Browsing by Subject "LGBTQ studies"
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Item Open Access Curtailing Excess: The Excision of Idolatry, Magic, and Non-reproductive Sex in Colonial Mexico(2022) Hagler, AndersonThis dissertation employs excess as an analytical framework to explore the ways in which commoner indigenous and mixed-raced peoples accessed the divine to alleviate the ills afflicting their communities. This study also highlights the moral and legal contexts in which colonial officials invoked excess to justify conquest. The documents that I have consulted show that monarchs, viceroys, clergymen and other state functionaries labeled transgressions such as idolatry, superstition, and deviant sex acts as “excesses.” In addition to these primary sources, my understanding of excess as a calculated rhetorical strategy that conflated non-European sociocultural experiences into a single pejorative category has been informed by historians and literary scholars of Latin America.
This dissertation develops three central arguments. First, European and Mesoamerican cultures recognized that excessive behaviors such as dissolution and licentiousness produced harmful repercussions in the terrestrial world. However, the precise definition of these categories and the ways in which they were addressed varied widely, providing the interstice necessary for Spanish colonizers to equate non-European cultural traditions with sin and immorality. A metaphysical impasse emerged as Europeans maintained a unidirectional relationship with the divine while Indigenous peoples emphasized reciprocity. Because Catholics opined that abstention from all sin was the best way to appease the Lord, the total eradication of excess, rather than its management, was the best way to secure good fortune in the terrestrial realm.
Second, additional conflict stemmed from whether geography was deemed to be sacred or profane. Throughout the colonial era, many indigenous and mixed-raced peoples believed that every aspect of the environment corresponded to a supernatural entity. Spanish colonizers, in contrast, approached geography from a secular perspective. Improper land usage failed to improve the terrain, leaving it wild, while acceptable forms of land tenure enhanced the surrounding area, rendering it cultivated. Areas distant from a city’s moral center were viewed as potentially dangerous, thereby transforming formerly sacred landscapes into dens of iniquity.
Third, although the sexual comportment and religious practices of commoners concerned both elite Spaniards and indigenous peoples, the sociopolitical changes that occurred after Iberians solidified their place in the upper echelons of colonial Mexican society meant that pre-Hispanic forms of sexual behavior and religious devotion were derided and pushed underground. Customs that had facilitated diplomacy, e.g. polygynous marriages, were stripped of their political utility and grouped alongside other sinful practices such as masturbation, sodomy, and. And while commoners continued to solicit the services of native and mixed-raced healers, Catholic officials disparaged them as Devil worshipers. Because excess was consistently interpreted to be antithetical to the imperial project, colonial officials attempted to excise practices such as idolatry, magic, and non-reproductive sex from the body politic. Spanish colonizers fretted about non-orthodox rituals, non-reproductive sexual acts, and other perceived excesses because the perpetuation of these practices threatened the construction of an orderly society.
Item Embargo Discrimination in Workplace, Health Care, Family Settings and Mental Health among Transgender People in Sri Lanka(2023) He, TaoDespite numerous studies demonstrating high rates of discrimination and poor mental health among transgender people in Western countries, little research has been conducted on this population in Sri Lanka. As such, the primary objective of this study was to assess the prevalence of discrimination experienced by transgender people in the workplace, health care, and family settings. Additionally, we investigated the potential association between discrimination and adverse mental health outcomes, including current depression, anxiety disorders, and low self-esteem. In Galle, 100 transgender participants were recruited through snowball sampling and then completed the survey through face-to-face interviews. The survey consisted of five sections: sociodemographic information, mental health scales, and discrimination experience in the workplace, health care, and family settings. We reported the prevalence of discrimination and adverse mental health outcomes. We also estimated the prevalence ratios of current depression and anxiety disorder, which are associated with work inaccessibility and workplace discrimination, adjusting for age, education, and gender identity in separate Poisson regression models. The study found that school harassment (67%), workplace insults (63.5%), and work inaccessibility (47.4%) were the most commonly reported types of discrimination among transgender participants. Among them, the prevalence of current depression, anxiety disorder, and low self-esteem were 44%, 38%, and 81%, respectively. Furthermore, work inaccessibility was associated with a 16% increase in the prevalence of depression. Workplace discrimination, as measured by two categories (1 or 2 types of discrimination, ≥3 types of discrimination) was associated with greater prevalence (41%-56%) of depression and anxiety (22% - 46%) than non-discrimination, although all of those associations were not statistically significant. The high prevalence of discrimination against transgender people presented in the study highlights the urgent need for legislative changes to protect their rights. Future studies should aim to identify coping resources and develop evidence-based interventions to minimize the adverse mental health consequences of discrimination. It is expected that the researchers and transgender voluntary groups who had been involved in the study may transform the study results into meaningful real-world interventions.
