Queer Studies Commons^™

Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition: Unpacking Gender Roles In Social Media Performances Of "The Good Life", Lauren Mar

Scripps Senior Theses

What do JD Vance, tradwife influencers, and the “sprinkle sprinkle” movement have in common? They all have something to do with the increasing popularity of an apparent return to traditional gender roles. This thesis is an intersectional investigation of women’s gender roles in relation to class and race as they appear in different performances of “the good life” on social media. Through a series of personal essays, this thesis explores how these media examples represent a deeper political unhappiness with present conditions. This thesis takes the time to unpack the different sides of discourse surrounding each subject, and counters the …

Queer Life In Nineteenth-Century America: A Historical Literature Review, Vivian Wright

SURF Posters 2025

In recent political discourses, queerness has often been treated as a modern phenomenon, and many people tend to think of queerness as a twentieth-century invention. Historians, however, have shown this to be false; an extensive amount of historical work details the lives of those who did not conform to sexual or gender norms in nineteenth-century America. This review surveys such works, analyzing nearly twenty different works spanning the course of nearly fifty years. By examining these works chronologically, the development of the field of queer history can be understood in the context of social and political developments occurring in the …

Living With Flying Colors: Associations Among Lgbtq+ Identity, Religiosity, Spirituality, Community, And Overall Well-Being Among Lgbtq+ Older Adults, Madison T. Diomede

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Experiences of discrimination and prejudice place LGBTQ+ individuals in older adulthood (i.e., 55 years old and older) at risk for poor overall well-being. This risk can be especially salient in the Southern and Midwestern U.S., where LGBTQ+ individuals enjoy fewer legal protections than in the Northeast and Western regions of the U.S. In defiance of these odds, LGBTQ+ individuals in older adulthood cultivate overall well-being through psychological-level constructs, like LGBTQ+ identity affirmation, and community-level constructs, LGBTQ+ community connection. Yet, little research has examined these avenues of strength among LGBTQ+ individuals in older adulthood. Guided by Iridescent Life Course Theory and …

Feeling Foreign / Foreign Feeling: Affect In Southeast Asian Diasporic Short Story Collections, Francys Aerin Fortes

Theses and Dissertations

Affect studies have long been saturated with scholarship investigating the fluidity of emotions, though a larger turn in the field now prioritizes the felt experiences of marginalized peoples. Sianne Ngai’s work is one part of this turn that seeks to unpack the effects of oppressive systemic forces on Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Sianne Ngai reexamined the nature of emotions in her seminal text Ugly Feelings (2005), particularly concerned with how negative feelings are disproportionately felt by marginalized bodies as a result of conditions of obstructed agency, systems of power, and wage labor capitalism. Drawing from Ngai’s writing, this thesis …

Queer-Keying: Performing Video Processes As [Trans]Gressive Resistance, Wren Tiffany

Theses and Dissertations

As part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I transformed the 'Sponge' gallery on the top floor of The Anderson, VCU’s historic thesis exhibition home, into The Green Room, a neon green, immersive video and performance space featuring mirrors, disco lights, a foam tile dance floor, makeup stations, and a functioning green-screen editing suite. This hybrid drag rehearsal and ‘Chroma-key’ green video production room deepened both my understandings of Queer performance art and process-based art making during the Spring of 2025, through two public performance activation …

Voicing The Violence: Carmen Maria Machado's Contribution To A Queer Archive, Audrey C. Bryant

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This project analyzes In the Dream House (2019) alongside “The Husband Stitch” and “Eight Bites” from the collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado. The first, a memoir, details Machado’s personal experience with domestic abuse between partners who share a female gender identity; the latter is a collection of short stories outlining everyday violations made against women. Scholars have discussed these works with specifications including female domestic horror, Machado’s use of retellings, and domestic violence and abuse. This project fills a gap in the discourse by intersecting and connecting queer theory with archival studies to support …

One Man Show/ Who Am I, Devin Baker

Dance (MFA) Theses

Historically, stereotypes of ideal masculine physiques and attributed qualities have led to discriminatory and exclusionary practices that adversely affect black queer men and how they show up in various performance and social spaces. As a result, black male bodies in these spaces have employed the alter ego as a tool to imagine themselves inside/outside these constructed masculinities. How can the alter ego aid in transcending dated notions of race and gender, beholden to black male bodies within concert dance? Through the intertwining of personal narrative and research rooted in psychology and gender studies, this work examines the alter ego as …

