“The story we have together”: Written and Oral Storytelling in Juan José Saer’s The Witness and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

This thesis explores the tension between written and oral storytelling in Juan José Saer’s The Witness, a novel about the narrator’s ten-year stay amongst a group of Indians in the 16th century, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel that recounts Tayo’s recovery from injuries sustained during World War II and his disillusionment with his Pueblo and white ancestry. While each text prioritizes one medium or the other, they also manage to surmount the difficulties inherent in both kinds of texts. Issues of written and oral texts, Western and Native American conceptions of authorship, and language itself are discussed in relation to Plato, Derrida, Butler, and Silko’s other work. An examination of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” unifies the themes from both novels to argue that the limitations of written and oral texts can be surpassed and that we must salvage language, even if our system of semiotics is imperfect. Our human need for connection is so vital that the difficulties posed by medium and language may be overcome

We Are All More Free : How Ideas and Arguments Shape the Lgbt Movement

This dissertation explores the roles of ideas and arguments in shaping the LGBT movement\u27s history, including its successes and failures in achieving its self-identified goals. The three papers in this text explore different pieces of that question within the LGBT movement. Each paper takes on a different aspect of this question, but focuses on the intersection of ideas, the arguments that derive from them, and how those ideas and arguments inform how the LGBT movement interacted with institutions. Chapter 1, From Deviance to Defiance, draws on the multiple traditions framework to examine the ideological foundations of the American state\u27s treatment of sexual minorities over time and how those foundations have changed over time, with a focus on the push-and-pull between traditionalist and egalitarian political traditions. Chapter 2, Bonds of Love, Bonds of Law, focuses on the fight for parenting equality for lesbian and gay parents, with an eye toward how advocacy for parenting equality, while limited in its success, contributed to the later success of marriage equality litigation. Chapter 3, For the Good of the Service, studies how the LGBT movement pursued open military service by pivoting between political and legal advocacy that allowed it to exploit a doctrinal quirk of the judiciary to pressure the political branches to act. Taken together, these three papers are directly in conversation with scholarship on the role of ideas in shaping social movements. President Obama linked the equality of LGBT Americans with the equality of all Americans. Rather than seeing civil rights and equality as a finite resource, this position drew on the fundamental American idea that all people are created equal. Each of the major rights-expanding social movements that have unfolded in American history – and many struggles besides – have taken this idea as one of their foundational principles. How each movement came to understand that idea alone and in company with other ideas, how they came to translate that idea into specific demands, how these ideas informed their approach to institutions, and how institutions eventually came to recognize and incorporate those ideas is a critical part of the story of social movements in the United States. In the following chapters, I hope to shed just a little more light on how the LGBT movement helped us all to become freer

Replication Data for: The Gag Reflex: Disgust Rhetoric and Gay Rights in American Politics

Replication data for experimental results. See replication code for more information

"Obergefell Syllabus"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: The “Obergefell Syllabus” is a publicly accessible resource on the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) and the movement for marriage equality in the United States. Eric van der Vort created the syllabus in June 2017 with a series of tweets that include academic articles and books, essays, law reviews, anthologies, and podcasts. Each source documents the effect, history, and critiques of the fight for marriage equality. It first features scholarly articles that examine the relation between the state and the family. While the syllabus includes peer-reviewed literature from public policy, sociology, and history, legal studies guides the syllabus. It links to scholarship documenting the potential effect constitutional power has on other marginalized groups, including the connections between Black citizenship and Black marriage, feminist legal advocacy, and undocumented gay migrants. The syllabus concludes with overarching critiques of marriage equality and possible future directions of LGBT legal movements

Schizophrenic Symptoms, Work Adjustment, and Behavioral Family Therapy

ABSTRACT We investigated work adjustment among 41 recently exacerbated patients with schizophrenia who were randomly assigned to receive either customary care alone or behavioral family therapy (BFT) and customary care. At baseline, most patients were unemployed and evidenced poor work adjustment. Negative schizophrenic symptoms were more strongly associated with current work dysfunction than were indices of other psychopathology. At one year, significantly fewer patients participating in BFT had evidenced psychotic exacerbations. However, vocational adjustment in both groups was still poor, with few benefits of BFT on work functioning noted