This dissertation examines the literary and activist histories of lesbian and queer communities in France from 1968 to the present, retracing the changing relationship between national and sexual identities. It contributes in several ways to debates about ‘homonormativity’ and ‘sexual democracy’ that have unfolded in France since the beginning of the twenty-first century, notably by bringing recent historical and sociological scholarship on the racialization of gender and sexuality into dialogue with literary studies. Sex, Race and the Epistemology of Desire puts well-established literary authors (such as Monique Wittig, Mireille Best, and Nina Bouraoui) in conversation with little-known queer writers and activists of color (such as the Groupe du 6 novembre and the Lesbiennes of color), studying processes of subject formation through which individuals come to understand their desires in relation to family structures and community belonging. Through historically and politically contextualized readings, it reflects on the fact that desire has often come to be understood through the lens of sexual identity, arguing that assumptions about the importance of visibility and “coming out” have tended to marginalize poor and racialized groups. Deconstructing the common opposition between “identitarian” and “non-identitarian” literature, it argues for a richer and more epistemologically-attentive approach to sexual and gender politics. It shows that this epistemological reframing is necessary to counteract mainstream media’s often reductive accounts of minority sexualities, particularly with respect to Islamic, Middle Eastern, or North African cultures.

This critical explanatory mixed methods study examined elementary teachers’ perceptions regarding the inclusion of LGBTQ-themed literature in the curriculum. An electronic survey questionnaire and focus group sessions were used to collect both quantitative and qualitative data that described the perceived benefits and barriers of LGBTQ-themed literature and teachers’ level of interest in attending professional developing on this topic. The sample population for this study consisted of 100 participants. All 100 participants completed the electronic survey questionnaire, and a subset of 10 of the survey respondents participated in focus groups to explore further the perceived benefits and barriers relating to the inclusion of LGBTQ-themed literature. There were five key findings that emerged in relation to the research questions for this survey: (1) although teachers perceive parental backlash and insufficient training as the two most significant barriers preventing them from including LGBTQ-themed literature in their classroom, their beliefs and comfort levels surrounding LGBTQ individuals and topics are significant barriers as well; (2) participants felt there were many significant benefits that might result from the inclusion of LGBTQ-themed literature, including building an increased awareness of diversity among students and less bullying in regards to sexual orientation/gender expression; (3) participants felt that parents and administration have significant control over what teachers can teach in their classrooms, and that their autonomy and choice was straightjacketed by the demands of the parents and administrators; (4) participants were interested in attending professional development training focusing on the inclusion of LGBTQ-themed literature; and (5) Black respondents expressed more hesitation towards the inclusion of LGBTQ-themed literature as well as towards attending LGBTQ-themed professional development than other demographic subgroups. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Anthropology Department, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Despite ongoing changes in the national sociopolitical landscape, negative attitudes toward non-heterosexuals continue to permeate throughout our society. Not only is sexual prejudice still prevalent, but experiencing it can have severe and far-reaching effects on LGBT individuals’ mental and physical health. Additionally, previous research has consistently found sexual prejudice to be a predictor of aggression directed toward sexual minorities. In fact, the recurrence and consistency of this finding has motivated researchers to suggest the development of intervention programming for the reduction of sexual prejudice. One major prospect for intervention involves interpersonal contact with sexual minorities. Evidence in favor of the contact hypothesis has been found with a wide variety of target minority groups, including sexual minorities. However, a review of the literature in this area reveals a significant measurement gap. Overall, most studies across all areas of contact research have neglected to follow the proper procedures necessary for the development and refinement of measures. This study sought to address this gap by validating a more robust psychometric measure of intergroup contact with sexual minorities developed by Daboin and Peterson (2012). Since this measure was previously constructed, this validation study relied on secondary data analyses. To achieve the purpose of this study, a series of analyses were conducted including exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and path analysis, as well as reliability and validity analyses. Results indicated that the CSMQ has an underlying structure of three factors: “Quantity of Casual Contact and Contact with Male Sexual Minorities,” “Quantity of Intimate Contact and Contact with Female Sexual Minorities,” and “Overall Perceived Quality of Contact with Sexual Minorities.” These three factors are significantly correlated with one another and negatively correlated with both negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. Additionally, results showed that the revised CSMQ and its resulting subscales have excellent internal consistency, and provided supporting evidence for their convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.

