In 2012 clashes between Catholic canonical law and Canadian common law regarding sexual minorities continue to be played out in Canadian Catholic schools. Although Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures same-sex equality in Canada, this study shows that some teachers in Alberta Catholic schools are fired for contravening Catholic doctrine about non-heterosexuality, while Ontario students’ requests to establish Gay/Straight Alliances are denied. This study seeks to uncover the causes and effects of the long-standing disconnect between Canadian Catholic schools and the Charter by comparing the treatment of and attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (lgbtq) teachers and students in publicly-funded Catholic school systems in the provinces of Alberta and Ontario. I employ a multi-method qualitative research framework involving: 1) semi-structured interviews with 20 participants (7 current and former teachers and 13 former students), 18 of which are re-presented as condensed narratives; 2) media accounts that illustrate the Catholic schools’ homophobic environment; and 3) two key Alberta and Ontario Catholic policy and curriculum documents. The central question driving this study is: How does power operate in Canadian Catholic schools? Is it exercised from the top down solely, or are there instances of power rising up from the bottom as well? To answer this question, I draw upon the critical theories of Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1970/2008), Foucault (1975/1995), and Giroux (2001) in order to explain the phenomenon of “holy homophobia” in Canadian Catholic schools. The chief finding of this study is that contradictory Catholic doctrine on the topic of non-heterosexuality is directing school policy and practice regarding the management of sexual minority groups in Alberta and Ontario Catholic schools, positioning these schools as potential hotbeds for homophobia. Hopefully, this thesis can one day serve as a resource for anti-homophobia education researchers and practitioners, school administrators, educators and students who are interested in eliminating religiously-inspired homophobia in school settings.

In 2012 clashes between Catholic canonical law and Canadian common law regarding sexual minorities continue to be played out in Canadian Catholic schools. Although Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures same-sex equality in Canada, this study shows that some teachers in Alberta Catholic schools are fired for contravening Catholic doctrine about non-heterosexuality, while Ontario students’ requests to establish Gay/Straight Alliances are denied. This study seeks to uncover the causes and effects of the long-standing disconnect between Canadian Catholic schools and the Charter by comparing the treatment of and attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (lgbtq) teachers and students in publicly-funded Catholic school systems in the provinces of Alberta and Ontario. I employ a multi-method qualitative research framework involving: 1) semi-structured interviews with 20 participants (7 current and former teachers and 13 former students), 18 of which are re-presented as condensed narratives; 2) media accounts that illustrate the Catholic schools’ homophobic environment; and 3) two key Alberta and Ontario Catholic policy and curriculum documents. The central question driving this study is: How does power operate in Canadian Catholic schools? Is it exercised from the top down solely, or are there instances of power rising up from the bottom as well? To answer this question, I draw upon the critical theories of Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1970/2008), Foucault (1975/1995), and Giroux (2001) in order to explain the phenomenon of “holy homophobia” in Canadian Catholic schools. The chief finding of this study is that contradictory Catholic doctrine on the topic of non-heterosexuality is directing school policy and practice regarding the management of sexual minority groups in Alberta and Ontario Catholic schools, positioning these schools as potential hotbeds for homophobia. Hopefully, this thesis can one day serve as a resource for anti-homophobia education researchers and practitioners, school administrators, educators and students who are interested in eliminating religiously-inspired homophobia in school settings.

In this thesis, I explore Latino masculinities and contest their uniformity through transforming an oral history conducted with my father into a collection of short stories. Following storytelling traditions of Latino/Mexican culture, I converted an oral history interviews with my dad into a collection of short stories. From these short stories I extracted themes relating to the micro and macro manifestations of gender policing. Drawing from Judith Butler's Theory of performativity and Gloria Anzaldua's theory of Borderland identities, I rethink masculinity and offer Jose Esteban Munoz's theory of disidentification. With these theories in conversation, I analyze the themes of the short stories I present. In Chapter One, I investigate the potential of verguenza and respeto, or shame and respect, to complicate masculinity. In Chapter Two, I critically analyze my father's interaction with INS officials during his interview to become a U.S. resident. In these two sets of stories, I use disidentification to uncover the third space relationship with masculinity. I see this relationship at the intersections of race, class, gender and ability, the identities which come together to leave my father in the borderlands. Ultimately, I complicate masculinity through these analyses, offering a space for a nonoppressive masculinity.

In this thesis, I explore how specific films and television shows use the preexisting structure and mechanics of narrative film in order to create queer characters and stories that defy their otherness and stereotypes, thus creating a profound cinematic experience. Not only does the manipulation of these structures and mechanics heighten the realism and depth of the narrative at hand, it also enhances audience identification by allowing queer viewers to find themselves and straight viewers to understand the “other.” In this manner, the New New Queer Cinema and television have had lasting effects on the modern gay rights movement, changing perceptions and attitudes of society on an extremely personal level and making way for incredible strides in public policy changes.

