Browsing by Subject "Queer theory"
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Item Enchufad@s : representations of the internet and new technologies in queer Latin American literature(2015-05) Dowdy, Mary Margaret; Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna; Robbins, Jill, 1962-; Domínguez-Ruvulcaba, Héctor; Borge, Jason; Paredez, DeborahThis dissertation explores themes of identity, desire, and connection as represented in three literary texts authored in Spanish during the first decade of the 2000s. The literature in question -- novels No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2000) by Ángel Lozada and Keres cojer? = Guan tu fak (2005) by Alejandro López as well as Cristina Peri Rossi's poetry collection, Playstation (2008) -- relies on queer aesthetics and themes in order to convey the experience of three unique individuals who, through the utilization of Internet and new technologies, navigate Latin America and the ever-globalizing world beyond. The protagonists and poetic voices in question use the Internet as a means to reject hegemonic norms, to reinvent the Self and/or, quite literally in some cases, to reconstruct the body. Using Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs", Henry Jenkins' theory of convergence culture, and a heavy-handed dash of diva studies, this dissertation explores how Internet spaces as represented in the novels and poems serve to enhance as well as hinder human connection, while also making the readers more aware of their Internet dependence.Item Exceptional feelings, ordinary violence(2013-05) Pascual, Michael Aaron; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009) and the work of LGBTQ activists in the U.S. I argue that the act consolidates the U.S. nation-state’s monopoly on violence by relying on criminal law as a cognitive apparatus and stifles the work of LGBTQ activists and cultural labor to expand or challenge sensibilities regarding violence. I look to the work of trans and queer activists and how they frame “minor” hate crime cases in relationship to space and systems of criminalization. The activism surrounding Sakia Gunn, the New Jersey 7, Chrissy Lee Polis, and CeCe McDonald broaden theoretical account of violence provided by hate crime protections by attending to affect, the body, and space, and make political demands that move beyond criminal law. This thesis attempts to follow those trajectories and provide alternative grammars and methods for addressing violence.Item “The gay Facebook” : friendship, desirability, and HIV in the lives of the gay Internet generation(2013-12) Robinson, Brandon Andrew; González-López, Gloria, 1960-Why are men seeking other men online? And how does the Internet influence these men and their sexuality? These are the two underlying questions driving this thesis. To answer these general questions, I conducted a qualitative study, which used in-depth individual interviews with 15 men who have sex with other men who self-identified as gay, queer, or homosexual. Through employing a theoretical framework that is inspired in queer theory, I uncovered three main topics in these men’s lives that are intimately shaped by their use of the Internet: friendship, racial and bodily desire, and HIV. First, I show the creative ways gay men are using the Internet, and specifically a sexualized space, in order to build relations with other gay men, despite the larger obstacles a heteronormative society puts in these men’s way to forge these friendships. In using their gay identity to try to establish relationalities with other gay identified men, the informants in this study challenge the impersonable traits associated with modernity, while seeking to build new alliances that could potentially radically disrupt heteronormative society. Secondly, I highlight how the social exclusionary practices toward people of color and non-normal bodies on Adam4Adam.com reifies whiteness and masculinity, which in turn, reifies heteronormativity. Here, I unmask how the structure of Adam4Adam.com, especially its filtering system, normalizes these discriminatory practices in users’ lives. Thirdly, I examine the role and meaning of HIV and sexual health in the lives of my informants. I incorporate the term “doing sexual responsibility” to show how my gay informants manage their anxiety-ridden lives when navigating their sexuality and sexual health. I also show how the gay men in this study engage in online foreplay as a pleasurable way to manage this anxiety and how trust and hegemonic masculinity are unintended consequences of this danger discourse on sexuality. As these men’s narratives and this thesis illustrate, society is still structured through heteronormative standards, but the Internet provides a new space for gay men to navigate their marginalized status in society.Item "It won't get better until we make it better" : the politics of self-representation, resistance and empowerment in the queer youth response to the It Gets Better Project(2011-05) Harding, Ashton Lee; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Pritchard, EricWith