This qualitative practitioner research study examined a ninth-grade young adult (YA) queer book club curriculum and culturally relevant pedagogy. Students read two out of nine queer-themed YA novels paired with a collection of nonfiction and media on topics that ranged from rethinking gender norms in society to historical issues that impact people with intersectional queer identities. The author collaboratively designed, planned, and taught the 6-week unit at the center of the study, Disrupting Dominant Narratives and Queer Book Clubs, using a critical queer pedagogy framework. The findings illuminated the ways in which pedagogy that nurtures and prizes student voice, critical reading, discussion, and humanizing classroom discourse work to situate students as empathic critical readers and writers of the world. The findings suggest that analyzing queer- themed literature moves students to build empathy, disrupts oppression, and humanizes people of all identities, thus empowering youth as producers and consumers of knowledge that facilitates their growth and supports queer and questioning youth. In addition, students found common experiences as teenagers with the queer characters across the novels, therby affirming the decision to use exclusively YA fiction for the book club and serving to aid in disrupting dominant discourses about queer youth. The study concludes with a suggestion for seven implications for practice and a call for further research that aims to advance culturally relevant queer pedagogy.

"Queer Things" takes the connections between homosexuality and materiality, and those between literary texts and cultural objects, as major repositories of queer history. It scrutinizes the objects that circulate within the works of Oscar Wilde as well as in the output of high fashion designers and the critics and consumers who engaged with them, in order to ask how gay identities and affiliations are formed and expressed through things. Bringing recent critical interest in the subtleties of nineteenth-century "thing culture" into contact with queer theory, I argue that the crowded Victorian object-world was a crucial location not only for the formation of social attitudes about homosexuality, but also for the cultivation of homosexuality's distinctive aesthetics and affective styles. In attending to the queer pleasures activated by material attachments that have otherwise been deployed or disavowed as stereotypes, my project reconsiders some of the most celebrated works of the gay canon, and inserts into it some compelling new ones. Furthermore, in illuminating the Victorian origins of modern gay style and the incipiently modern gayness of Victorian style, it adds nuance and new substance to our understanding of the elaborate material landscapes inhabited by Victorian bodies and represented in Victorian texts. The first part of the dissertation uses extensive archival research to excavate a history of queer men's involvement in women's fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. In the first chapter, juxtaposing accounts of the famous Boulton and Park drag scandal with a simultaneously emerging genre of overwrought fashion criticism, I argue that an (over)investment in fashionable objects and a detailed knowledge of fashionability became important sites for the develop of gay-effeminate social styles. The second chapter positions Charles Worth, founder of the modern system of haute couture, as the progenitor of a queer species of cross-gendered, non-heterosexual relations between male high-fashion designers and female clients. Though they are not based on same-sex eroticism, I argue that these relations deserve consideration as queer. The second part of the dissertation considers the representational functions of objects in several works across the career of Oscar Wilde. The third chapter presents a reading of De Profundis, Wilde's infamously hard-to-read prison letter, which focuses on how the text interweaves anxieties about the transmission of material objects into its complex affective structure. The fourth chapter considers the effects of the risky but irresistible attractions of that letter's addressee, the widely-loathed Bosie Douglas, on Wilde's aesthetic practice. Juxtaposing Bosie's charms with those of Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, and then moving to the little-read letters which document the final post-prison years of Wilde's life, I suggest that the frustrating states of intemperance and indolence become sites, for Wilde, of erotic excitement, artistic innovation, and political resistance.

Research concerning lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals has, thus far, largely focused on understanding the many ways in which stigma operates to harm their lives (e.g., Hatzenbuehler, 2011; Meyer, 2003). Conversely, little is known about the potential positive consequences of stigma among LGB individuals, and even less is known about the mechanisms that may facilitate the development of such positive consequences. Drawing on the distinct, yet related, literatures of minority stress, stress-related growth, character strengths, and well-being, a conceptual model of stigma-related strengths was developed and examined for the purpose of this study. The specific aims of the current study were designed to examine the various components of the stigma-related strengths model. Specifically, this study had six specific aims: 1) To compare self-identified LGB and heterosexual individuals on character strengths. 2) To identify the possible cognitive, affective, and interpersonal (i.e., social) mediators of the relationship between sexual identity (LGB vs. heterosexual) and character strengths. 3) To examine the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and character strengths among LGB individuals. 4) To identify the possible cognitive, affective, and interpersonal (i.e., social) mediators of the relationship between perceived interpersonal stigma and character strengths among LGB individuals. 5) To investigate which character strengths serve as mediators of the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and mental health among LGB individuals. 6) To explore which character strengths may mediate the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and well-being among LGB individuals. A sample of 718 individuals was recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete an online (i.e., web-based) survey consisting of a set of self-report measures. Of those, 421 (59%) participants self-identified as LGB. In addition to self-identifying as either LGB or heterosexual, eligible participants had to be fluent in English, 18-60 years old, and living in United States. No significant differences in character strengths were found between LGB and heterosexual participants. Among LGB participants, an inverted U-shaped relationship was found between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and five of the 24 character strengths, namely appreciation of beauty and excellence, curiosity, fairness, honesty, and kindness; these strengths were then referred to as stigma-related strengths among LGB individuals. Conversely, prudence and judgment were found to be negatively and linearly associated with perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma. Cognitive flexibility mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma and the five stigma-related strengths among LGB participants. Brooding mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal stigma and both kindness and appreciation of beauty and excellence. Furthermore, suppression was found to mediate the association between perceived interpersonal stigma and kindness. Social support mediated the perceived interpersonal stigma-fairness relation. As for prudence and judgment, only cognitive flexibility was found to mediate their relationship with perceived interpersonal LGB-related stigma among LGB individuals. All five stigma-related strengths, as well as prudence and judgment, mediated the relationship between interpersonal stigma and well-being, whereas only curiosity mediated the relationship between interpersonal stigma and mental distress among LGB individuals. The findings demonstrate that moderate levels of stigma are associated with character strengths among LGB individuals. Further, findings suggest that interventions addressing LGB individuals’ engagement in cognitive flexibility, brooding, and social support will facilitate the development of their stigma-related strengths, which in turn, promote their well-being.

