19th December

I've spent the past couple of days rereading Ace Voices by Eris Young, a book which draws from the author's personal experience as well as interviews with aspec individuals to discuss aspec (primarily asexual) issues. This book was particularly useful for looking at information about aromantic people, since this book had more of a focus on aromanticism than other sources I've looked at. Some key points!!

• "We're marginalised not because there's anything wrong with us - though many of us do have needs that differ from accepted norms - but because the very fact of our existence questions the legitimacy of established structures, from capitalism, monogamy and the nuclear family to white supremacy and heteropatriarchy" (p.15)
• The appendix of the book includes a list of media with aspec characters - Young notes that "At the time of writing, I've only come across a few pieces of positive a-spec representation, and I've had to work hard to scrape together even the paltry list I include at the end of this book" (p.21) - I would like to let the record show that imo that list is also EXTREMELY FUCKING GENEROUS. Like I don't know everything on that list so not sure how accurate all of it is, but like. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is on that list. (p.254) What fucking character are you talking about? I tried googling it and all I found was speculation where is this aspec character that apparently exists??? So my point is. I'm not feeling super trustworthy of this list.
• Definitions stuff!! "Asexuality is usually defined as a lack of sexual attraction towards, or a lack of desire for sexual intercourse with, another person" (p.35)
• More definitions!!!! "Many people described aromanticism, similarly to asexuality, in terms of a lack of romantic attraction, but just as often it was described as not feeling the need to form romantic attachments" (p.39)
• However Young is quick to note that "The aromantic people I spoke to, even the aroace people, weren't necessarily uninterested in intimate attachments or connections of any kind. Many aromantic people described their ideal relationship as something intimate and caring but not romantic in the conventional sense" (p.39)
• "Ace activists have had to challenge the notion that sex and sexual attraction specifically are universally healthy and natural. Part of this strategy has been the rhetoric of 'we fall in love just like anyone else'. And just as in the LGBT community, this pressure to assimilate, to prove that we are 'otherwise normal' despite being asexual, leaves some members of our community behind" - one of the authors Feminist and Queer Perspectives (I think) also discusses how aromantic people are seen as one step further removed from 'normal'. Actually that might have been Angela Chen who said that. fuck. (p.40)
• Young uses "a-spec" as a word "to refer to my community as a whole" - covers both asexuality and aromanticism - "it highlights the 'a-', the commonality between these sets of experiences, while allowing either one to occupy the foreground" (p.43)
• "If sex is considered by mainstream society to be a normal and universal function of a healthy body or mind, then romance and romantic coupling - its sexual nature often left unsaid but still implied - is framed as a natural function of a healthy personality (p.43)
• Discusses infantilisation of aro people as well as ace people: "I've begun to see hints of another, parallel maturity narrative running alongside this one: the idea that 'sex without love' isn't something that healthy, stable, fully grown people do. One-night stands are fine for your twenties or the odd midlife crisis, this narrative says, but you won't reallly be happy unless you ultimately end up in a committed romantic partnership" (p.45)
• "Most mainstream pop culture representation of 'asexual' people - from BBC's Sherlock to Sheldon from Big Bang Theory to 'that one episode' of House - is white as well" - frankly a bizarre choice of examples but the point does stand (p.106)
• Interviews with ace people from a range of different cultures who discuss how their culture impacts their experience - one Indigenous North American asexual person talks about how "There is a lot of pressure now to, you know, create those 'pandemic babies'... It's not a very good conversation to have, when you're asexual or you don't identify as female or male, or you're within the LGBTQIA community, because there are a lot of people who do feel that we are contributing to our own genocide. And that's a heavy, heavy accusation to deal with" (p.115)
• "Around 42 per cent of the 15,123 people who answered the 'gender' question on the (p.121) 2020 Ace Census survey listed something other than just 'man or male' or 'woman or female' (p.122)
• "Trans women especially tend to be fetishised and overly sexualised in pop culture and media depictions, so it's easy to see how, like an ace Black woman, an ace trans woman might find herself disbelieved in her asexuality, or her boundaries around sex disrespected" - oh hey that's like that thing Lily Simpson said! (p.123)
• Fun little gender anecdote: "One respondent to the 2020 Ace Census survey simply put an emoji [in response to 'How would you describe your gender?']: ':/'" (p.124)
• "The same system that desexualises women also actively rewards them for performing their social function as nurturers, family-buiders and emotional labourers - a memory of the 'angel in the house' echoing down the years. Women are shamed for prioritising careers, hobbies, friendship or creative pursuits over their 'familial duties', and aromantic women regularly report experiencing shame and stigma for not pursuing romance, coupledom, marriage and family" (p.130)
• "The 'riddle' of gender imbalance in the a-spec community has less to do with any biological differences between men and women, or between testosterone- and oestrogen-influenced bodies, and far more to do with who is able to safely embody the identity of asexual" - I'm inclined to agree (p.133)
• On a similar note: "Any would-be man who fails to conform to male compulsory sexuality" is seen "as not a man at all but something else: a failed man, punished accordingly" (p.133)
• "Asexuality has for much of modern history been misinterpreted as a disease, an untenable state - and asexual people as broken, lacking and in need of a cure" (p.135)
• "Stereotypes abound: the idea that 'asexuals are just depressed', or 'your asexuality is because you're traumatised and don't know it', are misconceptions that aces have to counter daily. At the same time, those of us who are both ace and mentally ill, ace and medicated, or ace and traumatised, often find ourselves silenced or shunted aside within community discourses" (p.135)
• EVEN MORE DEFINITIONS!!! Young defines the "split attraction model (or SAM)" - "The SAM is a way of deliberately de-coupling sex and romance. Within the SAM, a person is seen as having both a sexual and romantic orientation. While connected, these don't necessarily go hand in hand. A person can be asexual but alloromantic, bi-, homo- or heterosexual but demiromantic, pansexual and aromantic, and so on." (p.167)
• Am I gonna talk about QPRs? Eh, might as well make a note of the definition: "A QPR is a relationship that 'bends the rules' we use to distinguish romantic relationships from non-romantic ones. It typically involves more intimacy and closeness (physical or emotional) than what is considered normal or socially acceptable for friends. At the same time, it doesn't fit conventional ideas about what romantic relationships should 'look like'" (p.220)
• One of Young's interviews stated: "It would be great to see in popular media a-spec characters with meaningful relationships be it strong friendships, queerplatonic relationships or romantic relationships to show that a-spec people are very well able to love and feel strong emotions" (p.220)

