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.