The relationship between monstrosity and homosexuality is complex, interwoven, and essential to 21st century understandings of horror and pop culture. Yet, not enough work has been done to disentangle these narratives. While the LGBT community has recently made tremendous strides in national acceptance and legalized marriage, queer individuals still feel like the monsters of both media and real life. This thesis seeks to explore the relationship between monstrosity and queerness, developing both a lens for understanding monstrosity, and understanding pop culture monsters through that lens. This thesis seeks to dismember these cultural narratives––much as these narratives have dismembered queer communities. By dismantling and reconstructing monstrosity through verse, this thesis hopes to shed light towards the struggles queer men (and non-fictional monsters) face.

This thesis aims to analyze the films of the Trans New Wave in order to define tropes and motifs of cinematic language and structure. The language of the filmmaking itself presents a different approach from mainstream transgender films, and this changes how certain imagery of transness is contextualized in a larger narrative. In particular, the films of the Trans New Wave operate in contrast to both historical trans films and modern prestige/studio films to deliver more realistic portrayals of trans peoples’ experiences and beliefs. This new language of the Trans New Wave serves to create a more accurate and profound portrayal of the daily lives of trans people, leading to a more enriching experience for trans audiences.

Two studies were performed to examine the effect of salient awareness of transgender individuals on the choices of individuals on dating apps. This study posited that transgender individuals may represent a threat to the sexual and romantic identities of others, and that being reminded of transgender individuals’ existence on dating apps would cause participants to take longer to choose who to connect with, connect with fewer individuals, and make lower judgements of the individuals’ gender and attractiveness. Participant reaction time, choice in potential partners (swipe choices), gender perception, and ratings of attractiveness were compared across a control and threat condition. The threat condition was found to have no significant effect on measured outcomes. Different aspects of romantic and sexual orientation were implicated as mediating reaction time, swipe choices, and attractiveness ratings, where attraction to men or women are associated with slower reaction times when reacting to the face a participant is attracted to, and higher swipe choice scores and attractiveness ratings. In addition, romantic and sexual attraction to nonbinary people was shown to make participants take longer to swipe, swipe on more individuals, and rate all faces more attractive. While there were no significant findings related to the threat condition, high Genderism and Transphobia scores were associated with quicker reaction times, lower swipe choice scores, and lower attractiveness ratings overall. As well, high Right Wing Authoritarianism scores were associated with lower swipe choice scores and lower attractiveness ratings overall. These findings are discussed.

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.

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.

Most schools are not safe environments for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students or for individuals who are questioning their sexual orientation. Harassment and victimization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning (LGBQ) students is pervasive. The harassment and victimization result in these students having higher rates of absenteeism and lower academic achievements than their peers. To date, most research has focused on primarily high school lesbian, gay, and bisexual students. Very few studies have included students questioning their sexual orientation. This quantitative descriptive study utilized an anonymous survey to gather information about middle school LGBQ students’ experiences with harassment. The study included 208 middle school students. The results were compiled into three groups (lesbian/gay/bisexual, questioning, and straight) and compared. Findings indicated that LGBQ students experience significantly more harassment than straight students and questioning students are more likely to experience victimization that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight students. The findings support the need for middle school administrators and staff members to take steps to create more inclusive school climates for LGBQ students.

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.

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.

<p>In my dissertation, I advance an interpretive perspective that emerges from the politics of the Mad Movement (also known as the Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/Ex-patient Movement). This movement began in the 1970s in response to patient abuses in the psychiatric system and continues today in various forms. I argue that literary studies, which often reads madness in the reductive terms of psychiatric diagnosis or which renders madness as metaphor, would benefit from mad perspectives; likewise, literary studies has much to offer the nascent field of Mad(ness) Studies in terms of methods for locating the discursive conditions of madness’ emergence. Drawing on Foucault’s work on madness and biopolitics; poststructuralist feminism; Disability Studies; and Mad Movement writings, I concentrate on texts which narrate intersecting experiences of madness, resistance, community and identity: Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit (1947), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1994), Claire Allen’s Poppy Shakespeare (2007), Liz Kettle’s Broken Biscuits (2007), Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me (2010), Persimmon Blackbridge’s Prozac Highway (2000), Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985) and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2004). I further explore mad reading practices through my reading of a blog project I conducted for research purposes in which people with experience of the mental health system reviewed depictions of madness and mental health treatment in literature, film, popular culture and news media. In reading through a mad perspective, I postulate some of the material and ideological effects that establishing mad reading practices and communities might have. I consider how madness is gendered, and how it intersects with other aspects of embodiment such as race, class and sexuality; how narratives of madness elucidate the relationship between psychiatry and colonialism, patriarchy, eugenics and neoliberalism; and how they invite us to question the limits of reason, truth and subjectivity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis seeks to explore the commonalities between religion and video games, ultimately making the argument that video games employ religion as a tool to make some deeper commentary on (in this case) American society and culture. This will be done through a detailed analysis of the game play, narrative, and religious elements at work in three different video games, as seen through the lenses of Queer Theory and Civil Religion. Furthermore, it will attempt to show that, just as gamers are struggling with their previously insular community opening up to the outside world, America has also not yet figured out what role video games can fulfill in society. This thesis seeks to provide one possible answer: the potential for video games to become tools of inquiry, sites of disruption, and, like film and books, provide commentary on our values as a society.