Mohammad Khordadian is a gay, Iranian American dancer and entertainer who immigrated to the United States from Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution. Since his arrival to the United States, Khordadian has produced countless instructional and presentational dance videos which garnered enormous popularity among diasporic Iranians and Iranians in Iran alike. I locate a tension between his adoration by the public and the immense anxiety that male Iranian dancers can induce in other Iranians. Khordadian invokes the historical evolution of the archetypal Iranian male dancer/entertainers written about in Persian literature and poetry --the 12 to 16-year-old, handsome boys with older lovers. As Orientalists linked these sinful relationships to male homosociality and sexual repression in Islam, the memory of the male dancer has been repressed out of an Iranian desire to fold into the pale of Western modernity. Khordadian, with his over-the-top gestures (what I will call “queer gestures”), the transnational circulation of these gestures through instructional videos, and his lived experience as a gay Iranian man, transgresses the boundaries set by heteronormativity and Orientalism. However, this is not without a myriad of complications.

The sociocultural mythology of the South homogenizes it as a site of abjection. To counter the regionalist discourse, the dissertation intersects queer sexualities with gender and race and focuses on exploring identity and spatial formation among Black lesbian and queer women. The dissertation seeks to challenge the monolith of the South and place the region into multiple contexts and to map Black geographies through an intentional intersectional account of Black queer women. The dissertation utilizes qualitative research methods to ascertain understandings of lived experiences in the production of space. The dissertation argues that an idea of Progress has been indoctrinated as a synonym for the lgbtq civil rights movement and subsequently provides an analysis of progress discourses and queer sexualities and political campaigns of equality in the South. Analyses revealed different ways to situate progress utilizing the public contributions of three Black women interviewed for the dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation utilizes six Black queer and lesbian women to explain the multifarious nature of identities and their construction in place. Black queer and lesbian women produce spaces that deconstruct the normativity of stasis and physicality, and the dissertation explores the consequential realities of being a body in space. These consequences are particularly highlighted in the dissertation by discussions of the processes of racialization in the bounded and unbounded senses of space and place and the impacts of religious institutions, specifically Christianity. The dissertation concluded that no space is without complication. Other considerations should be made in the advancement of alleviating oppression deeply embedded in United States landscapes. Black women’s geographies offer epistemological and ontological renderings that enrich analyses of space, place, and landscape. The dissertation also concludes that Black women’s bodies represent sites for the production of geographic knowledge through narrating their spaces of material trajectories of interlocking, multiscalar lives.

Although many advocates believe that the increased representation of transgender people in mainstream fiction will lead to more understanding for the transgender community, many transgender scholars (Page, Richards) are critical of representation that is created without any involvement of actual transgender people. Some fear that the more radical perspectives of trans lives are being erased and replaced with a homogenous idea of the kinds of trans people who are “acceptable” (cárdenas). To avoid this homogeneity, it is important to allow for a multiplicity of trans perspectives and empower transgender people to have agency over their own narratives. The goal of this project is to highlight how trans agency in story telling can benefit trans fiction and take it beyond simply providing a “trans 101” for cisgender audiences. It will also address how the internet has benefitted trans creators by providing a platform for a variety of trans voices to share their stories. By analyzing fiction that centers on transgender experience and is created by transgender people, this thesis will explore the topics and issues addressed in trans stories and the diversity in the perspectives shown. Internet-based fiction such as webcomics and web series will be examined, as well as a trans authored anthology that was funded online. Examining these stories may show us what we are missing by relying on the current homogenous mainstream representation and open our eyes to the importance of empowering transgender people to tell their own diverse, radical stories.

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.

