Negotiating identities in the furry fandom through costuming

Satinsky, Emily N.; Green, Denise Nicole

doi:10.1386/csmf.3.2.107_1

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In the same way, versions of gender can gain some community traction, and turn into larger and more intelligible scripts by virtue of being adopted by multiple people to communicate with one another. Because individuals are exposed to a variety of sub-communities, and must negotiate gender in contact with them, our concepts of gender grow just as though they were physical communities (Satinsky and Green, 2016 ; Scaptura and Boyle, 2020 ).…”

Section: The Fluidity Of the Gender Scriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

Albarracin

Poirier

2022

Front. Psychol.

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This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability to humans because of physical-structural properties of handles and the anatomical-physiological properties of humans. Although humans live in fields of bodily, action, and cultural affordances, our work focuses on cultural affordances, where action possibilities are offered to individuals because of the normative responses of individuals in that culture. Knocking on a door affords entrance because knocking provides cultured individuals on the other side of the door an affordance to which they themselves behave normatively. Usually, behaving normatively in response to cultural affordances brings about sequences of perception-action loops, which we will call “scripts”: for instance, closed doors afford knocking, which affords the individual inside opening the door, which affords an interpersonal meeting, which (may) afford entrance. Although the notion of script has a strong cognitivist flavor, one of the aims of the paper to provide an ecological account of scripts, to show that what cognitivists viewed as representations (or representational structures) are in fact environmentally structured perception-action loops. On our account of gender, gendered cultures build and maintain gendered cultural affordance landscapes, that is, landscapes in which the action possibilities individuals face are normed according to a specific body type or situation; most often (assigned) biological sex. Individuals enact a given gender when they come to perceive the affordances reserved for one gender by their culture and respond in the culturally normative way, thus enacting gendered sequences of perception-action loops (i.e., gendered scripts). With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by several recent social, technological, and epistemic developments in some cultures, the gendered landscapes of affordances offered to individuals in these cultures have become more varied and less rigid, thus increasing the variety and flexibility of scripts individuals can enact. This entails that individuals in such cultures have an increased possibility for gender fluidity, which may in part explain the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

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Section: The Fluidity Of the Gender Scriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

Albarracin

Poirier

2022

Front. Psychol.

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“…Considering furries as a homogenous group with members sharing characteristics consistently [8], IARP has paid attention to furry identity, stigmatization, anthropomorphism, etc., from the perspective of social psychology [9]. Besides these topics, Dunn [10], Satinsky, and Green [11] have focused on the aesthetic study of costume, dress, and furry arts. In addition, Heinz [12] has researched the intersectionality between furries and LGBT+, and Silverman [4] studied Furry Fandom from the perspective of the queer study.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Destigmatization in the Furry Fandom: A Case Study on the X University Self-organization in China

Mao¹

2022

Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Sport Science, Education and Social Development (SSESD 2022)

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As a popular subculture among the Z generation, Furry Fandom has recently become a topic of mainstream media coverage. Previous research on Furry Fandom suggests that furry fans suffer from strong social stigma often perpetuated by negative or inaccurate media portrayals as sexual deviant, socially awkward, or bestiality fetish, and sometimes they stigmatize themselves. Nevertheless, in China, less social stigma has been observed about Furry Fandom. Paradoxically, furry fans in China even exhibit self-deprecation inside and outside the communities. Taking the Furry self-organization at X University in Beijing, China, as an example, this paper used the Process Tracing Case Study Method and conducted in-depth online interviews with the administrator of the self-organization to investigate the factors causing this phenomenon. As a comparative social study, firstly, the study introduces a general overview of the Furry Fandom as a new subculture in China and the differences between the portrayal of western and Chinese mainstream media sources. Secondly, the study reviews prior studies specifically on the stigmatization of the Furry Fandom, and the study introduces the methodology. Thirdly, self-organization is introduced and analyzed as an empirical case study of the existence and development of Furries in China. Finally, the limitation of this research and suggestions for the future study are given in the conclusion. This study fills a research gap regarding Furry Fandom in China.

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“…Incels, for instance, are very specific about the expression of their masculinity, and the way they wish to negotiate it with women (Scaptura & Boyle, 2020). Alternatively, furry communities have developed alternative codes for gender that intersect with specific iconic codes and are also intelligible from outside the community (Satinsky & Green, 2016).…”

Section: Gender Has Changed and Expandedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender fluidity as affordance negotiation

Albarracin¹,

Poirier²

2020

Preprint

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Gender is often viewed as static binary state for people to embody, based on the sex they were assigned at birth. However, cultural studies increasingly understand gender as neither binary nor static, a view supported both in psychology and sociology. On this view, gender is negotiated between individuals, and highly dependent on context. Specifically, individuals are thought to be offered culturally gendered social scripts that allow them and their interlocutors the ability to predict future actions, and to understand the scene being set, establishing roles and expectations. We propose to understand scripts in the framework of enactive-ecological predictivism, which integrates aspects of ecological enactivism, notably the importance of dynamical sensorimotor interaction with an environment conceived as a field of affordances, and predictive processing, which views the brain as a predictive engine that builds its probabilistic models in an effort to reduce prediction error. Under this view, script-based negotiation can be linked to the enactive neuroscience concept of a cultural niche, as a landscape of cultural affordances. Affordances are possibilities for action that constrain what actions are pre-reflectively felt possible based on biological, experiential and cultural multisensorial cues. With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by a number of recent social, technological and epistemic developments, the gender scripts offered to individuals are less culturally rigid, which translates in an increase in the variety of affordance fields each individual can negotiate. This entails that any individual has an increased possibility for gender fluidity, as shown by the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

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Negotiating identities in the furry fandom through costuming

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

Destigmatization in the Furry Fandom: A Case Study on the X University Self-organization in China

Gender fluidity as affordance negotiation

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