The purpose of this dissertation was to create a psychometrically sound measure of asexual prejudice through microaggressions that can be used to document and identify the unique experiences of asexual people (i.e., those reporting a lack of sexual attraction towards others). Asexual prejudice encompasses anti-asexual beliefs and attitudes that stem from sexual normativity which promotes sexuality as the norm while positioning asexuality as deviant (Carrigan 2011; Chasin, 2011; Flore, 2014; Gupta, 2013). Applying Sue’s (2010) description of microaggressions, asexual microaggressions are conscious and/or unconscious daily occurrences of insults and invalidation that stem from implicit bias against asexual people and asexuality. Development of the scale included creating items with content that was derived from close readings of the literature on asexuality and related measures of discrimination, prejudice or bias as well as expert review for clarity and verifying applicability of content. A total of 738 participants participated on-line and half were randomly assigned to Phase 1 for the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) while the other half was assigned to Phase 2 for the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results of the EFA indicate a 16 item four-factor structure for the AMS that capture expectations of sexuality, denial of legitimacy, harmful visibility, and assumptions of causality as descriptors of the types of microaggressions that occur. The CFA revealed support for the AMS total score with good internal consistency and strong validity as reflected in strong positive relationships with stigma consciousness, collective self-esteem, and another measure of discrimination and bias. Combined, the AMS is a valid and reliable measure of asexual prejudice. Contextualization of these results as well as implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.

Research on mental health outcomes among racial-ethnic, sexual, and gender minority young people indicates that they may be at increased risk for service use disparities when these identity statuses intersect. However, evidence of how having multiple minority identities is related to using mental health services is lacking. This dissertation used a mixed-methods, convergent design to explore and describe relationships between intersecting minority identities and mental health service use in the experiences of 31 Black and Hispanic, sexual and gender minority young adults. Consistent with an intersectional perspective, findings indicated that mental health service use was more strongly associated with minority identities collectively than with any single minority identity, and that experiences of intersecting minority identities could facilitate, as well as hinder, mental health service use among participants. A theoretical model was revealed in which participants negotiated multiple minority identities within four dimensions related to their service use: ethnic-racial culture, intersecting identities, family, and personal identities. Results suggested provider strategies that support intersecting minority identity strengths around culture, community belonging, and self-efficacy may encourage service use and engagement with treatment.

This dissertation rethinks the category of queer desire in early modern drama and early colonial travel narratives. Moving beyond previous scholarship which has conceived of early modern sexuality chiefly in terms of same-sex erotic acts, proto-homosexual identities, or homosocial relations, this dissertation describes new forms of heightened erotic feeling which are qualitatively queer in how they depart from conventional or expected trajectories, and not because of the genders of lover and love object. Each chapter considers an iconic scene in early modern literature, and draws out a specific, recurring affective mode - paranoid suspicion, willing instrumentality, inexhaustible fancy, and colonial melancholia -- which I argue constitutes a queer form of desiring. Chapter 1 argues that both a witch trial pamphlet, Newes from Scotland (1591), and a witch trial play, The Witch of Edmonton (1621) exemplify the violent, projective cycle of paranoid suspicion by which the witch trial defines a witch according to his or her secret, deviant desires. Chapter 2 focuses on cross-dressed figures who are willingly instrumentalized as erotic facilitators in two comedies, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's Philaster (1609) and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl (1611), arguing that "being used" makes the go-between an integral part of an ostensibly heterosexual relationship, transforming it into a queer triad. Chapter 3 takes up the promiscuous desire for too many objects in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1602) and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614). I read these very different comedies as both propelled by impossible-to-satisfy hunger, and trace the etymology of the concept of "fancy" to show how desire for pleasurable and beautiful things became characterized as a queer desire for improper and unproductive commodities. Chapter 4 moves into the New World, analyzing two accounts of failed colonialism: Thomas Harriot and John White's reports from the English expeditions on Roanoke Island (1590); and Jean de Léry’s memoir of the short-lived French colony in Brazil (1578). In these texts I uncover a distinctly melancholic and queer mode of colonial desire: one predicated on impossible longing, renunciation, and haunting, thwarted identification with lost native American "others."