Les perturbations des marches de la Fierté à Montréal et à Toronto par des membres de Black Lives Matter ont mis en lumière l’exclusion des personnes racisées au sein des mouvements LGBTQ au Canada, de même qu’en Europe et aux États-Unis. Ces évènements témoignent de la façon dont les personnes racisées s’organisent au sein des mouvements LGBTQ, c’est-à-dire par la création d’organisations formées autour d’identités racisées spécifiques. Ceux-ci s’inscrivent dans une riche tradition d’activisme portée par des personnes racisées LGBTQ au Canada qui demeure, néanmoins, peu étudiée au pays. Cette thèse poursuit ainsi deux objectifs principaux. Dans un premier temps, elle vise à rendre visible la façon dont les personnes racisées participent collectivement au sein des mouvements LGBTQ à Montréal et à Toronto, ou ce que nous appelons les trajectoires d’engagement collectif des personnes racisées LGBTQ, rompant ainsi avec les récits dominants, centrés sur l’expérience des militants LGBTQ blancs. Dans un second temps, elle tente d’expliquer pourquoi les personnes racisées participent collectivement au sein des mouvements LGBTQ de cette façon. Puisant dans la théorie des mouvements sociaux, cette thèse soulève l’importance de tenir compte du contexte relationnel dans lequel s’inscrit la participation, à savoir la configuration des rapports de pouvoir déterminant les positionnements sociaux des individus et des groupes, les uns par rapport aux autres. Pour ce faire, nous proposons l’élaboration d’un cadre théorique intersectionnel articulé autour de trois principes, soit la relationnalité, le pouvoir et le contexte social, combiné à une analyse multiniveau. Nous démontrons ainsi que les trajectoires d’engagement collectif des personnes racisées LGBTQ sont le produit des parcours individuels militants (niveau micro), de dynamiques organisationnelles (niveau meso) et de contextes sociopolitiques et institutionnels (niveau macro). Cette thèse est le fruit de séjours de recherche effectués à Montréal et à Toronto, durant lesquels nous avons réalisé 42 entretiens semi-dirigés avec des militantes racisées LGBTQ, de même qu’avec des militantes blanches LGBTQ. La documentation produite par des organisations LGBTQ ainsi que différentes instances gouvernementales a également été mobilisée de manière complémentaire. À un niveau micro, les résultats de la thèse révèlent comment les parcours individuels militants des personnes racisées LGBTQ diffèrent de ceux des personnes blanches. À un niveau meso, les résultats mettent en évidence la dimension structurante du privilège blanc (masculin/cisgenre/sans handicap) au sein des mouvements LGBTQ, ayant pour effet de reléguer les personnes racisées à la marge de ces mouvements. Enfin, à un niveau macro, une analyse comparative des régimes de citoyenneté québécois et canadiens démontre la façon dont les contextes institutionnels et sociopolitiques informent la participation au sein des mouvements LGBTQ. En rendant visible la participation des personnes racisées au sein des mouvements LGBTQ canadiens, cette thèse contribue empiriquement à l’avancement des connaissances sur le militantisme LGBTQ au Canada. À un niveau théorique, elle enrichit la théorie des mouvements sociaux en introduisant un cadre théorique intersectionnel pouvant faciliter l’analyse de la participation au sein des mouvements sociaux. En plus d’illustrer le potentiel théorique de l’intersectionnalité pour approfondir notre compréhension des mouvements sociaux, cette thèse se distingue de travaux récents davantage centrés sur la praxis et les coalitions intersectionnels au sein des mouvements sociaux. / Recent Pride march disruptions by Black Lives Matter protestors in Montréal and Toronto have pointed to the continuous exclusion of people of colour within LGBTQ movements across Canada, as well as in Europe and the United States. While these events constitute recent manifestations of a particular form of organizing within LGBTQ movements, namely organizations formed around specific racialized identities, they are in fact inscribed within a broader tradition of LGBTQ people of colour (LGBTQ-POC) organizing in Canada, overlooked by academics and mainstream activists. It is in that respect that the aim of this dissertation is twofold. First, it aims to render visible the ways in which people of colour have collectively participated in Montréal’s and Toronto’s LGBTQ movements, or what I refer to as LGBTQ-POC collective engagement trajectories, thereby disrupting dominant, White-centered, LGBTQ narratives. Second, it seeks to explain why people of colour have collectively participated in LGBTQ movements the way that they have in Montréal and Toronto. Building on social movement theory’s previous work, it argues for the need to unpack the relational context within which participation is set, meaning the power configurations that socially locate individuals and groups in relation to each other. With its emphasis on relationality, power, and social context, intersectionality thus comes across as a pertinent avenue to bridge this theoretical gap. Combined with a multilevel analysis, it reveals how LGBTQ-POC collective engagement trajectories are the result of individual activist paths (micro-level), social movement organizational dynamics (meso-level), and institutional and sociopolitical contexts (macro-level). This dissertation draws on fieldwork undergone in Montréal and Toronto, during which 42 in-depth interviews were conducted with LGBTQ-POC and White-LGBTQ activists. Secondary sources, such as documents produced by LGBTQ organizations and other government-related documentation were also used for the analysis. At a micro-level, results show how LGBTQ-POC and White-LGBTQ activists follow different activist paths. At a meso-level, results reveal the structuring character of white (male/cisgender/able-bodied) privilege within LGBTQ movements, in both Montréal and Toronto. At a macro-level, a comparative analysis of Québécois and Canadian citizenship regimes however demonstrates the extent to which institutional and sociopolitical contexts also shape social movement participation. By rendering visible people of colour’s collective participation within Canadian LGBTQ movements, this dissertation fills a significant empirical gap. Theoretically, it enriches social movement theory by introducing an intersectional theoretical framework suitable for analyzing social movement participation. Rather than discard social movement theory as a whole, it instead engages a dialogue with previous work on social movement participation. Alternatively, it lives true to the promise of intersectionality as a theoretical framework for advancing our understanding of social movements, distinguishing itself from recent work focusing primarily on intersectional praxis and intersectional coalitions in the context of social movements.

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.