History of Gender Commons^™

A Workers' Paradise: Re-Integrating Newfoundland Into Colonial American History, Elena Hynes

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

The island of Newfoundland is conspicuous in colonial British and North American histories, most particularly and paradoxically, in its absence, a state of affairs which this study aims to help address. Multiple factors, including a paucity of documentary sources and various historiographic trends, have traditionally contributed to Newfoundland’s marginalization within colonial historical narratives. However, developments in recent years have made Newfoundland’s potential integration into the broader colonial dialogue more feasible including the advent of the Atlantic perspective, the expansion of available sources, and the work of multiple regional historians who have challenged enduring historiographic trends characterizing Newfoundland colonial settlements as …

Gormley, Quinn, Liam Dunn, Katherine Sucy

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Quinn Gormley, who uses she/they pronouns, is 27 years old and lives with their husband and dog in Auburn, Maine. Quinn became involved in activism and trans liberation in 2011 after attending a support group with Maine TransNet, a grassroots trans organization serving Mainers. Since then, they have been highly involved with the organization and took on the role of Executive Director in 2016. Prior to Maine TransNet, Quinn worked in public health managing an HIV testing program for the Health Equity Alliance, one of the state’s main AIDS service organizations. She attended the University Church of Chicago for Percussion …

Edwards, Florence, Roukia Houssein, Annie Karim

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

The interview was conducted in a USM classroom Roukia and Annie. Florence is a 40 years old dentist who also served in the military. In this interview, Florence shared their journey in being a queer black woman in the military. Florence was asked about their identity and their story on coming out as their preferred sexuality. In the interview, Florence also talks about being a dentist in the military and also outside of the military. In the interview, Florence puts important people in their life in specific stories. They also touched on their education and difference in living in NY, …

Nero, Dr. Charles, Hana Elabe

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Charles Nero was born in Decatur, Alabama and was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He discusses discovering at a young age that he was not heterosexual but not acting on that until college. Nero also talks about the challenges he faced when he came out to his parents. During his time at college, he made decisions that led him away from organized Christianity. He discusses the HIV/AIDS epidemic and his work with the Ithaca NY AIDS Taskforce. He also discusses some of the challenges presented by racism and homophobia. He and his husband have adopted two children and he talks …

Clough, Travis, Josh Allen, Rachel Shanks

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Travis Clough is a 44 year old trans man who grew up in the small town of Bucksport, Maine. He uses the pronouns he/him/his, and identifies as queer or trans. From a young age, Travis felt different with his gender identity. He attended the University of Maine Farmington in the late 1990’s, and was the only school he applied to because it was “where all the queers went”. Having been into music since the age of 14, he began playing in bands while in college. Him and his band would make the long drive from Farmington to Portland every week …

Williams, Maya, Daisy Pelletier

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

*Included at the end of the interview is an original poem read by Maya.

Maya Williams is a 25-year-old Black, queer, trans, Christian person who grew up in North Carolina. Ey moved to Maine to attend grad school at the University of New England. They worked at Maine Inside Out as an intern while at the University of New England. She has also worked at Equality Maine, and now works at Maine Trans Net. Her Christian faith is important to her, and organizations like ChIME (Chaplaincy Institute of Maine), and interfaith organization that educations and ordains chaplains, and The BTS …

Twomey, Danielle, Elizabeth Cantey

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Danielle Twomey is a trans woman who was born and raised in Maine. She was born into a working class home and has four other siblings. Her mother died when she was seven and her father’s second wife helped to put the family into a better class. Her father was abusive, as were her peers, and her younger years were “brutal” as she was “physically small”, “effeminate”, and “clueless” when it came to fighting. She watched the world around her to learn how to fit in. She knew she was expected to be like the little boys her age but …

Fra-Molinero, Baltasar, Sandra Jose

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Baltasar Fra- Molinero grew up in Northern Spain with his four siblings and his parents.

