Hospitality is relational, a system of ethics contending with difference, navigating the mutable boundaries between self and Other. Desire or duty to reflect the gracious inclusivity of God without regard for reciprocation marks Christian hospitality in particular. Given the shortcomings of humankind in comparison to the divine, however, the utopian ideal of hospitality extended to all cannot be had on Earth. Thus, the impulse to reach out to the Other continually comingles with the shameful awareness of human limitation, a paradox the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls “infinite responsibility.” Building upon Levinas’s concept and fellow philosopher Jacques Derrida’s assertion that “ethics is hospitality,” I examine how various U.S. writers engender or interrogate the concept of Christian hospitality. Specifically, I investigate how each author develops shame as an affect with regard to Christian hospitality to the racial Other, the impoverished Other, the sexual Other, and the inanimate and animate Other in the natural world. The chapters feature case studies focusing primarily on one historical figure, Christopher Columbus, and three writers—Erskine Caldwell, Richard Rodriguez, and Leslie Marmon Silko—and four key moments in U.S. history: the 1892 celebrations of Christopher Columbus as a figure of belonging vs. later shameful perceptions of him as a figure of oppression; the plight of the rural poor in Depression-era Georgia; the ostracism of AIDS sufferers in San Francisco in the early 1990s; and the conflict between capitalist developers and environmentalists in the Southwest in the early 2000s. I demonstrate 1) how an author interrogates the tenets of Christian hospitality; and 2) how shame can both inspire commitment to social change and cloud a text’s reception due to negative, and even painful, emotions. Ultimately, I examine the authors’ attempts at “mobilizing shame,” a tactic among activist authors to trigger public shame in order to garner support at the grassroots level, ultimately shaming government bodies and average citizens into reform.

This thesis investigates the relationship between identity, behaviour and desire to examine the nature of research among homosexually active men. The hypothesis is that samples of such men necessarily reflect the definitions of sexuality and homosexuality, and their interpretation, by both the researchers themselves and their research subjects, meaning that the research process itself is marked by the subjectivity of the field of sexuality. The relationship between the observer and the observed is intrinsic to research into homosexual subjectivity and the samples obtained, therefore, represent particular kinds of sexual subjects in a particular social and sexual cultural milieu. Research in this field has given pre-eminence to behaviour over identity and desire, and, as such, has usually failed to account for these differences in sexual subjectivities. To investigate this problem, I have reviewed the relevant literature both on subjectivity and on methodological approaches to research among homosexual men, and I have appraised my own ideological and personal relationships with the subject matter. I have examined the nature of the samples of homosexual men I have obtained during my work as a researcher within the Sydney gay community and reanalysed these with regard to the particular problematic I have identified. These investigations and analyses have shown that there are numerous differences within and between the various samples of homosexual men obtained, indicating that methodological frameworks can determine the nature of the samples obtained. These differences in samples also appear to reflect differences in the ways of enacting homosexual desire among the men in the studies. However, they also parallel differences in the definitions and understandings of the target population by the researchers themselves. These differences reflect differences in definition and understanding both of homosexuality and of the population of gay men, but they also represent differing patterns in the ways of being and living ?gay?, differences in sexual subjectivity. ?Gayness? and homosexuality, as concepts in research, are both the subjective basis on which the research endeavour itself is based, as well as its representational outcome.

This thesis is about storytelling. It is presented in three parts, a major output with two supporting components. The first and primary section is the short film. The second is an exhibition of images, props, and environments created for the work. The third is the exegesis. Situated as creative practice, the project tests and develops structural and aesthetic hypotheses in the creation of a non-spoken film text. These hypotheses are shaped by considerations from two areas.The first is design for narrative music video. An analysis of selected texts leads to a creative reconsideration of the role and profile of imagery, space, time, sound, enigma, closure, and narrative voice. The second area is typography. Reflecting on the anti-language, bogspeak, and the culture that has given rise to its development, the thesis develops inaudible typographical voices that operate as narrative contributions to the film.These two areas of consideration support a unique way of telling stories. This is significant because emerging uses of short film now take these texts beyond the theatre. They are marketed as commercially available stories in their own right. As distribution companies are formatting them on DVDs, viewers are seeing these stories not once, but many times. It is useful therefore, for the design of such texts to consider alternative methods of narration that might work to preserve the durability and complexity of their stories as they unravel over repeated screenings.

