Thesis defense prep notes

[terresdebrume]

Okay you know what guys, the note-taking isn’t doing it for me right now as a preparation for tomorrow’s presentation, so what I’m gonna do is just type it out here and then I can take notes from that instead. If nothing else, it won’t hurt anyway.

It’s going to be a litle long, but if you’re interested in what I did for the thesis, this is the post to read. Otherwise, it’ll probably just be boring :P

 

At its roots, the reflection for my thesis started out back when I was in my last year of high school and utterly, supremely, devastatingly bored with Shakespeare. I’d studied Romeo & Juliet twice, watched a black and white version of Hamlet once (I think it might have been the one with Kenneth Brannagh–who, amusingly, was the director for the first Thor movie. This gets interesting later on) and my general opinion of Shakespeare was that his plays sounded super dull, made for super dull lessons, and generally didn’t compare to the likes of Harry Potter or tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, which were my primary read at the time and which several of my teachers expressed marked disdain for.

Then one day in English class (which, as a rminder, was a foreign language class for me) as we read through another extract from Romeo and Juliet, the teacher stopped, looked at us and went “you guys did realize there was a dick joke in there, right?” none of us had. I’d gotten the talk about swords (or is it spears?) but not the double entendre behind it. The discovery was hilarious–what more, now that I knew there were dick jokes in Shakespeare’s work I started looking for them and actually enjoying the read. At the end of the year, we watched Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and while I still don’t devour old Willy’s stuff every time I come across it, I was never bored with Shakespeare again. (And in fact, one of the reasons I enjoyed Thor so thoroughly was for its Shakespearean qualities)

This, to me, was an illustration of the main problem I had with the books I was asked to read for class: I couldn’t relate to them. For several reasons (ranging from being seventeen to the sanitized presentation school gave of them via the part where some ellitist assholes liked–and still like–to pretend that the only kind of “real” reading & literature was the one written by obsessively detailed dudes in the 19th century) I just never found something that spoke to me, as a teenager, in classics. So, I stuck to my intense love affair with Fantasy (picture people pursing their lips as they say it) for the adventure and mangas for the effeminate, ambiguously gay boys (yes, the studio CLAMP provided my then-unknowingly-gay little heart many a night of squeeing. I’m not even ashamed.)

 

Meanwhile in fandom (which I’d entered in 2004, aged 14, with a rather obvious LOTR ripoff fic using HP characters) I was involved in a LOTR french-speaking forum named Le Poney Fringant where movies and book analysis was a bit of a must-do, if only because we were all fic writers and fic writers must understand canon if they want to produce vaguely good fic. this was my first foray in meta–though I didn’t conceptualize it like that at the time–and it kind of left me wishing I’d get to talk about that stuff in school/more often.

For several years, the Poney was my only link to fandom. I learned a lot of things with them, which I re-used later in fic, but it didn’t take long before I found myself drifting away from them in terms of interest–mainly because, as I remember it (and afaik) the forum was a predominantly straight space, where slash was a minor thing and, iirc, I was the only one who wrote any with regularity (read: pretty much all my fics). This is relevant because it’s the main reason why, when a uni friend told me about Tumblr and all the good Glee-dom shenanigans happening there, I was completely starving for fandom and dove in like my life depended on it…and my dudes, my pals, my friends, Glee may be one of the shittiest shows ever produced, but boy did I read some super cool, in-depth posts about it and its characters in my time. I mean essay-worthy stuff on the first Klaine kiss. I mean obsessive observations on the flex of Kurt’s fingers when Blaine kissed him. I mean entire fics about Kurt’s facial expressions during Animals and really cool discussions about his relationship with his father.

And I know, none of this is going to surprise anyone from any fandom whatsoever but this is where I learned the biggest secret I have to impart to anybody who feels like their interests aren’t worthy: you do not need a “smart” or “quality” source material to have intelligent, in-depth conversations about it. Before my foray into Gleedom, I used to buy into the elitist (and also very French) idea that unless your object of analysis is quality, unless it’s, to put it shortly, already deemed worth analyzing, you can’t have an intelligent conversation about it, and it’s not worth studying. That idea is horsecrap, and the Gleedom taught me that.

 

Later on, as I started studying the art of teaching a foreign language, I realized the field constantly rand into the same essential question as any other field: how do we make our lessons as un-boring as possible? We know the first few years of lessons are boring as shit–no one past the age of twelve won’t get bored with repeating every possible variations of “My name is X” and “I live in Y” city and “I have Z siblings” it’s just mathematically impossible. So how do we make this less boring? Well, we make it sound more like actual conversation. Or maybe we could introduce literature.

Perks of literature include longer texts that weren’t written specifically for lessons (and therefore do not read like one), which usually incite people to get emotionally invested in them (more motivation to keep reading) and give teachers the opportunity to introduce a vast well of vocabulary both of the useful-for-everyday-life kind and of the meta-language kind (ie. all those nice literary concepts we use in fic writing all the time but may easily get bored by). With literature, you can introduce just about any subject you want, up to and including sex ed if you’re so inclined.

