A Syracuse University alumnus won the National Communication Association’s M.A. Thesis of the Year Award for his research on the queer southern transplants’ experiences in New York City during the 1980s AIDS epidemic.

Joe Hatfield, an alumnus of Syracuse University’s Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies’ masters program who graduated in May, will be presented with the award at the National Communication Association’s convention in Philadelphia next week.

Hatfield’s thesis, titled “Southerners and the City: Queer Archives, Backward Temporalities, and the Emergence of AIDS” analyzes the cultural styles of three unrelated queer southern men who traveled to New York City to escape homophobia in the South.

As the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s affected LGBTQ communities in New York City, members of these communities left writing, objects and photographs that were preserved in “queer archives.” Hatfield used his own experiences in the queer archives and as a southern transplant living in the North to conduct his research on how queer men in New York City used their “southernness” to cope with homophobia and the fear of HIV/AIDS.

“I wanted to know exactly what it was about southern mores and cultural practices that rendered themselves so desperate in a place like New York City,” Hatfield said in an email.

As part of his project, Hatfield traveled to the LGBTQ Community Center’s National History Archive in New York City four times. During his initial research, he discovered a box that stored leftover documents and memorabilia from an LGBTQ activist group called “The Southerners,” which was composed of southern transplants living in New York. Hatfield said he was fascinated with the group and used the pieces stored in the archive as a major part of his thesis.

Hatfield’s personal experiences in the queer archives were also used in his research. Rather than viewing queer archives as a simple space to store artifacts and memorabilia, Hatfield researched the impact of the archive’s existence on the queer community.

“The archive made people feel as if they were connected to a past they may have never known, and this public structure of feeling was equally if not more important than the actual materials housed within,” Hatfield said.

Because Hatfield himself is a queer southerner, he was able to research how he immersed himself in the pains and the pleasures of the southerners while studying in the archives. Using his own experiences as a southern transplant in New York City, Hatfield argued in his thesis that the cultural tendencies of southerners developed differently than the expected cultural habits of northern queers during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

“Hatfield’s thesis contributes to many longstanding projects inside and outside the academy founded on the belief that LGBTQ history and memory matter greatly to making the world less precarious and more livable for all LGBTQ peoples,” said Charles Morris III, affiliated professor of LGBTQ studies and Hatfield’s thesis supervisor, in an email.

Hatfield said he hopes his research contributes to the discussion to discredit the belief that the South is not a habitable place for LGBTQ people.

“Depictions of queer people on television or film are set in an urban area and feature cosmopolitan, upper-class characters, which can contribute to this idea that the South is not a place where queer communities may exist,” Hatfield said.

He added that his research showed the LGBTQ community has always been able to survive in the South.

Hatfield is now a doctoral student studying Rhetoric and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. He said he hopes to continue studying many of the issues discussed in his thesis.

“I find myself becoming more and more interested in asking questions at the intersection of queer archive, culture, and technology,” Hatfield said.

Published on October 31, 2016 at 10:08 pm

Contact Jordan: jmulle01@syr.edu | @jordanmuller18