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

Rainbow Writes: Peer-Led Creative Writing Groups’ Potential For Promoting 2slgbtq+ Youth Wellbeing, Ceilidh Harrison

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Though mainstream acceptance for the 2SLGBTQ+ community is on the rise, elevated risks of mental health challenges still pervade this community, particularly for youth growing up in this changing environment. Based on previous literature citing the benefits of creative interventions and youth autonomy, the current study sought to explore the implementation of an online, peer-led creative writing program as a possible means to increase emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing in 2SLGBTQ+ youth. Twenty self-identifying 2SLGBTQ+ youth from across Canada were recruited to form two 10-week, online peer-led creative writing groups titled “Rainbow Writes”. Based on Lerner et al.’s (2003) “Five …

Critically And Creatively Engaging With Trauma-Informed Mental Health Research And Treatment Of Lgbtqia+ Communities As Expressive Arts Therapists: A Literature Review, Kelli Lavallee

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Expressive Arts Therapists are uniquely situated as both artists and mental health counselors working in psychological pedagogy rooted in systems of oppression. Given the arts-based approaches to the therapeutic relationship, it can be unethical to offer these approaches without acknowledgement of the ways in which the arts intersect with social justice, and justice is only viable if practitioners critically review the clinical mental health education they are consuming from the institutions they learn in, specifically trauma-informed mental health research assimilation and treatment approaches for Expressive Arts Therapists in training, practice, and education. A review of the literature in this paper …

Whose Line Is It, Anyway?: Doing Harm In Disability Memoir, Teresa Milbrodt

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper examines disability memoirs, and the author's responsibility to their community versus their personal story. While telling stories of disability can be a means of sharing one's truth, authors may be wrongly interpreted as speaking for a diverse community of individuals, or they may do harm to other disabled people by devaluing an entire group. Some memoirsts have avoided this potential for harm by expanding their notions of disability and community to embrace intersectionality, but it is vital to read a wide variety of disability memoirs to gain this complex picture.

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.

Michael Field : Decadent Moderns, Sarah Parker, Ana Parejo Vadillo

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In the last twenty years, Michael Field has emerged as one of the most fascinating poets of the Victorian era. Through their collaborative partnership as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper engaged in the aesthetic and decadent movements of the fin de siècle, while their poetry and verse drama articulate ideas associated with the New Woman and boldly express queer and lesbian desire. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns extends the focus on these key literary and cultural contexts by emphasizing their continuing significance within twentieth-century literary modernism. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays, this book addresses Michael Field’s energetic engagements …

Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.

Ada Cheng Interview, Zishuo Wang

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Ada Cheng is the host of the storytelling show Pour One Out, a monthly storytelling series at Volumes Bookcafe. She is also the producer and host of the show Am I Man Enough? a storytelling/podcasting show, where people tell personal stories to critically examine the culture of toxic masculinity and the construction of masculinity and manhood. In addition, she is the co-producer and co-host of Talk Stories, an Asian American/Asian diaspora storytelling show, along with Randy Kim, a show where they showcase Asian/Asian American storytellers and performing artists.

Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explores the mind-body experience through an arts-based research approach to examine, and redefine the emotional capacity and usefulness of males through societal determinants that limits and hinders men from living their authentic selves. Through the lens of a metaphoric “Man Box” 112 men participated in a workshop recreating their personal narratives of socialization through, style of dress, coping mechanisms, belief systems and who they should be as men through society's standards. In the “Man Box,” male bonding, and emotional feelings are discouraged, while the objectification of women, material property and physical/emotional strength are encouraged. This research investigates the …

Posthuman And Alien Breeding: The Implications Of Cybersex In Octavia Butler’S Dawn 2019., Elizabeth Rutkowski

Master's Theses

Speculative science fiction affords new ways for authors to represent social problems of the modern day in an apocalyptic manner. Authors such as Octavia Butler use science fiction to analyze social injustices revolving around race, gender, and sexuality. Throughout her novel Dawn, Butler uses the posthuman to represent minority groups in the late twentieth century. The posthuman represents those who have moved from humanity towards a new opportunity that is mixed with the potential for struggle. 1 As demonstrated through Butler’s work posthumanism blurs the lines between binaries such as male / female, straight / gay, and consensual / nonconsensual …

Symmetrically Significant: Essays, David Stephen Haydon

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This collection of personal essays explores the use of symmetry as a metaphor of normality in contemporary American culture. These essays use formalistic exploration to enter into a conversation with the reader regarding the body, sexuality, gender, and mental illness. Each piece aims to dismantle and explode the metaphorical significations of symmetry through the use of interdisciplinary research combined with memoir.

Analysis In E Minor: An Autoethnographic Poetry Collection And Study Of Transgender Identity In Liminal Amsterdam, Em Panetta

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study is an autoethnographic account of the extent to which liminal identity, specifically genderqueerness, are continuously developed in the city of Amsterdam. Transgender identity is a permanently liminal personhood, which is influenced by both potentially liminal periods of time and the liminality of spaces in which the subject lives. At the time of this study, my genderqueerness was situated in the deeply liminal city of Amsterdam for a transient, yet semi-permanent, length of time; thus, this is a study of the temporal and spatial impacts that the Dutch context has had on my personhood. Five locations in the city …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

Ici-Bas!, Nicholas A. Koloian

Student Publications

High school student Moses King isn't a goody two-shoes, but the bully Samuel doesn't understand (or care) about this fact. In this story written by Nicholas Koloian, Moses finds his retribution through his bold friend, Henry, who must overcome his own problems in a tale exploring race, sexuality, and high school bullying.

