This dissertation features the stories of drag king performers. Through life story interviews coupled with participant observations, and informed by gender performance, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic theories, this project examines the ways in which drag performers construct, take up and perform multiple subjectivities and how they benefit from multiple knowledges in their learnings and unlearnings. Through an examination of the creation and circulation of these drag king pedagogies, I suggest ways in which drag performers create and sustain gendered knowledge, while navigating difference and working with multiple discourses of identity, oppression, and power in a socially and economically diverse city. Participants’ perceptions of their gender identities point to the ways in which identity categories are insufficient. Each participant uses an existing identity label (e.g., transgender, tranny, boi) or a combination of existing labels, to understand their gender identities, even as their narratives point to the failures of fixed categories. It is my contention that the narratives of these particular performers highlight the multiplicity of all selves, and the ways in which all learnings and unlearnings are fragmented. Thus, drag king narratives have significant pedagogical value in examining the relationships between subjectivities and knowledge.

In this study 21 trans-identified youth in Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada were interviewed about their experiences related to transition. Using the materialist research strategy of Institutional Ethnography, I explore the organization of trans-specific health care services in Ontario. I describe challenges participants had in relation to accessing care and describe key differences in how care is currently delivered in Ontario. The ways in which various politico-legal and medical forms of organization shape the provision of trans care in Ontario are explored in detail. This work provides an empirically grounded addition to the growing literature that seeks to make sense of trans marginalization and exclusion.

The voice is a fundamental method of communication and as such, helps in our efforts to define our identity. Projection of the appropriate voice is crucially important to transgender individuals in transition for acceptance as their identified gender. This study attempts to identify and examine the relationship between acoustic measurements of voice quality and the perception of speaker gender from audio recordings, including the male-to-female transgender voice, based on several acoustic properties that have been identified by previous studies. Recordings of female, male and transgender voices were acoustically analyzed for properties relating to differences in voice quality between men and women. Listeners then identified the gender of the recorded voices, with the intention of evaluating which voices are perceived as either male or female along with a corresponding rating of masculinity or femininity. What acoustic measurements of voice quality cue listeners to gender and do they correlate with gender perception?

The thesis explores the theological implications of intersex conditions (those involving the congenital development of ambiguous genitalia, a congenital disjunction of the internal and external sex anatomy, sex chromosome anomalies, or variations in gonadal development) and their medical treatment. Christian theology has valued the integrity of the body and the goodness of God reflected in creation, but has also set much store by the “complementarity” of “normal” male and female physiology (and gender as mapped onto these). It has been threatened by liminality, shifts in sexed and gendered identity, and non-marital sexual activity. However, a deconstruction or querying of male and female as essential or all-embracing human categories changes conceptions of legitimate bodiliness and of what it means for human sex to reflect God. Theologies based too unmovingly in sex or gender complementarity are dubious in light of intersex, and fail to resist imperialism, hegemony and heteronormativity. Theologies which value incarnation and bodiliness must speak with stigmatized or marginal bodies too: the Body of Christ is comprised of human members, and each member changes the Body’s definition of itself as well as being defined by it. Accepting the non-pathology of intersexed and otherwise atypical bodies necessitates a re-examination of discourses about sex, marriage, sexuality, perfection, healing and the resurrection body. Informed by existing theologies from three marginal areas (transsexualism, disability and queer theology), this beginning of a theology from intersex demonstrates the necessity of resisting erotic domination in defining bodies. Theology is always self-queering, since it contains tools for hermeneutical suspicion, for overturning religious and cultural practices which do not meet the demands of love and justice. Although intersexed people do not always align themselves with the politically queer, intersex is, unavoidably, theologically queer. The ongoing erasure of intersexed bodies and experiences demands theological responses motivated not by fear but by a desire to expand the ways in which human lives and bodies tell stories. Until theologians, medics and others accept that the male-and-female world is not the only “real” world, and that the normalizing procedures of surgery and signification which bolster it are themselves grounded in something partial and arbitrary, the silencing and devaluing of otherness in human bodies will go on. This cannot be justified.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains x, 366 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 73 p. Includes bibliographical references.

