I am very much not satisfied with the paper topics I considered last week. They just aren’t me. I could write them, but that’s not who I am academically. While I still don’t feel comfortable being my usual deviant self, I am just going to have to push through that and be myself.

I have been thinking about the topics for a little while and I do have a few topics I feel I could work with.

1. Stresses of Gender Performance (or the Stresses of Gender Policing) – basically considering the methods through which men have to control their outward identity. While identity may be fluid in gender-variant and sexually open settings, there is a lot of stress on men who are not in those situations. There is a constant risk of not being masculine enough given the context, always that risk of the anti-masculine shaming. Do men take certain actions do reinforce their own feeling of masculinity? What about gay men who embrace their identity in sadomasochistic settings? Do they use pain (maso.) and control (sado.) to reinforce their gender?
2. Role of sexual subcultures on the identity of their participants – My perspective on sexual subcultures is that their seem to have an “always-on” libido or at least identity inside the culture. Is this really the case? Is the in-group identity only performed so that the emotional resources of the community are always available to them or is the subcultural identity a component of their primary identity?
3. What happens when you integrate sociology’s identity theory (or affect control theory) with Butler’s performativity?