Item Embargo Estimating the Association Between Mental Health and Disability Among Sexual and Gender Minority Populations(2023) Wilson, Maya ChantelleBackground: While nationwide health surveys commonly assess the prevalence of mental health conditions and disability status at the population level, they often fail to elucidate the relationship between mental health and disability. The aim of this study is to estimate the association between past-month poor mental health days and two indicators of disability (difficulty doing errands alone and difficulty making decisions) among sexual and gender minority (SGM) respondents to the 2021 BRFSS survey. Methods: A secondary analysis was conducted on the publicly accessible 2021 BRFSS data to estimate the association between past-month poor mental health days and indicators of disability among SGM. Logistic regression models were used to report odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals. We then examined potential effect modification by gender, sexual orientation, race, and SES factors, and present stratified estimates as indicated. Results: We observed increasing difficulty of completing errands alone with increasing past-month poor mental health days (OR 2.64, 95% CI 2.194, 3.178 at moderately poor mental health; OR 5.025, 95% CI 4.289, 5.889 at severely poor mental health). This association is modified by gender and SES. We also observed increasing difficulty of making decisions alone with increasing past-month poor mental health days (OR 3.298, 95% CI 2.871, 3.787 at moderately poor mental health; OR 6.792, 95% CI 5.979, 7.716 at severely poor mental health). This association is modified by sexual orientation, gender and race. Conclusions: There are clear dose response relationships between mental health and the two disability outcomes that are modified by socioeconomic status, gender and sexual identity.
Item Open Access In Between the Closet and the Wild: Queer Animality in Contemporary China(2023) Wang, YidanThis thesis investigates the intersections between queer and posthuman studies, exploring how animality can serve as a force for queer movements. Drawing on the theories of Eve Sedgwick and Jack Halberstam, this project proposes the existence of an intermediate space between the domestic and the wild, which is linked by queer movements. Particularly, by examining three queer works from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this project demonstrates how animality provides resources and imaginative space for queering to transgress fixed features and identities. The works examined in this project queer taxonomies, language, species, bodies, and sexualities, opening up infinite possibilities for becoming. In this way, it intends to inspire new ways of thinking about identity, community, and the natural world.
Item Open Access Maintenance Works: The Aesthetics and Politics of Collective Support.(2021) Symuleski, Max J.Maintenance Works: The Aesthetics and Politics of Collective Support investigates the cultural visibility and value of maintenance labor through a critical examination of American visual and material culture, post-1969. Starting from the visual and performance practice of self-proclaimed “maintenance artist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!, I develop a conceptual definition of maintenance as sustaining activity that occurs across scales, from the intimate labor of caring for bodies, to the collective, macro-scale problems of sustaining infrastructures and environments. I argue that, with the gesture of assigning her own and others’ maintenance labor the status of “artwork”, Ukeles prompts a critical re-valuation of the visibility and social and economic value of maintenance that resonates with a host of historical and contemporary discourses on the gendered and stratified distribution of material and social reproduction, including Marxist-feminist approaches to care work, critiques of innovation discourse in science and technology studies, and concern with issues of social and economic precarity in recent cultural criticism and critical theory. At the center of both Ukeles’ project and these discussions lie important questions about the status, conditions, and social distribution of care and support: Who is doing it? How does it get done? How does it feel to maintain or be maintained? What happens when practices and structures of social and material support fail, whether through immediate crisis or prolonged neglect? How do those affected find ways of maintaining otherwise? Each chapter of Maintenance Works approaches these questions by examining the visual and material culture around what I define as late 20th-century “crises of maintenance”: shifting economies of care and support, global environmental destruction, and institutionalized abandonment and neglect. The cultural objects I discuss span decades and genres, including land and environmental art, feminist and queer performance, and social practice. Through these material case studies I add important theoretical and cultural foundation to contemporary discussions on care, precarity, and sustainability across disciplines from queer and feminist theory to eco-critical humanities, to science and technology studies, and center the production and reception of artwork as sites for critical inquiry and knowledge production.
