the main sources of advocacy for transgender athletes. Survey findings showed that not every coach throughout …

Assimilating Through Consumption: A Rhetorical History Of The Early Years Of The Advocate, Cora Beth Butcher-Spellman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses analysis of constitutive rhetoric and queer archival methods to examines how The Advocate used assimilationist rhetoric and consumerist rhetoric in fundamentally anti-democratic ways to consolidate the form of ideal gay consumer-citizenship. Focusing on the first three years of the publication, I utilize queer theory and theories of citizenship and political economy to explain how The Advocate’s rhetoric and mainstream success allowed the publication to normalize a limited and politically weak gay identity. This thesis argues The Advocate’s rhetoric of exclusion, authority, and consumerism were three central features shaping ideal gay consumer-citizenship as most available to people who …

Drag Incorporated: The Homonormative Brand Culture Of Rupaul's Drag Race, Nathan T. Workman

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis argues RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR, 2009–) positions itself as a homonormative pathway to LGBTQ+ social inclusion through privileging neoliberal selfbranding and commodity activist practices that reify privileged raced, classed, and sexuality identity markers. Utilizing interdisciplinary and intersectional cultural studies methods to conduct a textual analysis, I examine how RPDR produces homonormative LGBTQ+ identities through the commodification and standardization of drag cultures. In conversation with existing RPDR scholars, I critically survey RPDR’s gender biases and prosocial messaging as an example of brand culture’s reification of hegemony and homonormativity within LGBTQ+ communities. This research considers the …

A Model Of Individual, Relationship, And Societal Factors And Mental Health And Well-Being In Partnered Sexual Minority Women: The Central Role Of Relationship Satisfaction, Charlotte A. Dawson

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Sexual minority women (SMW) are at increased risk for mental health disorders, substance abuse, and physical health problems compared to heterosexual women. For heterosexual individuals, romantic relationships have been found to be protective against a variety of health issues. Less research, however, has focused on the association between romantic relationships and health in same-sex couples. The purpose of this study was to examine the potential protective nature of being in a relationship for SMW and to test a model investigating the central role of relationship satisfaction in the association between individual, relationship, and societal factors and mental health and well-being …

“When It’S Time To Come Together, We Come Together”: Reconceptualizing Theories Of Self-Efficacy For Health Information Practices Within Lgbtqia+ Communities, Alexander N. Vera, Travis L. Wagner, Vanessa L. Kitzie

Student Publications

This chapter addresses the shortcomings of current self-efficacy models describing the health information practices of LGBTQIA+ communities. Informed by semi-structured interviews with 30 LGBTQIA+ community leaders from South Carolina, findings demonstrate how their self-efficacy operates beyond HIV/AIDS research while complicating traditional models that isolate an individual’s health information practices from their abundant communal experiences. Findings also suggest that participants engage with health information and resources in ways deemed unhealthy or harmful by healthcare providers. However, such practices are nuanced, and participants carefully navigate them, balancing concerns for community safety and well-being over traditional engagements with healthcare infrastructures. These findings have …

To Build A Space: A Reading Of Bodies, Temporality, And Urban Colonization, Delaney Tax

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Abstract

Historical and modern urban planning theory often focuses on an idealized body and subject, shaped by race, gender, and sexuality, that exists within the city. This passively and actively divides space into thresholds impenetrable by bodies othered by social and political ideologies. This project looks at the realities of colonial urban planning and the gendered, raced, and queered implications forced onto bodies and communities through the built environment. This investigation examines the frameworks present in colonial urban theory that engender meaning and knowledges onto bodies as they move through the cityscape. Exploring modes of in/access and power along built …

Spilling The Lgbt(Ea)Q: A Study Of Lgbtq Youth Early School Experiences, Nicholas Catania

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this arts-based qualitative study, I explore the experiences of LGBTQ youth regarding inclusion during their early schooling. The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of youth participants regarding inclusion during their early school experiences to better assist educators and policy-makers at all levels with information to provide safe and equitable learning environments for LGBTQ youth to succeed. The intent of this study was to uncover the ways schools may marginalize or be inclusive of LGBTQ youth by examining school experiences with a particular focus at the elementary level. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, …

Queering The Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms In The Filipina/O Diaspora., Gina Velasco

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization.

Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the …

Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

By analysing Yugoslav writer Biljana Jovanović’s early novels, the essay follows her possible literary speculations on the capacity of the Yugoslav society to fulfill the promises of the revolution, together with her imagining of an alternative form of sociability, as that which could result in universal, human emancipation. Offering a peculiar portrait of the urban society of the late seventies in Yugoslavia, in her novels Jovanović tests if and how the problem of women’s emancipation is connected to the problems of class. Yet, a failure of class emancipation, an ‘impossibility to revise’ the society is antagonized from the scrupulous and …

Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, …

Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women – or “political workers” (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav socialism – Mara Rupena Osolnik and Aleksandra Kornhauser Frazer. In these texts, agency unfolds as a mosaic of multiple, naturally intertwined activities and engagements aimed at the common good and at improving the position of women and other socially marginalized groups. This kind of agency – understood as the ability to …

Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

For readers versed in the tradition of North Atlantic feminist theory, the intersection of “socialism” and “feminism” is relatively uncomplicated. As a rule, the theory proffers a critique of the “double oppression” that women experience under patriarchy and capitalism, with the exact relationship between these two systems then up for debate. While often not explicitly thematized, the theory’s geographical roots in North American and Western European struggles and contexts inform its epistemological practice and organizational protocols.

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay considers women’s emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia as central to the socialist project. I focus on the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as contemporary engagements with the question of Yugoslavia. I put in conversation performance works by Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Marina Gržinić, and Šejla Kamerić. The title of this essay, “Return of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair” points to how contested the position of Yugoslav women was during socialism, and how much it remains so today, albeit for very different reasons. As I show in the article, Yugoslav women in the arts embraced socialism as …

The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Other Side of Everything is a documentary about an apartment in Birčaninova 20, a leafy street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is the family home of Mila Turajlić, the film’s director (known for her much-lauded film Cinema Komunisto from 2010), who uses this well-appointed interior to explore the intimacy of history.

General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Ideologically charged arguments about truth, often linked to fabrications of the past, have been discussed for decades in post-Yugoslav countries. They have also contributed to memory conflicts in different discourses. In addition to relativizing historical facts, marginalization of one’s own crimes and enlargement of others have also contributed to fragmentation of the truth and the emergence of parallel stories about the historical past.