In the middle of the California Desert is an inland desert sea, called the Salton Sea. Its existence is curious, nearly magical. It is California’s largest lake, it is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, it is slowly dying, and its existence is a complete accident. This thesis breaks down the historical narrative of the Salton Sea from a white settler perspective, using theories posed by Yi Fu Tuan about distinctions between space and place. The temporality of spatial locations, the construction of the binaries natural/built, and the moralizing of landscapes all provide further understanding of the Salton Sea’s existence. Throughout history, the white settlers of the Imperial Desert have projected, their morals and desires upon the desert landscape, reforming the space into their vision of the future as a result of their abilities to tame and control rivers. Instead of a future, they produced a place replete with the past: a place considered worthless and potentially dangerous. Through looking at the constructions of space, place, memory, and history, we are better able to understand the birth of this desert sea.

Cyberqueer Techno-practices: Digital Space-Making and Networking by Swedish Gay Men     This study aims to highlight intersections of queer experiences and new media, by focusing on the use of digital platforms and communication practices among Swedish gay men. This is being carried out using a netnographic approach including an online survey and in-depth interviews among the target group, as well as field observations on gay catering online forums and GPS application software. Special attention is paid to the blur between online and offline, increasingly underpinned by innovations such as smartphones, tablet computers and GPS techniques, and how it may challenge and reconfigure concepts of public and private in relation to sexuality and sexual identity. Using a rich combination of queer theory and media and communication theory, the study intends to illuminate the underdeveloped potential of cross-fertilization between the fields. The concept of space has a central position, as the cyberqueer practices performed by gay men are argued to produce queer space that extends their social scope in a heteronormative environment. The interviews and the survey indicate that the use of digital media among gay men fulfill group specific purposes, for aspects such as social and sexual networking, as well as senses of community. Further, the possibility to visit digital spaces seems to have a particular significance during “coming-out processes”, since most of the informants have been dealing with their sexual identity and/or practice online, long before doing so offline. This is valid for individuals from both urban and rural areas, as the queer spaces online also are prioritized over offline alternatives when available.

This research explores the unique and divergent experiences of LGBTQ+ young adults as they engage in identity and space-making practices at the intersection of gender/sexuality and religion. Utilizing queer theorists’ conceptualization of identity as a form of embodied and spatial labor, I critique the approach of existing scholarship that constructs LGBTQ+ and religious identities as incompatible or at least in need of reconciliation. Based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ young adults in Utah, my research makes visible how vulnerability and risk impact the strategies that LGBTQ+ young adults employ to navigate their identities and make space. It shows that they strategically navigate space wherever they find themselves, regardless of whether they encounter accommodation or belonging. In doing so, it comes to look beyond the narrative of visibility as the primary strategy for LGBTQ+ progress to recognize that LGBTQ+ young adults employ varied strategies of visibility and concealment to navigate the spaces where they find themselves.

This dissertation examines how the chaotic social space of post-civil war England inspired new ideas of the ideal social structure and its ability to create social and political stability. Focusing on three non-fiction prose tracts, Margaret Cavendish’s Worlds Olio (1655), Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethicks (1675), and Gerrard Winstanley’s Law of Freedom (1652), I use the concept of “space-making,” or “how texts aided readers in producing the space in which they understood humanity to be living” (Sauter 47), to engage three distinct perspectives on social cohesion. I situate my study within the larger context of the scientific revolution, and what Michael Sauter calls the “spatial reformation,” whereby humanist thinkers embraced Euclidean geometry to “make” space in a manner akin to God. I argue that, through their writing, Cavendish, Traherne, and Winstanley structure theoretical space to control, guide, or influence how social beings relate to one another and to the state. In doing so they make social space heterogeneous. The authors create theoretical spaces in which alternatives to England’s social structure are outlined. These alternatives reflect the subjectivity and interests of the space-maker, and while each author wishes to establish social cohesion in post-civil war England, the spaces they create reveal unique perspectives on social responsibility, free will, and self-preservation, leading readers to question the benefits and drawbacks of social cohesion. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines three works of non-fiction prose by Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, and Gerrard Winstanley, all of whom were seventeenth-century writers. I examine the ways that social structure in post-civil war England in fact rejects the geometric premise popular among canonical natural philosophers that all space (including the spaces we inhabit as human beings) was homogeneous. Instead, I argue that homogeneous space is oppressive in a social context, while also acknowledging that heterogeneous social spaces (spaces that are divided and have distinct "parts") also tended to limit the free will of social actors, particularly those in the lower classes. I examine themes related to free will, self-interest, and subjectivity, specifically with respect to how these themes can both create or detract from social cohesion.