Becoming a Fan: Reinventing, Repurposing, and Resisting in First-Year Composition

This thesis explores the cultural and pedagogical potential of the fanfiction community. The practices of recursive peer feedback, reinvention as invention, and production of subversive narratives via repurposing posits the fanfiction community a democratic space where a myriad of identities can react to, interact with, and disseminate information in a productive learning community. During a time when socio-political interactions are so intense, it is necessary that teachers of composition and rhetoric pay attention to learning communities where democratic deliberation is promoted through the production and sharing of writing. Ultimately, this thesis argues that reinvention and repurposing within the fanfiction community can be adapted for first-year composition to produce an innovative and resistive pedagogy. This thesis comes in two parts. First, it explores the histories and practices of women and/or queer writers within the fanfiction community, giving particular attention to the compositional tools of reinvention and repurposing. These tools give marginalized writers the space to share their voice as well as helps them make meaning out of the collision of disparate narratives and identities. Second, it offers ways that repurposing and reinvention, as well as the collaborative practices of works-in-progress (WIP), gift-giving, and beta-reading, can be used within first-year composition to produce a democratic learning space within the classroom. Rather than blindly assigning fanfiction practices to fulfill these goals within then classroom, it outlines the ways the fan practices can be used to cultivate a learning community, thus providing an innovative pedagogy built on the convergence of theoretical composition backgrounds and fan practices. Advisor: Stacey Wait

Becoming a Fan: Reinventing, Repurposing, and Resisting in First-Year Composition

This thesis explores the cultural and pedagogical potential of the fanfiction community. The practices of recursive peer feedback, reinvention as invention, and production of subversive narratives via repurposing posits the fanfiction community a democratic space where a myriad of identities can react to, interact with, and disseminate information in a productive learning community. During a time when socio-political interactions are so intense, it is necessary that teachers of composition and rhetoric pay attention to learning communities where democratic deliberation is promoted through the production and sharing of writing. Ultimately, this thesis argues that reinvention and repurposing within the fanfiction community can be adapted for first-year composition to produce an innovative and resistive pedagogy. This thesis comes in two parts. First, it explores the histories and practices of women and/or queer writers within the fanfiction community, giving particular attention to the compositional tools of reinvention and repurposing. These tools give marginalized writers the space to share their voice as well as helps them make meaning out of the collision of disparate narratives and identities. Second, it offers ways that repurposing and reinvention, as well as the collaborative practices of works-in-progress (WIP), gift-giving, and beta-reading, can be used within first-year composition to produce a democratic learning space within the classroom. Rather than blindly assigning fanfiction practices to fulfill these goals within then classroom, it outlines the ways the fan practices can be used to cultivate a learning community, thus providing an innovative pedagogy built on the convergence of theoretical composition backgrounds and fan practices. Advisor: Stacey Wait

The Missing Women of Nebraska: Rhetorical Invisibility in the Leschinsky Archives

This presentation looks at the “rhetorical invisibility” in the Leschinsky glass plate negative collection held within the Stuhr Museum archives – particularly, the way that women’s identities and the historical records that represent them are sidelined in favor of more patriarchal accounts of history. One of the most prominent photographers in Hall County, Nebraska from 1880s to 1930s, Julius Leschinsky took hundreds of thousands of portraits within his life. The Stuhr Museum has access to nearly twenty-eight thousand of those portraits, in the form of glass plate negatives, which they are currently working to digitize into the archives – a project that I am in charge of. Though many of these portraits are of Nebraska women, their identities are often missing from Leschinsky’s records and in turn, their full histories cannot be included within our digital archives. Scholars in composition and rhetoric call this “rhetorical invisibility” – a loosely collated term that addresses how women, LGBT+ folks, PoC, and other marginalized groups are often missing within the archives, not because their artifacts, paraphernalia, and ephemera are not present, but because historical records and archival description makes their stories invisible. This is an especially prominent issue within digital archives, where use of archives is determined by online searches of archival rhetoric. Rhetorical invisibility has significant effects on how we view the past and in turn, shaped our perceptions of the future. This can be an even more significant issue when considering local histories, like the Leschinsky’s Nebraska portraiture, where knowledge cannot be outsourced via other avenues. This presentation describes context for the Leschinsky collection, demonstrates how archives (both brick-and-mortar and digital) are rhetorical sites, and uses specific examples from the Stuhr Museum’s digitization project to demonstrate the problem of rhetorical invisibility. Further, this presentation argues for the power of description – that while we do not have access to the full histories of these missing Nebraska women, we can use specific language, phrasing, and other rhetorical moves to cultivate archives as sites where identity is at once constructed as historical, reaffirmed in the present, and preserved for the future

Students as fan, or Reinvention and repurposing in first-year writing classrooms

I performed a study of two first-year writing classrooms and their interactions that used a fan fiction–based pedagogy. Rather than using fan fiction as class texts, this pedagogy used the fan fiction practices of reinventing and repurposing to help students better understand themselves and their community. This was done to position the students as fans themselves. Students were challenged to act as a fan would as they moved through myriad overlapping fan fiction and composition studies practices. I include descriptions of major assignments, examples of student writing, and reflections on both the successes and struggles within this classroom

Students as Fan, or Reinvention and Repurposing in First-Year Writing Classrooms

I performed a study of two first-year writing classrooms and their interactions that used a fan fiction–based pedagogy. Rather than using fan fiction as class texts, this pedagogy used the fan fiction practices of reinventing and repurposing to help students better understand themselves and their community. This was done to position the students as fans themselves. Students were challenged to act as a fan would as they moved through myriad overlapping fan fiction and composition studies practices. I include descriptions of major assignments, examples of student writing, and reflections on both the successes and struggles within this classroom

Netflix’s Cable Girls as Re-invention of a Nostalgic Past

For its first original Spanish series, Netflix chose a female-oriented melodrama focusing on four very different women working as switchboard operators in 1928 Madrid, Spain, struggling with universal themes such as love, sacrifice, pain, betrayal, and the fight for freedom in a patriarchal society. Cable Girls’ first season premiered on Netflix in over 190 countries on 28 April 2017; the second season aired on 25 December 2017, the third season came out on September 2018 and a fourth season is scheduled. As with their other original TV series, Netflix released the entire season all at once every time to allow fans to binge-watch the period-drama series in every country that has video on demand (VOD) platforms. The series’ title carries an implicit reference to a past in which information flowed through the cables of a central switchboard through people which at the time allowed telephone communication; the title is also reminiscent of films made between the 1920s and early 1930s when the cable technique was almost outdated. However, these films were among the first to show female workers, their work environment, fashion and feminine complicity, and they captured social changes. This chapter analyses Netflix’s success strategy in producing a series aimed at new European markets which blends the old and new media in a captivating period drama mixing elements of the past, such as costumes, decor and historical details with modern pop music in a form of entertainment that encompasses storytelling and nostalgic representations