Browsing by Subject "Queer"
Now showing 1 - 20 of 28
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item A-AVOIR Resistance : a cross cultural study of sexual citizenship in North America and France(2012-05) Batiste, Dominique Pierre; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Johnson, MichaelWhat forms of resistance are gay men in France and North America enacting against heteronormativity and homophobia? And why are they enacting these particular forms of resistance? To answer these questions, this thesis aims to draw connections between gay men's resistance strategies and larger socio-political phenomena in both France and North American cultures. First I focus on the discursive construction of citizens, both heterosexual and homosexual, in order to illustrate how gay men are relegated to second-class citizenship based on their sexual identities and practices. My focus, here, is cultural citizenship and sexual citizenship, two themes that run throughout this thesis. Next, I use Foucault's theories of knowledge-power to reveal how power relations in society discursively create subject positions, such as 'homosexuals' and 'heterosexuals', utilizing structures of control, norms, rewards, and punishments in order to champion heterosexuality to the detriment of homosexuality. In order to contest exercises of power, gay men engage in acts of resistance. i examine scholarly debates centered on resistance, and create a list of criterion for overt resistance, which I dub A AVOIR Resistance on account that it includes the characteristics of Action, Alternatives, Visibility, Opposition, Intent, and Recognition. Utilizing my rubric for overt resistance, as well as Foucault's notions of power, I analyze interview transcripts from a sample of gay men in North America and France to reveal that some gay men, living outside of large metropolitan areas, are rejecting hegemonic ideals of 'gayness' and integrating into mainstream heteronormative society. These men are creating what I call 'authentic communities' where many individuals from various backgrounds and lifestyles live together harmoniously based primarily on access to resources rather than identity markers such as sexual identity. this research shows a split between the ways that urban and suburban gay men embody their homosexuality. Since research on gay men focuses on those living in urban areas, my research calls, instead, for focus on suburban gay men and their resistance to homo-normative ideologies of what it means to me gay.Item Andy Warhol's cinema beyond the lens(2013-05) Weathers, Chelsea Lea; Reynolds, Ann MorrisThis dissertation examines a small selection of the hundreds of films made by Andy Warhol and his collaborators between 1963 and 1968. Each chapter contextualizes a particular aspect of Warhol's filmmaking in terms of the artistic and cultural circumstances that informed it. Through an analysis of the content of specific films, rather than just their formal or stylistic tendencies, I discuss how the filmmaking process might have functioned for those involved in the films' production, as well as how those films might have functioned for specific spectators. The first chapter is a speculation on how Warhol might have understood filmmaking as a method for creating concrete connections between feelings and things -- for collecting imagery with his camera in order to create a historical catalog of people and their emotions. This first chapter also considers how some art critics in the 1960s used Warhol's early silent films as exemplars for their own anti-formalist art-historical and critical discourses. The second chapter examines the relationship between Warhol's films and the proliferation of amphetamine use amongst his collaborators. Amphetamines functioned to perpetuate for its users a way of life based on an alternative conception of time, and often involved a continued engagement with bad feelings, which fueled much of the creativity of the artistic community whose locus was Warhol's Factory in the mid-1960s. As such, many of Warhol's films from this period exhibit what I term an "amphetamine aesthetic" -- visual clues that suggest the effects of long-term amphetamine use by its participants. The third chapter is an analysis of a single film, Lonesome Cowboys. Participants in the film's production used the conventions of the Hollywood Western film genre to create a circumscribed space for transforming their everyday lives and their relationship to contemporary politics in the late 1960s. All of these chapters explore the effects of Warhol's particular approach to filmmaking, which involved Warhol's own detached style of directing, as well as his cultivation of an ultrapermissive environment in which his collaborators -- actors, directors, writers, and technicians -- felt free to experiment. This environment was predicated on the idea that the boundary between the space in front of the camera and the world beyond it was simultaneously arbitrary and deeply imbricated. Such a fluid boundary between the world inside and outside the scope of Warhol's camera is in part why some spectators, watching his films a half-century after they were made, might still find new meanings for the present in the films themselves.Item "Are you getting angry Doctor?" : Madea, strategy and the fictional rejection of black female containment(2014-05) Faust, Mitchell R.; Richardson, Matt, 1969-Within the scope of this thesis, I provide close textual and visual readings