Considering Theoretical Tensions Between Informal and Formal Genres and the Stakes of Social Genre Proliferation

• In Event: Disrupting Top-Down Curricular Hierarchies Through Fandom and Media Engagement

Abstract

Fanfiction as a Mechanism for Genre Change and Disruption
In this theoretical essay, we consider how genres rapidly shift through communities of fanfiction writers and how fans’ interactions support learning and composition with and through media texts. One of the “forms of life” (Bazerman, 1997) of contemporary networked fandoms is the re-definition of narratives and sometimes genres themselves. Many fans have asked, for example, what it means to read the subtext of a novel like Lord of the Rings not as fantasy epic, but as queer romance where bonds of friendship and survival lead to ongoing love (Coppa, 2017; Smol; 2004).
Fans often take these critical rereading and rewriting actions across communities through spin-off texts like fanfictions, creating works that span a variety of genres and subgenres. Each fandom genre socially constructs features that become content and style elements.
Particularly in the early years of fanfiction, many original authors and media corporations have struggled with fan-based re-imaginings of their characters. All the same, fanfiction writers remain deeply engaged and motivated by the responsive and transformative texts that they create, as well as the feedback and conversation that ensue.

The Stakes of Social Genre Proliferation
Taking up recent theories of transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017) leads us to think about ways genres are reconfigured or transformed as they move across networked contexts. Fanfiction has profoundly hybridized genre expectations (e.g. remixing, developing, and proliferating new genres) and thus helps us think about the stakes of genre, and related questions around teaching genre, more broadly.
Tensions between informal and formal genres matter, particularly for questions about education. For instance, we teach genre in schools to support students with accessing spaces of power, whether that be personal essays to apply for college or research and analytical genres for academic advancement. These genres are encoded in policy such as the CCSS which assumes that they are stable and valuable, both socially and economically. However, this stability also means that these genres have been entrenched in systems that often unfairly benefit White cultures and languages that already are privileged (Baker-Bell, 2020).
Online genres are rarely perceived as stable: they change quickly, they are actively socially negotiated, they hybridized across media, etc. Consider how quickly a picture, a reaction or gesture, or a turn of phrase can be lifted from a digital source and transformed into a recognizable genre of meme (Wiggins & Bowers, 2015). But that does not mean that genre no longer exists in online spaces, as Darvin (2023) and others have argued. It means that we need to theorize genre differently in order to support learners in making sense of genre across personal and disciplinary boundaries in transformative and/or social-justice aligned ways (Moje, 2007).
Learning about how online genres form and proliferate — and therefore teaching students about these ideas — becomes increasingly important as we expand our educational goals from transfer into academia into more expansive trajectories of personal meaning-making, digital advocacy, and civic agency (Shrodes et al., 2023, Mirra & Garcia, 2022; McDaniel, 2023).

Authors

• Alecia Marie Magnifico, University of New Hampshire

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University