12th December

I feel like I'm losing my grip on reality. Time to make a to do list!!!!!

TO DO FOR HAND IN

Ace in the UK Report 2023: spoiler alert - we're doing a bit fucking shit

Notes from Yasmin Benoit and Stonewall's 2023 Ace in the UK report (go check it out!):

I thought this graph of search trends in the UK was very interesting - it shows that there has been an increase in public interest in/awareness of asexuality and aromanticism since 2018, even if it's a fairly small increase. I was curious what could be causing the spikes in the graph, so I made an attempt at cross referencing the dates with news stories that could be related. Here's my attempt at tracking it, which I fully admit may be completely wrong lol

As you can see. Not a great deal of progress was made.

The report also linked to the website for LGBT+ charity Galop, which has a page about prejudice against asexual and aromantic people. This page goes more in depth about prejudicial attitudes, including beliefes that asexual people "are less than human or against human nature", "are deficient or broken; that it is a result of mental illness or sexual abuse", "are confused or ‘going through a phase’" etc.

Peer review and tutorial

In the peer review session with Dayna I got some useful advice for the presentation on the 4th January and for using social media in my research. Which was nice because these are both things I haven't put much thought into yet. I'm definitely feeling less stressed about the presentation now - Dayna was saying it should basically be the same information as the contextual review but in a presentation form - it should mostly be about what your plan is with a couple of slides for what you've already done. The social media research I'm still a bit in the dark about but Dayna had some useful advice on websites I could use to possibly find statistics on where the community is situated, and this could help me decide what websites and such I want to look at. Idk man I'm kind of a luddite so I'm doing the best I can here.

In my tutorial with Willem we mostly focused (ha!) my focus group plans, as usual. I actually have more of a concrete idea of what I want to do with the focus groups now, so we were able to discuss specifics! Some key points:

15th December

Lads I cannot lie to you. Working through the to-do list is not going great. I've made some additions and edits to the contextual review and I've finished reading the Gender and Media Reader but jesus christ. This to-do list is gonna kill me.

Anyway time to write up my notes from the various articles I read I guess. At least these were genuinely very helpful.

Possible further reading:

Anywah speaking of gender, I've been watching a lot of videos by Lily Simpson in my spare time - she talks about transgender representation in TV, including an episode of the TV show Bones where Angel from Buffy himself David Boreanaz says the word transgender. This may mean nothing to you, but it means everything to me.

MORE RELEVANTLY, her video on South Park actually mentioned asexuality!! At 3:26 she talks about transphobic attitudes and beliefs that trans women only transition for sexual reasons and that transitioning is a fetish. She points out that not only is this y'know, wrong, but also it fails to take into account trans women who are asexual. Thought this was worth mentioning because it ties into Angela Chen's commentary on how trans women are sexualised and how this affects the experience of ace trans women.

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