My work explores subculture as a form of cultural resistance to the dominant ideology. I'm concerned with the ambiguous relationship we occupy as subjects to the material produced by popular culture, and how this is digested and understood by female viewers and cultural outsiders. The specific temporality of the queer subject is a key theme in my work.

This essay aims to examine how fan fiction texts and the digital non-profit platform Archive of Our Own can provide queer separatist spaces for reorienting cis- and heteronormativity as well as how that is manifest in the published stories. It does so through an analysis of the platform’s design and accessibility and through a reading of two short stories from the collection QUEER CONVERSATIONS by the pen name heliosole. Results include that the platform makes space for non-normative stories by being free of use, its equality between moderators, writers, and users, its tradition of education and resistance, by making writing accessible and collaborative, using famous characters’ voices for speaking comforting truths and by challenging norms regarding sexuality and temporality.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to examine queer aspects of the animated television show Steven Universe (2013-present), created by Rebecca Sugar and produced by Cartoon Network. Situating Steven Universe in the context of Cartoon Network and children’s animation in general, and drawing on queer theory, as well as feminist cultural studies and kinship studies, the thesis aims to contribute to understanding of non-normative family representation in children’s entertainment. Through a close reading of the material, the thesis explores how Steven Universe queers the notion of family. It focuses on the show’s depiction of kinship, temporality and reproduction, and examines how each of these aspects subverts reproduces different modes of normativity. In Steven Universe, the family of the main character, Steven, is depicted as socially unintelligible, and as a mixture of biological and chosen kinship, highlighting the importance of both. It places great emphasis on being accepted by one’s family and community, and I discuss how this message can be both empowering and undermining. Steven’s family mostly inhabits queer time and does not give in to chrononormative structures. However, I also explore and critically evaluate parts of the series in which queer temporality is provisionally replaced by chrononormativity and striving for maturity. Finally, Steven Universe queers reproduction, by defamiliarizing the notion of (hetero)sexual reproduction and providing other alternatives for reproduction and motherhood. In general, the depiction of family on Steven Universe is characterized by transgressing multiple dichotomies and by having a complex relationship to different modes of normativity, by both resisting them and engaging in them.

Conceived in the wake of a global pandemic and the unanticipated need to create digital theatre, COVEN-19, or Magicks for Unprecdented Times as a devising project consisted of two witchcraft-inspired performances: a fall 2020 Samhain ritual and a spring 2021 Beltane ritual. The company of undergraduate and graduate theatre witches explored decentralized, iterative, slow, caretaking, queer forms of devising over digital platforms. The written portion of this thesis takes the form of a digital tarot blog: 22 (plus a bonus) interconnected essays and spells that interrogate feminist and queer theories as they pertain to the Coven’s devising process. This digital format not only reflects the malleable nature of the creative process, but it is also a kind of praxis that invites the reader to take an active role in meaning-making and resists an objective, singular narrative. Woven through these tarot cards are threads of utopian futurity, situated subjectivities, and anticapitalist temporalities. The essays and spells are primarily in conversation with adrienne maree brown, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Jose Estaban Munoz, and Starhawk – engaging with these theorists as thought-ancestors in order to activate rather than regurgitate their knowledges of radical hope and nonlinear process. The tarot deck takes a situated, backwards glance toward these ancestors as it grasps at seemingly impossible utopian horizons of collaboration and creation.

<p>Following from such theorists as Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman and Heather Love, this thesis seeks to address current scholarship on queerness and temporality that conceptualizes queer subjects as complicating traditional notions of linear time, reproduction, and progress. Mobilizing theories of temporal disruption and disorientation, including backwardness and the queer moment, this thesis explores the association between such disruptions and a persistent impulse to reckon with and reconstruct what I refer to as “the fugitive dead,” understood here both as past events and as the ghostly figures of the dead and effaced. Such disruptions can, this project posits, foster queerly generative affinities between seemingly separate categories (e.g. between the present and the past or between the living and the dead), thereby providing alternatives and challenges to normative temporal trajectories.</p> <p>My analysis considers literary representations of such temporal disruptions, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, Michael Cunningham’s <em>The Hours</em>, and Alison Bechdel’s <em>Fun Home</em> to explore their treatments of temporal linearity, queer moments, affinity and connection, as well as haunting and spectrality. Furthermore, this thesis also addresses the capacity of literary texts to <em>enact </em>temporal disruption in the form of the revisioning project, which can be figured as the literary attempt to encounter the fugitive dead. Ultimately, this thesis explores the literary and intertextual dimensions of this complex approach to queer temporality, advocating for the generative possibilities of an attentiveness to the continued presence of the past and an engagement with the figures of the lost and disappeared.</p> / Master of English

This is a time of expanding futures for transgender youth who are able to “buy time” by blocking puberty and transitioning young. Twenty years of clinical literature indicates that suppressing puberty can be lifesaving for trans youth, allowing them to avoid the distress and harm associated with transgender lives writ large. A growing number of “gender affirming” clinics now offer young trans people greater autonomy over their bodies, their futures, and their future bodies. Yet there remain troubling disparities, with indications that clinics are primarily serving white middle class trans youth and that autistic trans youth face delays. This thesis is a discourse analysis of 18 interviews with international health and mental health clinicians and 10 interviews with key stakeholders. Drawing from the literature of queer temporalities, sociological work on time and social power, queer and trans of colour critique, critical disability studies, critical autism studies, and transgender studies, I use an “interpretive repertoire” analysis to ask: How have puberty suppression and early gender transition become thinkable futures for trans youth? This thesis finds that the conditions of possibility that make early transition possible for some, are the same that foreclose it for others. The discourses of maturity and cognitive age, the expected “chrononormative” narrative, and the discourses of crisis and the “race against time”, each work to make outsiders of autistic and racialized trans youth in particular. While there is much to celebrate in the new futures available to trans youth, I argue that puberty blockers currently function as a “switchpoint” moving privileged trans youth onto a track toward even greater privilege, and widening the gap in life opportunities. This thesis introduces the concept of “the temporality of privilege” and calls for greater attention to the political implications augured by the contemporary scene of gender-affirming care for trans youth. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / We are in a time of expanding futures for transgender youth who are able to “buy time” by blocking puberty and transitioning to a new gender while young. Clinical research and literature suggest this as a lifesaving option for trans youth, allowing them to avoid distress and harm. Yet there remain troubling disparities with this treatment. Many clinics report they are primarily serving white middle class trans youth and there are some indications that autistic trans youth may be stalled or delayed in the process. I report on a discourse analysis of 18 interviews with health and mental health clinicians across six countries, in addition to 10 interviews with community level experts. I draw on a range of theory and an “interpretive repertoire” analysis to theorize how these futures become thinkable and possible for trans youth, while considering the political implications and unforeseen consequences for those youth unable to benefit.