Considered as the ―...central organizing method‖ (Fuss, 1991:1) in terms of gender and sexual orientation particularly in the Western world, the heterosexual/homosexual binary, emphasises the centrality of ―compulsory heterosexuality‖ (Rich, 1993:227) in the everyday lives of social and sexual actors. In doing this, homosexuality is not only differentiated from heterosexuality, but may rather be ‗banished‘ to a lower and subordinate stratum of so-called sexual ―respectability‖ (Rubin, 1993:13). Using it as a point of departure, this particular sociological inquiry sought to critically explore the influence of a binary logic on the identity construction of gay male academics and students in South African tertiary education. This study provides an in-depth qualitative discussion of the lived experiences of these men on university campuses in order to redress the limited focus on the subject matter in South African sociology. Informed by the metatheoretical principles of phenomenology and central features of a symbolic interactionist methodology, three specific subthemes guided the research. These included the rationalisation of sexual orientation, self-reflexivity and, as my inductive contribution, a consideration of the deprofessionalisation and/or professionalisation of the gay male academic identity in South African higher education. In adopting Jackson and Scott‘s (2010) conceptualisation of the rationalisation of sexuality, the study sought to explore its role in the identity construction of gay men through, amongst others, ―sexual scripting‖ (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), ―doing gender‖ (West & Zimmerman, 2002), ―using gender‖ (Johnson, 2009) as well as ―doing gay‖ (Dowsett et al., 2008), to (de)construct a ―gay sensibility‖ (cf. Seidman, 2002a) within and between their private and professional contexts. Secondly, such negotiation of their homosexual ―performativity‖ (Butler, 1990) presupposed an undeniable degree of ―reflexiveness‖ (cf. Mead, 1962) on the part of the gay male, to adhere to the expectations of other individuals in a specific social context. Given the findings from a thematic analysis of fifteen (15) in-depth interviews with academics and seven (7) with students, as well as two (2) self-administered questionnaires completed by academics and seventeen (17) by students, the influence of heteronormativity, heterosexism and homophobia, was again reiterated. The participants mostly opted to professionalise their gay male identities (thus differentiate between their private and academic gay male identity), regardless of the fact that their narratives reflected an internal diversity, plurality and potentially non-subordinate otherness, akin to Plummer‘s (1998b) reference to ―homosexualities‖ rather than only one homogenised version of ‗homosexuality‘. Their choice to do so was attributed to a conscious effort to either ‗pass‘ as heterosexual, assimilate into the dominant sexual and gendered culture of the campus, or conform to a stereotypical gay performance in homosexually-segregated academic departments because of anxiety, fear or shame. As such, the potential of mastering an uncategorised ‗queer‘ inclination in tertiary education, becomes all the more difficult, if not improbable. / PhD (Sociology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Considered as the ―...central organizing method‖ (Fuss, 1991:1) in terms of gender and sexual orientation particularly in the Western world, the heterosexual/homosexual binary, emphasises the centrality of ―compulsory heterosexuality‖ (Rich, 1993:227) in the everyday lives of social and sexual actors. In doing this, homosexuality is not only differentiated from heterosexuality, but may rather be ‗banished‘ to a lower and subordinate stratum of so-called sexual ―respectability‖ (Rubin, 1993:13). Using it as a point of departure, this particular sociological inquiry sought to critically explore the influence of a binary logic on the identity construction of gay male academics and students in South African tertiary education. This study provides an in-depth qualitative discussion of the lived experiences of these men on university campuses in order to redress the limited focus on the subject matter in South African sociology. Informed by the metatheoretical principles of phenomenology and central features of a symbolic interactionist methodology, three specific subthemes guided the research. These included the rationalisation of sexual orientation, self-reflexivity and, as my inductive contribution, a consideration of the deprofessionalisation and/or professionalisation of the gay male academic identity in South African higher education. In adopting Jackson and Scott‘s (2010) conceptualisation of the rationalisation of sexuality, the study sought to explore its role in the identity construction of gay men through, amongst others, ―sexual scripting‖ (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), ―doing gender‖ (West & Zimmerman, 2002), ―using gender‖ (Johnson, 2009) as well as ―doing gay‖ (Dowsett et al., 2008), to (de)construct a ―gay sensibility‖ (cf. Seidman, 2002a) within and between their private and professional contexts. Secondly, such negotiation of their homosexual ―performativity‖ (Butler, 1990) presupposed an undeniable degree of ―reflexiveness‖ (cf. Mead, 1962) on the part of the gay male, to adhere to the expectations of other individuals in a specific social context. Given the findings from a thematic analysis of fifteen (15) in-depth interviews with academics and seven (7) with students, as well as two (2) self-administered questionnaires completed by academics and seventeen (17) by students, the influence of heteronormativity, heterosexism and homophobia, was again reiterated. The participants mostly opted to professionalise their gay male identities (thus differentiate between their private and academic gay male identity), regardless of the fact that their narratives reflected an internal diversity, plurality and potentially non-subordinate otherness, akin to Plummer‘s (1998b) reference to ―homosexualities‖ rather than only one homogenised version of ‗homosexuality‘. Their choice to do so was attributed to a conscious effort to either ‗pass‘ as heterosexual, assimilate into the dominant sexual and gendered culture of the campus, or conform to a stereotypical gay performance in homosexually-segregated academic departments because of anxiety, fear or shame. As such, the potential of mastering an uncategorised ‗queer‘ inclination in tertiary education, becomes all the more difficult, if not improbable. / PhD (Sociology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein may appear unrelated to one another at first glance. We have an impoverished upstate New Yorker versus relatively comfortable Californian, bisexual romantic nomad versus lesbian monogamist, nihilist versus life-affirming enthusiast, and agnostic-atheist versus secular Jew. When they are referenced together (which happens rarely), it is usually in the context of their Parisian exploits. But a closer look reveals more vital affinities. Both writers remain problematically situated in the modernist canon. Both were inspired by visual art. Both struggled to get published during their lifetimes. Both disassociated themselves from mainstream feminist movements, preferring subtler, more idiosyncratic ways of questioning the status quo. Both held a sustained interest in the queer and, as this dissertation seeks to demonstrate, imagined that theme in original ways—Barnes, through loss; Stein, through phenomenology. Writing out of the spirit of Christian martyrdom, Barnes revels in queer suffering and its transfiguring potential: queers extravagantly lose (themselves), fail, and suffer, yet such ordeals aren’t without value. The first half of my dissertation, thus, appraises Barnes’ “queer negativity” in general before pondering how its masochistic energies push against those authorities that would negate the queer. Chapter One analyzes Barnes’ mythical-seeming transgendered figures who encounter profound failure, despite the imaginative freedom emanating from their ahistorical surroundings. Barnes’ sense of queer failure intensifies in Chapter Two, where same-sex desire invokes the abject by symbolically collapsing psychic boundaries between lovers and refusing reproductive futurity. Both chapters contextualize the moral inversion that becomes the focus of Chapter Three: how does such nihilism tragically ennoble the queer and endow it with insurgent impulses? Without taking a self-consciously queer activist stance, Barnes draws on what Gilles Deleuze would later enunciate as an inverted affect regime: the power of punishment to enforce repressive sexual regulations through pain and hence to bridle perversion becomes inverted when punishment opens the portal to pleasure, when pleasure relocates to sites of perversion. If Barnes writes as a romantic martyr, Stein looks at the queer through a phenomenologist’s eyes. The reciprocity between social conditioning and consciousness, in particular, remains an urgent concern throughout her career. To be “queer,” one often breaks away from a lifetime of habituated orientations toward sex and gender. But queerness cannot wholly bracket the norms that have been left behind. It exists in relation to what it queers. Foregrounding this discussion, Chapter Four examines how Stein’s modernism, phenomenology, and queer criticism intersect. Chapter Five investigates how “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” “Many Many Women,” and The Making of Americans reorient us from the “straight” and narrow. Yet this reorientation remains partial. Not all heteronormative biases can be shed, as is evident in The Making of Americans’ classist undertones running through its “singular” queer vision. The sixth chapter further tests the limits of reorientation as such. Ida’s Ida desperately wants to live a queer life, but discovers that she cannot if she approaches queerness as a radically separatist ideal. A solipsistic universe where she can entirely withdraw from society through sleep, silence, or soliloquy remains a fantasy. Ida’s internal conflict, in turn, mirrors Stein’s struggle to enact aesthetic modes that prove just as impossible to practice, being devoted to eliminating memory, emotions, personal identity, and social awareness.