Grieving In Doorways: A Critical Autoethnographic Exploration Of Embodied Knowledge Amid Shifting Reality And Radical Possibility, Holly Rae

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This thesis is a critical autoethnographic exploration of embodied knowledge amid shifting reality and radical possibility. Beginning and ending with my own body, I explore how grief, as an embodied companion, offers wisdom and power in moments of profound change. Rooted in a methodology of slowness, rest, walking, and active listening, this work resists the extractive pace of modernity and instead invites building a relationship with grief and discomfort. This research is an experiment in co-creating knowledge with bodies and their intersectionality within systems that would keep us separate from knowing our embodied knowledge. As a location of research for …

A Monstrous [Un]-Becoming: Defining The Final Boy, Rhys Crumpton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Through an exploration of horror theory, monster theory, queer theory, and disabilities studies, this thesis defines a 21st century archetype within the serial horror narrative, known as “the Final Boy.” This character is a manifestation of a queer, often neurodivergent man in peril at the hands of a monstrous society. This harmful socionormativity is narratively represented by a monster wearing the face of a man, one whom the Final Boy must subdue and overcome if he wishes to survive. The seven tenets found in this project highlight the fluctuating morality the Final Boy is forced to engage in per the …

“A ‘Normal’ Life”: Red Dwarf, Temporality, And The Neuroqueer Absurd, Gretchen B. Graf

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The science fiction series Red Dwarf, beginning in 1988 and broadcasting sporadically over the past nearly four decades, takes place more than three million years in the future where human beings have gone extinct. All, that is, except one; the show’s central character, Dave Lister, is the last known living human being in the universe, outliving humanity by remaining in stasis during a radiation leak that killed the rest of the crew of the titular mining ship. Besides Lister, the narrative also focuses on the nonhuman beings that keep him company. Besides residing in the genre of science fiction, …

Worldbuilding A Queer Before: D&D As A Neomedievalism For A Modern Age, Brianna M. Thompson

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has had countless participants and audience members in the course of its over fifty-year existence. It has also been the subject of several studies that attempt to capture its unique form of performative play. Yet, there has been a scarcity of scholarship on how D&D acts as a neomedievalism and how that can offer a queer kind of opportunity to its players, allowing them to find a place in a past that is historically inaccessible and yet endlessly in the process of being (re)imagined. Using an interweaving of archival theory with queer and performance studies, particularly …

Phantasma, Grace Wright

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Ever since the infamous Ides of March, scholars have been debating the true psychology behind Brutus’s betrayal. The purpose of this project is to take a step back from the politicized motivations and explore the emotional, strenuous conditions of Julius Caesar’s assassination. This project will transform William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into a novella with its central focus on the relationship dynamics between the key figures of Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius. The intention of the novella is to not only analyze the play through a critical queer lens, but to interrogate the themes of violence and desire that surround male relationships …

A New Normal: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Gender Complexities In Los Angeles Social Justice Theatre Storytelling, Sue Hamilton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study uses autoethnography to examine the role gender plays in Los Angeles social justice theatre storytelling. Chronicling my autoethnography as a queer, nonbinary artist and social justice theatre practitioner, I will examine gender through the context of my social justice theatre company, Artists Rise Up Los Angeles (ARULA), by analyzing selections of its original, politically focused, professional stage plays performed from 2017 to 2019, utilizing ARULA’s emerging themes of gender expression and inclusion. ARULA was born out of a determination to create original social justice theatre storytelling to understand and transform reality by bringing theatrical expression to the environment …

Exploring Canadian Social Work Students' Aphobic Attitudes: The Role Of Knowledge About Asexuality And Asexual People, Brianna V. Azzoparde

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Aphobic attitudes are negative biases and prejudices against asexual individuals that can contribute to aphobic discrimination. While the Canadian Social Work Code of Ethics states that social workers should not discriminate and should provide culturally responsive services to marginalized populations, individually held aphobic attitudes have the potential to diminish one’s ability to provide culturally responsive services to asexual people. This national study examined aphobic attitudes among 326 Canadian social work students, exploring the relationship between knowledge about asexuality and aphobic attitudes, including controlling for demographic factors, social contact with asexuals, and social attitudes that previous research has identified as being …

2slgbtq+ Contact As A Vehicle For Promoting Alternative Sexual Scripts Through Exposure To Queer And Trans Ways Of Knowing, Sophie R. Landry

