This MFA Thesis traces my work as a joker (a la Theatre of the Oppressed) and facilitator through a three-year-long project with a trans applied theatre troupe. The troupe explored several techniques, including Image Theatre, Playback Theatre, storytelling exercises, and somatic movement. In three semester-long workshops, the troupe focused work around three sets of techniques. In the first workshop, the troupe explored the community-based interview process of Undesirable Elements, as designed by Ping Chong in collaboration with Talvin Wilks and Sara Zatz. These techniques were interrogated using queer and trans temporalities. In the second unit, the troupe practiced Augusto Boal’s “Cops in the Head” techniques from The Rainbow of Desire, utilizing a sociological perspective to examine the “ghosts” these techniques produce. In the final semester, I devised techniques specifically for and about transgender people, invoking trans theory and queer theory to explore issues of naming, trauma, and trans possibilities. Through this work I argue that techniques designed for cisgender bodies require adaptation to find success in transgender communities. I argue that the future of this work is not transforming existing techniques to suit our needs, rather it is creating techniques with transgender bodies and identities at the core.

This study focuses on the challenges faced by U.S. college students who identify as gay or lesbian and choose to study abroad in Latin American countries. The focus is on the challenges to the formation and negotiation of a gay or lesbian identity in a new cultural construct. The study incorporates information from identity development and identity negotiation perspectives in an effort to explain the problems that these students face. There is also an emphasis placed on how these students receive support while on site, and how these supports help students continue a successful negotiation of a gay or lesbian identity while in a new cultural environment. Recommendations for providing effective support to gay and lesbian students are included.

Transgender individuals go through their intrapersonal differentiation between covert “I” (expressed gender) and overt “I” (assigned gender), often unnoticed by family members before their coming out. Consequently, their coming out rockets anxiety in the family system and the process of differentiation of transgender parents seem to go through its unique path to search for equilibrium. Recent social and clinical studies about transgender parents have paid attention to the experience and challenges of the gender transition process, social pressure, acceptance of transgender individuals in a parenting role, and readiness of families to cope with the transition of a parent (Bischof, Warnaar, Barajas, & Dhaliwal, 2011; Chung, 2016; Di Ceglie, 1998; Freedman, Tasker, & Di Ceglie, 2002; Haines, Ajayi, & Boyd, 2014; Hines, 2006; Theron & Collier, 2013; Veldorale-Griffin, 2014; White & Ettner, 2004, 2007). No research study has attempted to explore the essence of transgender parenting and the related self-differentiation process (Bowen, 1978; Kerr & Bowen, 1988). In this research, I intended to address this gap in knowledge by utilizing a heuristic phenomenological research design to explore the essence of parenting and self-differentiation of transgender parents. I used interviews with ten transgender parents, both females, and males, to embrace the elements of the lived experienced. The first conducted heuristic analysis revealed five emerging themes: Selfish Unselfishness: Becoming Me; Relationship with My Close Family: It is About Respect; Battle of Emotions: Do the Right Thing; Competence, Confidence, and Legacy: This Is How We Do It. Or Not; and Life Satisfaction: Welcome to My World. The second, qualitative data analysis, brought evidence of these qualities of self-differentiation: Balancing Individuality and Togetherness; Balancing Thoughts and Feelings; and Self-differentiation in the Expressed Gender.

This study explored and highlighted the experiences of trained Marriage and Family Therapists of Afro-Caribbean descent in working with persons who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Questioning (LGBTQ). The researcher utilized collected data to help to advance our understanding on the potential impact of the cultural experiences and how they may or may not contribute to institutionalized homophobia within the Caribbean, by Mental Health professionals, specifically Marriage and Family Therapists. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with 3 practicing Marriage and Family Therapists (MFTs) with strong Caribbean upbringing, values, and influences. For the purpose of this study, strong has been defined as having being born and/or raised in the Caribbean. This qualitative study employed the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to aid in making sense of the data that was collected. Data gathered from the interviews of three participants revealed two prominent superordinate themes: “Homophobia” and “Evolving Views” with emerging subthemes that explored culture, religion, “checking yourself at the door” and connecting with persons who identify as LGBTQ. The findings from the study helped to add to the limited research available on the lived experiences of Marriage and Family Therapists of Afro-Caribbean descent and their work with persons who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Questioning (LGBTQ).

