Please join us for a poerty reading of Claus Lucas Lopez's capstone project Bestiary of Boys in Love. 

Abstract:

The last couple of years have witnessed a boom in mobilization efforts within creative writing circles and institutions to bolster platforms for the production, publication, and analysis of literary works that accurately and powerfully represent historically marginalized and deprivileged communities, both as authors and as actors within their literary works. These communities traverse a vast spectrum of human qualities, including race, migration history and status, religious affiliation, physical and mental (dis)abilities, sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and more. Due to their history of marginalization in various spheres of society, these communities have often had their identities subjected to political, moral, and spiritual scrutiny. One of the results of having their humanity doubted or undermined due to these particular qualities is the transformation of such qualities into powerful sources of identity that the individuals can then seek to highlight and advocate on behalf of. This collection of poetry explores how marginalized individuals develop and manage these identities through the medium of creative writing, including how they represent themselves and seek community with both members of their groups and outsiders. In other words, it will analyze how individuals develop a sense of identity in response to their experiences with marginalization and with communities within the marginalized groups they belong to, and how creative writing, and especially poetry, is a uniquely equipped vehicle through which such individuals can analyze and explore their own identities and then communicate their identities and experiences with others. I will be focusing especially on the unique experiences and struggles that LGBT people of color living with mental and/or physical disabilities confront in the intensely patriarchal, white-supremacist, and capitalist climate of the United States, as well as how these individuals have forged communities of support, growth, healing, and advocacy without relying on legal, medical, and government officials, who often fail to adequately support marginalized individuals due to institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, queerphobia, ableism, and more.