Eric Chambers’ dissertation work analyzes a gay men’s message board dedicated to the practice of gay male erotic hypnosis and BDSM. Participants join the message board in order to enter a relationship with a “coach”, get “tranced” so as to become a “dumb jock”. The coach is a “dominant” in BDSM parlance and the jock is the “submissive.” Eric’s work explores how these men enact their new found “dumb jock” selves through a set of non-standard orthographic and syntactic practices. He analyzes his data using (inter alia) Critical Discourse Analytic methods, (Fairclough 2012), focusing on the micro, meso, and macro levels.
Please post 1-2 questions for Eric here.
I’m interested in hearing about how you approach your analysis. The example you present on page 42 is fascinating because it shows a clear and chronological shift in identity performance by the user. Were there many examples of such clear shifts? If not, how do you decide whether the orthography of the posts is a performance of identity, a typo, or a colloquial way of writing that online platforms lend themselves to?
What kind of information do you have on the identities of the users of the message board? I suspect that contextualizing the analysis within the social, economic, and political identities of the users could affect the way we think about their language use on the message board.