Browsing by Subject "queer theory"

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    Lifemaking alongside Death: Violence, Care and the Everyday in Trans communities in India
    (2022-06) Bhattacharya, Sayan
    How do transgender communities disrupt and exceed the overdeterminations of their lives by structural oppression and death? My research investigates this question through a granular attention to the everyday of transgender life worlds in India. Despite the decriminalization of homosexuality and state recognition of the right to gender expression, transphobia, medical negligence, murders and suicides are still the daily realities that trans communities are forced to confront. My dissertation project, Lifemaking alongside Death: Violence, Care and the Everyday in Trans Communities in India, argues that trans communities devise various improvisatory and innovative strategies to make life in an environment signified by violence. I stage conversations between anthropologies of the everyday, trans and queer literatures on care and anti-caste scholarship to study the efforts needed to reproduce an everyday that can be inhabited. These effortful strategies range from gestures that seek pleasure, negotiations with the nation state on demands of welfare to the performance of care labor for each other and devising dark humour on death that help trans people not only endure violence but also to refuse its overdeterminations of trans life.
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    Post-Gay Television: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Marriage, and Bullying On and Off Screen
    (2015-06) Elias, Liora
    The 2000-era has been a momentous time for LGBT policy shifts. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project on these policy changes in the areas of military service, marriage rights, and bullying in schools within the context of post-gay television. I take as a starting point that post-gay politics assumes that civil rights for gays and lesbians have been achieved and continued activism is no longer needed. Since the 1990s post-gay politics has gained currency within important modalities of discourse (news media, television, print media). I investigate a cluster of television shows in which post-gay themes suggest that equality for gay and lesbian individuals has been achieved. Drawing from media studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines the television shows Army Wives (Lifetime), Modern Family (ABC), and Glee (Fox) as case studies for theorizing the ways in which media facilitates the emergence of post-gay discourse. It does so by situating these shows within the context of, on the one hand, government hearings and documents and Supreme Court decisions, and, on the other hand, the industrial and popular discourse surrounding these TV programs. Post-gay television is often comprised of conservative and assimilationist political values such as the desire for gays and lesbians to openly serve in the U.S. military, same-sex marriage, and "equality"� based initiatives to eradicate bullying in schools. These initiatives often mask structural issues such as the continued prevalence of homophobia in the U.S. Military, the assimilationist qualities of same-sex marriage, as well as the enforcement of heteronormativity and gender policing common in U.S. high schools. These series do not simply represent LGBT lives on screen; they also participate in fundraising and public relations efforts for issues like marriage equality. Following the call to move beyond the politics of representation, my dissertation provides a critical historical and contextual perspective on the way in which the implementation and repeal of policy legislation is productive of what I am calling the politics of norms. It also considers how these policy changes and their treatment on television are informed by post-gay discourse.