The Desire to See and Be Seen

Chapter 1 interrogates Bruce LaBruce’s, Todd Haynes’s, and John Greyson’s respective approaches to community and belonging in the midst of the pandemic. By turning to the biopic genre, these filmmakers sought to challenge how dominant culture sees and represents pathologized bodies. Queer filmmakers’ use of the biopic draws on the genre’s history of creating an imagined community, national and otherwise, to represent alternative social relations constructed in the image of different (queer) individuals. Moreover, the chapter gives sustained consideration to films like Zero Patience (Greyson, 1993) to explore constructions of queer (or gay and lesbian) community—who they include, who they exclude, what they produce, and how they affect queer embodiment.

The spectre of the thing: The construction of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust memorial

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial is situated on the western side of Green Park in Darlinghurst, in Sydney, Australia. Darlinghurst is considered the heart of Sydney's gay and lesbian population, having been the site of demonstrations, public meetings, Gay Fair Days, and the starting point for the AIDS Memorial Candlelight Rally. It is also very close to both the Sydney Jewish Museum and the Jewish War Memorial. The planning and construction of the Memorial between 1991 and 2001 was a process framed by two competing imperatives. Balancing the commemoration of a subset of victims of the Holocaust with a positioning of the event as a universal symbol of the continuing persecution of gays and lesbians was a challenge that came to define the ten year struggle to have the memorial built.

Spillover Effects of Retirement on Physical and Mental Health of a Spouse or Partner: Do Gender and Sexuality Matter?

While the health implication of retirement on retirees has been widely discussed in social sciences, less is known about its spillover effects on one’s spouse or partner. Indeed, large quantities of studies have shown that retirement is a joint decision of couples that may influence the time use of spouses and the incidence of divorce, and so leaving the cross-spouse effects unexplored may underestimate the influence of retirement and social security policies. Using ten waves of Health and Retirement Survey (HRS 1996-2014, N = 85039 observations), this research adopts fixed effects models and instrumental variable methods to examine the causal effects of a retiree’s retirement on the physical and mental health outcomes of his/her spouse or partner, with particular attention paid to the gender and sexuality differentials. Regression results suggest that transitioning into retirement is associated with enhanced self-reported health and cognitive function and decreased depressive symptoms, physical limitation, and BMI among the retirees’ spouses or partners. However, the timing when retirement occurs also matters that retirement at the culturally expected retirement age leads to beneficial spillover effects, while late retirement brings about detrimental effects. Further comparison analysis indicates that retirement’s spillover effects are more prominent among females and heterosexual couples than among their male and gay and lesbian counterparts. These findings inform policymakers of the cross-couple spillover effects of postponing retirement ages and the increasing physical and psychological disparities of females and gay and lesbian couples within families in middle and later life.

Literary-Historical Influences on the Novels of Sarah Waters

<p>In this thesis I examine the influences on the historical novels of Sarah Waters. Waters uses multiple sources from the Victorian literary tradition to construct her novels and displays an awareness of recent trends in scholarship in selecting those sources. Waters uses conventions that were popular with Victorian readers and updates them for a contemporary audience, by focusing, for example, on gay and lesbian characters and on sexuality.</p>

Literary-Historical Influences on the Novels of Sarah Waters

<p>In this thesis I examine the influences on the historical novels of Sarah Waters. Waters uses multiple sources from the Victorian literary tradition to construct her novels and displays an awareness of recent trends in scholarship in selecting those sources. Waters uses conventions that were popular with Victorian readers and updates them for a contemporary audience, by focusing, for example, on gay and lesbian characters and on sexuality.</p>