Item Open Access Out of the Church Closet: Hope for the Evangelical Covenant Church and Sexual Minorities in the Local Congregation(2019) Olson, Amanda (Mandy)The Evangelical Covenant Church, like so many Christian denominations, is embroiled in conflict over homosexuality and gay marriage. This small North American denomination cannot afford a split, not only due to its small size, but because doing so would fundamentally deny its very identity. Thankfully, it is the denomination’s shared identity that gives the church, and sexual minorities, hope for the future.
The ECC is a gathering of churches that covenant together for the sake of God’s mission in the world. It’s pietistic history and ethos values relational unity over doctrinal uniformity, making gracious space for theological diversity for the purpose of that mission. It’s affirmations and distinctives provide a strong DNA for the church to flourish in the midst of a rapidly changing culture.
Homosexuality and gay marriage are complex problems in the church. They challenge fundamental beliefs, values and identities, and they are inherently personal and emotional topics. In order to address this challenge, church leaders must learn new ways of leading.
This paper proposes that an adaptive leadership framework provides the tools necessary for the Evangelical Covenant Church to faithfully and fully take on the challenge without compromising its commitment to Christ and the authority of the Bible. It offers practical resources to assist local congregations in discussing the topic. And, it suggests ways that denominational leadership can support the work of the local congregation.
Item Open Access Partial Figures: Sound in Queer and Feminist Thought(2017) Dublon, Amalle DublonThis dissertation contends that sound and aurality ought to be more fully integrated into how gender and sexuality are thought. The dissertation’s title, “Partial Figures,” refers to its aims: not to exhaustively document the status of sound within discourses of sexual difference and dissidence, but rather to sketch how queer and feminist thought might draw on sound’s resources. The project is thus situated within the longer trajectory of visual approaches to power and gender. “Partial Figures” also describes what I suggest are sound and aurality’s specific erosion of the figure as a presumptive requirement of approaches to social life and aesthetic form. By partial, I mean both incomplete and nonunitary, subject to the decay and growth, the putative disfigurement, that Hortense Spillers describes under the rubric of flesh. Finally, the notion of being partial, as opposed to impartial, is also at play. Partiality -- having a weakness for something – describes an orientation that bridges affection and dependency or debility; it compromises aesthetics as a site for the exercise of judgement. To be partial to something or someone is to be rendered incomplete by that thing, a torsion or disfigurement that marks queer and feminist method. By considering notions of musical flavor and corporeality (Chapter 1), queer sound ecologies (Chapter 2), and gendered ontologies of frequency and vibration (Chapter 3), I revisit key conceptual knots within theories of gender and sexuality that require a more sustained attention to sound and aurality.
I focus on two fundamental preoccupations within queer and feminist scholarship that, I argue, are reconfigured by the methodological, material, and historical resources of sound: corporeality (Chapter 1) and ecology (Chapter 2). From this assessment of sound’s essential resources for theories of gender and sexuality, Chapter 3 then moves, through a consideration of sexual difference as noise, to suggest that sonic ontologies likewise cannot properly be thought without queer and feminist method.