Possible further reading:

• Yasmin Benoit on Being Alternative and Asexual for AZ Magazine
• What's R(ace) Got to Do With It?: White Privilege & (A)sexuality by Alok Vaid-Menon
• Radical Identity Politics by Erica Chu

Tutorial with Willem and Emma!!

• Need to add Paragraph on queer theory to contextual review
• Images? - Do I need them? Help guide the reader? Don't want to risk reducing it to just being about character's appearance
• Could try adding video clips - include links in contextual review - might be a better way to illustrate the characters since it could help show more of their personality
• Or could include them in research journal - storing clips
• Should name research question before discussing methods
• Definitely want to discuss media impact on social attitudes - impact on methods I use e.g. using focus groups to identify stereotypes and such
• Focus group discussion may lead people to identify stereotypes - might be good to let focus group results lead project - how many focus groups do I want to do?
• Look at grounded theory - approach where the theory you come up with emerges from on the ground research - interviews and focus groups can suggest new lines of inquiry - incremental process - used a lot in feminist social research, useful for emphasising lived experiences
• This will impact the questions I build the focus group discussions around
• Explore different research methods e.g. focus group vs general screening + questionnaire
• Researching Women's Lives From a Feminist Perspective book - can borrow from Emma - useful from a methodology perspective, talks about similar research methods for a similar topic

22nd November

This week I read The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation by Richard Dyer - a collection of essays dealing with the topic of representations of different groups, mainly in film. I found it a particular useful source for its discussion of queer representation, though of course a lot of what it says is less relevant today as many of the essays date back to the 1970s. Some key quotes + points:

