In this thesis, I assert that the mikvah, a Jewish purification ritual, can be understood as a queer ritual in that it has the potential to destabilize the knowledges and structures that it has traditionally been understood to uphold. I draw on queer theory in order to establish Victor Turner’s liminality as a productive analytical tool and then utilize this new queer liminality to illuminate the mikvah’s latent potential for producing new meanings and modes of resistance for its participants.

Spanning the period from the early years of the Cold War to the early twenty-first century, Crossing Out argues that medical theories of gender variance which emerge in the middle of the twentieth century are bound by the Cold-War–era discursive limits within which they were articulated, and that the ideological content of those theories persists into late-century research and treatment protocols. I parallel these analyses with interrogations of literary representations of transgendered subjects. What emerges most powerfully from this analysis of literary works is their tendency to signify in excess of the medical foreclosures, even when they seem consistent with medical discourse. By reading these two discursive systems against each other, the dissertation demonstrates the ability of literary discourse to accommodate multifaceted subject positions which medical discourse is unable to articulate. Literature thus complicates the stories that medical culture tells, revealing complex and multivariate possibilities for transgendered identification absent from traditional medical accounts. In tracing these discursive intersections the dissertation draws on and extends Michel Foucault’s theory of subjugated knowledges and Judith Butler’s writings on the formation of gendered subjects. Chapter One establishes the Cold War context, and argues that there are significant continuities between 1950s theories of intersexuality and Cold War ideology. Chapter Two extends this analysis to take in theories of transsexualism that emerged in the same years, and analyzes the discursive excesses of a 1950s pulp novel representation of a transsexual. Chapter Three establishes that the ideological content of the medical theories remained virtually unchanged by the 1990s, and argues that multivalent literary representations of transgenderism from the same decade promise the emergence of unanticipated forms of gender identity that exceed medical norms. Chapter Four is concerned with transgendered children, as they are represented in medical writing and in young adult and children’s literature. Interrogating fiction which negotiates between established medical discourse and an emergent transgender discourse, the chapter argues that these works at once invite and subvert a pathologizing understanding of gender-variant children while simultaneously providing data that demands to be read through the lens of an emergent affirmative notion of trans-childhood.

There is a dearth of research that explores the lives and experiences of trans-identified parents. The goal of this study was to explore the experiences of trans people who sought or accessed AHR services in Ontario between 2007 and 2010. Qualitative data that was collected from 7 qualitative interviews with 9 trans people and their partners was analyzed for the present analysis. Results from this study indicate that AHR providers do not possess sufficient knowledge about trans people, trans identities and trans lives to adequately address the needs of trans service users. Specific provider practices that trans people experienced as being unhelpful are illuminated and implications for improving clinical practices are discussed.

There is a dearth of research that explores the lives and experiences of trans-identified parents. The goal of this study was to explore the experiences of trans people who sought or accessed AHR services in Ontario between 2007 and 2010. Qualitative data that was collected from 7 qualitative interviews with 9 trans people and their partners was analyzed for the present analysis. Results from this study indicate that AHR providers do not possess sufficient knowledge about trans people, trans identities and trans lives to adequately address the needs of trans service users. Specific provider practices that trans people experienced as being unhelpful are illuminated and implications for improving clinical practices are discussed.

Few bodies consistently portray natural or unaltered forms. Instead, humans inhabit bodies imbued with sociocultural meanings about what is attractive, appropriate, functional, and presentable. As such, embodiment is always gendered. The social, extra-corporeal body is a central locus for expressing gender. Surgical body modifications represent inherently gendered technologies of the body. But psychomedical institutions subject people who seek gender-crossing surgeries to increased surveillance, managing and regulating cross-gender embodiment as disorderly. Using mixed research methods, this research systematically compared transgender and cisgender (non-transgender) people’s experiences before, during, and after surgical body modification. I conducted a content analysis of 445 threads on a message board for an online cisgender surgery community, an analysis of 15 international protocols for transgender-specific surgeries, and 40 in-depth interviews with cisgender and transgender people who had surgery. The content analysis of the online community revealed similar themes among cisgender and transgender surgery users. However, detailed protocols existed only for transgender consumers of surgery. Interview findings showed that transgender and cisgender people reported similar presurgical feelings toward their bodies, similar cosmetic and psychological motivations for surgery, and similar benefits of surgery. For both cisgender and transgender people, surgery enhanced the inner self through improving the outer gendered body. Despite these similar embodied experiences, having a cisgender gender status determined respondents’ abilities to pursue surgery autonomously and with institutional support. Ultimately, this research highlights inequalities that result from gender status and manifest in psychomedical institutions by identifying the psychosocial impacts of provider/consumer or doctor/patient interactions, relating gendered embodiment to regulatory systems of authority, and illuminating policy implications for clinical practice and legal classifications of sex and gender.

This essay discusses the students’ thoughts about the teacher's response to their gender identity. The students discuss their right to have an intergender identity which means that they don’t identify themselves in the traditional sexes, man and woman, and the gender role each category has. They want to be called with a neutral pronoun and not be seen like boys or girls. To understand these students’ point of view I used queer theory and discourse analysis to see the differences between sex and gender. Judith Butler the most famous philosopher in the field of queer theory emphasizes that there is no differences between sex and gender roles and explains that sex and gender roles are neither made by nature nor have mystery sources. Instead they are created by historical, social and cultural processes. She declares that language and the names we give each other affect what identities the society think are normal or not. There are many different identities that can’t be identified or categorized in the traditional gender roles. We have to think beyond these categories and not see people in only two sexes/genders, woman and man. The Swedish schools have many values to work with and in these values it’s written that the teachers have to treat every student with respect and encourage them to grow and evolve. I investigate how the teachers react to the students’ transgender identities. The investigation is made with four different students who identify themselves as intergender. The study is based on interviews that took between forty and sixty minutes. The interviews were transcribed and written with spoken language. The main purpose of this essay is to investigate what the students thought about their teachers’ reaction. The conclusion of this essay is that the students think that the teachers have insufficient knowledge about the transgender identities. The students want the teachers to have more knowledge about transgender identities. That will make the teachers more comfortable in their behavior against students who identify themselves between the traditional sexes.

In the current project, I examined the distinct elicitors and behavioral outcomes of anti-gay anger and anti-gay disgust. The CAD triad hypothesis (Rozin, Lower, Imada, & Haidt, 1999) suggests that anger and disgust are elicited by distinct moral violations and cognitive appraisals. A plethora of research has documented the strong link between disgust and sexual prejudice, but very little attention has been given to the role of anger in sexual prejudice. The biocultural framework of stigmatization (Neuberg, Smith, & Asher, 2000) suggests that people who counter-socialize against prevailing social norms are stigmatized by others. If homosexual sexual behavior does not elicit anti-gay anger (Giner-Sorrolla, Bosson, Caswell & Hettinger, 2012), then anti-gay anger might be elicited by promoting positive views of homosexuality. In Study 1, participants were induced to feel anger, disgust, or no emotion and then rated one of two gay male target groups. I expected that cognitive appraisals of morality violation would increase when the emotional state was congruent with the perceived threat posed by the target, but the emotion induction failed to elicit differences in cognitive appraisals. The results of Study 2, collected from a non-student sample, were also inconsistent with my hypothesis. Sexually explicit behavior did not elicit disgust, and behavior which resulted in more tolerant attitudes toward homosexuality failed to elicit anger and harm appraisals. These results suggest that sexual prejudice research requires stricter experimental control than online data collection methods currently allow.

This thesis discusses the ideological and political composition of the contemporary queer community in India. It is specifically concerned with the ways in which transgender/gender variant identities are represented within Indian queer scholarship and queer organizations in the subcontinent. At present, transgender/gender variant studies of South Asia are primarily confined to research on hijra and other trans feminine gender communities. While this research is important, this thesis seeks to expand the understanding of transgenderism/gender variance in South Asia by examining other transgender identities, including trans masculine identities, as well as analyzing Indian discourses on gender and sexuality more broadly. By examining Indian queer scholarship and the politics of contemporary queer organizations, I find that transgender/gender variant individuals face greater forms of marginalization within the contemporary queer movement in India because of the silence surrounding their gender identities. / text

Purpose: The purposes of the present study consisted of primary, secondary, and tertiary purposes: 1) to determine what factors that can be addressed in speech therapy are the most important for female-to-male (FtM) transgender individuals in passing as their true gender, 2) to determine what factors may contribute to these individuals seeking speech therapy services and to the importance that they assign to speech therapy as part of the transition process, and 3) to determine awareness of this population in regards to the availability and scope of speech therapy services relative to transitioning or passing as their true gender. Method: A 38-item survey was developed to address these research questions and a link to the online survey was distributed via email to various listservs, organizations, and personal contacts to assist in the electronic distribution of the survey link. The responses of the final participant pool of 63 respondents were evaluated. Results: Overall, the participants ranked voice characteristics as the most important for passing followed by nonverbal communication and social language use. These broad categories rankings are generally supported by the existing literature. Within category rankings revealed rankings that are in accord with the existing literature, others that oppose the existing literature, and others that have not been explored in the literature. The following factors stood out as possibly contributing to how important FtMs find speech therapy as facilitating their ability to live as their true gender: desire to pass, satisfaction with hormone related pitch changes, current overall presentation, and whether speech/language contribute to instances of not passing. Factors that appear to possibly contribute to how likely FtMs are to have sought speech therapy include: satisfaction with hormone related pitch changes, voice prior to transition, and if aspects of speech and language contribute to instances of not passing. Overall, FtMs have little awareness regarding speech therapy as part of the transition process, particularly for FtMs. / text

Women’s involvement in sport has remained a critical issue in society for several decades. Sex verification and drug testing are two methods that have been used to regulate women’s eligibility to compete in international sports competitions based on their testosterone levels. Organizations such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have published and updated policies and rules that set eligibility criteria for who can compete in women’s sport and under what conditions. However, the academic literature addressing Chinese women’s perspectives on international sex verification and drug testing policies available in English is extremely limited. This study investigates how recent policy revisions regarding doping and sex eligibility rules impact women student- athletes competing in track and field at the university level in China. Using qualitative research methods, this thesis analyzes the impact of recent doping and gender policies on a sample of Chinese female student-athletes. / October 2015