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

Part Of This World: A Personal Exploration Of Media And Queer Identity, Emilee Harrison

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This paper is a mix of research and personal narrative exploring the impact of television, film, and online media on identity formation. I look specifically at my own identity as a queer person and how it has been shaped by what I have seen and experienced as a young queer and as an educator. Topics discussed include homophobia in the classroom and workplace, the impact of social media on youth development and identity formation, and our changing culture as queer visibility increases. This piece is primarily a personal reflection that runs from early childhood to adulthood. It addresses social interactions …

Performing, Sensing, Being: Queer Identity In Everyday Life, Justin J. Rudnick

Communication Studies Department Publications

Drawing from performance, affect, and queer theories, I explore how queer identity is storied, performed, and sensed in everyday life. I access performance and sensory ethnographic practices to examine how queer persons “do” their identities on a daily basis. I draw from data collected through ethnographic participation in a queer-friendly district of Columbus, Ohio in addition to in-depth interviews with fourteen self-identified queer persons I met through my fieldwork. My approach privileges observations and reflections of mundane moments of everyday life to position queer identity as a routine, repetitive, habitual, and otherwise performative practice. I question the emphasis on verbal …

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

Theses and Dissertations

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

A Performative Script: Play With(In) Me, Erik Patton

Theses and Dissertations

Patton continues his interest in the body, its relation to material, the notion of abstraction (specifically related to queerness), and the phenomenological with this performative script. Enter the bath first; you must wash your dirty asshole, as you shat only two hours ago. Collect your body in the Silver Pond.

Gay Doesn’T Begin To Cover It: Non-Binary Sexuality In Community’S Dean Pelton”, Jessica Mae Harmon

SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

In modern media, characters whose sexuality lies outside of binary gender and sexuality representations are few and far between. Most queer characters in mainstream American television are labeled as either gay or lesbian, and in a few rare cases bisexual. Bisexuality, while least visible among sexual minorities that fit within the prescribed LGBT acronym, is most visible outside of the gay/straight dichotomy. Meanwhile the spectrum of non-binary sexualities is largely ignored. In this essay I will examine one character that breaks this mold and forces the modern viewer to consider non-binary sexuality, Dean Craig Pelton of NBC/Yahoo’s Community. The …

A Place To Belong: Critical Queer Pedagogy For Social Justice In Catholic Education, Roydavid Villanueva Quinto

LMU Theses and Dissertations

A growing number of gay and lesbian children attend Catholic schools throughout the United States; and an untold number of gay and lesbian children in Catholic schools are experiencing harassment, violence, and prejudice because of their sexual orientation or gender non-conformity. Whether due to their size, strong sense of community, or making special considerations for vulnerable students, Catholic schools seem to be the best equipped to address these issues, but all of the research points to such schools enacting policies of silence and suppression. This study specifically explores why Catholic teachings on sexuality and social justice have may have been …

Jotería-Historias: Theories From The Fringes, Robert Mitchell Gutierrez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By collecting the cultural/historical narratives of gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (GBTQ) Chicanos of Colorado, this research project locates theories in the flesh, or theories of resistance and agency, in the forms of cuentos, pláticas, chismé, mitos, testimonios, and consejos to explicate a queer of color performance of intersectional and decolonial politics. To set the context, several historical and political snapshots of GBTQ Chicano experience over the last 500 years are reviewed to demonstrate how communication about, for, and between GBTQ Chicanos operate in a liminal state (nepantla) where violence, marginalization, and oppression are …

Queer Student Development Theory, Kellian Clink

Library Services Publications

This was a review of the literature of studies that have tried to describe stages that queer college students are transitioning through during their college years. Understanding student development theory is valuable to student advisors.

Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans: Fact Not Fiction, Casey S. O'Higgins

Student Publications

This paper examines the narratives of Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans who have been oppressed by heteropatriarchal norms of colonization. Two-spirit creation stories are explored to show the prevalence and importance of their identities prior to contact with Euro-American settlers and the evolution of violence, exclusion, and marginalization due to colonization.The term "Two-Spirit" is examined as a cultural identity of the Indigenous Americans. Finally, the paper looks at how Two-Spirit scholars are looking to combine Queer Theory with Indigenous Studies to deconstruct colonial heteropatriarchal America.

But, Why Not?, Anonymous

SURGE

I am the lucky one.

That’s how I’ve felt growing up in backwater Pennsyltucky, yet somehow managing to be openly queer. I came out to my friends and family as bi/pan-sexual in the 8th grade. None of my coming-out experiences resulted in horror stories. At that point most people had already guessed and accepted the fact that I was most definitely a queer kid. Even the most conservatively religious members of my friend group seemed perfectly okay with the fact that my sexuality didn’t fit with their ideas of morality. I was who I was, and to all outward appearances …

The Cross In My Closet, Ann M. Sasala

SURGE

All this changed when I turned fourteen. Suddenly the quiet peace was shattered by my raucous, rebellious response to the “Adam and Eve Not Ann and Eve“ chanted by my neighbors, teachers, and family. The solace I once felt during prayer became a black hole of hate; instead of listening for words of kindness, instead of finding serenity, I spit in the faces of my family, friends, and religion. Hoping to purge my body of its new found, fiery anger, I turned to a priest who told me there could be no salvation: “man shall not lie with man…it is …

Queer Provisionality: Mapping The Generative Failures Of The Transborder Immigrant Tool, Alison R. Reed

English Faculty Publications

Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.

Queer Mysticism In The High Middle Ages: Pain, Love, Earth, And The Female Body In The Illustrations Of Hildegard Of Bingen’S Scivias, Becky Bushnell

UROP Posters

Many view Hildegard of Bingen as one of the most important female theologians of the 12th century, and her writing and sphere of influence is remarkable considering her gender. Many scholars, like Barbara Newman, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Carolyn Worman Sur, agree that Hildegard’s portrayals of God in Scivias are distinctly feminine. Scholars like Karma Lochrie, Sheryl Chen, and Flora Lewis have written on Christ’s wound as a metaphor for the womb or vulva. Yet what scholars don’t seem to focus on, as Lochrie writes in “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” is the ways that the work of many female mystics …

Adaptable Monsters: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Vampire Narrative As A Metaphor For Marginalized Groups, Alexa Wei

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis paper gives a brief history of the vampire narrative and its role in representing the collective anxieties of an age as well as serving as a metaphor for oppressed peoples. It uses Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla as historical examples of how the vampire adapts to suit issues of the day such as reverse colonization and female sexuality, respectively. The latter part of this paper speculates on the future role of the vampire in literature and proposes that the vampire could be used to discuss transgender issues as well as challenge the gender binary. …

Normaal Is Gek Genoeg: Homonormativity & Inclusivity In Amsterdam’S Lgbtq Community, Devin Hanley

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper examines the mechanics of inclusivity and exclusion within a homonormative framework in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces in modern-day Amsterdam. Using interviews from five participants involved in various capacities with LGBT/Q spaces in the city, the following paper asserts that the divide between the LGB and TQ communities in the city is predicated, in large part, on the openness in each community towards nonnormative sexual and (especially) gender expressions. In conclusion, it offers suggestions for further inquiry into intersectional inclusion and exclusion factors in these spaces, as well as an examination of the pronounced political …

Depressives And The Scenes Of Queer Writing, Allen Durgin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading . Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick's brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to …

Review Of Just Queer Folks: Gender And Sexuality In Rural America By Colin R. Johnson, Emily Kazyak

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Colin Johnson’s book Just Queer Folks provides a powerful corrective to the faulty assumption that gender and sexual nonnormativity and rurality are incompatible. As a historian, Johnson focuses on both the discourses about sexuality emerging and the wide array of sexual practices occurring in the first half of the twentieth century in rural America. He analyzes a wide range of sources to make two central points: first, that heterosexuality and heteronormativity are not “indigenous to rural areas,” but were constructed there (p. 18); second, that same-sex sexual behavior and gender nonconformity were commonplace in rural America in early twentieth century. …

