105 research outputs found
NEGOTIATING MULTIPLE STIGMATIZED IDENTITIES: EXAMINING THE STRATEGIES BLACK GAY MEN USE TO REDUCE IDENTITY CONFLICT
No full textBackground: Goffman’s theory on stigma management has provided a useful framework for understanding the relationship between stigma, identity salience, and strategies used to reduce identity conflict. However, Goffman focused his analysis on people who only dealt with one stigma at a time. More recently, scholars have expanded on Goffman’s work to examine how people manage more than one stigma simultaneously to reduce identity conflict. These contributions focus on hidden stigmas like mental illness and disease status without consideration of the effect that having a visibly stigmatized identity may have on stigma management strategies. I argue that it is important to consider how multiple types of stigmatized identities, including those attached to stigmas attached to both visible and hidden characteristics, interact to influence identity salience. It is possible that because visibly stigmatized characteristics are harder to hide, and subsequently control, they lead to more experiences with discrimination and increase the salience of the identity related to the stigma. Additionally, few scholars have examined how identity salience may shape people’s use of particular stigma management strategies. By examining the relationship between stigma management and identity salience, this study provides insight into how salient identities influence which stigma management strategies are used in particular contexts. Objective: To better understand stigma management and the role of identity salience, this study examines the church-going decisions of Black gay men (henceforth, BGM). I focus on BGM’s church-going decisions because Black churches have long been a space of refuge as well as community for Blacks in the US. However, many Black churches also have a reputation for being firmly anti-gay. Thus, BGM’s church-going decisions, identity construction processes, and decisions about gay identity disclosure provide an opportunity to study how people manage stigma in the face of multiple stigmatized identities, one that is visible (Black) and one that is hideable (gay). While churches may provide some respite from racial discrimination for Black men, they may, on the other hand, stigmatize BGM for being gay. How, then, do BGM manage this dilemma? How do they manage the identity conflict and the stigma? Do they privilege one identity over the other? How does the visibility of the stigma influence the process? Method: To answer these questions, I conducted a multi-method study. I constructed interview and survey questions based on previously validated scales. I conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews and online surveys with 31 self-identified BGM between 23 and 57 years old. The survey data served as supplemental data that provided a link between participants’ interview responses and standardized measures of Black identity, religious orientation, and attitudes toward homosexuality and gay identity. Lastly, I conducted 25 hours of ethnographic observation at various types of churches the men attended to provide context. Findings: Despite experiencing anti-gay stigma in some Black churches, findings reveal that BGM overwhelmingly maintain connections to Black churches. To do so, however, BGM use multiple strategies to manage stigma and identity conflict, including making distinctions between “normal” Black churches and those that endorse explicit messages about homosexuality as a way to distance themselves from the stigma associated with visible characteristics of homosexuality. BGM also find ways to manage anti-gay stigma within churches by constructing a faith-based identity that integrates their Black and gay identities. To construct a faith-based identity, BGM make distinctions between being spiritual and religious as a way to create social distance between themselves and “hypocritical” and “judgmental” religious others. Lastly, BGM use gay identity disclosure in Black churches to challenge anti-gay stigma and advocate on behalf of other BGM and boys. The pervasiveness of racial discrimination informs their decisions to continue participating in or maintain connections to predominantly Black churches, regardless of denominational affiliation and theological stance on homosexuality. Survey data further support this finding, showing that participants score highly on Black identity salience and positive attitudes toward identifying as gay as they continue to participate in and maintain connections to Black churches. These choices signal the salience of Black identity in these men’s lives and the primacy that the visibility of stigmatized characteristics associated with homosexuality plays in shaping BGM’s stigma management strategies. The study results show that people with multiple stigmatized identities may make efforts to minimize discriminatory experiences associated with the visibility of a stigma by choosing to participate in environments with individuals who share cultural similarity and do not emphasize their difference. This decision provides stigmatized BGM with more flexibility to control disclosure of their hidden stigmatized identity, challenge stigma, and claim recognition of their gay identity in Black churches.Doctor of Philosoph
Gay Movement, Community, & Culture: Israeli Experiences, American Representations
No full textQuestions of the relationship between the legal and cultural orders in Israel intrigued the author, for the country is in the seemingly paradoxical position of having amazing protective laws for gays and lesbians alongside a totally closeted gay culture. How could such laws and political protections coexist with and be mutually constituted by the cultural silence and invisibility of gay people. This paper is a study of the gay/lesbian movement in Israel encompassing issues of its positioning in the history of social movements in the country and questions of self-representation and the movement's role in the lives of gay and lesbian Israelis. The study also includes an examination of the movement and homosexuality in the context of Israeli political culture, and it finishes with an analysis of legal struggles waged by the movement in the Israeli judiciary. Methodology includes research, observation, and interviews
Bunker, Lisa
No full textLisa Bunker is an author who lives in Exeter, New Hampshire and worked at WMPG at the University of Southern Maine for fourteen years during her process of coming out as transgender. She is the author of Felix Yz and an upcoming book called Zenobia July, but spent most of her life in broadcast radio before she left to pursue a full time career in writing.
Citation
Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries.
