This thesis argues that the work of the artist David McDiarmid is to be read as an enactment of late twentieth century gay male and queer politics. It will analyse how both the idea and the cultural specificity of ???America??? impacted on the work of this Australian artist resident in New York from 1979 to 1987. The thesis examines how African American music, The Beats, notions of ???hip??? and ???cool???, street art and graffiti, the underground dance club Paradise Garage, street cruising and gay male urban culture influenced the sensibility and the materiality of the artist???s work. McDiarmid???s cultural practice of dress and adornment, it is proposed, forms an essential part of his creative oeuvre and of the ???queer worldmaking??? which is the driver of his creative achievements. The thesis proposes that McDiarmid was a Proto-queer artist before the politics of queer emerged in the 1980s and that his work, including his own life-as-art practices of dress and adornment, enact a mobile rather than fixed gay male identity.

This thesis argues that the work of the artist David McDiarmid is to be read as an enactment of late twentieth century gay male and queer politics. It will analyse how both the idea and the cultural specificity of ???America??? impacted on the work of this Australian artist resident in New York from 1979 to 1987. The thesis examines how African American music, The Beats, notions of ???hip??? and ???cool???, street art and graffiti, the underground dance club Paradise Garage, street cruising and gay male urban culture influenced the sensibility and the materiality of the artist???s work. McDiarmid???s cultural practice of dress and adornment, it is proposed, forms an essential part of his creative oeuvre and of the ???queer worldmaking??? which is the driver of his creative achievements. The thesis proposes that McDiarmid was a Proto-queer artist before the politics of queer emerged in the 1980s and that his work, including his own life-as-art practices of dress and adornment, enact a mobile rather than fixed gay male identity.

Thesis (M.A.)--Dalhousie University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-85).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines the role of scientific and medical disciplines in the construction of homosexuality in Mexico, and how non-normative gender and sexual subjects engaged in political activism, body modifications, and aesthetic production to challenge the pathologizing discourses reinforced by the increasing authority of the biomedical sciences. Chapter 1 examines the role of photography as a medical instrument in the first documented sex-reassignment treatment in the Western Hemisphere performed by Mexican physician and sexologist Rafael Sandoval Camacho in the early 1950s, and how his patient Marta Olmos, Mexico’s first transsexual woman, embraced photojournalism as a medium to document, archive, and validate her identity as a woman. In chapter 2, I examine the popular phenomenon of publishing photographs of erotized trans sex workers known as Mujercitos during the 1970s in Alarma!, Mexico’s most influential crime tabloid magazine, and how these marginalized subjects appropriated biomedical technologies like “sex hormones” intended to regulate gender and sexual deviance to construct bodily identities that challenged the medical and criminological positions on the essentialist natures of gender expression, sexual desire, and the sexed body. Chapter 3 examines the early gay narrative of Luis Zapata and José Rafael Calva that emerged in conjunction to Mexico’s Homosexual Liberation Movement in the late 1970s. My analysis demonstrates how Zapata’s El vampiro de la colonia Roma [Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel] (1979), and Calva’s Utopía gay [Gay Utopia] (1983) present sharp critiques shared by Mexico’s homosexual liberation groups on the growing authority of disciplines like psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and biomedicine in pathologizing homosexuality. Chapter 4 examines the changing understandings of homosexuality, homosexual desire, and the homosexual body during the HIV/AIDS crisis through the work of Julio Galán, Nahum B. Zenil, and art collective Taller Documentación Visual. My analysis presents the role of the HIV virus not as an explicit visual reference but rather as an elusive, spectral, and dangerous entity that is identifiable through the aesthetic and formal composition of the artists’ works, best exemplified by the references to condoms as physical and symbolic devices in the mediation of gay sexual contact and desire. This dissertation demonstrates the critical roles of biomedicine, criminology, sexology, and psychiatry in regulating diverse forms of Mexican homosexualities, while simultaneously functioning as liminal disciplines strategically adopted by homosexual subjects to redefine, shape, and validate their desired bodily, sexual, and subjective identities.

In the last forty years, U.S. national and statewide LGBT organizations, in pursuit of "equality" through a limited and focused agenda, have made remarkably swift progress moving that agenda forward. However, their agenda has been frequently criticized as prioritizing the interests of White, middle-class gay men and lesbians and ignoring the needs of other LGBT people. In their shadows have emerged numerous grassroots organizations led by queer people of color, transgender people, and low-income LGBT people. These "queer liberation" groups have often been viewed as the left wing of the GRM, but have not been extensively studied. My research investigated how these grassroots liberation organizations can be understood in relation to the equality movement, and whether they actually comprise a separate movement operating alongside, but in tension with, the mainstream gay rights movement. This research used a qualitative content analysis, grounded in black feminism's framework of intersectionality, queer theory, and social movement theories, to examine eight queer liberation organizations. Data streams included interviews with staff at each organization, organizational videos from each group, and the organizations' mission statements. The study used deductive content analysis, informed by a predetermined categorization matrix drawn from social movement theories, and also featured inductive analysis to expand those categories throughout the analysis. This study's findings indicate that a new social movement - distinct from the mainstream equality organizations - does exist. Using criteria informed by leading social movement theories, findings demonstrate that these organizations cannot be understood as part of the mainstream equality movement but must be considered a separate social movement. This "queer liberation movement" has constituents, goals, strategies, and structures that differ sharply from the mainstream equality organizations. This new movement prioritizes queer people in multiple subordinated identity categories, is concerned with rebuilding institutions and structures, rather than with achieving access to them, and is grounded more in "liberation" or "justice" frameworks than "equality." This new movement does not share the equality organizations' priorities (e.g., marriage) and, instead, pursues a different agenda, include challenging the criminal justice and immigration systems, and strengthening the social safety net. Additionally, the study found that this new movement complicates existing social movement theory. For decades, social movement scholars have documented how the redistributive agenda of the early 20th century class-based social movements has been replaced by the demands for access and recognition put forward by the identity-based movements of the 1960s New Left. While the mainstream equality movement can clearly be characterized as an identity-based social movement, the same is not true of the groups in this study. This queer liberation movement, although centered on identity claims, has goals that are redistributive as well as recognition-based. While the emergence of this distinct social movement is significant on its own, of equal significance is the fact that it represents a new post-structuralist model of social movement. This study presents a "four-domain" framework to explain how this movement exists simultaneously inside and outside of other social movements, as a bridge between them, and as its own movement. Implications for research, practice, and policy in social work and allied fields are presented.

