Online fandom communities as networked counterpublics: LGBTQ+ youths’ perceptions of representation and community climate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Online fandom communities (OFCs) provide lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and/or gender minority (LGBTQ+) youth opportunities to access community-generated LGBTQ+ representations—contrasting mass media’s continued deficiencies in depiction of LGBTQ+ people and communities. This study sought to better understand LGBTQ+ adolescents’ and young adults’ (age 14–29) perceptions of OFCs regarding LGBTQ+ representation and community climate. Qualitative content analysis was employed to analyze open-ended survey questions from respondents in the United States and Canada ( n = 3665). Three primary themes emerged: (1) LGBTQ+ mass media narratives remained insufficient but were improving; (2) counternarratives produced within OFCs were even better; however, (3) the climate of OFCs created challenges and limitations, including to the quantity and quality of depictions of diverse LGBTQ+ identities. Findings indicate OFCs may take on simultaneous qualities of networked publics and counterpublics, allowing youth opportunities to contest LGBTQ+ mass media depictions and problematic representations within OFCs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".