While research indicates that children reared in households headed by lesbian parents are no more likely to be teased or bullied than children from other households, lesbian mothers feel it is necessary to socialize their children as if they were. Twenty lesbian mothers with at least one child between the ages of eight months and 17 years old from the central Texas area were selected for this study. The mothers came from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and diverse socioeconomic statuses. This study was qualitative in nature, using primarily grounded theory methods. The mothers were interviewed using a semi-structured format regarding their socialization strategies. Themes emerging from the interviews were that mothers went to great lengths to secure parenthood. They engaged in both direct and indirect socialization strategies. They considered their children to be members of the gay community and emphasized contact with 'families like theirs.' They felt that their families were normal yet possessed some distinct advantages and had some unique concerns. Finally, they had egalitarian relationships in terms of the division of paid labor, household tasks, and childcare, with a focus on spending the most amount of time possible with their children. Racial and ethnic socialization literature was used as a framework for this study. The similarity between participant's responses and racial and ethnic socialization theory led to the development of a model of "Alternative Family Socialization." Similar to racial or ethnic socialization, "Alternative Family Socialization" involves preparing minority children to thrive in the majority culture. Mothers stated that they prepare their children for bias by encouraging them to take pride in their family, accessing support from the gay community, encouraging the development of positive self-concepts, encouraging open communication, and teaching them how to access support. Future directions for research include further development of the model of "Alternative Family Socialization" such as how this model might explain gay men rearing children. Also future research focusing on how children of lesbian parents perceive themselves within the gay community is suggested. / text

This thesis is focused on the commercialization of the Atlanta Pride Festival during the years 1992-1997. Through personal interviews, I have concluded that the Atlanta Pride Festival produced complicated experiences for participants who had mixed feelings about the commercialization.

Our current social climate suggests that there is greater tolerance and acceptance of lesbians than ever before. There is evidence to suggest that gays and lesbians are becoming fully integrated into mainstream culture. Gay and lesbian characters are now regular media features with entire television shows such as The L-Word constructed around “lesbian” characters. Social acceptance of same sex sexual behavior has become such that celebrities such as Madonna and Britney Spears can kiss each other on national television to the titillation and amused delight of straight viewers. Perhaps the biggest indicator of increased acceptability of gays and lesbians is Canada’s 2005 change in marriage laws, now granting marriage licenses to same sex couples. Despite these seeming advances to gay and lesbian equality, I contend that rather than cause for celebration, these developments are simply a modern spin on an old tactic – a reformulated method of assimilating and “normalizing” lesbians. The greater acceptance afforded to lesbians today is at least in part, a result of media images that commodify lesbians as reproductions of Hollywood straight women. Within this context it seems that few lesbians today, and even fewer young lesbians self identify as butch. My hypothesis is that if lesbian feminism was the old threat to butch identity, the shunning of identity and the appeal of inclusivity within the neo-liberal, capitalist paradigm is perhaps the new. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis and a feminist methodology, this thesis analyses historical and contemporary discourses related to lesbian subjectivity to explicate how butch identity is being made to disappear within North American lesbian communities. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Catholic University of America, 2007. / Adviser: Karlynn BrintzenhofeSzoc. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In 2006 South Africa extended marriage rights to gay and lesbian citizens, further signposting their legal inclusion in the post-apartheid order. This inclusion is marked by homophobic murder, signifying the continued social exclusion of those at the sexual margins. The spectre of murder is a political pressure point that has come to dominate local and global imaginaries of queer life in South Africa. This study of violence, sexuality and politics is located in the marriage-murder moment, which signals the paradox of being queer in contemporary South Africa. Against this backdrop, the study explores how lesbian subjectivities are constituted in the discourse of ‘violence against lesbians’; what this reveals and conceals about sexual, gender, race and class identities in post-apartheid South Africa; and what such discursive arrangements render (im)possible in relation to how homophobia-related violence might be politically resisted. Violence against lesbians is approached as a discursive surface for the production of meanings, identities and power, with a focus on its productive dimensions in constituting subjectivity and politics. The contending ways of knowing ‘lesbians’ and the violence they encounter produce the imaginable actions against it. Grounded in feminist post-structuralism, and queer and post- colonial theories, a discourse analysis was undertaken of data from focus groups with lesbian-identified women, media texts, and ‘official’ texts from activist organisations and public institutions. The findings show that homophobia-related violence is a contested discursive terrain wherein normative power relations of sexuality, gender, race and class are both reproduced and resisted. Largely staged around black women as victims and black men as perpetrators, violence is understood in highly sexualised, racialised, classed and gendered registers that draw on apartheid and colonial tropes. In particular, the discourse of sexuality articulates with a politics of race within homophobia-related violence as a knowledge regime. This is seen in the ‘blackwashing’ of homophobia and its discursive mobilisations to make racial attributions – intersected with sexuality, class and gender – about the causes and characters of, and ‘cures’ for, violence. Discursive investments in the spectacle of violence against lesbians, as a particularised form of black and queer suffering, deflect attention away from the social conditions in which violence – as an instrument of power – finds form. The spectacularisation of violence against black lesbians legitimises the ‘naturalness’ of homophobia, disarticulating it from the multiple modes of violent othering with which it is imbricated. In exploring the discursive resources for political agency against violence, the study finds divergent forms of agentic possibility. Some subject positions seek to adapt or regulate gendered behaviour through the promotion of feminised self-care strategies that individualise and depoliticise violence. Others assume homonormalising discourses that bolster gender, race and class hegemonies and their associated queer ascendancies. At the same time, the normalisation of violence and the regulatory practices that seek to constrain lesbian subjectivities are contested. A politics of law and order provides a dominant frame through which violence and conceivable actions against it are constructed. Through a discourse of hate crime, the cause of violence is individualised, and the law and the state are positioned as central to its prevention and punishment. In contrast, activist discourses locate the causes of violence within prevailing power relations that continue to render queers racially and economically precarious. The findings point to how violence against lesbians operates as a marker of queer inclusion and exclusion. Violence against lesbians does the work of race, gender, sexuality and class hierarchisation within the dominant social order. It both settles and unsettles apartheid rationalities, and, in doing so, exposes the contingency and precarity of queer subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa. The findings suggest that homophobia-related violence charts a story of differentiation, both amongst queers themselves and in their relationship to others. These differentiations have race, gender, sexual and class coordinates which, together and apart, assert particular views of what constitutes queer livability on the one hand, and queer violability on the other. Whilst some discursive frames for countering violence provide liberatory potential, others constitute new forms of regulation, scrutiny and disciplining of queer subjects. The study aims to contribute to the production of knowledge that might, in the face of violence, re-imagine power and advance the political aspirations of marginalised subjectivities.

