In 2009, 713,220 new cases of cancer were diagnosed for women in the United States with more than a quarter million deaths. African American women and lesbians exhibit behavioral risk factors as well as diminished access to and utilization of breast cancer screening that reduces opportunities for early detection. This secondary analysis of a national convenience-based study examined screening compliance among 647 African American lesbian and bisexual women. Barriers to accessing screening represented the theoretical framework for this study. Bivariate chi square analysis was used to assess the association between independent variables: sociodemographic characteristics; participation in wellness activities; sexual orientation/gender identity; and experience with health care providers and the three dependent breast cancer screening compliance variables: breast self-examination (BSE), clinical breast examination (CBE), and mammography screening. Statistically significant associations between dependent and independent variables at the .05 level were further analyzed with logistic regression. Results of the ten regression models found that BSE was predicted by socioeconomic characteristics and participation in wellness activities. Compliance with CBE guidelines was predicted by sociodemographic characteristics, wellness activities, sexual orientation/gender identity and provider experience. Sociodemographic variables and provider experience also predicted mammography screening. Overall compliance was predicted by sociodemographic characteristics, namely insurance status. The social change implications of this research are an improved understanding of African American lesbian and bisexual women's screening behavior and guidance toward interventions that can improve and breast cancer screening compliance with guidelines.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how LGB college students created meaning out of their coming out process to their parents. I recruited LGB college students who perceived support from their parents during their coming out process and asked the following research question: What are the lived experiences of LGB college students who have experienced support from their parents during the coming out process? Seven White (n = 4), African American (n = 2), and Hispanic (n = 1) college students, three men and four women aged 18-24 years, shared narratives that included time periods before, during, and after their coming out disclosures to their parents. Using an adapted phenomenological analysis, I identified nine major themes: awareness of feeling different, positive relationship with parents prior to coming out, college impacting the coming out process, feeling unsure of how parents would respond to disclosure, parents assuring continued loved and acceptance, parents affirming LGB identity, increased relational depth with parents, increased sense of authenticity, and an appreciation for family's response and support. The findings provide insight into how counselors might work most beneficially with LGB college students and their parents around the coming out process. Opportunities for future research and limitations of the study are discussed.

Namibia continues to face an ongoing struggle in protecting the rights and civil liberties of its LGBT population with LGBT rights-based organisations in the country strongly relying upon their volunteers to take advantage of political opportunities and manage multiple visibilities. Despite a growing body of international research into volunteer motivation and the beneficial application of such knowledge in volunteer management strategies, a dearth of literature exists on the motives of volunteers within LGBT rights-based organisations. This study uses data from qualitative interviews with 6 formal volunteers from Namibian LGBT rights-based organisations to explore volunteer motivations. A thematic analysis of the research findings reveal the complex motivations underlying volunteering in these organisations. Volunteer motivations in Namibian LGBT rights-based organisations included: (a) addressing and promoting humanitarian concerns; (b) improved social interaction, integration and support; (c) self-regulatory opportunities for personal enhancement; (d) developing career prospects; and (e) responding to past homophobic incidents. Barriers to volunteering were also identified and included: (a) strained organisational resources; (b) LGBT discrimination; and (c) complacency. For volunteer recruitment and retention strategies to be effective, organisations need to recognise and satisfy volunteers’ motives while also properly training and assisting volunteers in their respective roles. Also, given the local LGBT community’s sense of complacency, Namibian LGBT rights-based organisations would greatly benefit by strategically engaging community members and working to overcome the community’s lack of urgency. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology)

Many women experience sexual violence, but bisexual women are at particularly high risk for such victimization. Theories attempting to explain women’s risk for sexual violence have focused on numerous risk factors (e.g., childhood abuse, substance use, sexual risk behavior, among others); however, many of these factors have not been explored with sexual minority survivors. The current study used multiple groups path analysis within a structural equation modeling framework in order to test a theory-driven model of victimization risk, first among a general sample of women, and then among subsamples of heterosexual, lesbian, and bisexual women. The prospective model included childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse as three separate exogenous variables; sexual risk behavior, alcohol use, and drug use as separate mediators; and a count-based adult sexual victimization score as the outcome. The prospective model was trimmed until it best represented the observed data for the full sample, which saw the inclusion of childhood sexual and physical abuse as the only exogenous variables, sexual risk behavior as the only mediating variable, and adult sexual victimization as the outcome. Sexual risk behavior mediated the relationship between both childhood abuse variables and adult sexual victimization for the general sample of women. However, within the multiple groups model, sexual risk behavior mediated the relationship between childhood physical abuse and adult sexual victimization among bisexual women only. A mediational relationship between childhood sexual abuse and adult sexual victimization via sexual risk behavior approached significance among bisexual women only. A second-stage moderating effect approached significance whereby the relationship between sexual risk behavior and adult victimization was stronger for heterosexual women than for bisexual women. Additionally, the direct effect of childhood sexual abuse on adult sexual victimization was stronger for lesbian women than for bisexual women. Relationships among variables and the novel and unique findings pertaining to bisexual women’s victimization risk are framed as the compounding effect of childhood trauma and social stigmatization of bisexuality. Implications and future directions are described.

