Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gay men – Finland – History'

The focus of this thesis is the lived experience of 80 Australian gay men in the second half of the twentieth century. The oldest man in the sample was born in 1922 and the youngest in 1980. Their understanding of what it was to be gay is historically contingent, for their lives spanned the greater part of the twentieth century: from when homosexuality was illegal through the less repressive but no less problematic eras of gay liberation and the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Qualitative in approach, the thesis was based on oral history interviews. Interviewees were asked set questions about their social, affective and sexual lives. The sample comprised an old cohort of 22 men, a middle cohort of 30 men, and a young cohort of 28 men. The majority of interviewees were of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic decent. The exceptions were Aboriginal men, and the children of migrants to Australia from South-east Asia and Southern Europe. Interviewees' personal narratives included their experiences of the repression of the Cold War period, the exuberance, and, for some, personal confusion of gay liberation and the disco culture of the 1970s, and the trauma of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Through their life stories, the men in this sample illustrated the significant shifts in sexual attitudes and culture that Australia experienced in the latter part of the twentieth century. Aspects of the lives examined included the men's experience of coming out and development of their sexual identity, their social and affective lives, and their involvement in the gay 'scene' and gay community.

Limited legal reforms took place in England and Wales in 1967 that partially decriminalised private, adult, consensual homosexual acts. These reforms were not implemented in Scotland until 1980. This thesis documents the reasons why Scotland had to wait until 1980 to achieve legal equity with England and Wales and suggests that the combination of cultural and institutional silences regarding legal reform and an immediate valorization of the independent Scots Law system in the post-Wolfenden era hindered any moves for the 1967 legislation to be applied to Scotland. This thesis then examines the life experiences of 24 gay and bisexual males who had experience of living in Scotland during the period when all homosexual acts were outlawed. This thesis offers an examination of how continued criminalisation coupled with the influence of negative and stigmatising discourses influenced self-perception and identity formation amongst gay and bisexual men. The thesis finds that the operation and dominance of negative discourses regarding homosexuality, coupled with the limited public demand for legal reform had significant implications for the identity formation and attitudes among the gay and bisexual men who participated in this research.

Gay Power! A Study of Male Homosexuality and Identity Politics in the Swedish GayPress 1971–1986 In this essay, the author examines the sexual policy ideas behind the Swedish gaymagazine Revolt in order to describe one aspect of the history of ideas about male homosexuality in Sweden. In particular, the study emphasize the social and cultural creation of meaning, as well as constructions of a homosexual male subject. The author has here focused on the ideas and theories that governed and influenced the magazine in a certain direction during the examined period 1971–1986. The overall purpose has been to study the gay press's perception of homosexuality, and what values about same sex-sexuality that have emerged in the material. The author distinguishes between two kinds of directions of ideas who have affected the magazine. One was the ideology of sexual liberalism, where the ambition was to break the silence and stigma when talking about sex in general, especially homosexuality. Within the framework of sexual liberalism, the magazine has intended to depict the many facets of homosexuality in words and images. The other direction was more focused on conducting identity politics where the sexual practice was dimmed to instead give preference to issues that valued a creation of a homosexual identity. The construction of such an identity has primarily been about creating cohesion and continuity among gay men, in order to strengthen the homosexual community inwards. But the identity politics has also implied a normalization of homosexuality. Likewise, it has limited the scope for sexual variations in relation to the creation of a homosexual subjectivity. By the mid-1980s, the identity politics had become so strong that Revolt came to be a magazine for gay men specifically, and earlier liberal ideas of sexuality became almost alienated. The male homosexuality became here an object of moralizing where some sexual practices were problematized and even made incomprehensible in the light of social changes in the homosexual community and in the society in general.

The aim of this study is to compare the subject syllabuses for history education in uppersecondary school of Finland, Norway and Sweden. Three syllabuses from Norway, two from Finland and one from Sweden for courses that are compulsory for higher education preparatory programmes in the three countries have been analysed and compared. Qualitative content analysis has been used to find similarities and differences for what the countries find important with and in the history subject. A deductive analysis has been used for the part of the syllabus where the aim and the goals are written. An inductive analysis has been used for the part of the course content. By using a deductive content analysis with a coding scheme based on common historical didactic terms, the result of this study shows that every country finds that historical consciousness, narration, historical empathy, historical method and the uses of history are important parts of the history subject and education. However, the countries differ when it comes to if they see these parts as the aim or as a goal with the subject or the education. The inductive content analysis shows that all countries find sources and work with sources, uses of history, time periods, global historical events and processes and development of state and societies as important parts of the education. A difference between the countries is that Finland and Norway have more specific national history content in the syllabuses than Sweden has. Therewith does this result show that both Norway and Sweden find it important to problematize the time periods and to have different historical questions, aspects and explanations in the content of history education.