the ultimate goal of illustrating the ways that queer youth employ change and act as agents of self-representation, this project examines the relationship between the It Gets Better Project, a queer adult project focused upon ‘bettering‘ the lives of their younger generation, and the Make it Better Project created in response by queer youth. This thesis addresses the following questions: How do adult conceptualizations of queer youth as vulnerable victims operate within discourses that employ queer youth as agents of change? In what ways do queer youth grapple with such conceptualizations? Furthermore, how might queer youth actively resist adult narratives of risk, vulnerability, and surveillance? Seeking to not only examine the ways in which queer youth negotiate adult narratives of adolescent risk and vulnerability, this project is organized to highlight the ways in which queer youth understand and experience their own representational and performative narratives, particularly when performed in response to adult narratives. In examination of the “It Gets Better: Dan and Terry” (2010a) and “It Gets Better: President Barack Obama” (2010c) vlogs of the It Gets Better Project, this thesis seeks to uncover the ways that assimilationist goals of inclusion, tolerance, and equality impact the intelligibility of queer youth. As a means for which to explore the possible resistance employed to counter such silencing mechanisms, the examination turns to three youth-produced vlogs of the Make it Better Project. An additional intent of the focus on the “LGBTQ Youth Speak Out”, “Make it Better Project” and “Make it Better Project - You Can Make it Better Now!” vlogs is to construct a space to analyze the complex and fluid dynamics of queer youth communities. With focus given to the various mechanisms employed by the adult and youth performers of these particular vlog-narratives, this project constructs an interdisciplinary framework of new social movement theory, new online media studies, queer theory, quare (queer of color) studies, feminist sociolinguistics, and critical youth studies as a means to position queer youth voices at the forefront of discussion. With the goal of continuing research that represents queer youth as agents of their own experiences, bodies, lives, and identities, it is my hope that the framework provided by this examination will inspire future work that highlights and centers the voices of queer youth.Item Juvenile desires : the child as subject, object, and mise-en-scène in contemporary American culture(2005-08) McKittrick, Casey Douglas; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Staiger, JanetScholarship on the cultural status of the child in America has taken diverse and fruitful forms, yet there exists a significant ellipsis within theories of filmic spectatorship regarding cinematic children. This study engages the child figure's relation to the cinematic apparatus and analyzes spectator responses to the child's presentation as a desiring subject and desired object. Within contemporary American culture, the child figure generates at once a mise-en-scène of desire and a mise-en-abime of potential stigmatization, self-abjection and shame. The vexed relation to the image of the child that characterizes the contemporary adult citizen and, more pointedly, the adult spectator, is a symptom of the contradictory discourses of childhood at play in contemporary American media and within its political bodies. The Columbine shootings, the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, the Catholic Church scandals, many well-publicized child abductions, and countless occurrences over the past decade have produced a climate of moral panic over children's endangerment. Yet, more than ever, the eroticization of children's bodies has inundated cinematic and other media productions, generating anxieties within the adult spectator concerning the propriety of gazing at children. Juvenile desires suggests that the dissonances produced by the contradictory signposts of moral panic and sexual objectification have too often given rise to a homophobically polarizing model of the adult spectator: one the one hand, the ostensibly heterosexual spectator whose relation to the child image is aesthetically distanced, moral, and nostalgic; and on the other, a perverse, likely homosexual spectator whose relation is libidinal, regressive, and genitally oriented. As a theoretical intervention and a reception study, this dissertation examines the term pedophilia as one both culturally over-determined and critically under-investigated. The deployment of the term pedophilia has the rhetorical effect of reducing the complex relations sustained among adult spectators and children to a space of inarticulate abjection or criminality. The dissertation proposes that a deconstructive queer theory can unsettle the recalcitrant association of pedophilia with homosexual pathology, and thereby afford a complex and nuanced account of the roles cinematic children play in generating visual and