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.

This thesis paper gives a brief history of the vampire narrative and its role in representing the collective anxieties of an age as well as serving as a metaphor for oppressed peoples. It uses Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla as historical examples of how the vampire adapts to suit issues of the day such as reverse colonization and female sexuality, respectively. The latter part of this paper speculates on the future role of the vampire in literature and proposes that the vampire could be used to discuss transgender issues as well as challenge the gender binary. It addresses the suitability of the vampire narrative in particular for representing gender as a spectrum using the lenses of Foucault’s heterotopias, Kristeva’s abject, and Freud’s uncanny and pulls examples of early evidence of this trend from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.

Navigating the process of coming out led to feelings of isolation, depression, and a loss of self-worth that were compounded by a period filled with negative social media and mainstream messaging. This thesis explores how an understanding of the systems and processes of nature as well as physical exposure to nature offered a place of healing and an avenue for understanding my identity as a Gay man: from identity confusion all the way through to identity synthesis. Using Scholarly Personal Narrative Methodology, I will interweave poetry and counter narrative storytelling to illustrate the significance of nature during my identity development. Sexual orientation is scrutinized and vilified through social media platforms, advertisements, and daily life under the basis of cultural ideology and social construction. This disregards the larger contextual importance of other species that exhibit similar behaviors. I maintain that a connection with nature can provide individuals with a broader and more balanced perspective of sexual orientation--whilst navigating through the coming out process leading to a confluent sense of identity with reduced internalized conflict.

This work operates at the intersection of academics, art, and activism. Within queer studies there is a tension between assimilation and liberation, sometimes situated as between pragmatism and utopia. This work re-examines Frankfurt school Marxist views of utopia through a queer theoretical lens in order to employ the radical imagination and queer futurity to examine new ways of practicing liberation. Drawing from theorists like Judith Butler, Jose Esteban Munoz, and Gloria Anzaldua, this work uses art (film, writing, zine-making, and sound) as a way to envision and enact a better world situated in the present.

Without a doubt, violence continues to be a brutal reality in our society. It reaches and affects millions across our nation and around the world. For centuries, scholars, researchers and academics have studied and analyzed the existence of violence in many capacities. While violence affects every individual, group, and community the dynamics and the realties that are carried out vary tremendously across race, income levels, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation and national origin to name a few. The existence, impact and repercussions of violence in different communities carry varying meanings, perceptions and significance. This paper explores the influences of race, class, and gender identity on the help-seeking behavior of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) survivors of hate motivated and intimate partner violence utilizing data collected by the Virginia Anti-Violence Project (VAVP) Community Violence Survey. Utilizing a target sampling method, nearly 1,000 LGBTQ identified individuals from across the Commonwealth responded to the community survey. Only a descriptive analysis had ever been done on this data set; this more complex analysis was the first to be done. Patricia Hill Collins’ theoretical framework of intersectionality was applied in the analysis of the influences of race, class and gender identity. Concepts and propositions from Collins’ general theoretical framework have been utilized to examine how the three social locations intersect and shape distinct realities that influence how LGBTQ survivors of violence seek assistance if at all. The exploratory nature of this examination provides a glimpse into the many factors that influence the help-seeking behaviors of LGBTQ survivors of violence.

Experiencing a turbulence of source and subject in the variable inversions and supports of one source to another--the wreck of the U-352, Carpeaux’s Ugolino and his Sons, a movie poster for J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and Cassiopeia mythology--these four sources as sons, in sacrifice to and surviving by way of “daddy” documentation, are here refigured to reenact and critique the patriarchally recreational, monumental, cinematic, and mythological infrastructures supporting the sources of this work and thereby serving to critique the newer patriarchies to which these sources and their subjectifications here seek to cross consumptively dead end. Following three public installations, and in service to a final publication, this text hereby functions as the myth of this work.