This research examines the sense-making activities of women who engage in intimate relationships with women following a significant period of heterosexual marriage. Using data gathered through interviews with 36 women, the study explores how subjects use common cultural ideas about sexuality to frame the stories they tell to explain their sexual histories. The idea that sexuality is something one is born with, rather than a choice is on the rise in the United States. This essentialist view in conjunction with cultural ideas about the timing at which sexuality is supposed to emerge implies that people should be "aware" of their sexuality at adolescence. For many of the women in the study that "normal" timing was not the case. In addition to the essentialist supposition is the notion the sexuality is binary. One is either heterosexual or one is the particular type of person known as the homosexual, a construct created in the 19th century that continues to be an important part of modern understandings of sexuality. Women who have spent significant time as heterosexuals and go on to have intimate relationships with women must contend with these cultural understandings as they try to make sense to themselves of a sexual story that seems to lie outside the bounds of that hegemonic narrative. Using modified grounded theory to analyze the collected interviews, four story types emerged. These four story types evinced different levels and types of commitment to the views of sexuality that exist in both the mainstream culture and the gay and lesbian community. They include "Always Knew" and "Retrospective" stories, which demonstrated a close commitment to the dominant narrative. The other two types - "Shifter" stories and "Left Fielder" stories - were more loosely connected to the ideas of essential and binary sexuality. As these stories emerged additional insights were provided in the form of the women's discussions of the impact of the social world in terms of lesbian invisibility, lesbian imagery, homophobia, and group or individual support for telling certain types of stories and/or taking on a lesbian identity. This study builds on, and adds to, scholarship in a number of areas. These include: narrative and identity; the social construction of sexuality; the changing nature of biography as people strive to make the past make sense of the present; and the influence of hegemonic cultural ideas in important areas of social and personal life. Additionally the study provides some insight into how heterosexuality is both a "goes without saying" sexuality route as well as a sometimes problematic achievement. / Sociology

Fifteen feet tall and clad in a three-piece suit, a giant image of Ellen DeGeneres keeps watch over a major highway that skirts Philadelphia. She smiles off in the distance, looking past lines of commuting cars, seated with her knees wide and one arm casually resting on her leg. Advertising her 3 PM talk show, this image is part of a complicated past of lesbians embodying masculinity (Kennedy and Davis 1993; Faderman 1991). At the same time this image is clearly part of this specific historical moment in which gender is increasingly recognized as a malleable project of the body (Butler 1993; Halberstam 1998). This dissertation works to understand the ways that bodies become gendered bodies and conversely to understand the sense-making activities that individuals use to explain their bodies and bodywork. Because lesbian women already sit outside of traditional feminine norms, their femininity is already excised from their bodies. As such, the ways that lesbian women experience gender can be one path of inquiry to the ways that gender and other identities get mapped onto bodies. While academic scholarship has been increasingly addressing issues of sexual identity at a macro level, with particular attention paid to the same-sex marriage debates, there is a lack of consideration of the ways that individual gay bodies, identities, and embodied experiences are affected by the recent social and political attention to "gay issues." This billboard of America's most beloved lesbian is also symbolic of the ever-increasing visibility of the gay body. In this climate of unprecedented gay visibility and social action relying on that visibility, how are individuals assigning meaning to their own bodies and identities? Whose bodies and what identities are able to reap the benefits of this new climate of visibility, and which are still excluded? Drawing from 45 open-ended interviews with lesbians of color and white lesbians, my dissertation examines the ways that non-straight women enact, imagine, re-imagine, and narrate their experiences of gender. I have found two distinct rhetorical strategies used to talk about gendered performances of the body: essentialism and play. Whether women are describing their embodiment of femininity or masculinity, both, or neither, they overwhelmingly draw from one of these two narratives to make sense of their experience. However, I will argue that the choice of narrative is not a neutral or made in the absence of power relations. Instead, my research suggests that women are making these choices within larger webs of racialized political discourses that make available or constrain corporeal possibilities. This becomes most clear when examining the racial differences in the adoption of these narratives. While white lesbians comfortably used both rhetorical strategies, none of the women of color I interviewed invoked narratives that described their gender work as "play." Mainstream LGBT activism has been based on the civil rights model of single-axis politics that relies on subsuming other identities for the dominant strategies and goals (Cohen 1999). This single focus has become crystallized in the past two years as same-sex marriage has become virtually the only issue that gay activism has addressed. Queer politics in theory was a great alternative to these sexual identity politics. For folks experiencing marginality from multiple axes, this shift seemed promising. Unfortunately, queer theory and activism has not been the liberating force it promised to be for many queers of color and non-middle class queers (Cohen 1999; Ferguson 2003). As a result, the libratory promise of identity deconstruction and destabilization that postmodernism has promised appears to be a liberation reserved for white bodies. / Sociology

No / The current austerity in government spending has far reaching implications, not only for individuals but for the context in which a welfare state is perceived. The position has been reached at the same time as equality legislation makes some groups more visible. This article is an early attempt at drawing out the relationship between lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people and welfare spending cuts, made observable because of legislation requiring impact assessment. This article draws on research into impact prepared by the author, in affiliation with the Bradford LGBT Strategic Partnership, and considers LGB claims to welfare and to citizenship.

After a thwarted assassination attempt, renowned poet Sappho is forced into exile in ancient Sicily, where her hubris and terrible advice on love from Aphrodite jeopardizes her dreams of artistic greatness.

