abstract: This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2012

This project examines “positive change” with regard to queer/LGBTTITQetc. education-activism in Vancouver, British Columbia directed at building what has been described as “queer-friendly schools” through the development and implementation of policy, as well as activist work connected to those efforts. I employ elements of autoethnography and participatory research by documenting and analyzing my education-activist work in this context and that of others with whom I have done this work. I situate this project within the broader context of the education system and queer/LGBTTITQetc. education-activist efforts in British Columbia. In the process, I problematize what is meant by or capable of activism and “positive change.” As demonstrated in the literature review, various understandings of sexuality, gender, activism, educational leadership, and “positive change” are available to inform queer/LGBTTITQetc. education-activism. This thesis examines how these understandings sit in tension with the practicalities, limitations, and contradictions of activist engagement at the school district level of a complex, politicized public school system. My engagement with the literature, documentation of the practical work, and exploration of a number of guiding questions with the project’s participants comprise the bulk of this project. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

The goal of this dissertation is to explore the construction of the Catholic, the Moor, and the Jew in Shakespeare's early plays as instances of queering—as stagings of religious others as sexually deviant and a threat to normative, English, Protestant reproduction. As numerous critics have remarked, the alien is a conspicuous figure in Elizabethan drama. A number of explanations for this have been offered, the vast majority of which have sought to tie this phenomenon to emerging categories of race and empire (see, for example, Emily Bartels' work on the "alien" in Elizabethan drama, and the work done by both Kim F. Hall and Virginia Mason Vaughan on the role blackness plays on the early modern stage). I want to explore the religious dimension of otherness. In Protestant religious discourse, the error of other religions was characterized as a perversion of desire that had serious implications for physical and ideological reproduction. As Francis Dolan has noted, Catholics were seen as embracing a disordered vision of sexuality in which women are dominant. This fear of political and social inversion is typically associated with the "whore of Babylon" in late 16th and early 17th century rhetoric. As Nabil Matar observes, the Moor was seen to be lascivious, embracing a polymorphous, perverse desire that pollutes culture through sodomy while at the same time threatening miscegenation. Finally, as James Shapiro has noted, the Jew was seen as desiring money above all in a way that entailed a kind of "monstrous" and asexual reproduction through usury. In sum, the discourses of religious otherness were principally concerned with sexual deviance as a threat to reproduction. Shakespeare's construction of characters like Joan La Pucelle, Aaron the Moor, and Shylock is rooted in this protestant understanding of religious otherness as queer. That understanding was increasingly important in a late Elizabethan England that was, as Daniel Swift suggests, rooted in protestant ideology and simultaneously worried about the stability of that identity, given an aging monarch and growing military threats from Catholic and Islamic nations. Our understanding of Shakespeare's religious figures is enhanced by taking into account the queer character of their religious otherness at a time of acute reproductive anxiety.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Sara R. Luly / In Das Leben der Hochgräfin von Rattenzuhausbeiuns, written by Bettina von Arnim and Gisela von Arnim Grimm, the material used to dress the bodies of young girls is unexpected and non-traditional. There are characters clothed in dresses made from the pages of books, bearskin coats, butterfly wings, onion root wigs, and many other bizarre materials. The main protagonist, Gritta, experiences, what Katheryn B. Stockton conceptualizes as “sideways growth,” or a non-linear, non-heteronormative childhood. The initial book-dress foreshadows the developmental possibilities for the protagonist Gritta. In this paper I argue that the text uses clothing made of non-traditional materials to construct queer girlhood for the female characters, and in doing so provides possible paths of “sideways growth.”

Although there is a good foundation of feminist research at the intersection of performative labor, pornography, and sexuality, there are few (if any) published studies that examine race in porn content intended for gay men’s consumption. What’s more, existing research samples solely from corporatized porn, which is expressly produced, scripted, and directed. Bound by the conventions of the market, however, corporate pornography must abide by a consumer demand that reflects white machinations of black sexuality rather than the self-proclaimed sexual identity of African American men. Instead, I employ an exploratory content analysis of pornographic videos categorized as “ebony” on a popular user-submitted porn database. I am interested in 1) the character of pornographic representations of queer black masculinity and 2) how these representations vary between corporate and non-corporate producers. I find that representations of black men in gay porn rely on stereotypes of black masculinity to arouse consumers, especially those which characterize black men as “missing links” or focus excessively on their “dark phalluses.” Moreover, these depictions consistently separate gay black and white men’s sexuality into bifurcated discursive spaces, thereby essentializing sexual aspects of racial identity. Lastly, though such depictions are less prevalent in user-submitted videos, overall, both user-submitted and corporate content reify stereotypes about black masculinity.

