Thesis (M.A.)--North Carolina State University, 2002. / Title from PDF title page (viewed Apr. 2, 2005). Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-88).

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

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A burgeoning mega-club in the heart of Montreal's gay village, Sky embodies many forces active in gay club cultures and villages across North America at the end of the twentieth century. This project documents the daily operations of Sky--as a complex architectural site, a complicated set of managerial practices, and a popular space in Montreal's Village--and outlines the theoretical implications of such an establishment for both the gay community and for club culture more generally. A large entertainment complex currently undergoing a major expansion, Sky cannot be theorized as either a wholly oppressive or completely liberatory development. Although Sky presents some of the advantages of a mega-club for the gay community--increased diversity, accessibility and community--it also highlights the disadvantages in the development of such establishments: concentration of ownership, the removal of a gay presence from city streets, and the promotion of certain gay identities and cultures over others.

This study explores how Christian MLM in Lusaka-Zambia understand their sexual orientation and the imago Dei amidst the general teachings of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia, Zambia Episcopal Conference and the Council of Churches in Zambia on same-sex orientation and the imago Dei. A plethora of literature about same-sex orientation and the imago Dei reveals that the heterosexism is generally regarded as the authentic image of God while same-sex orientation continues to be regarded as an affront to the image of God. Hence the need to merge the two terms “same-sex orientation” and “imago Dei” in order to deconstruct and reconstruct how sexuality and God are understood within prevailing theologies, using emerging theologies from Zambian Christian Men who Love other Men. This study is framed within postcolonial and queer theories. Focus group discussions were audio-taped and transcribed and field notes taken. Themes are determined, analyzed and interpreted using recurring and unanimously held incipient voices of Christian MLM. Study participants’ views bring to fore that they understand their sexual orientation as being inborn and that they are wonderfully and fearfully created in the image of God. They also view themselves as being the image of God since they love other men, thereby, exhibiting God’s qualities which are love, justice and mercy. The study also found that Christian MLM do not feel welcome in affluent churches, unlike in churches on the outskirts, due to anti-same-sex messages preached in affluent churches. Furthermore, the study discovered that the churches use the Biblical creation accounts to condemn the practice of same-sex orientation and regard persons of same-sex orientation as sinful, satanic and sick. The study concludes that Christian MLM are created in the image of God, and hence recommends revisiting the theology of complementarity and an inculcation of hermeneutics of love in understanding sexuality and God. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

This thesis foregrounds a question unanswered in queer theory�s account of the ongoing reproduction of heteronormativity. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asks "From where does the performative draw its force, and what happens to the performative whose task it is to undo" that discursively legitimated enacting? (Bodies That Matter 224-5). While queer theory offers a compelling account of how the normative fictions of identity privilege heterosexuality, the first part of Butler�s question remains relatively under-theorised. This thesis addresses this gap and argues that to understand the source of performative authority, we must address the intimate relationship between gay identity and commodity culture. Thus, I investigate the connections between the marketing industry, an historically politicised gay press, and a lesbian and gay politics imagined through the paradigm of identity, and argue that they combine in a citational feedback loop to performatively produce gay identity as the "ideal consumer." I then undertake case studies of two media texts, the website Gay.com and the television series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in order to demonstrate how the white, male, middle-class gay aesthete functions hegemonically as gayness in culture. My analysis then turns to the second part of Butler�s question -"what happens to the performative whose task it is to undo?"- and examines the consequences of the absence of an analysis of commodity culture for the notion of queer. To that end, I suggest that alongside their repetitions of gay normativity, both Gay.com and Queer Eye perform queer possibility. However, the case studies I undertake, along with the critical reception of Queer Eye and the internet technologies behind Gay.com, suggests that these media texts fall short of the promise of queerness. This apparent failure to disturb heteronormative reproduction is connected in these critiques to each text�s commercial imperatives. This thesis argues that such critiques tend to rely on determinations of the authenticity of queer performance, and emphasise veracity over queer theory�s potential to exploit the critical potential of deliberate indeterminacy. I argue, instead, that a key part of queer theory�s contingency is its capacity to respond to the changing performative contexts of the normative repetitions it seeks to undo. To put this more simply: If consumer desire defines contemporary gayness, then it is with consumer desire that queer theory must contend. It is precisely the indeterminacy of queer that enables such shifts in its strategies of subversion. Recognition of how queer�s indeterminacy enables those subversive moves returns us to the importance to queer theory of a sustained consideration of the constitutive capacities of commodity culture. What I suggest in this thesis is that if we do no ask "From where does the performance draw its force?" then we cannot answer "And what happens to the performative whose task it is to undo?" the normative framework of identity.

[Truncated abstract] Since the late 1970s, the phrase that has captured the imagination of China's enormous socio-economic change is kaifang (opening up). This phrase signals not only a series of state-directed projects to make China a 'modern' nation, but also a self-conscious desire to find a new sense of national importance and 'Chineseness'. This nationalist self-consciousness is not new, but it indicates a desire to leave China's socialist past behind and become a world power in the new millennium. This thesis explores the complex and heightened manifestations of national pride and identity that have emerged since the era of opening up. Its central question examines how a renewed form of Chineseness, with a specific focus on a fresh form of Chinese same-sex identity, is articulated in both nationalist and globalist terms, with particular reference to China's opening up. This thesis thus contributes to an understanding of how Chinese same-sex identity in urban China is variously constructed and celebrated; how it is transformed; and how it presents its resistances in the context of China's opening up to the mighty flux of globalisation. In doing so, the research illuminates how seemingly modern and authentic Chinese gay and lesbian identities in urban China come into being at the intersection of certain competing discourses. These discourses are predominantly represented in the contexts of 1) an increasingly globalised gay culture, 2) the ongoing construction of an indigenous Chinese identity, 3) a hybridised transnational/Chinese identity, and 4) the emergence of a gay space in Chinese cyberspace. By indicating how these discourses are simultaneously globalised, localised and deterritorialised, and are necessarily entangled with global power relations, I demonstrate how an essentialised notion of Chinese same-sex identity is continuously transformed by the imaginary power of China's opening up to broader contexts. I conclude that it is within the paradigm of China's opening up to the current globalising world that same-sex identity in urban China, as a rapidly changing notion, can best be understood. ... To an extent, the articulation of seemingly modern and authentic Chinese gay and lesbian identities in urban China is in a state of continuous tension between opening up to a global identity and preserving a local authenticity. Furthermore, the development of these gay and lesbian identities is conditioned and regulated by political thought and action. In this way, political conditioning ensures control and conformity in the articulation of Chinese (same-sex) identity in a self-censored (or ziwo shencha) manner. Most fundamentally, self-censorship is practised more effectively at an individual level than at a state level. Against this background, I argue that the articulation of same-sex identity in urban China is paradoxical: open and decentred, but at the same time, nationalist and conforming to state control.

Thesis (M.A. (Health Social Science))--Mahidol University, 2007. / LICL has E-Thesis 0024 ; please contact computer services.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 10, 2006). Supervisor: Michael P. Young and Anne E. Kane. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 246-252). Also available from UMI.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-39).