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This article provides an overview of emerging research into the concept of deviant identity by highlighting major new directions in cyber‐deviance scholarship. We suggest that the examination of deviance in online settings offers unique new insights into the processes of identity construction and reinforcement, role play, and the social organization of deviant communities. We conclude by considering developments that may advance the literature on deviant identity in real world spaces, as well as expand the conceptual utility of deviance for other subareas of sociology.

Regulation plays a key role in the construction of sexuality. Given the extent to which new forms of communication technology have had a liberating effect on the production of new discourses emanating from historically marginalized sexual communities, this study examines how zoosexuals active in an online community work to construct, assert and manage their sex-based identities, situate their sexual practices, attempt to resolve ethical dilemmas, as well as moderate and sanction dissidents for the greater civility of zoosexual discourse. We conclude by further considering the complications inherent in accomplishing these interactive tasks in a virtual space.

In this article we engage the nature and role of the Internet in ethnographic research and reflect on how ethnographic methodologies may be adapted when researching digital forms of communication. We further consider how recent shifts in both the production and dissemination of textual discourse in networked media environments complicates conventional approaches to digital ethnography. Drawing on examples from our field research, our principal objective is to apply a Foucauldian structural perspective to David Altheide’s ethnographic content analysis to better contextualize the study of digital communiqué in a cultural moment where discourses are increasingly surveilled, modified, censored and weaponized.

This study examines contemporary crime and punishment discourse in mass media to better understand the institutionalization of hyperpunitive sanctions as acceptable forms of social control. Our principal focus is on gonzo rhetoric, or the discourse and symbolism used to promote and justify exaggerated acts of punishment. Using a content analysis of 136 broadcast transcripts, we examine the rhetorical techniques employed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, of Maricopa County, Arizona, in order to show how this brand of ''crime talk'' has become a central component of modern crime control culture. We suggest that the appeal of gonzo rhetoric is rooted in longstanding cultural assumptions about crime and disorder.