• In the Introduction, Dyer presents his argument that "how social groups are treated in cultural representation is part and parcel of how they are treated in life, that poverty, harassment, self-hate and discrimination (in housing, jobs, educational opportunity and so on) are shored up and instituted by representation" (p.1)
• Argues that how groups are represented has "to do with how members of groups see themselves and others like themselves, how they see their place in society, their right to the rights a society claims to ensure its citizens. Equally re-presentation, representativeness, representing have to do with how others see members of a group and their place and rights, others who have the power to affect that place and those rights. How we are seen deteremines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation" (p.1)
• Makes a very salient point that "what is re-presented in representation is not directly reality itself but other representations. The analysis of images always needs to see how any given instance is embedded in a network of other instances" (p.2) - feels reminiscent of Croteau and Hoynes' point about how the ideology of art needs to be analysed in terms of patterns
• "Reality is always more extensive and complicated than any system of representation can possibly comprehend and we always sense that this is so - representation never 'gets' reality" (p.3)
• "Representations here and now have real consequences for real people, not just in the way they are treated as indicated above but in terms of the way representations delimit and enable what people can be in any given society" (p.3)
• Dyer applies this last point to representations of "lesbians and gay men" - Dyer argues that "many would agree that the categories of 'lesbians' and 'gay men' are not given the reality" - the idea of identifying people by their sexual relations is a social construct! (p.3)
• "One cannot live outside the society, the network of representations, in which one finds oneself. Negative designations of a group have negative consequences for the lives of members of that grouping" (p.3)
• Really interesting essay on The Role of Stereotypes - mentions the interesting context that "when Walter Lippmann coined the term [stereotype], he did not intend it to have a wholly and necessarily perjorative connotation" - believed there is an "absolute necessity for, and usefulness of, stereotypes" (p.11)
• Defines stereotypes "as (i) an ordering process, (ii) a 'short cut', (iii) referring to 'the world', and (iv) expressing 'our' values and beliefs" (p.11)
• "This activity of ordering, including the use of stereotypes, has to be acknowledged as a necessary, indeed inescapable, part of the way societies make sense of themselves, and hence actually make and reproduce themselves" (p.12)
• Then identifies "two problems about stereotypes within this perspective": "Firstly, the need to order 'the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality' is liable to be accompanied by a belief in the absoluteness and certainty of any particular order, a refusal to recognize its limitations and partiality, its relativity and changeability, and a corresponding incapacity to deal with the fact and experience of blooming and buzzing" and secondly "not only is any given society's ordering of reality an historical product but it is also necessarily implicated in the power relations in that society" (p.12)
• "Lippmann's notion of stereotypes as a short cut points to the manner in which stereotypes are a very simple, striking, easily-grasped form of representation but are none the less capable of condensing a great deal of complex information and a host of connotations" (p.12)
• "Stereotypes are a particular sub-category of a broader category of fictional characters, the type. Whereas stereotypes are essentially defined, as in Lippmann, by their social function, types, at this level of generality, are primarily defined by their aesthetic function, namely, as a mode of characterization in fiction. The type is any character constructed through the use of a few immediately recognizable and defining traits, which do not change or 'develop' through the course of the narrative" (p.13)
• "The effectiveness of stereotypes resides in the way they invoke a consensus. Stereotypes proclaim, 'This is what everyone - you, me and us - thinks members of such-and-such social group are lik', as if these concepts of these social groups were spontaneously arrived at by all members of society independently and in isolation. The stereotype is taken to express a general agreement about a social group, as if that agreement arose before, and independently of, the stereotype. Yet for the most part it is from stereotypes that we get our ideas about social groups" (p.14)
• "Stereotypes are those who do not belong, who are outside of one's society" - mentions that while Orrin E. Klapp defines this in terms of nationality, Dyer argues that we can "rework his distinction in terms of the types produced by different social groups according to their sense of who belongs and who doesn't, who is 'in' and who is not. Who does or does not belong to a given society as a whole is then a function of the relative power of groups in that society to define themselves as central and the rest as 'other', peripheral or outcast" (p.14)
• "Stereotypes always carry within their very representation an implicit narrative" (p.15)
• Another good point Dyer makes: "The social type/stereotype distinction is essentially one of degree. It is after all very hard to draw a line between those who are just within and those definitely beyond the pale. This is partly because different social categories overlap - e.g. men 'belong', blacks do not, but what of black men?" (p.15)
• "This is the most important function of the stereotype: to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within and who clearly beyond it. Stereotypes do not only, in concert with social types, map out the boundaries of acceptable and legitimate behaviour, they also insist on boundaries exactly at those points where in reality there are none." (p.16)
• "The role of stereotypes is to make visible the invisible, so that there is no danger of it creeping up on us unawares; and to make fast, firm and separate what is in reality fluid and much closer to the norm than the dominant values system cares to admit" - great quote (p.16)
• Seen to be believed discusses specific "types" of gay characters
• "There are signs of gayness, a repertoire of gestures, expressions, stances, clothing, and even environments [...] that bespeak gayness, but these are cultural forms designed to show what the person's person alone does not show: that he or she is gay" - "Typification is a near necessity for the representation of gayness, the product of social, political, practical and textual determination" - since you can't tell someone is gay from looking, films often try to make it more obvious by putting gay characters into these certain 'types' (p.19)
• "Typification is, as a mode of representation, immediate and economical. It dispenses with the need to establish a character's sexuality through dialogue and narrative establishing it literally at first glance. Dialogue and narrative may themselves be stereotypical" (p.22)
• "As secondary characters, gays have familiar narrative functions: a woman's gay male best friend, the threatening lesbian" - also discusses "formulaic gay plots" such as "the tussle between a lesbian and a heterosexual man for a sexually unformed woman" or "the gay male affair that has built into its presentation from the beginning intimations of its inevitably fleeting, and therefore melancholy quality" (p.22)
• More examples of 'types': "We know these men are gay because we see aspects of them as in some sense feminine. This implies a conflation of sexuality and gender roles that is characteristic of gay types" (p.23)
• "Types keep the fact of a character's gayness clearly present before us throughout the text. This has the disadvantage that it tends to reduce everything about that character to his/her sexuality. It has the advantage that it never allows the text to closet her or him, and it thus (p.23) allows gay sub-cultural perspectives to be always present in a scene" (p.24)
