Janelle Monáe is a pop superstar whose Afrofuturist art is paving the way for a new revolution of popular music. An investigation into her oeuvre reveals an artform that ­relies on technological aesthetics and science-fiction narratives as a critical lens through which capitalism and its racist, sexist, homophobic, and hegemonic tendencies are clearly revealed. Monáe displays a masterful understanding of social hierarchy and power imbalances, and uses her music as a form of resistance to those heterosexist, white-supremacist institutions that attempt to reduce Monáe to the profitability of her body and culture. Situating herself as a visible and celebrated queer black musician and activist, Monáe uses her voice to provide political commentary on present-day America, through imagined future dystopias. Her seamless synthesis of black music genres and aesthetics allows for a unified musical project that is accessible, socially informed, powerful, and impactful.

Claude Cahun was an artist and a leader who subverted social binaries by employing a non-determinable style. This intentional ambiguity is omnipresent in all of Cahun’s works, regardless of their style. To demonstrate this commonality, I will analyze her work of theatre, Heroines, five of Cahun’s self-portraits and her autobiography, Aveux Non Avenus. Although Cahun’s artistic mediums are very different respectively, all three of these works use a sense of artistic ambiguity to resist social binaries. Such techniques of indeterminacy include subversive rewritings of famous characters and self-portraits that use motifs such as masks and masquerade to subvert the gaze of the spectator. Additionally, her photomontages include a fleeing gaze, an obstructed gaze, and a gaze that confronts itself. In this thesis, I affirm that Cahun's methods are aligned with queer theory because the way that Cahun uses a queer identity in her works creates a form of political and social resistance against heteronormativity and homophobia. Therefore, I will show all of the ways that Cahun has used visibility as a Jewish gender neutral lesbian for social resistance.

Choose Your End! is a short story collection that examines what it means to live in a world with containers at every corner. Containers like houses and studio apartments and Tupperware and blenders, and containers like the social constraints of domesticity and womanhood and the physical body. There are limitations in this world both out of and within our control. Both voluntary and involuntary. These stories delve into the ways in which we are affected by our surroundings, our technology, our relationships, our bodies, and our minds and the ways that individuals affect those in turn. Moreover, these stories attempt to pull apart how self-awareness works with regard to these affects alongside how conscious and subconscious delusion pairs with or overshadows that awareness. The world is weird. Mundane things that people accept as normal ways of life are really strange. This collection shifts into and out of the absurd to clash the mundane with the bizarre in an attempt to examine just how weird our world is. And also, because sometimes the traditional ways of examining the world and human existence within it do not feel nearly sufficient enough.

My research is centered upon my ongoing project GenderFail, a publishing and programming initiative featuring the perspectives of queer and trans people and people of color. GenderFail: The Queer Ethics of Dissemination is a collection of writings on queer collaboration, archiving as a collective act, and publishing as a site of queer community. The following text also illustrates the importance of creating and maintaining an intersectional platform as a non-binary white queer subject. I examine and define the role of “queer identity” in my own work while mapping the history of failure by white queers, including myself, in the of articulation of intersectionality. By understanding how intersectionality is important in a queer-focused collaborative practice, I seek to emphasize the messiness of citation, collaboration, and community in relation to my discursive uses of printed matter.

Being alone is not the only definition of loneliness. Loneliness can be felt even when surrounded by a lot of people, especially in the virtual online world. Our digital devices play an important role in connecting everyone together without the restriction of time and space. Communication became more and more convenient in this era. Mostly we are digitally connected, but sometimes, we are mentally disconnected. We are online and together in this virtual world, but loneliness is always a never ended situation that we are suffering from. As a visual communicator, My works focus on using performance as an approach to explore the evolving relationship between the online communication and online loneliness. In my thesis research, I want to investigate how does the online world created more loneliness to individuals digitally and physically, and how people release their spiritual desire and overcome loneliness in the online world.

The Break is a personal investigation into problems and possibilities of representing my specific transgender identity. Trans as a tactic to speak about a state of forever becoming, forever in between, outside of and in opposition to dominant social norms of being. Trans as a model for a different way of viewing and being in the world. Can we form a different kind of horizontal shared power though a collective refusal to play into existing structures from which we have been excluded? What are the potentials for modeling other ways of being, other ways of (dis)engaging, other ways to be in the world? What if we can disengage words from their established meanings? Can we re-see each other without the language that upholds the social conditions that maintain internalized categories? Can we collectively create the conditions to imagine the possibility of building other worlds in this world?

Tundra is a murder mystery/coming-of-age novel about a fifteen-year-old boy named Ethan and his high school biology teacher, Pam, who come together over a mysterious text-based video game and unwittingly use it to resolve an unsolved murder from 1994. The novel is largely interested in bodies—their perplexities, pleasures, and limitations—as well as what it means to “come of age” as a queer person in a time and place where queer folks are denied so many markers of adulthood—marriage, families, oftentimes job and housing security. This is also a book about the myriad of ways in which technology enables us to pursue modes of connection and intimacy outside of the limitations of both our bodies and repressive social strictures. This thesis contains the first seven chapters of the novel, constituting Part One.

By using the creative process as a means to reflect this work delves into the themes of memory and identity as they relate to my struggle, as an adolescent, to define my sexual orientation.

This dissertation argues that the representation of queer space in colonial and postcolonial Indian fiction and film counters the marginalization of the sexual dissidents, both in the Indian nation-state and the Indian diaspora. The spatial reclamation in these texts, I contend, also interrogates the received notion of queer empowerment by shifting the emphasis from visibility and inclusion to alternative agential modes such as secrecy and camouflage. This departure from liberal Eurocentric discourses defines the essence of my project. The main body of my dissertation consists of analysis of texts by Anglophone, regional and diasporic Indian writers and filmmakers: Rabindranath Tagore's short stories (c.1890), Ismat Chughtai's "Lihaaf" (1941), Shani Mootoo's "Out on Main Street" (1993), Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn (1999), Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe (2001), Manju Kapur's A Married Woman (2002), and R.Raj Rao's The Boyfriend (2003). I examine the different ways in which these texts represent queer space and how they imagine an alternate cartography for the disenfranchised sexual citizens. In order to contextualize the process of this dispossession, I examine the relationship between colonialism, nationalism and alternative sexualities by focusing on the contemporary historical and theoretical debates around the issues. My theoretical framework combines two emergent discourses in contemporary academia: cultural geography and postcolonial rethinking of the constructions of gender and sexuality. In the texts that I examine, queer space emerges as a site of contestation with an underlying consciousness of conflicts, not as utopian loci of disconnection with reality.

Historically, in academic literature—sociological and otherwise—surrounding the daily lives of LGBT+ people, people who reject binary gender are very marginally represented. In this study, I specifically seek to understand the way my participants articulate their sense of their gender identities through the stories they tell of their experiences. This study attempts to answer the following questions: What are the stories of gender identity construction for people who reject binary gender? How do they understand the ways they are held accountable to binary gender in the day-to-day? How do they perceive and make meaning of gender in their lives? Through ten in-depth interviews with participants accessed through online groups and snowball sampling, this project reinforces gender surveillance and accountability theories such as West and Zimmerman's. Although participants largely identified the root of their feelings about gender as within their selves, the stories they told about their experiences of gender revealed that interactions with others were important and thus have a large effect on their lives. This indicates that these interactions with others where participants are held accountable to binary gender do have an impact on the ways they construct their gender and selves but because this has been such a consistent part of their lives, participants perceive this as innate to their selves and private feelings.