Capstone Weekly Reflection 9- 16/11/2018

The past week was my first real struggle with writing. Part of it simply had to do with remembering to engage with some of Twyla’s ideas in ‘The Creative Habit’ and just establishing and sticking to a routine of writing. The other part just simply has to do with figuring out and trusting my impulse for creating work. Research informing practice which then informs my desire for more research is an essential idea for me as a writer and thinker, part of which is the framework of the class and partly just has to do with the development of my own ideas while working creatively. I found my scene on ‘Spectrum the Invisible Superhero’ that I was working on this week, extremely dissatisfying and that simply had to do with the fact that I felt as if I didn’t have enough raw material to convert the ideas and questions I am navigating around masculinity into something compelling. I found myself simply reproducing similar ideas around patriarchal masculinity as based on dominance and self- alienation and didn’t find a structure that allowed for the promoting of bell hooks’ ideas around interbing and compassion. I am hoping that by engaging with a more diverse and broadly speaking queer studies approach to art making and products it will allow me to view these ideas around masculinity differently. The issue I am facing is that while I am aware of the ways my thinking around patriarchal masculinity and identity are problematic, limiting or in need of reframing and unlearning, I think most of the material I am working with as a model is still based on patriarchal masculinist modes of thought, be it Stan Lee’s work on ‘The Amazing Spider-man’ or Chris Gavlier’s ‘Superhero comics.’ The path to knowledge for this work, for myself, to be truly radical and reframing these ideas necessitates an investigation into works and modes of thinking not only by those men or masculinist thinkers who engage with the idea of masculinity in a compelling way but alternative perspectives from queer studies and feminist scholarship. As Austin Kleon discusses in ‘Steal like an Artist,’ the goal is not to simply copy the sources I am using for each vignette and reframe them with my ideas but rather to engage the themes around superhero comics and masculinity with a different way of thinking, similar to the notion of the trickster that Lewis Hyde discusses in ‘Tricksters make this world,’ as creating new paths or blurring or transgressing boundaries in order to create something new. As my advisor professor Tsunoda details around the idea of the rematriation of dramaturgy, finding new lenses to view this work on superheroes is as essential to development of this project as is understanding the superhero genre and my personal issues around masculinity. It is only through viewing seemingly opposing ideas together, through a lens that may not intuitively fit with the material of superhero comics that something new might be possibly created. The next goal is to read ‘Queer art of Failure’ by Judith Halberstam and Rainbow Rowell’s ‘Carry on,’ as well as revisit Kohei Horikoshi’s ‘My Hero Academia,’ for a different way of viewing the superhero and different lenses with which propose an alternative engagement around the superhero and masculinity. The next task as always will simply be about writing, researching, thinking and discussing rehearsing and repeating.