While the general social climate in the U.S. has become more accepting and tolerant of sexual minority individuals, heterosexist discrimination, prejudice and violence continues to affect LGBT individuals, families and communities. While much research literature exists on the experience of minority stress and the psychological consequences of minority stress on sexual minorities, little research has been produced that examines sexual minority coping. Within the last decade, heteronegativity has been suggested as a possible coping response to heterosexism. The goal of the present study was to understand sexual minority responses to heterosexism (including heteronegativity) in a variety of contexts and circumstances. The present study involved individual interviews with twelve adult, self-identified sexual minority participants. Utilizing Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR), an inductive qualitative methodology of data analysis, eight domains were discerned from examining the experiences of lesbian and gay men’s coping with heterosexist individuals, systems and environments. These domains were: (a) assessing sexual orientation in context; (b) observation of change; (c) messages/social influences; (d) social systems; (e) categorizing; (f) empowerment; (g) resignation; and (h) equality. Eight subcategories existed under the domain of assessing sexual orientation in context: family, childhood, coming out, heterosexuals, work, harassment, acquaintances, and general. The domain observation of change yielded six subcategories: general, personal, advocates of change, heterosexuals, family, and gay and lesbian community. Under the domain of messages/social influences, six subcategories existed: general messages, peers, heterosexuals, gender roles, media, and family. Five subcategories contributed to the domain of social systems and include: religious institutions, educational systems and institutions, political parties, systems and institutions, media and general. In terms of how individuals categorized others, the fifth domain, six subcategories constituted this phenomenon: general categorizing, social institutions, challenged assumptions, gender roles, beliefs about heterosexuals, and gay and lesbian. Empowerment is a domain comprised of five subcategories: disengagement, coming out, advocate, engagement, and values/beliefs. Four subcategories contributed to understanding the domain of resignation: avoiding confrontation, rationalizing, pressure, and suppression. And under the domain of equality, two subcategories were explicated: parity and social institutions. Results of the study were consistent with aspects of minority stress including stigma consciousness and stigma and self-esteem. One important contribution of the findings from the present study reveals three overarching components to coping with heterosexism. These components were discernment, disclosure and concealment, and self-empowerment. Implications for trainees, educators, and practitioners were outlined.

The purpose of this research was to look into the issues one might encounter as a gay and lesbian Muslim with especial focus on the individual experience. I was interested in analyzing the dynamics of one's sexual identity interconnecting with one's religious identity with the assistance of identity theory, personality and culture concepts. I interviewed three different individuals who are all practicing Muslims and live openly as gay in their community, and gathered secondary resources to gain insights from gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims from other communities. The research disclosed individuals’ perceptions on the legitimacy of homosexuality in Islam and their lived experiences regarding their sexuality and the role their culture has played. / <p>Presentationen skedde genom Skype där lärarna satt i Uppsala och jag själv vid datorn hemma, boende i Paris, Frankrike. </p>

An extensive review of the existing literature makes apparent that academics who study intimate partner violence focus primarily on physical violence in heterosexual relationships. Non-physical forms of abuse receive secondary attention, despite reported claims from survivors that non-physical forms of abuse are more common, more painful, and have longer lasting effects than physical forms of abuse. The dominant focus on intimate partner violence as a social problem enacted by males on their female partners results in a lack of sufficient literature or conversation pertaining to abuse that exists outside these parameters. Members of sexual minority groups are deliberately excluded from the mainstream movement to protect and support survivors of intimate partner violence. Influenced by these realizations, this research explores the dynamics of non-physical forms of intimate partner violence in lesbian relationships; particularly the ways survivors frame the abuse and their experiences with seeking help.

Television is a mirror of society and in which we hope to see our lives and existence reflected. When the images shown marginalises your reflection through the use of stereotypes and common tropes it is hard to believe this does not affect the world around you and your perception about yourself. Television is vastly researched and this case study will add to it by analysing how lesbian and bisexual relationships are stereotyped through the use of tropes on Western television shows. Semiotics is used to decipher the underlying meanings of stereotypes and tropes; as stereotypes and tropes marginalise groups of people. By using visual analysis to watch episodes, the scenes analysed through qualitative content analysis proved that same-sex relationships are stereotyped through tropes and rarely challenge previous research. Social interaction based on representation theory solidify the perceptions through television images causing further harm to lesbians and bisexuals.