The Journey Of An Emotional Black Boy, Alonzo Elias

Philosophy Summer Fellows

The title of my project is "Emotional Nigga" a.k.a. "Emotional Black Boy" because people would be comfortable if I called it so. The audience for this project may want to think of it this way. The title I chose is meant to express the struggles I faced in my journey to self-awareness. I decided to share my story through fifteen topics, which have brought me a better understanding of myself and will hopefully help the audience as well. These topics are Self-Love, Prelude: Intimacy and Attachment Theory, Relationships, Sex, Beauty, Sexuality, Love, Self-Love, Spirituality, Religion, Astrology, Psychology, Self-Care, and Life. …

Run Me Dusk, Zane Truman Dezeeuw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a full-length novel with a critical afterward. Run Me Dusk is a falling-out of love narrative about twenty-seven-year-old Milo who, after being broken up with by his boyfriend Red, flees from Illinois back to his hometown in southwestern Colorado to meditate on his place and purpose in life. The themes covered in this book are gay relationships, family relationships, mortality, and the natural world.

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Care Forgotten, James M. Norris

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Microaggressions Within The Lgbtq+ Community: An Autoethnography, Erika A. Perez Montes

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This autoethnography is about different points in my life where I committed microaggressions towards the LGBTQ+ community specific to different genders, sexual orientations and/or how people in the community present themselves. I use “thick intersectionality” ‒ an embodied exploration of the complex particularities of individuals’ lives and identities associated with their race, class, gender, sexuality, and national locations ‒ as a means of portraying my message, voicing the emotions that I felt, and the identity I occupied at that moment. I show that the intersectionalities of queer folks’ identities create unconscious microaggressions towards other queer folks. The purpose of my …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Naming The Nameless: An Exploration Of Queer Poetry And Empowerment, Jesse Yelvington

2018 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

The Way We Dream Now: History, Theory, And Lgbtq Memoir In America, Megan Paslawski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines American memoirs written after 2000 by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors with an eye to how the recent institutionalization of queer theory and the open production of LGBTQ histories affect these writers’ conceptions of their lives, aspirations, and cultures. I argue that these memoirs, sometimes consciously, find themselves struggling with what are also competing ideas within queer theory about the queerness of futurity even as they turn to the past of queer/trans literature and history to bolster their senses of possible identities and communities. This often has the effect of positioning contemporary LGBTQ writers as …

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Dorothy Moser Medlin Papers - Accession 1049, Dorothy Moser Medlin

Manuscript Collection

(The Dorothy Moser Medlin Papers are currently in processing.)

This collection contains most of the records of Dorothy Medlin’s work and correspondence and also includes reference materials, notes, microfilm, photographic negatives related both to her professional and personal life. Additions include a FLES Handbook, co-authored by Dorothy Medlin and a decorative mirror belonging to Dorothy Medlin.

Major series in this collection include: some original 18th century writings and ephemera and primary source material of André Morellet, extensive collection of secondary material on André Morellet's writings and translations, Winthrop related files, literary manuscripts and notes by Dorothy Medlin (1966-2011), copies …

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …

Girls Are Us: A Collection Of Oral Histories From The Jmu Community, Anne M. Sherman

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

On a campus where women make up a majority of the student population, it is especially important that female voices are heard and given a platform on which they can control their own narrative. I wanted to give those female-identifying voices that platform. I conducted a series of interviews to examine how college-aged female-identifying students feel about their identity and how they construct that identity within the climate of the JMU community. I was particularly interested in the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, and ability. I asked each person to share their stories of times when they …

Intersexion, Cynthia Davis

English Theses & Dissertations

A combination of memoir, reportage, and opinion writing, Intersexion explores the realities of growing up intersex while also examining the conservative mindset that caused the narrator—a happily married suburban mother—to lose a tenure-track position at a Christian university for being unwilling to label Danny’s intersex condition as “repugnant” and “offensive to God.”

Ua12/2/2 2016 Talisman - Identity, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

2016 Fall Talisman.

• Street Style
• Home Sweet Home – Nashville, McKee, Bowling Green
• Doyel, Rachael. Happy Gas – Theatre & Dance
• Robb, Hayley. Stick & Poke – Tattoos
• Martin, Lindsey. Self-Made – Dexter Banks, Tattoos
• Sullivan, Abbey. Cover-Up – Tattoos
• Pettway, Shantel. Natural Roots – African American Hair
• Voorhees, Jessica. Living Laboratory – Benjamin Benton, WKU Farm
• Perry, Natalie. Frog in a Water Well – Keunsik Junk aka Brody
• Hormell, David. I Wanted to Touch Lightning
• Good, Hannah. Coffee Talks
• Reyes, Taylor. Ice Cold – Alpha Phi Alpha
• Games, Ann. Working the Desk
• Voorhees, Jessica. Killer Queen – Lane French, …

Jam On The Vine By Lashonda Barnett, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Book review of Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Barnett from the perspective of a lesbian and lesbian of color audience of readers.