RATIONALE
Anna’s POV
The process of creating the website was a long one. First, I had to find a website creator that was free. I originally set up an account on Squarespace, but after I started adding to the site, I realized that it was not free, and the trial would end before the due date of this project. Then I decided to use Wix because I had used it before for a different class. I spent a lot of time over Thanksgiving formatting the site and making a theme. I started writing blog posts as well to add to the site.
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When I was doing research, I found a couple of different poets from the ’20s that were gay or identified somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. I decided to make a list and link all of them to their biographies online. For each poet, I read through multiple biography sites and used the most thorough and reliable sites and hyperlinked them to the poets' names on the list.
In terms of choosing a theme, I remembered that a lot of the texts we read in class had themes of LGBT. For the blog posts I wrote, I analyzed texts for that content and discussed it using evidence and quotes from the texts. I wanted to add more to my site than just the blog posts. Therefore, on the Background page, I added a photo of a gay pride march from the ’20s and linked it to an article about the background of LGBT during the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance. I did this because I cannot assume that people visiting this site know about the Harlem Renaissance or the LGBT elements of it.
For the story “The Sea Change”, I decided to add a brief summary of the story for the reader. I added two sub-tabs under the Poetry tab that showed full versions of poems by Langston Hughes and Angelina Weld Grimke. Both poems are referenced in blog posts, and there is a link in each sub tab to the blog tab. Something interesting that I found in my research was a web page talking about LGBT themes in Pride and Prejudice. I thought it was rather interesting, so I added a link to it with a picture of the cover art.
The more I thought about the texts we read, the more I realized that a majority of them contained some LGBT themes. When Jackson and I were discussing what texts to use, we reached a moment when we couldn’t think of a final piece to discuss. Then Jackson brought up that we could add a blog discussing The Sun Also Rises, and I realized that could be discussed in terms of our focus. Once I had this realization, going forward with the assignment was a good experience for me. I learned a lot while re-reading the works that I wrote about for my blog posts.
Jackson’s POV
For this assignment, I looked back across all of the works that we’ve studied this semester. I didn’t really have too much to do with our group deciding to pursue the topic of LGBTQIA+ in the 1920s, but I was open to talking about almost anything that pertained to what we’ve read. When Anna suggested we talk about LGBTQIA+ in our final project, I readily agreed. She said that she would do most of the heavy lifting when it came to creating the website and I would be responsible for a lot of the blog posts and actual content that appeared on the site.
When writing my blog posts, I tried to keep the overarching theme in mind as well as how I could apply that theme to a larger array of the texts that we’d talked about. This was because there weren’t very many of the stories that we read this semester that actually had gay characters or who actually would qualify as LGBTQIA+. In order to apply this concept to more stories, I thought about them primarily in terms of sexuality, but additionally had to consider what influence on people’s lives that traditional gender roles held.
This caused my blog posts to be focused around the gender of characters and issues that they faced in regards to their gender. The ideas of traditional ways of life as opposed to the progressive or modern take was also very relevant. In stories like “The Sea Change,” it was easy to talk about the text because it was directly related to the sexuality of the protagonist. However, in stories like “Big Blonde,” it was a little bit more difficult because it is literally about a married woman. In this story, I found that the role of a straight woman being married was an integral factor that affected the plot, and that I could relate this story to the topic of LGBTQIA+ through this idea of gender roles. Another example of reaching outside the box was talking about “The Sun Also Rises.” With this story, again centered around straight people, I decided to look at what each character used to define themselves in their gender role and how their sexuality may affect the way they go about their daily lives. This, again, let me apply this specific topic to the broader swath of literature that we’ve talked about.
I found when working on this project that at no point was I lacking in material or a thorough understanding of the subject matter. Our in-class lectures helped to put me in the right frame of mind to talk about the texts we discussed, and the required reading of the texts gave me a large amount of material to pull from. Overall, I felt very prepared and the greatest challenge for me was simply selecting what sort of argument I was planning on making. I learned a lot!