On Monday, we finished the bulk of our storymap. There were a few small editing things that were taken care of Tuesday morning (or at least I think that’s what happened – I somehow missed the memo that we were all going to meet), but  Monday was when everything truly came together. Once we got past putting everything in the map and ordering the points, I was no longer stressed and everything felt like it would be fine.
Working on the project has definitely been an interesting experience, especially considering that I’m not a fan of group work. I was a bit apprehensive at the start of the semester because I didn’t know how well our group would work together, but that turned out to be a non-issue. We all got along really well and ended up having a lot of fun, and aside from some brief tensions stemming from the differences in how each person worked, everything went smoothly.
I think a big part of why this project was ultimately more fun than I initially expected is that it’s entirely digital. Projects with physical counterparts are always high-stress because everyone has to be present and working on things simultaneously, but doing everything digitally allows everyone some breathing room and the ability to work at their own pace. From a more personal perspective, I enjoyed it simply because I enjoy working with digital platforms – there’s so much you can do with multimedia and format, and it’s so much easier than working with physical materials because you have the freedom to play around and experiment with what you’re doing without any worry of screwing up to a degree that would require starting over.
In terms of stress and managing work, I don’t think this project has been anything out of the ordinary. For me, the biggest struggle were the blog posts; I realized when I started writing this entry that I had forgotten to post my earlier entries on the website and had them stored away in my computer, so I had to go and put those up before I could forget again. Aside from me being forgetful, it was also kind of hard for me to find things to write about. It felt really redundant trying to write about a lot of the things that came up with our project because I would spend time talking about them to teammates, and I ended up writing less than I should have because of this.
I’m excited to see the project go up now that it’s done. I’ve had a really great time researching the gay community within Uyghur society; it was fun to try and do research on something that had little information available, since I felt like I was actually contributing to academia. All in all, I think this was an incredibly worthwhile project, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves moving forward.
via GIPHY
–Nathan, 11/16

Things are still going pretty well, but it’s a little more challenging now that deadlines are getting closer and closer. It’s not so much that there’s a lot of work left to do – it’s not like there was ever a ton of work for each of us individually to begin with – but just knowing that we need to be done in another week or so has created some slight anxious tension.
At this point, I think the hardest thing has definitely been keeping up with group meetings. For the first portion of the semester, our group was only meeting on Friday mornings, and that wasn’t all that bad; now, we’ve been meeting around twice a week and there’s a good chance we’ll be meeting more than that as we get into the last week. The meetings are helpful, so it’s not an issue of wasting time, but living over half an hour off campus has made meeting something of a challenge. Most of our meetings are in the morning and I have to account for at least 45 minutes of travel, sometimes more if I’m leaving during the morning work/school rush. Between late nights working on assignments for all of my classes and getting up really early to try and get to meetings on time, sleep has become a bit of a luxury and I really can’t wait for this all to be over.

via GIPHY
The good news is that we’ve made significant progress on our project in the last week or so. We’ve been working on drafts of our storymap points, and it’s been interesting to see how things are taking shape. I think each of our topics will mesh fairly well in the end – Teiji’s and Elise’s will probably work really well, and I’m sure we can find a way to fit my subtopic of gayness in Uyghur communities in there somewhere. If I had been able to find out more about drag queens in Xinjiang, it would be easier, but I suppose we have to work with what we have.
It’s unfortunate that we’ve hit such a large language barrier in our research. Had one of us been able to speak Chinese, we probably would have been able to pull together something even more cohesive. I’ve been thinking about talking to Zhihong about finding more sources that aren’t available in English, but with everything I have going on right now I don’t think I’ll be able to find any time.
–Nathan, 11/09