A partir de observações etnográficas e entrevistas profundas junto às travestis brasileiras militantes, cartografamos histórias de vida que organizam cenas a respeito de suas relações na infância, adolescência e a vida atual, mapeando processos de estigmatização e suas respostas de enfrentamento que promovem a produção de uma cultura de resistência. Essas relações são marcadas por mediações denominadas encontros com o poder, que a partir da afirmação da diferença, inauguram um novo campo de investigação na saúde coletiva, mostrando a importância da organização social e política da comunidade transgênero no Brasil, como estratégia de promoção do cuidado de si e do exercício da cidadania. As cartografias existenciais sugerem elementos que recontam as histórias coletivas das travestis, solicitando novas possibilidades de diálogos entre os órgãos governamentais e demais setores da sociedade civil, de modo a favorecer o surgimento de novas políticas públicas. / From ethnographic observations and deep interviews with Brazilian transgender prostitutes we were able to trace life histories that organize scenes related to their relationships in their childhood, adolescence, and present life, mapping stigmatization process and confrontation responses that bring about a culture of resistance. Those relationships are marked by mediations called meetings with the power that, from the statement of the difference, open a new field of investigation of the transgender prostitute community in Brazil as a promotion strategy of self-care and of the exercising of citizenship. Existential mapping suggest elements that retell collective histories of transgender prostitutes, requesting new opportunities for discussion between governmental organizations and other sectors of our civil society in order to favor the elaboration of new public policies.

This dissertation explores how life narratives created by trans*-identified people (transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, and other non-binary identities included in the term’s asterisk) imagine new categories by re-working familiar stories; trans* life narratives are thus indispensable for comprehending how gender, identity, and self shape each other across social contexts in relation to dominant cultural narratives and embedded epistemologies. Prevailing U.S. ideologies (created and maintained through medical and media discourses) conceive of trans* identity through a binary formation, reinforce trans* people as objects who exist for nontrans* consumers, and rationalize trans* people as trapped within improper bodies or liberated within surgically constructed new ones. In opposition, twenty-first century narratives by filmmakers Jules Rosskam and Gwen Tara Haworth, autobiographers Jennifer Finley Boylan and Alex Drummond and YouTube digital storytellers Ky Ford and Skylar Kergil imagine trans* identity as productive – the goal is not to explain or justify gender diversity but to embrace it and to continue to widen its collective scope. The twenty-first century narratives I analyze reconceptualize trans* identity as viable with or without medical intervention and articulate a whole, continuous subject rather than a subject split between pre- and post-transition. Evoking a new historical moment, these life writers and media producers celebrate their identity in spite of or even because of the transphobia they experience. In so doing, radical trans* life narratives exemplify how medical models and popular media fail those who they purport to protect and represent. Gender is an identity as well as a social and historical process, which is constantly open to investigation. If laying claim to an identity makes subjects, as Michel Foucault argues, the process also occurs bi-directionally: identities come into existence through the act of naming and narrating them. As more individuals articulate what it means to be trans*, personal and collective knowledges will expand to include a range of diverse subjectivities, some of which have yet to be narrated into existence.

This project explores how a retreat ministry grounded in Theological Action Research (TAR) may help ameliorate the harmful effects of negative religious experiences among transgender persons. As a method of practical theology, TAR is interactive and participatory; in this study, TAR fostered agency and ownership among retreat participants. The study identifies larger implications of employing TAR to inform the practice of ministry, particularly among marginalized communities. Data and feedback from retreatants indicate that a retreat created through TAR and drawing upon spiritual autobiography, is a helpful model and method for ministry with transgender and gender non-conforming people seeking spiritual companionship

Individuals who identify themselves as transgender have gender identities that do not match their anatomical sex. Females who identify as male, also known as female-to-male transgender (FTM), may opt to undergo hormonal and surgical treatment in order to transition to the male phenotype, including high-dose testosterone treatment to develop male secondary sexual characteristics and surgical procedures. Currently, the recommendation is for the patient to have a hysterectomy within five years of initiating testosterone therapy to decrease the risk of developing endometrial cancer. However, long-term testosterone treatment has not been proven to cause an increased risk of endometrial cancer. With the use of gene expression and immunohistochemical studies, this study aimed to show no upregulation of genes associated with proliferation (Ki-67) and endometrial cancer (ZIC2) in endometrial tissue from FTM individuals treated with long-term testosterone compared to endometrial tissue from postmenopausal women, premenopausal women with benign endometrium, and women with endometrial cancer. Our findings showed that Ki-67 and ZIC2 expression in the FTM samples was significantly lower than in the endometrial cancer samples. Our findings call into question the concept that long-term testosterone treatment causes neoplastic changes in endometrial tissue and the need for routine hysterectomy in these patients. / 2018-07-11T00:00:00Z