Research Ethics & Me

The way I see this most impacting my project is if I decide to create and distribute a survey. I do not see myself really being able to make good use of a survey in the time we have with the specific limitations that my project offers. I would personally like a response of about 50 people and given that I would have to rely on my participants cooperation via the internet I don't really see that panning out. People are more likely to help you out if they can actually see the poor undergraduate standing there with their surveys in hand. If however, anyone can forsee another way this might impact my project please comment to this post.

Project Ideas

*After presenting in class I have chosen to do my project on the first idea I presented in the following original post. I also decided to narrow my subject. Instead of focusing on the broad subject of queer sex in the entertainment industry and its influence on the sexuality of heterosexual women, I am focusing on one area I mentioned. I am going to focus primarily on slash fanfiction (fanfiction whose primary relationships exist between two male characters).

I have a few ideas for my senior project. All of these ideas will take the form of a research paper since that medium is most familiar to me and it also seems the most practical for my major. There is one topic that I really like and that is a major interest of mine and I will start first with that idea.

I am really interested in examining the relationship that exists between heterosexual women and queer sex. I would like to look at genres of entertainment for women that deal directly with homoerotic themes. These areas of entertainment, which are an ever growing market, include slash fan fiction, boys love/yaoi manga (Japanese comic books),a few novels, and anything else I can find. I want to use these popular genres of entertainment to discuss the importance of specifically gay male sex for an audience of straight women. That idea will hopefully pan out and reach the stage of being a complete and well done research paper.

If I am unable to find enough resources or if I meet an insurmountable obstacle, my backup plan includes a possible paper on genderqueer individuals and the importance of this rising new identity for not only the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, but for the community of all people trying to overcome the oppressive nature of our current binary gender system. I believe that the identity of genderqueer, while a relatively new development, is as important as intersexuality in helping people recognize the fucked up institution that is the binary gender system. I have not thought as much on this topic so I might do another direction, but the main topic would deal with the deconstruction of gender.

Past Senior Projects in Review

I found 3 or 4 pretty well put together senior projects that covered some aspect of my gay & lesbian studies major. Some I found were kind of boring(just page upon page of words typed onto white paper), others focused on some area that did not hold my interest, but all were well written. I found one in particular that I really liked. It was from the Spring Semester 2002. The title is, G(ender)-Spot: Masculinity and the Lesbian Erotic by Joanna Sigart.

A summary of the project seems most appropriate about now so here goes. The main focus of the paper was on the 2 major and different perspectives surrounding lesbian eroticism. There was considerable focus on looking at lesbian eroticism through the lens of both a heterocentric masculinity and then a female(lesbian specific) masculinity. Sigart looked at the uses of the lesbian erotic for both of them communities and analyzes these findings

I chose to comment on this particular project for several reasons. I really liked the focus of the paper, I was honestly interested throughout the entire reading. It was nice to not be forced to read and write about a topic that I do not care for. Secondly the layout of the final paper was wonderful. I loved it. She went beyond using straight-up scholarly text for this reseach paper. There was ample and appropriate use of the following: poetry, statistic charts, advertisements, other graphics/pictures, and more that I'm positive I've forgotten. The only critique was that a page was missing from the beginning, due to the binding being no more than one of those black metal clips. It appeared to me, however, that the copy left in the IDS dept was actually a copy of the original properly-bond copy because you could see what looked like an actual binder on the left of some pages, as if it had been copied. I would love to be able to incorporate more than simple text into my own project and this example gave me a way to see that vision properly executed.

How I Got To Where I'm Going

*Excuse to lateness of this post, my internet was down 1/10/07 and since then I've been house-sitting at a house that lacks internet access.

I began my academic career at ASU back in the Fall semester of 2002. I entered completely convinced that I would become a teacher and declared my major as Elementary Education as soon as it was possible. As I worked toward completing that major I began to find that my heart was not in it. I was sitting in my Math for Elementary School Teachers when I began to realize that I was working toward this goal not for myself, but instead because I had been telling people since I was five years old that I wanted to be a teacher. Everyone I knew was invested in my old dream and I felt that I should accomplish it for them if no longer for myself. I received an A as my final grade in the class, but I knew there was no way I would continue completing the work and being as unhappy as I was fast becoming. I figured that maybe if I tweaked my major by staying with children, but switching to Early Childhood Development that I would be happy and everyone else would be okay with the change as well. I took a required class for the Early Childhood Development major and realized after about a month that I hated that major as much as my Elementary Education.

I then began to really examine what I was passionate about and came to the conclusion that I really wanted to focus my studies on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender issues. I talked it over with my then adviser to see what if anything was offered in that area at ASU. She pointed me in the direction of the IDS department and I have been here ever since. Most of my family and friends are supportive of my decision and are happy to see me so passionate about something again. I began my self-designed concentration of Gay and Lesbian studies in the Spring semester of 2004 with two courses; Queer Theory and Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality. I was finally excited about my classes and looked forward to doing my work. Over the years I have found more classes to apply towards my major and my understanding of queer issues. These classes include Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, Gender and Society, Women in History, Men in Film, Sexuality and Identity, Human Rights, and most recently Queer Stories: LGBT Lives in Fiction and Film.