Queer Studies Commons^™

Clinical Implications For Helping Professionals Learned From The Pastoral Care Of Lgbtq+ Youth, John Willis Ward, Heather Deal, Gaynor Yancey

Funded Scholarship

This qualitative article is informed by queer theory, and more specifically queer theology, and explores how youth ministers in various denominations care for LGBTQ+ teenagers in their congregations. Seven youth pastors from three major denominational groups were interviewed from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), Alliance of Baptists, and Presbyterian Church, USA (PC-USA). Participants had to identify as LGBTQ+ affirming, though their congregations could be in various states of affirmation. Thematic analysis found the following significant categories: confidentiality, implications of whole church engagement, student-led engagement, theology/image of God, and degree of support for identity development.

No One Lives In The Future: Family Dynamics And Environmental Discourse, Morgan Vanek

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In the context of catastrophic climate change, the optimism that underpins our economic models for calculating the future cost of present risks has become both untenable and dangerous. Nonetheless, even writing urgently concerned with these risks continues to invoke a version of the Child as a figure of futurity that appears to naturalize both this optimism and our present inaction. In this essay, I argue that we might find another path forward by looking back to the eighteenth-century stories that seem to demonstrate a similar preoccupation with children in danger. Taking Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress as a representative example, I …

Leading Towards The Queerest Insurrection: Queer Anarchism And Leadership Studies, Josie Holland

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

Leadership shapes our world, our narratives, and what is possible to imagine. Unfortunately, leadership studies has some trouble imagining queer leadership, or rather, queer theory and leadership studies. In order to integrate the more abstract aspects of queer theory with the largely evidence-based field of leadership studies, I draw on the texts, history, practices, and theory of queer anarchism. This article aims to highlight a gap in leadership studies as it currently stands, and through accounting for the absence of queer anarchism in leadership studies, expand what leadership looks like. To this end, I suggest the framing of ‘leadership acts’ …

Ballroom: An Exploration Of Queer Survival And Self-Sufficiency, Jet Mezini

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

The AIDs epidemic and its disinformation alienated queer people from U.S culture. As a result, queer people, especially queer people of color, began meeting together to express their self-made culture, a series of competitions among themselves, the underground scene of “ballroom.” Ballroom reveled in self-awareness and bordered on satire, being inspired by Western standards that were unable to be applied to a queer populous. This essay will analyze these cultural norms, understanding how they served as methods of reclamation for queer people, and how ballroom evolved to reflect social progression.

Diverse Possibilities Of Shakespeare: Teaching Twelfth Night Through A Queer Lens, Julia Ritzler

Honors Projects

This project seeks to understand the ways in which Queer Theory can be applied to secondary language arts education to enhance students' understanding of identity and gender in literature. For the purposes of this project, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is being used as a case study text. This project includes a thorough analysis of Twelfth Night through a queer lens, a literature review of Queer Theory and educational pedagogy, a block plan and related instructional and assessment materials, a rationale for the block plan, and project limitations and implications for future research. By analyzing scholarly texts and applying the theories within …

Mindfulness Matters: Addressing Anxiety And Navigating Toward Wellbeing Through Miea Mindfulness Practices, A Mixed-Methods Study Of Lgbtiq Graduate Writing Students, Kim Westerman

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness Matters: Addressing Anxiety and Navigating Toward Wellbeing Through MIEA Mindfulness Practices, a Mixed-Methods Study of LGBTIQ Graduate Writing Students

Anxiety has always been a part of the human experience, even before the phenomenon was conceptualized in the 17^th century and named by Freud in the 19th. And human beings have devised many strategies for addressing anxiety: reducing it, ignoring it, distracting oneself from it, despairing over it, medicating it, engaging with it, moving through it, co-existing with it. The current zeitgeist, more than four years into the COVID-19 global pandemic, situates anxiety as a central facet of …

Story Of Everything, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Publications and Research

Story of Everything, by Mariana Romo-Carmona. Translated by Caragh Barry.

Original title: Cuento de todas las cosas.

Ephemeral Legacy, Allison Hall

Master's Theses

Recently, my thoughts have centered on the problem of legacy. How do we forge bonds with other humans? What happens on an interpersonal level when these humans pass away, or when we pass, and they continue in life? How do queer spaces consistently offer deeper phenomena of interpersonal legacies; how does death operate as generational catalyst? I am particularly interested in putting these questions in the context of queer spaces. In queer culture, kinship is formed in ways that break from typical western notions of kinship. Despite being incoherent to western notions of family, queer bonds are extremely strong (Bradway …

Señoritas On And Off The Silver Screen: How Chicana Women Organized For Equality And Challenged The Cultural Prison Of Sexualized Media Representations In The First Half Of The Twentieth-Century, Rossandra Paloma Martinez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This research is personal for me due to lived experience and day-to-day situations where I have felt the pressures of unattainable beauty standards and society’s fluid definition of beauty and femininity surrounding Chicana, Latinas, Mexican, and Mexican-American women. What inspired me to pursue these issues and topics was the work of Dr. Vicki Lynn Ruiz in her book From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. This research focuses on rival and contested images of Chicana, Mexican, Mexican-American and Latina labor advocates and activists from the early twentieth as opposed to sexualized and eroticized packaged caricatures that Hollywood …

Recognition Or Refusal? Marginalized Identity Development In Passing And The Color Purple, Lee M. Kassay

Theses & Honors Papers

The novels Passing by Nella Larsen and The Color Purple by Alice Walker both involve identity development in their black queer female protagonists, but previous scholarship has rarely discussed the works in tandem. Thus, I merge the discussion around these two works by analyzing them through the concept of G.W.F. Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Assessing how both protagonists participate in their relationships with their female love interests versus their male husbands shows the importance of mutual recognition in the development of identity.

