The Process

Hey all,

As I may or may not have mentioned earlier, building up the necessary levels of energy for me to update this blog is to a large extent, quite taxing. However, I will not deprave you, dear reader who ever you are, of my research misadventures, blunders and successes. Without further ado:

The project officially started on the 05 July, and I'm currently on day 7 of my project and so far, I might say, so good. I have spent a lot of time getting to know the whole of Brighton, frantically waving my recruitment flyers and posters to every pub/bar/bookshop/hairdressers/group I can get a hold of. I am completely sure that i'm not the only bright eyed bouncy student they've seen claiming that their research is incredibly important to the society at large and therefore I almost as sure I was going to be met with a barrage of negative critiques or worse still. Nothing. However, I could not have been more wrong if I say so myself, every pub/bar/bookshop/hairdressers etc... greeted me with smiles and questions which A) was thoroughly delightful and B) rather threw me off. You see I imagined that I would be hand signalled to the nearest poster/flyer spot after regurgitating my research abstract in broken 'plain english', and then be asked to leave. I did not imagine that I would be met with inquisitive and thought provoking questions by the general public - who may have more important things to do than to entertain an undergrad student with his musings on Queer theory. Anyway I thought I might put up some of the said questions at the end of this blog and maybe open the panel for you to offer your opinion or correct, expand, contribute, rebut, your thoughts about the topic at hand (preferably, refraining from petty insults).

Officially I have not done any 'real' interviews, barring a pilot interview with my supervisor Kate O'Riordan which I feel went well (in that I didn't go down like a fiery zeppelin) and i've organised a few interviews which is exciting. And i've been updating a growing resource list for journals and the like that have some relevance to this research. In actual fact, I've found that Kate Weston's book "Families we choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship" and Jeffrey Weeks' "Same Sex Intmacies" are proving to be quite interesting reads. These articles deal with finding ways to challenge our conventional ideas surrounding families- i.e. the need for there to be a biological connection and the need for there to be a female and male presence in the immediate family - which resolves several tensions that surrounds queer kinship and in doing so, questions the concept of 'family' by exploring “the ways they live their lives, and discourses and ideologies of how they should live their lives” with regards to the heteronormative standards that have been put in place in society (Gittens 1993). Through the initial stages of research I have found that for some, the 'chosen family', requires more attention, the word 'nourish' appears - and people's biological kin are often considered a stable pillar of support. I'm not sure if I agree with Weeks on this point, however, alot of what his work goes through seems to make sense. Let me know what you think of it all.

As promised, questions:
Do you think that the term 'Queer' has softened and perhaps undermined the work of those who took part in the LGBT rights campaigns in the 1970s or is their power in its ambiguity?

What do you consider to be family? especially with the LGBTQ community in mind?

What difference does it make having LGBTIQ family for your own identity? (for this particular question I would like to suggest this article which is quite positive and therefore makes me happy: Raising Children in an Age of Diversity - Advantages of Having a Lesbian Mother

Enough from me, now to pester more people about this project!