Gay men and women have existed in the United States and in the armed forces much longer than legally and socially permitted. By World War II, a cultural shift began within the gay communities of the United States as thousands of gay men and women enlisted in the armed forces. Military policies barred gay service members by reinforcing stereotypes that gay men threatened the wellbeing of other soldiers. Such policies fostered the idea that only particular kinds of men could adequately serve. There were two opposing outcomes for the service of returning gay and lesbian veterans. For many hiding their sexuality from public view, they were granted benefits for their service to the country. For others not as lucky, they received nothing and were stripped of their benefits and rank. With the benefits of the new GI Bill, millions of veterans attended schools and bought homes immediately after the war, and the 1950s marked a new era in the course of the United States. But the Cold War’s deep fear of communism and subversives gripped the United States at the highest levels of government and permeated to the rest of society. This thesis examines the experiences of gay men and women in the American military in World War II and the early Cold War. Particularly after World War II, their experiences as veterans were not only limited to their time in service, but extended far into their civilian lives. This research primarily incorporates scholarly sources from 1981 to present with early gay magazines of the 1950s and 1960s and other archival materials available through the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.

Urban spaces and their meanings are continually reinvented by daily life and representational practices. Public spaces provide an avenue to analyse the construction and contestation of political and social power in the city. The geography of Montreal's gay men's communities underwent profound changes during the 1980s. The traditional gay areas of the downtown core and the "Red Light" districts have disappeared in favour of a new gay quarter, the Village. This transformation raises questions about the exercise of power in space since the heart of the gay neighbourhood and the downtown area were one in the same. The accumulated symbolism of downtown Montreal was contested and subverted by the growing visibility of sexual minorities. This analysis of urban space reflects a transformation in public discourse that evolved from a tight control of morals, to the confinement of private morality to private spaces, and finally to the constitution of a discourse centered on human rights. A variety of qualitative methods including interviews and documentary sources, such as the community press, have been used to show the political dimension of public space and the manipulation of the symbolic economy allowing the establishment of rights to urban space.
Dominion Square is the spatial focus around which collective and social phenomena have been analysed. The impacts of these phenomena on our collective imaginations have been reconstructed. The transformation of central urban space by modernist architecture and urban functionalism, reconfigured public spaces in the downtown core, along with its definitions, its representations and its control. A mapping of gay geographic imagination shows the importance of sexuality, language, social class, religion and national identities in the development of a sense of belonging in space. It has been shown that gay geographic imagination is necessarily linked to other aspects of identity and diverse manifestations of power. This imagination questioned the privileged representations of hegemonic social values through the practices of daily life, the subversion of the meaning of space and political protest. Police repression showed itself to be only one of the strategies used by the municipal establishment in its censorship practices.

This thesis is a reassessment of gay male politics in England and Wales during the period between the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private in 1967 and the HIV epidemic of the early 1980s. It looks beyond the activities of the revolutionary Gay Liberation Front and its offshoots which have dominated previous accounts. Instead it considers a broader range of social and political organisations which developed for gay men in the seventies: including reformist NGOS such as the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the gay club scene, and publications such as Gay News. Through a detailed consideration of these less formally radical enterprises it argues that the seventies saw the creation of a broadly Habermasian 'public sphere' of gay male life. The gay male public sphere was a set of social spaces, political campaigns, and communications media which were explicitly aligned to a gay male identity and had no direct precedent in previous queer public cultures. However, this was not precisely analogous to gay men 'Coming Out' as the GLF understood the term. Participation in the gay male public did not necessarily involve openly declaring your sexuality to all possible audiences. It was also not necessarily a radical challenge to the state and existing society and, this thesis argues, gay male politics in the seventies was characterised as much by people who wanted to work within existing systems as it was by those who wanted to overturn them. This thesis also considers the limits that were placed on the gay male public sphere, through an account of the operation of the Sexual Offences Act and Mary Whitehouse's prosecution of Gay News for blasphemous Libel. As such it is a contribution to debates about the nature and extent of Britain's postwar 'Permissive Society'.

