Graduation Term

Summer 2025

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of Sociology and Anthropology: Archaeology

Committee Chair

Liv Stone

Committee Member

Gina Hunter

Committee Member

Mike Hendricks

Abstract

The Peace Corps advertises that it accepts anyone, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation; however, recruiters and staff ask volunteers to go back into the closet for their twenty-seven months of service due to the Peace Corps’ safety concerns about their volunteers being out in their host countries. Queer Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) answer the call to serve, accepting that it means they will need to keep their queer identities concealed for two years and three months. I conducted ethnographic interviews with ten people who have served or are currently serving in the Peace Corps and identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella to learn how they navigated finding a sense of belonging during their service. In these semi-structured interviews, I chose not to define belonging for my participants, allowing them to define belonging for themselves. In these interviews, trends emerged regarding the creation of a Peace Corps identity, the compartmentalization of identities, and queer dating within the Peace Corps. I approached this research with an understanding of the queer Peace Corps experience, having served in Vanuatu in 2019, sensing that the Peace Corps’ training and policies impede the ability of queer volunteers to form genuine relationships with their host communities. The responses from my interview participants confirmed this suspicion. In this thesis, I argue that queer PCVs are compelled to create an entirely new identity to fit what is expected of them by the Peace Corps and their host communities, as a result of the conditioning experienced during Pre-Service Training. This can be especially disorienting for queer PCVs, leaving them to question the authenticity of the relationships they form with Host Country Nationals. This is a problem for both PCVs and the Peace Corps, since the second of Peace Corps’ three guiding goals is “to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served” (Peace Corps 2025a), and forming cross-cultural connection is one of the main motivating factors for PCVs to serve. PCVs sign up to give twenty-seven months of their lives to serve host countries on behalf of the United States government under the condition that the Peace Corps support and protect them, but instead, queer PCVs are forced to evade Peace Corps staff to find safety and belonging on their own terms.

Access Type

Thesis-Open Access

DOI

https://doi.org/10.30707/ETD.1763755359.099006

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