Category: Theses & Dissertations

This research looks at Kansas City’s War on Prostitution in 1977 and the larger women’s movement of second-wave feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The War on Prostitution makes the women’s movement in Kansas City unique because it brought together non-like-minded feminists despite their differences in ideology. A product of both oral history and traditional historical research, this work draws upon a large variety of primary sources including newspaper articles from the Kansas City Public Library, archived materials pertaining to women’s groups from the LaBudde Special Collections Archive at University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Radical queer (a term not in use at the time, but now more frequently employed) activists seized national headlines in the second half of the twentieth century with their fiery tactics, from so-called “die-ins” in the middle of church services to disrupting city council meetings. While many headline-grabbing protests took place in coastal cities typically characterized as queer havens, queer activists in the Heartland worked tirelessly for liberation from oppression. Queer historians in the 1990s and early 2000s tended to advance this coastal narrative, arguing that urbanization and large populations were necessary preconditions for queer activism. As they began searching elsewhere, scholars discovered evidence of thriving queer communities throughout the United States.

This project is the result of extensive research at the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid- America (GLAMA) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I engaged in a rhetorical analysis of The Ladder and Mattachine Review. These two publications were created and edited by two of the most prominent Homophile organizations in the 50s and 60s in the United States—Daughter of Bilitis and Mattachine Society.

My project explores the connections between literature and visual art to re-enact and re-imagine queer bodies of color in liminal spaces or porous passages as a means of contesting invisibility, exclusion, and displacement. I engage in the literature of James Baldwin and John Rechy and the conceptual art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to conceptualize symbolic and physical in-between spaces where racial and gender alternative projects of community, same-sex desire, and love are possible.

This project documents the efforts of Kansas City activists, organizers, and politicians who successfully fought for the passage of a municipal nondiscrimination ordinance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ordinance outlawed discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations based upon a person’s sexual orientation or HIV status.