For more information about the Querying the Past: Maine LGBTQ Oral History Project, please contact Dr. Wendy Chapkis.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/querying_ohproject/1016/thumbnail.jp
"Rise and Fall" or "Cycles of Change"? The Construction, Representations, and Limitations of Gay American Culture
No full textThe goal of this thesis is to first trace the emergence of gay culture in the United States through an exploration of the specific social, economic, and political constraints that not only structured the social actions and interactions of gay men in each era, but also shaped the possibilities for successive generations. The second goal of this paper is to demonstrate how gay culture is currently represented and limited by mass media and society as a whole. Finally, it concludes with a discussion about future incarcerations of gay culture. The author describes the elements of the sexual culture before the twentieth century and the social, political, and economic climate that enabled the creation of the homosexual. Also studied is the destabilization of the homosocial settings that was occurring during the early years of the twentieth century, as well as a look into the World War II era to examine the political and social context that helped create the closet and the strategies of resistance gay men enacted as a response to its repressive forces
Hetero-ever-after: Homonormative happiness for gay and lesbian characters on US network television towards and after Marriage Equality.
No full textThe Supreme Court’s decision on Marriage Equality legalised same sex marriage across the United States, and marked the culmination of decades of legal struggle, political partisanship and social activism. This thesis examines how network television has used same sex marriage as a happy ending for its gay and lesbian characters, and how this perpetuates a narrative that Marriage Equality signifies a happy ending for the LGBTQ rights movement. By using theories from cultural, sociological and economic fields this thesis constructs network television as neoliberal, and examines its output not just as an artistic product, but as a reflection of the political positions of its audiences and its financiers. By drawing on the works of Sara Ahmed and Lisa Duggan, this work argues that the connections made between marriage and happiness, privilege homonormativity as happiness causing and casts queerness as the source of gay unhappiness. The programmes analysed portray their characters’ problems as solved by marriage, reinforcing the idea of Marriage Equality as a solution to the problems of the LGBTQ community. However, as the political landscape has changed, so has the way network television engages with gay and lesbian unhappiness, allowing space for its gay characters to experience unhappiness as an impetus for political action.</p
Introduction to Between Gay and Straight: Understanding Friendship Across Sexual Orientation [book]
No full textThis chapter sets a personal, academic, and cultural context for the author\u27s PhD dissertation research (1994-98), an ethnographic and interview study of a network of gay male friends in Tampa, Florida
Crime and subversion in the later fiction of Wilkie Collins
No full textAlthough some good work on Collins is now beginning to emerge, complex and central elements in his fiction require fuller exploration. More consideration is due to the development of Collins's thinking and fictional techniques in the lesser-known novels, since out of a total of thirty-four published works most have received scant attention from scholars. This is particularly true of the later fiction. It is to work of the later period (1870-1889) that I devote the fullest consideration, whilst giving due
attention to the novels of the 1860s which are usually regarded as Collins's major novels.
Collins perceived that established discourses on criminality, deviance, femininity and morality functioned as mechanisms with which the dominant masculine and middle-class hegemony attempted to confirm and maintain its power. His later fiction reveals the anxieties of masculine and middle-class narrator-figures. In his novels written in the 1860s Collins explored narrative and subnarrative. He developed the technique of using the accounts of various characters to challenge the perspective of the narrator-figure and created the persona of an omniscient narrator whose response to his creations reveals his own anxieties.
The novels of Collins's later period develop such techniques to explore masculine apprehension at the changes occurring in late-Victorian society in which women and the working-classes were gaining greater freedom and middle-class dominance was threatened. Although narrators overtly argue the validity of standard discourses, their views are subverted by a level of sub-textual meaning at which the inadequacy of the narrators and their ideologies is revealed. Sub-textual meaning in the novels reveals
tensions and anomalies within ideas of criminality, the Victorian ideal of womanhood, medical discourses and the idea of the gentleman and his counterpart, the knight errant figure. Collins's later fiction presents itself as an impressive attempt to explore the ideological and social tensions of rapidly changing late-Victorian England
Coming out of the confessional: James E. McGreevey and the "Gay American" construct
No full textOn August 12, 2004 former Governor of New Jersey James E. McGreevey held a nationally televised press conference in which he announced his resignation and labeled himself a “Gay American.” In this project, I examine the discourses of McGreevey’s speech, the newspaper coverage of his resignation announcement, and McGreevey’s 2006 memoir in order to explicate the construction of the event. The analysis centers on two specific discursive contexts: the coming out script and the confession, in understanding the language of the “Gay American.” I examine how these two discourses were used throughout the construction of the McGreevey event to create both a memory of McGreevey as well as the Gay American construct itself. Lisa Duggan’s work on homonormativity and Jasbir Puar’s concept homonationalism provide a springboard for examining the Gay American construct as a new homonormative subject. Overall, this thesis seeks to explain how narratives of the media event surrounding McGreevey’s resignation were constructed and what implications these narratives hold for homonormativity in the early 21st Century United States.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesBy Kristin Caten
Exploring the college choice process for gay men
No full text2022 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.This study explored the "lived experiences" of cisgender gay males and their college choice process. During individual interviews, study participants shared their experiences about their college decision-making processes, the variables important to their process, and if their sexual identity played a role in that decision-making process. Transcripts from interviews were reviewed and compared between participants for common themes and shared experiences using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The study concludes with a discussion of the findings and a call for further research regarding the college choice process for gay men
Deadline: Ethics and the Ethnographic Divorce
No full textIn the summer of 2009, the author receives a call from a New York Times reporter about her book Between Gay and Straight. The book portrays her (now-ex) husband’s and her integration into a network of gay male friends. “Deadline” explores tensions between private and public as the private turmoil of divorce clashes with the public construction of the author’s marriage and with her determination to continue the social justice work of Between Gay and Straight
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