Queer (dis)orientation: exploring interactions between ruralness, queerness, and islandness in Newfoundland

This thesis explores the nuances that accompany West Coast Newfoundlander/Islander identities as they intersect with queerness, ruralness and other identity markers such as race, class, disability, et cetera. The methods autotheory and literary analysis are used to examine how the monolithic privileging of queer rural-to-urban migration narratives sidelines queer rural histories and experiences as it solely hypothesizes rural spaces as places which are abandoned. This multimedia thesis is formally innovative—it is modular and recombinative—which serves as part of the thesis’s queer poetics and unique organic form. This thesis suggests that queerness emerges in the interstices within the logics of cisheteronormativity and includes the in-between moments, in-process-ness, in-between worlding, edits, redactions, and interconnected webs of relations—which often get ignored and invisibilized in academia—as a way to affirm organic form as a legitimate possibility for queer expression.