Matching Items (38)
Filtering by
- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
The college years are crucial to formation and integration of lifelong psychosocial, personal and cognitive identities, and the identity development needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+ or gender and/or sexual minority) students are unique, particularly in the context of student development and support. How universities meet these needs can critically impact success and retention of these students. However, studies indicate when the academic and co-curricular environment does not foster development of healthy LGBTQ+ identities, these students experience myriad challenges compounded by identity discord and minority stress. Cumulatively, these factors contribute to non-persistence of over 30% of LGBTQ+ university students. This research study examines the ways positive LGBTQ+ identity development, cultural capital accrual and community engagement through a structured mentoring program fosters resilience and buffers the experience of minority stress and associated negative outcomes for these students. In doing so, the study addresses the following research questions: what does the process of LGBTQ+ identity construction look like for gender- and sexual-minority students, including students from non-dominant cultural backgrounds for whom LGBTQ+ identity is one of multiple competing identities, and how does mentorship affect the perceived identities of these students? How does participation in an LGBTQ+ mentoring program affect participants’ perceptions of development of resilience-building capacity?
ContributorsReeves-Blurton, Zachary Andrew (Author) / Puckett, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Jordan, Michelle (Committee member) / Sumner, Carol (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This doctoral dissertation proposes an analysis of a selection of photographic series by a diverse group of Latin American photographers such as Argentinian Gustavo Di Mario, Brazilians Claudio Edinger and Alair Gomes, and Mexican Dorian Ulises López Macías. The analyzed material focuses on a revision of characteristics of masculinity and imperative heteronormativity in the discourses on their respective national identities. The projects put-fourth by these four artists represent a political proposal that unveals the homoaffective possibilities of their photographic referents. Susan Sontag postulates in her On Photography (1979) that “the powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals” (179). These artists understand the power of the image and, through its meticulous composition, they propose to not only photograph, but to also narrate the reality of dissident identities and their belonging to a collective national identity.
ContributorsShalloe, Thomas J (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia M (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
LGBTQI people are often victimized by law enforcement and these victimizations often are related to victimizations of domestic violence and hate violence. Because reporting a victimization to the police leads to contact with police, a part of the research question involved herein looked at whether or not reporting a victimization to the police also increases the rate of police violence. Through secondary data analysis, this study investigated the correlation between reporting domestic violence and hate violence to the police, and subsequent victimizations by the police in the form of police violence. Additionally through secondary data analysis, this study investigated whether or not this correlation is stronger with transgender women and people of color. All data analyzed in this study was collected in Tucson, Arizona through the Wingspan Anti-Violence Project (WAVP). All data was analyzed with the permission of the data owner, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) (see Appendix IV), and with IRB approval from the Arizona State University Office of Research Integrity and Assurance (see Appendix III). The findings demonstrated a positive correlation between the rate of LGBTQI people reporting violent crimes to the police and the rate of police violence against LGBTQI survivors of domestic violence and hate violence. The results further demonstrated the rate of police violence associated with reporting domestic violence or hate violence is greatest for transgender women and people of color.
ContributorsFarr, Patrick (Author) / Lecroy, Craig (Thesis advisor) / Sangalang, Cindy (Committee member) / Brown, Mary Ellen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Here I explore three varieties of theatrical responses to the cultural amnesia brought about by what scholars have termed “post-AIDS” rhetoric. Specifically, I examine how AIDS history plays, AIDS comedies, and solo plays provide opportunities for theatregoers to participate in, or reflect on the absence of, what I call “AIDS mourning publics.” I understand these publics to be both the groupings of people that gather around a text, film screening, play performance, or event that was created in response to loss due to AIDS, and the text, screenplay, or play text itself when circulated. In these publics participants work through their grief, make political interventions, and negotiate the meanings of AIDS history for gay men whose sexual awakening occurred before and after the development of protease inhibitors. I join theories of grieving, affect in performance, and the public sphere to study these communal events. I use films, plays, and critical reviews to identify how mourning through performance can be therapeutic for cultural and social actors despite activists' and scholars' sole attention to the counterpublicity of these events. Still, counterpublicity remains an important concern because many in the dominant US public sphere consider AIDS to be a benign “manageable condition” in affluent countries like the US. As such, I also present a dramaturgy of mourning and counterpublicity in twenty-first century US AIDS drama and solo performance with attention focused upon how dramatists and solo performers are inviting spectators to engage with, and find new meaning within, this epidemic. For example, I investigate how pairing mourning with genres like comedy produces political interventions within the space between laughing and astonishment. My dramaturgy of mourning also examines recurring themes such as ghosts, the past, intergenerationalism, and AIDS amnesia to interpret how performers have framed individual and collective loss to challenge spectators' understanding of AIDS history. To support my claims I use sources from the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, gay and lesbian community newspapers, personal interviews, and my own experiences as a spectator viewing productions of The Normal Heart, thirtynothing, and The VOID.
ContributorsMorrison, Jayson Abraham (Author) / Underiner, Tamara L. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / McMahon, Jeff D (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Sociopolitical involvement has been previously shown to be associated with experiences of discrimination. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) racial/ethnic minorities have faced multiple levels of discrimination from the mainstream community, racial/ethnic minority communities, and LGB communities. However, not many studies have investigated the association between intersectional forms of discrimination and sociopolitical involvement. The present study examines differences in perceptions of racism in the LGB community, sociopolitical involvement in racial/ethnic communities, and sociopolitical involvement in LGB communities among LGB racial/ethnic minorities (N = 203, MAge = 27.25). The sample included 107 (52.7%) men and 96 (47.3%) women; 41 (20.2%) lesbians, 89 (43.8%) gay men, and 73 (36.0%) bisexuals; 47 (23.2%) African Americans, 50 (24.6%) Asian Americans, 64 (31.5%) Latinos/as, and 42 (20.7%) from another race/ethnicity or mixed race. This study also looks at the association between perceptions of racism in the LGB community and sociopolitical involvement in racial/ethnic communities and/or LGB communities. Asian American participants reported perceiving higher levels of racism in the LGB community than Latino/a participants. No other differences in perceptions of racism in the LGB community were found between sexual orientation or by racial/ethnic group. No differences between racial/ethnic group or sexual orientations were found in sociopolitical involvement in racial/ethnic or LGB communities. When controlling for sexual orientation, gender, and race/ethnicity, perceptions of racism in the LGB community predicted sociopolitical involvement in racial/ethnic and LGB communities. By exploring correlates of discrimination from an intersectional perspective, this study provides a better understanding of the experiences of LGB racial/ethnic minorities.
ContributorsVanDaalen, Rachel (Author) / Santos, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Homer, Judith (Committee member) / Tracey, Terence (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
There is currently a proliferation of images of transgender youth in popular discourse, many of which reflect the threat to capitalist heteronormativity that transgender young people pose to contemporary U.S. society. This veritable explosion in media visibility of transgender youth must be critically examined. This dissertation explores media economies of transgender youth visibility by examining media and self-represented narratives by and about transgender young people in contemporary U.S. popular discourse to uncover where, and how, certain young transgender bodies become endowed with value in the service of the neoliberal multicultural U.S. nation-state. As normative transgender youth become increasingly visible as signifiers of the progress of the tolerant U.S. nation, transgender youth who are positioned further from the intelligible field of U.S. citizenship are erased.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
ContributorsReinke, Rachel Anne (Author) / Switzer, Heather D. (Thesis advisor) / Aizura, Aren (Committee member) / Anderson, Lisa (Committee member) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
ContributorsFlores, Carlos A (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Hess, Aaron R (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation project examines the cultural labor of the drag queen in the United States (US). I explore how the drag queen can be understood as a heuristic to understand the stakes and limits of belonging and exceptionalism. Inclusion in our social and national belonging in the US allows for legibility and safety, however, when exceptional or token figures become the path towards achieving belonging, it can leave out those who are unable to conform, which are often the most vulnerable folks. I argue that attending to the drag queen’s trajectory, we can trace the ways that multiply-marginalized bodies navigate attempts to include, subsume, and erase their existence by the nation-state while simultaneously celebrating and consuming them in the realm of media and consumer culture. In the first chapter I introduce the project, the context and the stakes involved. Chapter two examines representations of drag queens in films to unpack how these representations have layered over time for American audiences, and positions these films as necessary building blocks for queer semiosis for viewers to return to and engage with. Chapter three analyzes RuPaul and RuPaul’s Drag Race to outline RuPaul labor as an exceptional subject, focusing on his investment in homonormative politics and labor supporting homonationalist projects. Chapter four centers questions of trans* identity and race, specifically Blackness to analyze how Drag Race renders certain bodies and performances legitimate and legible, constructing proper drag citizens. Chapter five utilizes ethnographic methods to center local drag communities, focusing on The Rock and drag performers in Phoenix, Arizona to analyze how performers navigate shifting media discourses of drag and construct a queer performance space all their own.
