São Paulo, Brazil is currently pursuing a project of creative urbanism. Though city rhetoric insists this project is rooted in tolerance of sexual diversity, I suggest that city policy effectively perpetuates normative conceptions of family and respectability. Using data gathered through a series of qualitative interviews with transgender and travesti individuals living in São Paulo, I argue that the straight time of São Paulo’s creative urbanism generates exclusionary temporalities and spatialities in the city that render travestis out of time and out of place. Furthermore, I argue that travestis use their capacity to enact shame through scandals to generate temporalities and spatialities of their own, ones not aligned with the reproductive, progressive futurity of straight time. In doing so, travestis participate in their own kind of creative urbanism and provide an affective challenge to the hetero- and homonormativity of São Paulo’s creative urban project. Building on recent scholarship in queer urbanism and affect, this thesis adds to critical efforts to understand how creative urbanism sexualizes space and time in contexts outside of EuroAmerica and how a queer theoretical approach contributes to critiques of progressive modernity.

The writings and life of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004) have had an immense impact in a variety of disciplines. Her oft-cited text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is included in many university courses’ reading lists for its contributions to discourses of hybridity, linguistics, intersectionality and women of color feminism, among others. Unfortunately, most scholars content themselves with the intricacies of Borderlands to the neglect of her corpus of work, which includes essays, books, edited volumes, children’s literature and fiction/autohistorias. This analysis presented here wishes to expand our understandings of Anzaldúa’s work by engaging with her pre- and post-Borderlands writings in an attempt to highlight the unrecognized contributions Anzaldúa offers to feminist theory, spirituality, spiritual activism, queer theory, expansive ideas of queerness and an articulation of alternative, non-Western epistemology. This project offers close readings of published and archival Anzaldúan text and draws parallels between her life and her writing.

The Problems of Protest and the Persistence of Domination: Social Movement Theory and Bourdieu’s Economy of Practice is a normative intervention into social movement theory and debates about social movement goals, strategies and tactics. The project asks: what normative implications derive from incorporating Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological framework into social movement research? My core arguments are that Bourdieu’s framework has the potential to sensitize activists and analysts to the tension between conformity and failure and that escaping radical/reformist debates requires working through this tension. The dissertation intervenes in social movement theory from within the critical theory tradition by refusing to separate empirical and normative questions. I develop my argument using two strategies. First, I undertake a close reading of Bourdieu’s most important works and the debates they have provoked. Second I apply the conceptual tools this close reading offers to reconsider the logic behind two key social movement theory concepts: collective identity and repertoires of contention. Following a general introduction and literature review, I undertake a close consideration of habitus and an argument for how attention to the suffering produced by symbolic power constitutes grounds for normative justice claims. I then consider how collective identity formation in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer mobilization indicates the presence of symbolic violence, primarily in the form of epistemic violence. Next I argue that the nature of neoliberal symbolic power creates political antinomies for representation and affinity-based segments of the alterglobalization movement. Finally I argue that Bourdieu needs to be balanced by Nietzsche and that an orientation toward ‘overcoming’ offers a way out of the tension between conformity and failure. My findings point to the need for more sophisticated instruments for understanding the relationship between objective interests and subjective perception, impositions of, and challenges to, ‘logical consensus’, and strategies for counter-training and other mechanisms to support activists in resisting symbolic violence. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-01-29 14:14:16.699

