My project looks at current conceptualizations of identity relating to gender and sexuality in order to understand how queer individuals enact gender as connected to their non-normative sexuality. I will use the notion of "desire" through Butler's (1990) notion of performativity as a part of iterability that reproduces an opposition between what is intended and how it is perceived. This approach creates space to problematize the status of identities that posits the conception of fluidity and dialectic as attached to notions of gendered sexualities - the understanding that sexuality interacts with gender and that these two notions are not compartmentalized. The construction of these systems of categorization allows for an assumption of the role of sexuality as connected to gender that can then be read through discursive practices and performances. This research is placed within a post-structuralist and queer theory discussion that is used to understand identity as separate from an isolated core self and is rather comprehended through a particular connection of gender, sex, desire, and performance. By entering into a queer theory and post-structuralist discussion, this project aims to highlight ways in which gender and sex are not necessarily "intelligible" - in which one's gender enactment follows their sex, which then leads them to be attracted to the "opposite" sex/gender - and by doing so I will be able to understand how non-heterosexuals understand their own sexualized gender. The categories of gender and desire are not mutually exclusive nor are they dichotomous. According to Butler (1990), the heterosexual matrix addresses the power structures associated with hegemonic modes of discourse and thought; therefore, my project embraces this approach to gender and sexuality and how these understandings create a unique performance of repetition that further constructs an identity. This study specializes in the reformulation and re-articulation of a distinct consciousness of compounded identities that are comprised of a sexualized gender involving the performative interplay of sexuality on gender for queer individuals. In addition, this project seeks to understand how queer individuals form, understand, perform, and enact their evolving gender identity as connected to their sexuality. Specifically my research asks: 1) How do queer individuals narrate the construction of their particular identities? 2) How do queer individuals enact their gender as connected to sexuality? and 3) How do queer individuals describe their identities as marginalized? In order to answer these questions I conducted 20 interviews with queer individuals in Portland, OR aged 18-35 in order to get a broad range of life experiences. The use of one-on-one interviews allowed me to get at the interpretative perspective of the participant such that they can clarify the connections and relationships they see between their own sexualized gender enactment and the world around them. This also allowed access to acquire information about the social interplay of gender, sex, and desire and how these individuals may or may not place importance on their queer identity and the processes involved.

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This thesis is an examination of the representation of trans characters like Bridget from GuiltyGear Strive(2021). By analyzing trans representation in movies and games, the typical tropesof trans characters were found, and conducting a close reading of the visual design of Bridgetto see where she represents and differs from these tropes. The results of the close readingfound that Bridget's shape language conveys a harmless appearance, differing from the tropeof violence. The color scheme conveys harmonious and youthful, contrasting trope ofdysphoria. Bridget's cute appearance makes her similar to the trope of ambiguity. Bridget'suse of toys as weapons makes her comedic without becoming the butt of the joke. Bridget isnot treated as disgusting nor focused on the male gaze. This thesis concludes that Bridgetmainly differs by not being as adult-oriented, showing it can represent trans identity withoutrelying on these negative tropes.

This dissertation argues for an ethical investment in the flourishing of black trans women. It builds on the ongoing work of womanist and black theological ethics and draws from the personal narratives of black trans women. Carrying forward the black ethical tradition, this project recognizes black trans women and their lived experiences as an ethical source from which a unique, ethical posture emerges: ploughing. Necessitated by a social context that understands black trans feminine existence as abject and expendable, this ethical posture is a necessarily dynamic and laborious movement through life that resists and disrupts the moral ground thereby revealing and creating new moral possibilities in the process. Ploughing shows how the everyday experiences of black trans existence embody moral postures of resistance to heteropatriarchal systems of surveillance and violence. Ploughing denotes a series of ethical postures that generate alternate moral capacities that embrace embodiment and underscore the centrality of community. Focusing on respectability politics, its influence on black (Christian) religious spaces, and the operations of Black Sexual Panopticism (BSP), a system wherein black sexuality is acculturated through surveillance, chapters 1 and 2 examine the long history of social narratives that regulated and disciplined black movement and sexuality in ways that later targeted black trans femininity. Chapter 3 turns to black aesthetics. It examines blues culture and its links to black gospel through gesture and performance, introducing interstitial performativity as a glimpse of the moral potential within black-constituted spaces that affirm black erotic expression. The remaining chapters develop ethical postures through the metaphor of ploughing, highlighting distinctive features of black trans women’s existence. Drawing on published personal narratives, Chapter 4 outlines the social realities that confine and relegate black trans femininity in service of oppressive demands for social order. Chapter 5 identifies four ethical postures -- claiming pleasure, humble un/knowing, incessant becoming, and “no mind” ethos -- that coalesce to form ploughing. These postures irrupt social expectations and forge new moral trails in the process. This project recognizes black trans women as moral exemplars largely overlooked in Christian ethics, and the moral imperative to prioritize black trans feminine futures.