narrative pleasure across gendered and sexually oriented subject positions.Item Malice in Wonderland : the perverse pleasure of the revolting child(2010-05) Scahill, Andrew, 1977-; Staiger, Janet; Kearney, Mary; Fuller, Jennifer; Benshoff, Harry; Mickenberg, Julia“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton.Item "The maniac bellowed" : queer affect and queer temporality in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre(2015-05) Davis, Carolyn Marjorie; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Moore, Lisa LCharlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre, is commonly read as a feminist bildungsroman in which a young woman claims her independence. In opposition to these readings, I instead choose to question the ways in which the novel's feminist potential is elided by its simultaneous imperial project. Using the figure of Bertha Mason, I trace the ways in which Jane Eyre's relationship with Edward Rochester is constructed through Bertha's dehumanization in order to reassert the dominance of the healthy Anglo-European family. I examine Jane Eyre's claims to subjectivity, alongside Bertha's very few textual interventions, through the lens of affect theory to show the way in which Bertha Mason, rather than Jane Eyre's mad double, represents nineteenth-century prejudices about creole bodies and undomesticated women. Finally, I engage with theories of queer temporality to read the novel in a way that makes Bertha Mason's agency legible while also evading the novel's troubled relationship to traditional feminist theory. I ultimately suggest that the climactic destruction of Thornfield Hall represents a repudiation of sympathetic feminine bonds in favor of the patriarchal institutions of marriage and respectability.Item The self as subject and the subjected self: networks of being and becoming in the captivity of Miguel de Cervantes and Antonio de Sosa(2015-05) McCoy, Christina Inés; Reed, Cory A.; Harney, Michael; Robbins, Jill; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Heng, GeraldineIn this dissertation, I draw on theories of affect, performance and social networks to examine cross-cultural contact in three captivity plays by Miguel de Cervantes that take place outside of Spain, La gran sultana, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel, as well as the only extant work by the Portuguese cleric Antonio de Sosa, Topografía e historia general de Argel, an understudied and historically significant account of life in Algiers during the late sixteenth century. Both of these authors, held against their will in Algiers’ slave quarters, emphasize humanity and corporeality despite their dehumanizing experience of captivity. I regard the act of writing as an attempt by these two authors to create new nodes in a human Mediterranean network, one expanded by corsairing and spanning from Algeria to the Spanish playhouses and beyond. In doing so, my dissertation shows how works of this epoch often dismantle binary systems of Christian and Muslim, self and other, dyads upon which modern postcolonial studies rely so heavily. I argue that these authors, and their fictional characters, are intermediaries across categories of identity, in spite of difference. Through my close readings I further refashion early modern Spanish identity within the framework of cosmopolitanism, wherein sites of bondage become not only spaces of conflict but also of confluence.Item The spectacle of transformation : (re)presenting transgender experience through performance(2016-05) O'Rear, Jess; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-; Rossen, RebeccaIn December 2015, when The Public Theater cast two cisgender actors in the leading roles of a musical based on the true story of two transgender individuals and their fight against transphobia in the United States, performance makers from across the country spoke out against the casting decision. This outrage joins a chorus of transgender people and allies speaking out against a continuously growing film, television, and theatrical archive of performance which focuses on transgender characters without centering actual transgender people. While media attention on transgender individuals in the United States might be at an all time high, when it comes to representing transgender experiences in performance, transgender-identified characters are repeatedly performed by cisgender actors whose gender identities do not match that of their character. This thesis argues that these casting choices and the critical praise that these performances (termed “cross-gender performances” by the author) garner reinforce cissexist and heteronormative ideology wherein biological sex and gender identity are inextricably linked. Therefore, self-determined gender identity is invalidated and the lives of transgender individuals are devalued in favor of valorizing the “spectacle of transformation” that the cisgender actor undergoes in preparation for the role. This thesis tracks the legacy of these “cross-gender performances” across U.S. film and stage