Contemporary Western feminist scholarship fails to explore the backdrop to the naturalization of feminine subjugation. By analyzing the structures, histories, and theories of gender relations, this study dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and, in doing so, demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked or rendered invisible within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are constructed and perpetuated in contemporary Western feminist theory. In part, this perpetuation is achieved through the pedagogical and theoretical exclusions from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities and expressions. Privileging of identities is demonstrated through the designation of literary space and in an overview of dominant theories, such as how the feminine subject is maintained as the object of critique and as not able to be “properly” feminist. This assessment of gender studies course texts reveals a limited understanding of femme and femininity that maintains these identities as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. Feminist theory demonstrates an embedded normative feminist subject, one marked by whiteness and body privileges. By deconstructing the privileging of theories of the normative feminist subject, this study argues that gender studies has replicated feminist histories in which the politics and concerns of the white socially privileged subject are the first to be addressed. While white femininity is present in hir Otherness and in critiques of hir femininity, the racially marked femme does not exist, even in absence. The femme—as a queer potentiality—offers a way of thinking and re-thinking through the limitations of contemporary Western feminist theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-09 19:36:29.903

This thesis examines the gender-subversive potential of mixed-sex martial arts. The research problem takes its significance from the well-documented linkages drawn within feminist research between combat sports and hierarchal gender differentiation. It is posited that from a feminist perspective, gender-subversive physical practices are desirable because they instigate a shift towards fairer and freer bodily discourse, and as such they are deserving of critical academic attention. Furthermore, sex-integrated sports have the potential to lead participants towards embodying and propagating such subversive gender discourses, and when these changes take place within highly masculinised activities such as combat sports, the significance of this subversion is amplified. While existing literature has addressed these themes with reference to women s participation in these kinds of activities, there is a relative paucity of sociological work explicitly examining mixed-sex participation, which this thesis is intended to redress. Using semi-structured interviewing, qualitative data were gathered from a group of male and female martial artists across the English East Midlands. The interviews were transcribed and then subjected to discourse analysis. Findings suggested that mixed-sex martial arts does involve gender subversion but that the practice also remains structured by dominant, hierarchal gender discourse in several significant ways. It is therefore suggested that mixed-sex training can present the possibility of gender subversion under particular conditions, such as: martial arts being accessible to both men and women at multiple levels of participation; a normalised presence of women, particularly at higher levels such as being coaches and competitors; participants coming to share an identity as martial artists which is irrespective of sexual difference; and ultimately training being integrated as much as possible, particularly with regard to the more intensely physical, combative aspects, such as sparring. The participants indicated that under these conditions they were able to conceive of and practice their gender differently, in ways which portrayed little or no hierarchal distinction between the sexes, and as such is considered subversive . Following these findings, the thesis ultimately concludes with a brief outline of some recommendations for good practice in martial arts clubs. In this way, the thesis contributes towards feminist understandings of the body and of physical culture, by highlighting one possible way in which to conceive of the sexed body differently from the prevailing norms of hierarchal sexual differentiation.

The perspectives of gay men on college and university campuses is informed by a rich gay social history and extensive roots of community politics. The experiences of gay undergraduate men have been illuminated in segmented ways in scholarly literature to date. This narrative inquiry develops and advances those efforts by exploring how gay undergraduate men construct, experience, and make meaning of their gender as a population ascribing to both liberationist and assimilationist viewpoints. Data for this qualitative study were collected at one public, four-year research university in the southeastern United States in the fall 2015 semester using recorded personal interviews with eleven men. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed for data analysis. The men included in the study represent a broad range of personal identity backgrounds, including a variety of college majors and years of experience in university study. Self-authorship and queer theoretical frames were used to analyze participants’ gender interpretations. Findings suggest men do not understand gender in isolation, but in tandem with intersections of familial ethnic and cultural backgrounds, social class status, and involvement on campus. Four major themes of experience that effect self-authorship of gender evolved from narrative analyses: masking, agency, costs, and policing. Implications for higher education professionals, including faculty, staff, and administrators, are discussed. Opportunities for further research in navigating lived experiences of marginalized campus subpopulations are also suggested and explored.

