Choosing a Topic and Narrowing it Down

I found that the reading for this week, “Choosing a Topic” by the University of British Columbia, brought up some very good points. Particularly, the comment that “effective academic writing is not an innate skill or ability” I find to be important because I often see students struggle with writing, but they are always more upset because they don’t seem to be getting the hang of it quickly rather than the subject material.

I have already begun narrowing down my topic based on the last criteria the article brought up, “what interests you”. When it comes to history specifically, the topic that interests me the most is the LGBT+  community. As a gay woman myself, its very frustrating to not be represented by the information that everyone is taught in class, especially when I know that we who are LGBT+ have always existed, even if we have been silenced by the historical narrative. It is my goal to make our voices heard, especially so those who are growing up LGBT+ won’t have to wonder why they are different or if they are normal because the proof will be there in the textbooks and course materials. Visibility matters and this is why I wanted to focus on something related to my community for my paper. Hopefully, what I write about can be something that I can use to build off of for part of larger work in the future, whether that be a dissertation or a book.

At this point, my historical question is more or less: In what ways did European colonialism change cultures’ attitudes towards those who we now call in the modern-day LGBT+? How did these changes affect their communities? 

I’ve found two articles that have been helpful in a starting point for my questions. The first, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/30/the-british-colonial-origins-of-anti-gay-laws/?postshare=3131487285965080&tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.b8e91564a2d3, gave me a very basic background of modern anti-LGBT+ laws in Africa and statistics on how colonies that were under British rule have been proven to keep their anti-LGBT+ laws and beliefs longer than other previous European colonies. The second article, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/08/african-homosexuality-colonial-import-myth?CMP=share_btn_link, proved to be more useful because it gave me more historical information to look into, such has: the koetsire and soregus, the Siwa of Egypt, and the ancient cave painting from the San people in modern-day Zimbabwe. Also this article proved that there is “adequate source material for my topic” by giving me two books to look into: Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities edited by Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe and  Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS by Marc Epprecht. These resources ended up being invaluable as Will Roscoe also wrote a book on the LGBT+ people in the Americas during European arrival to the continents titled, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, which led me to two more books: The Spirit and the Flesh : Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture by Walter L. Williams and Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang.