College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item “WHAT’S SPANISH FOR AIDS?”: LATINO ACTIVISM AGAINST RACIALLY EXCLUSIVE HIV/AIDS HEALTHCARE OUTREACH IN WASHINGTON, D.C., 1981-1995(2019) Brandli, Elizabeth Jane; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examines the racially exclusive health outreach practices in Washington, D.C. during the HIV/AIDS crisis that created barriers to healthcare for Latino residents. After analyzing the ways in which mainstream organizations failed to disseminate educational materials within Latino communities, this thesis turns to the ways in which Latino activists combatted exclusion and performed healthcare outreach within their communities. Finally, this research considers the national significance of the D.C. region on Latino HIV/AIDS outreach and the importance of immigrants and transregional migrants to the nation’s capital.Item Evidence of Being: Urban Black Gay Men's Literature and Culture, 1978-1995(2014) Bost, Darius; Hanhardt, Christina B; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of black gay men's literary and cultural production and activism emerging at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, focusing in particular on cultural formations in Washington, DC, and New York City. Through an exploration of the work of black gay male writers and activists from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, I argue that recognizing the centrality of trauma and violence in black communities means accounting for its debilitating effects, alongside its productivity in areas such as cultural and aesthetic production, identity-formation, community building, and political mobilization. Though black gay men's identities were heavily under siege during this historical moment, I show how they used literary and cultural forms such as poetry, performance, novels, magazines, anthologies, and journals to imagine richer subjective and social lives. This project makes three key interventions in the existing scholarship in African American studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and Trauma Studies 1) this project recovers a marginalized period in U.S. histories of race and sexuality, in particular the renaissance of black gay literary and cultural production and activism from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s 2) the project examines how black gay men have used literary and cultural production to assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood 3) it explores how historical trauma has functioned as both a violently coercive, as well as a culturally and politically productive force in black gay lives. The project focuses on cultural movement activities in two cities, Washington, DC, and New York City, to offer a more broad, comparative perspective on urban black gay subcultural life. The first section on Washington, DC, explores the work of DC-based writer and activist Essex Hemphill, and the black LGBT-themed magazine, Blacklight. The second section on New York City looks at black gay writer's group, Other Countries Collective, and writer and scholar Melvin Dixon's novel, Vanishing Rooms. I include individual black gay voices in my study, positioning these voices alongside larger structural transformations taking place in cities during this moment. I also foreground the efforts of self and social transformation that emerged through black gay collectivities.Item Shades of Gay: Representations of Male Same-Sex Desire in French Literature, Culture, and Ideology from 1789-1926(2014) Gomolka, Carl Joseph; Orlando, Valérie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Shades of Gay: Representations of Male Same-Sex Desire in French Literature, Culture, and Ideology from 1789-1926," provides a critical overview of ways of representing homosexuality in France from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. More specifically, I contend that the emergent nineteenth-century gay subculture influenced not only the way socio-political and medico-juridical sources represented and defined sexual and gender identity but that nineteenth and early twentieth century authors followed suit, contributing to the construction and deconstruction of social definitions of sexual and gender identity through literature. The first chapter of my thesis, titled "Preparing the Palette: Gay Male Literature from 1792-1910," surveys the works of nineteenth century authors who created the framework for a homosexual epistemology that would structure representations of homosexuality during and after the nineteenth century. In the second chapter, entitled "Through the Looking-Glass: Representations of Fin-de-Siècle Homosexuality in the Works of Jean Lorrain," I explore the influence of science on representations of homosexuality, especially with regard to criminal and degenerate images of the homosexual in the works of Jean Lorrain. My third chapter, entitled "Scandalous Sexualities: the Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and the World of Apologetic Impropriety," addresses the relationship between scandal, journalism, and literature in the works of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. This chapter also questions whether Akadémos, the journal orchestrated by Fersen, can be considered France's first gay journal. The fourth chapter, entitled, "For the Love of Boys: Ephemeral (Homo)sexuality and Platonic Politics in the Works of Achille Essebac" pioneers an analysis of the works of Achille Essebac, the first such study in English. The final chapter, titled "The Trouble with Normal: the Politics of the Closet in the Works of André Gide," analyzes the dichotomies silence/disclosure and desire/restraint in the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century works of André Gide, contradictory notions that are of particular interest in the context of sexual and gender identity study. Ultimately, I