What about pitch perfect is your paper/presentation on? That’s super exciting, congrats!
Thank you so much! I presented this past year already about Game of Thrones and classical rhetoric, so this is a nice, fun change that’ll take my mind off law school for the time being.
It’s a modification of the presentations and projects I worked on over the past year, since PP3 came out. I’ve presented things to my friends and cohort and even to a professor for a major class assignment.
This is the abstract I submitted to the conference:
Carolyn Miller writes that it isn’t possible to box everything into neatly marked “technical” or “nontechnical” boxes, though it is possible to treat any specific nuance of reality as either one of those categories (613).
Fandom studies exist at the intersection of media studies, digital humanities, and critical theory. Within this overlap, however, there is an area where the exploration of fandom becomes one that incorporates both an understanding of technical communication as a laborious task within fandom: how does a fandom member establish connections and generate interest in their creative content? While an analysis of text, context, and paratext would shed some light on this particular rhetorical situation, including a technical communication lens would diversify the explanation and generate a more nuanced discourse in this particular field of study.
I am interested in exploring fandom and media studies through the lens of not only the usual suspects like Henry Jenkins and Laura Mulvey, but also through Foucault, Barthes, and technical communication studies.
This presentation is born out of academic and personal interest; I explore fandom as a genre of technical communication, further exemplifying the multi-modal development of discourse communities. I use the Pitch Perfect franchise to illustrate this technical communication in fandom studies, delving into the world of a capella and how fans shape their own consumption of media – the same media that dangles a “ship” just out of their reach.
Essentially, while academically whining about Bechloe, I talk about fandom desires, shaping orderly discourse, and how fans know how to shape and adapt to their specific audiences.
Also, I play with a question of queerbaiting, though I think I need to tease that out more before putting it into the final product.