Com a discussão sobre as pautas LGBT vigentes na sociedade brasileira, no início do século XXI, encontram-se no teatro, diferentes temáticas que abordam aspectos do universo homoafetivo sobre diversas perspectivas. Entretanto, é possível observar que estes espetáculos contemplam identidades gays, trans e queer, enquanto pouco se fala sobre as temáticas lésbicas. Sendo o teatro um espaço simbólico de transformações sociais, a representatividade das pautas lésbicas se torna um assunto primordial a ser pensado e discutido como um meio de construção de memória e visibilidade na Pós-Modernidade, já que dialoga com a sociedade em geral, bem como com os Estudos Culturais. É nesta dimensão que se discute a visibilidade das temáticas lésbicas em contraponto a quantidade de produções de peças que abarcam a representatividade de outras identidades que se enquadram na categoria LGBT. Seguindo a corrente Pós-Estruturalista, a metodologia adotada é o construcionismo, de caráter qualitativo, utilizando da análise de práticas discursivas. Para tanto, adotou-se como procedimento um levantamento de peças com temáticas LGBT, servindo-se do banco de dados OFF Guia de Teatro SP, com a coleta de dados de espetáculos decorrentes do período 2012 a 2018. Foram realizadas também seis entrevistas semiestruturadas com atrizes que atuaram em alguns desses espetáculos catalogados. Como resultado, compreende-se que existe uma visibilidade das temáticas lésbicas no teatro, do ponto de vista da interação e envolvimento do público, capaz de causar transformações sociais, mas que ainda é limitada pela reprodução da heteronormatividade e do machismo estrutural manifestado por meio da hegemonia gay, resultando, principalmente, na falta de incentivo e investimentos por produtores culturais / With the discussion about the current LGBT agenda in the Brazilian society, at the beginning of the 21st century, different themes that approach aspects of the homo affective universe in different perspectives were found in the theater. However, it is possible to observe that these spectacles contemplate gay, transsexual and queer identities, while little is said about the lesbian themes. Since the theater is a symbolic space of social transformations, the representativeness of the lesbian agenda becomes a primordial subject to be thought of and discussed about as a means of building memory and visibility in postmodernity, since it dialogues with the society in general, as well as with Cultural Studies. It is in this dimension that the visibility of lesbian themes is discussed in counterpoint to the quantity of productions of pieces that encompass the representativeness of other identities that fall into the LGBT category. Following the poststructuralist flow, the methodology adopted is constructionism, of qualitative character, using the analysis of discursive practices. To do so, it was adopted, as a procedure, a collection of LGBT-themed pieces, using the database OFF - Guia de Teatro SP, with the gathering of data from shows within the period from 2012 to 2018. Six semi-interviews were also conducted - structured with actresses who acted in some of these cataloged shows. As a result, it is understood that there is a visibility of lesbian themes in the theater, from the point of view of interaction and public involvement, capable of causing social transformations, but still limited by the reproduction of hetero normativeness and structural chauvinism manifested through gay hegemony, resulting, mainly, in the lack of incentive and investments by cultural producers

Thesis advisor: William A. Gamson / In 2006, Mariane Valverde announced the birth of what she called, “a new type in the history of sexuality” (155), the Respectable Same-Sex Couple. This work analyzes newspaper coverage of same-sex couples during the Massachusetts campaign for marriage equality to explore the content of and contours around that new socio-sexual category. The processes involved in the incorporation of lesbians and gay men into the governing relations of American society are used to explain the development of this type, and its replacement of the pathological Homosexual. The manufacture of respectability by movement activists is explored via the selection of “public face couples” as a framing strategy that links the lives of these couples to marriage itself and the hardships they suffer due to their inability to marry. The respectability of these couples and their incorporation as economic citizens is also linked to representations of professional status, upward mobility, economic success, and the creation of identity-based markets through entrepreneurial and consumptive practices. Boundaries around this respectability are evident in stories of failure, either to remain together as couples or to act in accordance with marital normative standards, while the boundaries between Heterosexuality and Homosexuality, and among and between same-sex and different-sex couples, are also being re-drawn as marriage becomes available. The broader historical transformation of lesbian and gay life is discusses in the development of new life-scripts becoming available. While these transformations have led to greater possibilities for the living of gay and lesbian lives, the absorption of these lives into governing relations also erases and expels other queer life practices and reinforces other forms of social inequality and injustice. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