Our group has been doing pretty well so far, and I think things will continue to go well for us moving forward. We’ve been working on research even as we’ve been pushing forward into the next steps, since my own topic hasn’t been all that generous with sources and Elise changed her topic right before we went on break. I don’t necessarily think this is a setback, though; even though there’s a bit more work to do now, it’ll probably benefit us in the end with a more substantial map and better connections between our topics.
In my case, I haven’t found much since I last wrote about having difficulty finding sources. I’ve yet to find the name or location of the gay bar in Urumqi, and I think I’m ready to accept that I likely won’t be able to find it in the time we have to finish the project. I thought I had found the owner’s name, but looking into him I learned that he was “Mr. Gay China” and lives in Beijing, so I’m not quite sure what to make of his ties to the bar.
While definitely not the most reliable method, I spent some time the other day using Google Translate to search for websites about gay Uyghurs in Chinese, and I ended up stumbling across some rather bizarre things. There was a website with a very short piece of (I’m assuming) creative writing wherein a guy was admiring a Uyghur man, but far more interesting were the comments; they ranged from relatively normal encouragement for the author to some absolutely wild accusations that Islam required Uyghur men to maintain two gay love affairs at any given time. Google Translate isn’t the most reliable translation source, so perhaps something was translated incorrectly, but I’m very much interested in where that idea originated. There were also some sexually explicit stories about Uyghur men nestled in the comments, but it was unclear whether or not the authors of the comments were Uyghur, Han, or another ethnicity. Another thing that I noticed was how most Chinese pages refer to gay guys as “comrades,” and I haven’t been able to find any explanation for this.
I’ve also been having some fun looking into gay culture in China’s eastern cities, Shanghai in particular. Plenty of websites for clubs are accessible, and it’s been interesting to look into all of that and get a sense of what clubs there are like. I’m also having a great time looking at all the posters that clubs have made to advertise their events – I’ve been sifting through page after page of attractive guys to find the perfect poster to use in the storymap. For science, y’know?

So far I’ve only found a total of three sources for my topic, which is a little bit daunting – still better than nothing, though, as I wasn’t expecting to find sources as good as I have. As it is, information surrounding queer culture and identity in Han China is fairly lacking in comparison to western countries, so why would Uighur sexuality be a heavily studied topic? I’m definitely excited by what I’ve found, though. They’ve provided me with a decent thread to follow, and they themselves were just interesting in general (who wants to read a bunch of clinical stuff when you’re researching something?).
The one source that I found particularly cool is an essay that was published on Gawker. It was written by Massoud Hayoun, an ethnically Middle Eastern journalist, and it’s his account of his sexual development while spending a year abroad in China back when he was in college. It’s unexpectedly very explicitly detailed – while I know that some people would find that to be an uncomfortable read, I appreciated it. I’ve never been one to shy away from or be bothered by openness towards sexuality, and the way the essay reads feels far more genuine and honest than if Hayoun had tried to remain ‘polite,’ for lack of a better term. Only a small part of the essay focuses on anything related to the Uighur people – a single tale of love lost with a Uighur dude from Xinjiang who was studying in Beijing – but it at the very least provided a brief glimpse into what it’s like to be gay in an “ethnic” community within China (the ending of the story was far from happy, though perhaps not as bad as it could have been). The piece also touches on what currently feels like Urumqi’s mythical gay bar, wherein Uighur drag queens put on shows objectified by the Han patrons due to their more “exotic” qualities. Despite having found several references to the bar, I’ve yet to find it’s name.
Outside of the Gawker essay, I also found a blog entry on Blogspot by Kim Baskin that references the same bar. It goes deeper into what it means to be queer and Uighur, recounting several rather unfortunate stories and once again highlighting the way in which Uighur queens are problematic in their reception inside the bar. Unlike the Gawker piece, however, I’m unable to find any info about the author. I’ve managed to find a brief news article that mentions the bar and (I believe) the owner’s name, so I know that what the blog entry is based in is true, but the rest is based entirely in Kim’s personal experiences. I’m tempted to try and contact Baskin and Hayoun in hopes of hearing more about the bar (or, if I’m extremely lucky, obtain photos/videos of the interior and the queens performing), but I’m unsure of how to go about that. I’m not sure how much additional info I’ll be able to find on the internet, so I should probably start looking into them.
For anyone interested:
Gawker Essay
When Queens Go Ethnic in Gay Urumpqi

