2014-2015 Magic Grantees Jessa Lingel and Adam Golub have just published a paper from the Bushwig project. “In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn’s Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication” appears in the June issue of The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and is likely the first paper published on how drag performers use social media. Here is their abstract.
Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self-promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyn’s drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities.
The full article is available from the journal site (you might need a subscription to view the articles in this journal). Congratulations to Jessa and Adam!