Cette thèse doctorale constitue le recueil de trois études. Deux d’entre elles contribuent à la littérature s’intéressant aux dynamiques et aux corrélats de la violence entre partenaires intimes de même sexe (VPIMS), par l’intermédiaire de données testant des hypothèses à l’intersection de la théorie de l’attachement et de la VPIMS. Entre la première et la troisième étude se trouve une étude de validation psychométrique d’un questionnaire portant sur la confiance dyadique, utilisé dans l’Étude 3. Globalement, le but de cette thèse est l’examen de liens proposés entre l’attachement insécurisé et la perpétration et/ou la victimisation de violence physique, psychologique et sexuelle chez les individus en dyade de même sexe. Ces liens sont bien soutenus dans la littérature théorique et empirique s’intéressant à la violence conjugale hétérosexuelle (voir Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016), mais restent à être testés de façon approfondie lorsqu’il s’agit de la VPIMS. La première étude s’intéresse à l’examen détaillé des contributions respectives des systèmes d’attachement et d’offre de soutien en matière de perpétration et de victimisation de violence physique et psychologique de même sexe. Les résultats provenant d’analyses hiérarchiques de régression soulignent des taux de variance substantiels partagés entre chacune des dimensions d’attachement insécurisé, de soutien et de VPIMS. L’évitement et la proximité se sont démarqués en apportant des contributions indépendantes au-delà des autres dimensions d’attachement et de soutien. En considérant le chevauchement important entre les dimensions d’attachement et de soutien, ainsi que les contributions indépendantes de l’évitement et de la proximité, la réduction factorielle des six dimensions d’attachement et de soutien (soit, l’anxiété, l’évitement, la proximité, la sensibilité, le contrôle et le soutien compulsif) a été tentée. Deux composantes principales ont été extraites, soit, l’hyperactivation et la désactivation. Ces dernières ont été mises en relation avec la VPIMS par le biais d’une deuxième série d’analyses hiérarchiques. Les résultats qui en découlent soulignent des variances partagées entre l’hyperactivation, la désactivation et la VPIMS, et que ces variances partagées apportent chacune leur contribution indépendante. Par soucis de rigueur méthodologique destinés à favoriser l’utilisation de questionnaires validés, la deuxième étude vise la validation psychométrique de la Dyadic Trust Scale auprès d’individus en relation de même sexe. La structure factorielle de ce questionnaire a été testée par analyse factorielle confirmatoire, afin d’évaluer si elle demeure unidimensionnelle lorsqu’elle est administrée aux individus en dyades de même sexe. Les résultats obtenus soulignent que la structure unidimensionnelle de la mesure originale a pu être répliquée avec l’échantillon recruté. La fidélité de cette mesure s’est avérée excellente. Globalement, cette mesure semble être appropriée pour évaluer la confiance dyadique chez les individus en relation de même sexe. La troisième et dernière étude propose un modèle théorique dans lequel la confiance dyadique et l’intimité sexuelle agissent comment médiateurs sériels de la relation directe entre l’attachement insécurisé et la perpétration de VPIMS sexuelle. Les résultats issus de procédures bootstrapping soutiennent le modèle proposé dans son intégralité. L’attachement insécurisé (c.-à-d., l’anxiété ou l’évitement) était directement associé à la perpétration de VPIMS sexuelle. Les trajectoires indirectes propres à la confiance dyadique et à l’intimité sexuelle étaient soutenues, et les résultats soutiennent également l’existence d’une médiation double et sérielle entre l’attachement, la confiance dyadique, l’intimité sexuelle et la VPIMS sexuelle perpétrée.

