Beyond Community: Negotiating Identity within Online True-Crime Forums

• In Event: 40214 - Digital Sociology: Politics, Artificial Intelligence, and Online Community

Abstract

True crime media’s (TCM) popularity among women in the last decade has created new opportunities for theorization about empowerment, safety, victimhood, and the criminal legal system. Online TCM communities, specifically, are fertile ground to analyze the ways that these meaning-making processes are occurring among women who consume this content and how this discursive context is informing women’s socio-political attitudes especially as mass incarceration and carceral reforms continue to be pertinent political topics. This study utilizes digital ethnographic methods to analyze the discursive moves that inform the feminist logics around topics of race and gender, through the backdrop of TCM consumption. In addition to digital ethnography, I also utilize in-depth interviewing to ask women how their consumption and involvement with TCM has facilitated discussions around safety and danger and their resulting views, if any, on the criminal legal system. Combined with my own participant experience in 2023’s annual CrimeCon convention in Orlando, Florida, I will analyze the ties between true crime media engagement and the feminist logics which result from these narrative-creation spaces.

Author

• Liz Chavez, University of Chicago