![[ Visit Client Website ]](images/banner.gif)
In a rapidly developing media landscape, virtually all young people in North America are online. A significant minority also post their own creative content, including artwork and audio/video clips. LGBTQ young people may be particularly engaged and active users. While online media undeniably poses significant risks to LGBTQ youth, it also provides critical opportunities for young people to develop relationships, acquire health information, build community, and access resources and services.
Creative forms of online media are increasingly influential. ‘Fandom’ refers to vibrant digital communities composed of fans of various media (e.g., television, books, movies), many of whom produce and/or consume ‘fanwork’ or materials created by fans based upon characters, plotlines, and/or settings of those media (e.g., stories, art, multi-media). For LGBTQ fans, ambiguity in media provides opportunities to integrate, increase, and/or elaborate upon LGBTQ representation, allowing individuals to appropriate and creatively reinterpret existing media to create narratives more representative of their own experience than they can find in offline media. ‘Slash’ genre fanwork depicts romantic and/or sexual same-sex characters and relationships. Although many – or perhaps even the majority of – producers and consumers of slash fanwork identify as members of the LGBTQ community, little research has explored the importance of these communities for social work research and practice. This is despite burgeoning attention in a number of other disciplines.
This paper discusses a study undertaken in Toronto, Canada on online media participation by LGBTQ young people, focusing particularly on participants’ experiences of fandom and its impact on their identity development, community engagement, and psycho-social well-being. Experiences which have significant implications for social work practice with the population.
Methods:
The study utilized an in-depth, grounded theory strategy to provide complex depictions of participants’ experiences. Semi-structured interviews of 1–3 hours in length were undertaken with LGBTQ participants (n=19, age 18—22) drawn from local organizations serving the population. Each interview was coded a minimum of three times by independent coders. Open and axial coding of categories led to the identification concepts, the development of categories, and finally synthesis into themes. To encourage rigor, trustworthiness measures were employed.
Results:
Analysis found that fandom was an important developmental environment for participants, as it permitted them to (1) explore their sexual and gender identities and desires through their fandom participation and fanwork production and/or consumption. This participation also (2) facilitated their coping and resilience through challenging stereotypical mainstream media representations by producing more inclusive, diverse, and reflexive representations. Finally, participants were able to (3) build personal networks of support and (4) engage in larger LGBTQ-inclusive communities through their fandom engagement.
Conclusions and Implications:
As media becomes increasingly important to social work research and practice with young people, understanding fandom and related activities may help facilitate safe online engagement, foster the working relationship, detect areas of clinical concern, identify sources of support and individual strengths, and open opportunities for creative self-expression and exploration. Strategies for investigating media and fandom participation with youth, and incorporating fandom into practice settings, will be discussed.