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.