"Quare Contestations: Bridging Queer, Lesbian, and Feminist Narratives of the Irish Diaspora" examines three sets of biographical and autobiographical narratives about Irish who migrated to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Dwelling primarily in queer studies and diaspora studies, this thesis participates in the construction of a queer Irish diaspora archive by analyzing the spaces of overlap between Irish queer, feminist, and lesbian - together, quare - theory and lived experience in these narratives. In my analysis, I demonstrate the fluidity, movement, and interdisciplinary scope of a quare framework for approaching studies of gender and sexuality in the Irish diaspora context. This thesis intervenes into the work already being done to queer Irish diaspora by examining the contestations of "Irishness" appearing in the narratives that are analyzed, and by in turn contesting and complicating the action and meanings made by "queer" in the existing archive of queer Irish diaspora literature.

Although in recent years there has been increased attention on bullying prevention and bullying legislation in the United States, there is limited research on the implementation of anti-bullying policies. Moreover, few studies have addressed the use of anti-bullying policies to protect LGBT youth from bullying. The present study seeks to examine the role of anti-bullying policies as a means to protect against bullying based on perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. Qualitative interviews with high school teachers, administrators, and staff members within an urban school district in the United States were conducted to gain insight into how those charged with the task of protecting LGBT youth engage with their school and district policy in efforts to create a supportive environment for their students. In this study, I argue the following: 1) the policy structure, both in the language of the state law and district policy on bullying, created barriers for schools to implement the anti-bullying policy; 2) the barriers created by the policy structure limited teachers' ability to protect LGBT youth from bullying; and 3) despite the evident barriers, teachers found ways to create supportive classroom environments for their students. Results indicate that teachers are not knowledgeable of the contents of their school's anti-bullying policy, and have had limited exposure to the policy through training specific to their school's anti-bullying policy. Similar results occurred when teachers and administrators were questioned about their awareness of trainings specific to the prevention of bullying against LGBT youth, posing significant barriers to effective policy implementation. In addition, interview data suggests that although teachers lack the sufficient support in terms of training on the anti-bullying policy, there were multiple examples of teachers serving as advocates for LGBT youth in both their classrooms and in their schools more broadly. The displays of advocacy by teachers, in addition to the presence of district and school administrator support for LGBT students, serve as an example of how school districts can find ways to implement school policies, address bullying in their schools, and raise awareness for the unique experiences of LGBT youth in terms of bullying.

School counselors need to advocate and act as an ally for all students. Safe Space, a training designed to facilitate competency for working with and serving LGBTQ youth (i.e., LGBTQ competency), has received increased attention in the field of school counseling. However, limited empirical support exists for training interventions such as Safe Space, with only one study to date examining its effectiveness for graduate psychology students (see Finkel, Storaasli, Bandele, & Schaefer, 2003). This study used a randomized pretest-posttest control group design to evaluate and examine the impact of Safe Space training on competency levels of a sample of school counselors/school counselor trainees and to explore the relationship between LGBTQ competency and awareness of sexism and heterosexism.

Citizens' increased access to the internet is transforming political landscapes across the globe. The implications for civil society, culture, religion, governmental legitimacy and accountability are vast. In nations where one does not typically expect "modern" or egalitarian ideals to be prevalent among highly religious and conservative populations, those with motivations to unite around socially and culturally taboo causes are no longer forced to silently acquiesce and accept the status quo. The internet has proven to be an invaluable tool for those aiming to engage in social activism, as it allows citizens in highly oppressive authoritarian regimes to covertly mobilize and coordinate online protest events (such as hashtag campaigns, proclamations via social media, signing of petitions, and even DDoS attacks) without the fear of repression. What catalyzes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) equality movements in authoritarian regimes, specifically with respect to the Middle East and North African region? This thesis argues that gay rights movements are more likely to emerge in politically repressive, more conservative states when new political opportunities--namely access to the internet for purposes of political organization--become available. This master's thesis identifies why LGBTQ movements emerged in Morocco and Algeria, but not in Tunisia until after it underwent democratization. These states will be analyzed in order to gauge the strength of their LGBTQ rights movements and, most importantly, to identify which variables most cogently explain their existence altogether.

In the last forty years, U.S. national and statewide LGBT organizations, in pursuit of "equality" through a limited and focused agenda, have made remarkably swift progress moving that agenda forward. However, their agenda has been frequently criticized as prioritizing the interests of White, middle-class gay men and lesbians and ignoring the needs of other LGBT people. In their shadows have emerged numerous grassroots organizations led by queer people of color, transgender people, and low-income LGBT people. These "queer liberation" groups have often been viewed as the left wing of the GRM, but have not been extensively studied. My research investigated how these grassroots liberation organizations can be understood in relation to the equality movement, and whether they actually comprise a separate movement operating alongside, but in tension with, the mainstream gay rights movement. This research used a qualitative content analysis, grounded in black feminism's framework of intersectionality, queer theory, and social movement theories, to examine eight queer liberation organizations. Data streams included interviews with staff at each organization, organizational videos from each group, and the organizations' mission statements. The study used deductive content analysis, informed by a predetermined categorization matrix drawn from social movement theories, and also featured inductive analysis to expand those categories throughout the analysis. This study's findings indicate that a new social movement - distinct from the mainstream equality organizations - does exist. Using criteria informed by leading social movement theories, findings demonstrate that these organizations cannot be understood as part of the mainstream equality movement but must be considered a separate social movement. This "queer liberation movement" has constituents, goals, strategies, and structures that differ sharply from the mainstream equality organizations. This new movement prioritizes queer people in multiple subordinated identity categories, is concerned with rebuilding institutions and structures, rather than with achieving access to them, and is grounded more in "liberation" or "justice" frameworks than "equality." This new movement does not share the equality organizations' priorities (e.g., marriage) and, instead, pursues a different agenda, include challenging the criminal justice and immigration systems, and strengthening the social safety net. Additionally, the study found that this new movement complicates existing social movement theory. For decades, social movement scholars have documented how the redistributive agenda of the early 20th century class-based social movements has been replaced by the demands for access and recognition put forward by the identity-based movements of the 1960s New Left. While the mainstream equality movement can clearly be characterized as an identity-based social movement, the same is not true of the groups in this study. This queer liberation movement, although centered on identity claims, has goals that are redistributive as well as recognition-based. While the emergence of this distinct social movement is significant on its own, of equal significance is the fact that it represents a new post-structuralist model of social movement. This study presents a "four-domain" framework to explain how this movement exists simultaneously inside and outside of other social movements, as a bridge between them, and as its own movement. Implications for research, practice, and policy in social work and allied fields are presented.

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant culture from marginalized perspectives. And I offer deep adaptive readings of multi-ethnic adaptations in order to answer questions such as: what happens when adaptations are created to remember, to heal, and to disrupt? How does adaptation, as a centuries-old mode of cultural production, bring to the center the voices of the doubly marginalized, particularly queers of color? The texts I examine as “adaptive acts” are radical, queer, push the boundaries of adaptation, and have not, up to this point, been given the adaptive attention I believe they merit. David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Tony award-winning play, M. Butterfly, is an adaptive critique of the textual history of Butterfly and questions the assumptions of the Orientalism that underpins the story, which causes his play to intersect with Pierre Loti’s 1887 novella, Madame Chrysanthéme, at a point of imperial queerness. Rodney Evans, whose 2004 film, Brother to Brother, is the first full-length film to tell the story of the black queer roots at the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance, uses adaptation as a story(re)telling mode that focalizes the “gay rebel of the Harlem Renaissance,” Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), to Signify on issues of canonization, gate-keeping, mythologizing, and intracultural marginalization. My discussion of Sherman Alexie’s debut film, The Business of Fancydancing, is informed by my own work as an adaptive actor and showcases the power of adaptation in the activation of Native continuance as an inclusive adaptive practice that offers an opportunity for women and queers of color to amend the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene writer-director’s creative authority. Adaptive acts are not only documents, but they document movements, decisions, and sociocultural action. Adaptation Studies must take seriously the power and possibilities of “adaptive acts” and “adaptive actors” from the margins if the field is to expand—adapt—in response to this diversity of adaptive potential.

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the room. ‘A spectacle and nothing strange’ is an arrangement of gestures, of made difference, of kinships, of orientations and possible futures, sustained tension, coded adornment, big dyke energy, shifts in hardness, leaning softness, much more than flowers, ...and in any case there is sweetness and some of that.

