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Queer artists have engaged archives throughout modern and contemporary American art, but art historical discourse of their work has centered the writing of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to theorize these spaces without considering archival scholarship. This text takes up Gabriel Martinez’s Archive series as a case study to critique archival selection theory and better understand how prejudice has affected the preservation of queer folx’s collections. Martinez’s series is situated amongst other Western artworks that center archival records and queer themes throughout the last century. This section places his artwork in dialogue with other artists for whom the archive is the subject of their artwork. The artworks detailed exemplify the multiplicity of ways that queer folx critique and interpret the histories preserved in these institutions. Following this survey of art is an analysis of how archival records are selected for preservation and the inherent subjectivity of this task. Pedagogical writing on archival selection by Frank Boles, Richard Cox, and James O’Toole are consulted to better understand how archivists working in the field are taught to handle this type of work. Most of their writing is focused on traditional archives and fails to articulate the challenges facing counterarchives, spaces formed to compensate for the erasure of queer persons in traditional institutions. This review of archival scholarship ends with a critique of how queer counterarchives have fallen short of their inclusive aims. The final section of this text is dedicated to a close study of Martinez’s Archive series. His photographs document the Harry R. Eberlin photograph collection and the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia. The historical context of the Eberlin collection and the founding of its host repository are presented in conjunction with Archive series because Martinez’s compositions are inseparable from these histories. Philadelphia queer culture in the 1970s and 1980s is revealed through the retelling of these histories and by examining who was visualized in the images themselves. These images of bars and events simultaneously reveal the gender and racial disparity of patronage within these spaces and exemplify long-standing tensions in the city’s queer spaces. Lastly, this text posits a practice called “pseudo-processing” where artists document and preserve facsimiles of archival records to question the divisions of archival labor from that of an artist performing comparable tasks. / Art History

The past decade has witnessed an increase in queer-themed television. Cable networks, including Bravo, HBO, Showtime, and most recently LOGO, have also begun writing and airing programming with queer characters in the primary roles as well as focusing on themes relating to the gay community. Shows, such as Queer as Folk and The L-Word, while primarily written for a queer viewing audience, have been mass marketed and have had strong viewership outside of the queer community. The L-Word is unique in that it is the first show to focus on the lives and relationships of non-heterosexual women, thus making it the first show to subvert gendered and sexual norms relating to the female sex/gender. Using ethnography, this study builds upon previous textual analyses by examining how audiences of Showtime's The L-Word construct and interpret queer female identities. The problem is not of accurate representations in media, but rather, the necessity of understanding constructions of gender and sexual expression and representation. In addition, it is necessary to examine how audiences negotiate media texts about oppressed identities and if these negotiations help to perpetuate dominant ideals regarding gender, gender roles, and heterosexuality. This study analyzes how viewers' individual experiences and ideologies help to construct their own identities and their negotiation of television images and texts, and how new modes of understanding influence social relations concerning gender and sexuality difference. Inspired by the works of discourse, feminist, and queer theory, this study examines audience interpretations constructed about the queer female community after viewing The L-Word. / Mass Media and Communication

Theorizing and Performing Socio-political Representation: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins" focuses on the performance of gender and sexuality in works by three African American women writers who were also public figures. In this study, I examine what I have named the "politics of representation" in these texts, whereby their authors articulate the benefits and drawbacks of capitalizing on the dual socio-political positions of subject and object in American culture. I argue that Wilson, Jacobs, and Hopkins critique and theorize the public demonstration or performance of gendered and sexually categorized African American bodies to achieve political ends. In particular, they challenge the conflation by whites and by black male leaders of masculinity and political recognition. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, these writers envision a political authority for black women not circumscribed by normative concepts of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality popularized by the dominant culture. / English