of director/actor/producer Tyler Perry's most well-known character, Mable "Madea" Simmons -- a performance he does in full female drag attire -- focusing on his mainstream hit film, Madea Goes to Jail (2009). My reading of the character of Madea veers against the common narrative her existence being just another recycled trope of men disguised as women only to perform in stereotypical and demonizing behavior. I argue Madea represents what I refer to as a "trans*female character", within the space of Perry's popular film that feature her. Read through the lens of being trans*female character, I propose this shift in analysis and critique of cinematic displays of drag helps to transgress beyond male/female binaries of acceptable and possible visual gender representations. More in-depth, using the theoretical concept of Gwendolyn Pough's "bringing wreck", I make the argument that while ostensibly representing the "angry black woman" stereotype, Madea's characterization and actions within the film represent strategies and efforts to not be contained within hegemonic ideals of black female respectability politics and the law efforts to put her behind bars. By "bringing wreck", Madea's fictional acts of violence and talking back are read as a strategy that reflects a historical trend of misrecognition that renders black women's concerns and discontent with marginalization as irrational anger.Item Delicacy or shame : Christopher Isherwood’s obscured sexuality in Lions and shadows(2013-05) Stevenson, Katharine A.; Carter, MiaChristopher Isherwood’s 1938 autobiographical novel Lions and Shadows is often read in light of its subtitle as the story of “an education in the ‘twenties.” Yet Isherwood’s early work is more than a simple interwar bildungsroman. Lions and Shadows is a narratively complicated account of a privileged, queer youth in interwar England and an exposition of the effects of the Great War on an entire generation. The autobiographical novel provides veiled descriptions of the queer cultures of Cambridge and London in the 1920s, and records the early artistic development of several members of what has come to be called “The Auden Generation,” including Edward Upward, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. In this project, I explore how and why Christopher Isherwood obscures his sexuality in Lions and Shadows, looking in particular at his friendships with Edward Upward and W.H. Auden and at the fictional work that the former friendship produced, The Mortmere Stories. Chapter 1 provides background information on homosexuality in England during Isherwood’s lifetime, focusing on how class and privilege affect the experience and expression of homosexuality. Chapter 2 analyzes the obsession with the Great War that pervades Lions and Shadows, concentrating on how the Great War affected ideas of masculinity and male sexuality. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the relationship between Isherwood’s social and sexual discomfort and the production and content of The Mortmere Stories, which tend to poke fun at sexual foibles and the proclivities of the upper classes.Item Expressing, entertaining, empowering queerness : Ellen DeGeneres(2012-05) Hsieh, Ming-Hao; Beltrán, MaryThe discourse constructing a queer representative with LGBT identity embodies subversive queer rebellion grounding interdependence between advertisers, stars, and audiences in commercial television. Considering her media roles for American Express, CoverGirl, and J.C. Penney, as well as a daytime talk show host, Ellen DeGeneres expresses queerness, queer moments, and space in accordance with anti-heteronormativity described by Alexander Doty in Making Things Perfectly Queer. In the mainstream advertising, using LGBT subculture texts is a strategy for advertisers to target mass heterosexual consumers, while simultaneously not to alienate homosexual communities. In U.S. daytime television programming, The Ellen DeGeneres Show emblematizes identity declaration of Ellen’s coming out episodes in 1997 and embodies entertaining segments in terms of a coming out party through talking, dancing, and liberating. In audience reception, viewers, based on egalitarianism, are empowered by a moment of pleasure, sympathy, and liberation in relation to DeGeneres’ queer performance in the media. Through identifying three main media practices, advertising, broadcasting, and, spectating, I conclude with a discourse that DeGeneres, as a queer representative, signifies a satirical token of homonormativity to negotiate heteronormative media narratives in the mainstream media.Item GLBTQ representation on children's television : an analysis of news coverage and cultural conservatism(2015-05) Mayer, Christopher John; Tyner, Kathleen R.; Fuller-Seeley, KathrynThe invisibility of GLBTQ characters on children's television stands in stark contrast to trends in adolescent and adult television over the past decade. A deep cultural ambivalence exists as to whether or not sexual identities are appropriate topics for young children on preschool television programming. For example, a marriage between Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie has been the topic of many petitions, political debates, and academic studies over the years. This analysis seeks to reconcile the cultural ambivalence through analysis of news coverage over the most prominent children's shows associated with latent and/or manifest GLBTQ content. New stories that make up the