The Queer Sisters and its Electronic Bulletin Board

Queering Internet Studies: Intersections of Gender and Sexuality

“…Internet-mediated spaces have strengthened opportunities for making resistance possible globally as well as locally, and increased marginalized groups' access to the traditionally restricted public sphere (Harcourt, 1999;Mitra, 2001;Mele, 1999;Shade, 2002). Countercultural Internet-mediated groups have appeared to represent unique arenas for creating networks, solidarity, and community (Wakeford, 1996;Corell, 1995;Nip, 2004). For many people, experiencing recognition and community on non-normative grounds is not possible in their local community offline.…”

“…(Heinz et al, 2002), and there are also various intersections between local queer community online and offline. For example, Nip (2004) describes the close relations of online and offline discourses of gender, sexuality, and identity in a local Hong Kong group online, and its community-strengthening functions offline.…”

“…At its worst, conflicting views end up in frustrated and destructive debates leading to exclusion and harassment of male-to-female transsexual and transgendered participants (Bromseth, 2007). Both Nip (2004) and Bromseth (2007) have shown how ideological differences have affected the sense of community within lesbian/queer groups, where understandings of gender, identity, and sexuality have been important boundary objects. Who are part of the "us" and who are part of the "them" is certainly a constant negotiation where discourses and ideas of gender, sexuality, and embodiment contribute to shaping the grounds for community and the frames for interpreting social practices, as the introductory scene suggests.…”

“…From a selection of 4000 webpages Halavais found that webpages are more likely to link to another site hosted in the same country than to cross national borders, and if they do cross borders, they are more likely to lead to pages hosted in the United States than to anywhere else in the world. 22 See also Berry and Martin, 2002;Nip, 2004;Bromseth, 2006a, who all look at communities targeting a queer audience in national cultural contexts. Other examples include national net-dating sites in Western countries (see Sommer, 2003).…”

Mixed Methods and Multimodal Research and Internet Technologies

“…One might study an online community for example, through a mixture of approaches including observation, interviews online or offline, and online surveys (as in the studies by Williams et al (2006) and Nip (2004b;2004a) described by Hesse-Biber and Griffin (2013)) and still be relatively straightforwardly able to claim that one was studying the same community. Temporal fluctuations in the membership of the community and sampling issues can however mean that the research object is not completely the same as viewed through each approach.…”