Research Blog Post #1

Image via Robert Voets/CBS

Quileute tribe members (real ones, not from Twilight) at a whale welcoming ceremony. Image via Lonnie Archibald/for Peninsula Daily News: https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/quileute-welcome-whales-with-song-dance/

This is the UCI Libraries "Pre-Search" simulation, which really helped me get an idea of how to approach the beginning processes of the research project.

To be entirely honest, I am pretty terrified of the Spring Research Project. It is a massive undertaking, and I have never done anything like it before. However, the past two quarters of Core have been inspiring, engaging, and thought-provoking - so much so that my mind is now overflowing with ideas about how I want to approach the Research Project. Professor Imada’s lectures about the movie Twilight and its role in the commodification of Indigenous culture was perhaps my favorite unit of the year. She introduced us to concepts and phenomena that I had never considered, and created space for further discussion, exploration, and research that I hope to delve into. I especially appreciate the way she exposed the hypocrisy in White America’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, and her explanation of the ecological nobility myth. I would love to take these ideas further by connecting the myth of ecological nobility to pop culture and media. Besides Professor Imada’s lecture content, I would really like to explore concepts of gender and sexuality in my research project in some way, since these topics hold incredible value to me personally. Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure and Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s exhibition of The Couple In the Cage both highlighted notions about queerness, gender, and power in ways that I found striking and poignant.

My goal is to, somehow, tie together both these topics of discussion and connect them to a larger social movement or pop culture phenomenon that I’m familiar with.

Some of the primary sources I’ve considered thus far include: the film Sorry to Bother You (my favorite of all time), the TV show Survivor, the Miyazaki film Ponyo, and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Clearly, I’m interested in film and television (I come from a family full of photographer-videographers and actors, I have to be), and I look forward to doing a lot of in-depth film analysis. How will I choose? I’m not quite sure yet, but I’ve compiled these sources as potential subjects of my research because of how near and dear they are to me. I plan to start by looking into each one of these sources and evaluating how they think about the topics I’m interested in (Indigenous ecological nobility myth, queerness, and gender). Thanks to the UCI Libraries “Pre-Search” simulation, I feel like I have a better idea of how exactly to dive into the Spring Quarter and the research that follows. Daunting as the Research Project may be, I am excited for all the ways it will push, encourage, and expand my writing and thinking abilities.