This study examines the experiences of public library staff who works in an LGBTQ-profiled children’s library. The aim of the study is further to find out whether the library as an institution can challenge heteronormativity or if traditional gender identities are reproduced. I have conducted five qualitative interviews with librarians who all work in the same library, and who all work with children to some extent. The interview material is analyzed with queer theory and norm critical theories of pedagogy. These perspectives wish to critically examine heteronormativity and change what is defined as normal. The result of the study shows that the way the library works with separate rainbow shelves, where LGBTQ-themed material is gathered, is pointing out LGBTQ as something different. And although it may also shed a light on a group formerly made invisible, it is reproducing traditional gender identities and leaves heteronormativity unquestioned. By contrast, the way the librarians are working with always including LGBTQ-materials in programming as storytimes and book presentations, is challenging the dominant position of heterosexuality. It is also shown that the way the library staff has developed their written and oral communication with the patrons, including using the gender neutral pronomina ”hen” and alternatives to ”mom and dad”, is increasing the possibilities of an inclusive reception in the library. The oral communication is for various reasons not always used though. In conclusion the interviews show that the librarians are positive to working with LGBTQ-issues although they sometimes tend to forget. The study further concludes that the library’s way of working with LGBTQ-issues is both reproducing traditional gender identities, and challenging heteronormative structures. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

Racial Queer is a qualitative study of Multiracial college students with a critical ethnographic component. The design methods, grounded in Critical Race Methodology and Feminist Thought (both theories that inform Critical Ethnography), include: 1) 25 semi-structured interviews of Multiracial students, 2) of which 5 were expanded into case studies, 3) 3 focus groups, 4) observations of the sole registered student organization for Multiracial students on Central University’s campus, 5) field notes and 6) document analysis. The dissertation examines the following question: How do Multiracial students understand and experience their racialized identities within a large, public, tier-one research university in Texas? In addition, it addresses the following sub-questions: How do Multiracial students experience their racialized identities in their everyday interactions with others, in relation to their own self-perceptions and in response to the way others perceive them to be? How do Multiracial students’ positionalities, as they relate to power, privilege, phenotype and status, guide their behavior in different contexts and situations? Using Holland et al.’s (1998) social practice theory of self and identity, Chicana Feminist Theory, and tenets of Queer Theory, this study illustrates how Multiracial college students utilize agency as racial queers to construct and negotiate their identities within a context where identity is both self-constructed and produced for them. I introduce the term, racial queer, to frame the unconventional space of the Multiracial individual. I use this term not to convey sexuality, but to convey the parallels of queerness (both as a term of empowerment and derogation) as they pertain to being Multiracial. In other words, queerness denotes a unique individuality as well as a deviation from the norm (Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 1993; Gamson, 2000). The primary purpose of this study is to illustrate the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Preliminary findings suggest the need to expand the scope of racial discourses to include Multiracial experiences and for further study of Multiracial students. Their counter-narratives access an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race. / text

Scholarship 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. / text

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. / text

The intersection of homosexuality and faith values, a very controversial topic in the United States, has generated both social accommodation as well as “culture war.” In the past forty years this nation has witnessed the establishment of predominantly gay congregations, gay “welcoming” and “affirming” mainstream congregations, as well as virulently anti-gay religious organizations. This study investigates the origins and evolving history of gay and gay-affirming religious traditions in America with an emphasis on Atlanta and Georgia. Primarily an oral history, this project draws from eighty-two interviews as well as primary and secondary documents to construct this history. Several conclusions unfold: 1) Southern culture, though uniquely religious, has been more accommodating of gays and lesbians than heretofore appreciated; 2) citizens of Atlanta and the state of Georgia have been primary historical producers of gay and gay-affirming religious culture and institutions in America; 3) gay religious history pre-dates the Stonewall Rebellion, thus troubling and adding nuance to the traditional metanarrative of LGBTQ history; and 4) the paths of and to gay-affirming religious activism and institution building follows several distinct patterns.

