The state of queer representation in games is poor, and queer consumers are growing increasingly vocal in their demands for nuanced portrayals. This thesis investigates how queer players perceive the tropes and stereotypes commonly used to portray them in games. By sorting through existing representation and using the most common tropes found, this study created two example characters which were represented both narratively and visually. These characters were then the subject of a study of 29 participants. The comments and opinions of these 29 participants were then analysed to find a largely negative consensus which is chiefly concerned with making portrayals less tragic. From this, this study proceeds to analyse the desires of queer consumers and contextualize them in relation to a world which still actively oppresses them.

I create to heal wounds – personal, emotional and social. I create to break the patriarchy  and normative systems that excludes people of different genders, sexualities, colours and bodies. I make human wear – fashion for bodies of all sizes and genders. I want people to be comfortable with themselves and their bodies and that is the goal with my brand EKLUND EKLUND.  The fashion world today consists of “his and hers”, size zero, “wear and tear” and sexist ads, all of which maintains heteronormativity and sick beauty ideals. Clothes are made for “women” and “men” in size XS-XL, leaving everyone outside of those norms excluded.  I will research the gender - and beauty norms in western media and fashion and how it affects people and their self esteem. How can I make fashion inclusive and socially sustainable? Can I make clothes that fits all?  I’m gonna make a One Size Queer Couture Collection to include different expressions and bodies to change the norms of gender and size. One Size that adjusts to different shapes and sizes, Queer as in genderless for everyone and Couture as in hand-made fashion.  I will achieve this through experimental pattern making, non-normative design and a presentation of the clothes with and for people confronting norms of gender, sexualities, beauty and colour.

Submitted by Caroline Xavier (caroline.xavier@pucrs.br) on 2017-05-23T17:41:07Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DIS_MARIA_EUGENIA_BONOCORE_MORAIS_COMPLETO.pdf: 551767 bytes, checksum: 4ae563929a3ba79002106cc1e23383a7 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-23T17:41:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DIS_MARIA_EUGENIA_BONOCORE_MORAIS_COMPLETO.pdf: 551767 bytes, checksum: 4ae563929a3ba79002106cc1e23383a7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-01-20 / Gender technologies are, according to Lauretis (1994), cultural and discursive constructions and they are not a priori in relation to the subject. Though, they cannot also be considered as fixed categories and given by culture. It is precisely within the discursive and cultural character of the gender technologies that such technologies are never considered ready, but always in construction within culture. Gender technologies have direct relation to the sexual representation of sexualities and to what Foucault (2012a) calls mechanism of sexuality, as its ramifications (the regulation of the bodies and the interpellation, for example), and make the subversion of the identity possible. For the keeping of such technologies, the reiteration within culture and discourse is constantly necessary, and for that the theory of gender performativity, as postulated by Butler (2015a) accounts for the complex process of ?maintaining the gender? of a certain individual. Such process consists of a series of cultural and discursive acts performed, up to a certain point, intentionally, by the subject as a product of gender technologies. These acts are regulated by what Althusser (1980) names ?ideological State apparatuses? and they seem to be in consensus with the current norm. To Rich (2010) this norm is called heteronormativity and is always compulsory, its work is to regulate bodies, identities and genders, however this regulation collects its price by the obliteration of certain existences. This paper proposes a queer reading of The first bad man, a novel by the north-american writer Miranda July, to discuss the way the character Cheryl Glickman?s gender is constructed and deconstructed along the narrative and if the novel contemplates only the binary expressions of gender (male and female), or if July sees other gender identities, although marginal, possible. / Tecnologias de g?nero s?o para Lauretis (1994) vistas como constru??es culturais e discursivas que n?o est?o a priori em rela??o ao sujeito; por?m, tampouco podem ser consideradas como categorias fixas e dadas pela cultura. O car?ter discursivo e cultural das tecnologias de g?nero ? que faz com que tais tecnologias nunca se encontrem prontas, mas em constante constru??o na cultura. As tecnologias de g?nero t?m rela??o direta com as representa??es das sexualidades e com o que Foucault (2012a) denomina dispositivo da sexualidade, assim como seus desdobramentos (a regula??o dos corpos e a interpela??o, por exemplo), e fazem a identidade pass?vel de subvers?o. Para que tais tecnologias sejam mantidas, ? necess?rio que sejam reiteradas a todo o momento na cultura e no discurso, para isso a teoria da performatividade de g?nero, como postulada por Butler (2015a), dar? conta de elucidar o complexo processo de ?manter o g?nero? de um determinado sujeito. Tal processo consiste em uma s?rie de atos culturais e discursivos realizados, at? certa medida intencionalmente, pelo sujeito enquanto um produto das tecnologias de g?nero. Estes atos s?o regulados pelo que Althusser (1980) denomina ?aparelhos ideol?gicos do Estado? e parecem estar em consenso com uma norma vigente. Para Rich (2010), essa norma s? ? poss?vel enquanto heteronormatividade, e esta ? sempre compuls?ria. Seu trabalho ? o de regular os corpos, as identidades e os g?neros. No entanto, essa regula??o cobra o pre?o do apagamento de certas exist?ncias. Este trabalho prop?e uma leitura queer de O primeiro homem mau, romance da autora estadunidense Miranda July, para discutir de que maneira o g?nero da personagem Cheryl Glickman, a protagonista do romance, ? constru?do e desconstru?do ao longo da narrativa e se o romance d? conta apenas das express?es de g?nero bin?rias (masculino e feminino), ou se July v? como poss?vel outras identidades de g?nero, embora marginais.

