“There’s Something That I Want You To Know ”: an Analysis of Coming out Videos in Relation to Community Building and Co-cultural Theory

Abstract

There has been no previous research analyzing coming out videos published to YouTube by content creators in relation to discourse dependency, online community building, and co- cultural theory. Galvin’s (2006) discourse dependent communication has been used in family communication research to examine how non-normative families have to use communication to prove their identity as a family unit. Orbe’s (1998) co-cultural theory is used to study interactions between members of the dominant culture and members of co-cultures, specifically looking at the strategic ways in which members of co-cultures communicate with dominant group members. In this study, I aimed to analyze how content creators on YouTube, in their coming out videos, utilized the four external boundary management strategies of discourse dependent communication: labeling, explaining, legitimizing, and defending. I also examined how the content creators and viewer comments constructed an online community. I used co-cultural theory to analyze the interactions happening in the comments section between viewers to see what co-cultural strategies were being used. I selected five coming out videos to watch in order to complete this study