This is a comparative study between binary and nonbinary transgender people based on their everyday experience of difficulties. Previous studies show that many transpeople experience violence, infringement and oppression. Studies also show that suicide rate among transgender people is much higher than among the common (cisgender) population. Those studies rarely make an analysis based on specific gender identity, which shows the diversity among transgender people.To analyse the individual experiences, this study made four interviews with binary and nonbinary transgender people. The interviews were analysed with a queer-theoratical perspective to show and focus on the oppressional mechanics that heteronormativity has. The results show clear differences and similarities between binary and nonbinary transgender people's experiences of everyday life difficulties and oppression. Nonbinary transgender people elucidate their nonexistence in the majorities knowledge as a big difficulty; that people in their everyday surroundings and society in general are not aware of them. Binary transgender people's experiences have instead been focusing on their bodies and social context of their transitions. / Denna studie avser att undersöka och jämföra transpersoners erfarenheter kring svårigheter i vardagen. Jämförelsen görs mellan binära och ickebinära transpersoner. Tidigare forskning visar att många transpersoner blir utsatta för våld, kränkningar och förtryck. Den visar även att självmordsfrekvensen bland transpersoner är mycket högre än hos populationen i övrigt. I dessa undersökningar kring transpersoners hälsa och situation görs det sällan eller aldrig analyser baserade på den mångfald gällande identitet som finns inom gruppen transpersoner. För att undersöka dessa individuella erfarenheter genomfördes ett antal intervjuer med binära och ickebinära transpersoner. Intervjuerna analyserades utifrån en queerteoretisk utgångspunkt för att belysa de förtryckande mekanismer som heteronormen medför. Resultatet visar att det finns tydliga likheter och skillnader i binära och ickebinära transpersoners erfarenheter kring svårigheter och förtryck. Ickebinära transpersoner tar upp omgivningens omedvetenhet kring deras existens som en stor svårighet, att personer i deras vardagliga omgivning och i samhället i stort inte känner till att de finns medan svårigheterna för binära transpersoner snarare har varit i förhållande till deras kroppar och sociala sammanhang.

