Queer sex work

Sex work is a subject of significant contestation across academic disciplines, as well as within legal, medical, moral, feminist, political and socio-cultural discourses. A large body of research exists, but much of this focuses on the sale of sex by women to men and ignores other performances, practices, meanings and embodiments in the contemporary sex industry. A queer agenda is important in order to challenge hetero-centric gender norms and to develop new insights into how gender, sex, power, crime, work, migration, space/place, health and intimacy are understood in the context of commercial sexual encounters. Queer Sex Work explores what it might mean to 'be', 'do' and 'think' queer(ly) in the study and practice of commercial sex. It brings together a multiplicity of empirical case studies - including erotic dance venues, online sex working, pornography, grey sexual economies, and BSDM - and offers a variety of perspectives from academic scholars, policy practitioners, activists and sex workers themselves. In so doing, the book advances a queer politics of sex work that aims to disrupt heteronormative logics whilst also making space for different voices in academic and political debates about commercial sex. This unique and multidisciplinary volume will be indispensable for scholars and students of the global sex trade and of gender, sexuality, feminism and queer theory more broadly, as well as policymakers, activists and practitioners interested in the politics and practice of sex work in local, national and international contexts.

Regional aspects of Miami crime fiction

This thesis argues that forces of literary regionalism and postmodern culture are behind the explosion of crime fiction being written in and about South Florida by a growing number of resident authors. ^ Research included four methods of investigation: (1) A critical reading of many of the novels that make up the sub-genre. (2) A study of the theories of regionalism, postmodernism and the genre of the crime fiction. (3) Interviews with a number of the authors and a prominent Miami book seller. (4) Sociological studies of Miami in terms of historical events and their cultural significance. ^ Today's South Florida crime fiction authors cast their narratives in the old genre of the detective novel where characters are delineated according to traditional definitions of good and evil. What makes South Florida crime fiction different from traditional detective fiction is its interest in the exotic, postmodern culture and setting of South Florida. There is a unique cultural diversity of the city due to the geographical location of Miami in relationship to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the political forces at work in the region. South Florida's sub-tropical climate, fragile ecosystem, and elements of frontier life in a cosmopolitan city work to support Miami crime fiction. ^

The representation of motherhood in contemporary Catalan fiction

This dissertation analyzes four twenty-first-century Catalan novels which present the complex positions occupied by mothers in the last seven decades. Its conceptual framework posits motherhood as both a changing social construction and a political institution in a constant state of flux. In Inma Monsó´s Todo un carácter (2001), Eva Piquer´s Una victoria diferente (2002), Carme Riera´s La mitad del alma (2004), and Najat El Hachmi´s El último patriarca (2008) motherhood is explored as a metaphorical act, a gender-constructing experience, as well as the locus of expression with regard to gender and power relations. During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), the majority of women were excluded from public spaces, and forced to stay home to care for their husbands and children. Furthermore, the state criminalized abortion, made contraception and divorce illegal, and promoted an ideal of femininity based on silence, sacrifice, and self-denial. The political changes of the late 1970s allowed women greater personal autonomy, and many women writers began to challenge stereotypical views of women’s social roles. Yet in the 70s and 80s, the narratives of Esther Tusquets, Ana María Moix, and Montserrat Roig represent the mother as a repressive figure whom the daughter must reject in order to liberate herself and regain her voice. It is not until the 90s when the novelists Mercedes Abad, Maruja Torres, Carme Riera, Imma Monsó, Eva Piquer, and María Barbal rehumanize the mother figure, recovering their matrilineal heritage. However, far from suggesting a unified trend in representations of motherhood in Catalan fiction, the diverse points of view of the novels under discussion here reveal that differences in attitudes among women authors about mother-daughter conflict are far from resolved. The theoretical background for this dissertation draws mainly on the work of Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, and Julia Kristeva. It includes psychoanalytic studies as well as sociologically based essays by Anna López Puig, Amparo Acereda, Jacqueline Cruz, Barbara Zecchi, Ángeles de la Concha, and Raquel Osborne, among others.