This project is an invitation for lesbians within Metropolitan Community Churches to speak the truth of their lived experiences, describe their experiences and encounters with God, and through that, create a lesbian theology. This author has observed that even in welcoming faith communities such as Metropolitan Community Churches, lesbian voices are missing from theological conversation. By critically engaging with various feminist, women’s, and queer theologies, this project envisions the modification of a Holy Conversations resource created by Metropolitan Community Churches that will consider how lesbians encounter God in various aspects of their lives. This author hopes that the creation of a lesbian theological resource will encourage other marginalized communities to speak of their God experiences and to create theologies that will connect them with God and with others.

Theoretical You is a collection of autobiographical queer love poems told from the perspective of a single speaker. These love poems speak not only to lovers and exes, but also to lust and sex and desire, to the speaker's father (they do not reciprocate the cruelty he has shown her--they are neither malicious nor vindictive), and perhaps most importantly, to the speaker herself--she recognizes herself as a lesbian, as a human, who deserves to love and be loved. While love is the crux of these poems, the collection is just as much about heartbreak (which is, of course, inevitably tied to love, is the consequence of love), heartbreak others have inflicted on the speaker and heartbreak she has inflicted on herself, having walked out on many of the women she addresses in the collection. The poems work to navigate the challenges of heartbreak by confronting homophobia, familial rejection, gender binaries and the appearance norms tied to them, as well as the grief that comes with simply being unable to stop missing someone. Here is a young woman who still loves every woman she has ever been with, who has so much love to give, who has a father who refuses to accept her, in a world that is often cruel. All of this together creates the complicated situation of being perpetually heartbroken, even when the speaker is happily in a relationship, even though she has learned to love herself. / Master of Fine Arts

Previous studies have suggested that gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals may be at increased risk for symptoms of depression and suicidality, but little empirical investigation to date has attempted to make clearer the stressors or factors that are associated with the development of symptoms. This study explores the roles of identity development as a sexual minority individual and the acculturative process in terms of the impact of interaction with heterosexual culture as predictors of depressive and suicidal symptoms. In addition, other psychosocial variable that have been previously associated with suicidality in other minority groups were tested as mediators between gay cultural identity and depressive and suicidal symptoms. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual college students were recruited for participation through social groups specific to this population. Results indicated that gay cultural identity was associated with depressive and suicidal symptoms. Furthermore, social support was shown to mediate the relationship between gay cultural identity and symptoms. Both frequency of social contact and interpersonal quality of social support were included in the analyses, with the latter showing a stronger relationship to the outcome variables. These findings emphasize the importance of research investigating points of intervention and organized efforts to provide social support to gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth that may be most effective in the prevention of depressive and suicidal symptoms. / Ph. D.