1 Introduction
This dissertation is about how community happens. Structural features – the social density of interactions, the physical density of proximity, the presence and abundance of others with shared group characteristics – create the conditions for the existence of a community. These social features are so essential for community to be perceived and real and as a meso-level social fact that they can be considered part of the definition of the phenomenon.
How individuals outwardly express and subjectively experience community relates to those structural features, and depends on what groups and social identity categories they are members of at all. There are two hypotheses for how the relationship between those aspects of community could play out. First, structural and contextual characteristics could be co-constitutive with expressive and subjective ones, a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Members of a group who are the most deeply structurally integrated into a group context simultaneously express the greatest subjective investment in it. Alternatively, expressions of community might substitute or stand in for the structural elements that promote togetherness and belonging. For the most embedded group members, community becomes relegated to the background and taken for granted (Zerubavel 2018). In this phenomenon of “ambient community” (Brown-Saracino 2017), while individuals may still have rich social ties, they do not experience or express a sense of community corresponding to their structural integration.
This tension is especially relevant for communities organized around marginalized and minoritized identity categories, like LGBTQ identities. The experience of being an outsider, of not being able to take acceptance and belonging for granted in communities of origin, pushes LGBTQ individuals to seek out community in subcultural, identity-based contexts. At the same time, the preestablished existence of queer spaces and queer collectivities affords opportunities to belong and serves as a positive draw, an attractive force. These push and pull factors do not necessarily coincide in the same places or at the same times, raising the question of which matters more for creating individual experiences of community. The first hypothesis emphasizes the positive draw of community, implying that community is most relevant and most expressed for those who structurally have the most access to it. The competing hypothesis emphasizes the negative force of outsiderness, implying heightened salience for community in contexts of stigma, marginalization, scarcity, and lack of access.
1.1 Conceptual background
Community itself is a meso-level social entity that comes into existence through the overlap of social interactional density and shared cultural commonalities – where culture is a broad umbrella encompassing moral values (Tavory 2016; Vaisey 2007), group discursive styles (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003), and embodied habitus and practices (Lizardo 2017; Orne 2017). What distinguishes community from other similar social phenomena (e.g., “group,” “organization,” or even “society”) is a sense of unity or togetherness, of sharing something in common. Community in this specific sociological sense is also called Gemeinschaft (Brint 2001; Tönnies [1887] 2001), a term I will use to emphasize its distinctive social features.
One of those potential commonalities is a shared social identity. Identities are categorical divisions that can be cognitively and socially salient or can be relegated to the background (Blau 1977; White [1965] 2008; Zerubavel 2018). To be a focal point for community-building, identities must become salient rather than ambient; this may be aided by expressive features that reflect identity such as language and group style (Bourdieu 1991; Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). For identity to be available to individuals as an opportunity for community and belonging, a sufficient number of others belonging to the identity category must be present, visible, and recognized; this is where contextual features like demographics might come into play.
Identity is not the only organizing principle for community. Shared activities, especially when understood as ritual or other meaningful practices (Brint 2001; Collins 2004; Orne 2017), further develop community and belonging. This might occur in conjunction with shared identity or in lieu of it.
Shared place provides a third focal point for organizing community. Place continues to matter for community-building even as virtual communities have come into existence and grown in prominence (Rheingold 2000). Place, as generally understood in the discipline of geography and in spatial sociology, is meaningful space; place is what happens when a physical and material geographic location is invested with meaning and value (Gieryn 2000). Togetherness in place provides another structural opportunity for interaction and for developing a shared sense of unity in the process. A space becomes place through that collective meaning-making process, and itself becomes an object of attachment (Cross 2015). Shared identity, shared activities, shared place – each of these focal features becomes a vehicle for belonging when it is imbued with meaning.
The question, however, is meaning for whom? In a literal, mundane sense, every individual who shows up and participates is a member of a community. But community is not always internally recognized or conscious, nor always outwardly expressed. Structural integration could straightforwardly be reflected in the behavior and subjectivity of core community members. Alternatively, those who struggle to belong for structural reasons might invest the most in subjective or expressive dimensions of community, while those who are well-integrated take community for granted.
1.2 The case
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other (LGBTQ) sexual and gender minority individuals experience a structural struggle for belonging. In general, they cannot presume acceptance of their identities in communities of origin (Orne 2011, 2013), and they do not automatically have access to queer spaces and communities. At the same time, their individual experiences are varied rather than uniform: greater or lesser acceptance, greater or lesser access. Because of this, recent historical and contemporary LGBTQ communities provide an interesting set of cases to draw on in order to investigate the tension in the expression of community that I outlined above.
The historical emergence of queer spaces and the communities that inhabit them was fraught with challenges (Bérubé 2011; D’Emilio 1992); their continued existence is contingent and fragile (Ghaziani 2014; Orne 2017). But enough people evidently desire those communities to bring them in into existence and allow them to persist – at first, in spite of stigma and oppression, and still, in spite of normative and assimilatory pressures. Even today, many LGBTQ people want distinctive spaces in which to build queer community and culture (Pew Research Center 2013).
