Scholarly Publication: “Making Our Voices Heard”

Scholarly Writing · McFarland · 2010

Project Overview

My chapter “Making Our Voices Heard: Young Adult Females Writing Participatory Fan Fiction” was published in Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, an edited scholarly collection examining digital writing, fan culture, and participatory media. Edited by Heather Urbanski and published by McFarland in 2010, the book explores how fans engage with popular culture through activities ranging from discussion and interpretation to the creation of new texts.

The chapter examines how young female fan fiction writers use online research and participation in fan communities to move beyond consuming popular media and actively reshape its narratives. Through a case study of a young woman's fan fiction based on the Japanese video game series Pop'n Music, I analyze how writers develop authority and agency through research, interaction with other fans, and the reinterpretation of existing characters and stories. I also consider how these participatory writing practices might inform approaches to academic writing instruction.

External Review

Danielle Roney Roach discusses this chapter in her review of Writing and the Digital Generation for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

Read the review in Kairos.

Skills Demonstrated

Scholarly writing, qualitative research, rhetorical and textual analysis, synthesis of academic sources, and audience awareness.

Publication Information

Coleman, Susanna. “Making Our Voices Heard: Young Adult Females Writing Participatory Fan Fiction.” Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, edited by Heather Urbanski, McFarland, 2010, pp. 95–105.

View the book on Google Books.

Research and Writing Process

Early versions of this project proposed comparing two fan fiction stories by a teenage writer: one composed for a school assignment and another written for personal enjoyment. The proposed analysis explored how different writing contexts might affect the agency young women experience as authors.

As the project developed, I narrowed its focus to a close reading of one extracurricular fan fiction story, examining how its author used online research, fan communities, and creative reinterpretation to establish her own voice within an existing fictional world. The published chapter combines this case study with scholarly research and my own experience as a fan fiction writer, concluding with implications for writing instruction.