Bachelor of Arts, Marietta College, 2008, English

This paper explores how fans construct works of fanfiction based on William Shakespeare's plays. Fans situate themselves within the modes of discourse common to online fanfiction communities, and within those modes of discourse, their works serve four primary functions. Writing fanfiction helps to familiarize writers with the content and style of their source texts; it also allows writers to expand upon the events and characters available in these texts; it serves as a medium for subtle critical analysis of texts, which in many ways parallels mainstream literary criticism; and it allows writers to interact with a shared-knowledge community of fanfiction writers and readers.

Committee: Joseph Sullivan PhD (Advisor); Jeffery Cordell MFA (Committee Member); Beverly Hogue PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Language Arts; Literacy; Literature; Theater

PHD, Kent State University, 2024, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This portfolio-style dissertation includes four articles on topics in fanfiction studies and queer theory, ready to be submitted for review and publication in academic journals. Each article addresses aspects of transformative writing and fan engagement in the 21st century, including: 1. How fans transfer social media tagging practices to the curated folksonomy of Archive of Our Own to create new genres of short form writing, and how fan writers have developed new ways to use digital platforms and technologies in their transformative writing. 2. How fans use the conventions of fanfiction microgenres to critique the canon media, and how they use these fan works to communicate this critique or to form communities with one another. 3. How and when fans engage with or communicate queer readings to increasingly more accessible media creators, and how media creators respond to queer readings and/or accusations of queerbaiting. 4. How fan works and transformative writing fit into, influence, or reinterpret the broader culture surrounding media texts. In addressing these topics, I explore fan practices and analyze transformative works from three fandoms, Good Omens, Leverage, and Pride and Prejudice.

Committee: Christopher Roman (Committee Chair); Lala Hajibayova (Committee Member); Ryan Hediger (Committee Member); Tammy Clewell (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Information Science; Literature; Mass Media; Multimedia Communications; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

This dissertation is a critical consideration of the phrases ‘representation matters' and ‘reading too much into it' and their consequences for the queer reading and interpretive practices of slash fanfiction in light of an influx of LGBT+ mainstream media storytelling over the last 20 years. I contend that, with the advent of more and more dynamic representation of LGBT+ characters and storylines in mainstream media, the expectations for what ‘representations' of queerness may be said to ‘matter' have likewise shifted, resulting in disciplinary action taken against those readers who still insist upon the presence of extracanonical queer potentials in a given media text. By considering the temporal codes through which LGBT+ characters come to matter in media narratives, I will evaluate the limitations of such storytelling and argue that extrapolative fanfiction is a means by which practitioners “[turn] to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative,” which has expanded to include many depictions of LGBT+ experience on television and in film (Munoz 2009). By focusing on characters and stories that are frequently taken up by queer fanfiction communities despite lack of intention or confirmation of canonical representation from the media producers, I want to explore the ways in which queer utopian possibilties defy material representation and resist the finitude of contemporary narrative structures. I argue that the queer possibilities of mainstream narrative media objects—even those that are produced in arguably the most normative and rigid production economies—coalesce around characters and in stories that bear important formal and thematic similarities. I will examine queer pairings from several contemporary media narratives, including Supernatural, Sherlock, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. By considering some of the most popular and prolific queer fanfiction pairings of the last few decades, I explicate these simil (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Robyn Warhol (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Guisela Latorre (Committee Member); Linda Mizejewski (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Comparative Studies

This project is an exploration of the intersections between fanfiction and asexuality, and the potential for online play spaces to produce meaningful and useful insight for asexualities work. Inspired by my own experiences in public health, I approached this project through folklore with the goal of experimenting with a digital mixed-methods approach that could help introduce professionals in applied fields to the potential benefits of intentional and sustained attention to online spaces. Using thematic textual analysis on a sample of Avengers (Marvel Movies) fanfiction stories on Archive of Our Own that are tagged as Acefics, I looked for recurring themes and topics around asexual experience and asexual representation that would benefit from further pursuit. I used those initial findings to develop and deploy a survey to gain a deeper understanding of those themes and topics and to recruit Acefic readers and authors for 90-minute interviews. Interviews and surveys were used to confirm salient themes and build a greater depth of clarity on those topics. The combination of interviews, surveys, and textual analysis demonstrated that even an online play space like AO3 was a productive site for discovery and study development for applied project intended to serve members of primarily online communities, like the asexual community, as well as emerging communities.