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.

Drawing on my own process of entry into local queer, lesbian and feminist public cultures, I argue that a powerful relationship between feminist and lesbian existence can be felt and that this sensibility bears influence on the way queer erotic and politicized identities emerge in relation to one another. These affective links remain frequently unacknowledged and/or are actively repudiated due to popular accounts of feminist genealogy whereby second wave lesbian-feminist positions are rendered fundamentally incompatible with contemporary queer/third wave feminist ones. I challenge this narrative by building on select early articulations of radical lesbian feminism to show that when affirmed consciously, the sense that lesbianism and feminism are interconnected constitutes a “woman-identified experience” and an opportunity to bear witness to the unrealized possibilities of second-wave radical feminism in the present. I conclude that politicized “lesbian” and/or “woman” identification remain indispensable strategic sites from which to observe and confront heteropatriarchy.

<p>French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this study was to gain knowledge about how people who identify themselves outside the gender binary system look upon treatment from people in different contexts and how the strategies they use in relation to treatment are expressed. As an approach to this study, we chose to do a qualitative internet study, the empirical material included ten various blogs written by people who identify themselves outside the gender binary system. By using a content analysis we were able to distinguish themes concerning good and bad treatment as well as different forms of coping in our empirical material. The analysis was based on two different kinds of perspectives: queer theory and the concept of coping strategies. The result of this study showed that people who identify themselves outside the gender binary system experience poor treatment more often than good treatment from people in different contexts. One important result that this study showed was that most people described that they felt reduced and ridiculed by, for example, government officials and family members because of their gender identity. We also found that the people in this study used different strategies to cope with the poor treatment they received. A strategy that most of the people in the study used to avoid being treated badly were dressing in gender-neutral clothes. The main conclusion of the study is that it is important that we humans do not assume that all persons belong to the gender binary system. More knowledge about the area is needed to enable us to treat people who identify outside the gender binary system adequately.

Existing literature about transgender college students calls upon higher education organizations to support trans students' use of self-identified first names (in place of legal names, given at birth) and self-identified pronouns (in place of assumed pronouns based on sex assigned at birth, or other's perceptions of physical appearance), but that literature lacks guidance on how to achieve this work, which is deceptively complex. This study addressed this gap in the literature in two ways. First by using critical theory to show how hegemonic, binary notions of gender shape intellectual, social, and regulatory dimensions of higher education in ways that complicate practitioners' efforts to provide trans students with support. Second, by using institutional ethnography (IE) as a critical framework and methodology to uncover what IE refers to as texts and relations that operate in unintended ways to undo practitioners' efforts to provide desired supports. I use examples from my experience as a higher education LGBTQ resource professional at the University of Vermont (UVM) to add depth to my analysis and present the results in two articles. The first article presents the rationale for changing campus information systems to enable transgender students to use self-identified names and pronouns on campus, and presents examples of the work accomplished at the University of Vermont and the University of Michigan. The second article extends beyond logistics to explore the complex questions that are the focus of this dissertation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate if and how the picture book about Alfons Åberg express gender stereotypes and sexuality, through its images and texts. That is because it is one of the most borrowed books in Swedish libraries and also there fore could be a book that is especially common i Swedish preschools. The books about Alfons has also played a major role in Swedish cultural history and the Swedish history of literature, and are known as a part of the swedish heritage. Since children books are well used in Swedish preschools and because children often are left alone to read, we wondered what kind of gender norms the books of Alfons could express to the preschool children. There- fore the aim of this study is to investigate how gender norms are expressed in two of the Alfons books in the book series. The survey was conducted through qualitative picture book analysis which is inspired by former text and image analysis. The theoretical method to investigate how gender norms were expressed was gender theory. We also used discourse analysis and social constructivism as a base, which means that the norms are defined as a social construction that are under constant transformation. The results show that sex, gender and sexuality are interacting in the books of Alfons Åberg. The characters in the book expressed that sex and gender norms were expressed by separation of male and female. The separation find out to be a way to show that opposites also expect to attract each other. The conclusion was that sex, gender and heterosexuality were linked together as a normative exclusion of other sexualitys as inpossible.