This research employs qualitative methodology to analyze social change in business news articles of The New York Times. A random sample of 127 articles published between 1970 and 2000, discussing advertising news and containing one or more of the terms "Gay", "Lesbian", " Bisexual", "Transexual", "Transgendered" and "Queer" (GLBTQ), were selected. Feminist, Marxist, Postmodern, and critical theory is used to analyze social representation, cultural norms, stereotypes and levels of visibility. The "meta-theoretical" lens applied is a gendered postmodernism grounded in stratification theory that assuages the cultural-based critique of Marxism, overcomes the essentialist limitations of radical feminism, incorporates the pluralism of socialist feminism and delimits the relativist tendencies of a purer postmodernism. Quantitatively, gay men were found to achieve twice as much business news coverage as lesbians. Bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders and queers were highly invisible. Overall, a change in the representation and depiction of corporate interest in gays and lesbians was manifested. This socio-historical analysis revealed a shift from deviantization and stigmatization of homosexuality to the commodification, and spectacularization of GLBTQs. GLBTQ invisibility is documented and the misconception of gay and lesbian wealth, created by market research, is addressed. Invisibility of GLBTQs is posited to be both an intentional and actively managed form of politics. Furthermore, business news reporting is argued to be less "objective" and more a political, social cultural and political activity where the media itself is a stage for the cultural contestation of social norms. This sociologically informed reading of business news articles details numerous case-specific instances where The New York Times contributed towards the proliferation of norms, values and beliefs characterizing GLBTQs. The New York Times is argued to be a contributor towards the creation of sexuality as a cultural product. Its representations of GLBTQs are seen as one manifestation of an institutionally created understanding of the "culture of homosexuality". / Ph. D.

A growing number of gay and lesbian children attend Catholic schools throughout the United States; and an untold number of gay and lesbian children in Catholic schools are experiencing harassment, violence, and prejudice because of their sexual orientation or gender non-conformity. Whether due to their size, strong sense of community, or making special considerations for vulnerable students, Catholic schools seem to be the best equipped to address these issues, but all of the research points to such schools enacting policies of silence and suppression. This study specifically explores why Catholic teachings on sexuality and social justice have may have been unable to compel Catholic schools to do more to understand and support gay and lesbian children. In addition to looking at traditional Catholic teaching, this project also engages non-traditional approaches to scholarship and theology, with an eye towards creating a new theoretical framework that can serve as the basis of a new pedagogical space within Catholic schools in which gay and lesbian children can affirm both their sexual identity and their Catholic identity.

Really, Daddy is a collection of twelve stories that explore the dynamics of racial, intra-racial, gender, and religious power clashes. In narratives that range from realistic to postmodern, characters move through conflicts on a path to self-realization. Ostensibly the responsible ones, the protagonists’ identities are elucidated in the context of the burdens that they carry. At the center of this collection are women and fathers in crisis, as they attempt to save their families or to nourish their own spirits. Whether the character is an African-American Muslim mother shocked into indecision when the Qur’an doesn’t lead her family in its crisis, or an enslaved woman torturing other slaves out of anger over losing her female love, fabulist techniques are combined with realism to unfold the haunting and humorous tales of the imposition of family responsibilities on the lives of the most vulnerable. Here, the reader will find the lapsed Catholic and her wife seeking help from African religion devotees who don’t approve of lesbian relationships, the maid who sacrifices her daughter to a lecherous boss so the rest of her family can eat, and the gay Muslim brother and his lesbian sister in conflict over what to do with his baby. Reflecting the contemporary world in which people live in overlapping marginal spaces of society, these are the stories of America’s forgotten subcultures. / Master of Fine Arts

This thesis is concerned with the two AIDS-era novels of Gary Indiana, a long-neglected yet essential literary figure who, as the critic Christian Lorentzen has argued, “connects the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend” (xii). Beginning chronologically with a study of Indiana’s first two novels, Horse Crazy (1989) and Gone Tomorrow (1993), this thesis attempts to realize Lorentzen’s call to action, attending particularly to the ways in which Indiana’s novels write the neoliberal subject. More than exploring life under the AIDS crisis and embodying a radical queer approach to narrative, I contend, through the repurposed frame of noir and thematic explorations of kitsch, the novels of Gary Indiana radically interrogate neoliberal subjectivities, offering a remarkably stark vision of interior lives completely colonized by capitalism, commodified subjects incapable of intimacy.

Throughout my time at UCF, I have committed my studies to better understanding my positionality as someone who both benefits and suffers from systems of oppression. I have dedicated my pedagogy and artistry to questioning how I can apply theatre as a tool to resist these systems through my work, as well as wondering how I may communicate my thoughts and concerns to the colleagues I collaborate with as I am to hold myself accountable for my involvement in works that I recognize as being in need of revision in order to resist systems of oppression. I conceptualize that to resist means to intentionally take accountability for one's implicit biases, in order to actively identify how the work we create may resist those biases rather than uphold the oppressions that supports them. In my thesis, I will reflect on how I have applied feminist and queer theories to my work as a director, playwright, and dramaturg, in order to develop a methodology for fostering resistance in the kind of theatre that I partake in. I ask how applying these theories may help me to expand my understanding of what the shows I participate in can accomplish, and what advice theory has to offer about introducing the concept of resistance to rehearsal spaces. My background as an Egyptian American Muslim cisgendered queer woman influences much of the perspective I bring into rehearsal rooms, production meetings, and to my writing as a poet and a playwright. Therefore, this thesis also aims to examine how my lived experiences intersect with the queer and feminist theories I employ in my theatrical practices. I will do this by sharing details about my upbringing, and including poetry related to multiple themes related to the shows reflected on in the following chapters.

This study utilizes theories from the population ecology and political strategy to make inferences about the mobilization and maintenance of gay and lesbian interest groups. Interest organizations typically have high mortality rates and are constantly replaced by new organizations. By noticing population ecology trends throughout the history of a specific population of interest organization, the entrepreneurs of a specific organization will be better able to develop an effective mobilization and maintenance strategy to keep their organization alive in the long run and allow the organization to effect more change in the broader political environment.