Committee: Amy Shuman (Advisor); Miranda Martinez (Committee Co-Chair); Merrill Kaplan (Committee Member); Gail Kaye (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Public Health

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

This dissertation, Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe, works to categorize and introduce a heretofore unrecognized genre within the medium of fanfiction: The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe (AU). Building on previous sociological and ethnographic work within Fan Studies, scholarship that identifies fans as transformative creators who use fanfiction as a means of promoting progressive viewpoints, this dissertation argues that the Coffee Shop AU continues these efforts within a defined set of characteristics, merging the goals of fanfiction as a medium with the specific goals of a genre. These characteristics include the Coffee Shop AU's structure, setting, archetypes, allegories, and the remediation of related mainstream genres, particularly the romantic comedy. The purpose of defining the Coffee Shop AU as its own genre is to help situate fanfiction within mainstream literature conventions—in as much as that's possible—and laying the foundation for future close reading. This work also helps to demonstrate which characteristics are a part of a communally developed genre as opposed to individual works, which may assist in legal proceedings moving forward. However, more crucially this dissertation serves to encourage the continued, formal study of fanfiction as a literary and cultural phenomenon, one that is beginning to closely analyze the stories fans produce alongside the fans themselves. Far from writing chaotically, fanfiction authors have spent the last six decades developing structured forms of literature for online spaces, of which the Coffee Shop AU is a part, yet most scholarship has yet to acknowledge that structure outside of overly broad categories (such as slash) or equally specific tropes (such as bed sharing). Defining what is currently one of the most popular genres written today—a genre that is the product of and is now helping to produce other genres—is the first step in filling this gap.

Committee: Sean O'Sullivan (Advisor); Matthew Birkhold (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Mass Media; Romance Literature

Bachelor of Science of Journalism (BSJ), Ohio University, 2020, Journalism

Media fandom — defined here by the curation of fiction, art, “zines” (independently printed magazines) and other forms of media created by fans of various pop culture franchises — is a rich subculture mainly led by women and other marginalized groups that has attracted mainstream media attention in the past decade. However, journalistic coverage of media fandom can be misinformed and include condescending framing. In order to remedy negatively biased framing seen in journalistic reporting on fandom, I wrote my own long form feature showing the modern state of fandom based on the generation of late millennial women who engaged in fandom between the early age of the Internet and today. This piece is mainly focused on the modern experiences of women in fandom spaces and how they balance a lifelong connection to fandom, professional and personal connections, and ongoing issues they experience within fandom. My study is also contextualized by my studies in the contemporary history of media fan culture in the Internet age, beginning in the 1990's and to the present day. In both my academic and professional projects, I also examine how other journalists should best write about fandom spaces and other Internet communities populated by marginalized people.

Committee: Eve Ng Dr. (Advisor); Bernhard Debatin Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Journalism

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Mass Communication (Communication)

The social make-up of countries like the US and the UK is increasingly diverse. Furthermore, media texts from both countries are growing in popularity with international audiences. Still, mediated portrayals from both countries continue to privilege one social group, i.e. white males, while neglecting to represent females and ethnic minorities in deep and meaningful ways. In turn, technological developments in the past couple of decades enabled the re-appropriation and re-imagining of commercial media texts in previously unimaginable ways. Scholars like Henry Jenkins have argued that these practices have enhanced audiences' enjoyment of media texts but also, in the case of ongoing texts, their participation in creative decisions in the production of the originals. Similarly, some have claimed that re-imagining media texts provides members of underrepresented social groups to insert their identities into the popular texts they enjoy. This dissertation explores how fans re-imagine two popular television characters: The Doctor (Doctor Who, UK) and Castiel (Supernatural, US).

Committee: Joseph Slade (Advisor); Jenny Nelson (Committee Member); Yea-Wen Chen (Committee Member); Patty Stokes (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Gender; Gender Studies

MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Drawing from Amy J. Devitt's ideas of classifying genres through the lens of social purpose, I examine several slash stories about the Welcome to Night Vale podcast to better elucidate some of slash's social purposes and its interactions with heteronormativity and homonormativity (as explained by Lisa Duggan). Welcome to Night Vale features canonically gay characters, something which has been almost unheard of in slash fiction until recently. My analysis of Night Vale fics about polyamorous same gender relationships and male pregnancy demonstrates that even these seemingly transgressive stories do not always fully accept nor reject homonormative values. Just as with the genre of slash fiction itself, individual instances of slash can blur boundaries and simultaneously promote transgression and conformity.