This thesis investigates conceptual networks —systems of organising, understanding and explaining thought and knowledge— and the ways in which they underlie both text and its mise en page across a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Catalan literary texts and their manuscript witnesses. Each of the three chapters explores a separate corpus of texts, using two of four interrelated network theories: Michel Serres’ notion of parasites and hosts as the basic interconnecting units that combine to constitute all relational networks; the ubiquitous organizational tree; Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold as the primary factor in producing differentiation and identity; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s unruly, anti-hierarchical and anti-arborescent rhizomatic systems. The first chapter engages primarily with parasites and trees; the second with trees and folds; and the third with folds and rhizomes. However, resonances with the other network theories are discussed as they occur, in order to demonstrate the fundamentally interconnected and often interchangeable nature of these systems. Each chapter includes close analysis of manuscript witnesses of the texts under discussion. The first chapter, ‘Saints Denis and Fanuel: Parasitism and Arborescence on the Manuscript Page’, examines parasitic and arboreal networks in two hagiographic texts: late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century prose redactions of the Vie de Saint Denis, and the thirteenth‐century hagiographic romance Li Romanz de Saint Fanuel. The second chapter, ‘Ramon Llull’s Folding Forests: The World, the Tree and the Book’, addresses arborescent and folding structures in Llull’s encyclopaedic Arbre de ciència [Tree of Science], composed between 1295 and 1296. The third chapter, ‘Transgender Genealogy: Turning, Folding and Crossing Gender’, considers three characters in medieval French texts who can be read as transgender: Saint Fanuel; the King of Torelore in Aucassin et Nicolette; and Blanchandin/e in Tristan de Nanteuil. The chapter explores the ways in which these characters’ queer trajectories can be understood through conceptions of directionality which relate to the fold and the rhizome.

The relatively new field of Queer Theory creates ways of thinking about people living without binary gender, but does not provide for a research model with which to give context to the material struggles of such people. Through the use of Internet discussion groups, the current research project attempts to examine the challenges that people who identify with the concept "genderqueer" describe facing as they fashion selves in social interactions; a process which inevitably requires consumer goods that typically only allow for heteronormative binary gender. Findings suggest that there are similarities in how respondents came to identify with "genderqueer," but such similarities are less present in how they understand and apply the concept to themselves. This study shows a potential conflict arising between academic Queer Theory, which seeks to deconstruct identity categories, and a more popular use of "genderqueer" claimed as an identity by some respondents. In conclusion this thesis examines possibilities for activism and marketing that may come out of "genderqueer" as a widely recognizable identity category.