This thesis contributes to the burgeoning field of the history of sexuality in New Zealand and seeks to distill the more theorised and reflexive understanding of the subjectively understood queer male identity since 1948. Emerging from the disciplines of History and English, this project draws from a range of narratological materials: parliamentary debates contained in Hansard, and novels and short stories written by men with publicly avowed queer identities. This thesis explores how both 'normative' identity and the category of 'the homosexual' were constructed and mobilised in the public domain, in this case, the House of Representatives. It shows that members of the House have engaged with an extensive tradition of defining and excluding; a process by which state and public discourses have constructed largely unified, negative and othering narratives of 'the homosexual'. This constitutes an overarching narrative of queer experience which, until the mid-1990s, excluded queer subjects from its construction. At the same time, fictional narratives offer an adjacent body of knowledge and thought for queer men and women. This thesis posits literature's position as an important and productive space for queer resistance and critique. Such texts typically engage with and subvert 'dominant' or 'normative' understandings of sexuality and disturb efforts to apprehend precise or linear histories of 'gay liberation' and 'gay consciousness'. Drawing from the works of Frank Sargeson, James Courage, Bill Pearson, Noel Virtue, Stevan Eldred-Grigg, and Peter Wells, this thesis argues for a revaluing of fictional narratives as active texts from which historians can construct a matrix of cultural experience, while allowing for, and explaining, the determining role such narratives play in the discursively constructed understandings of gender and sexuality in New Zealand.

