Welcome

Welcome to my research blog, Bonds of Intimacy.  This is my second experience using Blogger to record and make public the process of a semester long research project that culminates in a conference paper and presentation.  My first experience is visible here, at my blog Conduct Yourself.  Feel free to explore my previous work, both Conduct Yourself and the wiki-styled page I created with three other classmates, Geography of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  See my bio for more details about the classes and professors. 

Because this project encourages us to record the process, this blog will not be perfect.  The components of the research project posted will be the copies I submitted to Dr. Logan for a grade – not corrected copies.  Sometimes I will be right, but more often (probably) I will be wrong.  But that’s okay.  What is important is that I learn with each assignment, expanding my base of knowledge.  It will be messy, even chaotic at times.  You will learn how nerdy I am, that my social life (what little there is to begin with) will take a backseat to this project because I get severe tunnel vision, and that if I forget to bring a sweatshirt to the fourth floor of the UCF Library, I will complain about the cold and how it makes my nose drip.  In short, the life of an English literature graduate student is decidedly unsexy.  But that’s okay too.

This blog, by its very nature, will be a strange, and perhaps uneasy, combination of academic product and personal reflections.  I am in a way, taking my cue from Anne G. Myles, whose article "From Monster to Martyr: Re-Presenting Mary Dyer" we read for our second class.  In her article, she states, “My approach to, and need for, this material is obviously informed by the fact that I encounter it as both a Quaker and lesbian reader looking for a usable past; however, these seem to me powerful, challenging dimensions in any context” (18).  The material she references is the relationship between Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, and it is Myles’s hope that it can be categorized as a “’lesbian’ scene in seventeenth-century America” (18) – as based on the idea of the lesbian continuum¹.  

It is this article, and specifically the class discussion we had concerning this claim of a lesbian scene, that birthed (pun intended) my thesis: that the commonplace book Milcah Martha Moore created is a physical representation of her love for her friends, and their love for her.  That these women belong somewhere on the lesbian continuum, I am sure.  I am risking my entire research project on this claim because in a way, despite being neither a Quaker nor a lesbian such as Myles, I too am looking for a usable past.  I want to believe that despite the political, social, economical, religious, and legal restrictions women faced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, they could in fact, rely on each other.  It is important to me to believe they could turn to each other for love (sexual or non-sexual), comfort, support, affection, advice, and friendship to form intimate bonds, both in spite of and despite the men involved in their lives.     

Feel free to explore my blog, and especially feel free to comment on its design and content (what little there is so far).  I hope my enthusiasm for this project is contagious, and that you, my readers, stick around until the conclusion.

¹The lesbian continuum, as Dr. Logan explained in class, is like a sliding scale.  On the one end, you have women who are friends with women, and at the other, women who have sex with other women.  I must admit that is the extent of my knowledge on this theory, so of course, I have more research to do.



Works Cited:
Myles, Anne G.  “From Monster to Martyr.”  Early American Literature 36.1 (2001):  1-30. JSTOR.  Web. 24 August 2010.