When the Supreme Court grants new rights, public awareness is a crucial part of enforcement. Gerald N. Rosenberg and Michael J. Klarman famously criticized minority rights organizations for attempting to gain new rights through the judiciary. The crux of their argument relied heavily on the American media's scanty coverage of Court issues and subsequent low public awareness of Court cases. Using the 2013 United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry rulings as a case study, I suggest that the media environment has changed so much since Rosenberg and Klarman were writing that their theories warrant reconsideration. Minority rights groups now have access to social media, a potentially powerful tool with which to educate the public about the Supreme Court and new rights granted by the Court.

Racial minority men who have sex with men (MSM) experience greater levels of discrimination and higher rates of HIV infection. However, little is known about the associations between racial and heterosexist discrimination and HIV risk behavior. Further, little is known about the mechanisms of the association between racial and heterosexist discrimination and HIV risk behavior. There is some evidence to suggest that depression may be a mechanism that mediates the relationship between racial and heterosexist discrimination and HIV risk behavior. Thus, one purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which discrimination based on both race and sexual orientation, alone and in combination, are associated with HIV risk behavior. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine whether the relationship between discrimination and HIV risk behavior is mediated by depressive symptoms. Lastly this study sought to examine whether the relationships between discrimination, depressive symptoms, and HIV risk behavior were mediated by social support, LGBT and Native identity, and LGBT and Native community participation. This study analyzed data from the HONOR project, the first national study of two-spirit individuals, which included 221 American Indian and Alaska Native MSM. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine the extent to which experiences of racial and heterosexist discrimination were associated with HIV risk behavior. Results indicate that heterosexist discrimination was associated with HIV risk behaviors, whereas racial discrimination was not. Conversely, results indicate that racial discrimination was associated with depressive symptoms, whereas heterosexist discrimination was not. This study found no association between depressive symptoms and HIV risk behavior, even when accounting for alcohol and substance use. Results indicate that depressive symptoms are not a mechanism that explains the association between discrimination and HIV risk and perhaps the better mechanism to examine in future studies is substance use. Finally, LGBT community participation was shown to have protective effects against HIV risk behaviors. These findings have the potential to guide development of mental health and HIV prevention interventions for Native MSM, with special attention to LGBT community participation and social support. Future research should examine attributes such as types, sources, and frequency of heterosexist discrimination and LGBT community participation.

Proceeding from a framing of theater as collaborative storytelling, I argue for defining role-playing games as a kind of performance and for their value in structuring experiential and participatory theater. Building on the impulse at the heart of experiential and immersive theater to place the audience within the world of the performance and center their experience, I explore what it means for theater artists to cede control over how audiences make meaning of their work in favor of letting narrative emerge from the participation of the audience during the performance event. I propose a framework called pervasive performance that merges theatrical frames and methods with pervasive gaming, which expands the magic circle of play and blurs the distinction between the game and everyday life. This union of ideas puts audience members in contact with one another and allows them to be playful and co-author the overall performance experience. Further, the blurring of the performance and everyday life transforms audience members’ relationship to the real world and gives them space to imagine and experiment with other worlds and ways of being in them. I devised an alternate reality game (ARG) at UMass Amherst in May 2023, and in my thesis I analyze this project and the process of creating it as a case study in pervasive performance.

