Expressions of Community:
Understanding Variations in Community through LGBTQ Experiences
Structural features – social density of interactions, physical density of proximity, abundance of others with shared group characteristics – create the conditions for the existence of a community. How individuals outwardly express and subjectively experience community relates to those structural features. This dissertation investigates and compares two hypotheses about that relationship. First, structural and contextual characteristics could be co-constitutive with expressive and subjective ones, a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Alternatively, expressions of community might substitute or stand in for the structural elements that promote togetherness and belonging. The tension between these possibilities is especially relevant for members of marginalized and minoritized identity categories, like LGBTQ identities, who cannot take acceptance and belonging for granted. To investigate this theoretical tension, I triangulate across three quantitative and computational case studies of LGBTQ communities. In the first empirical chapter, I use text from an early LGBTQ virtual community to examine whether, when LGBTQ people talk about community, what they mean invokes a belonging- and social organization-oriented sense of the concept to a greater extent than in more general contexts. I show that discourse in the soc.motss Usenet group uses “community” in the sense of Gemeinschaft to at least an equal extent as generic English-language text. In the second chapter, I ask whether dense places full of LGBTQ people facilitate a greater sense of connection to the LGBTQ community, or whether community becomes ambient in those contexts. I find that small-area abundance of same-sex couples, and to a lesser extent overall density, is associated with greater sense of community connectedness for LGBQ people. In the third chapter, I look at whether, in virtual communities organized around LGBTQ identities, core or peripheral members engage in more talk about community. I show significant heterogeneity in the relationship between interaction network centrality and expressions of community talk in a set of 11 LGBTQ groups on Reddit, a contemporary virtual platform. Overall, this work connects contextual features to how LGBTQ individuals outwardly express and subjectively experience community, through their language, group participation, and self-reports of belonging. Across the work, I find that experiences of community are most intense and expressions of community most frequent, not for peripheral members of LGBTQ communities but for the most central. Something beyond stigma animates the attractive force of community for LGBTQ people.
Acknowledgments
This dissertation owes a great deal to many, many people. No one can do a PhD alone. First, I would like to thank my advisor and chair, Kate Stovel, for years of intellectual conversations and support, and especially for motivation during the final sprint to the end. I would like to thank Jelani Ince for his encouragement and willingness to jump in so soon after joining the UW sociology department, which is extraordinarily lucky to have him. I am grateful to Kyle Crowder for his generous feedback, always pushing me toward greater conceptual and theoretical clarity. I thank Mako Hill for being an enthusiastic Graduate School Representative and for graciously inviting me to participate alongside the Community Data Science Collective on occasion. It’s always powerful and meaningful to see intellectual community in action.
The various chapters of this dissertation benefited from varied and diverse intellectual support. For Chapter 2, I thank Avery Dame-Griff for sharing code and advice for working with Usenet archives, and Steve Goodreau for the suggestion to look more closely at soc.motss. Previous versions of Chapter 2 also received generous feedback from the Community Data Science Collective and the Metaphors and Meaning roundtable at ASA 2021. I thank Greggor Mattson for reading Chapter 3 and providing much-needed encouragement at a crucial moment, and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, especially Kelly Ogden-Schuette, for facilitating access to geocoded survey data. I also thank Mahesh Somashekhar for inviting me to present Chapter 3 on the Queer Placemaking panel at ASA 2022. For Chapter 4, I thank Nate TeBlunthuis and Ian Kennedy for technical and theoretical advice on how to work with Reddit data and make thoughtful use of word embeddings. Throughout, the TechnoSoc writing group provided a valuable virtual space for focusing on this work.
Personally, I thank my mom, for being the strongest person I know; my dad, for always being there to pick up the phone and chat; and my sister, for fighting to make our hometown a more vibrant, colorful place.
Lastly, I would not have made it this far without support from queer communities here in Seattle. Thank you, to all of you. To Lincoln, Kyle, Kai, and the rest of the queers of the Hill, for showing me what real community can feel like. To Kince, for your tireless work building community for Seattle Gaymers and beyond. To Maarten and Oliver, for your support from afar. To Nick, for more than a decade of friendship. To S&B, for making my life more interesting when you were a part of it. And finally, to Jason, for long walks with the dog and unrepayable debts.