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.
\nWhile 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.
\nAside 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading Progress… It's a wonderful thing.<\/span>