We had a meeting with Eric the other day to try and narrow down our topic further, and it actually ended up with us having a bit of a breakthrough moment right after the meeting. We had settled on the idea of exploring feminine identity in Uighur China, but we were still a bit scattershot – Teiji was focusing on beauty standards, myself on queer identity and its relations to the feminine (drag queens all the way), and Elise was looking into feminine health issues. The obvious challenge came in trying to build one cohesive narrative from what we had – I could fairly easily relate my topic to Teiji’s through drag queens/drag entertainment, but Elise still fell somewhere outside the core focus. After Eric suggested looking into aesthetics, though, it all came together.
While we were talking after the meeting, the idea of looking into fashion came up, which Elise was quite interested in. She decided to ultimately switch her individual focus from health to Uighur fashion, and now we’re all set to go. I can relate queer identity to Elise and Teiji’s focuses through drag shows in what is apparently the only gay bar in Urumqi (fashion and makeup and all that tie in very strongly), and Elise and Teiji’s focuses tie together through notions of beauty and high fashion (I guess? I know what I want to say with that but I don’t really know how to put it together properly in words). I’m personally really excited to llok into this further, but it’ll be hard to find adequate sources. I’ll likely need to find photos or videos of the drag queens performing within that particular bar, but due to its underground nature and anticipated social media barriers (and let’s not even start with the language barrier) it’ll definitely be an uphill battle to find some. Or there’s the possibility that photos/videos simply don’t exist on the internet – either way, it’ll be rough.
Aside from all that, Eric and Zhihong brought up something that was a bit disconcerting. As a group, we had been finding a lot of tensions between the Han and Uighur population, and we were told about how the current state of affairs in Xinjiang isn’t all that sunny between the two. We ended up talking about how we need to be careful about what we ultimately choose to publish and include in our project, as we could potentially end up putting people we interact with while travel in danger of being arrested if the PRC doesn’t approve of what we ultimately put on the site. Scary stuff.

It became rather painfully obvious midway through last week that our topic was still in a very preliminary phase. We had a decent idea of where we wanted to go – the focus still centered largely on women and associated minorities along the silk roads, and we knew we wanted to tie their experiences together under Islam. It was the location that was proving to be a bit of a challenge. We initially settled for the area around the Arabian Sea, but we quickly learned that the Arabian Sea is circled by a wide range of peoples and it would be difficult to make a cohesive project out of that.
After Eric recommended looking into the Uighur people of western China, things cleared up a bit. We’re all on board (as far as we’ve voiced) with making them our primary focus – I’m particularly down with the idea because they’re outside of the Han and Persian empires, which feel as if they’ve been researched quite a bit already. It’s weird, considering how difficult it’s been (and will likely continue to be) to find sources for my individual focus, that I’m so willing to dive into this. I don’t feel like I’m going to find many sources, and certainly not many academic ones. So far, I’ve only found two particularly useful websites.
Despite only finding those two sources, I’m really interested in the thread that seems to be falling out of them. Both pieces (a blog post and a personal essay) reference a gay bar in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province, and from what I’ve been able to find it appears to be the only one in the area. What’s particularly interesting, however, is both pieces reference an ethnic divide between Uighur and Han men in the bar, the essay describing how Uighur men apparently sit on one side and Han men on the other. The most fascinating bit about all of this, though, is that the bar hosts drag shows – and the drag queens are all Uighur. The blog post that I found mentions this in reference to the apparent Han notion that the Uighurs are “exotic,” but only in entertainment – in the real world, so to speak, they’re just lesser.
The gay community has always been rather problematic in matters of race and discrimination – in the west, there’s a running joke about guys who list “no fats, femmes, or asians” on their Grindr profiles, alongside other phrases such as “rice queen” – but it’s fascinating to see that manifest in a society where queer individuals can’t really afford to be so picky (for lack of a better word).

