Gender identity

Overview

"The dual first-person narrative guides the reader through a present-time reflection on my sexuality and upbringing while highlighting my struggle with procrastination while researching a Midwest killer with connections to my family. You’ll also find included in this piece: mother-daughter drama, struggles of a gay chick raised in a Southern Baptist household, an epic road trip and a lot of reminiscing." --Abstract.

Overview "The goal of this dissertation is to provide an individual perspective within the prevailing homogeneous societal opinion. The poems in this MFA thesis map my observations of our impossibly complete world, while examining the authenticity of chatter, the blurry lines of my imagination, the grey area of blended family, the precariousness of foreclosure, and the difficulties of defining oneself after coming-out. In this attempt at understanding what makes me human, the collection interrogates...

Overview "The poetry manuscript "Around This Impossible Black" unravels what it means to be a queer, Syrian-American woman in America. Through the incorporation of Arabic language, Syrian heritage, and Islamic tradition, the poet navigates her identity as a borderland, ruminating on the loss of the inherited mother tongue and land while not being fully comfortable in America. This conflict is punctuated not only by the war in Syria and widespread Islamophobic terrorism, but also by the breakage of...

Overview "A poetic hybrid of verse and prose, 'Ars Prophetica' expresses through form and content the varying registers through which the queer self is constructed and mythologized in the wake of trauma both spiritual and emotional. Taking the reader through a mystic's wrestle with the familial, religious, and academic institutions that simultaneously provide him with both spiritual insight and hierarchical pushback, 'Ars Prophetica' follows an intuitive logic that resists the narratives typically...

Overview

The intention of the paper is to ignite thought about gender identity and illuminate the ever-connected relationship between individual and cultural gender identity.--Abstract.

Overview "My Share of the Body is a collection of short stories that revolve around grieving, ownership, and queerness. Each story confronts the process of grieving from an angle unique to character and circumstance, often positing loss as a yearning for the body of another. The collection attempts not to make sense of grief, but rather to explore the experience both in the immediate wake and beyond. As a whole, these stories question time, how time changes as we move through loss, and, still, how...

Overview

"This thesis is the first quarter of a book-length memoir about the author’s sexual identity and preferences as they developed and were shaped throughout her life by her experiences and events of circumstance. The author describes the influence of her mother and her own life growing up in poverty on her sexuality, and how her high school years were also formative to her ideas of sexuality." --Abstract.

Overview

"The following collection of stories explores humankind at its most vulnerable. These stories range in length, from short story to flash and even micro fiction. Characters experience loss and isolation, learn to cope with grief, and come to terms with their own complex identities. Gender and sexuality are major themes present in these works of fiction, demonstrating both the dangers and pleasures that arise when people considered "other" enter society." -- Abstract

Overview "Trannifesto is an creative nonfiction essay collection which focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, mental illness, and belonging. These essays range to the extent which they discuss each of these issues: some focus more on gender identity, while others focus more on mental illness. However, tying them all together is the theme that, no matter how marginalized or alienated a person may feel, connection with those around them is always possible -- and, this connection is vital and necessary...

Overview "'Trapped' is an experimental exhibition telling the story of the struggle with coming to terms with your sexuality, examined through the lens of 1970s queer culture and gender performance. The installation chronicles the story of one man, frozen in both time and his personal development, as he attempts to engage with the bright hopefulness of queer expression, only to be tamped down and destroyed by expectations of heteronormativity, addiction and the fear of his own femininity. 'Trapped'...