Queer Studies Commons^™

Rhetorical Violence: The Rhetorics Of Women's Counter Political Violence, Kylie Rowland

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Protest is omnipresent, and yet not much is known about the efficacy and impacts of its different rhetorical strategies—particularly so for marginalized populations, whose available means of protest are already limited by both material realities and assumptions that govern who and what can make waves. This bind is further exacerbated by gendered and racialized civility politics that determine which bodies can be disruptive and which already are considered “violent.” To address this gap, I turn toward the under-researched rhetorical potentials of marginalized people’s—specifically women and queer folks’—use of symbolic protest “violence,” which works to strategically make evident the larger ongoing …

Hope Against Hope: Problems, Possibilities, Agency, And Survival, Erin Kay Chambers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In response to a critique of hope put forth by queer theorist Jack Halberstam, this thesis is a reassessment of what makes us capable of response—to “stay with the trouble,” in the words of Donna Haraway—in the face of overwhelming collapse. If not hope, then what? This thesis explores a number of questions about hope and its absence, opposites, and various deployments: is hope always an effective tool for survival? Does hopelessness always spell doom? Are hope and its apparent opposites necessarily incompatible? And if there is no hope, how do we keep going?—how do we survive? I explore these …

Treading Lightly: The Ethics Of Instructor Il/Legibility And Neutrality In The Classroom, Marcus A. Woodman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Instructors in the classroom often describe their experiences teaching as being a performance, which often combines authenticity with boundaries to keep certain aspects of the instructor’s life out of the classroom. For queer instructors, their performance may be especially complicated; since queer identity is less visible than other types of identities, instructors must also weigh whether or not to come out to their students. In our current political moment, where queerness has yet again become a scrutinized topic (especially when in proximity to youth), teachers have an even more difficult decision to make.

This thesis uses queer theory and queer …

“Re-Storying” Anne Shirley And The Adhd Child: A Crip Genealogy Of Anne Of Green Gables, Darian Aleyna Wilson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the contested nature of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), focusing on its cultural and historical constructions. While ADHD has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since 1980, its legitimacy remains a subject of debate across medical, disability studies, and historical scholarship. Using Eli Clare’s critique of diagnosis as a tool rather than a fact, this project examines how ADHD is both pathologized and re-storied within societal and medical discourses. It highlights the tension between medical classifications and lived experiences of those diagnosed with ADHD, particularly in the context of girlhood.

The central …

Queered Tradition: Disidentificatory Practices Of Queer-Affirming Religious Space, Amanda R. Peterson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Responding to high rates of religious trauma in the United States, particularly for LGBTQ people, this study investigates the rhetorical moves made in protestant Christian spaces to consider what makes these spaces safe and affirming for queer people. Specifically, I consider the rhetorical impact these churches make through not only their space but also their liturgy and online presence, which informs the embodied experience of the space.

Through autoethnographic research, I look at three local churches—Metropolitan Community Church of Omaha, Urban Abbey, and Elevate Church–the first two queer-affirming and the third conservative. Findings show the various church elements negotiated with …

My Last Concussion, Shannon Valkr

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

MY LAST CONCUSSION is a thesis consisting of a critical introduction, a number of poetic influences, and a collection of poems. The introduction touches on the themes of the collection, my personal history with my subject, my changing approach to poetry, and a brief evaluation of the work as a whole. It details my approach to Catholicism, paganism, transgender identity, and oppression. My work grapples with both my current understanding of myself and my inability to enunciate my reality in the past. I aim to view divinity and personal history through a lens of queerness.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

Lessons In Persistence, Syble Heffernan

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

LESSONS IN PERSISTENCE is a thesis that operates within the tradition of writing about trauma and resilience, taking up themes of mental illness, class, colonialism, loss of a parent, navigating queerness in a conservative Christian context, and reckoning with gender-based violence and expectations directed toward people socialized as women. The use of ecopoetics highlights the relationship between traumas to the earth brought about by climate change, war, and worldwide suffering, and those brought upon the human body (specifically marginalized bodies) by grief, illness, abuse, and the loss of self. The collection ultimately aims to establish explicit connections between internal and …