O estudo da literatura e de objetos artísticos, por um viés da teoria Semiótica greimasiana, prevê que todo sentido é gerado a partir de articulações semióticas que arquitetam um discurso presente em todo e qualquer texto. Desse modo, o presente trabalho propõe uma análise semiótica da autobiografia em quadrinhos de Alison Bechdel, Fun Home:Uma tragicomédia em família. Por meio da metodologia da Semiótica francesa, a presente análise descreve os artifícios discursivos de persuasão do gênero autobiográfico utilizados pela quadrinista norte-americana para convencer o leitor de que está diante de uma história real. Tais artifícios apontam para uma aproximação da realidade por meio de efeitos de sentido predominantemente referenciais. No entanto, Bechdel (2007b) complexifica tal aproximação, ficcionalizando seus personagens por meio da literatura, não só pela própria natureza do enunciado, mas também como artifício discursivo no interior do texto. Além do gênero autobiográfico, analisa-se a estrutura dos quadrinhos e os efeitos de sentido produzidos pelo sincretismo inerente ao gênero, isto é, a relação entre texto verbal e texto visual. Também é analisada a temática lésbica que permeia todo o enunciado e a rede discursiva polêmica que problematiza. Na obra de Bechdel encontram-se, portanto, as relações entre o gênero autobiográfico, a sua textualização por meio do sistema dos quadrinhos e a pertinência entre eles para a literatura que abrange a temática lésbica. / The study of literature and art objects from the standpoint of the Greimasian Semiotic Theory indicates that all meaning is generated from semiotic articulations that construct a discourse in any given text. Thus, this study proposes a semiotic analysis of Alison Bechdels graphic autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Through the methodology of French semiotics, this analysis describes the discursive devices of persuasion of the autobiographical genre used by the North American cartoonist to convince the reader that they are faced with a real story. Such devices point to an approximation of reality through predominantly referential meaning effects. However, Bechdel (2007b) complicates such an approximation, fictionalizing her characters through literature, not only due to the nature of the utterance, but also as a discursive device within the text. Besides the autobiographical genre, we analyze the structure of comics and the meaning effects produced by the syncretism inherent in the genre, that is, the relationship between verbal text and visual text. Also analyzed are the lesbian issues that permeate the whole utterance and the controversial discursive network that it examine. The proposal is to open a dialogue between language studies, sexuality studies and gender studies. In Bechdel\'s work there is, therefore, the relationship between the autobiographical genre, its textualization through the system of comics and their relevance for a literature encompassing lesbian issues.

Née en 1935, Monique Wittig est aujourd’hui célèbre surtout grâce à ses textes théoriques, mais elle est aussi l’autrice d’une œuvre littéraire éclectique, complexe et subversive. Au centre de de sa production littéraire et théorique, il y a le corps. Tout d’abord, nous nous proposons donc d’étudier la relation entre corps du texte et corps humain dans l’œuvre de l’autrice. L’attention que Wittig focalise sur le corps est strictement liée à son idée de langage. À son avis, la langue peut opérer une « plastie » sur la réalité et, de la même manière, les mots ont un côté matériel qui touche notre vie quotidienne. De plus, le langage peut nous heurter et il joue un rôle précis dans la construction des injustices sociales. Ma thèse vise donc à sonder cette violence langagière qui est véhiculée par les textes littéraires et par le langage quotidien. Finalement, nous nous proposons d’analyser le personnage lesbien qui peuple les livres de Wittig. Le corps de ce protagoniste est traditionnellement monstrueux et effrayant : Wittig se réapproprie cette tradition afin de démontrer dans quelle mesure les corps lesbiens sont au même temps vulnérables et puissants. Bref, le personnage lesbien de Monique Wittig n’est pas seulement la femme qui aime une autre femme, mais il est un être humain qui échappe à toute norme hétérosexiste et dont le corps est à la fois heurté par les mots et grâce aux mots peut devenir puissant. / Even if Monique Wittig was a very talented writer, she has been especially studied as an essayist. At the center of both her fictional and political universes is the human body. First of all, I intend to examine the relationship between the body of the text and the human body described in the text. The attention that Wittig pays to the body of the text is interrelated to her idea of language. According to her, language can operate a “plastic surgery” on reality. In the same way, the book as an object and the act of reading can operate on the perception of one’s identity and body. In other words, the language has a material side that affects our everyday life. It can seem a banal statement, but Wittig goes further in her thought: words hurt us and cooperate in the development of social injustices and class hierarchies. On account of this, my research aims to investigate this particular kind of violence that literary texts and common language perform on our bodies. Finally, Wittig’s lesbian characters will be analyzed in the last part of my work. The body of this peculiar lesbian protagonist is traditionally represented as ambiguously monstrous and scary. Wittig takes this tradition back and she manipulates it in order to show how lesbian bodies are vulnerable and strong at the same time. In short, Wittig’s lesbian characters are not simply women who love other women: they are people who do not fit in the heteronormative binary system and whose bodies are made of and from words, and it is through words that they can create a different reality.

