Crafting Fictions and Subjects: Foucault’s Care of the Self and Adolescent Fanfiction Writers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 65
  In Roundtable Session: Applying Foucault to Qualitative Inquiry in Education: Looking at Resistance as Opportunity for New Knowledge

Abstract

As fans extend and re-envision popular books, movies, and television series through fanfiction, the medium bristles with poststructural notions of textual fluidity, intertextuality, the convergence of pop culture and art, and questions of textual ownership and control (Viires, 2005, p.167). The aim of this paper is to highlight ways in which adolescents employ Foucault’s (2001/2005) Care of the Self when they post and review online fanfiction. Instead of merely demonstrating their knowledge of the plots and literary devices of their favorite stories, fanfic writers strive to consciously and deliberately envision and craft themselves.
Rather than seeing themselves as consumers of texts, fanfic writers seek to participate and, in fact, to create art themselves (Jenkins, 2006). Foucault (1997) put it this way: “What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? “ (p. 296). As they take up themes of power, sexuality, class, justice, and evil, fan writers proclaim themselves artists; they simultaneously critique society and carve out their place within it as well. They enact Foucault’s (2001/2005) Care of the Self by setting personal and artistic goals, developing conscious practices of self-development, constructing communities designed to support fan writers, and extending these components to an extended telos, or long-term goals for their art itself.
The interactive, peer-influenced medium of fanfiction has much to teach policymakers, researchers, administrators, and classroom teachers about adolescents’ perceptions of writing. Adolescents who participate in fanfiction bemoan the “right” and “wrong” interpretations of texts and writing that permeate classrooms and welcome the more open notions of reading, texts, and writing that make up the tangle of the Web (Thomas, 2007). Simply put, one must question whether adolescents would seek this outside site away from the structures or authorities of school if reading and writing were not treated so formulaically within schools themselves. In our era of standards and the pressure to achieve AYP, classroom discourse is often shaped by high-stakes testing or rigid curricula. Yet in their creative, out-of-school process, fanfiction writers question and push back such artifices and assert that this constriction presents only a shadow of culture, an insubstantial reflection of the fluid, multi-faceted, dialogic reality of texts and of art.

Author

• Amanda L. Hodges, Newberry College