At last, it seems like our project is coming together. Our topics are solidifying: our main task now is to narrow down some locations and discuss how we will frame some potentially controversial topics. The language barrier is also a big issue: a lot of potentially useful sources are written in Chinese or other languages.
I’m looking forward to doing some research over fall break. During the semester, I’ve often been worn out by other classes and assignments and don’t feel like delving into Silk Road research, but I think the free time over break is a good research opportunity. My team has decided that we should have the majority of the research done by the end of fall break as well.
I have a few paths of research I’m contemplating. Most of the fashion I’ve found has represented a traditional form of dress, and I’m wondering what kinds of other clothing are worn by the Uygher women, and whether traditional clothing is only used for special occasions, or is the norm for some women. I’m also hoping to find some Uygher fashion designers. I’m interested to know whether these designers are normally men or women, and if they typically design more traditional or other types of clothing. I’m also looking into some research about how Uygher women’s Muslim beliefs play into how they dress.

One of our most recent quizzes asked the class to choose a name from a list of the 99 names of Allah. Right away i picked Al-Aziz, The Victorious One. Now, I don’t proclaim to be religious, but I respect religious institutions and that name stood out from all the rest. If you read my blog titled “Minus One” then you’d know we lost a team member. I took this quiz during the time we were rethinking the direction of our project.  Our team set up of a meeting with our TA and instructors. We were able to organize our ideas into a cohesive digital  research project. So, after consulting with our TA and our instructors we are back in motion!  Although we still have research, archiving and mapping to achieve, today I feel victorious.  Our instructors provided us with some great advice and direction. We have finalized our location and decided on a cohesive topic that fits our own interests perfectly. We will not be discussing childbirth, education and medicine. While reevaluating our roles and communicating about our sources, we found we were able to take some things out and put some things in.  Readjusting was another unforeseen challenge but it provided us with an opportunity to really dig deeper into brainstorming. Because our team was in the beginning stages of our project there was room and time to make the necessary rearrangements. So, we came to a consensus and we’ve decided to that take a closer look at the Uyghur society in the autonomous region of Xinjian China.  My teammates have revamped their topics to reflect a more harmonized subject matter. I’m excited to say the least. My research has increased. My level of interest has increased. The correspondence between myself and my team mates has improved tremendously. We have already started to locate some interesting places with the Uyghur region. Again, I feel victorious. For me, it’s important to note the unforeseen challenges when working this a project like this. Losing a team member and rearranging our entire focus definitely threw a curve ball into our plans. Nevertheless, we are making huge strides towards a fantastic, digital, never seen before analysis about women, queer identities, sexuality, femininity, beauty and body images in the autonomous region of the Uyghur society.
The lesson here is all about pushing forward even through adversity. Again, I’m inspired by Xuan Zang’s historic journey. We definitely hit a bump in the road. No pun attended. The team feels more enthusiastic about the overall project. (I think they feel victorious too) I don’t want to start the celebration to soon but it feels wonderful to know we are on the right track. Still, there is so much more work to do but we have proved that we can get past the challenges and move forward. In hindsight, I’m glad that losing a member and changing our topic happened sooner rather than later. I can’t imagine how unbelievably difficult it would have been to rearranged our topic and reconstruct our overall thesis in the middle of research or near the end of the project. So, as we move on in our Silk Road journey, I look forward to encountering some interesting pieces of information and working more closely with my team. We are one dedicated group. We will not give up yes, and we are victorious. Peace family.