research sample are analyzed for "Anti-GLBTQ" logics, and placed in a broader discourse analysis of societal expectations for children’s television, and what is considered to be appropriate content. The goal of this study is to draw greater attention to debates over how to best serve the educational needs of young children, and posits that the increasing numbers of children living under same-sex parented households are underserved by the children's television industry. The ambivalence by the industry seems suspect given prior, and well established efforts, of children’s shows, such as Sesame Street, and the ability of educational programming to bridge cultural, class, and racial divides. This study represents a preliminary effort to extend the conversations about children’s television content to be more inclusive of GLBTQ identities.Item “I wanted my tiara, damn it” : queer kinship and drag royalty in Felicia Luna Lemus’ Trace elements of random tea parties(2013-05) Traylor, Julia Faith Foshee; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-This paper traces La Llorona’s evolution from ancient Aztec cosmology to Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, a contemporary novel by Felicia Luna Lemus. I argue that the protagonist’s entrenchment in her own Llorona myth ultimately inhibits the development of a queer community in collaboration with the community of her birth. While Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties leaves the tension between familial duty and personal desire unresolved, the constant narrative oscillation between past tea parties with Leti’s grandmothers and present tea parties with Leti’s chosen lesbian familia opens a space for new kinship structures to emerge, remapping the contours of the Mexican-American family and a woman’s role within it.Item I'm from everywhere : articulations of queer identity in online spaces(2010-05) Hill, Erica Ruth; Mallapragada, Madhavi; Fuller, JenniferThis thesis is an exploration of the various ways in which queer identity has been subsumed within an urban sensibility by mainstream culture, and how mediated articulations of queerness have subsequently been impacted. Highlighting the influence of late capitalism within the creation of a categorical “queer” identity, this work connects the history of the gentrified gayborhood to televisual and filmic representations of urban and rural queers. Interrogating legacy media representations opens up a conversation about how new media articulations of queerness might operate in the digital age. Examinations of popular queer websites, Downelink, GLEE and I’m From Driftwood illustrate the reification of common LGBTQ identity tropes, as well as highlight the spaces where queer affect theory might perform a critical intervention in how new media scholars might approach future research of online sources.Item Imagining queerness / queer imagination : online slash fiction and radical fan productions(2014-05) Rodenbiker, Austin James; Browne, SimoneThe subject of inquiry for my thesis is slash fiction, a subset of fanfiction which creates queer identity, romance, relationships, sex, or desire where it was not ostensibly present in the proto-text. I divide my thinking into a non-linear model of five nodes in order to open up multiple in-roads towards examining the queer work of slash without crystalizing into a comprehensive theory that would efface its nuance and particularities. These nodes figure under notions of failure, embodiment, archives, temporality, and hybrid body erotics. The current, motion, and energy running through all of these nodes is what I call critical queer imagination. Critical queer imagination is not an overarching theory that explains slash (or queer creative works in general), but rather a gesture towards the impulse behind queer activism as well as a signal towards queer futurity. It is ultimately this queer critical imagination that allows me to argue for slash fiction as part of a larger queer project that is necessarily engaged with queer potential and political imagination.Item "Listen to the stories, hear it in the songs" : musical theatre as queer historiography(2010-05) Dvoskin, Michelle Gail; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Wolf, Stacy Ellen; Dolan, Jill; Kackman, Michael; Kearney, Mary; Paredez, DeborahThis dissertation takes musical theatre seriously as a historiographic practice, and considers six musicals that take the past as their subject matter in order to interrogate how these works craft their historical narratives. While there have been studies of historical drama and performance, musicals have generally been left out of that conversation, despite (or perhaps because of) their immense popularity. This project argues that not only can musicals “do” history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call “queer historiography.” While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use “queer” to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals’ queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it. Each chapter uses a different theoretical lens to guide close readings of a pair of thematically linked musicals. The first chapter considers 1776 (1969) and Assassins (1991, 2004) as challenges to official narratives of United States history. My primary lens in this chapter is form, as I analyze how musicals’ structures influence their queer historiographic potential. Chapter 2 examines two musicals that offer histories of