"Queer Things" takes the connections between homosexuality and materiality, and those between literary texts and cultural objects, as major repositories of queer history. It scrutinizes the objects that circulate within the works of Oscar Wilde as well as in the output of high fashion designers and the critics and consumers who engaged with them, in order to ask how gay identities and affiliations are formed and expressed through things. Bringing recent critical interest in the subtleties of nineteenth-century "thing culture" into contact with queer theory, I argue that the crowded Victorian object-world was a crucial location not only for the formation of social attitudes about homosexuality, but also for the cultivation of homosexuality's distinctive aesthetics and affective styles. In attending to the queer pleasures activated by material attachments that have otherwise been deployed or disavowed as stereotypes, my project reconsiders some of the most celebrated works of the gay canon, and inserts into it some compelling new ones. Furthermore, in illuminating the Victorian origins of modern gay style and the incipiently modern gayness of Victorian style, it adds nuance and new substance to our understanding of the elaborate material landscapes inhabited by Victorian bodies and represented in Victorian texts. The first part of the dissertation uses extensive archival research to excavate a history of queer men's involvement in women's fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. In the first chapter, juxtaposing accounts of the famous Boulton and Park drag scandal with a simultaneously emerging genre of overwrought fashion criticism, I argue that an (over)investment in fashionable objects and a detailed knowledge of fashionability became important sites for the develop of gay-effeminate social styles. The second chapter positions Charles Worth, founder of the modern system of haute couture, as the progenitor of a queer species of cross-gendered, non-heterosexual relations between male high-fashion designers and female clients. Though they are not based on same-sex eroticism, I argue that these relations deserve consideration as queer. The second part of the dissertation considers the representational functions of objects in several works across the career of Oscar Wilde. The third chapter presents a reading of De Profundis, Wilde's infamously hard-to-read prison letter, which focuses on how the text interweaves anxieties about the transmission of material objects into its complex affective structure. The fourth chapter considers the effects of the risky but irresistible attractions of that letter's addressee, the widely-loathed Bosie Douglas, on Wilde's aesthetic practice. Juxtaposing Bosie's charms with those of Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, and then moving to the little-read letters which document the final post-prison years of Wilde's life, I suggest that the frustrating states of intemperance and indolence become sites, for Wilde, of erotic excitement, artistic innovation, and political resistance.

O estudo da literatura e de objetos artísticos, por um viés da teoria Semiótica greimasiana, prevê que todo sentido é gerado a partir de articulações semióticas que arquitetam um discurso presente em todo e qualquer texto. Desse modo, o presente trabalho propõe uma análise semiótica da autobiografia em quadrinhos de Alison Bechdel, Fun Home:Uma tragicomédia em família. Por meio da metodologia da Semiótica francesa, a presente análise descreve os artifícios discursivos de persuasão do gênero autobiográfico utilizados pela quadrinista norte-americana para convencer o leitor de que está diante de uma história real. Tais artifícios apontam para uma aproximação da realidade por meio de efeitos de sentido predominantemente referenciais. No entanto, Bechdel (2007b) complexifica tal aproximação, ficcionalizando seus personagens por meio da literatura, não só pela própria natureza do enunciado, mas também como artifício discursivo no interior do texto. Além do gênero autobiográfico, analisa-se a estrutura dos quadrinhos e os efeitos de sentido produzidos pelo sincretismo inerente ao gênero, isto é, a relação entre texto verbal e texto visual. Também é analisada a temática lésbica que permeia todo o enunciado e a rede discursiva polêmica que problematiza. Na obra de Bechdel encontram-se, portanto, as relações entre o gênero autobiográfico, a sua textualização por meio do sistema dos quadrinhos e a pertinência entre eles para a literatura que abrange a temática lésbica. / The study of literature and art objects from the standpoint of the Greimasian Semiotic Theory indicates that all meaning is generated from semiotic articulations that construct a discourse in any given text. Thus, this study proposes a semiotic analysis of Alison Bechdels graphic autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Through the methodology of French semiotics, this analysis describes the discursive devices of persuasion of the autobiographical genre used by the North American cartoonist to convince the reader that they are faced with a real story. Such devices point to an approximation of reality through predominantly referential meaning effects. However, Bechdel (2007b) complicates such an approximation, fictionalizing her characters through literature, not only due to the nature of the utterance, but also as a discursive device within the text. Besides the autobiographical genre, we analyze the structure of comics and the meaning effects produced by the syncretism inherent in the genre, that is, the relationship between verbal text and visual text. Also analyzed are the lesbian issues that permeate the whole utterance and the controversial discursive network that it examine. The proposal is to open a dialogue between language studies, sexuality studies and gender studies. In Bechdel\'s work there is, therefore, the relationship between the autobiographical genre, its textualization through the system of comics and their relevance for a literature encompassing lesbian issues.