history in order to demonstrate how critical responses to these performances shift attention away from the transgender character and onto the body of the cisgender actor. After tracing this legacy from the late 19th century theatrical stage and late 20th century Hollywood to early 21st-century Broadway, this thesis arrives at the work two contemporary transgender performance artists, Sean Dorsey and Annie Danger, in order to demonstrate how transgender stories told by transgender performers refutes, reclaims, and repurposes the harmful tropes and stereotypes perpetuated by performances helmed by cisgender directors and producers with cisgender actors for mostly cisgender audiences. Finally, this thesis imagines the revolutionary and liberatory possibilities of finding joy through queer and transgender bodies and experiences, ultimately asserting the value of these lives through their celebratory presence in performance.Item "Textual glory holes" : genre and community in fan kink memes(2010-05) Wall, Mary Amanda, 1985-; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cvetkovich, Ann“Textual Glory Holes” examines a particular online fan community called a kink meme, in which fans exchange sexually-charged fanfiction as gifts. In this essay, I argue that, not only does the genre of fanfiction help to create and sustain the concept of kink, but that kink as a category is an interpellation of, experimentation with, and performance of the eroticism of genre in fanfiction. Furthermore, the kink meme community constitutes itself by performing this fannish erotics for each other in fiction and in sexualized feedback, resulting in a community that embraces the pleasures of this performance but sometimes distances itself from the power and political implications of the performance. Moments when fans do not distance themselves from this erotics of genre—one of unearthing and understanding diverse and diffuse pleasures—hold the potential to become what Audre Lorde calls “creative energy empowered,” a shared pleasure that can “lessen the threat of difference.”Item The intersection of dating scripts and Queer Theory: An analysis of dating experiences of gay men in West Texas(2012-08) Layne, Robert A.; Heuman, Amy N.; Scholl, Juliann C.; Hughes, Patrick C.Gay dating scripts have been rarely researched and when these studies have been conducted, there have been significant limitations with their design. In this thesis, I investigate first date encounters experienced by self-identified gay men in West Texas by taking a qualitative approach to understanding participant definitions of dating, as well as dating script behaviors. Within the research, I collected open-ended responses from 75 gay men located in the West Texas region and analyzed the research through a queer theoretical lens and qualitative cluster analysis. Cluster analysis involved close reading the data, open line-by-line coding, the creation of a codebook, peer debriefing, and clustering codes into thematic categories. After data collection, 211 coded points were clustered around 18 separate thematic categories for dating definitions. Participants provided 630 dating scripts, which proffered 1521 coded data points that clustered around 43 thematic categories. Analysis of data revealed that definitions of dating produced five themes of analysis describing the components of dating, the purposes of a date, definitions of negation, the presence of heteronormativity as well as themes on the queering of dating behaviors in West Texas. Additional analysis on data concerned with dating scripts enacted during a first date found six emergent themes including the use of definitions to inform dating scripts through components and date purpose, assessment as ongoing process through “follow up” and debriefing, role negotiation with(in) the date, recognition of heteronormativity, as well as the performance and realization of queer identity. From these themes, a conceptual model was created and forwarded as means to explain the process of gay male dating scripts. The data and emergent conceptual model revealed several salient implications. For example, the importance of dating as a social construction was illuminated within the data reported by gay men and when comparing this data with past dating script research. Further, I explicated similarities between gay men and heterosexual dyads stemming from data analysis, which impacts the adoption of heteronormative practices by gay men and the socialization of gay men into heteropatriarchal dating behaviors. Differences between gay men and heterosexual couples revealed important concepts such as the breaking of heterosexual gender roles through assessment, differences between lesbian women and gay male dating behaviors, the use of “coming out” narratives, role negotiation as a process of resistance, the navigation of a heterosexual matrix, as well as tensions between private and public spaces. Moreover, I argued for extending queer theory by carving out discursive space, engaging against homophobic behavior, and calling for queer