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The X Files On The Ddebrp By Rhiannon Bury

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In her first chapter ‘Feminine Pleasures, Masculine Texts: Reading The X-Files on the DDEBRP’, Rhiannon Bury examines the interpretations of television show The X-Files and also its actors among a female-centric private forum group. As an observation of a virtual space, there is a hybridity of speech and text (Turkle 1995, Mckee and Porter 2008, Hine 2000) that gives the methodology an ethnographic approach but with a textual focus. Using discussion threads and texts posts, which are backed up with data gathered from questionnaires and e-interviews, she focuses on performances of both normative and feminist heterosexual female identities in the context of how collective meaning is negotiated and produced out of the television show. Due to …show more content…

One is that Bury’s interest in online spaces and social practices resulted in a more involved ethnographic methodology. Though it might seem strange, it is argued that the interactivity of discussion groups and the conceptualisation of cyberspaces as social spaces makes them ethnographic field sites (Escobar 1996; Hine 2000). Instead of just gathering found data, Bury made a private list discussion group and jointly observed and participated in their forum for a year. She further supplemented this data with questionnaires and e-interviews, which are methods often noted for complimenting ethnographic research (Hansen and Machin 2013: 60; Hammond and Wellington 62). I believe such a mixed methods approach is understandable, and practical, as her research was initially for a doctoral degree, and then to be published as a book. Both cases require sufficiently large data to analyse.

Additionally, there are strengths in ethnographic research that I think better her research. One is that questionnaires (included in appendix of book) allowed for a greater context of her participants. Above all, Bury knew the community she was monitoring was not just dominantly but completely white middle class (21). Though not the focus of her first chapter, she develops her analysis to include bourgeois aesthetics, and (somewhat) white and middle-class femininity. Overall, it might also point to a limitation; a rich study of one fan identity but lack of broad perspective which could

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