The first chapter concerns corporeality as a principal site of feminist theory’s turn to questions of matter and affect in the 2000s. For some influential theorists, I argue, an ambiguous and overdetermined relationship between food, fatness, and “epidemic” debility became a cipher for the specifically causative or agential powers of matter and affect. I show, however, that these powers have already been thought otherwise in the overlapping contexts of black studies and musicology. I take up notions of musical flavor and culinary sound in the work of Fred Moten and Theodor Adorno, respectively, alongside Hortense Spillers’ account of ungendered flesh as resisting figuration in the sense of both embodiment and (ac)counting. Like fatness, musical flavor is felt as the distension and elaboration of form and enjoyment, its aesthetic and figural enrichments taken for a failure to budget and apportion pleasure, need, and dependency. Within feminism’s turn toward corporeal matter, I argue, fatness and food have been made to serve as both a hinge and an impasse. On the one hand, the purported links between eating, fatness, and debility have been taken as the very image of self-evident causation. On the other hand, however, fatness troubles etiology, generating endless (and to date, inconclusive) speculation about what causes it and how its alleged social pathology might be reversed. Its status as a site of commingled growth and purported decay, life and “premature” death or debility, has presented itself to some writers as an apparent conundrum. In addition to Moten, Adorno, and Spillers, I draw on critiques of causality by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Michel Foucault. The nonopposition of growth and decay, life and debility, enjoyment and dependency, emerges through music and artworks by Future, UGK, Anicka Yi, Alvin Lucier, and Constantina Zavitsanos, among others.
Chapter 2 concerns a second historically vexed site for thinking gender and sexuality: nature and ecology. I approach the relation between sex, ecology, and sound through one of queer theory’s founding preoccupations: “public,” outdoor, or undomestic sexual gathering. “Public sex” has been imagined as a question of sightlines and their obstruction, but I argue that its sociality is given form by acoustics and acute sensitivity to environmental sound in spaces where visual obscurity offers both protection and danger. I read the 1998 album Second nature: an electro-acoustic pastoral, produced from field recordings of a parkland cruising ground by the group Ultra-red, who develop an audio ecology of this queer sexual commons alongside a critique of the pastoral as a site of musical and ecological containment. Works by Samuel Delany, Simon Leung, June Jordan, Park McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady, TLC, and others situate Ultra-red’s Second nature within an understanding of a sexual commons that views need and dependency as forms of ecological wealth.
Chapter 3 considers noise as a figure for feminine sexual difference, suggesting that ontologies of sound must be conditioned by queer and feminist thought. My argument proceeds through an account of chatter, frequency, and perpetual motion, considering Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” chatbots, gifs, David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, consciousness-raising, and the work of artists Jessica Vaughn, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Pauline Oliveros. Questions of frequency and vibration have emerged as part of sonic ontologies in recent years; I trace the entry of vibration and “vibes” into U.S. popular discourse in the early 20th century through the theological and musicological writing of Sufi Inayat Khan. Among his areas of influence, I focus on the history of modern dance, particularly its Orientalist preoccupation with the animated wave-forms of loose fabric, which was demonstrably molded by Khan’s theories of vibration. This racially and sexually marked “signature” gesture was the subject of several intellectual property lawsuits that sustained legal ambiguity about the status of performance as property.
Item Open Access Picturing Poetics: Seriality, Comics, and the Cartoon in US Experimental Poetry(2020) Stark, Jessica QI argue that experimental poets, beginning with Gertrude Stein but proliferating later in the century with such poets as Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Joe Brainard, and Barbara Guest, were drawn to comics for the way they perform, while undoing, the most conventional appeals to authorship, authenticity, personhood, and the unified text. Examining twentieth-century poetry in juxtaposition with comics as an often-overlooked interlocutor, I show how comics—from their inception—have always held an influential place in an US, poetic avant-garde. Drawing on critical work in visual cultural studies and popular culture as well as queer theory and literary studies, this project revises the term “avant-garde” and its loaded connotations of privilege, elitism, and obscurity, to include a myriad of popular frameworks that expand literary histories of the US American avant-garde and its recognized artists.
