Gender Expression in the Furry Community
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Authors
Gersdorf, Victoria
Date of Issue
2021-03-15
Type
Presentation
Language
en_US
Subject Keywords
Other Titles
Abstract
We investigated how furries, which are people who enjoy anthropomorphized depictions of animals in art and other media express their genders both as people and through their fursonas and how the furry fandom (and by extension), having a fursona may provide a creative outlet for expressing oneself, especially in the realm of gender. After receiving Carroll College IRB approval on October 15th, 2020, we then conducted two different experiments. The first involved the observation of 500 different public profiles on the website frequented and created by furries called FurAffinity. The second was a survey posted to an online furry Facebook group for members of the group to answer questions about their gender identity and their fursonas gender identity, gender roles and expression, which received 16 usable responses. The results of the FurAffinity profile observations found that only a small number (172 out 500 observed profiles or 0.344 or 34.4%) had fursonas that did not match the profile owner's gender. Due to the low number of participants in the survey, the quantitative result were not statistically significant enough, nor representative of the members of the Facebook group nor the fandom at large. Nonetheless, the data combined from both the FurAffinity profile observations and the furry Facebook group revealed that their levels of gender expression creativity in the furry community were unique and not otherwise seen among people offline, something to be further explored in future studies.