In this study, I use social constructionist feminist and queer theory and narrative analysis to identify messages about gender, sexuality, and sexual violence in both the book versions and film adaptations of The Hunger Games trilogy, the Divergent trilogy, and the Vampire Academy series. These three series are representative of a major pop culture trend in which young adult novels are not only popular and financially successful, but in which these types of novels are being adapted into major films. In this study, I demonstrate that the book and film series all generally privilege whiteness, able-bodiedness, and heterosexuality, and in doing so, these texts reproduce a narrow worldview and privilege normative ways of knowing and being. However, while the films strictly reinforce normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, each book series reimagines gender in important ways, disrupts normative scripts that denigrate women’s ownership over their sexuality, and represents sexual violence in graphic but not exploitative ways that portray the real life consequences and complexity of sexual violence. My analysis of these texts reveals that the book series employ a variety of mechanisms that empower the women protagonists including establishing their narrative agency and representing them as gender fluid, while the film series utilize a variety of mechanisms that both objectify and superficially empower women including an emphasis on women’s sexualized physical bodies especially in times of vulnerability, the pronunciation of “natural” sexual differences, and the strict regulation of women’s bodies by dominantly masculine men. I argue that the significant alteration of the books’ original messages are a product of logistical, historical, cultural, and economic elements of the film industry, which has continually constructed women’s roles in terms of their sexual availability, victimization, and need to be rescued by heroic men. In this study, I address the institutional imperatives of the film industry that dictate specific representations of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, and I address what these representations might mean for audiences. / Media & Communication

This dissertation examines the work of concert dance artists within the Black Arts Movement (1965-75) in order to situate the impact of their work in the present. I use a method of diaspora citation to comprehend their choreographic strategies in articulating forms and critiques of belonging that continue to resonate today. My method builds on Brent Hayes Edwards’ theorization of diaspora as an articulated, or joined, structure of belonging (Edwards, 2003). This necessitates attending to décalage, or the incommensurable gaps in experience and differentiations of power across lines of nation, class, language, gender, sexuality, etc. My development of diaspora citation departs from Edwards’ provocative concept metaphor of “articulated joints” as a way to envision diaspora—as the joint is both a place of connection and is necessarily comprises the gaps which allow for movement. I propose that concert dance choreographers in the Black Arts Movement worked through the articulated joints of choreographic intertexts to build critiques and offer alternative structures of diasporic belonging. I define diaspora citation as a choreographic strategy that critiques the terms for belonging to the figure of the ‘human,’ conceived in Western modernity through property in the person, as white, Western, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man. Simultaneously, this choreographic strategy works to index, create and affirm alternative forms of belonging, articulated in/as diaspora, that operate on distinct terms. One way in which the practice of diaspora citation occurs is through Signifyin’ or ‘reading,’ a strategy of indirection and critique developed in African American social contexts. Rather than conceiving of movement as a form of property (on the terms of property in the person) these artists are driven by a sense of connection, motivated by the forms of assembly and structures of belonging enabled by bodies in motion. In their refusals of the terms for belonging to the ‘human’ (i.e. normative subjectivity), the dance artists of the Black Arts Movement examined in this dissertation announce a queer capacity to desire differently. Half a century after the historical Black Arts Movement, this project turns to its manifestations in concert dance as a usable past. The structure of the dissertation moves from 1964 into the present in order to consider the resonances of this past today. Through oral history interviews, performance and archival analysis, and participant observation, this project moves between historical, cultural analysis and embodied knowledge to pursue the choreographic uses of citation developed in Black Arts Movement concert dance contexts that imagined new ways of being human (together) in the world. / Dance

Absent provenance or any background information, and with both implicit and explicit barriers to access within the archival space, how can we hypothesize—or critically fabulate—queer material legacies? The first—or earliest extant—American film to explicitly depict “queer” sex is The Surprise of a Knight (1929). By synthesizing perspectives on archives, material culture, queer identity, film, the Internet and pornography, this paper treats Surprise as an entry point into a discussion of public history and sexuality—revealing current issues with processing erotic materials and their impact on queer historiographies. This study outlines the problems presented by Surprise and explores contingencies for historical contextualization—methods public historians (archivists and interpreters alike) may adapt to fit similar materials within a broader history of film and queer identity. It explores current methods and future conundrums for best practices in the preservation of (born-digital) pornography, and concludes with impressions from potential audiences and present-day content producers as a means of envisioning new avenues of queer grassroots history-making. / History