In comparing US poetry and the comics field in the twentieth century, I attend to the places, socialities, and shared materials of the avant-garde in order to move beyond an inversion of long-standing concerns for the “great divide” between “high” and “low” art. Rather than attempt to reverse hierarchical classifications, I chronicle production continuities (e.g. publication models, modes of distribution, editorial influences, and common audiences) between avant-garde culture and mass media in order to emphasize overlapping contexts between these seemingly disparate fields. Attending more closely to the sites of formation, dissemination, and the literal and symbolic boundaries of these contexts, I use the comparison to open up a more nuanced dialogue about American culture with respect to experimental poetry and its interactions with popular, pictorial media. My consideration of long-publishing comics in poetry—from the Nancy comics to Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy—not only highlights the ways these poetic works challenged conventions in their use of comics media, but also how multi-authored texts provide agitating, lyrical depictions in response to reductive classifications of race, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth century. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theory of disidentification, I analyze poetic texts alongside close readings of the comics they use to reveal how these literary forms mirror and respond to one another in, turn, to challenge how we perceive popular images and texts as fixed, irrelevant, or boring.
Item Embargo Queer Women's Activism in China: Trauma, Sociality, and Confrontational Politics(2021) Huang, AnaIn an ethnography of queer women’s (lala) activism in China, I tell the story of a social movement from its effusive beginning to disillusionment and pose the difficult question of what went wrong. I trace the dissolution of a key organization, the Chinese Lala Alliance, in which I played a leadership role for over ten years, and examine the pattern of interpersonal drama that frequently erupted between lala activists throughout China. With “glass hearts” that easily shatter, many activists air their grievances and angrily demand redress with an affective intensity that further escalates conflict and fractures sociality. I argue that trauma results from the chronic, systemic oppression that impact the lives of most queer women. The intimate kinship bonds formed between lala activists also leads to deeply felt pain and injury when conflict erupts.Delving into the in-fighting, the break-down of social bonds, and the demise of an organization, I point out the problems with the tools of critique and confrontational politics, which have defined queer and feminist politics around the globe. Utopia is a vision of the social, but those with utopian fantasies of safe space in the activist community are inevitably disappointed when interpersonal conflicts arise. Perceiving their experience of injury and pain as abuse and oppression inflicted by another, activists with glass hearts deploy the powerful tools of confrontational politics against other activists, with devastating consequences. To build sustainable social movements, we need a different activist culture that prioritizes healing and reparative work. I also situate “movement trauma” in the national landscape and draw parallels between the temporal arch of lala activism and the Chinese Dream. The pursuit of progress, in both capitalism and activism, follows a trajectory from effusive optimism and hope to disenchantment a decade later.
Item Open Access State Violence and Transgender Cultural Politics in Post-Dictatorship Argentina(2020) Rizki, Cole AlexanderThis dissertation turns to illiberal state violence and state formation in Latin America’s Southern Cone region as the ground for trans politics and activisms. Focusing on the entanglements of Argentine trans politics with histories of dictatorship (1976-83), I ask: how do contemporary transgender cultural producers deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present? What sorts of political, aesthetic, and legal tactics do trans cultural producers adopt within political contexts hyper-saturated by state violence? What ethical and political challenges arise? In response, I formulate a trans framework of analysis that combines archival, visual culture, literary, and ethnographic methods to study contemporary transgender politics and cultural production as these have taken shape in response to shifting Argentine state formations.
