Through interviews with adult children of queer parents, this paper begins to understand the possibilities, consequences, and limitations of queer families and to take seriously the lives and feelings of queer-raised adults as a potential site for theorizing. This project contributes to conversations in queer theory surrounding children and family – conversations that, while lively and contentious, have yet to contend with the actual experiences of adults raised by queer people. Through qualitative analysis of informal interviews with people raised by queer parents this thesis considers two main sites of tension – how adult children of queer people navigate and refuse visibility and legibility and how we respond to pressures to perform as the “happy, healthy and heterosexual” children of our parents. These themes, as well as our potential wisdom in intergenerational queer and feminist conversations, are potential entry points for taking adult children of queer seriously as thinkers in queer theory.

“Reading Between the Baselines: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Elite Women’s Tennis,” theorizes how women’s elite tennis functions as both an expression and incubator of discourse. The global dispersion of professional tennis tournaments and the international background of those who travel with the tour make it into a quasi-diasporic space defined by perpetual movement, competition, and precarity. This project engages with a series of interrelated questions: First, what does the women’s professional tennis tour articulate concerning global regimes of gender, sexuality, and race? Secondly, how do these regimes circulate and reproduce through the tour? And third, how does the tour shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and race globally?

I argue that the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour is not only a manifestation of various cultures, but through its policies, players, and media, it also molds discourses at the sites of its audiences. In five chapters, I show the ways in which knowledges about gender, sexuality, and race are inscribed on the bodies of Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, and other womens tennis stars. These inscriptions are disseminated widely by the apparatuses of the entertainment and advertising industries and constitute a powerful site of social instruction about the normative boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality that transgress national borders. I draw on my own background as a tennis writer and photographer, using my experience in media centers at some of the world’s biggest tournaments to better understand where knowledges about tennis come from and what editorial decisions shape mainstream representations. My insider-outsider dive into the creation of discourse forms the backbone of this analysis.

My dissertation reads the women’s professional tennis tour and its history as a text to be analyzed. Chapter 1 explores the fight for equal pay in tennis, asking what the labor of a professional tennis player is, if women demand equal pay on the grounds of equal work while competing in a separate system. Chapter 2 argues that while women’s tennis markets itself openly to US audiences as an LGBT-friendly sport, the tour and its culture actively discourage queer visibility by foregrounding Western models of identarian sexuality and dismissing queer potentiality outside of that imagination. Chapter 3 draws on Foucauldian theory, philosophy, and sports physiology to argue that prohibitions against loud grunting are intended to shame women into a silence that physically weakens them. Chapter 4 turns to formal logic to incorporate the superaltern as an analytic to theorize an individual ultra-elite position in post-Cold War power formations contrasted with the subaltern; I do this by tracing Maria Sharapova’s doping scandal back to the Chernobyl disaster and American interest in minimizing the public’s concern with radioactive fallout. Chapter 5 examines how Serena Williams has deployed social media to construct a nuanced self-representation that resists mainstream representations of her that are rooted in essentialist logics about Black women. I conclude that women’s elite tennis forges and circulates regimes of gender, sexuality, and race as they function globally.

This thesis explores the history of Black menstruation through enslavement and its afterlives and posits Black menstruation as an erotic and autonomous project that resists the culture of disembodiment from the Black reproductive body. I argue that ancestral trauma has conditioned a disembodied relationship to the body as Black people with uteri must internalize and negotiate the deviancy white supremacy, nationhood, patriarchy, and capitalism projects onto Black reproduction. To demonstrate this ancestral trauma, I analyze menstruation in the Gold Coast prior to European colonization and during chattel slavery in the U.S to reveal how menstruation has undergirded efforts to surveil Black reproduction and disrupt kinship paradigms in African and American cultural landscapes. I shift to current representations of Black menstruation including Audre Lorde’s “My Mothers Mortar” essay and Michela Coel’s drama HBO series I May Destroy You, to unravel how menstruation can cultivate erotic autonomy and resist violent disembodiment as they foster intimacy with Black menstruators and their bodies. Overall, my thesis demonstrates how Black menstrual history connects narratives of menstruation from precolonial Gold Coast and the American plantation to the current plight of Black menstruators and offers what I call the bloody erotic as an intervention to disrupt racialized and gendered disembodiment.

This multi-methods dissertation explores the politics and processes of creating comics-based research and pedagogy. My central framework of “reading the margins” refers to the process of asking critical questions about the history, genealogy, and methods of comics studies, particularly as it intersects with feminism. I argue that considering feminist studies and comics studies together centers each field’s history with marginality and envisions their shared potential for making arguments through the critical and self-conscious representation of marginalized experience. Throughout this project, I examine the formal properties, stylistic conventions, and narrative patterns that make the comics medium particularly effective for feminist scholarship. I do this first through a review of examples of popular feminist educational comics, examining their use of the comics medium for feminist pedagogy through common tropes and discourse analysis. Next, I offer an original piece of feminist comics-based scholarship to demonstrate a few of these formal commitments and affordances.