LGBTQ identities are often strongly held and offer a strong basis for possible community formation. LGBTQ identity shapes attitudes toward sexuality, but also beliefs and values more broadly (Schnabel 2018). LGBTQ identities are potentially encompassing enough to constitute a subculture (Fischer 1975; Mattson 2015a) or a counterpublic (Berlant and Warner 1998), leading theorists to write about “gay culture” (Halperin 2012) or a “way of life” (Foucault 1998). Structurally speaking, the mere fact that gay/queer/LGBTQ community exists as a possible object of attachment and source of belonging is itself noteworthy; the identity itself structurally and cognitively provides a potential axis of belonging that is not otherwise available. By contrast, the unmarked category of “heterosexual” is not available as a source of community in the same way – referring, for instance, to “members of the heterosexual community” is nonsensical (Zerubavel 2018), even if many communities do have heteronormativity and heterosexuality as defining or central traits (Eliasoph 1998).
One unique feature of LGBTQ communities is a lack of rootedness, which shapes queer life trajectories: for the most part, LGBTQ people are not born into and do not grow up in queer communities and queer spaces (Weston 1995). This is one reason that the existence and experience of queer community is not something LGBTQ people can necessarily take for granted. Because the potential need for community is visible and salient in LGBTQ contexts, surveys targeted toward LGBTQ people ask about community in detailed and explicit ways, where more general surveys often do not (Meyer 2020). Similarly, this is why some LGBTQ people have sought out virtual communities since those spaces first came into being (Auerbach 2014; Rheingold 2000). Of course, this does not mean that all LGBTQ people experience the salience of community to the same degree. But because queer community is only taken for granted in unusually accepting contexts (Brown-Saracino 2017), it makes an ideal case for observing explicit processes of community.
Queer communities are marked by their diversity and fluidity, by a proliferation of identities, expressions, practices, and ways of being. Due to processes of social sorting, this variation is not observable everywhere; some particular LGBTQ groups and spaces are more homogeneous and exclusionary, some more diverse and welcoming. Regardless, anarchic, chaotic variation is a defining feature of the overarching LGBTQ community as a whole (Brekhus 2003; Brown-Saracino 2017; Lichterman 1999; Mattson 2015b; Orne 2017). At the extreme, some queer theorists, like Berlant and Warner (1998), engage in a theoretical refusal of community and identity and deny that ephemeral and fluid “queer counterpublics” can entail community at all; some queer sociologists disagree and argue that in some ways these liminal queer spaces are the most powerful sites of community-building (Orne 2017). In this work, I will not presume but rather seriously investigate the possibility of community being central for LGBTQ people in their everyday lives.
1.3 Methodology
To study LGBTQ expressions of community, I adopt a quantitative and computational approach. This is an innovation and a departure from most research on the topic, which is qualitative and ethnographic (e.g., Baldor 2019; Brown-Saracino 2017; Orne 2017; Winer 2022). I complement and extend that deeply grounded work by offering breadth and scale instead. Statistical methods are well-suited for uncovering patterns in the relationships between structural features like place demographics and interaction network structures and expressed or reported community-oriented outcomes. Computational text analysis methods extend the reach of quantitative methods and bring them closer to the insights derived from qualitative work Nelson (2021); they are especially well-suited for measuring and operationalizing culture and meaning (Arseniev-Koehler and Foster 2022; Mohr et al. 2020). One limitation of these methods is that they are better suited for studying identity and linguistic expressions, rather than activities and embodied practices. The latter are also an essential element of group culture that contributes to community formation (Lizardo 2017; Orne 2017), and this methodological limitation does not diminish their importance. To ensure that my results are robust, I leverage variation and comparison across contexts, triangulating across different cases to build a more complete picture of what features lead to strong experiences of LGBTQ community.
1.4 Plan of the work
In Chapter 2, I examine the question of whether, when LGBTQ people talk about community, what they mean invokes a gemeinschaftliche, belonging- and social organization-oriented sense of the concept to a greater extent than in more general and generic contexts. As a site, I use the the first example of an LGBTQ virtual community, founded in 1983, a Usenet group called soc.motss (Auerbach 2014); the data are the text of individual messages sent to the group, from the late 1990s through the 2000s. For a comparative baseline, I use a pre-trained model based on generic Internet text. In a self-selected virtual community based on LGBTQ identity, if community itself is salient as a topic, then members will visibly talk about community as Gemeinschaft. If community is backgrounded and ambient, other senses of the word will be more evident.
In Chapter 3, I ask whether dense places full of LGBTQ people (and institutions) facilitate a greater sense of connection to the LGBTQ community. Or, conversely, are those exactly the places where LGBTQ community fades into the background? I use a representative survey of cohorts of LGBQ people from the contemporary United States (2017-2018), the Generations study (Meyer 2020), with demographic information and survey question responses measuring community connectedness. I geographically link these responses to American Community Survey data on zip code and metropolitan characteristics. This chapter addresses the core question head-on through the association between spatial context and self-reported experiences of community and belonging, asking whether those are positively associated and complementary or inversely associated and substitutive.
In Chapter 4, I look at whether, in virtual communities organized around LGBTQ identities, core or peripheral members engage in more talk about community. I analyze Reddit conversations from 11 LGBTQ-themed subreddits from their founding (earliest 2008) through to 2018 (Chang et al. 2020). Reddit is a topic and group based social media platform, so it emphasizes “community” to a greater degree than many such contemporary platforms. This data structure has the text of top-level posts and all comments; importantly, it identifies which individuals are making those comments and who, exactly, they are replying to in the thread of a conversation. More central members of a group could either engage in a lot of expressive community talk, or they could take it for granted; whereas peripheral members’ marginal status could be reflected in an absence of community-oriented language, or they could performatively create their own sense of group belonging through the language they use in conversation.
To conclude, in Chapter 5, I assess the joint contributions of these three empirical projects. I draw on my empirical findings to anticipate and imagine the possible future trajectories of LGBTQ communities.