• Discusses different gay 'types': firstly "in-betweenism" - the "mannish" gay woman or "effeminate" gay man, "both represent homosexuality through what is assumed to be a gender correlation" (p.31)
• Makes an important point that "negative use of the types should not blind us to the fact that ideas of in-betweenism have been used by gay people themselves, not only in sub-cultural practices but in historically progressive activism" - probably applies to a lot of other stereotypes/types as well (p.36)
• Gay people "are more characteristically portrayed as people who in failing, because of not being heterosexual, to be real women or men, at the same time fail to be truly masculine or feminine in other ways - dykes are unwomanly but fall short of being truly masculine; queens are unmanly and unwomanly. Both are thus often seen as tragic, pathetic, wretched, despicable, comic or ridiculous figures" (p.37)
• Masculine gay women are "frequently represented as dangerous and threatening" (p.37)
• A second gay 'type' is the "macho" man: "It is an exaggerated masculinity, and indeed its very exaggeratedness marks it off from the conventional masculine look on which it is based. It is, moreover, a consciously erotic look" (p.40)
• A third type is the "sad young man": "The sad young man is neither androgynously in-between the genders nor playing with the signs of gender. His relationship to masculinity is more difficult, and thus sad. He is a young man, hence not yet really a real man. He is soft; he has not yet achieved assertive masculine hardness. He is also physically less than a man. [...] The sad young man is a martyr figure" (p.42)
• The final 'type' discussed is that of "lesbian feminism": "It is a representation of lesbianism as a femininity that is almost pantheistic in origin. It refuses the analytical, taxonomic appropriation of nature that the institution of biology has promulagated, and in this sense it is close to the kind of romantic receptivity to nature of the hippie movement" (p.45)
• Dyer's essay Homosexuality and Film Noir argues that "It is important to understand these images [of homosexuality in film noir] as one aspect of the armoury of gay oppression and indeed of sexual oppression generally. How gays are represented is always part and parcel of the sexual ideology of a culture" (p.52)
• Interestingly, Dyer mentions "single (i.e. 'incomplete') people" as being depicted as "abnormal" in the same way that gay people are - relevant to depictions of aro people (p.57)
• On a similar note, Dyer brings up how "childlessness" is used as a sign of "sexual 'unnaturalness'" (p.63)
• "In most instances, gays function as both villains and frustrations of the heterosexual development" (p.67)
• The essay Coming out as going in also makes a point about stereotypes: "Sterotypes can be both a complex and a formative mode of representation. We are accustomed to thinking of them as simple repetitive, boring and prejudiced group images which, should they supposedly be about ourselves, we angrily reject. We mistake their simplicity of formal means (a few broadly drawn, instantly identifiable signs endlessly repeated) and evident ideological purpose (to keep/put out- (p.73)groups in their place) for a simplicity of connotation and actual ideological effect" - makes note that "a stereotype can be complex, varied, intense and contradictory, an image of otherness in which it is still possible to find oneself" (p.74)
• "Like all sterotypes, the sad young man is a combination and condensation of many traditions of representation. This intensifies the image (so much history of signification caught by such spare formal means), gives it rich possibilities of connotation and use and enables it to be read in a multiplicity of ways." (p.77)
• The essay also includes an interesting discussion of race: "Gay African-American writers have usually been distant or equivocal in their writings here, even James Baldwin making his sad young hero David in Giovanni's Room white. Though this may have been a self-protecting strategy on his part, it may also be because there is something specifically white about the stereotype" (p.80)
• Homi Bhabha (1983) has argued in the context of racial stereotyping that the fixity and stability of stereotypes is only apparent. Stereotypes are a function of the desire to control through knowledge; the stereotype, its fixed contours and endless repetition, constantly reassures 'us' that such-and-such group is known [...] Yet the stereo-typicality of the stereotype, the endless need to repeat it, betrays, suggests Bhabha, the underlying knowledge that in actuality no social group is fixed, really under the grasp of knowledge, and in particular, that relations of power are not static" (p.87)
• The Victim: Hegemonic project essay provides useful context for discussion of queer representation, as it discusses what Dyer calls "the first film to defend homosexuality as a cause in a mainstream context, the first to deal with gayness explicitly" (p.93)
• Dyer says that thinks of the film "not as an expression of some vague Zeitgeist or cultural world-view, nor as a 'stimulus' which had a discernable 'effect' on the law, public attitudes or the daily lives of gay people, but rather as a way of intervening - a way characteristic of British cinema - in a social debate" (p.93)
• "Of course, quite apart from its embeddedness in the social conscience cycle, the notion of women's only fulfilment being achieved through marriage and childbearing is central to the culture" (p.106)
• Naturally, the essay on Male sexuality in the media was very useful - particularly Dyer's quote that "We live in a world saturated with images, drenched in sexuality. But this is one of the reasons why it is in fact difficult to write about. Male sexuality is a bit like air - you breathe it in all the time, but you aren't aware of it much" (p.111)
• I think he also makes a really salient point that "Visual symbolism not only reduces male sexuality to the penis, cutting us off from other erotic pleasures, and placing on the penis a burden of being driving, tough, aggressive, it also tends to separate men from their sexuality. The penis is seen to have a life of its own, leading the man on almost despite himself" (p.113)
• What are the consequences of this view? "Pursuit, seduction, rape, murder - not only are these different story events hard to distinguish from each other, not only do the bellicose symbols of male sexuality so easily lend themselves to the representation of sexuality as violence, but also the sense of the penis-weapon being apart from the man often absolves him of responsibility for his actions. It is not the man that is being aggressive, it is his penis" (p.113)
• "Since sexuality is supposedly natural, acts that express it can be viewed as pre-social and irresponsible because they are beyond social or individual responsibility. Secondly, the idea of the separateness of male sexuality, 'it's all happening down there', leads to accepting the natural irresponsibility of men" (p.114)
• Great quote about comedy: "Comedy is unruly - it can no more be secured for the right-on than it can for the right-wing" (p.117)
• "Comedy may often undermine men by ridiculing their sexuality but it still ends up asserting as natural the prevalent social definition of that sexuality" (p.117)
• The final essay in the collection is White, which discusses how whiteness is depicted in film
• Discusses "a perspective that associates whiteness with order, rationality, rigidity, qualities brought out by the contrast with black disorder, irrationality and looseness" (p.145)
• Points to the film Simba as an example of "an endorsement of the moral superiority of white values of reason, order and boundedness" while depicting "irrational violence supposedly specific to blacks" (p.151)
• "If blacks have more 'life' than whites, then it must follow that whites have more 'death' than blacks" - idea of black people being inherently more 'lively' can probably be connected to hypersexualisation of black people (p.157)
• Final point: "White women are constructed as the apotheosis of desirability, all that a man could want, yet nothing that can be had, nor anything that a woman can be" (p.161)