All practices within the BDSM community are built upon a firm foundation of consent, which I, as an insider-outsider, interrogate in this study. This thesis critically examines the construction of consent and gendered policing of sexual violence in pansexual BDSM (bondage and discipline, Dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) communities. Participant observation and interviews with 29 individuals representing more than 15 distinct BDSM challenges the binaristic approach to consent in that it establishes consent as interactional and ongoing, rather than episodic, while also illuminating the role that non-verbal communication and interaction plays in the giving and revocation of consent. Two types of consent violations occur within the community – “newbie fuck-ups” and “purposeful predations” – each of which is responded to differently by practitioners because of the assumed intent of the violator. Moreover, men’s and women’s approaches to preventing sexual violence in BDSM communities, while similar in nature and practice, have different outcomes: men’s work results in a reification of their masculinity while women’s work serves to build community, often as a result of women having themselves experienced sexual violence. Implications of this research for future projects is discussed, as we can never bring the problem of sexual violence to an end if we do not explicitly define consent and reflect on the power relationships that constitute it.

Contemporaneous 19th century U.S. social activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth are publicly memorialized as women’s rights pioneers. In my thesis, I situate these historical figures in conversation by qualitatively analyzing three textual documents: (1) “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton; (2) “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States” (1876) by Susan B. Anthony; and (3) “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851) by Sojourner Truth. My thesis deduces “woman” as a salient, contested, and asymmetrical epistemological and political category, outlining its travels across the three documents. To begin, I pair the existing historiography of 19th century U.S. women’s rights with a theoretical framework encompassing intersectionality, feminist and social epistemology, and social movement framing. I conduct qualitative content analysis and identify key sites of congruence and difference between Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth.

My analysis finds that all three figures construct “woman” by developing “rights” frames and diagnoses of aggrievement. I propose that white feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony frame “woman” vertically by deferring to the seeming preeminence of the U.S. nation. In contrast, I propose that Black feminist Sojourner Truth frames “woman” horizontally by synthesizing her feminist consciousness, lived experience of enslavement, and personal religiosity. These findings illustrate how historical trajectories of U.S. women’s rights are contoured by power, race, class, gender, and citizenship status. My thesis makes scholarly contributions by recontextualizing U.S. women’s rights memorialization and interlacing feminist and social epistemology with social movement theory.

This project analyzes teenage pregnancy prevention media campaigns sponsored by Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 2006-2015. Constructing teenage pregnancy as a serious social problem, the Milwaukee campaigns use raced, classed, heteronormative, violent rhetoric to abject teenage mothers and instruct the public in how to feel about them and their offspring: disgusted and angry. I argue that teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns constitute a form of biopower, which influences all teenage women to construct their sexual subjectivity and behavior in relation to what I call “the straight path” and the “path to happiness.” I demonstrate that teenage mothers are positioned as queer in their relation to power, through their engagement in sexual activity deemed unnatural, useless, and dangerous to society, and through their reproduction, which is decoupled from reproductive futurity and is positioned as (re)producing failed citizen subjects.

This dissertation is a study of consent epistemologies in BDSM communities in the United States. What is consent? What constitutes a consent violation? How are violations handled, given the extralegal status of BDSM practice? To answer these questions, I draw on a year of fieldwork in BDSM communities in California, in addition to interviews with 55 BDSM practitioners from more than 20 distinct kink communities across the United States (and one in Canada). Four major findings emerged: (1) consent in BDSM operates on a spectrum, rather than being a simple yes-or-no; (2) some level of consent violation is not only expected, but acceptable, to most practitioners; (3) consent is learned by doing, and; (4) in regards to these first three findings, community is centered in critical ways where it is not in other sexual communities. From these larger findings come my analysis: I first analyze 10 prevalent consent discourses, five each from broader American sexual culture and from BDSM communities more specifically, articulating how these consent discourses fail to align with consent practices adequately because of the discourses’ singular focus on the individual. I demonstrate how these discourses become weaponized in a multitude of BDSM communities to maintain social hierarchies along lines of gender and sexuality, but also as importantly, along lines of dis/ability, social class, and race, leading me to theorize hegemonic consent. But this hegemonic ideology of consent is not reflected in BDSM play; instead, I outline four tenets of consent practices in BDSM communities that operate counter to this hegemonic consent ideology. I conclude by providing an application of my findings in the form of a new framework of consent, called the ABCCCs (awareness, bodily autonomy, caring, communication, and context), which is derived from experiences of consent, violation, and response that BDSM practitioners shared with me. Though I developed this way of thinking about consent in practice both from and for sexual communities, my goal with the framework is in fact a larger one: how does consent operate in many realms of social life? And how might a framework like this be usable both within sexual communities and also beyond them?

In the United States, people who inject drugs intravenously (IVUs) often respond to opioid overdoses using intervention techniques that are not medically approved due to the unique legal, embodied, social and environmental risks IVUs, but not professionals, must navigate. Despite an unprecedented legislative shift towards harm reduction-informed overdose drug policy in the past decade, which help mitigate several risks complicating IVUs’ ability to respond by medically approved means, lay methods remain a common practice. While expert critiques of these methods are prevalent in medical and public health educational discourse, the unique cultural meanings and uses that unapproved methods hold among IVUs remain underacknowledged in professional medicine and underexamined in social scientific literature. Because medical and public health discourse discounts the methods without adequately addressing the unique risks IVUs contend with that professionals do not, IVUs are unable—not merely unwilling—to follow recommended medical practices. I argue that this medical lay knowledge must be recognized as an enduring cultural feature and an essential survival method among those who hold and apply this knowledge, and that the precarity of unapproved methods can be mitigated by policies and research practices that engage and validate, not erase and discredit, these alternative ways of knowing.