01/22/2012

Writing Interlude: Approaching “community”

The big writing roadblock, lately, has been understanding just what “community” is, and how it functions for the folks in my data set. Is it a social space? Is it an entity on its own? If you can “belong” to it, does that mean it functions like a collective membership category? If so, what are the features that constitute it? Can one be assigned community membership if they don’t claim it (even though they have the necessary credentials to incumbency)?

So I decided to data-dive and pull up every appearance of the term. Thus, a (brief) list of how community is used (in paraphrases):

  • “represent the trans community”
  • “new to the community”
  • “trans community” = “such a small community”
  • “big on loving the LGBT communtiy”
  • “community space”
  • internet community =/= a/the larger community?
  • community = group of people?
  • community can be supported
  • community can be to big
  • community lacks meaning
  • community can offer support
  • community = simultaneously singular and plural
  • community is not just vloggers, but commenters too
  • community provides something to those who join/seek it out
  • community means coming together
  • community can be let down
  • community membership has prerequisites
  • community can also be a resource
  • community is something one can be accountable to

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to stare at this list for the next hour.

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Filed under research, technology, vlogs

11/06/2011

Born This (or That) Way?

I saw an interesting juxtaposition in my Facebook feed today:

Earlier this week, I spoke to another grad student’s Intro to Sociology class at a local community college. Unlike the classes at KU, these classes are a grab bag of backgrounds, ages, and educational experiences. That’s one of the reasons I’ve really enjoyed doing them. While the KU students I talk to tend to think in the mode of students (that is, they study for the test), these students are usually interested in learning for learning’s sake. Continue reading →

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Filed under gender expression, medical, trans issues

10/21/2011

Proud citizen of Facebook Nation?

Though I primarily work with trans male vloggers on YouTube, lately I’ve thinking a lot about issues of privacy for trans people across platforms. Spotify’s reaction to the opposition to their move making membership contingent on having a Facebook account jumpstarted my thoughts around the problems of spreading “real name culture”. Thus, this post.

—–

The first time I heard about Facebook, it was as part of a now-paradigmatic question: “Are you on Facebook?” (Ironically, it was one of the first (and only) times I would interact with this roommate.)

I wasn’t, at the time. But as a new college freshman, I quickly learned having Facebook would be an essential part of my social capital portfolio. I joined accordingly.

By itself, this story is unremarkable. But placed in the context of my own history as a trans person, it takes on a different valence. If I’d joined Facebook at 14, 15, or even 16, I would have a long history of being perceived as a certain kind of person on Facebook. I might have been friended by my parents, to whom I can’t or don’t want to come out to even though I now present as a different identity socially. Or I might have had to build two Facebook accounts: one for the at-birth gendered me, and one for my current identity. All of these are practices I’ve seen people in my social circles engage in to mitigate social risk.

Continue reading →

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Filed under media issues, passing, trans issues

09/18/2011

Guest Post Up!

Just in case the 5 of you who actually subscribe to this blog missed it: I had a guest post up at Sociological Images this Saturday:  Media Depiction of  Trans People. It’s a pretty standard overview of media framing of trans bodies, but I do hope it is included in the curriculum they’re developing based on the blog.

Check it out!

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09/16/2011

Review: Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites

(I should note, in reviewing this book, that’s I’m speaking both as a person engaged both academically and politically with the texts Elliot studies, and this entry reflects that.)

In Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory: Contested Sites, author Patricia Eliott has taken on a fairly monumental task: “explore [the] rifts [throughout queer, feminist and trans studies], not in order to mend them…but in order to foster a better appreciation for the complexity, heterogeneity, and political diversity that exists” (3).

In particular, she focuses in on five hearty perennials: the role of trans women in the category “woman” as seen through the lens of the Kimberly Nixon case, the transgender/transsexual rift, the value of intelligibility, the comparability of trans and non-trans embodiment(s), and the question of “natural diversity.” However, her analysis reaches beyond these individual debates to encompass many of the ancillary issues that crop up throughout trans* studies. Continue reading →

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08/26/2011

A personal reflection

I am, at the moment, procrastinating; if I were being properly productive, I would be hip-deep in research, watching long stretches of vlogs while taking notes, coding for specific content and comments.

