Session 3: Cyber-SubCultures

4th Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Sunday 15th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Sex, Sexuality and Cyberspace: Intersecting Queer Spaces on and Offline
Vikki Fraser
School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Australia

This paper explores the discourses operating on websites that are designed for and used by queer youth in order to gain understandings of the ways in which online and offline queer spaces might intersect and inform each other. Drawing on qualitative research carried out in Australia to gain deeper insight into the ways that queer youth use internet sites; the paper focuses on the way discourses of sex operate on websites commonly used by queer youth, such as Gaydar (www.gaydar.com) and Gaydar Girls (www.gaydargirls.com), in ways that (re)produce the discourses present in offline queer spaces (such as bars and clubs). These two sites were chosen from a number of sites discussed by participants in the aforementioned research due to their international scope and the pervasiveness of the sex discourse on the sites. Further, it explores the ways such sites work pedagogically for young queer users, particularly in relation to gaining an understanding of what to expect in other queer venues and developing insight into how queer cultures might be constructed and participated with. Drawing on cultural geography to explore the ways that bodies and discourses shape and are shaped by space and utilising both textual analysis of the websites and participant discussions, this paper challenges the assertion that internet spaces are spaces of transcendence, instead positing that they are intrinsically linked to ‘real life’ and therefore offline operations of discourse.

Following from Foucault’s analysis of discourses of sex, this paper demonstrates the ways in which sex operates multiply on the websites. Of particular interest is the ways in which sex is used on the websites as a way of legitimating, or making knowable and recognisable, the presence of various users online while removing others to a periphery status. Sex is a particularly pervasive discourse in this respect. It is constructed on the sites and taken up by users as an integral marker of place within online queer space, in much the same way as it is in offline queer spaces such as bars and clubs. However, sex does not just operate to legitimate particular articulations of queer sexuality (for example ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’). Sex is also used on the sites in ways that legitimise race or ethnic identities in a variety of ways, usually highlighting whiteness as inherent in recognisable queer sexuality. This paper highlights the deployment of discourses of sex in this way in order to unpack and contest the way sex and whiteness are privileged on the sites in ways which silence and remove non-white and non-sexual queer experience. Although the discussions made throughout this paper are by no means able to be generalised, the paper aims to provide insight into the multiple ways in which websites used by queer young people might be read and the implications for this reading in the context of increasing internet use, particularly among queer young people.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Online and Offline Social Networks: Use of Social Networking Sites by Emerging Adults
Natalia Waechter
Austrian Institute for Youth Research, Austria and Children’s Digital Media Center, UCLA/ CSULA, USA

Social networking sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, and studiVZ are a popular online communication form among adolescents and emerging adults. In fact, according to a 2007 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half (55%) of all online American youth, ages 12-17, use online social networking sites (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). The German “ARD/ZDF Online Studie 2007” reports at least that 40% of all Internet users between 14 and 19 years use such social networking sites (Gscheidle & Fisch, 2007). Yet, little is known about young people’s activities on these sites and how they relate to their other online (e.g., instant messaging) and offline networks. Furthermore, because of the potential to interact with known others as well as meet and befriend strangers on these sites, it is important to study the nature of their online social networks in order to get an understanding of how such online communication relates to young people’s development. This study investigated emerging adults’ online activities, use of social networking sites for communication, and overlap between their online and offline social networks. US-American college students completed two surveys, one in-person and one online that asked a variety of questions about their online activities and closest friends. Specifically, they were asked to list the 10 people they interacted with the most in three contexts: social networking sites, instant messaging, and face-to-face. Results showed that participants often used the Internet, especially social networking sites, to connect and reconnect with personal friends and family members and that there was an overlap between participants’ online and offline networks. However, the overlap was not perfect, suggesting that emerging adults may use different online contexts to strengthen different aspects of their offline connections. The results support the position that young people’s online and offline worlds are psychologically connected.

Articulation of the self after anorexia, an illness that sufferers reveal is extremely isolating disease, finds community in cyberspace. This paper, in a spirit similar to Arthur Frank in The Wounded Storyteller (1995), shows how the injuries of the eating disordered can become seeds of their self-stories. Through everyday life stories and reflections on their personal blogs, recovering eating disordered individuals forge bonds of empathy between themselves and their readers.  Growing pains and telling pains in defining despair and disorder and in expressing the trials while journeying through individualized and therefore unchartered routes for recovery make for painful and active typing and reading. Susan Sontag’s metaphor of illness as travel is surveyed. This paper addresses implications for ethical storytelling and about how one can go about reading/listening to the corporeal body (with)in the ill person’s virtual speech. How may illness stories circulated in cyberspace resist and perhaps even subvert instead of surrender to the medical narrative that Frank asserts as being “The story of illness that trumps all others in the modern period” (1995,5). Do pro-recovery blogs of the eating disordered merely shadow legitimate illness narratives of medical authorities? Illness experiences in post-modern cyberspaces can serve as cultural (re)sources of healing and can aid in empirical studies of the socio-cultural roots and routes of illness and recovery.

Issues of identity are delved into when understanding how recovering eating disordered individuals give voice to experiences that Prozac prescriptions cannot communicate. While voices of recovering eating disordered individuals are embodied in particular persons, in the democratic space of the internet, they are simultaneously social.  Examining explicit sculpting of the body-self online through illness narratives can serve to shed new light on Goffman’s ideas of management of stigma, presentation of the self and “spoiled identity”.  Illness, it has been said, is about learning to cope with lost control. Cyberspace then offers a medium to reclaim some semblance of lost control, a space where potential narrative wreckage can be rescued. Online membership to eating disorder causes can serve to turn illness into meta-control. How may blogging be a means through which the “dyadic body” (Frank 1995,35) proffers its own body and obtains the comfort that others recognize what torments it. The paper conceptualizes such online confessionals as proof of embodied community, sites where medically treated monadic bodies re-connect.

Ethical acts of storytelling are explored through textual analysis of virtual modes of expression from recovering eating disordered individuals living in the Republic of Singapore, a country whose Tourism Promotion Board has actively promoted as a “foodie’s paradise”. These modes of expression include personal blogs, online community forums and social networking groups based on common interest or self-help which serve to actualize a community of not only pain, but of promise – of full recovery. The potential impact of online eating disorder support groups and blogs for shaping individual and collective identities, for cyber-activism among youth, for professional-patient interactions, and for the ongoing debate of what constitutes ethical web-based research with vulnerable groups is also explored.