Abstract Finnish male teacher has been viewed related to e.g. their low number, suspicions of criminal record and salary policy in the past years' teacher discussion. This educational-historical study examines Finnish male teachers' autobiographies and films on them by using narrative approach. The period in focus is the time of independence. Honest attitude towards life, an attempt to serve and please are reflected in the narratives of male teachers' autobiographies. Views on cooperation and voluntary work are emphasised in the narratives of older generation. Conflicts in working and private life increase in narratives describing the period after the war. All teacher generations mention the valuing of teachers' work but the meaning of valuing decreases towards the time of comprehensive school. Finnish school management has been remembered and investigated in the data based on both idyll and conflict. In so far as films are considered, the prevalence of conflict is significant. A mediated solution is often found for conflicts. Many films criticise school as a collective upbringing and educational community. Negative features of school are transferred to screen by many films. Based on the films, the teaching personnel seem to be divided. One group of teachers lean on to the strong institution in their use of power in educating and teaching whereas the other group of teachers presented by the films seem to understand the meaning of individual teaching and upbringing. Impression based on the watched films is that the values and aims of general school discussion are seen on the screen. At times, films also criticise school values. During the period in focus, model teaching has changed from Christianity-based model towards a pluralistic educator influenced by democracy. If films are studied based on their writers, a group of Finnish film directors seem to have a rather negative view on their male teachers. The role of female writers has also had an effect on the descriptions of males. However, the narratives of autobiographies do not strengthen the message conveyed from film texts, for there is no authority based drive towards teaching nor unreasonable keeping under discipline in teachers' narratives. In this study I investigated male teachers in historical context based on films and autobiographies. The general fading of role model and model teaching of male teachers after the war can be seen in the data. Teacher profession is becoming more and more women's profession in Finland. Current interpretation of equality regulations and salaries that are fallen behind strengthen this development. The meanings and hidden expectations set on male teachers in Finnish educational system are continuously transferred to women. Based on the data, it is possible to see the usefulness of male teacher in school. At the same time, many questionable practices that gender-based authority building can include, are seen. Male teacher in his profession has had to function under a strong obligation and control set by the society and the people using school services. This has often resulted in the forming of divided self concept. Teacher's private and working life have often been controversial
Tiivistelmä Viime vuosien opettajapuheessa suomalaista miesopettajaa on sivuttu muun muassa lukumääräisen vähyyden, rikostaustaepäilyjen ja palkkauspolitiikan yhteydessä. Tämä kasvatushistoriallinen tutkimus tarkastelee narratiivisessa kehyksessä suomalaisten miesopettajien omaelämäkertoja ja heitä esittäviä elokuvia. Tarkasteltava jakso on ollut maan itsenäisyyden aika. Miesopettajien omaelämäkertojen kerronnassa kuvastuvat rehellinen elämänasenne, pyrkimys palvella ja miellyttää. Vanhemmalla sukupolvella korostuvat näkemykset yhteistyöstä ja talkoohengestä. Sodan jälkeistä aikaa esittelevässä kerronnassa kasvavat ristiriidat työpaikoilla ja työn ulkopuolisessa elämässä. Kaikki opettajapolvet mainitsevat opettajan työn arvostuksesta, mutta arvostuksen merkitys vähenee peruskoulua kohden tultaessa. Suomalaista koulunpitoa on muisteltu ja tarkasteltu lähdeaineistossa niin idyllin kuin konfliktin perspektiivistä. Elokuvien osalta konfliktivoittoisuus on merkitsevää. Ristiriidoille löytyy usein soviteltu ratkaisu. Useat elokuvat kritisoivat koulua kollektiivisena kasvatus- ja koulutusyhteisönä. Koululaitoksen negatiiviset kaiut siirtyvät valkokankaalle monien elokuvajaksojen välityksellä. Opettajakunta näyttäisi elokuvien mukaan olevan kaksijakoista. Toiset tukeutuvat kasvattavassa ja opettavassa vallankäytössään vankkaan laitosinstituutioon. Toinen elokuvan näyttämä opettajaryhmä sen sijaan ymmärtää yksilöllisen opetus- ja kasvatustavan merkityksen. Katsotun elokuva-aineiston perusteella jää vaikutelma, että yleisen koulupuheen arvot ja tavoitteet näkyvät valkokankaalla. Välillä elokuva myös kritisoi koulun arvomaailmaa. Tarkasteltavalla ajanjaksolla esikuvallinen opettajuus on muuttunut kristillisyyden sävyttämästä esimerkistä kohti demokratian muovaamaa moniarvoista kasvattajaa. Mikäli elokuvaa tarkastellaan tekijälähtöisesti, on suomalaisen elokuvan ohjaajakunnalla melko negatiivinen näkemys miesopettajistaan. Naiskäsikirjoittajien kynän jälki on myös värittänyt mieskuvauksia. Omaelämäkertojen tekstit sen sijaan eivät elokuvatekstejä vahvista, sillä opettajien kerronnassa ei ole virkaintoista paloa opetustehtäviin eikä oppilaiden perusteetonta kurittamista. Tutkimuksessa tarkastelin miesopettajaa historiallisessa kontekstissa elokuvalähteitten ja omaelämäkertojen mukaan. Miesopettajien roolimalli- ja esikuvaopettajuuden yleinen himmeneminen sodan jälkeen näkyy lähteiden valossa. Opettajan ammatti on Suomessa yhä enenevästi naisten ammatti. Nykyhetken tasa-arvosäädösten tulkinta ja palkkauksen jälkeenjääneisyys varmistavat kehitystä. Merkitykset ja piilo-odotukset, joita miesopettajalle on suomalaisessa koulujärjestelmässä asetettu, siirtyvät enenevästi naiselle. Tutkimuslähteiden valossa on mahdollista nähdä miesopettajan tarpeellisuutta koulussa. Samalla on myös nähtävissä kyseenalaisia käytänteitä, joita sukupuolellinen auktoriteettimuodostus voi pitää sisällään. Miesopettaja ammatissaan on joutunut toimimaan yhteiskunnan ja koulupalveluita kuluttavan väestön vahvan velvoitteen ja kontrollin alaisena. Tämä on vaikuttanut usein kaksijakoisen minäkuvan muovautumiseen. Opettajan siviilielämä ja työelämä ovatkin usein olleet ristiriitaisia

The question of homoerotic sensibility is, in the purpose of this thesis, a matter of visual language connected to the portrayal of male bodies. By identifying this sensibility throughout the western art canon the essay seeks to understand its origins, development and function in relation to expressions of power. With the introduction of theorists such as Alois Riegl, Laura Mulvey, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Raewyn Connell, the aim is to deconstruct homosexual masculinity. Adapting formal analysis and parts of visual semiotics, the focus lies on the visual expression of power through the homoerotic gaze, and asks what consequences it has in forming homosexual identity. Greek antiquity is home not only to the ideals that foster western art history, but is also where we find early examples of same-sex affection being portrayed in the arts. Hence classical antiquity is so important for the homoerotic: whenever the classical language of style is popular throughout history, we are sure to find homoerotic sensibility. For reasons mentioned, the main periods analyzed are the Italian Renaissance, the French Neoclassicism and then, naturally the late 20th century onwards as this is the period of gay liberation and modern homosexual identity.  By identifying classical acceptance of homosexual relations only in the form of a clear social hierarchy, we soon discover how homosexuality has appropriated the idea of binary difference within its masculinity throughout history. Accepting relationships only between erastes and eromenos, or man and ephebe, homosexuality is forced to exist only on the terms of difference of power. With classical ideals, these tendencies are recurring in the visual representation of male homosexuality, and becomes a big part of the liberation and forming of a modern identity in the late twentieth century. As a result of objectification of the male body, in combination with idealized and sexualized power, modern gay culture has in many ways embraced a destructive culture shaped by misogynist ideas of hegemonic culture, where sexual violence exists, but is not spoken of.