Take Off Your Masc: The Hegemonic Gay Male's Gender Performance On Grindr, Duncan Shuckerow

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

The hegemonic Grindr clone is a gay male Grindr user who enforces the privileging of traditional masculine gender performance and condemns effeminacy. Through this project’s own field work along with the website “douchebagsofgrindr,” the hegemonic Grindr clone is here within analyzed. Drawing upon the theory ofhegemony articulated by Gramsci, a historical analysis of the 1970s urban gay male clone, and contemporary analysis and research, the project argues that the hegemonic Grindr clones, while only a minority group of Grindr users, rules over the cyberspace as sexual gatekeepers. Hegemonic Grindr clones maintain their privileged status on the application through depicting and …

"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Greenwich Village, a final generation of bohemians contested the rise and trajectory of gay liberation. During the 1930s, this generation blended modernist poetry and sexuality to develop a new manifestation of bohemia. In the postwar period, they transformed modern poetry into the new artistic medium of film that was critical to shaping postwar American art and culture. This wave of bohemia was built on certain modernist principles, including a universalist understanding of sexuality and identity that was different from, and incompatible with, the growth of identity politics in the 1960s. This dissertation argues that this was a last gasp …

2013-2014 Clemson Lgbtq Task Force Recommendations, Joshua Morgan, Will Stockton, Blair Durkee, Meredith Mccarroll, Alrinthea Carter, Richard Graham Duncan, Kendra Stewart-Tillman, Megan Denison, Susan Hilligoss

Publications

In December of 2011, a group of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and other Clemson community members came together to discuss the invisibility of the queer and trans communities in the “Clemson family” message. The event was held at the Madren Center and sponsored in part by the then‐Dean of Students Joy Smith. One of the motivating factors of the meeting was Clemson University’s unfortunately low score, 2 out of 5 stars, on the National LGBT‐Friendly Campus Climate Assessment tool from Campus Pride. The average score among the Top‐20 Public Schools (U.S. News & World Report, 2013) is 4.4 out of …

The Rainbow Effect: Exploring The Implications Of Queer Representation In Film And Television On Social Change, Maya S. Reddy

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore how specific films and television shows use the preexisting structure and mechanics of narrative film in order to create queer characters and stories that defy their otherness and stereotypes, thus creating a profound cinematic experience. Not only does the manipulation of these structures and mechanics heighten the realism and depth of the narrative at hand, it also enhances audience identification by allowing queer viewers to find themselves and straight viewers to understand the “other.” In this manner, the New New Queer Cinema and television have had lasting effects on the modern gay rights movement, changing …

Rent: Same-Sex Prostitution In Modern Britain, 1885-1957, Jonathan Coleman

Theses and Dissertations--History

Rent: Same-Sex Prostitution in Modern Britain, 1885-1957 chronicles the concept of “rent boys” and the men who purchased their services. This dissertation demonstrates how queer identity in Britain, until contemporary times, was largely regulated by class, in which middle-and-upper-class queer men often perceived of working-class bodies as fetishized consumer goods. The “rent boy” was an upper-class queer fantasy, and working-class men sometimes used this fantasy for their own agenda while others intentionally dismantled the “rent boy” trope, refusing to submit to upper-class expectations. This work also explains how the “rent boy” fantasy was eventually relegated to the periphery of queer …

Queer Alchemies: Radical Futurity In The Shell Of The Now, Elizabeth R. Canfield

Theses and Dissertations

This work operates at the intersection of academics, art, and activism. Within queer studies there is a tension between assimilation and liberation, sometimes situated as between pragmatism and utopia. This work re-examines Frankfurt school Marxist views of utopia through a queer theoretical lens in order to employ the radical imagination and queer futurity to examine new ways of practicing liberation. Drawing from theorists like Judith Butler, Jose Esteban Munoz, and Gloria Anzaldua, this work uses art (film, writing, zine-making, and sound) as a way to envision and enact a better world situated in the present.