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Research on the Traditional Sexual Script (TSS) suggests it can have harmful repercussions, such as sexual violence, gender inequity, and the undermining of communication. My research explores the novel idea that intergroup contact with 2SLGBTQ+ individuals can promote CisHet (cisgender, heterosexual) individuals to value alternative sexual scripts that emphasize communication, authenticity, and equity, and to question the TSS. In Study 1, I found that CisHet people who had more 2SLGBTQ+ contact reported greater concern for consent and were less likely to agree with traditional gender norms relative to those who made less contact. In both Study 2 and Study 3, …

No One Lives In The Future: Family Dynamics And Environmental Discourse, Morgan Vanek

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In the context of catastrophic climate change, the optimism that underpins our economic models for calculating the future cost of present risks has become both untenable and dangerous. Nonetheless, even writing urgently concerned with these risks continues to invoke a version of the Child as a figure of futurity that appears to naturalize both this optimism and our present inaction. In this essay, I argue that we might find another path forward by looking back to the eighteenth-century stories that seem to demonstrate a similar preoccupation with children in danger. Taking Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress as a representative example, I …

Leading Towards The Queerest Insurrection: Queer Anarchism And Leadership Studies, Josie Holland

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

Leadership shapes our world, our narratives, and what is possible to imagine. Unfortunately, leadership studies has some trouble imagining queer leadership, or rather, queer theory and leadership studies. In order to integrate the more abstract aspects of queer theory with the largely evidence-based field of leadership studies, I draw on the texts, history, practices, and theory of queer anarchism. This article aims to highlight a gap in leadership studies as it currently stands, and through accounting for the absence of queer anarchism in leadership studies, expand what leadership looks like. To this end, I suggest the framing of ‘leadership acts’ …

Ballroom: An Exploration Of Queer Survival And Self-Sufficiency, Jet Mezini

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

The AIDs epidemic and its disinformation alienated queer people from U.S culture. As a result, queer people, especially queer people of color, began meeting together to express their self-made culture, a series of competitions among themselves, the underground scene of “ballroom.” Ballroom reveled in self-awareness and bordered on satire, being inspired by Western standards that were unable to be applied to a queer populous. This essay will analyze these cultural norms, understanding how they served as methods of reclamation for queer people, and how ballroom evolved to reflect social progression.

Diverse Possibilities Of Shakespeare: Teaching Twelfth Night Through A Queer Lens, Julia Ritzler

Honors Projects

This project seeks to understand the ways in which Queer Theory can be applied to secondary language arts education to enhance students' understanding of identity and gender in literature. For the purposes of this project, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is being used as a case study text. This project includes a thorough analysis of Twelfth Night through a queer lens, a literature review of Queer Theory and educational pedagogy, a block plan and related instructional and assessment materials, a rationale for the block plan, and project limitations and implications for future research. By analyzing scholarly texts and applying the theories within …

Mindfulness Matters: Addressing Anxiety And Navigating Toward Wellbeing Through Miea Mindfulness Practices, A Mixed-Methods Study Of Lgbtiq Graduate Writing Students, Kim Westerman

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness Matters: Addressing Anxiety and Navigating Toward Wellbeing Through MIEA Mindfulness Practices, a Mixed-Methods Study of LGBTIQ Graduate Writing Students

Anxiety has always been a part of the human experience, even before the phenomenon was conceptualized in the 17^th century and named by Freud in the 19th. And human beings have devised many strategies for addressing anxiety: reducing it, ignoring it, distracting oneself from it, despairing over it, medicating it, engaging with it, moving through it, co-existing with it. The current zeitgeist, more than four years into the COVID-19 global pandemic, situates anxiety as a central facet of …

Story Of Everything, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Publications and Research

Story of Everything, by Mariana Romo-Carmona. Translated by Caragh Barry.

Original title: Cuento de todas las cosas.