Researchin how to do interviews and focus groups doo doo doo

I started by looking at Doing Interviews by Steinar Kvale - mostly focused on one-on-one interviews, but with some good discussion of the use of focus groups as well

• "We should not regard a research interview as an open dialogue between egalitarian partners. The research interview is a specific professional conversation with a clear power asymmetry between the researcher and the subject" - important to remember (p.14)
• Another important point they make "In reaction to the dominance of the interviewer, some subjects will withhold information, or talk around the subject, and some may start to question the researcher and also protest at his or her questions and interpretations, or, in rare cases, withdraw from the interview" - hazards to look out for (p.15)
• Lists different ethical issues at different stages of the research - in the "thematizing" stage, the interview study should "be considered with regard to improvement of the human situation investigated", in the "designing" stage, you should consider issues that "involve obtaining the subjects' informed consent to participate in the study, securing confidentiality, and considering the possible consequences of the study for the subjects", in the interview itself you should "take into account" effects on the interviewee, such as "stress during the interview and changes in self-understanding", during transcription "the confidentiality of the interviewees needs to be protected and there is also the question of whether a transcribed text is loyal to the interviewee's oral statements", in the "analysis" stage there are issues to do with "how penetratingly the interviews can be analyzed" and "whether the subjects should have a say in how their statements are interpreted", in the "verification" stage there is of course "the researcher's ethical responsibility to report knowledge that is secured and verified as possible" and finally in the "reporting" stage "there is again the issue of confidentiality" (p.24)
• Lists some potential ethical questions to ask: "What are the beneficial consequences of the study?" "How can the informed consent of the participating subjects be obtained?" "How much information about the study needs to be given in advance[...]?" "How can the confidentiality of the interview subjects be protected?" "Who will have access to the interviews? "What are the consequences of the study for the participating subjects?" "Will any potential harm to the subjects be outweighed by potential benefits?" "How will the researcher's role affect the study?" (p.26)
• Going into these in more detail: "Informed consent entails informing the research subjects about the overall purpose of the investigation and the main features of the design, as well as of possible risks and benefits from participation in the research project" - need to think about what the risks and benefits are!! (p.27)
• "Through briefing and debriefing, the interviewees should be informed about the purpose and the procedure of the interview. This may include information about confidentiality and who will have access to the interview; the researcher's right to publish the whole interview or parts of it; and the interviewee's possible access to the transcription and the analyses of the interviews" (p.27)
• "Confidentiality in research implies that private data identifying the subjects will not be reported. If a study does publish information potentially recognizable to others, the subjects need to agree on the release of identifiable infromation" (p.27)
• Points out that "there may be an intrinsic conflict between ethical demands for confidentiality and basic principles of scientific research, such as providing the necessary information for inter-subjective control and for repeating a study. We should also note that in some cases interviewees, who have spent their time and provided valuable information to the researcher may want, as is usual in journalistic interviews, to be credited with their full name." (p.28)
• "The consequences of an interview study need to be addressed with respect to possible harm to the subjects as well as to the expected benefits of participating in the study." (p.28)
• Also notes the importance of "the integrity of the researcher" - "In the end, however, the integrity of the researcher - his or her knowledge, experience, honesty and fairness - is the decisive factor" (p.29)
• "In the expression of a therapist researcher, Fog (2004), an experienced interviewer's knowledge of how to create rapport and get through a subject's defences may serve as a 'Trojan horse' to get inside areas of a person's life where they were not invited. The use of such indirect techniques, which are ethically legitimate within the joint interest of a therapeutic relationship, becomes ethically questionable when applied to research and commercial purposes" (p.30)
• Lists the "seven stages of an interview inquiry": 1) "Thematizing" - where you "formulate the purpose of an investigation and the conception of the theme to be investigated before the interviews start. The why and what of the investigation should be clarified before the question of how - method - is posed", 2) "Designing" - where you "plan the design of the study", 3) "Interviewing" - where you "conduct the interviews based on an interview guide" (p.35), 4) "Transcribing" - where you "prepare the interview material for analysis" by translating it "from oral speech to written text", 5) "analyzing" - an appropriate analysis method must be chosen "on the basis of the purpose and topic of the investigation, and of the nature of the interview material", 6) "verifying" - where you "ascertain the validity, reliability and generalizability of the interview findings", 7) "reporting" - where you "communicate the findings of the study and the methods applied in a form that lives up to scientific criteria" (p.36)
• Provides three key questions for the thematizing stage: "why: clarifying the purpose of the study; what: obtaining a pre-knowledge of the subject matter to be investigated; how: becoming familiar with different techniques of interviewing and analyzing, and deciding which to apply to obtain the intended knowledge" (p.37)