Queering Composition Pedagogy: Camp-Informed Teaching Within Florida's Censorship, Isabelle V. Karleskint

Feminist Pedagogy

This social justice strategy article examines composition teaching within Florida colleges and universities over a seven-year period of intense political and social change. These institutions carry different levels of protection from Florida's censorship and anti-LGBTQIA+ laws. Using principles from Susan Sontag's 1964 "Notes On Camp," the author examines strategies for navigating these boundaries and creating safe, inclusive spaces for students while flying under the oppressive state government's 'radar.' This article found that teaching which includes multimodality, popular culture, digital learning, inclusive content, and identity politics can 'camp' pedagogy, with benefits to students and low risk to faculty. However, it also …

Chaucerian Echoes: Chivalric Tradition And Gender Construction In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Gillian Guy

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

George Eliot’s Middlemarch critiques Victorian social and gender norms through characters' relationships with each other and with horseback riding. This paper argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde informs the symbolism and literary tropes Eliot uses in crafting her narrative. Analysis of Chaucerian tropes of courtly love and medieval codes of chivalry reveals how characters either maintain or undermine traditional Victorian conventions of masculinity and femininity; these dynamics are primarily seen through horse ownership and horseback riding. One protagonist in particular, Will Ladislaw, is examined in this paper as representing ideas of androgyny through his unconventional relationships with horses and …

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy, Laurie Fuller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy raises questions and analyzes classroom practices based on adrienne maree brown’s (2017) Emergent Strategy, a radical self-help manual for our current political climate that calls for a paradigm shift in organizing work. Black, mixed, queer, pansexual, feminist writer, pleasure activist, facilitator and sci-fi scholar, brown builds on a continuous tradition of women of color feminists resisting oppression to bring together science fiction and permaculture, biomimicry and organizing, pleasure and activism. She offers fresh perspectives on how to imagine liberation and provides dynamic ways to think about teaching and learning. Emergent Strategy provides principles to …

Exploring The Confines Of The Closet, Maddi Stillabower '28

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” and Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room both illustrate how the “closet” works within and between individuals. Unlike religious identity which can be easily explained through familial heritage, David is unable to trace his sexual orientation to any concrete reason. His inability to reconcile his identity with the beliefs of his culture highlights the conflicting experience of many in the queer community. His relationship with Giovanni reveals how internalized homophobia and the absence of queer role models play into feelings toward himself and all queer relationships. The constant dissonance between Giovanni’s genuine feelings and David’s fear of their …

“I Am A Conversation”: Media Literacy, Queer Pedagogy, And Steven Universe In College Curriculum, Misty Thomas

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The recent cartoon show on Cartoon Network Steven Universe allows for the blending of both queer theory and media literacies to create a pedagogical space for students to investigate and analyze not only queerness, but also normative and non-normative identities. This show creates characters as well as relationships that both break with and subvert what would be considered traditional masculine and feminine identities. Additionally, Steven Universe also creates a space where sexuality and transgender bodies are represented. This paper demonstrates both the presence of queerness within the show and the pedagogical implications for using this piece of media within a …

Tear In The Wing, Aspen Balducci

Student Sequential Art and Comics

A short comic based on the author's own experiences with disability and acceptance, as a plus size person with knee problems, growing up.

“‘And Númenor Went Down Into The Sea’: Tolkien, Beowulf, And The Masochistic Jouissance Of Westernesse”, Christopher Vaccaro

Journal of Tolkien Research

In Tolkien, Enchantment and Loss, John Rosegrant avers that Tolkien wrote of the downfall and destruction of Númenor in order to release a personal emotional complex (John Rosegrant, Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss, 118-20). In this essay, I examine in greater detail the emotional power of this story and relate it to the psychological notion of primary masochism (Freud, Deleuze, Bersani) and the pleasures connected to the dissolution of the self. The Beowulf poem renders conspicuous the dependency of heroic Anglo-Saxon male subjectivity on experiences of masochistic desire and the Death Drive, the desire to be unburdened of great …

Celebratory Queer Space: Innovation Beyond Safe Space, Ezra Hebron, Adriane Sparks

Faculty & Staff Research & Creative Activity

"Safe space" refers to a place "free of bias ... or potentially threatening actions [or] ideas ... "* Simply, it is a place where one is accepted. A "celebratory space" is a safe space, but it is ALSO a place that reaches out to queer patrons to make them feel that they are not only accepted by the community, but that they are a part of the community.

"safe space." Merriam-Webster.comM. erriam-Webster, 2024. Web. 1 July 2024.

Out And About, Fall 2024, Queer Coalition

Queer Coalition

Newsletter of Queer Coalition, Illinois State University's sponsored LGBTQIA+ faculty, staff, and graduate student affinity group. Also available as a dynamic Foleon site: https://dig.illinoisstate.edu/isuqueercoalition/out-and-about/fall-2024/

“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …