Matching Items (2)
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- All Subjects: LGBTQ
- Creators: Allison, Maria
- Creators: Anderson, Kate
Description
This study situated a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) softball league within the logic of homonormativity and queer futurity and explored how community and identity were constituted, practiced, negotiated, and problematized. The project endeavored to address the questions: What is the meaning and significance of community for the League participants? To what extent and how does participation in the League affect gender and sexual identity discourse and practice? And, in the context of the League, how are dominant ideologies and power structures reinforced, disrupted, and produced? A critical ethnography was undertaken to render lives, relations, structures, and alternative possibilities visible. Data was collected through participant observation, interviews, open-ended questionnaires, and archival document analysis. A three stage process was employed for data transformation including description, analysis, and interpretation. LGBT identified sports clubs, formed as a result of identity politics, are understood to be potential sites of transformation and/or assimilation. Although the League was imbued with the discourses of inclusion and acceptance, the valorizing of competition and normalization led to the creation of hierarchies and a politics of exclusion. The League as an identity-based community was defined by what it was not, by what it lacked, by its constitutive outside. It is possible to learn a great deal about community by looking at what and who is left out and the conspicuous absence of transgender and bisexual participants in the League highlights a form of closure, a limit to the transformative potential of the League.
ContributorsMertel, Sara (Author) / Bortner, Peg (Thesis advisor) / Allison, Maria (Committee member) / Mean, Lindsey (Committee member) / Kivel, Dana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Employing Queer Intersectionality, this study explored how undocuqueer activists made sense of, interacted and worked within the intersection of their LGBTQ and undocumented experience. Participants ascribed three overarching self-meanings: Vulnerability, Complexity, and Resilience. These self-meanings describe the ways participants perceived the interplay of their gender, sexuality and immigration status within the current sociopolitical context of the U.S. Recognizing their vulnerability within a state of illegibility, participants described a sense of exclusion within spaces of belonging, and wariness managing relationships with others; opting for more complex self-definitions, they resisted simplistic conceptions of identity that rendered their social locations invisible (e.g., homonormativity, heteronormativity, DREAMer); and describing themselves as resilient, they described surviving societal as well as familial rejection even when surviving seemed impossible to do so. Interacting and working within the intersection of gender, sexuality and immigration status, participants described identity negotiation and coming out as a form of resistance to institutionalized oppression, and resilience amidst simultaneous anti-immigrant, xenophobic and heterosexist power structures. Participants learned to live in multiple worlds at the same time, and embrace the multiplicity of their undocuqueer identity while seeking to bridge their communities through stories, activism and peer education. This study has implications for further understanding the way that queer politics and identity interact/ relate with various axes of inequality.
ContributorsCisneros, Jesus (Author) / Ott, Molly (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Kate (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015