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

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 …

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 …

Exhibit Me / Prohibit Me, Alok Vaid-Menon

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

No abstract provided.

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.

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 …

The Mammy, The Strong, Or The Broken: Politics Of Hair Afrocentricities In Scripted Television, Hayley Blackburn

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

The general literature on the experiences of Black women in America consistently discusses the way that more Afrocentric appearances— whether through skin tone, hairstyles and textures, clothing, language, or a combination of all the above— have been negatively framed throughout cultural and media histories ...

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).

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 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.”

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.

The Queer Omaha Archives: The First 5 Years, Amy C. Schindler

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Kick-off LGBTQ+ History Month by learning more about Nebraska’s LGBTQ+ history and how archivists and librarians are preserving and sharing the past today. Presentation for the NCompass Live, a program of the Nebraska Library Commission. The Queer Omaha Archives in UNO Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections launched in 2016 as the first dedicated LGBTQ+ archival and book collection in Nebraska. In the collecting initiative’s first 5 years it has grown to over 80 cubic feet and 3 GB of personal papers and organizational records, 50 oral history interviews, and 3,000 books. In this session, you will be introduced to some …

Distribution Struggle: Assembling A Media History Of J. Brian’S Enterprises With Court Proceedings And Public Records, Finley Freibert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article introduces the concept of “distribution struggle”—the panoply of cultural and industrial conflicts that must be traced and accounted for in distribution histories—to sequence a primary-sourced media history of J. Brian’s gay media enterprises. In tracing this history, primary sources are surprisingly accessible, and provide new insights into J. Brian’s industrial operations. By triangulating archival records with secondary accounts, this article provides a more nuanced cultural and industrial portrait of J. Brian. It argues that media industry historiography must frame historical narratives by accounting for the cultural and industrial struggles that culminated in the available archival sources, in this …

Y’All Means All: The Southern Queer Experience And Grassroots Archives As Places Of Remembrance, Emma R. Johansen, Emma R. Johansen

The Cardinal Edge

While the burgeoning field of queer history grows in academic prominence and scholarship, southern queer identities and histories are left in the gaps of this trailblazing research. As a segment of a larger senior honors thesis on gay press in Kentucky and the broader American South, this brief research report will specifically examine queer rurality, visibility, and space in the archive. This report also aims to highlight the political and sociological importance of remembering, studying, and teaching queer heritage, especially in the rural American South. This report argues that the complexities of southern queer histories are especially felt in the …

Suicidality As A Discourse Of Safety In The Queer Youth Movement, Robert M. Cleary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In November 1991, a group of queer teenagers gathered to rally at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Two years later, the state passed the first law in the nation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the state's schools. The November rally was the first public expression of what became the safe schools movement, which went on over the following decade to transform the landscape in public education for LGBTQ students. A notable feature of the rally was the staging by the youth of a mass performative act of queer suicide. This paper uses Foucauldian concepts …

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

Land Lines: Modes Of Communication In Kentucky's Queer Past And Present., Emma R. Johansen

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

As the queer historical discipline grows in reach, prominence, and scholarship, southern queer histories are on the tail end of this growing academic attention. Academic historians, digital humanists, and public historians alike have neglected Kentucky’s rich queer history in academic circles. This thesis aims to mend this gap in historic interpretation through research in Kentucky gay press, television, radio, and their effect on Kentucky’s queer organizing. Through extensive primary research in the Williams-Nichols archive, and secondary sources on the women in print movement, queer rurality, and gay media studies, this thesis measures the ways Kentucky queer communities have correlated with …

Maine Bisexual People's Network (Mbpn), Kat Hartford

POP 101: Queering the Archives

This presentation attempts to construct a history of the Maine Bisexual People’s Network (MBPN), drawing from primary sources from USM’s Special Collections, specifically from the LGBTQ+ Collection in the Jean Byers Sampson Center. Information includes when, why, and how the MBPN was founded, who founded the organization, important events in the MBPN’s history, and the experience of bisexuality for Mainers. Also included are images of the primary sources, such as clips from Our Paper: Serving the Alternative Community, a publication that served queer Mainers. While the MBPN was just one of several examples from Maine’s history of LGBTQ+ organizations, the …

Crafting An Image: Love, Confidence, And Representation In Leonard Fink’S Photographs Of The Gay Liberation Movement, Alex Del Dago