• "Interviews can have explorative or hypothesis-testing purposes" - the first type "is usually open with little pre-planned structure" while "interviews that test hypotheses tend to be more structured. When investigating hypotheses about group differences, it may be preferable to standardize the wording and sequence of questions in order to compare the groups" (p.38)
• There are also interviews that are "primarily descriptive and seek to chart key aspects of the subject's lived world" (p.38)
• "To the common question about interview inquiries, 'How many interview subjects do I need?', the answer is simply: 'Interview as many subjects as necessary to find out what you need to know.' [...] If the number of subjects is too small, it is difficult to generalize and not possible to test hypotheses of differences among groups or to make statistical generalizations. If the number of subjects is too large, there will hardly be time to make penetrating analyses of the interviews" (p.43)
• "The setting of the interview stage should encourage the interviewees to describe their points of view on their lives and worlds. The first minutes of an interview are decisive. The interviewees will want to have a grasp of the interviewer before they allow themselves to talk freely and expose their experiences and feelings to a stranger. A good contact is established by attentive listening, with the interviewer showing interest, understanding and respect for what the subject says, and with an interviewer at ease and clear about what he or she wants to know" (p.55)
• "The intitial briefing should be follwed up by a debriefing after the interview" (p.56)
• "The interview stage is usually prepared with a script. An interview guide is a script that structures the course of the interview more or less tightly. The guide may merely contain some topics to be covered or it can be a detailed sequence of (p.56) carefully worded questions" (p.57)
• I quite liked this suggestion: "When preparing an interview, it may be useful to develop two interview guides, one with the project's thematic research questions and the other with interview questions to be posed, which takes both the thematic and dynamic dimensions into account. The researcher questions are usually formulated in a theoretical language, whereas the interviewer questions should be expressed in the everyday language of the interviewees" (p.58)
• Useful section on different types of interview questions, such as "introductory questions" (e.g. "Can you tell me about...?" or "Do you remember an occasion when...?"), "follow-up questions" which can "extend" "subjects' answers" (p.60), this can be done either "direct questioning" or just "repeating significant words of an answer", "probing questions" (e.g. "Could you say something more about that?" or "Do you have further examples of this?"), "specifying questions", "direct questions" where the "interviewer here directly introduces topics and dimensions", "indirect questions", "structuring questions" (e.g. "I would now like to introduce another topic...") (p.61), and "interpreting questions" (e.g. "Is it correct that you feel that...?" or "You then mean that...?") (p.62)
• Just as important as questions is "Active listening - the interviewer's ability to listen actively to what the interviewee says - is as important as the specific mastery of questioning techniques. The interviewer needs to learn to listen to what is said and how it is said" (p.63)
• The chapter on different types of interviews includes a discussion of focus groups!! "A focus group usually consists of six to ten subjects led by a moderator", "The moderator's task is to create a permissive atmosphere for the expression of personal and conflicting viewpoints on the topics in focus", "The aim of the focus group is not to reach consensus about, or solutions to, the issues discussed, but to bring forth different viewpoints on an issue. Focus group interviews are well suited for exploratory studies in a new domain since the lively collective interaction may bring forth more spontaneous expressive and emotional views than in individual, often more cognitive interviews" (p.72)
• Also discusses the concept of "active interviewing", which "contrasts with the prevailing forms of empathetic and consensus-seeking interviewing" - it is a style where "the interviewer activates narrative production, suggesting narrative positions, resources and orientations" (p.75)
• "Active interviews do not necessarily aim for agreement between interviewer and subject, and the researcher may challenge what the interviewee says" (p.75)
• "The utilization of confrontational interview forms depends upon the subjects interviewed; to some subjects strong challenges to their basic belief may be an ethical transgression, while confident respondents, such as elite interviewees, may be stimulated by the intellectual challenges" - so probably not very suitable for what I want to do lol (p.76)
• Lists "quality criteria for an interview", including "the extent of spontaneous, rich, specific and relevant answers from the interviewee", "the shorter the interviewer's questions and the longer the subjects' answers, the better", "the degree to which the interviewer follows up and clarifies the meanings of the relevant aspects of the answers", "the interviewer attempts to verify his or her interpretations of the subject's answers in the cocurse of the interview" (p.80)
• Also lists important "interviewer qualifications", including "an extensive knowledge of the interview theme", "introduces a purpose for the interview, outlines the procedure in passing", "poses clear, simple, easy and short questions" (p.81), "allows subjects to finish what they are saying, lets them proceed at their own rate of thinking and speaking, is easy-going, tolerates pauses, indicates that it is acceptable to put forward unconventional and provocative opinions", "listens actively to the content of what is said", "hears which aspects of the interview topic are important for the interviewee", "knows what he or she wants to find out", "does not take everything that is said at face value, but questions critically", "retains what a subject has said during the interview", "manages throughout the interview to clarify and extend the meanings of the interviewee's statements" (p.82)