U.S. popular culture, Gypsy (1959) and Hairspray (2002), considering how the placement of divas at the center of each show enables a historiography that is feminist as well as queer, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality while making women central to the histories they represent. In the third chapter I look to two musicals, Falsettos (1992) and Elegies: A Song Cycle (2003), which present histories of trauma while featuring overtly gay, lesbian, and queer characters. I use these two texts to theorize how musicals might not simply present history as it “really” was, but also as it might have been, thereby offering what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a “reparative reading” of history. In examining each of my six case studies, I analyze specific performances as well as written texts whenever possible.Item "Listen to what your jotería is saying” : pain, social harm, and queer Latin@s(2015-05) Glisch-Sánchez, David Luis; Rudrappa, Sharmila, 1966-; Rodríguez, Néstor; Ekland-Olson, Sheldon; Carrington, Ben; Peña, SusanaIn this dissertation, I investigate how transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (TLGBQ) Latin@s have experienced social harm during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, what is the socio-historical context for their experiences, and how have ideologies of Latin@ gender and sexuality shaped these experiences. This is accomplished through the analysis of twenty-six (26) life story interviews where TLGBQ Latin@s provide a testimonio account of their encounters with social harm. Using a social harm framework and centering markers of pain, I develop the theoretical concept algorithms of pain to understand the dynamic and complex experiences TLGBQ Latin@s have with harm rooted in the everyday and institutional realities of racial, gender, sexual, and class inequalities. Algorithms of pain asserts that the totality of social harm TLGBQ Latin@s encounter shapes the meaning they assign to any individual harmful event, informs evaluations of pain and potential harm, and structures daily behavior and attitudes. Algorithms of pain reveal the myriad of ways TLGBQ Latin@s can and do express, communicate, and narrate pain; thus, countering the dominant presumption that pain manifests and is communicated in very narrow terms. This is exemplified in what I have observed as racial utterances, where TLGBQ Latin@s narrate in ways that make use of silence, brief remarks, or stories in passing as ways to index racial social harm, instead of stories thick with detail, description and explicit accounts of pain. Additionally, algorithms of pain establish the centrality of racism, patriarchy, transmisogyny, homophobia, class exploitation, and xenophobia to constructing the full spectrum of emotions that represent pain. Lastly, the dissertation documents through an analysis of governmental mission statements why the state is unable to intervene into the social harm effecting TLGBQ Latin@ lives. The state represents the institutionalization of an algorithm of pain that privileges whiteness, cisgenderness, heterosexuality, wealth, and citizenship, which results in harm management being the overall orientation and function of the state in social harm.Item The outcomes project(2011-05) Castillo, Jose Raul; DeCesare, Donna; Cash, Wanda G.Lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender young people face a landscape of prejudice and intolerance when first coming to terms with their identities. In these moments of confusion, they often turn to their parents for support, yet parents often lack the information and resources necessary to support their LGBT child. The outcomes project interviews LGBT people about their "coming out" experience, and presents their video interviews a multi-platform website. The interviews appear alongside written accounts that highlight common themes encountered in research. The website also links to well-sourced resources for parents coming to terms with a child's disclosure. By telling these stories in a context that encourages an empathetic response, The outcomes project aims to give parents the information and understanding they need to support their LGBT child.Item Performing unreachable bodies : the politics of encounter in Alison Bechdel's Fun home(2010-05) Francica, Cynthia Alicia; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Moore, Lisa L.Readings of Fun Home thus far have tended to focus on the representation of Alison Bechdel’s traumatic life experiences and on the ways in which the memoir bears witness to that trauma. While Jennifer Lemberg explores the role of drawing in overcoming the difficulty or impossibility of naming the traumatic experiences Alison undergoes (135), Ann Cvetkovich draws attention to the cultural and political work the memoir performs by making space for everyday life histories of trauma and for accounts of forbidden, pathologized desires (111). I would like to explore the ways in which Fun Home foregrounds those illicit desires, and performs that political work, not only through the telling of Alison’s story but, more specifically, by mobilizing the reader’s affective capabilities in the face of what may be read as surprising, emotionally charged objects and situations. I suggest that Bechdel’s memoir boldly sets the stage for an affective and cognitive encounter with out-of-bounds, unapproachable bodies and histories. Our assumptions about hetero and homonormativity, as well as our conception