Lived Experiences of Gay Men and Barriers to Reporting Intimate Partner Violence

Gay men encounter barriers when reporting same-sex intimate partner violence (IPV) to officials. This phenomenon is vital to address, given that IPV impacts gay men more than others in the LGBTQ community, with gay men making 31.5% of the IPV reports among that population. The identified gap in the literature showed the lack of research regarding the lived experiences of barriers encountered by gay men in reporting IPV, which was the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study. Merten’s strain theory served as a framework to answer the study’s two research questions on how barriers in reporting IPV affect gay men’s lives and what the men have done to overcome those barriers. Data collection was from semistructured interviews with 10 men ages 18 to 35 years who self-identified as gay, had been in a same-sex relationship involving IPV for 3 months or more, and experienced barriers to reporting same-sex IPV. Data analysis showed how barriers to reporting IPV affected the lived experiences of gay men by causing three significant forms of distress, including shame and embarrassment from feeling responsible for the abuse, loss of support associated with fear and despair, and fear of retaliation from the abuser. Three themes also emerged specific to overcoming barriers to reporting IPV; these were a nondiscriminatory law enforcement response, confiding in trusted people, and supportive health care providers. This study has implications for positive social change in that findings might contribute to the development of training programs for law enforcement and health care providers to learn about IPV among gay men in same-sex relationships so as to respond with respect and compassion

Ancient Latin American objects in the archive: selections from the George and Louise Patten collection of Salem Hyde cultural artifacts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

https://scholar.utc.edu/exhibition-records/1004/thumbnail.jp

“Thy Fame Shall Never Cease”: Ritualized Oratory and Mythmaking in Renaissance Reproductions of Elizabeth I’s Tilbury Address

Tracing the mythohistorical influences on Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury (1588), this article reexamines Tilbury’s critical historiography to assert that debates over historical veracity exaggerate the importance of truth for a hero narrative and argues for viewing the address as an instance of ritualized oratory. Adopting E. R. Leach’s model for the symbolic representation of time, this study locates the prebattle oration at a liminal point between secular and ritual/war time. It contends that Elizabeth’s speech evokes Victor Turner’s communitas and Kenneth Burke’s identification in rhetorical moves that solicit audience cooperation and appropriate conscious mythmaking processes

Fighting Words: The Discourse of War in Early Modern Drama and Military Handbooks

This dissertation analyzes war discourse in sixteenth-century military handbooks and history plays with a focus on formal performances of martial rhetoric and the informal language used to rally audiences and justify war. Chapter One uses Rhetorical Genre Studies to classify the pre-battle oration as a social genre with common structures and themes, familiar not only to exhorting commanders and their soldiers but also to the general Renaissance populace. Establishing the pre-battle speech as a highly-conventionalized, even ritualized form of oratory, Chapter Two argues that performances of the genre are social actions in which audience familiarity elevates the speech act. This heightened valuation raises anticipation for the rhetorical moment and helps transform events like Elizabeth's Tilbury Speech and Henry V's Agincourt address into transcendent hero narratives. Chapter Three dissects formal justifications of war in William Shakespeare's Henry V and George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar. The chapter demonstrates a playwright's ability either to persuade an audience of legitimate cause, even in the face of possible war crimes, by systematically leading viewers through the rules of Just Cause Theory or to complicate legitimacy assumptions by disrupting the expected framework and destabilizing the systematic narrative. The final two chapters examine informal motives in the trope of martial masculinity and in figurative language descriptions of war. Conducting a character analysis of official and surrogate martial commanders in Shakespeare's 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, Chapter Four evaluates recurrent themes of effeminacy in the manuals. It connects anxieties about masculinity to questions of patriarchal power and uncertainties about sociocultural transitions occuring within an English society that at once idealized peace and vilified it as emasculating. Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory, Chapter Five uncovers similar anxieties embedded in the figurative expressions used to describe war in which warfare is conceptualized as natural and unpredictable, but England's men lack the knowledge and training to keep the country ordered and war-ready. This study advocates for an increased literary-historical awareness of war discourse and gives explicit evidence for connecting the treatises to early modern literature, an assumption that remains as-yet unproven by prevailing scholarship