It's not queer to be gay: Miami and the emergence of the gay rights movement, 1945–1995

This work chronicles how queer individuals politicized their same-sex desires from the post-World War II era to the mid-1990s. Using Miami as a site of exploration, this work demonstrates the shift from understanding homosexuality as a same-sex "desire" to a distinct form of "civil rights." It argues that by no means was it inevitable that queer issues entered the American political mainstream. This project pays particular attention to Miami's Cuban exile community, as it managed to garner great socio-political power in the city. Like others in the city's power structure, Miami's Cuban exiles were also fundamentally traditionalists. Together, these phenomena crystallized into a matrix of obstacles that stunted the growth of the gay rights movement. This work demonstrates the historical dynamics of sexuality and politics by contextualizing immigration, ethnicity, race, consumerism, and Cold War domestic and foreign policy.

The Commodification of Queer Virgins in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Keats

The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as a queering of identity—manifested through reversals of power and rejection of patriarchal institutions like marriage.

Regional aspects of Miami crime fiction

This thesis argues that forces of literary regionalism and postmodern culture are behind the explosion of crime fiction being written in and about South Florida by a growing number of resident authors. Research included four methods of investigation: 1. A critical reading of many of the novels that make up the sub-genre. 2. A study of the theories of regionalism, postmodernism and the genre of the crime fiction. 3. Interviews with a number of the authors and a prominent Miami book seller. 4. Sociological studies of Miami in terms of historical events and their cultural significance. Today's South Florida crime fiction authors cast their narratives in the old genre of the detective novel where characters are delineated according to traditional definitions of good and evil. Evil characters threaten established order. What makes South Florida crime fiction different from traditional detective fiction is its interest in the exotic, postmodern culture and setting of South Florida. Like the region, the villains are exotic and the order that they threaten is postmodern. There is less of an interest in attributing a larger social meaning to the heroes. Rather, there is an ontological interest in the playing out of good against evil in an almost mythical setting that magnifies economic, environmental and racial issues. There is a unique cultural diversity of the city due to the geographical location of Miami in relationship to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the political forces at work in the region. South Florida's subtropical climate, fragile ecosystem, and elements of frontier life in a cosmopolitan city work to support Miami crime fiction. The setting personifies the unpredictability and pastiche of a postmodern world and may call for a new definition for literature that relies on non-traditional regional characteristics.

Transcultural satire in German fiction of Turkish migration: Self-deprecation, ethnic impersonation, intertexuality

My dissertation presents a study of satire in contemporary German Fiction of Turkish migration. Engaging with a body of works hitherto neglected in scholarship, I examine how satirical texts, films, and plays intervene critically in discourses on post-unification German national identity. Drawing on the seminal work of scholars such as Leslie Adelson, Tom Cheesman, B. Venkat Mani, Petra Fachinger, and Deniz Göktürk, my dissertation expands the scholarship of Turkish German Studies by linking a discussion of satire as a critical rhetoric to the question of how we talk about what it means to be German.

Chapter one offers a novel framework of the satirical vis-à-vis standard conceptions of satire and deconstructionist theories of reading. I understand satire as a form of rhetoric that creates moments of ambiguity by bringing together intersectional categories like gender, ethnicity, race, religion, in order to challenge the audience’s practices of interpreting cultural otherness. Chapter two examines the use of ethnic self-deprecation as one such strategy in Osman Engin’s short stories and his first novel, Kanaken-Ghandi through the lens of Bakhtinian polyphony and Judith Butler’s work on hate speech. Engin, I argue, employs ethnic selfdeprecation as a narrative strategy to straddle the line between deconstructing and re-affirming cultural stereotypes. Investigating the role of ethnic impersonation in Hussi Kutlucan’s film Ich Chef, Du Turnshuh, the third chapter turns to the question of ethnicity as a visual signifier for the negotiation of cultural inclusion and exclusion in post-1990 film. In dialogue with Katrin Sieg’s work on ethnic drag and Amy Robinson’s theory of passing, I show how the film challenges ethnically-coded narratives of Germanness. In the final chapter on Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut, I discuss how intertextuality and adaptation (Hutcheon, Genette) of different story and character worlds are used to create moments of ambiguity and overdeterminacy in the play, in order to challenge the audience’s perception of what an inclusive German society might look like.