Each chapter considers how trans activists strategically deploy existing visual and material culture, activist strategies, and legal interventions developed by antigenocide activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to forward trans rights claims. In doing so, my work traces unexpected affinities between Argentine transgender and antigenocide politics, cultural production, and activisms. Taken together, the dissertation’s chapters evoke an interdisciplinary method that twins the study of cultural practices with histories of state violence, focusing on gender and sexuality as central to such analyses. By tracing the ways Argentine trans activists reanimate the past to meet the demands of the present, my dissertation offers an historical interpretation of trans political subjectivity that extends and revises trans studies’ geopolitical imagination, bringing Latinx American archives, national histories, and political strategies to bear on existing trans studies scholarship.
Item Open Access The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate(2023) Fischer, Julien E.This dissertation, The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate, intervenes in the conundrum I call “the trans autobiographical mandate” that characterizes the relationship between U.S. Trans studies and sexological genres of trans autobiography. The conundrum is as follows: some forms of trans self-representation—namely, those found in sexological archives—have been understood by Trans Studies to be oppressive and too mired in anti-trans ideologies and discourses to allow for trans people’s agency. This has meant that, to do justice to the trans authors of these autobiographies, Trans Studies critics have been compelled to read the past through the enabling perspective of a trans affirming present, where what is found in the archive is given new shape through contemporary lexicons of trans identity. At the same time, other forms of trans self-representation, including those found on the presumed “outside” of medicine, have been endowed with a liberatory potential to challenge, disrupt, overcome, and rewrite the norms and ideologies of medicalization that have historically defined trans life in limited and limiting ways. In The Lure of Origins, I argue against three tendencies that have characterized the dominant position of Trans Studies in its attempt to resolve the conundrum of the trans autobiographical mandate: I contest the idea that trans medicalization only represses trans life, which has established the assumption that the field already knows both what can be found in the medical archive and how to read what we find there; I resist the idea that there exist forms of trans autobiography that are free from the constraints of medicalization and pathologization; and I refuse the burden that this bifurcation in modes of autobiographical reading and writing places on trans people to know ourselves and each other, to be able to author and authorize our own stories, and to do so in terms which are imagined to be our own. To these ends, I reopen an anonymous case study I call “the case of the metamorphosing physician,” which arrives to us in the Trans Studies present as definitively trans, in order to retell the story of how the case arrives here. I construct an account of the multiplicity that this case carries in its enmeshment in discourse, interpretation, and the desires of those who have gone back to read and re-read it while offering pathologizing frames for understanding its true meaning. Over four chapters, I follow the case study’s successive resignification in the course of the long twentieth century sexological canon: as a “Stage of Transition to Metamorphosis Sexualis Paranoica” in Krafft-Ebing (1892); a case of delusional cross-dressing for Magnus Hirschfeld (1910); an illustration of the difference between same-sex desire and cross-gender identity in Havelock Ellis (1913); and finally as the original autobiography of a transsexual in Richard Green (1966). In each chapter, I examine how the meaning of this paradigmatic case study evolves by changing sets of sexological hermeneutics which transform how the autobiography is read. I call attention to the multiple diagnostic inheritances buried within the contemporary signifier “trans,” including those that carry a pathologizing history with which the field has sought to dispense, and argue against reading this case within the singular “true” meaning of a trans origin offered by Trans Studies today. By attending to each scene of its medicalization, I consider how “trans” harbors a complex history of pathologizing frameworks from which it is still not free. I also show how the notion of a self-defining trans person who knows themselves does not emerge apart from the history of trans medicalization, but rather as a product of medicalization itself, which has demanded an equation between health and self-certainty as a prerequisite for trans inclusion. I insist on the importance of attending to the complex archive of pathology that troubles Trans Studies from the inside, not to recuperate pathology for more liberatory ends, but to disrupt the fantasy of the trans autobiographical mandate which demands a self-authorizing and self-knowing trans subject. I argue for a de-exceptionalizing story of the trans “origin” which refuses to pull this figure from the past into the self-conscious form that Trans Studies now desires. Ultimately, I rethink the terms by which trans affirmation has been made equivalent to the insistence that trans must be disarticulated from categories associated with insanity, particularly paranoia and psychosis, in order to be legitimate. By refusing this disarticulation or the assumptions in which it is grounded—which would only permit the freedom of transition to subjects who are presumed, by medicine’s own standards, to be sane—I insist on reading “trans” within a broader context in which its formation is unthinkable outside of its enmeshment with pathologizing histories. In doing so, I offer a mode of storytelling that historizes “trans” while resisting the demand to prove trans sanity through the articulation of true trans selves in transparent, autobiographical speech.
