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Michelle Ann Abate (Teaching & Learning, English), "'Learning How to Be the Boy or Girl That You Are': 'Me Tarzan, You Jane', the Crusade to 'Cure' LGBTQ Youth, and the New Face of the Ex-Gay Movement in the United States"

Portrait of Michelle Ann Abate
April 11, 2014
All Day
311 Denney Hall

2014 Sexuality Studies Lecture Series: New OSU Faculty in Sexuality Studies

See the full lecture series flyer, attached below.*

Michelle Ann Abate, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning and Department of English

This talk will make the case that as it has become increasingly untenable to claim that same-sex desires in adults can be eradicated, individuals who remain committed to combating homosexuality have turned their attention to a new and ostensibly more efficacious cause: preventing its emergence in the first place. The picture book Me Tarzan, You Jane (2011) by Janice Barrett Graham exists at the forefront of this shift in focus. The text offers a vivid illustration of how the ex-gay movement is reinventing itself as what might be called the pre-gay movement—or, perhaps more accurately, the ex-pre-gay movement.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English.