Community, Attachment, Structures and the Epidemic maps some of the changes in gay men�s experience and conceptualisation of community that have occurred during the AIDS epidemic. Social identity theory has been employed to investigate the social-psychological aspects of gay identity at personal, social and community levels. The study compares three generations of gay men in Melbourne; pre- peri- and post-AIDS. As a starting point, the study employed focus groups to explore basic conceptions of gay community. In the first of two major data collection phases, 32 gay men between the ages of 18 and 40 participated in semistructured interviews of between 45 minutes and one and a half hours. The interviews explored the men�s social networks, past and present relationship to the commercial gay scene, feelings about gay organisations businesses, neighbourhoods, entertainment, aesthetics, the way they see other gay people, their thoughts about the impact of AIDS on gay communities and their aspirations for gay communities. The second phase of data collection utilised a questionnaire developed from the analysis of the interviews. The 55 item questionnaire covered demographic information, coming out history, initial experiences of the gay world, friendship networks, feelings about the institutions, people and conceptual elements of gay community, items concerning practices of gay community, the community attachment subscale from the SAPA study and items on HIV/AIDS. The questionnaire was completed by 432 gay men, 207 recruited at the Midsumma carnival, an annual gay and lesbian event in Melbourne and 225 through the mailing list of the Victorian AIDS Council. Analysis of the questionnaire data uncovered a complex constellation of difference in the conceptualisation and experience of gay community between the groups, particularly with regard to the content and boundaries of the category �gay community�. The research challenges practice based models of gay community attachment and proposes a more dynamic, fluid and multi-dimensional conceptualisation of gay social identity.

Doctor of Philosophy / Following on the proposition that the history of Western thought is importantly constituted by a discourse of male-male pedagogic or pederastic relations stretching in narrative form, according to Allan Bloom, from the Phaedrus to Death in Venice, the deconstructive project of reading 'against the visible grain' has been mobilised in the interests of interrogating and unsettling what can only be defined as homophobic misreadings of Martin Boyd. Critical discursive practice, by the near-uniform imposition of a tacit censorship, has refused by means of erasure, silence and repression to reflect on Boyd from the perspective of sexual definition or same-sex love and desire, presumably in the belief that there are no interpretive consequences. In the process, an hypothesis of Boyd as himself mounting an act of social criticism by surreptitiously contesting conventional and hierarchical typologies of masculinity in the margins of institutionalised and popular hegemonic culture, seems to have escaped inscription in the canonical records. Martin Boyd's 'dividedness', 'doubleness', ambivalences and dichotomies point to a complexity that is not ultimately or ontologically resolvable. The Derridean 'de-sedimentation' modus operandi used here makes no claim to a relevatory hermeneutics of Hegelian essence. It does, however, utilise the various tropes of ambivalence, uncertainty, anxiety and incoherence — aspects of Boyd which may be correlated, perhaps, with his sense of the unheimlich or not being at home with himself or his environment — to reposition him in terms of his psychosexual constitution. In the process, the advocacy of aestheticism and pleasure for which he is recognised is found to be tempered and/or subverted by an overt recourse to the transgressive and 'decadent', elements irretrievably linked to his fetishization of the beautiful male body and his obsessive redeployment of the Hellenic ideal of manly love. The interpretive frameworks applied in the reclamation of the 'different' sensibility Boyd articulates by means of an alternately subtilized and strenuous challenge to sex/gender identity and behavioural norms encompass a field ranging from late nineteenth century theoretical discourse on homosexuality through to the intertextual influences of cultural innovators like Pater and Wilde. It includes reference to the literary strategies devised by Sedgwick to uncover deviance and 'erotic pathways'; it surveys the psychoanalytic hypotheses of Freud and Adler as relevant; and it pays heed to an aesthetics of the religio-erotic.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Film and Video. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-130). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL:http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss&rft%5Fval%5Ffmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss:MQ99293

Le contexte historique et épistémologique de l’émergence de la génétique des comportements en tant que discipline trouve ses racines dans différentes disciplines biologiques : la génétique, la biologie de l’évolution et la biologie moléculaire. Ces dernières font partie du paradigme néodarwinien moléculaire. De cette origine, elle a hérité deux grands domaines de recherche, la génétique quantitative et la génétique moléculaire. Ils ont chacun des objectifs et des méthodologies différents. Les études concernant l’intelligence, les comportements agressifs, les comportements addictifs et l’orientation sexuelle permettent notamment d’illustrer ces différences. Elles permettent également de faire un état des lieux des recherches menées dans ce domaine parfois hautement polémique. En fait, la génétique des comportements est marquée par deux ères épistémologiques, l’ère génomique qui a débuté dans les années 1980 et l’ère post-génomique, qui comme son nom l’indique, lui succède dès le début des années 2000. Les résultats apportés par l’ensemble de ces recherches imposent une conclusion, les approches théoriques et techniques phares de l’ère génomique sont insuffisantes à rendre compte de la complexité des phénomènes développementaux liés aux comportements. L’ère post-génomique tente donc de combler les faiblesses de l’ère précédente. Ainsi, la biologie développementale revient au premier plan et ce retour est souhaité depuis longtemps par un courant philosophique majeur né dans les années 1990, la Developmental Systems Theory. L’ère post-génomique est également caractérisée par un pluralisme pragmatique, à la fois théorique et expérimental. La nécessité de multiplier les modes d’appréhension des comportements s’impose car leur complexité intrinsèque est reconnue et tend à être assumée. Les résultats plus récents apportés par les recherches sur l’intelligence, les comportements agressifs, addictifs et l’orientation sexuelle illustrent cette évolution épistémologique. L’opposition entre inné et acquis échoue à rendre compte de la complexité et du dynamisme développemental des phénotypes comportementaux./ The historical and epistemological context of the birth of behavioral genetics as a discipline has its roots in different biological domains: genetics, evolutionary biology and molecular biology. They are parts of the molecular neo-Darwinian paradigm. From this multiple outset, behavioral genetics has inherited two major areas of research, quantitative genetics and molecular genetics. They each have different purposes and methodologies. The study of researches on IQ, aggressive behaviors, addictive behaviors and sexual orientation illustrate these differences. It also permits to make an overview of results provided in this field that is sometimes highly controversial. In fact, behavioral genetics is marked by two epistemological eras, the genomic era that began in the 1980s and the postgenomic era that began by the early 2000s. The results provided by all these researches lead to one conclusion, the theoretical and technical approaches of the genomic era is insufficient to show the complexity of developmental phenomena associated with behaviors. The postgenomic era attempts to correct the weaknesses of the previous era. Thus, developmental biology comes back in the foreground and the necessity of this return has been defended by a major philosophical theory born in 1990, the Developmental Systems Theory. The postgenomic era is also characterized by a theoretical and experimental pragmatic pluralism. The complexity of the developmental patterns of behaviors is recognized and tends to be assumed. The latest results produce by researches on IQ, aggressive behaviors, addiction and sexual orientation illustrate these epistemological changes. The opposition between nature and nurture fails to properly apprehend the developmental dynamism of behavioral phenotypes.