This project analyzes the sexual and gender politics of flight attendants, especially the men who did this work, since the 1930s. It traces how and why the flight attendant corps became the nearly exclusive domain of white women by the 1950s, then considers the various legal battles under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to re-integrate men into the workforce, open up greater opportunities for African-Americans, and liberate women from onerous age and marriage restrictions that cut short their careers. While other scholars have emphasized flight attendants' contributions in battling sexism in the courts, this project is unique in expanding such consideration to homosexuality. Male flight attendants' status as gender pariahs in the workforce (as men performing "women's work")--combined with the fact that many of them were gay--made them objects of "homosexual panic" in the 1950s, both in legal proceedings and in various forms of extra-legal intimidation. A decade later, aspirant flight attendants were participants in some of the first cases brought by men under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Their victories in the courts greatly benefited the gay community, among others, which thereby enjoyed greater freedom to enter a highly visible, public-relationsoriented corporate career. As such, my project helps to recast the legal legacy of the civil rights movement as a three-pronged reform, confronting homophobia as well as racism and sexism. Beyond legal considerations, Manhood Up in the Air also examines how both labor unions and the airlines negotiated a legal environment and public sentiment that largely condoned firing homosexuals, while nonetheless accommodating gay employees. This form of accommodation existed in the 1950s, though much more precariously than in the post-Stonewall decade of the 1970s. Thus, the project records the pre-history to the current reality, in which both corporations (with airlines at the forefront) and labor unions have become core supporters of the contemporary gay rights movement. / text

Cette thèse de doctorat étudie les mouvements LGBT en Belgique, en France et en Espagne à travers une double comparaison (entre les cas et à travers le temps) qui intègre également les échanges et influences transnationaux et internationaux. Elle examine l’émergence et le développement de la revendication d’ouverture du mariage civil aux couples de même sexe dans ces pays, analysant les convergences en termes de contenu des demandes et de timing des mobilisations. Par conséquent, elle porte sur des convergences au niveau des mouvements sociaux, à l’inverse de la majeure partie de la littérature, qui se concentre sur les convergences de politiques publiques. Cette situation impose de construire une grille d’analyse basée sur la littérature sur les mouvements sociaux, les politiques publiques et les relations internationales (influence des normes internationales). Le développement des revendications relatives au droit au mariage a été retracé de manière généalogique depuis la fin des années 1980. La comparaison repose sur la méthode du most different systems design et un travail empirique important combinant analyse documentaire et entretiens a été réalisé. Cette thèse confirme l’importance de l’étude des échanges et des influences internationaux et transnationaux pour comprendre la politique domestique et insiste sur l’influence cruciale du réseautage transnational sur les revendications des mouvements sociaux. Elle révèle aussi quelques cas de diffusion entre mouvements sociaux et montre comment des caractéristiques et des contraintes communes peuvent inciter les mouvements sociaux à formuler des revendications similaires. Par ailleurs, les discours en faveur du droit au mariage ont été analysés avec soin. L’émergence de cette revendication a aussi été mise en perspective sur le plan historique, ce qui implique de réfléchir aux modalités de transformation des mouvements LGBT au cours des trente dernières années. Pour terminer, la notion de citoyenneté sexuelle a été interrogée et la manière dont l’accès à la citoyenneté a été posé a été examinée à partir du concept de resignification proposé par Judith Butler. <p><p><p>This dissertation looks at LGBT movements in Belgium, France and Spain through a double comparison (between cases and through time), which also takes into account transnational and international exchanges and influences. It investigates the simultaneous emergence and development of same-sex marriage claims in these countries, examining convergences in the content of the claims and the timing of protest. Therefore, it looks at convergences at the level of social movements, unlike most of the literature, which focuses on convergences in public policies. This specific research interests implies building an analytical model based on the literature on social movements, public policies and international relations (influence of international norms). It has also required a genealogical account of the development of same-sex marriage claims in each country from the end of the eighties until now. The comparison is based on the most different systems design method, and an extensive field work combining archives analysis and interviews has been carried out. This dissertation confirms the importance of taking into account international and transnational exchanges and influences to understand domestic politics, and insists on the crucial influence of transnational networking on social movements claims. It also discloses some cases of diffusion between social movements and shows how common characteristics and constraints may induce social movements to make similar but independent decisions. Discourses in favour of same-sex marriage have been carefully analysed, and the emergence of this claim has been put into a historical perspective. This implies a reflection on the transformations of the LGBT movement over the last thirty years. Finally, this dissertation interrogates the notion of sexual citizenship and examines the specific mechanisms through which access to citizenship has been proposed, discussing Judith Butler’s concept of resignification. <p><p> / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished