Browsing by Subject "LGBT"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Brokering Identity: Exploring The Construction Of Lgbt Political Identity And Interests In U.S. Politics, 1968-2001
    (2016-08) Murib, Zein
    This study introduces a theoretical framework grounded in intersectionality to the study of identity-based groups in politics, raising and addressing the following questions: how within group marginalization develops, why within group marginalization occurs, and to what effect? By focusing on the construction of the LGBT group and through discourse analysis of three bodies of archival evidence from 1968 through 2001 – the institutional records of several national LGBT interest groups and social movements, a variety of LGBT publications, and transcripts of germane debates from the Congressional Record – this study shows how political actors framed the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities as a cohesive and unified coalition by presenting LGBT people as a minority group defined along a single axis of identity: sexuality. The unity of this new LGBT minority group – organized exclusively around sexuality – was achieved by foregrounding the political interests of gender-normative lesbians and gay men, particularly those who are white, middle-class, able bodied, and gender normative. Consequently, issues such as marriage and second-parent adoption were elevated as the predominant political interests on behalf of the LGBT group, while others, such as the passage of gender-inclusive employment anti-discrimination legislation or political mobilizations to end the documentation of sex on state documents, were deprioritized. Throughout this study, attention is drawn to the ways in which this projection of LGBT group unity obscured intersecting identifications, such as race, gender, class, nation, ability, and immigration status, with significant political and material consequences for the most marginalized members of the LGBT minority group: people of color, people who are transgender, lesbians, people who are gender nonconforming, people who are poor or homeless, people with disabilities, and people who are undocumented.
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    Carceral Normativities: Sex, Security, and the Penal Management of Gender Nonconformity
    (2014-11) Vitulli, Elias
    "Carceral Normativities: Sex, Security, and the Penal Management of Gender Nonconformity" examines the history of the incarceration of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the US from the early twentieth century to the present. While rarely discussed in prison scholarship and activism, gender nonconforming and transgender prisoners have garnered intense scrutiny from prison administrators and have experienced persistent and pervasive violence. Through archival and legal research, I historicize this violence, arguing that for the last century prison administrators have labeled gender nonconformity as a threat to institutional security or, as I call it, as queer dangerousness, which has structured penal practices and policies used to manage these prisoners and normalized violence against them. I argue that this construction of gender nonconformity as security threat is produced from a set of institutionalized logics, which I call racialized gender normativity. "Carceral Normativities" examines often overlooked and continually evolving prison policies and practices to trace the history of the construction of gender nonconformity as queer dangerousness and institutional security threat as well as how racialized gender normativity has been constructed and reconstructed as a constitutive logic of the prison system. Chapter One examines the history of the construction of penal sex-segregation alongside newspaper stories from the mid-twentieth century of penal administrators "discovering" sexually "misclassified" prisoners in their institutions, in order to argue that the prison system's programmatic design and core understandings of rehabilitation and incorrigibility have been deeply shaped by racialized gender normativity, which produced the imperative to sex-segregate and constructed sexual ambiguity as administrative disorder. Chapter Two traces the history of the systematic segregation of gender nonconforming and transgender prisoners, which began in the early twentieth century and continues into the present, and argues that this segregation was created as a management tool as prison administrators began to identify gender nonconformity as a threat to institutional security, or as queer dangerousness. Chapter Three examines the relationship between dominant penological, social scientific, and legal narratives about sexual violence in penal institutions and the use of sexual violence as a tool of control--a practice I call carceral sexual violence. I argue that narratives, which portray prisons as sites of rampant sexual violence entirely perpetrated by prisoners, construct transgender and gender nonconforming prisoners as simultaneously unrapable and constantly subject to sexual violence, which justifies and obscures many quotidian forms of carceral sexual violence that target gender nonconformity. Chapter Four examines federal civil rights litigation regarding access to hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for transgender women and argues that carceral necropower, or the production of the prison as a space of death and prisoners as socially dead, and the racialized gender normative construction of gender nonconformity as queer dangerousness securitizes gender-affirming medical treatment in prisons, constructing security concerns as a primary factor determining access to such treatment. Most broadly, "Carceral Normativities" expands our understanding of how the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality shapes carceral constructions of deviance and dangerousness as well as penal policies and practices.
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    Common ground: performing gay shame, solidarity and social change
    (2015-02) Winn-Lenetsky, Jonah Ari
    This dissertation examines Gay Shame activism of the late 1990s and early 2000s through case studies of three distinct performance sites: Gay Shame San Francisco, Kvisa Shchora, a Tel Aviv based collective, and Euroshame (London). Analyzing the performance work and self-articulations of these three groups, I demonstrate how their performative and rhetorical use of shame attempts to both critique the "pride" of mainstream LGBT groups and to forge solidarity between queer communities and others marginalized by neoliberal economies and nationalist rhetoric through what I refer to as "hyperidentification". These performances can, at their best, be aesthetically challenging and creative interventions that reimagine and place queer identities in ideological and, at times, actionable alliance with marginalized others; while at their worst they imagine themselves in solidarity with other communities, but ignore or fail to account for the perspectives, agendas and values of those communities. My exploration of these sites examines the limits of solidarity and empathy and investigates the contributions of queer activist performance to debates regarding the ethics and efficacy of political performance within the disciplines of Theatre and Performance Studies.
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    Gay Bar Culture and Drinking in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and Two-Spirited Community
    (2024-04-10) Dolan, Eleanor; Ostrander, Nomi
    Gay bars have long been a staple of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and Two-Spirited (LGBTQIA2S+) community. They were often the only spaces for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals to meet others, connect with their community, and engage in activism (Escoffier, 1997). Yet today the LGBTQIA2S+ community engages in disproportionately high levels of drinking (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2017). This study examines the impact of gay bar culture of drinking in the LGBTQIA2S+ community through a survey of 60 participants from Minnesota who identify as members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. The majority of participants reported no change in their drinking behavior between LGBTQIA2S+ and non-LGBTQIA2S+ spaces. Yet many expressed a need for more sober LGBTQIA2S+ spaces. Participants also expressed feeling safe in LGBTQIA2S+ spaces and enjoying their time in them. More research is required on the need for sober LGBTQIA2S+ spaces and the benefits they bring.
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    Mapping Transgender History
    (2017-05-09) Matthews, Lacie
    History of transgender, transexual, MTF, FTM, and queer peoples is exceedingly significant towards understanding transgender rights, advocacy, and pro-trans policy. The history of transsexuality and transgender has been significantly impacted by incorrect assumptions and perceptions of normal sex and gender behaviors. The Transgender Oral History Project (TOHP) as part of the The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies within University of Minnesota Libraries works to give voice back to transgender people, who have repeatedly had their voices ignored, through the medium of oral history. This research has focused on the task of creating a comprehensive timeline for transgender history in the United States. For any movement it is essential to know where you are from, to know where you are going. Outlined in this document are the major transgender history events, along with influential people, and historical changes to the language of transgenderism.
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    Queer texts and the Cold War: how nationalism shaped U.S. lesbian and gay writing, 1945-1960.
    (2009-06) Galik, Angela E.
    This dissertation explores the impact of mainstream discourses of nationalism, gender, sexuality, race, and class on the development of lesbian and gay identities and communities in the United States in the early Cold War period (1945-1960) by analyzing the literary productions of several lesbian and gay writers. Placing neglected and forgotten texts alongside works by authors considered "canonical," I show how these writers responded in different ways to the dominant, anti-homosexual discourses that characterized the era. During this critically under-examined period in U.S. LGBT history, paranoia about Communist expansion led to the conflation, in the national imagination, of homosexuals with enemy agents, and government, mass media, the self-help establishment alike promoted the suburban nuclear family headed by a married heterosexual couple as an important line of national defense. Simultaneously, the 1950s saw the formation of the first public gay and lesbian rights organizations in the U.S., the publication of the country's first nationally-distributed lesbian and gay magazines, and an unprecedented flurry of novels published by gay and lesbian authors, ranging from high art to pulp paperback romance. In these conditions of seeming contradiction, of heavy state repression combined with optimism and new possibilities for self-expression, lesbians and gay men participated, through published writing, in a broad national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality. Gay and lesbian writers wrestled with the question of what it meant to be homosexual in the early Cold War United States, contested exclusionary and discriminatory understandings of the homosexual's place in society, and challenged the validity of rigid gender roles - as well as the United States' moral authority as the self-declared protector of democracy. The ways in which each individual author interacted with and responded to these hegemonic national discourses depended, to a great degree, on the author's specific social positioning within the interlocking hierarchies of privilege based on gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as their larger ideological perspectives and political commitments. My dissertation teases out these specificities, illuminating previously unrecognized contributions to the national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality, examining the ways an author's multiple points of reference often led to the reproduction of competing ideologies within a single work. This project contributes to the work, within the field of LGBTQ Studies, of reclaiming and expanding the boundaries of a queer U.S. literary tradition by re-examining the textual productions of an era usually seen as a "dark age" between the social upheavals of World War II and the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. At the same time, by placing the discursive processes by which the meanings of homosexuality were negotiated during this period, highlighting the state of flux itself, my analysis makes it impossible to refer to a unitary gay, lesbian, or "homosexual" experience, viewpoint, or identity.
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    When you can’t go home: Associations between family environment and suicidality for transgender youth with histories of homelessness
    (2019-05) Morrow, Quinlyn
    Transgender youth who are or have been homeless are at an increased risk of suicide. To better understand risk and protective factors for suicide in this population, the present qualitative study analyzed interviews with 30 racially diverse transgender young people (ages 15-26) who had experienced homelessness. Inductive qualitative content analysis revealed that gender-based rejection from family members, other dysfunctional family dynamics (e.g., domestic violence, substance abuse), and mental illness appeared to increase risk of both homelessness and suicide, rather than homelessness itself increasing suicide risk. Results show that although homelessness was a stressor in these young people’s lives, conflict and rejection from family members could also be severe stressors. In these instances, participants managed conflictual relationships in ways that allowed them to maintain relationships when safe, and to create distance when relationships were not supportive. Findings suggest that clinicians and other service providers working with homeless transgender youth need to be mindful of the intersectional nature of potential familial stressors, wherein gender-based prejudice can interact with other family dysfunction to make the home unsafe, and to facilitate their clients’ agency in establishing appropriate boundaries with family members. Additionally, efforts to support trans youth may need to focus on advocating for the expansion of social safety net programs that provide access to basic necessities in order to proactively reduce harm to transgender people, regardless of their specific family circumstances.