The first decade of this century marked a moment of hypervisibility for lesbians and bisexual women on British television. During this time, however, lesbian hypervisibility was coded repeatedly as hyperfemininity. When the BBC and ITV adapted Sarah Waters’s novels for television, how, I ask, did the screen versions balance the demands of pop visual culture with the novels’ complex, unconventional – and in some cases subversive – representations of lesbianism? I pursue this question with an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from queer and feminist theories, cultural and media studies, and film adaptation theory. Chapter Two looks back to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC 1990). I examine this text – the first BBC television serial to feature a lesbian protagonist – to establish a vocabulary for discussing the page-to-screen adaptation of queer identities throughout this dissertation. Chapter Three investigates Waters’s first novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) and its complex intertextual relationship with Andrew Davies’s serialized version (BBC 2002). I also examine responses to the serial in the British press, tracing the ways in which dominant cultural forces seek to domesticate non-normative instances of gender and sexuality. Chapter Four examines Waters’s novel Fingersmith (2002) in relation to Peter Ransley’s adaptation (BBC 2005) to situate adaptations of Waters’s retro-Victorian texts amid the genre of television and film adaptations of Jane Austen novels. I argue that Ransley’s serial interrogates the notion of Austen as a “conservative icon” (Cartmell 24) and queers the Austen adaptation genre itself. To conclude this study I address Davies’s television film (ITV 2008) of Waters’s second novel Affinity (1999). In this chapter I examine how the adaptation depicts the disruptive lesbian at the centre of the text. I argue in particular that by casting an actress who does not conform to dominant televisual norms of femininity, the adaptation is able to create a powerful audiovisual transgendered moment which adds to the novel’s destabilization of Victorian hierarchies of gender and class. This chapter considers, finally, how Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity have contributed to lesbian visibility on British television. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-27 11:26:42.504

This thesis explores the cultural production of addiction and the psychologization of everyday life. Through analyses of ubiquitous addiction literature, as well as ordinary, everyday encounters, I examine how we make meaning of addiction, thus culturally constituting the addict. I explore my situated-ness in relation to addiction, which in turn helps me to think through how I am oriented toward addiction. Through an analysis of a specific account of an intersubjective experience of addiction, I examine how experiences of addiction are made between us. This thesis also explores the relationship between substance use and harm and the role the perceived “warnings signs” of addiction play in how we recognize addiction. Using a phenomenologically informed method of social inquiry, I question what the psychologization of everyday life, or our (over) use of psychology, means for our engagement with others.

This thesis explores the cultural production of addiction and the psychologization of everyday life. Through analyses of ubiquitous addiction literature, as well as ordinary, everyday encounters, I examine how we make meaning of addiction, thus culturally constituting the addict. I explore my situated-ness in relation to addiction, which in turn helps me to think through how I am oriented toward addiction. Through an analysis of a specific account of an intersubjective experience of addiction, I examine how experiences of addiction are made between us. This thesis also explores the relationship between substance use and harm and the role the perceived “warnings signs” of addiction play in how we recognize addiction. Using a phenomenologically informed method of social inquiry, I question what the psychologization of everyday life, or our (over) use of psychology, means for our engagement with others.

Rent: Same-Sex Prostitution in Modern Britain, 1885-1957 chronicles the concept of “rent boys” and the men who purchased their services. This dissertation demonstrates how queer identity in Britain, until contemporary times, was largely regulated by class, in which middle-and-upper-class queer men often perceived of working-class bodies as fetishized consumer goods. The “rent boy” was an upper-class queer fantasy, and working-class men sometimes used this fantasy for their own agenda while others intentionally dismantled the “rent boy” trope, refusing to submit to upper-class expectations. This work also explains how the “rent boy” fantasy was eventually relegated to the periphery of queer life during the mid-century movement for decriminalization. The movement was controlled by queer elites who ostracized economic-based and public forms of sex and emphasized the bourgeois sexual mores of their heterosexual counterparts. Sex between adult men in private was decriminalized, but working-class men selling sex suffered harsher laws and more strictly enforced penalties under this new, ostensibly “progressive” legislation.

This paper is part of the academic effort to recover historical memory in post-Civil War Spain and metaphorically applies the so-called Giobert Tincture to Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004) in order show how these works reveal the ghosts of the repression exerted against the epitome of the abject/obscene by Franco’s dictatorship: the queer collective. This collective continues to suffer from marginalization as well as from the effects of repression. I argue that El cuarto de atrás reveals C.’s repressed hybrid/queer identity and sexual orientation, that La voz dormida reveals Tomasa and Reme’s homoerotic/queer relationship and that La mala educación reveals in the form of cross-dressed/hybrid bodies how gender performativity is based on the repression of generic and sexual identity. First, I analyze the historical and artistic-cultural context of the selected works. Second, I outline the methodology and poststructural theoretical concepts that frame my thesis. Although the following chapters develop an episodic structure, a comprehensive reading of the paper provides a holistic perspective of the repression of queer people and its palimpsestic-spectral representation in the works of the above-mentioned authors.