Aside from the prologue and introduction, I focused my time with this book on Chapter 4, to see how Pritchard went about doing a “webnographic” study. It seems that some of his normal interview participants mentioned various platforms/websites they visited or used to visit and their experiences with them as Black LGBTQ+ people. Then, Pritchard made accounts on some of them himself to look around, participate in chat rooms, talk to people, and get a sense of the community/vibe of that website.
This reminds me of chapters in (Re)Orienting Writing Studies and the Bisexuality Reader by Meryl Storr (I think that’s right)— in the first, Michael J. Faris does a study of Grindr culture that addresses most of the same racist and fatphobic issues, and in the second, the author talks about early chat rooms and gender performance. Even though everything was text based so everyone could pretend to be whoever/whatever they wanted, there were still a lot of social prejudices and norms imposed on people. For example, in one chat room where a third gender option was available, the author found that many people tried to find out what gender they were “really.”
This chapter also reminded me that it’s okay for a chapter to be its own contained or semi-contained discussion. So, theoretically, I could do multiple mini-studies in different areas around the same research questions.