Jackie Morgan - Class and Culture in American Cities
Jackie is currently in Oakland trying to find post-graduation work in the Urban Planning sector. She is keeping herself busy by reading, writing, making music, and playing board games with her friends. She hopes to go back to school in the coming year to either continue with City Planning or pursue a career in academia through American Studies.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies 101 - History of the Present: The U.S. After 9/11
American Studies 101 - Dust and Chrome: America and the 1930's
American Studies 102 - California, the West, and the World: From Gold and Guano to Google and the New Gilded Age
America Studies 102AC - The Great American City: Chicago in the Nineteenth Century
Thesis
From the Closet to the Club: Safe Space and Gender Performativity within Queer and Trans Communities During the Early Twentieth Century
Jackie’s thesis explores through a contemporary lens how Queer and Trans communities were able to cultivate safe spaces and articulate gender through night time leisure in early 20th century San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. Various primary sources including, but not limited to, cabaret flyers, blues music, photographs, oral histories, and matchbooks are utilized to display the aforementioned cultivation of safe spaces and gender performativity being conducted in these venues. In addition to this, early 20th century notions of Trans identity are juxtaposed with modern ones in order to create a thorough understanding of identities of the past compared to the present. By approaching in this fashion, not only is the importance of Queer and Trans safe spaces emphasized but also spaces of identity and radical experiments which aided in establishing the foundations of Queer and Trans society as we know it today.