• "Although the wording of a question can inadvertently shape the content of an answer, it is often overlooked that deliberately leading questions are necessary parts of many questioning procedures" (p.88)
• "In contrast to common opinion, the qualitative research interview is particularly well suited for employing leading questions to repeatedly check the reliability of the interviewees' answers, as well as to verify the interviewer's interpretations. Thus leading questions need not reduce the reliability of interviews, but may enhance it" (p.88)
• "It should be noted that not only may the questions preceding an answer be leading, but the interviewer's own bodily and verbal responses, such as second questions following an answer, can act as positive or negative reinforcers for the answer given and thereby influence the subject's answers to further questions" (p.88)
• Conflict between "scientific and ethical responsibility": "the researcher wants the interview to be as deep and probing as possible, with the (p.89) risk of intruding upon the person, and on the other hand to be as respectful to the interview person as possible, with the risk of getting empirical material that only scratches the surface" (p.90)
• "Methods of recording interviews for documentation and later analysis include audiotape recording, videotape recording, note-taking and remembering. The common way of recording interviews has been with the use of a tape recorder. The interviewer can then concentrate on the topic and the dynamics of the interview. The words and their tone, pauses and the like are recorded in a permanent form that it is possible to return to again and again for re-listening" (p.93)
• "Video recordings offer a unique opportunity for analyzing the interpersonal interaction in an interview" - could be useful for being able to analyse body language etc? oh lol the book makes that exact point - "Video recordings of pilot interviews might be useful to sensitize interviewers to the importance of body language" (p.94)
• "Computer programs facilitate the analysis of interview transcripts. They replace the time-demanding 'cut-and-paste' approach to hundreds of pages of transcripts with 'electronic scissors'" (p.99)
• Discussion of different analysis methods: "The method of analysis should not only be given thought in advance of the interviewing, but may also, to varying degrees, be built into the interview situation itself" (p.102)
• Lists the "six steps of analysis": 1) "subjects describe their life world during the interview", 2) "subjects themselves discover new relationships during the interview, see new meanings in what they experience and do so on the basis of their spontaneous descriptions", 3) "the interviewer, during the interview, condenses and interprets the meaning of what the interviewee describes, and 'sends' the meaning back", 4) "the recorded interview is analyzed by the interviewer alone" (p.102), 5) "a re-interview", 6) "to extend the continuum of description and interpretation to include action, by subjects beginning to act on new insights they have gained during their interview" (p.103)
• "Coding and categorizing were early approaches to the analysis of texts in the social sciences. Coding involves attaching one or more keywords to a text segment in order to permit later identification of a statement, whereas categorization entails a more systematic conceptualization of a statement, opening for quantification; the two terms are, however, often used interchangeably" (p.105)
• "By categorization, the meaning of long interview statements is reduced to a few simple categories" (p.105) [ADD IMAGE]
• "With categorization involving either/or decisions, it is preferable with precise pre-interview definitions of the categories and careful probing during the interview to ascertain how the statements may be categorized. When the codes or categories are not to be developed until interviewing and analysis, it is important during the interviews to obtain rich descriptions of the specific phenomena to be coded or categorized" (p.106)
• "Meaning condensation entails an abridgement of the meanings expressed by the interviewees into shorter formulations" (p.106)
• "For a phenomenologically based meaning condensation it becomes paramount to obtain rich and nuanced descriptions of the phenomena investigated in the subjects' everyday language" (p.107)
• "The interpretation of the meaning of interview texts goes beyond a structuring of the manifest meanings of what is said to deeper and more critical interpretations of the text" (p.107)
• "For deep and critical interpretations of meaning, rich and nuanced descriptions in the interviews are advantageous, as well as critical interpretative questions during the interview" (p.109)
• "Many analyses of interviews are conducted without following any specific analysis method. The researchers may then freely change between different techniques and approaches" - calls this a "bricolage" approach (p.115)
• A few more interview analysis techniques: "Noticing patterns, themes", "clustering", "Making contrasts/comparisons", "building a logical chain of evidence" (p.116)
• Some brief notes about generalizing findings: "Statistical generalization is formal and explicit. It is based on representative subjects selected at random from a population. Statistical generalization is feasible for interview studies using even a small number of subjects in so far as they are selected at random and the findings quantified" (p.127)
• On the other hand, "analytical generalization involves a reasoned judgement about the extent to which the findings from one study can be used as a guide to what might occur in another situation." (p.127)

