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?

Last week, there was a little bit of a scramble. There was nothing up on the story map, the introduction and conclusion had hardly been written, and there were no sources. And the deadline was coming up very soon: we had less than a week to pull it all together and present a good project.
Luckily, this ended up being due to us not putting up the information, rather than a lack of information itself. We all had the content and the sources for the storymap, but it hadn’t made its way there yet. All we had to do that night was upload the sources, and write what we already knew into the introduction in conclusion. So what had been a nearly empty project on Thursday looked nearer to a finished product on Friday.  And over the weekend, everything has been improved even more.
I think the story map came together very well. Teiji and my topic overlap quite a bit: a lot of concepts I introduce she later expands on, so two perspectives are given on a similar event. While Nathan’s topic doesn’t fit as neatly, it definitely is still relevant, and that idea can be easily expressed through our introduction. All in all, the project I’ve been stressing over all semester is finally coming together in a cohesive way, with interesting and interlocking perspectives.
One struggle I faced while putting together my section of the story map was finding the location of one of the sources. It was cited as being taken in the city of Kyria, which I could not find when I typed the name into Google. We met with Eric later that day, and he hadn’t heard of the city either. However, when I asked if I should just put the location of the picture as a more general area, Eric encouraged me to keep searching for the true location. I’m grateful he gave me that advice. I finally found the real city. When I found the original source, it spelled the city as Keriya rather than Kyria. With the new spelling, I was able to put my source to a concrete location. It was incredibly rewarding to finally find this location. While the current ability to Google everything and find an answer right away is incredibly useful, there’s something exhilarating about solving a small mystery and having to dig a little deeper. Here is the picture taken in the city of Keriya:

The semester is beginning to wind down (how do we only have one month left?), the deadline for the website is approaching, and shockingly, I feel ready for it.
I have worried this whole semester over the amount of information I have, and whether my team is creating a cohesive project. But now, with our points decided upon and the beginnings of an introduction written, I feel a lot more confident.
The information I had didn’t feel like enough until I began to actually pin down physical sites and started to notice a pattern in what I was researching. Making concrete deadlines within the group for choosing sites and beginning to input information onto the storymap also really helped: before, it had been easy to sort of push work back and fall behind. Basically, moving from the research stage to the actual creation of the project led to a lot more confidence!
The conversation the Sky group had with Eric a few class periods ago also made things clearer. I had been worrying about cohesiveness as a whole, however, he suggested on “exploring phenomenons” instead. This put the project into a new perspective for me. Before, I thought that we would have to all be making the same point, just through the different lenses of beauty standards, queer identities, and fashion. But, now I realized that we could each explore slightly different ideas under the umbrella of “Body aesthetics within Uighur communities.”
My subsection of this topic is fashion, and I’m focusing on how fashion is used among Uighur women as a form of self-expression. One way of doing this is through the braiding of the hair I mentioned in my last blog post. But a more serious way this is being done is through silent protest against laws limiting outward expressions of Islam. There have been many bans against veils and other clothing items the Uighur wear to show their Muslim faith. Despite this, many Uighur women continue to wear these items not only to represent their religion, but to quietly rebel against these limitations. There have also been pressure from the government pushing for different ways to express faith without the use of veils.
It’s incredibly interesting to see the many ways fashion is being used. These strong strategies of self expression and protest provide a powerful contrast to the idea that fashion is a vapid and shallow interest.

I wanted to share some interesting things  I uncovered about the perceptions of beauty and body images on the Silk Road.  I ran across many current events that are very relevant to my topic but I digress in my attempt to include those subjects. Here’s why. I’ve come to realize there is a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese government and Uighur societies on the topic of beauty and body images. Apparently, the Chinese government has pushed forth their notions of beauty through a series of beautification campaigns.  They call it ‘Project Beauty’. The idea behind the campaign is to promote unveiling the faces of Muslim women, especially in the Uighur society. In some provinces it is a civil offense to wear a veil.  See, Uighur’s trace their ancestry back to the Turkish dynasty on Tarim Basin. It wasn’t until after the death of Genghis Khan in the late 16^th century that Uighur populations converted to Islam, thus the majority of Uighur women in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China are Muslim. Although not mandatory, wearing a hijab (veil) is customary in the Islamic faith.  This project directly targets Uighur Muslim women. On the other hand, the Chinese government defends its motives for Project Beauty as an aim to put a stop to forced veiling. The government also contends that in the wake of so many Islamic extremist uprisings, veils (or covering the face in general) may become synonymous with terrorism. So, once again I am setting parameters for what I will and will not discuss in my narrative about beauty and body images in the Uighur society. Don’t get me wrong, typically I would be very vocal about where I stand with this issue but, I’ve decided that it’s best to approach this in a different way. The ramifications of my outspokenness could possibly result in more tension as our Silk Road website will be available worldwide. At the same time, it’s interesting to make of note this debate as it adds context to the images that I am uncovering for research. Now my analysis will be centered around how these differences in opinion perpetuate a hegemony of what it means to be beautiful.  Today, as more Han Chinese relocate to urbanized areas in Uighur communities, the overall idea of beauty is imminent all over the place. Fashion shows, beauty pageants, talent competitions along with anti-veil signs and anti-veil security checkpoints,  all reveal this much noted controversy. This is a big deal however; in this circumstance I’ll remain silent on this discussion. Peace folks.

 

My team met today for our weekly meeting, where we discuss where we are in our research. Today we focused on planning when to meet for the deadlines.
One of the main problems we seem to be facing as a group is still coherency of narrative and how the story map is going to be analyzed. The plan to confront these problems is to have all our information up on the google doc by next Tuesday, along with a paragraph describing the narrative we see within our own individual topics, and some ideas for the points we find important to put on the maps. Then, we will all meet in person the next day to discuss the narrative.
I have some hope that the narrative will come together organically and naturally. Our topics of beauty standards, gender expression, and fashion are all interlinked, so a similar narrative for all three may emerge. I know we are already noticing many continuities within our topics, and I think that these similarities can be shaped into a greater, overarching narrative. We also have to figure out how the geography intersects, and how to arrange the points on the map in a cohesive manner. Maybe similarities will arise once we see the research from everyone’s individual topic. Then comes the issue of in what order to arrange the points on the map. Maybe we’ll be lucky and a clear pattern will emerge!
I have been facing some small issues concerning my own individual project. I have yet to find any Uygher fashion designers, or find any evidence about whether traditional clothing is the norm for day to day life. The artifact I have included shows a wedding celebration, and I’m wondering if they normally wear clothes like the ones pictured outside of special occasions. Other pictures I have seen of Uyghers at market places or other everyday areas seem to show a similar style of clothing. I also have to find some more scholarly sources: most sources I have found just through Google searches, and are often just descriptions of the clothing normally worn, or focus more on the ways the current social situation affects attire.
Despite all of this, I have still learned a lot of interesting information! It’s very interesting to me the way fashion can be used to tell information about a person: for example, unmarried Uygher girls often wear their hair in many braids, while girls who are married only wear two braids.  Another interest I have is seeing how their fashion relates to their Muslim faith.
So, even though we have faced some issues with this project, and still have some problems to resolve, I am still confident we will be able to create an interesting and cohesive final project!