Gayme: The Development, Design And Testing Of An Auto-Ethnographic, Documentary Game About Quarely Wandering Urban/Suburban Spaces In Central Florida., David Moran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking'. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man's journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando's most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. "The art of cruising" city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not …

The Queer Truth, Chelsea E. Broe

SURGE

I remember learning about intersexuality (then called hermaphrodism) for the first time in my health class when I was twelve years old. In that lesson, my teacher mentioned that when a child is born intersex, the parents will likely choose a binary sex (male or female) for the child, have the child undergo sex reassignment surgery, and raise the child to fit the corresponding gender. My teacher went on to explain that sometimes the parents pick the “wrong” sex for their child, and the child grows up feeling like he or she should be the “opposite” gender. Implied in this …

As The World Turns...Gay, Not Queer: Privileging Heteronormalized Representations Of Sexuality In American Soap Operas From 1977 - Present, Brett Edward King

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project argues that American daytime soap operas, since the1970s, have adopted prevailing discursive ideas of queerness, re-articulated them, and introduced new discursive understandings of queerness into popular culture. Most often, these re-articulated representations reflect a heteronormalized model,owing to myriad historically-situated discourses related to human sexuality (e.g.,mental health, AIDS, and gender identity). This point is made through a broad examination of these shifting discourses, coupled with a direct analysis of salient queer characters and storylines that appeared concurrently within daytime serials. Building on Feminist and Media theory, this project includes Queer theory to frame a comprehensive historical-discursive understanding of queerness …

The Materialism Of The Encounter: Queer Sociality And Capital In Modern Literature, Michael David Schmidt

Wayne State University Dissertations

In The Materialism of the Encounter I argue for the critical importance of queer sociality as a confrontation with global capital in which sexualities emerge as a material history necessary for rethinking the broader experiences of twentieth century modernity. To do so, I draw together a series of transnational texts--Henry James's nonfiction travel narrative The American Scene, Djuna Barnes's canonical Nightwood, and two neglected novels, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's The Young and Evil and Claude McKay's unpublished Romance in Marseilles--that exhibit a mode of sociality and literary practice I am calling the "encounter." While the …

Final Report As A Member Of The Lgbtq Center Staff, Joseph A. Santiago

Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Center

It is with a heavy heart that I write my final report as a member of the LGBTQ Center Staff. I have been part of the Center since 2002 and have seen it grow in many ways over the years. It is my hope that it will continue to improve and establish the programs and services that make it a leader and innovator in LGBTIQQ and cultural studies. The following is a brief breakdown of the spring 2012 semester.

Borders That Matter : Trans Identity Management, Reese C. Kelly

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation presents the responses, strategies, and meaning-making processes that forty trans (transgender) people engaged in when confronted with or when preparing for the possibility of encountering two different types of identity checkpoints, or what I regard as "borders": situations where sexed bodies and presentations of self would be matched against identity documents or records, and the use or attempted use of sex-segregated facilities. The project addresses the questions: In what ways do trans people prepare for and respond to identity inspections in border crossing scenarios? What strategies do they employ in order to successfully border cross? What effect does …

Queering Art Before, After And During The Sexual Revolution (1960-1980): A Study Of Aesthetics And Subversion, Gary C. Kilian Mr.

The Macalester Review

Works produced by the queer artists in 1970s America is oftentimes not considered to be an integral part of the sexual revolution’s narrative. Not only is this problematic in that it demonstrates the heteronormative discourse that permeated liberatory pro-sex rhetoric of the time, but this exclusion also makes the LGBTQ struggle for visibility ahistorical. In this paper, I argue that notable artists who self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer created art that fostered gradual acceptance of the queer community before, during and after the sexual revolution, explaining that resistance to dominant paradigms were rendered unseen due to the …