Trans Cinema and its Exit Scapes offers a critical and creative intervention into cultural representations of gendered body dissidence in contemporary film. The study argues for the possibility of finding spaces of “disidentification”, so-called “exit scapes” within the films. Exit scapes disrupt the dominant cinematic regime set up for the trans character, which ties them into stories of discrimination, humiliation and violence. In Trans Cinema, for instance films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Transamerica (2005), Romeos (2011) and Laurence Anyways (2012), scenes of singing, dancing and dreaming allow a different form of engagement with the films. As argued here, they allow a critical re-reading and an affirmative re-imagining of trans embodiment. The aim of this study is to investigate the utopian and hopeful potential within Trans Cinema from a critical transfeminist perspective. While focusing in particular on trans entrants as “spectators” or readers, this study draws on the work of a wide range of feminist and cultural scholars, such as Sara Ahmed, Susan Stryker, José Esteban Muñoz, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. The thesis etches out cinematic spatiotemporalities that unfold possibilities of utopian worlding and trans becoming through a set of conceptual innovations. By utilising a critical approach to audio-visuality and feminist film theory, the thesis re-conceptualises haptic spectatorship theory and its critique in western modernist ocularcentricism through a set of conceptual innovations. The methodological tools developed in this thesis, such as the “entrant”, the “exit scape” and “sensible cinematic intra-activity”, feature here as a multisensorial methodology for transdisciplinary transgender studies and feminist film theory as well as visual culture at large. / Trans Cinema and its Exit Scapes är en kritisk och kreativ intervention med fokus på kulturella representationer av kroppar som bryter mot en könsbinär ordning i samtida film. Studien argumenterar för möjligheten att hitta utrymmen för “disidentification”, så kallade “exit scapes” inom filmerna. Exit scapes stör den dominanta filmiska ordning som skapats för transkaraktären, en ordning som är förbunden med berättelser om diskriminering, förödmjukelse och våld. Inom Trans Cinema, i filmer som exempelvis Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Transamerica (2005), Romeos (2011) and Laurence Anyways (2012), öppnar scener med sång, dans och drömmar upp för andra former av engagemang med filmerna. Som det argumenteras för i avhandlingen tillåter dessa ett kritiskt omformulerande av, och ett nytt affirmativt sätt att föreställa sig, transkroppslighet. Syftet med den här studien är att undersöka den utopiska och hoppfulla potential som finns inom transfilm utifrån ett kritiskt transfeministiskt perspektiv. Även om studien främst riktar sig till trans entrants som “åskådare” eller läsare, så har den en bred teoretisk bas hämtad från verk av en lång rad feministiska forskare inom kulturfältet, såsom Sara Ahmed, Susan Stryker, José Esteban Muñoz, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Karen Barad och Donna Haraway. Denna avhandling skissar filmiska spatiotemporaliteter, vilka öppnar för möjligheter av utopiska värdsliga och transsubjektiva tillblivelser genom utvecklandet av olika teoretiska begrepp. Genom ett kritiskt förhållningssätt till audiovisualitet och feministisk filmteori, revideras och omformuleras haptisk åskådarskapsteori och dess kritik i en västerländsk okularcentrism genom olika teoretiska innovationer. De metodologiska verktygen som utvecklas i avhandlingen, såsom “the entrant”, “the exit scape” samt “sensible cinematic intra-activity” utgör här funktionen som multisensorisk metodologi för transdisciplinära transstudier, feministisk filmteori samt för visuell kultur i stort.

Same-sex couples are affected by the social and political climates in which they live, as these create the difference between acceptance and legalization, and discrimination and prohibition, of their relationships. This contingence is made increasingly impactful by the privileges and protections afforded to married couples by the federal government; same-sex couples, along with other couples that choose not to, or cannot, marry, are excluded from these benefits. Following the June 26, 2013 ruling that Section Three of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, was unconstitutional, same-sex couples were given access to over 1,100 federal protections and benefits and supported legally for the first time. My research explored the lived experiences of same-sex couples following this milestone in order to develop an understanding of the psychological and relational effects of the DOMA repeal on same-sex couples. This understanding may assist therapists working with these couples by increasing comprehension of their context and the effects of the DOMA repeal on their internal and relationship functioning. By understanding these aspects, therapists may work more capably and sensitively with same-sex couples, and be more informed regarding potential problems these clients may bring to therapy. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were employed in order to gather comprehensive data on the topic, utilize the strengths of both methodologies, and enhance the results of each method with the other. A single instrument, an online survey, was utilized. The quantitative paradigm provided numerical data on the experiences of same-sex couples following the DOMA repeal, as well as differences in experiences based on variance in state laws. Under the qualitative paradigm, phenomenological methodology was utilized to explore and convey participants' experience of the repeal in their own words. Responses were collected via survey to allow for more anonymity for participants, as well as a more representative sample of same-sex couples across the country. Qualitative and quantitative questions were included on the survey; responses were analyzed separately, and then merged during interpretation. Implications for clinical practice derived from this study are reviewed, as well as implications for advocacy work and directions for further research. It is hoped that this study will provide a better understanding of same-sex couples' lived experiences following the repeal of DOMA's Section Three, and provide implications for therapists working with these couples.

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; and (2) examine the interplay between this body of scholarship’s primary foci (e.g., gender, sexual identity, and family dysfunction) and the evolving cultural climate in which its subject, Cat, is perennially reinterpreted and restaged. In other words, my thesis reframes Cat as a series of inherently American—and potentially unanswerable—questions posed by Williams to his viewers; it then investigates the artistic and critical responses generated by sixty years of public engagement, or “dialogue,” with those questions. Ultimately, each case study will illustrate my central premise: that the value of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof lies in its ability to resonate, both in production design and reception, with the social, sexual, and domestic challenges of the period in which it is produced.