I wrote an honours thesis

For real.

For the sake of honesty, I will admit that the version I printed, bound, and handed in had two errors in the table of contents, which I fixed for this version. Other than that, this is my (hopefully) final product. If it’s awful, I’ll have to rewrite.

It was a monster to complete.

I’m hoping to write a retrospective piece for Dr. Srivastava (who should have been in my acknowledgements – I missed a few people) and I’ll post that here when it’s done.

But now!

My English Honours thesis.

Sostar – Redefining the Money Shot

* Edited to add, again for the sake of honesty, I forgot to include Courtney Trouble in the acknowledgements. Which, considering it was her email that suggested the comparison, is inexcusable. So I changed it to add her.

Ned Mayhem’s Giant Clit: Opening Up New Possibilities for Cisgender Masculinity in Fuckstyles of the Queer and Famous

Performance and Performativity term paper. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out.

Revising my plan

I didn’t reach my word count goals for the last two days (or even come close) and it was hard to pull out the work I did from the bigger document since I mostly worked on revisions.

So! For those who might be interested in what I’m working on, that’s why it’s missing from the blog.

Today I’m working with Linda Williams Screening Sex and looking at her writing about ejaculatory imagery. I’m working this into the existing writing I have from the symposium.

My new goal is 1600 words/day, split between the thesis and the research paper for performance and performativity. I am terrified. This process is painful. And not going well.

Anyway! To work!

April 13 work

I’m disappointed with the work I’m producing. I feel like the information is in my head, but I can’t shake it loose. I made myself a list of goals to accomplish in yesterday’s work but then I totally failed to accomplish a single one of them. I’m also considering whether a chronological approach to the lit review is actually the best way to go. I’m leaning away from that, and am thinking about reorganizing it to be more thematic. (So, rather than anti-porn -> anti-censorship -> pro-porn, which is basically chronological (though there are two waves of anti-porn), I’m leaning towards grouping it thematically and looking at writing about ejaculation and about queer interpretations of pornography. So it would be two sections rather than three/four, and when I’m writing about ejaculation, I’d be talking about the gendered power dynamics of the act, etc. And that leads in to a discussion of the queer issues.

In more positive news, I emailed Courtney Trouble yesterday and got a fantastic reply back from her with some insight into why she chose the scenes she did. So, that’s awesome.

I’m feeling really discouraged about this process, and worried that I’m just kidding myself if I think I’ve got what it takes to be an academic. It’s disappointing and frustrating.

My goal for today is to get 2000 words written, since I was 450 words shy of my goal for yesterday.

Anyway, yesterday’s work:

April 12 Work

It was like pulling teeth to get the last 300 words written, and I’m still 30 short. Hopefully tomorrow will be better!

April 11 work

After the jump.

April 10 work

I did a lot of work! It might even be actually usable work! I am starting to feel less terrified. (I also wrote almost 1400 words today. If I can keep that up, I will be finished my thesis in 10 days and will have 4 days to edit it. Woo!)

Okay, today’s work, for those who are reading it. Oh, and a note – I’m pasting in my Works Cited as it grows, so not all of the works are cited in each day’s work. But I am happy with how it is growing each day. And I came up with a structure for my lit review today.

April 9 pages

Today’s writing session was more productive! And I found some flow – I think a lot of what I came up with as a result of the close-read of Karen Boyle’s article will be usable. To avoid annoying anyone who doesn’t want to read these progress updates, it’s after the jump.

Content!

Writing this honours project is like PULLING TEETH. So I’m going to post my pages as I write them, unedited. I will also post as I edit. This may be horrifically tedious but I want to document the process and I want to have a place to put my writing where people can see that it is (or isn’t) actually happening. Here are the three pages I wrote at my Friday writing session. (I didn’t do any writing over the weekend. It was a tumultuous weekend in non-academic ways. My mental health is… teetering.)

* indicates where I gave up on a thought and moved on. This is an attempt at just getting words onto the page, which is not how I normally work. But words need to happen. So. Read the mess after this –