I have been stressing myself over the lack of productive thought that I feel like I have generated for my directed readings in subcultural (punk) masculinities and as such contacted my project advisor to update her on my status and seek advice or insight into my situation. Her key response to me was “create questions”. That option had not occurred to me before. I am used to working toward a goal in academic writing of producing a final product that either fills a gap or produces some sort of productive discourse into a topic area. Asking questions is not a something I’m familiar with doing, but now that it has been suggested seems to make perfect sense. If we open numerous lines of inquiry and attempt to flesh them out, then something productive will come of some of them. For my meeting on Wednesday I’m going to work on asking all of the questions that I can form regarding my topic area up to where I have gotten so far in my thought process.

“It’s totally OK to keep coming up with more questions & not finding many ‘answers’.”

I guess sometimes I forget that I may be taking a WGST directed readings, but my advisor is a philosopher at heart and sometimes answers just aren’t possible.

I feel like at the end of this project I may not have many answers, but I will have explored a multitude of possibilities and learned a valuable too for academic writing. Having an advisor for a project like this is certainly a far leap from all of those “advisors” I had as an undergrad.