In this article, the author dissects and refracts a single, defining moment in his life using autoethnography and the lenses of specific communication and social theories. The author mines the moment in first, second, and third person to uncover the different responses to overwhelming emotions ranging from the noble to the shameful in response to his father’s “coming out of the closet.” A torrent of emotion took the author by surprise and is the total moment of his analysis in this article. The author scrutinizes the multiple ways in which this moment was a release, a turning point, an ending, a beginning, bittersweet, hateful and hate filled, selfish, guilt ridden, and loving. Through multiple retellings of the event, like the film Groundhog Day, the author presents the moment in different narrative formats, from multiple perspectives, with relevant quotations and passages to thoroughly dissect the emotional layers.

<p>A thesis involved with the coming of age of a young queer person.</p>

Woman of Dust: An Exodus is a collection of themed non-fiction experiences and stories with themes, characters, and ideas that coincide deliberately and verge on the cohesiveness of memoir. The overarching themes of this collection are womanhood and coming of age. The stories examine the ways in which childhood crushes, current relationships, parenting, religion, and pets influence the growth of a child into an adult, in this case, a girl into a woman. They take individual moments, conversations, conventions, and thoughts and explore how they shaped the woman who now writes them. Stories range in content from how the standards of a southern Baptist church raised a girl who was afraid to date, drink, or kiss, about the role of God in the narrator's private life, to stories that explore how cartoon Disney prince crushes turn into crushing on neighbor boys and classmates, discovering the narrator's current conceptions of love as different from her early conceptions and questioning the ways in which those conceptions came into existence in the first place. These stories look at the domestic implications of religious life that dictate specific roles for women in a marriage relationship, and how the narrator interprets these implications in terms of her own love and pending marriage. Still other essays investigate how a mother's overbearing fear of sex, men, and drugs drove one daughter to be a small town porn star and drove the other to complete abstinence, how gender conventions shape a girl's mind, and how family life sometimes contradicts the same conventions. While the subject of each story is deeply feminine, revolving around a woman narrator and woman experiences, the content of these stories creates a very human experience, one outside the confines of gender. They are about one girl turned woman, from one perspective, and about one life, but they are mostly about being human, about growing, and about the ways in which humans grow.

In this collection of short stories, the characters struggle to recover equilibrium in their lives that have been turned upside down. They struggle against one another, against change, and against the loss of loved ones. No matter what bonds hold the characters together, the underlying tension of change and reaction permeates their relationships and threatens what they know to be true. A theme of discontent runs in these stories. Something beneath the surface is not right, and the characters struggle to climb out of the mess their lives have become. Some of them have been stifled, like the narrator in "Resounding Gong, Clanging Cymbal," who's being pressured on all sides to marry. Some of them are toeing the line of fitting in and being independent, like the teenagers in "Hibiscus Boulevard," who, caught up in the last days of summer, are more concerned with being adults than being kids. In the title story, the teenagers in a small town find a way to memorialize one of their own by performing the act that caused him to die. The cautious bonds between the characters are continuously being worked by one another, by oppressive scenery and location, by the aftereffects of dysfunction, or by unrequited love. No matter what the context or situation, something is always just a little bit off, or wrong, in each story in this collection, and the characters must do their best to correct the situations.

Whereas sex is a classification that is expected to remain consistent and stable over time, gender is more fluid and changes depending on one's culture, within culture, and in relation to the other gender. Our society suggests that all individuals fall neatly into one of two sex and gender categories; however there exists an entire community of individuals who, in fact, do not. Transgender individuals "express their gender in non-traditional ways and find their sense of self as female, male, or other to be in conflict with their assigned gender role" (Burdge, 2007, p.244). Disclosing as transgendered is a process of emergence that is not only an internal psychological process but is also a "relational and systemic dynamic that intimately involves family, friends, loved ones, and all social relationships" (Lev, 2005, p. 11). In this study, the disclosure experiences of male to female transgender individuals as well as the changes and adjustments that occurred in their relationships were explored through individual interviews. Thematic coding was used to analyze the data and identify themes in the disclosure experiences. Considering the experience from a systemic perspective, participants discussed the mutual impact of their disclosure on family, friends, acquaintances as well as greater systems including the medical field, mental health field, and other community agencies. / Master of Science

Her Terrible Splendor is a poetry collection that transports the Greek witch-goddess Circe from her mythical island of Aeaea to modern-day East Texas, where I was raised. By locating Circe in the Piney Woods, I heighten the strangeness that I identify with that setting and open up new contexts for considering Circe as a woman, as an enchanter, and as figure of retelling and revision. Circe appears in an array of roles—friend, lover, mentor, alter-ego, muse—as the poems view her through different lenses, including ekphrastic responses to visual art, rewritings of myths, and "portrait" poems that cast people from the human speaker's life as the goddess herself. A powerful mythic woman who works alone and creates a haven for strange creatures and lost humans, Circe offers a way for the manuscript to consider the complex, multifaceted process of coming of age as a woman, self-making as myth-making.

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This case study elicits the process of coming out of a 6 member family-of-choice of an adult gay man in rural New Hampshire. 27.5 hours of face-to-face interviews were conducted with the family individually and collectively. Reflexivity, as a technique, was used extensively. Four themes were identified: Embracing gay identity, integrating as a family, building social networks, and social awakening. This study addresses the complexities of how multiple individuals negotiate rules and accommodate diverse viewpoints within a family system, provides insight into a family's journey of accepting their gay identity, utilizes personal narratives of family members, and reveals how the reflexive process contributes to a family's creation of new stories. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed. / Ph. D.

The teenage daughter of a summer camp slasher, trained to kill sexually active adolescents, questions her father’s work when the camp she’s assigned to terrorize hands out bibles instead of condoms. That’s right, it’s a Christian camp.

A kindhearted sharpshooter and his father, a greedy wild west showman, conspire to rob Flagstaff’s first movie palace. But when the son falls for the owner’s daughter, more than just the heist goes awry.