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GSS 202 Fall 2022

Final Project

  • Due: Friday, December 9
  • ~1,500-2,000 word critical introduction to your archive + descriptions of each object + final self-assessment
  • You can choose a citation style, but you should choose one (MLA, Chicago, APA, etc).
  • Turn in via Blackboard

An Archive of the Contemporary Moment

For this assignment, you will construct and reflect on your own archive of objects or materials that tell a history of queerness and/or queer communities in the contemporary moment. Completing this assignment requires 3 steps:

1. Assemble your archive

First, you will assemble an archive of at least 5 objects or materials from contemporary culture/your daily life that you believe tell a history of queerness and/or queer communities in the contemporary moment. Think about what a historian (or literary historian, or film historian, or social media historian, etc.) living at least 50 years from now and writing about a facet of queer history or culture from the early 2020s might be interested in or want to know about. You have a lot of latitude in deciding what to organize your archive around: you could focus on a particular television show and materials its fans produce; you could focus on a specific social or political movement and social media posts about that movement; you could gather specific materials from your daily life that are all organized around a certain theme. The possibilities are endless. The 2 questions to ask yourself are: 1) What history of queerness and/or queer communities in the contemporary moment do I want to tell?; and 2) What objects or materials do I need to collect that are connected to this history and/or that best exemplify or help to tell this history?

Your archive can include any collection of “historical” objects or materials from the contemporary moment: a series of TikToks, a series of memes, a genre of films or television shows, interviews, a short story or novel, a YouTube trend or collection of channels, tweets that use a specific hashtag or series of hashtags, a collection of images…the list goes on. It can include different materials and genres – so you can include, for example, TikToks as well as memes and a short story – or you might decide to focus on one particular kind of cultural object, genre, format, or material. The only stipulations here are that your archive should be a collection of items from the contemporary moment (i.e., the last 2-3 years, although you can stretch this a bit farther if you can make a case for it), and that this collection should constitute a coherent conceptual category (i.e., the items in it should all “go together” in some way to tell a history of queerness and/or queer communities in the contemporary moment).

2. Write object descriptions

Once you have assembled your archive, you will write a description of each object in your archive that contains the following information (you can write this out as a list in a Word/Pages/Google doc):

  1. The name or title of the object (if the object does not have a title, give it a short descriptive name to distinguish it from the other objects in your archive).
  2. The creator(s) of the object (whether an individual or a group/organization).
  3. The date of creation, posting, production, publication, broadcasting, etc.
  4. The publication or website or app in which the object appears (e.g., The New York Times, TikTok), or the publisher or producer of the object (e.g., NBC).
  5. The medium or format of the object (e.g., episode of a television show, social media post, photograph, etc.).
  6. If applicable, the object itself (if it’s an image or something else that you can include in a Word doc) or a link to the object online (or an indication of how to access the object).
  7. A short statement explaining how this object relates to the other objects in your archive.

The point here is to provide enough information about each object in your archive so that a historian working at least 50 years from now would be able to understand what this object is, who created it, how it was created, and where and when it appeared or circulated in our time. If you are working with objects online, I strongly suggest you download or save copies of these objects to your own machine (preserving information about where you found them, of course) so that you will be able to access them if the link changes or they are removed.

3. Write a critical introduction to your archive

Finally, you will write a ~1,500-2,000 word critical introduction to your archive that explains how it tells a history of queerness and/or queer communities in the contemporary moment, connecting the objects in your archive to readings from the course. In this critical introduction, you should do the following things:

  1. Explain what history of queerness and/or queer communities your archive tells. What would a historian working 50 years from now learn from this archive?
  2. Explain why you have selected these objects to tell this history. How are all of these objects connected to one another and how or why are they important for understanding the history you want to tell?
  3. Relate this discussion to specific ideas, passages, and/or moments from at least 2 texts (or films, etc.) from our course.

You can absolutely do this! However, your critical introduction should not begin and end solely from the perspective of a fan. Writing by and for fans is important, lively, and engaging, and it definitely has its place in our culture. But this is not the genre in which I am asking you to write for this assignment. I have named this portion of the assignment a critical introduction for a reason: the word “critical” means lots of things, but one of the things it is indicating here is that I want you to try to achieve some reflective (and dare I say scholarly) distance from your objects of study. Your critical introduction should not just be about how great the person, phenomena, media, etc is that you have chosen to write about is. Instead, I am asking you to consider how the objects you have chosen to study are significant or meaningful within the context of our contemporary culture.

Final Self-Assessment

The final self-assessment, like the contract reassessment you completed this semester, is about documenting the work you’ve done to earn the grade you’ve contracted for. It should include the following things:

  1. A brief statement (no more than ~1 paragraph) detailing how you fulfilled the participation aspect of your grade contract. As a reminder, all grade contracts require that you “come to class having completed and prepared to discuss any assigned readings, films, or other media. Participate actively in class activities and discussions, making observations and asking questions that help the class think together.”
  2. The grade you believe you earned in this class (including +/-), based on how you fulfilled your contract.
  3. A brief discussion of the following question: What is at least 1 thing you’ve learned in this course that you will carry forward with you?

If you would like comments from me on your final project, please indicate that somewhere in your final project/self-assessment.