Queer Theory

So I've decided that in addition to blogging about my novel writing expeditions, i'm also going to use this space to blog about my thesis which I am currently working on. I'm still in the preliminary stages (which means lots of planning and lots of reading), but it looks like my paper will be centred around queer 'heroes' in contemporary young adult literature. As far as I can gather, my supervisor seems pretty happy for me to come up with my own definition of the word hero, which really, is fabulous because it means that I can bend the meaning to include whichever characters I want - to an extend. So it seems pretty certain that i'll be using Perry Moore's Hero, and most likely the City of Bones series by Cassandra Clare, but other than that, i'm not too sure yet.

I had been spending my time thus far researching comic book characters that are gay heroes but after meeting with my supervisor today, she thinks that we should focus more on novels. Which I'm both happy and unhappy about. Happy because I know nothing about comics, and quite frankly I was feeling rather daunted by the whole thing. But unhappy because there do seem to be a lot of gay comic superheroes around. So but excluding them for primary analysis, i've totally limited myself for my overall paper. So i'm on the hunt for any super natural or superhuman characters in books that might be gay (even if they're not totally overtly gay, I reckon I could probably bend the theory to include them as well).

Did I mention that my thesis is actually 20 000 words, not the initial 10 000 that I thought it was? I'm pretty sure that the look on my face when I was told that today was a total Kodak Moment. I think it's pretty safe to say that this will be my hugest academic effort to date. Maybe ever....