Choosing group research topics always tends to be a painful and messy process – it’s hard enough as an individual – so I was very pleasantly surprised by how smooth the ordeal was for our group. From the outset, we all had similar foci in mind for the project; if I’m not mistaken, I believe everyone in the group had written something about gender/female/queer identity on our initial interest cards. Since all three sort of go hand-in-hand, it wasn’t hard to hone down that portion of our topic. The rest (time period, geographic distribution, and other unifying links) took a little bit of work to finesse, but it wasn’t anything particularly difficult. We were all very willing to focus in on the western parts of the Silk Road, and once we had that down, we bounced off of instructor suggestions to settle our focus on the 18^th-20^th centuries, as well as unifying our entire research question under our individual topics’ relations to Islam. We’re currently looking at designating a specific interest to each group member for our individual research, which we’ll then bring together and connect to one another’s topics (using Islam as a parameter throughout the research so that we’ll actually be able to connect what we have). None of our individual topics are completely unrelated to the rest, either – I’m focusing on queer identity and its relation to Islam, another member is looking at racial identity through the same lens, and other group members are looking at the various facets of female existence in the region and time period we chose.
My individual role within the group has become that of the timekeeper. Personally, I’m very happy to have this role – I’m terrible in public speaking situations, so had that fallen on me the group likely would have suffered as a whole. Similarly, while I’m usually good in leadership roles, it’s harder for me to bring out my assertive side and tell people to pull themselves together when I’m not already close to the people I’m working with; while it wouldn’t have been catastrophic, we might have gotten off to a rocky start had I ended up the facilitator. Timekeeper works out far better, as it allows me to fill a leadership-type role without necessarily needing to chew people out. Instead, I’ll be working to figure out some preliminary due dates for the various pieces of our project and monitoring where people are in their work so that dates can be adjusted to better fit our team’s progress.
Given how well everyone’s interests within Team Sky aligned, I’m not expecting too many issues to arise due to team dynamics. We’re all on the same page (at least so far) about where we’re taking our research and final product, and we’ve worked to build a research topic that would allow everyone some wiggle room to pursue their own specific interests. Everyone has been quite supportive of one another, and everyone wanted to ensure that no one’s interests were edged out in refining our topic. Additionally, I think we’ve all been given roles within the group that will play to our abilities and benefit how we work together. We were lucky in that Teiji feels comfortable in a public speaking role, and that covers what tends to be one of the shakiest parts of any project. Jamie was on top of notes during the class activities we’ve done so far, so she definitely seems like a great pick for our group’s recorder, and Elise is serving as facilitator and ensuring that we don’t unravel at the seams – I’m already good friends with her, so I know that should conflict arise she’ll definitely be able to diffuse any tensions and find a suitable solution.
That said, I’m not entirely without concerns for our final product. My personal interest within our topic is queer identity; belonging to the queer community, it’s a topic that I have a personal hold in and I initially chose to focus on it because I figured my connection to it would keep me invested and help bring out the best of what I have to give. Even so, I’m worried that it might end up falling through due to a lack of sources. When we were narrowing down our time period, we deliberately chose a more modern time-frame so that we’d hopefully have more luck in finding information for both myself and some of the other more specified interests that other group members had. I’m still worried in spite of this, though. I have a backup focus should queer identity fall through (the role of femininity in religious ritual), but I hope that I don’t lose some steam if I ultimately need to make that switch.
I also want to say that I think that the way the teams for this project were initially chosen was a fantastic system. One of my biggest anxieties with group projects is simply finding a group to join; it takes me awhile to get comfortable enough so that I can really interact with new people and not have it be awkward, so if we had been told to figure out teams ourselves I likely would have ended up in a group with a topic I wasn’t interested in and knowing myself I probably would have been too uncomfortable to say anything. By having the instructors attempt to pair us based on our interests, that anxiety was cut out, and while I can’t speak for others, it certainly benefited me.
As for my performance within the team and within the class so far, I’d say I’ve been pulling my weight. It’s hard to truly assess that at this point since we’ve barely done that much of anything, but I haven’t been neglecting any work and I’ve been looking into some potential sources that might aid in our research. I tried to be active in the narrowing of our topic and I gave suggestions for how other group members could incorporate their primary interests into our final product. If this reflection were due a week or two later I’m sure I’d have more to say, but that’s about it up until now.