frameworks to dating guides. Future directions are proffered by outlining constraints and the potential for future research. Constraints of participant inclusion, peer debriefing similarities, as well as the conceptualizing of identity through category construction are reviewed. These constraints and the analysis derived during the study provide opportunities for future research in areas including the use of more intensive qualitative methodological techniques, the expansion to other geographic regions, the extension of the data and method to other areas of queer interpersonal research, and the completion of a more complete model of the first date experience.Item Uncanny affects : professionalism and the gothic sensibility(2013-05) Herbly, Hala; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Baker, Samuel, 1968-"Uncanny Affects" argues, broadly, that the gothic novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries models a critical ethics of reading. By examining recurrent scenes of reading and interpretation in key gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), I surmise that this critical ethics posits affect, or the experience of generalized emotion, as central to the act of interpretation. I contend that this gothic critical ethics influences the concurrent development of the discipline of literary criticism. By reading these key gothic novels and then tracking their broader influence on Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, I make a case for the significance of a gothic epistemology to the development of literary criticism in British and American universities from the nineteenth century onward. A focus on the gothic novel's critically inclined characters, including antiquarians and detectives, enables me to read gothic novels and other gothically-inflected writing for what they can tell us about the practice of interpretation, particularly as that practice becomes institutionalized and professionalized. Thus I track the gothic mode's tendency toward affective reading in relation to ideas of professionalization, which values critical detachment or disinterestedness in interpretation. As a result, interpretation in the gothic mode can seem too emotional or "creative" for a typically professional practice. Reading the gothic as such links it to modern discussions about interpretive practices such as close reading, paranoid and reparative reading, and surface reading. Perhaps more importantly, reading the gothic alongside these new discussions on critical ethics allows us to think through the place of affect and pleasure in an ethical critical practice. Ultimately, examining how gothic texts formulate a gothic mode or philosophy of reading demonstrates the real ubiquity this mode has achieved in the critical setting, a ubiquity that continues to shape and influence our conceptions of scholarly and critical reading even today.Item Writing and kinship in the Argentine Fin de siglo, 1890-1910 : la familia Bunge(2013-05) Pierce, Joseph Matthew, 1983-; Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 1962-; Shumway, NicolasMy dissertation departs from the idea that horizontal kinship, in particular the sibling bond, has largely been overlooked by criticism of 19th century Argentine literature. Works on the foundational mid-century narratives concentrate on allegorical heterosexual unions, while those of the late century primarily deal with the failed marriages of naturalist fiction. I argue that in viewing the fictional family as a vertical, genealogical structure, these texts often fail to consider what Pierre Bourdieu calls "practical kinship". Also, in primarily focusing on the novel, they overlook the minor genres to which women were traditionally limited, such as pedagogical texts, as well as private or semi-private writing like the diary and the memoir, in which sibling relations are more prominent. This project, in contrast, takes a politically engaged, socially influential family of writers, rather than a fictional representation, as the framework for analyzing the social, cultural, and political shifts of the turn of the century in Argentina (1890-1910). Focusing on the work of two proto-feminist sisters, Delfina and Julia Bunge, and a closeted homosexual brother, Carlos Octavio Bunge, I study the dynamic relationship between these siblings, reading a wide range of their public and private texts. In dialogue with naturalist novelists and positivist essay writers, la familia Bunge challenges the conventional view that the upper class saw the traditional criollo family unit as the last bastion of stability in the face of sexual and class "inversion" by themselves questioning normative gender roles, complicating compulsory heterosexuality, and performing the gaps in the hegemonic division of public and private space. I analyze siblinghood as a dynamic actor in shaping the literature, culture, and politics of the turn of the century, underscoring the role of relational subjectivities in forming notions of gender, sexuality, citizenship, and mutual intelligibility.