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--Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-313). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Education Policy and Management, 2001. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-225).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2002. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Washington University, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 266-283).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Ashland Theological Seminary, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 176-180).

Diss. Malmö : Malmö Högskola, 2006. / Härtill 7 uppsatser.