Ephemeral Legacy, Allison Hall

Master's Theses

Recently, my thoughts have centered on the problem of legacy. How do we forge bonds with other humans? What happens on an interpersonal level when these humans pass away, or when we pass, and they continue in life? How do queer spaces consistently offer deeper phenomena of interpersonal legacies; how does death operate as generational catalyst? I am particularly interested in putting these questions in the context of queer spaces. In queer culture, kinship is formed in ways that break from typical western notions of kinship. Despite being incoherent to western notions of family, queer bonds are extremely strong (Bradway …

Señoritas On And Off The Silver Screen: How Chicana Women Organized For Equality And Challenged The Cultural Prison Of Sexualized Media Representations In The First Half Of The Twentieth-Century, Rossandra Paloma Martinez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This research is personal for me due to lived experience and day-to-day situations where I have felt the pressures of unattainable beauty standards and society’s fluid definition of beauty and femininity surrounding Chicana, Latinas, Mexican, and Mexican-American women. What inspired me to pursue these issues and topics was the work of Dr. Vicki Lynn Ruiz in her book From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. This research focuses on rival and contested images of Chicana, Mexican, Mexican-American and Latina labor advocates and activists from the early twentieth as opposed to sexualized and eroticized packaged caricatures that Hollywood …

Recognition Or Refusal? Marginalized Identity Development In Passing And The Color Purple, Lee M. Kassay

Theses & Honors Papers

The novels Passing by Nella Larsen and The Color Purple by Alice Walker both involve identity development in their black queer female protagonists, but previous scholarship has rarely discussed the works in tandem. Thus, I merge the discussion around these two works by analyzing them through the concept of G.W.F. Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Assessing how both protagonists participate in their relationships with their female love interests versus their male husbands shows the importance of mutual recognition in the development of identity.

Queering Composition Pedagogy: Camp-Informed Teaching Within Florida's Censorship, Isabelle V. Karleskint

Feminist Pedagogy

This social justice strategy article examines composition teaching within Florida colleges and universities over a seven-year period of intense political and social change. These institutions carry different levels of protection from Florida's censorship and anti-LGBTQIA+ laws. Using principles from Susan Sontag's 1964 "Notes On Camp," the author examines strategies for navigating these boundaries and creating safe, inclusive spaces for students while flying under the oppressive state government's 'radar.' This article found that teaching which includes multimodality, popular culture, digital learning, inclusive content, and identity politics can 'camp' pedagogy, with benefits to students and low risk to faculty. However, it also …

Chaucerian Echoes: Chivalric Tradition And Gender Construction In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Gillian Guy

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

George Eliot’s Middlemarch critiques Victorian social and gender norms through characters' relationships with each other and with horseback riding. This paper argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde informs the symbolism and literary tropes Eliot uses in crafting her narrative. Analysis of Chaucerian tropes of courtly love and medieval codes of chivalry reveals how characters either maintain or undermine traditional Victorian conventions of masculinity and femininity; these dynamics are primarily seen through horse ownership and horseback riding. One protagonist in particular, Will Ladislaw, is examined in this paper as representing ideas of androgyny through his unconventional relationships with horses and …

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy, Laurie Fuller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy raises questions and analyzes classroom practices based on adrienne maree brown’s (2017) Emergent Strategy, a radical self-help manual for our current political climate that calls for a paradigm shift in organizing work. Black, mixed, queer, pansexual, feminist writer, pleasure activist, facilitator and sci-fi scholar, brown builds on a continuous tradition of women of color feminists resisting oppression to bring together science fiction and permaculture, biomimicry and organizing, pleasure and activism. She offers fresh perspectives on how to imagine liberation and provides dynamic ways to think about teaching and learning. Emergent Strategy provides principles to …

Exploring The Confines Of The Closet, Maddi Stillabower '28

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” and Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room both illustrate how the “closet” works within and between individuals. Unlike religious identity which can be easily explained through familial heritage, David is unable to trace his sexual orientation to any concrete reason. His inability to reconcile his identity with the beliefs of his culture highlights the conflicting experience of many in the queer community. His relationship with Giovanni reveals how internalized homophobia and the absence of queer role models play into feelings toward himself and all queer relationships. The constant dissonance between Giovanni’s genuine feelings and David’s fear of their …

“I Am A Conversation”: Media Literacy, Queer Pedagogy, And Steven Universe In College Curriculum, Misty Thomas

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The recent cartoon show on Cartoon Network Steven Universe allows for the blending of both queer theory and media literacies to create a pedagogical space for students to investigate and analyze not only queerness, but also normative and non-normative identities. This show creates characters as well as relationships that both break with and subvert what would be considered traditional masculine and feminine identities. Additionally, Steven Universe also creates a space where sexuality and transgender bodies are represented. This paper demonstrates both the presence of queerness within the show and the pedagogical implications for using this piece of media within a …

Tear In The Wing, Aspen Balducci

Student Sequential Art and Comics

A short comic based on the author's own experiences with disability and acceptance, as a plus size person with knee problems, growing up.