SAGA meeting and what I have been working on so far

Thursday night I met with the SAGA group at 8 p.m. in I.G. Greer. I did not have time to stay due to the fact I commute and did not want to get back to my hometown after midnight. I thought that my announcement was very clear and concise. I even had contact information for those that were interested in helping me. I told them that they were all invited to attend my speech.

In the meantime, I am working on bits and pieces of my thesis. So far I think that I am going to divide it up like this:

1) Cover sheet
2) Introduction to my thesis topic
3) Chapter 1: History of Homophobia in the 'old' world and the 'new'
4) Chapter 2: Poltical progress and special interest topics through literature
5) Chapter 3: Representing homosexuals and transgenders in film
6) [possible] Interviews with SAGA members or others who would add 'color' to my project
7) Bibiography

This is subject to change, but this is what I have to go by as of late.

Presentation comments

I wanted to say to everyone that I sincerely hope that I did not hurt any one's feelings with any of the comment cards. Anything negative was purely meant as a constructive criticism and not a mean, nasty comment. There were a few speakers that I did not want to put anything negative down, and everyone did well overall, but I wanted to be fair, so everyone had a positive and negative.

When I took a speech class, the main things my professor looked for were:
1) Volume
2) Delivery speed
3) Eye contact
4) Hand gestures
5) Anything special (i.e. humor)

So this is what I based my comments on as far as what I had to go through.

Maybe this is an asinine post, but I want everyone in this course to graduate and succeed immensely.

Finishing notes, timing myself

As of 10/14/07, I have finished transcribing my notes from the stickies to my paper. Now, in order to see them more clearly I am going to print them out. It has been fairly time-consuming, but enjoyable at the same time.

I have completed what I am going to present tomorrow, and have timed myself. I should be an ol' pro at giving speeches, and I am a lot more comfortable now than say, oh a high school freshman. My big problem would be going on too long, but as this has to be five minutes, I am obviously going to have to truncate and remove unnecessary information.

Bibliography

As of late, I have just updated my bibliography.

I am now in the process of reading my book on Latin American Masses and Minorities, which was available on Interlibrary loan.

10/09/07

Great news, I have finally finished with the Hispanisms and Homosexualities book. It was more information rich than the Ethnic Eye book, but both were valuable sources.

I have two books that I recently received from InterLibrary Loan. One of which happens to be from Princeton, so I know that it will be chock full of information as well as a very credible source of scholarship. I plan on tackling those two this week while finishing some more pages for the paper.

I am glad to say that all of my books have been helpful so far, which is more than I can say for another one of my classes. I mean, those books were wonderful, but they strayed away from my original topic and many of them were written in 1985 or before.

In the meantime, I am going to contect SAGA and alert them to my project. (Thank you again, Jason)

Hope everyone is doing well.

10/5/2007

I have started writing the first pages of the initial draft. I have had to go through a lot of different pages of notes that I have written down and that has taken some time, but not as much as I thought at first. I continue to find more items to aid me in this project.

Two things are on my mind: Does anyone know anything about SAGA? I contacted someone on the board of student diversity about a GLAAD group or some group that Harriette said I should inform about my presentation, but she (Kathy, I think?) said she didn't know anything about a GLAAD group, but she said try SAGA. I was wanting to know if anyone knew anything about SAGA.

The other thing, has anyone seen Cade Raper's blog yet? I was very curious to see his final project and have not yet been able to find it.

About one of those novels

I was re-reading my last post when I saw 41 as an example of a novel that I found. I wanted to point out that 41 was the title of the novel. I have not actually found 41 novels, although that could possibly be beneficial.

Moderate alterations...maybe a little more than moderate

Umm.... I think that I am going to change my focus from media to art and film. I thought that I would be able to find more television shows/transcripts and journals as media, pero fue muy dificil tan tarde, aunque hablo espanol.

In other words, it was difficult so far, even though I could read/understand the Spanish. I don't think that an article in People en Espanol would be a credible source. I have found some interesting novels about Homosexuality/Homophobia (such as 41) that I could greatly use in my paper as well as presentation. Of course I was already going to use film, which I need to mention that I found more films focusing on my topic.

So I'm on the lookout for a lot of books, films, and possibly songs/poems to be used.