of home and the family as heterosexual, normative spaces, are interrogated in and through those encounters. I analyze the fundamental role of the graphic narrative form, and the employment of archival objects and elements of performance in particular, in setting the stage for the reader’s affective encounter with Alison’s family history.Item The pleasure is all ours : race and queerness in the Promised Land(2012-05) Ramirez, Alexandro Rudolpho; Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul; Canning, CharlotteThis paper calls for a queer art and politics that treats identity categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class and others as co-constitutional. With the writer's one-man show, Promised Land: A Radical Queer Revival, as its central text, this paper describes a performance of co-constitutionality that acknowledges the artist's subordinate and privileged statuses through carnivalesque performance tropes such as humor, open sexuality and audience interaction. The first chapter uses media and performance studies to address the investment in whiteness by heteronormative gay politics and culture. The second chapter explores the creation of a racially constituted queer world in Promised Land through the performance and its intertexts. The conclusion offers a notion of performing "the utopian identity" as a means of engaging with and resisting normative hegemony.Item Queens of the South Plains: Collected oral histories of drag queens living in Lubbock, TX(2013-05) Ballard, Katy; Check, Ed; Akins-Tillett, Future; Ortega, Francisco; Peaslee, Robert M.; Sharp, Elizabeth A.In my dissertation research, Queens of the South Plains: Collected Oral Histories of Drag Queens Living in Lubbock, Texas, I am collecting oral histories of five Lubbock, Texas performance artists who participate or have participated in local drag queen shows and culture: Thomas Mims, Devon Nicole, and Damion Davis, Audrianna Guillen, and Chris Wheeler. I utilize oral histories because no other institutional histories exist. Academically, there is a large amount of research on drag histories in metropolitan areas and on non-metropolitan lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, questioning, queer and intersexed (LGBTQ) lives, but there is very little, if any, research that connects these two fields of study. Since the early 1990s, there has been a small but growing body of literature and art documenting rural and non-metropolitan spaces and lives. However, other than the collected interviews of two rural drag queens in the documentary film Small Town Gay Bar scant literature exists on drag queens in rural areas. In this study, I conduct face-to-face interviews with five subjects that I document through audio recordings using a semi-structured interview format. In addition to the five subjects/performers, I conduct supplemental interviews of people involved in the subjects’ lives to gain a broader perspective of small city drag culture in Lubbock as a non-metropolitan setting. The literature review of urban drag queen cultures and rural queer lives is juxtaposed against the contexts and invisible histories of the lives of drag queens in rural/non-metropolitan settings. This research is a small step in bridging the gap in academic research connecting drag queen culture and research on rural and non-metropolitan LGBTQ lives.Item Queer as punk : queercore and the production of an anti-normative media subculture(2013-08) Nault, Curran Jacob; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-This dissertation examines the historical contexts, major themes, and archival practices of queercore, an anti-normative queer and punk subculture comprised of music, zines, film, art, literature and new media that was instigated in 1985 by Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones in Toronto, Ontario. Via their fanzine J.D.s., LaBruce and Jones declared “civil war” on the punk and gay and lesbian mainstreams and conjured queercore as a multimedia subculture situated in pointed opposition to the homophobia of mainline punk and the lifeless sexual politics and assimilationist tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian society. In the pages that follow, I engage wider histories of radical queer politics and punk aesthetics and values to reveal the generative and long-standing symbiosis between these two energies – a symbiosis that informs queercore, but that also extends beyond its temporal and material boundaries. Through close analysis of queercore films (e.g. No Skin Off My Ass, The Lollipop Generation, The Living End, By Hook or By Crook), music (e.g., Pansy Division, Tribe 8, Beth Ditto/The Gossip, Nomy Lamm) and zines (e.g., J.D.s, SCAB, Bimbox, Bamboo Girl, i’m so fucking beautiful), I establish queercore’s primary themes: explicit sexuality (the use of risky, erotic queer punk images and performances to undermine heteronormativity and confront accepted notions of gay and punk identity); imagined violence (the deployment of a threatened, as opposed to actualized, violence in the hopes of frightening and, thus, destabilizing powerful white, bourgeois, heterosexual masculinity); and bodily difference (the circulation of affirmative representations of marginalized queer bodies, and specifically those that are fat, disabled and/or gender non-normative). Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the institutions and individuals currently involved in queercore archival efforts, thus placing my project within a crucial lineage of subcultural preservation. Taken as a whole, this study asserts that queercore articulates and disseminates a set of alternative identities, aesthetics, politics and representations for queer folks to occupy and engage within social space, providing a dynamic anti-normative, anti-corporate, D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) alternative to a consumer-capitalist hetero- and homo-normative mainstream.Item Queer pedagogy : performing outside the lines(2014-12) Williams, Sidney Monroe; Schroeder-Arce, RoxanneThis qualitative study reflects on my experiences as a queer pedagogue developing a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered/Transsexual, Questioning/Queer, and Ally (LGBTQA) youth theatre ensemble, Outside the Lines. Through the analysis of my pedagogy and the pedagogy of three practitioners affiliated with the Pride Youth Theatre Alliance, I explore how my queer culture, language, expression and politics influence my Applied Drama & Theatre practice within educational and community spaces. It is hoped that by inviting other practitioners and allies into my process this document will generate constructive dialogue around queer pedagogy and its fluid performance. Furthermore, this document aims to serve as a reference for future practitioners that work with queer youth and in queer spaces.Item Radical self-care : performance, activism, and queer people of color(2014-05) McMaster, James Matthew; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-Queer people of color in the United States are perpetually under siege politically, psychically, economically, physically, and affectively in the twenty-first century under capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Radical Self-Care, connects radical artivist performance in Austin, Texas with the theoretical genealogies of queer of color critique, women of color feminism, queer studies, and performance studies in order to propose a program for queer of color survival, sustainment and political revolt. Radical self-care is the holistic praxis that names the confluence of two distinct but inextricable processes developed in the first two chapters of this thesis. In chapter one, I take up the Generic Ensemble Company’s workshop production of What’s Goin’ On? as a case study in order to theorize the ‘performative of sustenance,’ a mechanism of queer worldmaking and queer world sustainment defined by its erotic and utopian affects. Chapter two, through a discussion of reproductive rights activism at the Texas state capitol, reformulates the concept of ‘parrhesia,’ the Socratic practice of ‘free speech’ taken up by Foucault in discussions of the care of the self, into a performance praxis of speaking truth to power with the potential to interrupt hegemonic systems of oppression. The final chapter explicates the ways in which these two mechanisms converge and operate as a dyad in the holistic process of radical self-care through an analysis of Fat: The Play, a devised work that premiered in Austin by and about fat queer femmes. Ultimately, Radical Self- Care aspires to offer queers of color a methodology of queer world sustainment that is also a program of political intervention, grounded in solidarity politics, into those systems of oppression that too often characterize queer of color existence as a project of survival rather than a project of flourishing.Item Reclaiming fat, reclaiming femme(2013-05) Arteaga, Nicole Ann; Heinzelman, Susan Sage; Rehberg, Peter, 1966-The aim of this essay is to discuss some of the shared legacies of oppression between queerness, femininity, and fatness in order to theorize a form of activism that can do justice to these intersecting identities. A key component of this is to discuss the complexities of negotiating the shame and pride that go hand in hand with stigmatized identities, a project recently taken up by queer theorists that has yet to be well represented in fat studies or activist circles. This essay will engage with conversations happening in queer theory and fat studies about shame as it relates to the politics of attachment. I hope to begin a conversation about how to organize effective activist circles that can do justice to queer fat femmes' complex relationships with visibility, embodiment and community building.Item Reconciling contradictory feminism Law & Order : Special Victims Unit and the queers who love it(2016-05) Hicks, Helen Logan; Livermon, Xavier; Khubchandani, KareemLaw & Order: Special Victims Unit is a locus of the production of feminist anti- rape discourse as well as messages promoting carceral justice. These contradictory ideologies are somehow reconciled by queer viewers of the show. I use interdisciplinary methods and a variety of feminist and queer theories to investigate this peculiar reconciliation. First, I analyze the narrative of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit through a queer critical lens of reading media. Then I examine the fans and the industry players of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the context of the show’s problematic messaging. The conversation between the contradictions of the show and the populations who are fans of the show but who also suffer under the same conditions I criticize in my narrative analysis is important to the larger feminist conversations about rape culture, capitalist media enterprise, and queer and feminist self-identification and community building.