The Contextual Review Cutting Room

In my desperate attempt to stick to the word limit, I'm having to cut a lot of sections and potential points from my contextual review. Saving them here for possible later use!

"According to Croteau and Hoynes (2000, p.157), the wide consensus is that “media texts articulate coherent […] ways of seeing the world”, or ideologies. They define the ideology of a piece of media as "the underlying images of society” that the piece of media presents (Ibid.)."

• Horror reflecting fears would be a good thing to discuss!!! - shoutout to my friend Zuza who made this point about my media and ideology section

TALK ABOUT RELATIONSHIP ANARCHY. ANREL - thanking miles for the suggestion but god bless i will NOT have space in this contextual review

" at least that it can be. Although it can be a way for people who are “interested in or identify with”, for example, asexuality, to “join a community” (Cerankowski, 2014, p.140), it is also"

"The ideology of a piece of media can also be seen in its “absences and exclusions” i.e. what ideas are omitted or presented “only to be ridiculed” (Ibid., p.161)."

"Sinwell (2014, p.171) also discusses subtextual depictions where characters may not be explicitly referred to as asexual but are depicted as not experiencing sexual attraction/desire, such as the TV show Dexter and the film Mysterious Skin. Another subtextual depiction of asexuality and possible aromanticism from this period is that of Varys from the TV show Game of Thrones, who explains in one 2014 episode that he has never been interested in boys or “in girls, either” and is glad to “have no part” in sexual desire (Game of Thrones, The Laws of Gods and Men, 2014). - this would potentially be good to add back in later but atm it's kind of adding. nothing."

While early models of media impact, such as the “hypodermic model” (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000, p.237) and “mass society theory” (Ibid., p.238) proposed that media has a “direct and powerful” (Ibid., p.237) or “dramatic” (Ibid., p.238) influence, later models have argued for an understanding of the media as having “limited” effects (Ibid., p.241)."

"As Chen (2020, p.74) explains, we “absorb messages about what certain groups are like” from media, and this can result in us “grow[ing] biased”. Croteau and Hoynes (2000, p.158) agree that the portrayal of different groups is important because such portrayals “contribute to the ways we understand the roles of these groups in society”. "

"argue that media generally “reproduce[s] the race, class, and gender inequalities that exist in society”, they are also quick to add the caveat that this doesn’t mean that media simply “passively reflect[s] the inequalities of society”. Rather, they "

Furthermore, Brown (2022, p.62) considers compulsory sexuality to be a “sibling” of pronatalism, “the policy or practice, particularly on the government level, of encouraging the birth of children”, and prioritising the birth of children over “the quality of life or health of those children and the people who birth them”.

These stereotypes often complicate the experience of a-spec people in these groups; the idea of a Black person being asexual is seen as “impossible” (Brown, 2022, p.121), while some Asian-American ace people report feeling “as though they [are] confirming racist stereotypes” by identifying as asexual (Chen, 2020, p.72).

Stereotypes like these, along with attitudes “like the misogynistic idea that women owe men sex for being 'nice guys'” (Brown, 2022, p.22), mean that the notion of an asexual or aromantic woman inherently goes against what is expected of women generally.

Some scholars argue that rather than being intentionally inserted into media by some “evil-minded capitalistic plotters”, ideology appears in media almost naturally, because it is “the more or less automatic outcome of the normal, regular processes by which commercial mass communications work in a capitalist system” (Connell, 1977, quoted in Butsch, 2015, p.508).

"It is the responsibility of the moderator of a focus group to “maintain a friendly atmosphere and keep participants involved” (Ibid., p.81). "

"The “cost of drama programming” that encourages producers to “avoid risk” could also be a factor in the use of simple stereotypes (Ibid., p.509)."

"and argues that “the different media are especially important sites for the production, reproduction and transformation of ideologies” (Ibid., p.105). However, it is important to note that analysis of media ideology cannot be limited to a single piece of media and is in fact useful “only if we think more carefully about the patterns of images in media texts” (Croteau and Hoynes, p.60, emphasis mine). "

"Tuchman (2012, p.41) asserts that “Americans learn basic lessons about social life from the mass media” and "

"though it can also be defined as “not feeling the need to form romantic attachments”

"As far as back as Foucault (1975, quoted in Cerankowski, 2014, p.140), scholars have argued that “visibility is a trap”, and"

"This increase in “nuanced visibility” has largely been credited to the work of activists calling for “media representations that speak to the diversity of gendered identities and sexualities”. "

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