Traditional Marxist historical materialism employs a material analysis that privileges how capitalism interacts with subject formation and has been used in recent historicizations of sexuality. This paper understands that line of analysis to be gendering, racializing, and pathologizing and examines LGBTQ history as a starting point to decenter capitalism from the analysis. Using Roderick Ferguson's "queer of color" critique, this paper maintains that more specifically, history should attend to the emergence of surplus populations which capitalism keeps hidden. Under the umbrella of queer of color critique, migration studies, transnational perspectives, and the destabilizing nature of queer theory all have the capacity to provide a fuller view of sexual difference and the histories of LGBTQ and other surplus populations. Furthermore, a legal framework provides an opportunity to take theory into practice by examining legislation with the analytical scope of queer of color and from an anti-capitalist vantage point.

The primary objective of this thesis is to queerly analyze the Planning 10 curriculum of British Columbia, Canada. ‘Queer’ in this case means the destabilization of identities that are traditionally understood in terms of binaries, and normalized through discourse. The lead research question is: how British Columbia’s Planning 10 curriculum (specifically it’s health component) might serve to reinforce and naturalize heterosexuality in its students and by extension in society by utilizing a combination of both Queer and curriculum theories. By using such an analytical framework, this thesis seeks to provide a multi-theoretical analysis of how sex, sexuality and gender identities are maintained and reinforced by the sex education curriculum in BC, and as such, normalized. This work will complement the recent move within curriculum studies from a modernist, or ‘black box’ understanding of curriculum, with a general focus on goals and objectives, towards a post-modernist and hopefully queer(er) understanding. Through both semi-structured interviews with in-service Planning 10 teachers (and one external educator specializing in sex education), and document analysis of the Planning 10 Integrated Resource Package (last revised in 2007), this research will uncovered queer potential within the curriculum, as well as those discursive constraints that might limit challenge to the heteronormative order. This thesis found that although there is the potential to include queer concepts through silence towards identities within the curriculum, because sex education is not a “teachable subject” in teacher education and a lack of professional development opportunities, teachers are left feeling unqualified, underqualified, and generally uncomfortable with the subject matter. More over, the curriculum document provides an “Alternative Delivery Clause” that pushes sex education into the realm of “sensitive subject matter”. This discomfort is further perpetuated by a number of binaries that remain rigid due to heteronormative discourse and other major narratives, while sex education exists in a grey area between private/public, child/adult, school/home, and state/family. / Graduate

This thesis explores the question “What do teachers who have recently graduated from teacher education programs know, believe, and experience about supporting LGBTQ+ students?” This research was conducted using narrative inquiry and métissage, with a group of six volunteer participants who had completed their teacher education programs since May of 2012. The participants wrote narrative responses to written prompts and the researcher wove those narratives together with his own experiences to highlight points of affinity and tension. This research articulates a number of ways in which teacher education programs can better prepare teachers to support LGBTQ+ students. / Graduate / 2018-12-18

This study investigates ‘how men knitting functions as a queer pedagogy’. In the doing it recognizes that a man knitting elbows his way into long-held contrived conventions of (domestic) femininity, queering space and generally causing embarrassment and a sense of cultural unease through his performance. As a work of educational research (situated within a Society, Culture, and Literacies profile) it is intent on troubling lingering gender-based notions of in/appropriate educational research and what remains academically out-of-bounds: knitting as domestic diversion has largely been neglected by scholars with the few academic sources focusing almost exclusively (and unapologetically) on female knitters. As such, the pedagogical meaning(s) of men knitting are essentially absent from the educational literature. This research project seeks to address that gap. Taking the form of three journal articles, this work reads the everyday performance of men knitting as queer pedagogy, learning which ‘minces’ and troubles not only masculinity but traditional constructions of educational discourse limiting pedagogy to classrooms and accredited educators. Using personal narrative and a methodology which brings together document analysis and queer theory, this study interrogates photographic and other artifacts through a queer lens, destabilizing meaning(s) and problematizing gender. It recognizes that leisure activities like knitting, as with other human activities, are by-products of the culture where they’re re/produced and a reflection of broader societal boundaries. ‘Men knitting as a queer pedagogy,’ is about gendered desires, anxieties, and places where critical dissatisfactions with culture gets performed in other/ed ways.

The following thesis will explore and evaluate the lighting design behind Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge produced by the UMass Amherst Department of Theater as part of their 2017-2018 season. It will cover the entire lighting design process from reading the script to producing the world on stage. It will reflect early conversations, the collaboration process, design goals and executions, and the successes and failures reflecting on our art.