Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of their own: Female fandoms online

Extract

Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of their own: Female fandoms online. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pp. x, 242. Pb $29.95.

This is an ethnographic study of two all-female online communities, ostensibly founded to discuss certain television series and the male actors they feature. One of Rhiannon Bury's aims was to make her book accessible to the participants in her research, but although it is written in an accessible style, this is decidedly an academic monograph rather than a popular science book. Bury begins by giving an overview of her object of research, her participants, and her own involvement in the research process as an ethnographer. She goes on to outline her theoretical frameworks. She places herself at the nexus of four interconnected theoretical traditions: poststructuralism, post-Marxism, feminism, and queer theory (p. 5). She then describes in more detail some of the theoretical underpinnings of her work. Judith Butler's Performativity Theory features prominently, as does Stuart Hall's “articulation.” A number of linguists and sociologists are also mentioned: Norman Fairclough, Deborah Cameron, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, among others. Thus, although Bury considers her work to be (broadly) within the field of cultural studies, there is much of interest for readers who identify more with other disciplines.