ContributorsCollier, Cassandra M (Author) / Anderson, Lisa M. (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Marlon M (Committee member) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen entered Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, FL and shot and murdered 49 people and wounded over 50 more. At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting ever to occur on U.S. soil. That particular evening, Pulse, a queer nightclub, was hosting a “Latin Night,” which resulted in over 90 percent of the victims being Latinx in descent and many that identified as Afro-Latinx or Black. Essentially, Pulse is the most lethal act of violence against queer and trans bodies of color in this country. Pulse reminds queer and trans people of color of the conditions of the world that position Brown and Black queer and trans death as mundane. That is to say, the lives of trans and queer bodies of color are lived in close proximity to death. And yet, Pulse was anything but mundane. In every practical sense, it was a fantastical event of radical violence. The tension between these and the implications found within is what this project seeks to engage. Utilizing critical/performance-based qualitative methods and data derived from the queer and trans of color communities in Phoenix, AZ, this project investigates the performative afterlife of Pulse. I apply and name the term performative afterlife to suggest that the events at Pulse are connected to material conditions and consequences that get performed by and through queer and trans bodies of color. Interlocutors share the afterlife is performed within the context of ubiquitous whiteness found in Phoenix, often manifesting as a survival mechanism. Additionally, many interlocutors express the mundane threat of violence everyday has prevented a thorough engagement of what it means to live in a world after the events at Pulse nightclub have occurred. Ultimately, the performative afterlife of Pulse gets performed by queer and trans bodies of color in Phoenix through a co-performance between one another. Much like the dancing that occurred at Pulse, the performative afterlife is a performance that moves the world towards queer or color futures not yet here.
ContributorsTristano, Michael (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Marlon (Committee member) / Danielson, Marivel (Committee member) / LeMaster, Benny (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The secret Facebook group ////sads only/// was formed in October 2015 to provide a safe space for women and trans and nonbinary people to express their emotions, a sort of digital support group. Members can post individually about things happening in their lives, comment on other members’ posts with advice or support, and contribute to discussion threads. Common subject matters include mental health, relationships, sexuality, gender identity, friendships, careers, family, art, education, and body image. The group’s location on Facebook adds to its utility – it can be an alternative site of community-making and communication, away from the often toxic, triggering, or just plain negative posts that clog up social media news feeds and the unsolicited comments that get appended. The group is informed by principles of affect theory, and in particular, sad girl theory, which was developed by the artist Audrey Wollen. She suggests that femme sadness is a site of power and not just vulnerability. In her view, sadness isn’t passive existence, but instead, an act of resistance. Specifically, it uses the body in a way that is crucial to many definitions of activism, incorporating the violence of revolution, protest, and struggle that has historically been gendered as male. This thesis examines the history and future directions of the ///sads only/// group as well as its theoretical underpinnings and the implications of its intervention, considering such perspectives as cultural studies, gender performance, identity formation, digital citizenship, mental health, and feminist activism.
ContributorsKoerth, Kimberly (Author) / Ward, Mako (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Lisa (Thesis advisor) / McGibbney Vlahoulis, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019