contend that the authors examined in my dissertation pull from social, ideological, cultural, as well as political representations of sexuality and gender to create an antagonistic and pugnacious literature that contributes to the contemporary definition of homosexuality.Item TIME WARPS AND ALTER-NARRATIVES: GAY AND LESBIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH HISTORY IN BRITISH FICTION SINCE WORLD WAR II(2013) Clark, Damion Ray; Cohen, William A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contemporary British gay and lesbian authors engage with history through two distinct methods I call fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space. The fixed moment/cultural critique model focuses on a fixed historical moment, usually from the recent past. By focusing on this fixed moment, authors explicitly engage in critiques of the present that question society's homophobia and gay and lesbian people's participation in their own oppression. The abstract moment/fantasy space model uses moments from the distant past, often collapsing historical and narrative time and space to create a fantasy space for lesbians and gay men to reflect on their own cultures and identities and to create links with their literary and historical ancestries. Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), both demonstrate the vein of historical engagement in gay and lesbian British fiction that builds a political argument challenging heterosexual cultural and political definitions of homosexuality and detailing the effects of such definitions on gay people. They do this while rooting this discussion in a specific near past iconic historical British moment: World War II for Renault, and the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule in the 1980s for Hollinghurst. The second vein of historical engagement is one that holds as its purpose gay and lesbian cultural fantasy. Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) and Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988) and the Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998) explore authorial engagement with the more distant past as a means of examining the present and creating possible futures. The past in these works is not one sharply defined locus; rather it is broadly defined periods that the authors seek to collapse with the present. In the Coda, I turn to the films of Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien, and the plays of Alexi Kaye Campbell and Jackie Kay to see how the fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space models apply to contemporary British art mediums outside of narrative fiction.Item The Sound of Smoke; A Look Back(2013) Horan, Nicholas Robert; Ashizawa, Izumi; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Sound of Smoke is a visually stunning one-man theatrical event, which uses projections and text to challenge the audience's conception of sexuality, truth, and identity in the modern world. It features dance movement, music, and imagery to illuminate a dark period in our history that in many ways mirrors our world today. Set in 1930's Germany, the audience witnesses an environment of glorious decay right on the edge of collapse as they follow a transsexual who loves too hard and loses it all in the search for her identity at the end of the world.Item Man Enough: Fraternal Intimacy, White Homoeroticism, and Imagined Homogeneity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature(2006-04-27) Schramm, Geoffrey Saunders; Lindemann, Marilee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Man Enough" construes mid-nineteenth-century literary representations of sameness as corollaries of the struggle during this volatile era to realize unity among white men. I argue that three canonical authors envision homoerotic or same-sex erotic desire as a mechanism through which men can honor and defend sameness. These authors advert the connotative power of sameness by envisioning or assaying erotic desire between men as democratic. This fraternally conjugal (or conjugally fraternal) union serves as a consequence of the cultural directive to preserve the nation's homogeneity. In chapter one I reflect upon the circulation of sameness in mid-nineteenth-century America. I provide an overview of the logic of sameness in conceptions of race and then discuss how it textured sexual difference. As historians have recorded, new homosocial spheres led to fraternal intimacy at a time when white men competed in the free market economy. These new forms of friendship were erotically--though not necessarily sexually--charged. In the second chapter I argue that in <u>The Blithedale Romance</u> Hawthorne represents homoeroticism as effecting strong, yet tender erotic bonds between men that circumvent women and feminizing domesticity. He ultimately registers that same-sex erotic desire imperils male individualism and autonomy since it demands submission. Chapter three begins with an observation that critics fail to consider how dominant attitudes about race and gender shaped Whitman's representations. Another aspect of his <u>Leaves of Grass</u> that has eluded attention is the prevalence of California in his work. As I argue, Whitman's references to California in his own "Blue Book" copy of the 1860 edition suggest his desire for a racially and sexually homogeneous gay nation. Herman Melville's <u>Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War</u> is the focus of my final chapter. In this poetry he underscores that the homosocial martial life of war provided American men with an opportunity to forge fraternal intimacy with one another. Seeking to memorialize the sacrifices of Union soldiers, Melville sentimentalizes their losses so much that his poetry comes across as a homoerotic epic. Melville in <u>Battle-Pieces</u> offers a model of fraternity in which men eroticize racial and gender sameness.