2006:
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz,
a recent doctoral graduate from the Graduate Center’s department of
Sociology, was awarded the Monette-Horowitz award for his dissertation,
“Sexuality” and “Gender” in Santería: Towards a Queer of Color Critique in
the Study of Religion. His dissertation theorizes the relationship between
sex, gender, and sexuality by empirically studying the participation and
reception of Lesbian-, Gay-, Bisexual-, and Transgender- or Transsexual- (LGBT)
identified practitioners of Santería, an Afro-Cuban religious-cultural
practice, in New York’s metropolitan area. Using traditional ethnographic
and interview methods, selected media coverage, experimental qualitative
methods, and Santería literatures, the dissertation challenges the
relationship between “gender” and “sexuality” as either interrelated
categories in the social
sciences, or as ontologically distinctive.
2005:
Jordan Schildcrout
was awarded the 2005 Monette-Horwitz
prize for his dissertation, This Thing of Darkness: Reclaiming the Queer Killer
in Contemporary Drama. Schildcrout
completed his Ph.D. in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center in May 2005. His dissertation analyzes
“the queer killer” as a frequently recurring character type in dramatic
narratives. The study examines the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual nonconformity as criminal,
destructive, and evil, but also aims to deepen and enrich our understanding of
plays featuring queer killers by interpreting them as complex works of
imagination that trade on metaphor and fantasy to entertain, provoke emotion
and thought, and illuminate queer experience.
2004:
Terence Kissack
was awarded the Monette-Horwitz Prize for
his dissertation, “Anarchism and the Politics of Homosexuality.” Kissack
defended the dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Fall of 2003
and is currently revising the manuscript for publication. His work has appeared in the Radical History Review,
the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He
is currently serving as executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender Historical Society (http://www.glbthistory.org).
(Honorable Mention)
Sean Massey received an honorable mention for his
dissertation in psychology, completed at the CUNY Graduate Center,
“Polymorphous Prejudice: Liberating the Measurement of Heterosexuals’ Attitudes
Toward Lesbians and Gay Men.”
2003:
Patty Kelly was awarded the 2003
Monette-Horwitz Prize for her dissertation, "Sex Work in the 'Other'
Chiapas: Prostitution, Morality, and Modernity in Urban Mexico." Kelly received her Ph.D. in
anthropology in October 2002 from the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York, currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at Baruch College, CUNY,
and just published a chapter called, "I Made Myself from Nothing: Women and Sex
Work in Urban Chiapas" in Women of Chiapas:
Making History in Times of Struggle and Hope (Christine Eber and
Christine Kovic eds. Routledge 2003). Based upon twelve months of ethnographic and archival research, Kelly's work examines legalized prostitution in
Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, in order to analyze both the relationship between neoliberalism,
urbanization, and culture, and how cultural beliefs surrounding gender,
sexuality, and morality are constructed, experienced, and contested in
contemporary Mexico.
2002:
Bruce Kirle for "Cultural Collaborations: Re-Historicizing the American
Musical." Kirle argues that musical theater texts are not fixed by
authorial intent or by the authenticity of an original production, but can
be read in relation to their cultural moments. To explore this phenomenon,
he focuses on three successful Broadway musicals that featured queer
characters and opened in the season following the Stonewall riots: Company,
Coco, and Applause.
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