<p>In this thesis, I explore the manner in which loneliness has been presented culturally, scientifically, politically, and academically as the asocial antithesis of happiness. I suggest lonely people are presented throughout these discourses as misfits, trapped by their lonely feelings and in danger of entrapping others. I further put forth that the impetus to understand and promote a conception of loneliness as depressive and alienating is politically inflected, strengthening neoliberal models of sociality that rely upon particular notions of good citizenship. As a consequence, Western scientific, academic, and cultural discourses continue to reinforce particular brands of “productive” intimacy (heterosexual, middle/upper class, able-bodied, white, monogamous partnerships), while strategically policing the lonely person’s presumed immaturity, negativity, and illegibility.</p> <p>The thesis begins by considering how recent scientific studies are lodged in evolutionary models, with the implication that they position loneliness as an abnormal and dangerous setback to Western sociability and its progress. As a corollary, I demonstrate that contemporary cultural narratives such as Dan Savage's "It Gets Better Project" that have surfaced in order to address queer, teen suicide, bullying, and violence tend to frame loneliness as a degenerate feeling that warrants survivalist tactics and adaptations away from queerness. In scientific and cultural discourses alike, then, loneliness has become stuck onto queer subjects and can only be understood as a condition that infects a sub-set of weak and vulnerable subjects. Judged for their seeming narcissistic and unhappy tendencies, queer sexualities come to be considered dangerous and contagious, and lonely queer bodies are being represented in scientific, cultural, and social media narrativizations as the reason for a larger, Western failed happiness.</p> <p>The body of the thesis deepens and extends these concerns by analyzing the marked tension between the figurative language that speaks of loneliness as a pathology and an (a)political desire for selfish individualism. I suggest that in light of the current failures of Western sociality what is needed is a space for an understanding of the everydayness of loneliness and its potential to be political. Drawing on critical work on affective politics, this thesis makes a space for the lonely queers among us. Focusing attention on four key areas— the science of loneliness, lesbian narcissism, childhood sexuality, and queer disability—I argue that loneliness is neither an exceptional trauma, nor is it extraordinary: rather, it is every subject’s inheritance. By envisioning loneliness as possibly pleasurable as much as it is traumatic, and by seeing the act of declaring oneself lonely as a political strategy, I argue that we may be encouraged to re-evaluate the ways in which we experience relationality, human empathy, and sociality. Moreover, our shared loneliness as Western subjects may actually have the potential to rupture the rigidity of societal paradigms (sexism, ableism, classism, racism, and homophobia) that are based upon exclusion, upward mobility, and capital gain.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

"Quare Contestations: Bridging Queer, Lesbian, and Feminist Narratives of the Irish Diaspora" examines three sets of biographical and autobiographical narratives about Irish who migrated to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dwelling primarily in queer studies and diaspora studies, this thesis participates in the construction of a queer Irish diaspora archive by analyzing the spaces of overlap between Irish queer, feminist, and lesbian - together, quare - theory and lived experience in these narratives. In my analysis, I demonstrate the fluidity, movement, and interdisciplinary scope of a quare framework for approaching studies of gender and sexuality in the Irish diaspora context. This thesis intervenes into the work already being done to queer Irish diaspora by examining the contestations of "Irishness" appearing in the narratives that are analyzed, and by in turn contesting and complicating the action and meanings made by "queer" in the existing archive of queer Irish diaspora literature.

Although in recent years there has been increased attention on bullying prevention and bullying legislation in the United States, there is limited research on the implementation of anti-bullying policies. Moreover, few studies have addressed the use of anti-bullying policies to protect LGBT youth from bullying. The present study seeks to examine the role of anti-bullying policies as a means to protect against bullying based on perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. Qualitative interviews with high school teachers, administrators, and staff members within an urban school district in the United States were conducted to gain insight into how those charged with the task of protecting LGBT youth engage with their school and district policy in efforts to create a supportive environment for their students. In this study, I argue the following: 1) the policy structure, both in the language of the state law and district policy on bullying, created barriers for schools to implement the anti-bullying policy; 2) the barriers created by the policy structure limited teachers' ability to protect LGBT youth from bullying; and 3) despite the evident barriers, teachers found ways to create supportive classroom environments for their students. Results indicate that teachers are not knowledgeable of the contents of their school's anti-bullying policy, and have had limited exposure to the policy through training specific to their school's anti-bullying policy. Similar results occurred when teachers and administrators were questioned about their awareness of trainings specific to the prevention of bullying against LGBT youth, posing significant barriers to effective policy implementation. In addition, interview data suggests that although teachers lack the sufficient support in terms of training on the anti-bullying policy, there were multiple examples of teachers serving as advocates for LGBT youth in both their classrooms and in their schools more broadly. The displays of advocacy by teachers, in addition to the presence of district and school administrator support for LGBT students, serve as an example of how school districts can find ways to implement school policies, address bullying in their schools, and raise awareness for the unique experiences of LGBT youth in terms of bullying.