Committee: Stephanie Moody Ph.D. (Advisor); Tammy Clewell Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kevin Floyd Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Mass Media; Modern Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, Popular Culture

Inspired by Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, this thesis utilizes a survey and set of interviews conducted with 100 participants to engage with a variety of fan experiences, perspectives, and interpretations. This thesis also draws on my own experience as an active fanfiction reader and writer. I argue for a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary theory of the erotics of fanfiction, drawing on Marxist, literary, feminist, queer, genre, and cultural/media studies theories. Then, I analyze and breakdown the data acquired through my own research to discuss the trends and outlying responses found through these analyses. I then apply this theory to the research findings to discuss the relationship among fanfiction, sexuality, and community. This relationship extends to all erotic fanfiction, and shows the queerness even of heterosexual pairings in fanfiction. While a majority of participants identify as female, most fans consider themselves sexually fluid. This fluidity is particularly evident in erotic fanfiction, which I argue is a transgressive space for fans to explore and imagine a multiplicity of pairings, contexts, and plots. Fanfiction allows fans to disrupt the scarcity/abundance dichotomy, lack of queer representation, stringent gender roles, and regulated sexual content controlled by media corporations producing these original works. Fanfiction, then, is a medium that queers and problematizes these concepts through fan imagination, and ultimately also queers the fans, works, and communities involved. This project challenges the ways we have previously understood the relationship between fans' sexuality and their interests in and consumption of erotic fanfiction, exploring how writing, reading, and sharing fanfiction itself is a queer act, and one that queers the participants and communities involved. This queerness is both in reference to sexuality, and also in terms of transgression and non-normative behavior. I question the traditional relationship between (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jeff Brown (Committee Chair); Becca Cragin (Committee Member); Montana Miller (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Gender Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2016, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation studies imaginative reading and its relationship to fanfiction. Imaginative reading is a practice that involves engaging the imagination while reading, mentally constructing a picture of the characters and settings described in the text. Readers may imaginatively watch and listen to the narrated action, using imagination to recreate the characters' sensations and emotions. To those who frequently read this way, imagining readers, the text can become, through the work of imagination, a play or film visualized or entered. The readers find themselves inside the world of the text, as if transported to foreign lands and foreign eras, as if they have been many different people, embodied in many different fictional characters. By engaging imaginatively and emotionally with the text, the readers can enter into the fictional world: the settings seem to them like locations they can visit, the many characters like roles they can inhabit or like real people with whom they can interact as imaginary friends and lovers. The readers feel that they have been absorbed into the world of the text, and sometimes into the characters. One genre of literature is particularly closely connected to the act of imaginative reading: Internet fanfiction. In fact, imaginative reading is the source of Internet fanfiction and thereby shapes many of the genre's characteristics. Bringing imaginative reading to bear on fanfiction texts reveals characteristics of these texts and of the genre in which they participate. Because imaginative reading, especially of culturally devalued texts by young women, is frequently decried by critics, fanfiction, which is frequently written by young women about these culturally devalued texts, is often tarred with the same brush. Thus many of the characteristics of fanfiction derive from fan writers' attempts to avoid the stigmas accruing to imaginative reading and readers.

Committee: Robert Miklitsch (Committee Chair); Marsha Dutton (Advisor); Thomas Dancer (Committee Member); Katherine Jellison (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of the Arts / School of Art

In the United States, comic books have often been construed as a male medium and social sphere. In fact, comics have been created and enjoyed by artists of any gender since their inception and it was only after the 1950s that current perceptions of comics were formulated. Comics' history begins in the 1890s when men and women were submitting comics to newspapers, including outspoken suffragettes like Rose O'Neill. As comics took off in the early twentieth century, the iconic hero, Superman, kicked off the United States' most popular genre: superhero comics. Superhero comics were read and enjoyed by readers of all genders and ages, leading to the creation of characters like Wonder Woman. After World War II, comics fell victim to government scrutiny and censorship, creating the regulatory Comics Code. In response, during the counter culture of the 1960s, underground comics or comix appeared including feminist anthologies during feminism's second wave. These comics, in turn, led to alternate and indie comics and literary efforts called graphic novels. Graphic novels then influenced the mainstream comics and predominant superhero genre, particularly in the 1980s and forward. In the current era of comic books, more and more readers include young women who wish to see superheroes like themselves. These comics include the works of feminist writers like Kelly Sue DeConnick, Marjorie Liu, and Gail Simone. Japanese comics have also played a huge part in influencing this change for comics in the United States. With multiple genres and a different approach to production, Japanese comics (manga) have become popular, especially where male-oriented comics in the United States may not cater to readers. This has also led to an individualistic movement inspired by both manga and alternative comics: webcomics. These self-published Internet-based comics are often solo efforts in which the artist is in full control of the production. This is also a study of fan culture (fando (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Scillia Diane Ph. D. (Advisor); Medicus Gustav Ph. D. (Committee Member); Smith Fred Ph. D. (Committee Member); Stasiowski Kristin Ph. D. (Other) Subjects: Art History