This paper examines the caring experiences of 7 LGBT older adults in Southwestern Ontario. Up to 2 90-minute interviews were conducted with 7 participants which were then transcribed and analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Participants described life histories of discrimination and isolation, as well as contemporary experiences of medical discrimination. As a result, participants were highly skeptical of the formal care system, with only one indicating they would be willing to enter long term care. Analysis was conducted according to four themes that were identified while engaging in the interpretive phenomenological process. The research was influenced by life course theory and cultural scripts: specifically, that the current cohort of LGBT+ older adults is perhaps the first to age openly in their identity and as a result lack cultural scripts as to what they should do as they age. Questions were open-ended and asked participants about their experiences giving or receiving care, life histories of discrimination, and how their care experiences influence their plans for the future. Although no questions were directly asked about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the legacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on contemporary LGBT older adults became a major theme of this paper. Other themes identified include the role that stigma and concerns about autonomy play in their plans for the future, the importance of political advocacy and community caregiving for LGBT older adults, and how LGBT older adults have developed resiliency and the practice of holding loved ones in personhood in order to cope with medical issues and death. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This paper examines the experiences of LGBT older adults giving and receiving informal care for physical or mental health conditions. It highlights themes of stigma and autonomy, the relationship between community caregiving and political advocacy, the legacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and how LGBT older adults hold each other and the dead in personhood. Seven LGBT older adults from Southern Ontario were interviewed about their experiences with care, and the relationship between social structures and discrimination and their personal experiences with the medical system.

This bachelor thesis highlights how queer women of color perceive their racial, gender and sexual identity in targeted areas in Sweden. This is achieved from a constructivist lens using a case studies design in qualitative research. By using Intersectional theory, exploring the connection between race, gender, queerness and class and the unique experience this creates. Six different queer women of color from targeted areas were interviewed and the results showcased exclusion in both targeted areas as well as general Swedish society because of their collective, unique experiences of inhabiting marginalized intersectional identities. Furthermore, the results are discussed as a consequence of oversexualizing black women’s bodies, a systemic creation of an excluding divide in Swedish society and the lack of belongingness for queer people of color.

Who uses they, and who can they be (or not be) used for? Singular they has been proscribed in formal grammars since the mid-18th century, yet it dates to at least the 14th century (Balhorn 2004; Curzan 2003), persevering in both writing and speech (e.g., Baranowski 2002; Balhorn 2009; Lagunoff 1997; Matossian 1997; Newman 1992; Strahan 2008). This thesis investigates the envelope of variation (e.g., LaScotte 2016; Maryna 1978; Meyers 1990) in which speakers make choices of third person singular pronouns based on a multiplicity of both linguistic (e.g., gender stereotypicality, antecedent type) and social (e.g., gender, age, LGBTQ2S+ identity) factors. The analysis is based on data from 620 participants from across Canada and the US between the ages 13 and 79. An online survey sought responses related to three occupations: LaScotte’s (2016) open ended ideal student question was replicated, and Martyna’s (1978) fill in-the-blank style was modelled for mechanic and secretary—nouns with observed and unambiguous gender stereotypes (masculine and feminine respectively; Deaux & Lewis 1986; Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro 2016). Participants self-identified their gender and were categorized into a ternary grouping: men (e.g., cis, trans, transmasculine), women (e.g., fem, cis, trans, female ish), and non-binary (e.g., genderqueer, genderfluid). LGBTQ2S+ identity was also collected, as well as personal pronouns. Use of third person pronouns in the survey responses is quantified by consistency (i.e., maintaining use of the same pronoun throughout a participant’s response) and by proportional frequency of use—the latter explored in depth. The most important quantitative finding is that singular they is the most consistently and frequently used third person pronoun overall. But, its patterns of use are not parallel across test occupations or participant social groups. The results indicate that student is gender-neutral, whereas mechanic and secretary remain gendered (he:they; she:they), results that are reflected by perceptual ratings: student remains neutral (they), mechanic skews masculine (he), and secretary skews feminine (she). The impact of social characteristics adds layers of complexity about the groups leading sociolinguistic change at societal levels and/or within their own communities and networks: Non-binary, LGBTQ2S+, users of gender neutral personal pronouns, and/or younger. Collectively, these findings suggest that gender stereotypical roles are not unilaterally weighted and biases can manifest through pronominal choice. There are multiple dimensions of influence, such as the referent, one’s identity, and the communities to which individuals are connected. Thus, this thesis both uncovers persistent gender biases and creates a dynamic display of pronominal variation across speakers. / Graduate