Item Open Access The Perspectives of Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Adolescent Males with Parent-Child Sex Communication(2016) Flores, Dalmacio DennisProblem: Gay, bisexual, and queer (GBQ) adolescent males are disproportionately affected by negative sexual health outcomes compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Their sex education needs are not sufficiently addressed in the home and the larger ecological systems. The omission of their sex education needs at a time when they are forming a sexual identity during adolescence compels GBQ males to seek information in unsupervised settings. Evidence-based interventions aimed at ensuring positive sexual health outcomes through sex communication cannot be carried out with these youth as research on how parents and GBQ males discuss sex in the home has been largely uninvestigated.
Methods: This naturalistic qualitative study focused on the interpretive reports of 15- to 20-year-old GBQ males’ discussions about sex-related topics with their parents. From a purposive sample of 30 male adolescents who self-identified as GBQ, participants who could recall at least one conversation about sex with their parents were recruited for one-time interviews and card sorts. This strategy revealed, using Bronfenbrenners’ Bioecological Theory, their perceptions about sex communication in the context of their reciprocal relationship and the ecological systems that GBQ males and their parents navigate.
Results: Parents received poor ratings as sex educators, were generally viewed as not confident in their communication approach, and lacked knowledge about issues pertinent to GBQ sons. Nevertheless, participants viewed parents as their preferred source of sex information and recognized multiple functions of sex communication. The value placed by GBQ youth on sex communication underscores their desire to ensure an uninterrupted parent-child relationship in spite of their GBQ sexual orientation. For GBQ children, inclusive sex communication is a proxy for parental acceptance.
Results show that the timing, prompts, teaching aids, and setting of sex communication for this population are similar to what has been reported with heterosexual samples. However, most GBQ sons rarely had inclusive guidance about sex and sexuality that matched their attraction, behavior, and identities. Furthermore, the assumption of heterosexuality resulted in the early awareness of being different from their peers which led them to covertly search for sex information. The combination of assumed heterosexuality and their early reliance on themselves for applicable information is a missed parental opportunity to positively impact the health of GBQ sons. More importantly, due to the powerful reach of new media, there is a critical period of maximum receptiveness that has been identified which makes inclusive sex communication paramount in the pre-sexual stage for this population. Our findings also indicate that there are plenty of opportunities for systemic improvements to meet this population’s sexual education needs.
Item Open Access Tracing, Expanding, and Making Accessible the Digital Pathways of Latinx Sexual Dissidence in the Hemisphere(2020) Gonzalez, Melissa MThe project aims to analyze, archive, and enable the powerful ways that contemporary Latinx intersectional queer activists, located in sites as disparate as Oakland (U.S.) and Santiago (Chile), use YouTube, Facebook, and other globally popular media platforms to disseminate their activist-oriented cultural productions and connect with other activists. Envisioning and theorizing liberation from intersecting oppressions, Latinx activists across our hemisphere make important contributions to queer and transgender culture that are unevenly visible because they occur in ephemeral digital spaces and are incoherent from the standpoint of the most massively circulated, received ideas about gender, race, and sexuality. My project consists of the present essay, which analyzes formations of sexual dissidence in relation to the disciplining and extractivism of academic institutions, as well as a multi-modal website. Grounded in virtual and IRL community-based participatory research methods, the digital resource accompanies the creators of Latinx sexual dissidence by using the technologies and funding I have access to in order to offer a multilingual, semi-public digital resource that supports the archiving, production, translation, and intra-community circulation of Latinx sexual dissident culture, thought, and activism.