<p>“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the writers of two history textbooks describe females and males, and how they are presented in different discourses. The theories, which constitutes the foundation of the essay is that of gender studies, queer-theory and gender-socialization. The main methods of the essay are discourse analysis and text analysis. The main questions are: - What type of discourses are found in the text books and how would they be described? - How are women and men depicted in the found discourses? - How are the discourses holding up with school values? The results of the essay concluded that there are three different discourses present in the two text-books. These discourses are as follows: ”women as oppressed”, ”women mentioned in relation to the male sex” and ”males as the oppressors”. These discourses are analyzed with the mentioned theories above.

Den här studien fokuserar på framställningen av transpersoner i svensk television. Mer specifikt studeras klipp från de två största svenska kanalerna, SVT och TV4. Från varje kanal har två klipp valts ut, ett klipp med en intervju och ett klipp med någon form av rapportering. Klippen har valts ut strategiskt för att matcha studiens syfte, vilket innebär att de på ett eller annat sätt berör transpersoner. För att kunna undersöka och analysera framställningen av transpersoner har kritisk diskursanalys (CDA) tillämpats, både som teori och metod. Studiens teoretiska ramverk utgår även från queerteori och de teorier som grenar ut därifrån, exempelvis teorin om genussystemet. Studiens tillvägagångssätt utgår ifrån tre olika nivåer som klippen analyseras utifrån. Den första är textens nivå, där lingvistiska verktyg studeras. Den andra är diskursnivån, där diskurser i texten identifieras. Den tredje och sista är den sociala praktikens nivå där innehållet kontextualiseras och sätts i förhållande till en social omvärld. I analysen identifieras fyra teman. Det första temat, exponerandet av en minoritet i en minoritet, visar att i hälften av analysmaterialet har transpersoner som ångrat sin könsbekräftande behandling exponerats, vilket inte är representativt för majoriteten av gruppen. Det andra temat, heteronormativitet som rådande norm, visar att heteronormen kan utläsas i samtliga klipp genom diskussioner, berättelser och ordval. Det tredje temat, transpersoner som utsatt grupp, visar på en framställning av transpersoner som utsatta. Det fjärde och sista temat, HBTQ som folkbildning, visar en utbildande tendens i materialet. / This study focuses on the portraitation of transgender people in Swedish television. More specifically, clips from two of the biggest Swedish TV-channels, SVT and TV4, are being analysed. Two clips have been chosen from each channel, one interview and one reporting/news segment. The clips have been chosen strategically to serve the purpose of the study, which means that they in one way or another treats the topic of transgender people. To be able to examine and analyse the portraitation of transgender people, critical discourse analysis (CDA) have been implemented both as a theory and as a method. The study’s theoretical framework is based on queer theory and the theories that branch out from it, for example gender theory. The approach of the study is based on three different levels, from which the clips are analysed. The first one is analysis of language texts, where linguistic tools are being studied. The second one is analysis of discourse practice, where discourses in the text are being identified. The third and last one is analysis of discursive events as instances of sociocultural practice, where the content is contextualized and is put in relation to a social world. Four themes are identified in the analysis. The first one, the exposing of a minority in a minority, shows that half the analysis material shows transgender people who have regretted their gender confirmatory treatment, which is not representative for the majority of the group. The second one, heteronormativity as present norm, shows that the heteronorm can be identified in all clips, through discussions, stories and wording. The third theme, transgender people as a vulnerable group, shows a portraitation of transgender people as vulnerable and exposed. The fourth and last theme, HBTQ as education, shows an educational tendency in the material.

When Donald Trump took the stage as the Republican presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, he made a historical appeal to LGBTQ Americans: to the boisterous applause of a Republican audience, he promised "to protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology." Utilizing this historical moment as an indicator of shifting political views around LGBTQ rights in the Republican Party and the US nation-state as a whole, this paper links contemporary iterations of the War on Terror to the legalization of same-sex marriage in June 2015. Connecting same-sex marriage to the US nation-building project, I argue that the "dignity" newly available to certain queer folks via the institution of marriage makes possible an articulation of queer-defensibility that services a Republican investment in the aging War on Terror and the sustained targeting and hyper-surveillance of Muslims globally.