Defence date: 24 January 2014
Examining Board: Professor Giulia Calvi, (EUI) Professor Laura Downs, (EUI) Professor Matti Peltonen, (University of Helsinki) Professor Jens Rydström, (University of Lund).
First made available online on 7 September 2018
From 1894 to 1971, "same-sex fornication" was a crime in Finland. However, a wide variation can be seen in the degree to which same-sex relations were controlled during the existence of the law. From the 1930s onwards, the number of convictions started to rise, reaching its peak in the early 1950s and dropping sharply in the latter half of the 1960s. This research studied the ways in which male same-sex desire was perceived, controlled and lived through during the first seventy years of twentieth-century Finland. The longitudinal-type analysis provided the perspective to view the transformations in discourses on male sexual practices and their impact on actual policing. The research question was elaborated through the microhistorical narratives of seven men who had been convicted of same-sex fornication in different decades of the twentieth century. The theoretical basis of the dissertation was queer theory. The main sources were same-sex fornication court case documents which were read together with legal, medical and moral writings, and newspaper and tabloid articles. By combining micro- and macro-dimensions, the research was able to reveal the changing attitudes towards male sexual intimacy in Finnish society, and by comparison to European historiography the study showed the roots of these attitudes. Until the late 1920s, the Hirschfeldian view on male sexual intimacy was dominant in Finland as well as in other Nordic countries. However, the dissertation shows how in the 1930s Finnish medical and legal authorities adapted the Nazi German perception of homosexuality as a transmittable disease, which increased control over male-male sexual practices in Finland at the same time that they became decriminalized in other Nordic countries. In Finnish agrarian society, male sexual practices were tolerated and not labeled, and boys were not viewed as possible victims of sexual abuse. Men who exclusively and extensively sought sex with other men or boys were called manlovers until the Second World War and the immediate post-war period, when sexual presentations of Finnish men were nationalized, and homosexual practices were constructed as unmanly and dangerous. Homosexual emancipation took place fast alongside the "sexual revolution" in the latter part of the 1960s.

Current understandings of aging and the life course are largely based on taken-for-granted hetero-normative assumptions. Gay men lack aging road maps that are unique to their life course experiences and which consider the changing contextual and social conditions that shape their participation choices in family and community roles. This is particularly so for gay men aging in rural environments as most studies of aging gay men focus on the urban experience. This study adds to understandings of aging and the life course by examining the lives of three gay men aging in rural environments. I use a life history approach to shed light on how sexual identity development and marginalization within rural environments intersect with shifting social contexts to shape the aging process in terms of engagement in social role opportunities, namely, community and family participation. As a life course researcher, I pay particular attention to the tensions between individual agency and structural constraints and how they are revealed through the life histories. Epistemological and methodological assumptions based on social constructivism, critical and queer theory inform the study while my own lived experiences as a gay man and an occupational therapist practitioner and educator ground the study. Cross-cutting themes identified in the life narratives reveal connections between sexual identity development and the coming out processes with patterns of social relationships and the gay aging process. These themes are then discussed in terms of their relevance to broader aging and life course constructs including generativity, social capital and gay aging; agency and structure in identity development; and expanded notions of family and social support for gay men. Findings from this study have implications for current explanations of ageing and life course processes; challenge limiting stereotypes of older gay men; inform health and social service professionals who work with older gay people; and provide examples of alternative queer life pathways for gay people of all ages.

