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Maria McCann paints a dark picture of masculinity and its effects in her novel As Meat Loves Salt (2001). The violent Jacob Cullen struggles with his masculinity as he faces the intricacies of religion, sexuality and politics in the midst of the English Civil War where he falls in love with fellow soldier Christopher Ferris. By using R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt’s framework for the hierarchy of masculinities, I explore masculinities on local, regional and global levels and emphasized femininity in a close reading of McCann’s novel. My aim is not only to analyse the masculinities of the novel but also to use the framework to redefine toxic masculinity in order to make it a useable concept when analysing masculinities in literature. I redefine toxic masculinity because it lacks a clear definition anchored in an established framework used to study masculinity that does not see masculinity as inherently toxic. I believe that anchoring it to Connell and Messerschmidt’s framework will make it a useable concept. Due to the novel’s relationship to the Bible, I will use masculinity studies done on David and Jesus from the Bible to compare and reveal similarities with the masculinities in the novel, how they appear on the local, regional and global levels in the novel and its effects. I draw parallels between the love story in As Meat Loves Salt to the love story of David and Jonathan in the Bible by using queer readings of David and Jonathan in order to explore how masculinity affects the relationships and how the novel uses these two love stories as a study of toxic masculinity and how it relates it to hegemonic masculinity.

This dissertation takes musical theatre seriously as a historiographic practice, and considers six musicals that take the past as their subject matter in order to interrogate how these works craft their historical narratives. While there have been studies of historical drama and performance, musicals have generally been left out of that conversation, despite (or perhaps because of) their immense popularity. This project argues that not only can musicals “do” history, they offer an excellent genre for theorizing what I call “queer historiography.” While sexuality remains one category of analysis, I use “queer” to signify opposition, not simply to heterosexuality, but to heteronormativity, and normativity more broadly. Musicals’ queer historiography, then, is a way of engaging past events that challenges normativity in form as well as content; a way of productively challenging not only what we think we know about the past, but how we come to know it. Each chapter uses a different theoretical lens to guide close readings of a pair of thematically linked musicals. The first chapter considers 1776 (1969) and Assassins (1991, 2004) as challenges to official narratives of United States history. My primary lens in this chapter is form, as I analyze how musicals’ structures influence their queer historiographic potential. Chapter 2 examines two musicals that offer histories of U.S. popular culture, Gypsy (1959) and Hairspray (2002), considering how the placement of divas at the center of each show enables a historiography that is feminist as well as queer, challenging ideas about gender and sexuality while making women central to the histories they represent. In the third chapter I look to two musicals, Falsettos (1992) and Elegies: A Song Cycle (2003), which present histories of trauma while featuring overtly gay, lesbian, and queer characters. I use these two texts to theorize how musicals might not simply present history as it “really” was, but also as it might have been, thereby offering what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms a “reparative reading” of history. In examining each of my six case studies, I analyze specific performances as well as written texts whenever possible. / text

On April 30, 1997, for the first time in television history, an actress on a popular television sitcom announced to the world that both se and the character she played were lesbians. This study offers an interpretation of the significance of Ellen DeGeneres' coming through a cultural studies analysis of the April 14, 1997 Time magazine article in which DeGeneres comes out and the April 30, 1997 "Ellen" television episode in which DeGeneres brings her character, Ellen Morgan, out. The study revealed sites of ideological differences between the two texts that could point to a struggle over the meaning of gayness in modern American society. The results suggest that mainstream attitudes and beliefs could be in the process of shifting toward a more normalized view of homosexuality.

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