History of Gender Commons^™

Sustaining Ireland, Body And Soul: A Woman Leader's Story Of The Cooperative Movement, Elizabeth Summerfield

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This article tells the story of the Cooperative Movement in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the perspective of one of its woman leaders. It does so in order to distil lessons for the contemporary thought leadership of sustainability from a period before the term was coined. It does so with the warrant of Albert Einstein:

The distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Its evidence base is historical literature, but its argument and analysis draw on recent research in leadership studies, neuroscience and theology.

Diversification Of Suffering: An Analysis Of The Historiography Of The Home Fronts Of First World War Germany And Austria-Hungary Of The Past Quarter-Century, Gage Overton

Student Scholarship & Creative Works

The scholarship analyzing the home fronts of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War has grown sharply in the past quarter-century. These studies revealed many details that were scarcely known to many historians and introduced perspectives of the home front that were largely ignored beforehand. The scholars highlighted in this analysis all provide discussions which have deepened our understanding of the war, like the German government's punishment of women for "sexual treason," the extent of Vienna's devastation caused by hunger and disease, and the relationship between theatre and Austrian identity. Overall, the recent scholarship on this subject has demonstrated …

A Legacy Of Homophobia: Effects Of British Colonization On Queer Rights In India And Uganda, Kelly Christensen

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Globally, there are 69 countries where homosexuality is still illegal, of these 69, 36 countries are current or former British Colonies, creating a statical connection between the era of British Colonization and homophobic practices. This paper researches how moral regulations were used during the act of colonization to control and separate populations, using India and Uganda as case studies.

Warnock, Kyle, Jen Butler, Rachel Shanks

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Kyle Warnock is a young queer person living in southern Maine whose non-profit, QueerlyME, has taken off to provide resources for the queer community in Maine. Starting as a photo documentary, QueerlyME is that, a resource directory and an event planning organization that focuses on queer activities outside of the traditional queer nightlife scene. Warnock talks about his experience growing up in South Dakota, coming out and the impacts of that. He also talks about his passion for connecting queer people with QueerlyME and the impact the organization has had on his life and the lives of many queer Mainers. …

Geist, Dale, Abby Milewski

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Ever since his coming out in a Facebook post, Dale Geist has championed queer representation in one of the most conservative music genres. Country. He is the founder of the online blog called Country Queer, where his goal is to shine a light on LGBTQ+ country and Americana music artists. He talks about influential artists such as Bob Dylan, The Indigo Girls, Elton John, Brandie Carlile, and David Bowie. In this 50-minute interview, Geist covers many stories from his life, including discovering his sexuality, the importance of media representation, David Bowie’s positive influence on the bisexual community, and the cultural …

Mcconnell, Mickey, Christina Miner

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Mickey is a graduate student at USM studying Social Work and is an Adult Learning Coach at USM. She is 31 years old and is bi-sexual. Mickey grew up in Brunswick, Maine and her mom raised her and her two sisters. She has been in a seven year relationship with her partner David. She came out about 14 years old, however, it was not well received by her mother, and Mickey remained quiet about it for several years until more recently. Her mother has relaxed more about it, is more accepting and wants her to be happy. As a result …

Lo, Q, Rheros Iliad Kagoni

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Q Lo is a 45 year old transgender man, the son of two Chinese immigrants who grew up in New York. Q discusses growing up as a queer person of color, how his gender and sexual identity was impacted by the lack of representation he saw around him, how his upbringing in Chinatown influenced his view of the world, and how his immigrant parents influenced his relationship with school, work and creativity. Q talks about attending college, dropping out of college, and his experiences going to MECA in Portland Maine while grappling with the classism and privilege he was experiencing …

Marine, Benn, Andrea Carpenter

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Benn is a 37-year-old trans man living in Maine. He identifies as being pansexual because he feels that he falls in love with personalities regardless of the person’s gender. He grew up with his family in rural southern Maine. He describes feeling that he was different than others from a young age and that, as he describes it, God made a mistake and he was supposed to be a boy. Yet he pushed those feeling under the rug for a long time. He first came out as gay, and much later he came out as trans in his mid-20s, and …

Farnsworth, Susan, Larisa Filippov

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Susan Farnsworth is a 75 year old lesbian who has lived in Maine for over 50 years. She currently resides in Hallowell, ME, but has lived all over Maine and other places in New England. Farnsworth is an attorney and has her own law practice where she helps a variety of clients with their legal problems. She realized she was a lesbian while she was in law school during her marriage to a man. Farnsworth attended Bates College for her undergraduate degree before going to the University of Maine School of Law in Portland. The multiple political organizations she has …

Blanchard, Mike, Micaiah Wert

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Mike Blanchard is a 60 year old gay man from Westbrook Maine. He has struggled as an alcoholic due to repressing his queer identity, but has been sober for 33 years (since 1989). Through addiction recovery he was able to come out as gay in 1992. After years of struggling with alcohol and rough relationships, Mike met his husband at Blackstones in Portland, and describes their relationship as, “nothing I ever chased and everything I could have hoped for.” Mike worked for a long time in the field of recreation, but left after feeling as though he could not be …

Rand, Erica - 2022 Follow Up, Sofia Oliveri

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Erica Rand is a professor of Arts and Visual Culture at Bates College, an adult figure skater, author and activist. This is a follow-up interview to her previous interview for Querying the Past in 2017. Erica Rand was heavily involved with ACT- UP Portland and more specifically the branch of ACT UP called: Pissed Off Dyke Cell and Women’s Health Action Crew. But more recently she has been involved with a new form of activism through sports and writing. At Bates, she is pushing the importance of trans-inclusion policies in sports and even testing the gender limitations put in place …

Brownlee, Margaret, Gretchen Muehle, Shelice Wilson

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Margaret Brownlee is a multi-racial/Afro-Latina Lipstick Lesbian who was born and spent most of her life residing in Maine. Margaret was 16 when she came out and is now married to a woman and has a daughter. Margaret attended multiple universities–including Wells College, Lesley University, and the University of New England–as a first generation college student in her family with the goal of becoming a dancer. Margaret is currently a Burlesque dancer and instructor and is also employed with the Maine Department of Education. She has been involved in political activism and a number of organizations based in Maine–including Portland …

Wanderer, Nancy, Mary Wallace

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Nancy Wanderer is a professor at the University of Maine School of Law and was also the first Director of the Legal Writing Program at Maine Law. She received a B.A from Wellesley College, and M.A. from George Washington University, and a J.D. from University of Maine School of Law. Nancy Wanderer has dedicated her life to women’s rights and protecting and fighting for the rights of other minorities as well. Since growing up in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, Wanderer has always been drawn to education and Academia.

She was married to her ex-husband during her Junior year at Wellesley in …

Chann, Marpheen, Kendall Garland, Meghan Horner

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Marpheen Chann is a Cambodian, Asian-American, gay man living in Portland, Maine. He was born in California to an immigrant mother and later moved to Maine, then adopted by a white, Evangelical family. He spent his childhood in the church and would later attend Valley Forge Christian College. Then later transferring to USM to earn a Bachelor’s in Political Science and later attended Maine Law. Chann participates in advocacy work with organizations, such as the Equality Community Center and is the president of Khmer Maine. He currently works for the Good Shepard Food Bank as their Community Impact Manager.

Please …

Gifford, Dan, Erin Schott, Hailey Kamenides

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Dan Gifford is a gay white man who grew up in Arkansas, and eventually moved to Maine with his partner. Dan is now an employee at the Portland Museum of Art, where he enjoys his job and being close to art. Dan has always known he was gay, yet to some in Arkansas this was viewed in a negative light or simply swept under the rug. Dan explains that the first time he visited Maine he felt “home”, and enjoys that he can be his true authentic self here, without the scrutiny that he experienced in the South. Dan also …

Hine, Rook, Ty Bolduc

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Rook Hine is a 47-year-old transfemme non-binary person from Connecticut. In this interview, Hine describe their life experiences, from challenges in her household, zir benefits and complications within education, and finding their identity as ze grew up. They discuss masking, performing arts as an outlet for gender expression, activism in college and beyond. Ze also mentions developing their non-binary identity, use of the term metagender, polyamory, and internalized transphobia, as well as adventures around the country - attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York, spending time in New Orleans as a tarot card reader, stripper, and phone sex operator after …

Labbe, Roland, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Roland Labbe discusses growing up in Maine in Millinocket, Winterport, and Lewiston, before moving to Worcester, MA at 14 with an older lover. He also talks about his time as a young man in New York City; that made him realize that Portland needed a gay bar which he opened in 1967: “Roland’s Tavern” on Forest Ave. He shares stories about challenges he faced in opening Portland’s first gay bar, including licensing struggles with the city of Portland and hostility from police and some of the public. He discusses his tremendously supportive family, with his mother and siblings often working …

The Dance Of Domesticity: How Gender Constructs Obscure Lived Experience At Museums, Marcy J. Botwick

Museum Studies Theses

My thesis focuses on Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein and Ernest L. Blumenschein, married artists born in the late 1860s. Ernest Blumenschein was an important regional artist and member of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). Paintings by Blumenschein and other TSA members promoted tourism in the Southwestern United States through annual exhibitions and their use in advertising the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF). Mary Greene Blumenschein was an award-winning painter and illustrator whose work focused on images of women at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, she is now a secondary and obscure figure in art history. …

Macnaughton, Daniel, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Dan MacNaughton was born in 1955 in Bangor, Maine, and raised in Hampden, Maine with his mother, father, and older brother. He came out as gay in high school with supportive teachers and classmates who were either supportive or indifferent. However, he had deeply internalized homophobic attitudes and believed that being gay meant he had very limited employment options. In college at the University of Maine Orono, MacNaughton became active in the newly formed Wilde Stein student group where he became the first Vice-Chair of the club, met Sturgis Haskins, and became involved in educational efforts on campus. He also …

Ghosting Humanity: In Search Of An Ethics For The Disappeared, John Kaiser Ortiz

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

This paper visualizes what an ethics of the disappeared might look like if the troubled ontology of ghosts and their (un)seen realities are posited as real as allied discussions of the victims of human trafficking and other instances of violence against women, including femicide and sexual slavery.

Review Of Walaa Alqaisiya. Decolonial Queering In Palestine. London: Routledge, 2023, Ankita Chatterjee

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

Decolonial Queering in Palestine by WalaaAlqaisiya offers an in-depth study of the conquest of Palestine with respect to the variegated power structures of settler colonialism and underscores the political significance of a reformulated mode of decolonization. It argues for the need to interweave queer into the native Palestinian positionality termed as 'decolonial queering', so as to challenge the (hetero) sexualizing and gendered discourses embedded within both the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial regime and the Palestinian Nationalist visions of liberation. By the 'ethnographic' engagement with the works of Palestinian artists and activists from one of the prominent queer groups, alQaws, the book …

Perhaps Discomfort Is The Answer: Refusing Liberal Feminism And Imperial Cartographies Of Thinking/Feeling, Saida Hodzic

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

The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs is an unsettling feminist ethnography that traces the movements of three objects: the endings of female genital cutting in Ghana, their relationship to anti-cutting campaigns and the forms of governance they instantiate, and the role anthropology and feminism have played in this governance since colonial rule. It makes the case that the three objects must be studied together: namely, that we need to understand the practice of female genital cutting alongside its endings; that cutting does not exist outside of anti-cutting campaigns; and that anti-cutting campaigns are entangled with both …

Review Of Saida Hodzic. The Twilight Of Cutting: African Activism And Life After Ngos. Oakland: Univeristy Of California Press, 2017., Tobe Levin Von Gleichen

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

With considerable fanfare, in Adieu !'Excision. Histoire et fin d'une tradition (Raymond Hounsa, 2009), Christa Muller rejoices in having saved Benin from FGM, the French text lauding eradication. The effort instigated by a Saarbrucken-based NGO, it has banned blades from the vicinity of vulvae. In 1996, on a state visit, Muller, then married to Saarland's governor Oscar Lafontaine, was asked by Benin's First Lady Rosine Vieyra Soglo¹ to assist her Inter-African Committee (IAC) chapter by creating an association. This she did, launching I(N)TACT, e.V. and securing 300,000 Euros for the movement, a sum with strings, however. Berlin insisted on …

Feminists As Cultural ‘Assassinators’ Of Pakistan, Afiya S. Zia

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

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March (Women’s March) signifies a milestone in the culture of feminist protest, but a tense impasse follows a series of encounters between sexual and religious politics, and this has serious implica- tions for rights-based activism in the Islamic Republic.

The Fundamentalist Nexus Of Neoliberalism, Rentier Capitalism, Religious And Secular Patriarchies, And South Asian Feminist Resistances, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

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

In two case studies from Pakistan, which I then link to Afghanistan (under the Taliban before and after the Soviet/ US proxy war there) as well as the Farmer’s Movement in India—I wish to proffer an intersectional analysis of debates around the issue of women’s rights in the global south. Feminist artivism (art-as-activism), can help build solidarities to mount resistances against globally-inflected state repression in our age of neoliberal economic and religious fundamentalisms, which, working in tandem, seek to roll back the rights of women and minorities in and across South Asia, as elsewhere.

The Still Unfathomed Trans+Oceanic, Daze Jefferies

The Goose

For centuries, violence against mermaids has coexisted alongside slippery sexualizations in much of Newfoundland’s folk and popular cultures. This is demonstrated most grievously in colonist Richard Whitbourne’s 1620 text, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland. The fishy reality of simultaneous disposability and desirability also mirrors the life histories of trans women and sex workers in the capital port city of St. John’s. Imagining mermaids as trans and sex-working ancestors in a province that has been structured by ecologies of fish trade, this work of research-creation drifts through precarious survival in the North Atlantic.

A Forgotten ‘Riot’: Discovering The Black Cat Tavern Raid’S Place In Queer History, Katelyn "Katie" Nash

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

The Black Cat Tavern Raid of 1967 has long been relegated to the footnotes of history, and, when it is remembered, it is portrayed as a riot similar to the one that occurred at the Stonewall Inn two years later. Using archival and contemporary sources, this article explores the events surrounding the raid and subsequent protest and places them within the greater context of the 1960s. In addition, I contextualize and analyze the legacy of these events, explore their often overlooked contributions to queer history, and conclude that, while they are often overshadowed by Stonewall, they still deserve to be …

Birth Control And The Sixties: The Dialogue Surrounding The First Oral Contraceptive, Eden E. Baize

The Cardinal Edge

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

The Queer Student Affairs Career Of Stephen Lenton, 1970-1980, Michael S. Hevel, Timothy Reese Cain

Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article primarily uses document-based historical methods to reconstruct Stephen Lenton’s LGBTQ advocacy while a student affairs professional at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1970 to 1980. Lenton enjoyed significant career success in his first several years at VCU, establishing popular and successful programs and a strong rapport with students. In 1974, Lenton agreed to advise VCU’s first LGBTQ student organization, even as its members sued the institution for refusing to register their group. After the students won the lawsuit, Lenton became a visible and noted advocate for LGBTQ people and became an openly gay man on campus. Yet as Lenton’s …