Bound Together elucidates how gay and lesbian leather communities, in the years between 1966 and 1984, contested and expanded fungible notions of sex, community, and history, mostly through material and visual cultural systems: dress codes such as the hanky code, architectural spaces (bars, bathhouses, private clubs), garments, posters, advertisements, newsletters, films, and performances. In examining visual and material cultures, procedures of archival research, as well as the physical states of key archives associated with historic gay and lesbian leather communities, this dissertation opens out a discussion of a set of visual documents and terms rarely considered within the discipline of art history, or academia at large. Through rigorous rhetorical experimentation Bound Together seeks to propose new ways of writing histories. Long and short chapters are interpolated, telescoping between historical leather communities and key works of contemporary art which reformat 1970s documents and visual sources. Jean Luc-Nancy’s conception of “being-with,” a state of coterminous existence that lies at the foundation of being and subjecthood, provides an ideal framework for coming to terms with the challenges of writing leather histories. Nancy’s notion is one that privileges mutual and relational difference. The structure of Bound Together works similarly, building a set of differential modes of viewing, analyzing and writing. In this way I wish to, in the words of Tilottama Rajan, use “history as the condition for an internal distanciation and for self-reflection on what we do,” and to furthermore present alternatives to a discipline’s often “routinized, even commodified […] repeatable techniques.”
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This thesis deals with gay identity politics and its relation to the Zionist ethos as it is portrayed in several Israeli films. It primarily analyzes two different points of view of two film directors whose homosexuality plays a central role in their cinematic work – Amos Gutman and Eytan Fox – and examines the way they perceive their gay lived experience. Analyzing Gutman’s Drifting (1983), Bar 51 (1985), and Himmo, King of Jerusalem (1987), I show how he encloses himself in his own queer universe and demands to be acknowledged as such, practicing his authenticity separately from the hegemonic discourse. On the other hand, the sexual politics in Fox’s Yossi & Jagger (2002) and Yossi (2012), suggests that homosexual men should join the national hegemonic space while ignoring their otherness. Since the films in question use the Zionist narrative and the national identity of their protagonists as points of reference, these two approaches are discussed in relation to the Zionist ethos. Several other films with similar points of reference are analyzed as well, including Fox’s Time Off (1990), Walk on Water (2004) and The Bubble (2006), Dan Wolman’s Hide & Seek (1979), Ayelet Menachemi’s Crows (1987), Nadav Gal’s A Different War (2003), Yair Hochner’s Good Boys (2005), and Mysh Rozanov’s Watch over Me (2010). Discussing the Zionist ethos, I emphasize Daniel Boyarin’s concept of the parallel between Jewishness, queerness, and abnormality. I show how the Zionist yearning for normalcy (the wish ‘to be like all nations’) and the identification of the homosexual as abnormal are embodied in the cinematic representations. The analysis in this thesis is mainly based on queer theory, as it strives to deconstruct and destabilize the traditional binaries of heterosexuality and show how the hegemonic discourse is based on those limited binaries. It challenges any political discourse that by naturalizing heterosexuality enforces heteronormative practices. By highlighting queer marginality in the cinematic text and linking it with elements of post-colonial theory and its analysis of the other, I show how gay identity politics discourse subverts or yields to the Zionist ethos.
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This study acknowledges that historical antipathies towards gay men have marginalised their theatrical representation in the past. However, over the last century a change has occurred in the social location of gay men in Canada (from being marginalised to being included). Given these changes, questions arise as to whether staged representations of gay men are still marginalised today. Given antipathies towards homosexuality and homophobia may contribute to the how theatres determine the riskiness of productions, my investigation sought a correlation between financial risk in theatrical production and the marginalisation of gay representations on stage. Furthermore, given that gay sex itself, and its representation on stage, have been theorised as loci of antipathies to gayness, I investigate the relationship between the visibility and overtness of gay sex in a given play and the production of that play’s proximity to the mainstream. The study located four plays from across the spectrum of production conditions (from high to low financial risk) in BC. Analysis of these four plays shows general trends, not only in the plays’ constructions but also in the material conditions of their productions that indicate that gay representations become more overt, visible and sexually explicit when less financial risk was at stake. Various factors are identified – including the development of the script, the producing theatre, venue, and promotion of the production – that shape gay representation. The analysis reveals that historical theatrical practices, that have had the effect of marginalizing the representations of gays in the past, are still in place. These practices appear more prevalent the higher the financial risk of the production.
The author would like to sincerely thank Ann Wilson, Ric Knowles, Matthew Hayday, Alan Shepard, Sky Gilbert, Daniel MacIvor, Michael Lewis MacLennan, Conrad Alexandrowicz, Chris Grignard, Edward Roy, Brad Fraser, Cole J. Alvis, Jonathan Seinan, David Oiye, Clinton Walker, Sean Cummings, Darrin Hagin, and Chris Galatchian.
SSHRC, The Heather McCallum Scholarship, Lambda Prize for achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gendered studies.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Art in Dramatic Arts
My dissertation presents a textual analysis of John Greyson and Jack Lewis's South African film, Proteus (2003), which is based on archival records and plots the never-before-told narrative of an intimacy between two inmates on 16th century Robben Island. Locating this same-sex intimacy in the 1700s Cape Colony has far-reaching implications when considered in relation to the increasingly pervasive twenty-first century discourse which proposes that homosexuality is necessarily 'unAfrican'. The film's social and political commentary is, therefore, significant for how we might think about sexuality, among other subjectivities, in post-apartheid South Africa. By analysing the film's formal and thematic attributes, I demonstrate that the directors' protean approach to filmmaking has queering effects for the linear notion of time and the cohesive conceptualisation of identity that the colonial archive tends to reinforce. I suggest that commonsense notions of time, space, language and identity that structure the archive have allowed for multiple fissures to develop along the trajectory from past to present. As I show, the aforementioned process has almost effaced from official records narratives, such as the one told in Proteus, that would trouble totalising ideas about the intimate orientations of certain individuals. Therefore, I argue that while the record of this same-sex intimacy does appear in the archive, it has been subsumed by other, more dominant, narratives. The film's work, which I replicate in my reading of it, has been to queer this archive by foregrounding what has historically been repressed. In my first chapter, I argue that by enacting what Halberstam (2005) terms a mode of 'queer temporality', Proteus carves out spaces in the archive for alternative renditions of history to come into visibility in ways that demand fluidity and heterogeneity. I propose that the strategic filmic mechanisms employed in Proteus necessarily engender nuanced spectatorial procedures, which call on the spectator to engage reflexively with the film. I continue to argue for the spectator's need to be particularly reflexive throughout the dissertation. My second chapter deals with the filmmakers' strategic use of language in order to present a commentary on the material effects that the acts of 'naming' and 'categorising' have on living bodies. The final chapter explores a critical perspective which has not previously been brought to bear on the film. I examine how Greyson and Lewis construct positions for their main characters from which they may assert their subjectivity - what Mirzoeff (2011) describes as 'the right to look'.