In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins. Coming-of-age graphic novels in this category often depict complex engagements with trauma and history, and couple those depictions with the loss of attachments: the subjects represented in these texts usually do not belong. I make a case for productive spaces inside of the unbelonging represented in my chosen texts. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison finds multiple nodes of attachment with her deceased father through the process of writing his history. Importantly, none of those attachments require that she forgive him for past violences, or that she overwrite his life in order to shift focus onto the positive. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim features a protagonist, Skim, who is rendered an outcast because of her body, her hobbies, and eventually her process of mourning. Skim carves out a life that is survivable for her, and resists the compulsion to perform happiness while she does it. Charles Burns’s Black Hole depicts a group of teens who are excommunicated from their suburb after contracting a disfiguring, sexually transmitted disease, and who take to the woods in order to build a miniature, ad-hoc society for themselves. I concentrate on the question of precarity, and notice that safety and stability have a strong correlation with gender and sexuality: women and queers are overrepresented at the margins. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins. I focus, especially, on the way that people who are marginalized come to be that way, and I come to the conclusion that marginalized people suffer losses are that tied to different kinds of trauma. Sometimes those traumas are historical: like slavery, or internment. Sometimes they are personal, like ostracization from one’s community. And, finally, sometimes trauma comes from social systems: some subjects are pushed to the margins of society by the same forces that bring others into it. In the case of all of those types of trauma, I find a possibility for community: if people are sometimes marginalized, they are often resilient. The bulk of my dissertation tries to find where exclusions end, and make-shift communities begin.

This dissertation excavates the multifaceted intricacies surrounding the socioeconomic transformations of southeastern Syria, which subsequently was named Transjordan, from the late Ottoman period (circa 1840s) to the 1930s. Through a rigorous engagement with Marxism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, gender and queer theor(y/ies), and studies of “economic theology,” it reinterprets capital, not as a thing or as an illusion, but as the performative effect of the capitalization of networks of knowledge-power, or, in other words, as an intersubjectively (i.e., ideologically) agreed upon symbolization of the power relations that enable the bringing of future revenue into the present.The dissertation unfolds in three parts. The inaugural section, “Deconstructing Fantasies; (Re)Conceptualizing Capital,” problematizes foundational economic theories, scrutinizes capital’s ontological and theological underpinnings, and juxtaposes capitalization to sharīʿa’s moral cosmology. In doing so, it destabilizes conventional dichotomies between the economic and the political, probing deeply into capitalization’s metaphysical affinities with the metaphysics of modernity. The second part, “Explicating Capitalification,” foregrounds the structural transformations of the Ottoman Empire, dissecting its evolution in response to capitalistic imperatives. The narrative delves into the moral cosmologies that underpinned the Empire’s existence and the subsequent structural transformation of the empire, focusing particularly on fiscal centralization, the interplay of debt and power, and technologies of capitalification. This section interrogates the Ottoman Empire’s projects in southeastern Syria, excavating its endeavors in controlling the Bedouin, the implementation of education policies, and its intricate land codes and registration policies. In the third and final part, “Post-Ottoman Legacies,” the narrative transitions to spotlighting the residual colonial imprints on Transjordan’s emergent state structures and its intricate class formations. This part of the exploration takes a critical view of the Jordanian state’s production as an effect through colonizing mechanisms, mechanisms of colonization that limited production, and the performative aspects of class as an effect of citational practices. By focusing on different stratifications such as shaykhs, soldiers, and workers, this section demystifies the intricacies of class within the Transjordanian context, particularly in relation to the capitalization of land and debt-induced expropriation.

Queer theory emphasizes the circulation of power through sex-gender-sexuality systems to trace methods of normalization for the purposes of political intervention. Within literature, queer theory functions as a lens into historical gender and sexual ideologies. My thesis attempts to bridge queer theory with medieval studies to highlight queer and non-normative sensibilities within a particular medieval text: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales develops characters who straddle the line between the queer and the licit, and he creates situations that disrupt the expected hetero-normative, masculine ideology of medieval England. Queering Canterbury explores how queer-gender, queer-bashing, queer humor, and the queynte function within Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while relating the overarching struggle for masculinity and power.

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