Despite advances gained by LGBTQIA+ people the issue of discrimination against the queer population continues. Recent events surrounding comments made by alt-right leaders have continued the conversation regarding homophobia and transphobia. The followed study built on previous understandings of moral disengagement theory and communication. 15 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with queer students were conducted in order to explore the role of self-cognitive mechanisms and their potential justifications for anti-queer communication. Findings suggested that not only were mechanisms of moral disengagement present in incidents surrounding anti-queer communication, but the carried with them a range of personal and societal implications. This study offered new understandings in moral disengagement theory, its application to interpersonal communication and its possible explanation for discriminatory behavior.

The term “phantom limb” is used to describe the phenomenal tingling sensation that occurs in the nerve endings of an amputated limb; though the limb is no longer physically attached to the body, the person experiences pain and physical sensation in the space the limb once occupied. Though the body part has been removed, it haunts both the body and the brain. It is through this metaphor that I am interested in investigating the connection between the disembodied and the embodied. The disembodied connects to the embodied through the loss or lack of a bodily form; the embodied, therefore, links the disembodied to movements and mannerisms of the body. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, I define manner as a fluctuating force that operates as a spectrum. Manner links, rather than separates, the internal and the external through the social. In other words, the interplay between the internal and external must be socially interpreted in order to be understood as manner. The first chapter of my thesis will focus on embodied manner and use Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a case study to explain how society impacts the construction of normative manner. Building off Jack Halberstam, I adopt the theory that Mr. Hyde “is both a sexual secret, the secret of Jekyll’s undignified desires, and a visible representation of physical otherness” (82). My argument focuses on the connection between the “deformity hidden within” Mr. Hyde and that “inscribed upon his...skin” that Utterson, Enfield and Lanyon struggle to identify (82). The second chapter of my thesis will focus on how manner operates as both a disciplinary force and cultural haunting. In other words, just as the phantom limb reproduces a distorted version of the lost limb, the social control of manner ultimately reproduces imperfect replicas. In George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, the protagonist, Latimer, begins suffering from visions after he parts ways with his dear friend Charles Meunier. Here, the unconscious operates at the individual level; I argue that these “visions” are the result of an implosion of Latimer’s repressed sexuality. I then turn to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to argue that manner operates as a type of social law that attempts to stave off haunting but instead inadvertently reproduces it. In this section, I argue that the narrator’s secondary status as a female character gives her a different kind of agency from Mr. Hyde and Latimer, and that her husband’s ultimate failure to control her results in a type of queer production that calls into question the dialectical relationship between haunting and manner.

A collection of creative texts written concurrently with the creation of the artist’s thesis exhibition. A range of written forms coexist - poetry, prose, and dialogue - to open up the narrative and emotional space of the visual work. The text emerges from the point-of-view of different voices, describing experiences and body states that hinge upon the physical and conceptual space of the pond. Amphibiousness offers a gateway to a state of becoming and transformation. Some of the following texts appear in video works by the artist.

(and i can’t stress this enough) in my mouth: Extradiegetic Affect as Material is a non-linear exploration into the structures of feeling that exist in relation to cinema in its role as a technology for generating subjectivity. In the development of this research, a proposal of cinema’s likeness to the ecological circulation of microplastics is drawn in order to illustrate cinema’s materiality and nearly invisible ubiquity. The notion of extradiegetic affect is outlined as a post-cinematic condition in which lived experience becomes secondary to cinematic representation and which, simultaneously, becomes directly shaped by engaging with these representations.

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