Thesislog

Building on an earlier post about chapters, I do like the three directions I’ve already established, but want to tweak them a bit and add an introduction and conclusion:

1. Brief introduction which situates the reader in a historical context before the invention of homosexuality, and gives her the tools necessary to understand why I keep using constructions like “proto-homosexual” and “proto-lesbian”
2. Chapter on art, literature, aestheticism, etc.; a.k.a. “Wilde and the Americans Who Loved Him,” or something like that
3. Chapter on science and pseudoscience: phrenology, psychology, etc. Need to learn MUCH more about this before I can even think about pulling a chapter like this off*
4. Chapter on competing social movements: race and the Civil War/abolition, gender and suffrage/first-wave feminism, and other contextual reasons why America would differ from Britain, which I hope to start thinking about through my fall women’s-suffrage JP
5. Conclusion which addresses recent history and historiography to talk about what changed: under what circumstances could and did Americans start to confront suggestions of homosexuality in the culture more blatantly and openly? How did figures like Whitman or even Wilde get “adopted” as gay? How did homosexuality become a political movement in its own right, alongside race and gender instead of a different kettle of fish? And things like this

[* I wonder if I can find a way to learn/practice writing about this in the context of my psychoanalysis class next semester.]