An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays e…
Within this written thesis and in conjunction with a physical practice I will explore the complex nature of identity as a universal concept throughout humanity. Examining how it develops and changes through time as a fluid thing. From my perspective, as a gender and sexually que…
Proceeding from the perspective that theory can be utilized in practice, this thesis chronicles the making and production of the University of California San Diego production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika in 2016, directed by Jon Reimer. Through the …
A drag queen is as American Dream as a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence. Drag performance is more than entertainment in a night club: it is a way of expressing, dreaming, commenting, and escaping the crippling reality. For many, doing drag is their only way to a…
In Toward the Horizon: Contemporary Queer Theatre as Utopic Activism, I pursue two intersecting goals. First, I offer close readings of theatrical representations of queerness that expand beyond the shallow representations of the not-so-distant past, including the trope of the g…
The geographic south’s pervasive image in popular imagination is a monolithic south unified through ultraconservatism, hyper-religiosity, cisgenderism, heterosexuality, whiteness, and patriarchy. This monolithic view paints the south as a region deserving of comeuppance, as one …
This dissertation plumbs the often-eclipsed connections between antiblackness, Indigenous dispossession, sexuality, and urban space. It contributes to an understanding of the racial and gendered sexual economy of settler neoliberalism by examining a variety of (queer) narrations…
Going back at least as far as the Judeo-Christian creation story, the idea of men giving birth has appeared across a wide range of literary genres and forms. Only in the last forty years, however, has this figure moved from the realms of fable and science fiction to representati…
An extensive body of literature exists on both the sociopolitical history of religion in Latin America and the cultural narratives surrounding sexual orientation and practices. Yet surprisingly few researchers have explored sexual minorities’ navigation of their spiritual and se…
This dissertation aims to show women and feminine characters in Luke’s accounts of the fall of Jerusalem (13:34-35; 19:41-44; 21:20-24; 23:28-31) as haunting from and attesting to multiple ends that need to be treated eschatologically, or more accurately, eschata-logically. Thes…
Young American Jews are increasingly diverging from the American Jewish consensus on Zionism, while theoretical arguments for Jewish diasporism have been developed over the past several decades. I argue in this thesis that over the past half-decade, Jewish diasporism has develop…
What can an intersectional lens that considers race, gender, and sexuality offer ballet in the 21st century? Historically, Black and Queer stories have been relegated to the margins of ballet history in service of Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals. This creative and written pr…
This study proposes a framework through which to examine queer resistance and oppositional behaviors under oppression and persecution, such as the Nazi regime. Under the Weimar Republic, queer circles coalesced into communities that developed a degree of visibility in the German…
In the past thirty years the LGBTQ community has become increasingly studied within academia. However, it is only in the past decade that their spaces and places have begun to be examined. When one narrows this down even further to New South cities, practically nothing exists. T…
Despite his critical role in the development of American Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Postwar Assemblage, gay Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio remains at the margins of the historiography of these movements. Born in Manila, Philippines, the artist immigrated t…
In this dissertation, I examine the way Seattle drag artists embody the practice of remix through live and digital performance, weaving together sound, visual references, history, politics, gender, body, and affect in creative ways that both entertain audiences and make critical…
This dissertation reports the results of a descriptive phenomenological study which explored the experiences that LGBTQ+ (queer) folks had of being immersed in their own goodness and wisdom, which are qualities used as descriptive analogues for the concept of “brilliant sanity”;…
To examine the undergraduate experiences and perceptions of students who self-identify as LGBTQ during their matriculation at two church-affiliated historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), this cross-comparison qualitative case study sought the following: 1) to dete…
This thesis is an exploration of witches, as depicted in entertainment media. “Queering Witches: A Queer Feminist Exploration of Witches in Media” analyzes the way history has contributed to the reinforcement of stereotypes about witches using queer theory and feminist analysis.…