Below Morgan’s topic proposal, you will find her complete annotated bibliography.
Queering Homeless Shelters: The Case of Jay Toole
For my final research paper in Queer America, I would like to further research the topic of queer shelters and queer homelessness. After writing a response paper on an article about Jay Toole, “A Queer Agenda: “Nobody Should Ever Feel the Way that I Felt”: A Portrait of Jay Toole and Queer Homelessness” by Aine Duggan, I feel passionate about the subject matter. I would like to research the question: How has Jay Toole established and aided queer homeless shelters and what are the sad realities of these shelters? I feel zealous about this subject due to how I was touched by Aine Duggan’s article. In Duggan’s writing, Jay Toole is effortlessly described as an inspiration. Toole devotes her life to helping others in need, and she does it so well because she can relate to other queer homeless individuals given, she once was also a queer homeless person. I want to research Toole and her projects in particular because after reading Duggan’s article about her, I get a clear sense of how genuine a person she is.
Toole is particularly interesting to me due to how she was once in the same position or similar position of the people who she is trying to help. That makes her work that much more admirable. She can relate to people who are struggling, and people who feel as if they have nowhere to turn to for help. Toole wants to make a difference and already has done so. Toole established the first queer homeless shelter as discussed in Duggan’s article.
In my research paper, I plan on initially writing about Jay, her story, and use her voice in how she directly feels about her work. I will use her blog on wordpress for some primary evidence along with her website. Additionally, I will use parts of a clip of a video entitled, “Taking Freedom Home”, where Jay Toole speaks on behalf of queer homelessness. In addition, I will use interviews and articles, which ask Toole questions directly regarding queer homelessness and shelters.
I plan to use information on journal databases regarding the history of queer homeless shelters and how they have changed over the years, from not existing, to existing, to their expansions (“Unsuitable Bodies” by Jake Pyne). I plan on further researching the journal article, “Redistribution, Recognition, and the State: The Irreducibly Political Dimension of Injustice” by Leonard Feldman, which explores the hardships queer individuals face when being placed in a homeless shelters. Additionally I plan on further exploring the article entitled, “Young, Gay, Homeless and Invisible: A Growing Population?” by Gillian A. Dunne, Shirley Prendergast, and David Telford, which highlights how so many gay individuals voices are not heard in the homeless shelter system, or how they are merely seen as invisible. I seek to use journal article and databases for concrete evidence of how homeless queer individuals face so many hardships, along with the hard facts of how these establishments are run. I seek to reveal the sad truths of how guards don’t provide protection for the homeless queer, rather, they sometimes are abusive. Additionally, the sad truths of how infectious homeless queer shelters can be in regards to the spreading of diseases.
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