Okay. So. ONCE AGAIN, the focus of my research has shifted. I'm probably the least decisive person I know, but I feel pretty confident that THIS topic is the one that will go all the way to the big league. Or the conference. Or whatever.

What is this mysterious topic, you ask. When I first started this project, I was interested in the way Twilight was received by my generation (and maybe a generation below us). The more I researched the novel, the more I realized that what really interested me was the way Stephenie Meyers portrayed sexuality in the novel - and they way readers, as pre-teens and teenagers and twentysomethings, reacted to that portrayal. And as I read and re-read the novel, and read and re-read the research, I noticed that I couldn't get a certain image out of my head. Throughout my research, all I could think about were the twelve year-old girls I'd worked with over the summer, girls who had read Twilight a hundred times, and were "totally in love with Edward". I couldn't help but wonder how they read the sexuality in Twilight, and how their reading of that sexuality would influence their own sexuality as they grew older.

So I started asking my friends questions. Questions like, "What was the first movie you saw that contained a sex scene?" (The answer, overwhelmingly? Titanic) and "What was the first book you read that contained a sex scene?". And as I asked these questions, I wondered what that movie and that novel would be for my parent's generation. Or the generation of graduating college seniors. Or my seventeen year-old sister's generation.

My questions, essentially, are these: which novels build our collective sexual education? To whom are these novels marketed? How is sexuality portrayed? And what is the result of this portrayal? I'll probably shift my research towards Queer Theory, since I'm primarily concerned in the development of sexuality.

I understand that this has the potential to be an huge, long-term project. But right now, I really just want to answer these questions for my generation. I'm planning on sending out an online survey to ask people about the way they experienced sexuality in literature, and I'm honestly very very excited to read the responses.