Fursonas : furries, community, and identity online

The furry fandom is a loose-knit online subculture of fans devoted to anthropomorphic animal characters. Furries are not necessarily fans of specific media properties, but instead often create their own media, including the "fursona," an anthropomorphic animal character to represent oneself in the community. Conducting empirical research through interviews, participant observation, auto ethnography, and virtual ethnography, I have sought to understand this aspect of furry identity and sociality through a number of disciplinary lenses. In this thesis, I argue that furry queers fandom through several interrelated processes: severing fandom from textual objects; developing queer sex publics; paving new pathways to queer becoming; and displacing online identity through stylized, affective modes of embodiment. These fan practices, as articulated through the fursona, cohere into a queer worlding of virtual spaces.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Comparative Media Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Silverman, Ben(Benjamin Luke Matanos)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ian Condry.

• Comparative Media Studies.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127662

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127662