Twitter and the Furry Public

Posted onAuthorJayde Rice4 Comments

Reflection.

I’ll try to make this short, because my draft (attached) is long enough on its own.  More on that, below.

I chose to write about the topic of the furry public/counterpublic, because, simply enough, I’m a furry. I have been for years, and it’s always been a source of some stigma. I’ve attended a single convention, I maintain an anonymous digital presence under an assumed name, and four of my five most serious relationships — my current fiance included — have all been members of this particular counterpublic, as well.  But recently, I’ve noticed that the stigma has been receding. Non-furries are casually, jokingly, adopting “fursonas,” in sometimes ways that seem mocking, but often in ways that do not. A furry tweet was read aloud on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Halloween ’17 saw a furry, in full fursuit, wandering the ECU campus. Furry artifacts bleed into other spaces frequently. And amidst it all, no one seems to care or be bothered by it, anymore. No cruel jokes or accusations of perversion and bestiality. It’s just kind of, accepted or ignored. The stigma seems to be fading.  So for my various projects and dissertation, I’ve decided to look at the discourses, rhetorics, and literacies surrounding this phenomenon.  And for this course specifically, I chose to look at furry literacies on Twitter.

Now. When it comes to my current draft of this paper, I’m struggling in one major area, which is also the only question I have for anyone who has the time to read it. It. Is. Long. I was supposed to have at least 10 pages ready today, right?  Well I have 19.  And those 19 pages are ONLY about my methods and data. I have only hinted at any analysis, the core of which is still to come, and there is absolutley no Lit review included. I assume I can handle both of those sections together, in less than 10 pages, total, but that would still put me upwards of five pages over the max-25 goal.

So: what can I cut out?  What is unneeded?  What have I elaborated or gone into too much detail on?  How can I shorten this?

~

Draft

CLICK HERE

4 thoughts on “Twitter and the Furry Public”

  1. Hey Jayde,

    I’ve put comments on the draft, but I was trying something new. I used the comment feature right on the Google Drive screen that I was provided. I don’t know how to explain it. It was different than looking at the document in the normal word processing screen. It was a dark screen like Google Drive usually sends me to for downloading images or viewing videos. I am afraid to close the window without knowing whether you can see my comments or not! Please check it when you can and see if you can see the comments from my Gmail account. My profile picture there is an outfit picture with a purple bow tie, but you can’t see my face. I’m not sure if you’ll see that or my name. Let me know!

    I provided a few ideas for shortening the essay in my comments, but I’ll also try to think of more ideas and post them here tomorrow in response to your memo. I was a little silly in the comments sometimes, but it was purely out of love. I hope you don’t mind.

     

  2. Hi, Jayde.

    I find what you’ve written to be very interesting, and I also think that you’ve this works well as a research project.

    To your question about your length: One thing I would consider is just focusing on 1 of the questions your broached in your first paragraph. Even though the questions all overlap, what you actually have are 3 research questions which amounts to 3 research projects, potentially.

    I also agree w/Kelsey’s suggestion regarding the inclusion of more charts. Even though it was interesting, the Methods section started feeling a bit heavy because there was so much information dedicated to how you completed the process. As a reader I was certainly interested in how you completed this process, but I was more interested in finding out what happened (the Results and Discussion sections). Is there a way you can look at each of those Methods sections and consolidate each section into a single? Then your Methods section would still be thorough and include your main ideas, but it would be more concise.

    I hope this helps.

    Alicia

  3. I learned a lot from reading your draft — I know nothing about furries beyond the most rudimentary idea of humans who dress up and/or play as animals — and I’m not even sure that’s right/accurate. There’s a lot of information around literacies/literacy practices hinted at in your paper, but so much of what’s here, as I note in my marginal comments, seems not to be about identifying literacies/literacy practices so much as your already knowing what those things are and then seeing how many of the furries you researched use them as part of their usernames/identifiers on Twitter.
    One thing that is confusing to me is why you have used a second researcher to do the research. I understand the idea behind your choice — you thought that having someone else do the work would decrease your own researcher bias, but now all of your data is based in this other person’s biases — how did that decrease bias? And what sort of biases were you trying to decrease? If your point here is to study furry literacies and to take an ethnographic approach, and you’re identifying as a furry, then why not just make the determinations yourself and explain how you made them? By engaging another person as a co-researcher, you’re getting into some really awkward territory in terms of research ethics and IRB. This moves beyond simply looking at public texts, for example, and involving another human being who is doing work on the project. In categorization, you “validate” the data on your own, I end up really confused why you didn’t just do the work yourself and cut out lucentorb.
    Ultimately, I was left wanting to know what the literacies/literacy practices are, those things you seem to know already and then use to explain how the Twitter users enacted them in their visuals and naming conventions. This project seems like more something for your discourse analysis course than for our course, where you project is to identify or examine literacies/literacy practices. Why did you dismiss your own knowledge as a basis for showcasing those literacy practices?

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