Popular Culture Review 30.2
identified as using they , them , their pronouns . This is an interesting breakdown , considering the usual demographic and stereotype of comic con goers . It also suggests that women are doing much of the heavy lifting when it comes to speaking about diversity and representation in geek circles . Of the in-person interviews , six were authors , six were artists or in the art community , and five had general professions .
Interviews at the comic con event were conducted in hallways or the green room available to panel participants . The interviews in hallways often occurred immediately following a panel , meaning the participants had just recently experienced the emotions of a panel . The emotions can run very high during and after some of these events . For example , following the panel about being LGBTQIA + in the geek community a throng of people moved to the front to speak with the panelists . Several audience members were in tears while many others hugged each other ; the panel immediately following was delayed because of the difficulty clearing the room .) Interviews were digitally recorded in order to avoid loss of context and comprehension , individual interviews were transcribed within 24 hours . Field notes were compared and added to analysis . The interview questions are added in Appendix A .
Thematic analysis of the transcripts was conducted by repeated reading and comparison for themes , at both the individual interview level and the overall question level . The researcher not only read through each individual transcript repeatedly , but also created documents with all answers to each question combined together to better understand how each question was answered . Using thematic analysis “ identifies patterns ( themes , stories ) within data , and theorizes language as constitutive of meaning and meaning as social ”
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