In our tech lab yesterday, we finally covered the topic of the story map, which was the last general piece of information we are going to learn about. From now on, the tech labs will be focused on group work on the actual project, and the questions addressed will be more specific and geared towards particular worries, rather than on how to do general web stuff, like making a blog post or citing images.
In past blog posts, I have talked a lot about my worries about the story map, and I think this tech lab really helped with these fears. The maps were extremely easy to use, even for someone like me who is not the best at geography.  I also had a lot of fun making the map! I mapped out my birthplace, my current home, and some places I had visited this summer. I messed around with a lot of the features to produce a map that was funny to me, such as writing inane descriptions and using ridiculous lines for the “Explore” button. While I will definitely be more serious for the actual project, I still think this helped me because I played around with each of the features, so I will better know how to manipulate the Silk Road story map. Since much of the map was open to editing, we can personalize our story map beyond what I had imagined. Images were painless to add, and the map moved nicely and was greatly accessible to any viewer, whether they had any knowledge on the Silk Road or not.This is especially helpful for our topic, considering it focuses on an ethnic minority that many people may not know about.
Despite the many upsides, there are still some difficulties to deal with. When looking at the maps in our area of interest, we noticed a lot of the street names were in Chinese, which, unfortunately, none of us can read. Hopefully, either Zhihong or Google Translate will come to our rescue. Another problem isn’t a technical difficulty, but rather an issue with narrative. We still haven’t really been able to connect our research to an array of places. I’m hoping with more research we will find a good solution for how to arrange our map.
I’ve noticed that I mention a need for more research in almost every single blog post so far. I personally haven’t been able to do much: I never feel I have enough time for every thing, with other classes, college applications, and life outside of school. I don’t necessarily think this means too much work is being put on us in class: instead, I think I, personally, need to manage my time better. My group has agreed that a majority of our research should be done by fall break, so I really need to put aside the time then. Luckily for us, since our project is on the aesthetics of the Uygher people, a lot of our research will double as an artifact on the story map. For example, if I analyze a style of clothing, and where and why this clothing was worn, the picture I’m using to analyze all this could also be used as the artifact. I think the same would apply to the rest of my group. As we discover the areas where these styles and other types of artifacts are either present or where they originated, these would hopefully line up with points on a map!

Sadly, Team Sky lost one. In an instance our entire project changed. Our topic and overall analysis of a specific society on the Silk Road needed revising. Unfortunately, our discussion about education regarding women in a distinct city on the Silk Road want be covered. The remaining topics are still very good interests to research but , combining them in cohesive way is the hard part. So, what do you do when the plan goes awry?  My research was stalled slightly,  but at the same time I was well engaged into studying the geography of the region. During our reconstruction period I explored several different cities while we worked out the kinks of our project . Our map test gave me the opportunity to understand exactly what I was dealing with.  Pinpointing areas in the Tarim Basin was very interesting. While I was studying I began to realized just  how phenomenal it was for a man up in age like Xuan Zang  to  have traveled through parts of this land.
Xuan Zang’s  story is amazing and I’ll admit it inspired me. Quite frankly, his story gave me an extra push. Although we are minus one person and topic our project still has potential.  Currently, we are in the middle reconstruction our ideas. As we work together to put  things into place, I constantly think about Xuan Zang. I think about him crossing through desert and mountainous terrains. I think about his journey and his challenges. What it must’ve been like I wonder?      In this moment of clarity I always come to  realize that we can do this -minus one.
 

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.

On Wednesday, we had our first meeting with Eric and Zhihong, and luckily, it cleared things up a lot. Even though I ended up changing my topic, I’m happy with it and our project now seems a lot more coherent and connected. I was also reassured by the fact that we are able to focus our research on modern times, though we must still use research to contextualize.
 
My topic changed because, the more we talked, the more clear it became that it no longer fit. I think this is mainly due to one of our members dropping the class. When she was part of the project, my topic of healthcare meshed well with her topic of education. But after she left and our topic continued to evolve, my topic didn’t make sense with the other subtopics. So, due to our focus on aesthetics, using sources like pictures and music videos, to prove our point, I have shifted my focus to the fashion of Uyghur women. I’m really excited about this: I think it will be fun to look at trends and analyze what they represent.
So, the first meeting went well. My whole team agrees that we feel a lot more focused, and like our project has finally come together. Since all three of our topics are so related, I’m sure a narrative will emerge.

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).