Degree Year
2014
Document Type
Thesis - Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Advisor(s)
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham
Committee Member(s)
Meredith Raimondo
Pablo Mitchell
Keywords
Queer, Feminist, Coming out, Identity, Narrative, LGBT, Lesbian, Gay, Queer theory
Abstract
This project employs a queer and feminist lens to critique the prominence of the coming-out narrative in discourses surrounding queer life experiences, and configures alternative ways of thinking about these experiences. I conducted on-campus interviews with queer-identifying women about their identities and experiences with visibility and disclosure. I investigate in this project both the role that the coming-out narrative plays in shaping these stories and the radical possibilities embedded within these stories for new types of narrative. Guided by queer theory's complicated relationship with the notion of identity, I define and employ the concept of "queer alignment" as an alternative way of understanding what it might mean to "be queer," and I lay out two alternative formulations to the coming-out narrative; queer temporality and queer visibility. This project is not a comprehensive solution to the problem of the coming-out monolith, but a gesture towards the vast array languages and concepts that might be developed in order to describe and value a more diverse array of narratives of queer experience.
Repository Citation
Harris, Julia Golda, "Without Closets: A Queer and Feminist Re-Imagining of Narratives of Queer Experience" (2014). Honors Papers. 289.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/289
