Plan for the Week

TO DO THIS WEEK:

Looking at my time plan and realising how close I am to the summative review and final hand-in deadlines. Guys I hate to see this but it's actually so over.

Happy Tutorial Tuesday (again)

Had my tutorial with Colin this week! Main points:

The last point is the one I've probably done the most work on this week - it's actually relatively easy to find sources for the history of asexuality as a concept, since a lot of the books I've looked at discuss it. Finding sources for aromanticism is harder and I've had to look outside of academia - I found a good source for history of aromanticism as a concept here

Further Adventures in the Methodology Cave

I'm a big enough person to admit I'm currently panicking quite a lot about getting everything done on time. But such is life and I must plough on and hope for the best I fear. So, getting stuck back into Thematic Analysis by Braun and Clarke. Notes from this week:

TV (and documentaries!) of the Week

Finished watching The Imperfects. Not a whole lot of further thoughts on it - asexuality didn't really come up much past episode 1, but there was a kind of romance arc between Abbi and another character (Hannah). Once again, the most interesting thing about this show to me is how much it doesn't make a big deal of asexuality. There's a scene of Abbi telling Hannah she's ace, but we don't even see this conversation, and instead experience it through another character (Tilda), who has super-hearing and overhears it happening. Other than that scene, there's no further mention of asexuality and it doesn't even seem to pose any kind of obstacle to that relationship. I did also think it was interesting that the show presents there as being a "correct" response to someone coming out as ace - Tilda commenting on the conversation she hears says "And that is the correct answer, Hannah" - but doesn't actually show us what that correct response is.

I also listened to a podcast episode talking about asexual comedy, and via that went down a rabbit hole looking at the show Nathan For You, which has a segment about asexuality. The segment is mostly played for laughs - the premise of the show is that host Nathan Fielder goes to small businesses and gives them ridiculous advice on how to improve their business, and in this segment he convinces a computer repair store to hire only asexual technicians, so they won't be tempted to look at people's private photos - but there is also clearly an attempt to educate the audience about asexuality. I don't think I'd include it in my thesis because it's more of a reality show than a scripted fiction show, but I found it interesting.

The other thing I watched this week was The Celluloid Closet, a documentary from 1995 about portrayals of LGBT+ people in cinema. Obviously it's a relatively old documentary, so reflects a very different time period to the one we're in now, but I still found it fascinating! Some key points:

Working on Thesis

Spent most of this week working on my thesis - I'm ahead of where I need to be at this point in order to get my word count up to the minimum by hand-in, so that's good! Still doesn't mean I'm not shitting myself!

Stuff about aro history I had to cut (but still interesting tidbits):

• “The aromantic community is connected to the asexual community, but not everyone who is aromantic is asexual.” – Chen, p.128

• Possible reference to aromanticism in 1922 – “The Female-Impersonators, written by an androgyne named Ralph Werther (who also went by Jennie June and Earl Lind), details the existence of what Werther calls “anaphrodites”—derived from the term anaphrodisia. According to Werther, “anaphrodites are not suffused with adoration for any type of human.” (Brown, 2022, p.157)

Focus group updates

I've now sent out the consent forms and finished participant information sheet for my focus group, as well as a form for people to fill in with their availability. Now I just need to wait for people to respond! Am I freaking out about the fact that I sent everything out on Wednesday and it's now the end of the week and only one person has properly got back? A little. Let's not think too hard about it.

At the weekend I did a test run of my focus group with my flatmates and some friends, to test out my recording setup and get some feedback on the questions I use as well as the collection of clips I chose for prompts. I decided to select clips based around the theme of "coming out" - including clips from BoJack Horseman, Game of Thrones, Generation, Heartbreak High, Heartstopper, and Legends of Tomorrow.

I tried out a few different methods for recording. First I tried recording with Audacity and then putting the audio into Premiere to transcribe. Next I tried recording by setting up a Teams call (Miles was part of the test focus group so I did this by calling him and then having him mute and silence his device, so the call would only pick things up through my microphone) and then using Teams' own recording and transcription feature. I had to do this through my staff account since apparently students can't record, which is a bit annoying, but workable. At first glance, neither of the transcription methods honestly seem that accurate, but I'm planning to have a closer look to identify if one was a bit more accurate.

In good news, I was able to establish that my external microphone is powerful enough that it can pick up people speaking all around the room, so as long as I keep people in the focus group fairly close together, that should work fine. There were some technical issues where I accidentally forgot to plug in the microphone before recording for one of the recordings, and it quickly became clear that my laptop's internal microphone would not work well for this. It's good to know that I have equipment that will work for the focus group.

Since this was just a test, I didn't run the focus group for the full three hours or ask all of my questions (I also had a mix of people in the group who identify as asexual/aromantic and who don't, instead of having the two separate groups I'll have in the real thing) - instead we kept the first part of the discussion to half an hour, then watched just a couple of the clips from my montage, and then spent just ten minutes discussing them, as two of my friends had to leave. I still got some really useful feedback on the focus group process, particularly on the collection of clips - a couple of my friends gave me the feedback that they felt the clips used were a bit too long. Both clips I showed featured a fair bit of lead-up to the discussions of asexuality/aromanticism - I'd kept these in so people would have the context, but my friends told me that they'd found it a bit confusing and that it felt like a bit of a waste of time. In particular, they said it had confused them because they hadn't been sure at first which parts were meant to be about asexuality/aromanticism and had been trying to draw conclusions based on parts of the clips that had nothing to do with it. For example, with the Game of Thrones clip they mentioned being confused about whether the mention of "the Unsullied" was meant to be some kind of reference to virginity or a fantasy term for asexuality, or if maybe the country that the characters mention was in the show "known for having a lot of asexual people", before they got to the part of the clip that was actually about asexuality and realised that none of the previous part had been relevant. Based on this, I'll definitely be cutting down some of the clips.

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