Big downside of literature: it’s long, complicated, and it uses fancy words and techniques that only ever exist in books and are almost never used in real life conversations. This means that literature, for beginners, is a super tough subject to introduce because it’s usually too long and too complicated to understand unless you have several years of language learning and reader experience under your belt. By reader experience, I mean stuff like the ability to figure out the setting of a book, who to pay attention to, and following larger, more complex plots, all stuff that takes you years to learn in your native language and which, in a foreign language, are made even more difficult by the fact that you may sometimes wonder why the hell is Juliet so scandalized that he nanny is talking about swords (or spears. didn’t look it up). As it turns out, fanfic is a super counterpoint to that because

1. It uses written english as often as (if not more often that) literary English, meaning it’s easier to understand to foreigners who may not know how to pick up metaphors and whatnot yet
2. It provides complete stories (way better than extracts) that are under 100 words long, aka manageable even for super beginners
3. All the general understanding you have to do for traditional lit (ie. who is who, where are we, what’s happening) is already taken care of because usually if you read MCU fic you don’t need people to explain who Steve Rogers is.

So basically, this is how I came to consider fanfiction as a potentially excellent weapon to add to any teacher’s arsenal. If you add to that the factthat fandom takes place online, meaning you can have genuine interaction with native and/or expert language users without needing to organize a school trip (particularly useful when the language you’re teaching isn’t widely spoken in your country of operation), it actually starts sounding like a language teacher’s wet dreams. Sort of.

 

Going from this state of mind (seeded during my first year in Master’s courses) the main problems I encountered with this topic of research were the following:

1. Legitimity: Fandom in france is still widely unknown–it’s much less public than it is on the anglo-saxon market. This isn’t helped by the fact that french copyright laws are different from the US and doesn’t protect fanfiction at all. This means that, switch to US-based fandoms notwhisthanding, I’m essentially a multiple-offender because of my fanfictions (lol) which is kind of an awkward element to have attached to class activities (although it’s not like teachers don’t use fic but, you know. Me being an anxious shit, it weighed).
   This invisibility of fandom and fanfiction as activities (and, more so, as communities) also means there are pretty much no academic works on fanfiction that I could find (I think I found like, two thesis at some-point in the beginning, and then I didn’t really look further in French academia because it wasn’t, strictly speaking, needed for my research) and that made me doubt the topic was a legitimate one until I ended up ranting about it to my thesis director and she encouraged me to talk about that instead of my previous subject pick (bless her heart).
   Also, the other problem I had was that when you want to present (western) fandom, the best and most reliable source you can find so far are…well, online, fandom-made websites, such as fanlore. And I’m not sure about AS academia but French academia is still pretty fucking touchy about online sources, let alone wikis–that didn’t exactly help me feel confident, even if I knew for a fact those were my best go-to.
2. Impossibility to conduct complete research: Anne Jamison’s book about fandom, Fic: Why fanfiction is taking over the world got criticized quite intensely around itse release for not really going into non-western fandoms, such as Japanese (& more generally asian) fandoms, let alone african one. It’s a legitimate criticism, seeing as the book barely (if at all, I may be getting jumbled with Fanlore here) acknowledges the existence of stuff like manga and how their huge popularity in the early 2000s influenced the HP fandom and the insane number of liste dojinshi for it (see fanlore for more details), which says nothing about the site-specific cultures that exist, etc etc.
   And all of this was for an entire book. My presentation and summary of what fandom is lasted five pages. Ten if you count the portion about more specific aspects such as fic exchanges and big/mini bangs. That shit is dreadfully incomplete and doesn’t even begin to adress the multiculturalism that arises in fandom, the difficulty it creates (ie. what kind of english/frnech/etc. do you want your students to learn, what kind of socially unacceptable content do they risk encountering in fandom, will the ideas circulated by fandom clash with their social structures, how do you deal with the sensitive themes introduced by fandom (ex: queerness) etc. etc.)
3. Social and political bias: Fandom, as a predominantly female space, is already perceived as politically biased by many people, if only because western cultures really aren’t good about acknowledging that women do stuff, so there was that to deal with, for example when my thesis director told me to maybe not focus so much on the part where fanfiction was used to explore parts of the characters that TPTB wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole (such as sex life and sexual identity) and that the arrival of those themes in TV (such as in BTVS) manifested in pretty successful runs and/or pretty faithful fandoms (BTVS again, but in more recent time things like Cassandra Clare’s books and FSOG have benefited from it, at least in part).
   On a more personnal level, there was the fact that my fandom is a feminist, queer, antiracist fandom. I discovered feminism through fandom (and specifically through tumblr) and fandom was the space in which I built my identity first as a slash fan, then as a maybe-not-straight fangirl, then as a queer fangirl and, more recently, as a lesbian. Fandom, for me, is inherently and undoubtedly political, and that wasn’t supposed to show in my research (which was frustrating as hell, btw, but I think I managed) while at the same time said research would have been terribly wrong if it didn’t account for fandom’s origins and social specificities.