This thesis discusses narrative texts by Japanese female writers and popular manga artists* that deal with fantasies of male-male sex. It applies a variety of psychoanalytic theories (Freudian, Kleinian, feminist and so forth) to demonstrate how fantasies about male homosexuality may be analyzed in terms of the psychological orientations of the many Japanese women who are the readers of this narrative genre. I also discuss a variety of themes that often accompany and appear to support female fantasies of male homosexuality: the concept of Thomme fatal' in Mori Mari's male homosexual trilogy; sadomasochism in Kono Taeko's "Toddler-Hunting"; the decadent aestheticism of Okamoto Kanoko's "The Bygone World'; postmodernism in Matsuura Rieko's The Reverse Version; and the concept of . pornography as it relates to yaoi manga. * * In attempting to analyze the discursive aspects of female fantasies of male homosexuality, I begin with an examination of Sigmund Freud's article, "A Child is Being Beaten," in which he refers to the female scoptophilic impulse. Several Japanese female writers—Kono Taeko, in particular—provide clear examples of narratives that parallel Freud's model of the beating fantasy. This female scoptophilic desire to watch a male homoerotic 'show' is activated by a psychological orientation such as that defined by Klein's model of projective identification: female characters and readers project their 'unbalanced egos' onto male homosexual characters, and this enhances the processes of identification with and (scoptophilic) dissociation from these characters—which in turn create the possibility of regaining psychological 'balance.' One of the main themes of my analysis is the development of subconscious female desires to access the bisexual (simultaneously masculine and feminine) body. I discuss the idealization of the shorten (boy) identity (in "Toddler-Hunting" and The Reverse Version) and the image of the 'reversible couple' in yaoi manga as specific forms of a sexual discourse that presents possibilities of escape from the arbitrary, socially-constructed, but institutionalized concepts of the female body. *manga: narrative comic books for readers of all ages **yaoi manga: a subgenre of comic books by and for women that feature male-male eroticism
Arts, Faculty of
Asian Studies, Department of
Graduate