However, I and my subjects are currently “seeing other people” (at least in my mind). No unethical contact (fucking or otherwise) is going on, but there are days where it certainly feels like it. My advisor describes ethnographic field work as “attentive hanging out,” but sitting with vloggers for (in some cases) hours on end feels more like an endless string of terrible dates with someone who can’t stop talking about themselves. Continue reading →

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07/23/2011

Write Your Representative: The Trans* Self on Film, Part 2

Screenshot from vlogger Dominic Scaia's vlog "Shirtless at 2 and a half weeks."

As I noted at the end of Part 1, key to the idea of broadcast television networks as harbringers of minority acceptance was the belief in the power of networks to reach a mass audience and articulate a “legible” (U.S.) nation. Yet this belief proved increasingly facile, as audiences proved far more “active” media consumers. So new technologies ideally would come to take the place of broadcast networks as the medium for creating new social relations.

YouTube, with its mixed model of content delivery and social networking, fits the bill of these “new” technologies, confounding the more traditional broadcast television model. Not that YouTube hasn’t taken pains to draw the connection for users between their service and broadcast networks: up until some point in 2009 YouTube’s slogan (referenced in many an academic article) was “Broadcast Yourself.” It implied that you, yes you, could be just like a broadcast network, reaching thousands—or millions in the case of a lucky few—every minute. Continue reading →

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Filed under passing, research, SNS, transgender, vlogs, youth

07/01/2011

Write Your Representative: The Trans* Self on Film, Part 1

Bono with Becoming Chaz's directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.

(I feel like I should have a disclaimer on each post that my titles will inevitably be unselfconsciously pretentious, because I myself am so in real life. Makes me primed to be great at academic writing, though.)

During the media press junket prior to the release of Becoming Chaz, I joked that when I inevitably watched it, I’d have to resist from playing the Trans Documentary Drinking Game, lest I get alcohol poisoning.[1] While I sincerely wanted Bono to pull off something different (my standard for the best “trans” documentary being the fantastic STILL BLACK), my hopes weren’t high. And though I admit it was a bit presumptive on my part, turns out I shouldn’t have had hopes at all.

For a viewer versed in the Way of the Trans Documentary, Becoming Chaz is neither new nor revelatory. Sebastian’s review at Autostraddle encapsulates the documentary’s key problem in his title: “About a Boy or About a Body?” The camera fixates on Bono’s body, viewing it as the ultimate exteriorization of his internal self—a supposed perfect model of inverse Cartesian dualism on display. And on a private trans-focused community I belong to, the response was equally lukewarm. Such mixed feelings-to-downright negativity prompted a member ask an important question, one that (seemingly) inevitably accompanies the release of trans* memoirs and documentaries: “What is it about all of the public transmen that doesn’t represent your experience?” Members offered many different responses, all of them equally valid.

Continue reading →

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Filed under media issues, research, trans issues, vlogs

06/29/2011

Queers With Beers Ep #2 Now Out!

This month’s topics: parsing community-specific language, in this case cisgender/cissexual, and the tircks/tropes of giant robot anime.

Listen to the episode, and if you like it enough, head over to Facebook and click on that like button.

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Filed under podcast

05/28/2011

Building a Vlogger Network on YouTube: A Visualization

One of the problems I’ve run across in working with YouTube is that its social network elements are tied us with its primary function as a platform for user-generate content (UGC). This content is also primarily user-filtered, based around the idea of “tags.” Presumably, a YouTube user “subscribes” to another’s videos because of the content.

On YouTube, unlike other social network sites (SNS), participants aren’t always “primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network” (boyd and Ellison). Especially in the case of a special identity-oriented community as trans people are, users are specifically seeking (in some cases) “latent ties” based on an offline connection. These ties are what allow transmale vloggers to call their connections a “community,” even though they’re really a small network within a larger networked public.

However, before I embarked on my critical reading of vlogs, I wanted to get a sense of what this network might look like – so I did.

Continue reading →

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Filed under research, SNS, technology, transgender, visualization, vlogs