Despite increased efforts by more organizations to be seen as "gay-friendly," workplaces remain challenging sites for LGBTQ employees to navigate. We examine the ways in which LGBTQ employees experience dignity threats in the workplace and the protection strategies they use to deflect those threats. Interviews with 36 LGBTQ working adults revealed that their dignity is threatened by a range of identitysensitive inequalities that undermine their safety and security when they claim authentic gendered/sexual identities. Specific safety and security threats to dignity include social harm, autonomy violations, career harm, and physical harm. To (re)claim their dignity, they engage in four primary dignity protection strategies: avoiding harm by seeking safe spaces, deflecting harm with sexual identity management, offsetting identity devaluations by emphasizing instrumental value, and creating safe spaces for authenticity and dignity.

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In 2010-2011, the Nebraska History Museum featured two temporary exhibits: "We the People: the Nebraskan Viewpoint" and "Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances." We argue the public memories of Brandon Teena and Willa Cather contained in the exhibits are distanced from regional politics when articulated alongside the nostalgic regionalist rhetoric of the Nebraska History Museum. Specifically, both exhibits not only discipline the memory of trans* performance within problematic material and symbolic contexts, but also place these memories within a rhetoric of regional optimism that has critical consequences for restricting counter-public formation. In performing this reading, the essay argues that critical regionalism has the potential to offer a nuanced perspective on the geopolitical dimensions of memory places by exploring understandings of the relationship between "local" and "national" commemoration at these sites.

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