Baltasar Fra- Molinero grew up in Northern Spain with his four siblings and his parents. He attended college in his hometown and out from the watchful eyes of his parents began to explore his sexual identity. Baltasar received a fellowship to study in the United States at the University of Bloomington in Indiana. It was during his first week in the United States that he met his now-husband, Charles. They knew right away that this relationship was forever. Together, they also knew that they wanted …

Ekart, Donna, Gretchen Muehle, Brooke Hall

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Donna Ekart is a 53-year-old queer, femme woman living in Portland, Maine. Ekart grew up in Manhattan, Kansas surrounded by both her immediate and extended family. Ekart moved to Portland, Maine with her wife when she was in her mid-forties. Ekart came out as queer to her friends and family when she was 40-years-old. She has been involved in LGBTQ+ organizations including Equality Maine, which is Maine’s biggest queer organization whose aim is to secure full equality for the LGBTQ+ community in Maine through political action, community organizing, education, and collaboration. Ekart’s religious identity and relationship with the Catholic Church …

Black Queer Times At Riis: Making Place In A Queer Afrofuturist Tense, Jah Elyse Sayers

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

This paper posits a queer Afrofuturist mode of spatiotemporal production in queer and trans Black, indigenous and people of color’s navigation to and making of a queer beach to honor Black queer and trans histories and build Black queer and trans futures in opposition to multiple forms of displacement.

The Fantasy Of “Home”: Locating Dislocation, Loss, And Silence, Roksana Badruddoja

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

The meaning(s) of “home” are once again a robust conversation in the American national landscape as we continue to struggle over postcolonial empire-inspired borders. As a queer Person of Color, Woman of Color, and Mother of Color in the U.S.; an American offspring of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant parents; and a professor of social inequalities, I am particularly concerned about thinking through neoliberal anti-liberatory U.S. racialization projects and the notion of “home” or what I call the “neoliberal home.” I concern myself with diverse languages, images, myths, and rituals through which “home” is represented and constituted, and from the dispatches of …

Artist Statement: Tutorial On Radiance, Kearra Amaya Gopee

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

Tutorials on Radiance explores a queerness beyond the physical body and extends to the lived environments of queer people. I am particularly focused on Anglophone Caribbean cultures of queerness. I will be looking specifically at the boundaries of the 2D image in relation to queerness, portraiture and visibility.

A Vacation Is Not Activism Part Iii —On Tourism And Ecosocial Disasters, Bani Amor

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, And Schooling In San Francisco, By Savannah Shange, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, Siobhan Brooks

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

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist, in 1831 visited the United States to observe U.S. democracy, and in 1835 he wrote Democracy in America. One of the observations Tocqueville made was that slavery coexisted with ideals of freedom. This observation from almost 200 years ago informs Savannah Shange’s groundbreaking book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, and Schooling in San Francisco.

Review Of Melancholia Africana By Nathalie Etoke, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, Kristen Kirksey

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

Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition by Nathalie Etoke, is equal parts ruminative meditation and urgent call to action for Black Africans and those in the diaspora. The titular concept, melancholia africana, is “an extensible concept that examines how sub-Saharans and people of African descent cope with loss, mourning, and survival in a practice of everyday life contaminated by the past.”

Racialization.Spectacle.Liberation, Sm Rodriguez, Chriss Sneed

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

This special issue navigates the complexity of racialization, experiences related to identity, social structure, and inequality, and that which emerges when one/many embark on journeys towards liberation. “racialization.spectacle.liberation” is an intentional provocation; in both punctuating each word and leaving them affixed, wegesture towards the curious amalgamations that are produced at the intersections of where each project begins and ends. Such processes are not benign.

Presumed Nonhuman: Black Women Intellectuals And The Struggle For Humanity In The Academy, Andrea N. Baldwin

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

In this article I engage with the work of Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and Kevin Quashie, weaving in my own personal narrative of being presumed nonhuman to detail the everyday struggles Black women academics face. Herein I also illustrate how these struggles become sites of resistance, building, and hope.

Dreaming With A Future: Queer Memory Beyond National Trauma, Cynthia Melendez

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

This article examines queer memory in Peru through the works of artists Christian Benday.n, Barboza-Gubo and Mroczek, and the collective No Tengo Miedo. I suggest that they construct alternative memories to the hegemonic one, as they denounce the violence against the LGBTIQ population during the years of political violence (1980-2000).

The Fantasy Of Spotting Human Trafficking: Training Spectacles In Racist Surveillance, Elena Shih

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

In January 2019, in honor of National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month in the US, the Marriott International hotel group announced that it had successfully trained 600,000 hotel workers to spot the signs of human trafficking in its hotel properties around the world. This training, planned and executed in partnership with anti-trafficking organizations and law enforcement, reflects the recent proliferation of training schemes to identify victims of trafficking. This paper explores how such trainings script racist optics into the surveillance and policing of potential victims. Using proxy markers of poverty, sexuality, race, and nation, victim identification trainings expand policing--by …

Exhibit Me / Prohibit Me, Alok Vaid-Menon

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

No abstract provided.