Out in the Woods Performances of Self and Play in Landscapes of Queerness and Community

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Vesperi, Maria

Keywords

Anthropology of Performance, Space, Place, Performance Theory

Area of Concentration

Anthropology

Abstract

This ethnography, centered on a rural queer community founded in the 1980s to provide sanctuary for emerging queer culture, and primarily explores of the experience and performance of social identity. This community is situated in a particular cultural historical context, which I examine through the analysis of sexual and gender discourse and discursive practices. With political, social, and cultural roots in the homophile organizations of the 1950s leading to queer discourses of identity and social relations, I braid the history of the sanctuary with these broader discourses to understand the social forces at work in identity (re) construction. As a site of homestead, convergence, and expansion the sanctuary presents a unique opportunity to survey the negotiation, transformation, and continuous recreation of spatial meaning, identification, and valuation along the lines of similarity and difference for communities and individuals. Overall, I am interested in social construction of identity at the intersections of the everyday, play, and fantasy. I seek to understand how these queer identities play out in the context of this rural space, drawing from post-structural, spatial, and performance theory. My findings emphasize circulation and multivocality instead of rural-urban dichotomies and homogeneity. Space is made place through social construction, and the individuals claiming membership are cultural agents and social actors inhabiting a community informed by intersubjective relations.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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