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Honorable Mention Winner

Leonard Fink (1930-1993) was an American photographer who documented the modern Gay Liberation Movement and inaugural Christopher Street Liberation Day marches that evolved into the Pride Marches we now know of today. This research addresses how Fink used photography as both a form of personal expression and participation in the growing LGBTQ community as well as to document these critical moments in modern queer US history. Prior scholars and research have looked at the Christopher Street Liberation Day marches and the role it had on the LGBTQ movement following the Stonewall Riots, however, little has been done …

Grief Work With The Philly Death Doula Collective: An Oral History Project, Leo L. Williams

Oral Histories HIST300, Spring 2021

On March 25th, 2021 a Master’s student in American Studies (Leo Williams) at the University of New Mexico met with the Philly Death Doula Collective over Zoom. The current members of the collective are Lori Zaspel, Kai Wonder, and Nicki Cowan, social workers, and Death Doulas living in Philadelphia. In this oral history interview, the collective speaks to their vision of death care infrastructure, their goals and services as a collective, how COVID-19 has affected them, and their relationship to death positive activism.

Consumerism And Pride: The Fate Of Paris’ Marais “Gayborhood”, Christina M. Csensich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the 1980s the Marais neighborhood in Paris, France, became a haven for queer people, specifically gay, white men, filled with queer-owned and queer-centric businesses. By the year 2020, however, these businesses had been priced out by name-brand international corporations. In the 1990s, French television commercials and programs would not speak the word ‘homosexual,’ even when a character was openly queer. By the 2010s, companies regularly featured queer people and gay pride imagery and slogans in their advertising. The queer community in Paris has a unique relationship with the consumer economy, one that ties aspects of queer identity directly to …

The Effects Of Victorian Circulating Libraries On The Conventions Of Society, Kaitlyn M. Clary

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

As an era that is oftentimes categorized as one of the most prudish in British history, it is commonplace to see the Victorian Period as a time that imposed strict moral codes onto people of all classes, genders, and ages. Although the 18th century proved to be quite lenient with the manner in which social behavior was controlled, the 19th century proved to be an era of tension between the social order and individual desire, particularly for the middle and upper classes. With the aid of the Industrial Revolution, many governments found it essential to utilize the newly innovated printing …

The Challenges Of Lesbian Senior Leaders In The Army Branch Of The Department Of Defense, Ella Nunley-Spaights

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of lesbian senior leaders and the types of challenges they experience while serving in the Army Branch of the Department of Defense. A secondary purpose of this study was to identify strategies lesbian senior leaders employ to overcome perceived challenges while serving in the Army Branch of the Department of Defense.

Methodology: This phenomenological study described the lived experiences of seven lesbian senior leaders serving in the Army who were retired from service within the past five years. Convenience and snowball sampling were utilized to identify women who …

Article 6.21, Tatiana Stolpovskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Article 6.21 is a short documentary film that aims to examine the state of censorship around queerness in Russia today and its effects on personal lives in the queer community.

Twenty years after Russia decriminalized homosexuality, on June 30th in 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values", also known as the "Gay Propaganda Law". Its broad and ambiguous wording allows the government significant leeway in deciding what kind of public queerness is punishable.

In 2020 Russia passed multiple constitutional amendments that affect many areas …

Overture: Love—Love Is A Pink Cake, Or, Queering Chopin In Times Of Homophobia, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Abstract:

An introduction to the three essays included in this section. The article highlights the right to know whether Chopin was gay and contextualizes this inquiry in a very long and pervasive historiographical tradition, essentially two-hundred years long, dedicated to examine Chopin sexual orientation, on the one hand, and on the other the more recent tradition of queering western classical music composers. The main point is not to demonstrate categorically that Chopin was “gay” (a relative, modern identity marker in any case) but rather to highlight the discourses that have presented him as unequivocally heterosexual.

Resumen:

Una introducción a los …

Archives Of “Sexual Deviance”: Recovering The Queer Prisoner, Vic Overdorf

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Queer federal prisoners are a population often inaccessible to queer memory due to the strong institutional barriers that separate these individuals from life outside of prison walls. This paper asks: how can we employ feminist methodologies in the recovery of queer voices from federal prison archives? By documenting perceived deviance and perversions, carceral institutions in the 1930s-1950s built a case to justify their use of discursive and physical violence against queer bodies. This paper argues that carceral archives serve as norming mechanisms, creating barriers between normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual. To counter this norming, Ann Laura Stoler (2002) provides …