 

Plus, of course, the need to justify what I said and link it all to teaching theories, which shouldn’t have been too hard but was because I will never not hate reading academic theory books, which is probably why 90% of this thesis is thoroughly based on practical experience rather than direct/pure theory. This was a part that kind of worried me, by the way, and played into the legitimity problem which didn’t help the anxiety, but hey, that’s a bit less relevant on the academic side of things.

The main thing I did to research for this thesis, aside from rereading Jamison and devouring way more Fanlore pages than I actually needed (and also searching my username which, for the curious, is mentioned twice over there) was ask people to participate in an online survey, which received a little over 300 participations and whose results overwhelmingly confirmed my hypothesis that people felt writing fic & taking part in fandom helped improve their performances in a foreign language (note: this is a ridiculously small sample of fandom, even if you narrow it down to people who write fics in english and use tumblr, so ideally a wider research would have to be conducted, but it’s still a bit of a significant number) which in turn lends credential to my overall point. Still, other than that I didn’t actually have to do all that much “real” research, in that all the theory I invoke is stuff I learned in class which I then internalized and remembered when writing the thesis. So really the most annoying part of this whole job was to stop whining “but we all know this why do I have to prove it agaiiiiiiin???” and actually do it–petty, I know. I never claimed I wasn’t, and also I don’t like repeating myself, I feel annoying when I do.

The second hardest part (although much less annoying) was to figure out the practical ways to introduce fanfiction in a school context, in a way that allows for the keypoints of fandom to happen (freedom to pick your topic, freedom to not be graded on your work, freedom to explore stylistically and ideologically in what you write) while still respecting the necessary constraint of language learning (discussing stuff in a foreign language, having a teacher/fellow student look at your stuff to correct it, being mindful of how the higher ups/parents might react if their kids start reading slash, etc.). That required quite a lot of thinking and, honestly, will always be a complex topic that requires a lot of adaptation to your public, as well as a teacher/animator who is a fan.

(That’s actually my only hard and fast rule. If you want to introduce a class/group of student to fandom in a way that will lead them to actively participate in it as a group, which is what I propose in my thesis, you need to have a community member to guide them. External studies are different, but if you’re going to set a bunch of students into fanfic writing communities, they have to have a guide, period.)

 

As for the perspectives opened by my thesis, honestly, they’re a bi too vast for me to define precisely. Like I said above, French academia still is pretty skeptical of internet-based things (unless, of course, that’s part of your area of study, but those aren’t quite the most popular yet) so there would be many ways to develop/bounce back on a thesis about fanfiction, be it from a sociological standpoint (studying French fandoms) or a linguistic standpoint (is there an internet french the way there is an internet english? My bet is on yes, but I have zero idea if french academia is studying that already or not) etc.

From a language-learnign perspective, I guess you could be ambitious and, assuming the kind of fanfic workshop I describe in my thesis takes off (which is a bit of a huge IF), imagine a network of fic workshop, which would be interesting because that would mean a bit of a pocket inside fandom and a different, fiction-based approach to language learning, which as I hinted earlier would be pretty much an inversion of what is currently being done.

On a less ambitious/hazardous scale though, you could imagine, once the students have gained enough confidence to write and read fic about say, Star Wars or the MCU, try and have them aply the same mechanism to literary classics. Instead of envisioning, idk, Victor Hugo, as a dusty old book you have no choice about reading, why not see if you can write a fic in his verse? Or write about Quasimodo in the modern days?

And of course, there’s the whole activism part I mentioned earlier, in which fanfic writing and reading can serve to introduce concepts like mutual respect in the classroom, being mindful of people’s history and need (with trigger warnings for example) and, even if you’re not ready to tackle an explicitely political discussion for whatever reason, you can also use fanfic to hand your students vocabulary that isn’t normally dealt with in manuals. for example, where most french manuals I’ve seen give you descriptive words for white people, you can use fanfiction to introduce descriptive words for black people (skin colors, hair types, hair style, etc.) where you can (even if that should be done by default but let’s face it, that’s still not the case).

That’s the great thing about fanfiction and fandom, by the way: it being a counter culture (and even if it still has plenty of shit to look at in terms of racism, ableism and the likes) means that you will, at some point, stumble onto something that either a) not talked about (much) in mainstream culture or b) talked about in a very different way from how the fandom deals with it (be it queerness, disability, neurodivergence etc.). It’s kind of scary, especially if you’re not prepared for it, but the great thing is that it opens up a ton of possibilities for introducing interesting, important and complex topics to your student which, especially when you’re working with teenagers, is very important to do, even if it’s only for their sake..