The Perspectives of Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Adolescent Males with Parent-Child Sex Communication

Problem: 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.

Social paranoia and absurdist fiction in Cold War America and Soviet Russia: a comparative study

This thesis explores the theme of social paranoia as depicted in the Absurdist fiction of Cold War America and Soviet Russia. The central hypothesis informing this research maintains that, despite the ideology of moral and cultural “Otherness” constructed and reinforced by both nations throughout much of twentieth century, the US and the Soviet Union more often than not functioned as mirror images of paranoia and suspicion. Much of the fiction produced in Russia from the Revolution onwards and in the US during the Cold War period highlights how these two ostensibly irreconcilable nations were consumed by similar fears and gripped by an equally pervasive paranoia. These parallel conditions of anxiety and mistrust led to a surprising congruity of literary responses, which transcended the ideological divide between capitalism and communism and, as such, underscored the homogeny of fear which lay beneath the façade of constructed difference. I contend that, because Soviet Russia and the America of the Cold War period were nations consumed by fear and suspicion, authors living in both countries became preoccupied by the mechanics of such deeply paranoid societies. Consequently, much of the fiction of the US and the Soviet Union during this period was preoccupied with the themes of paranoia, conspiracy, intensive bureaucracy and the politicisation of science, which resulted in the terror of the Nuclear Age. This thesis explores how these central themes unite apparently diverse literary texts and illustrate the uniformity of terror which transcended both the physical and ideological boundaries separating the United States and the Soviet Union. In doing so, this research focuses primarily on the multi-faceted manifestations of paranoia in selected works by Soviet authors Mikhail Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms and Yuli Daniel, and American authors Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. Focusing on key works by each author, this research considers these texts as products of two culturally diverse, yet equally paranoid societies and explores their preoccupation with issues of spying, infiltration and conspiracy. This thesis thus emphasises how these authors counter simplistic notions of Cold War Otherness by revealing two nations possessed by a similar sense of vulnerability and insecurity. Furthermore, this thesis examines how this social anxiety is reinforced by the way in which these authors position issues such as the mechanics of the bureaucratic system and clandestine scientific experimentation as the focal point of the paranoid imagination. Ultimately, by examining the concordance of paranoiac representation in America and the Soviet Union during this period, I demonstrate that these ostensibly divergent nations harboured similar fears and insecurities.

Crises of In/Humanity: Posthumanism, Afrofuturism, and Science and/as Fiction

This thesis engages black critical thought on the human and its contemporary iterations in posthumanism and transhumanism. It articulates five categories of analysis: displace, interrupt, disrupt, expand, and wither. Each is meant to allude to the generative potential in different iterations of black thought that engages the human. Working through Sylvia Wynter’s theories of the rise of Man-as-human in particular, the project highlights how black thought on the human displaces the uncritical whiteness of posthumanist thought. It argues that Afrofuturism has the potential to interrupt the linear progression from human to posthuman and that Octavia Butler’s Fledgling proffers a narrative of race as a technology that disrupts the presumed post-raciality of posthumanism and transhumanism. It then contends that Katherine McKittrick’s rearticulation of the Promise of Science can be extended to incorporate the promise of science fiction. In so doing, it avers that a more curated conversation between McKittrick and Wynter, one already ongoing, and Octavia Butler, through Mind of My Mind from her Patternist series, expands our notions of the human as a category even at the risk of seeing it wither as a politic or praxis. It ends on a speculative note meant to imagine the possibilities within the promise of science fiction.

Fiction and reality in "The Kindly Ones" of Jonathan Littell

This paper studies the novel The Kindly Ones, whose main plot charts the anguished memories of a Nazi officer. The reader of this novel is plunged into the harshest atrocities of the Holocaust and WWII, as these are recounted by a perverse conscience who is unmoved by the most terrible actions. Fiction and reality are contrasted in the novel against the framework of history writing and the subsequent debates sparked by historical elaboration. This novel perceptively captures historical truth, thus calling for critical attention upon the collective responsibility which will prevent the repetition of events.