Race insanity: intertextual discursive practices challenging race and ethnicity in the digital age

Abstract

In the global communicative landscape of the digital age, researchers and educators need a more nuanced understanding of identity creation. This paper analysed how fan fiction writers create representations of identity in their personal profiles in the fanfiction.net archive site. Specifically, I assessed whether traditional racial/ethnic categories are relevant and/or applicable in a fan fiction community and examined what we learn from fan fiction writers’ representations of their own identity that could inform and expand how multicultural education considers the diversity of individuals and groups. The study drew on an electronic corpus of 45 user profiles chosen randomly from fanfiction.net and applied a cultural discourse analysis framework (CuDA) to this set of data. The results indicated that rather than fitting into specific racial/ethnic categories, the discursive practices of these fan fiction writers revealed portraits of self that were much more unique, elaborated and meaningful to their personal identities. Consequently, I argue that the real challenge for multicultural education is to develop a more complex understanding of the uniqueness of learners as individuals, welcoming their lives, relationships, memories, fantasies and desires specifically as well as how they connect or are connected to larger sociocultural groups.