This study aims at exposing and challenging the effects of heterosexist assumptions that are prevalent in institutions of higher learning. It (study) further seeks to highlight and address the gaps that exist within the academic literature in South Africa with regards to homosexuality. Five students from an institution of higher learning in the Western Cape Province of South Africa with predominantly Black Students were used for this study. All the participants were Black students aged between 19 and 25 years who openly identify themselves as lesbians. Their participation was voluntary. A narrative approach was utilised as an attempt to afford the participants an opportunity to narrate their histories and personal experiences. This is a qualitative research approach which deals with personal stories that are told to describe human action and make sense of events that surround an individual. It involves getting a story from an individual who is identified as having some knowledge or experience with the topic of study. In an attempt to gain a better understanding and an insightful perspective into the personal narratives that were shared by the participants of this study, all their experiences will be put under the control of the thematic analysis.

This study examined how gay men construct a gay identity and have relationships within a heteronormative (Kritzinger, 2005) society in South Africa. The impact of this study is that homophobia continues to persist within different levels of society despite progressive legislation (Republic of South Africa, 1998 / Republic of South Africa, 2006 / Republic of South Africa, 2007), that gender binarisms persist in gay relationships, that power differences impact and shape gay relationships, and that resistance and transgression to heteronormativity were present in some of the narratives. The qualitative study employed a semi-structured guide with in-depth interviews. Sampling procedures that were utilised were snowball sampling in a non-probability sample. Data was collected via an MP3 player and each interview was transcribed and analysed using content and narrative analysis. I-poems using the listening guide (Gilligan et al, 2003) were constructed in six of the narratives. The sample distribution included 15 gay men aged between 20 to 46 years. Of these, 12 participants were black (6 coloured, 3 Indians, 3 African) and 3 were white.

Historiskt sett har det frekvent förekommit olika former av diskriminering utav homosexuella såsom kriminalisering och sjukdomsstämpel. Forskning har visat att homosexuella individer får otillfredsställande hälsoinformation och sämre vård. Syftet med litteraturstudien var att belysa om sjukvårdspersonal har ett diskriminerande förhållningssätt  gentemot homosexuella individer och hur detta i så fall tar sig till uttryck. Resultatet visar på att diskriminering av homosexuella män och kvinnor förekommer inom hälso- och sjukvården men kommer till uttryck på olika sätt. Ett diskriminerande förhållningssätt, såsom till exempel ignorans och nedvärderande kommentarer, attityder och handlingar är några exempel på hur vårdmöten kan se ut vilket kan leda till att homosexuella individer upplever känslor av ensamhet och utanförskap. Även närstående till homosexuella patienter uttryckte negativa upplevelser då de blivit exkluderade ur vårdsituationer.  Sjuksköterskeutbildningen bör lägga större fokus på bemötande och förhållningssätt gentemot individer med annan sexuell läggning än heterosexuell. På vårdinrättningar bör ledningsgruppen och cheferna verka för en trygg miljö utan diskriminering. / Historically, there have been several forms of discrimination against homosexuals as criminalization and disorder labeling. Research has shown that homosexual individuals receive inadequate health care and health information. The purpose of the literature survey was to try to find out if the health professionals have a discriminatory attitude towards homosexual individuals and if so how this is expressed. Discrimination in healthcare takes place in different ways against both homosexual men and homosexual women, and manifests itself in different ways. Discriminatory approaches, attitudes and actions are some examples of how health care encounters may appear which may lead to those homosexual individuals experiencing feelings of loneliness and alienation. Also relatives to homosexual patients expressed negative experiences when they had been excluded from care situations. Nursing education should put more focus on response and attitudes towards individuals with other sexual orientation than heterosexual. The directorate in health care settings should operate for a safe environment without discrimination.