I was recently involved in a reader’s advisory workshop in which discussion of popular genre fiction came up. Presenters offered synopses of different genres for participants who might not know a great deal about them, and as I listened to the descriptions I was struck again by something which has for a long time bothered me: the stigmas that surround certain types of genre fiction.

In both my undergraduate experience as a creative writing major, and my graduate experience as a librarian, I have become very aware of the way in which popular genre fiction, in particular romance fiction, and what might be termed “pulp” science fiction and fantasy, are regarded as being lesser genres, read only by individuals who are less educated and enlightened than those who read literary fiction and non-fiction. As both an individual and a librarian this frustrates me greatly, because it means that patrons end up feeling discouraged and judged when their reading interests are treated as lesser or as somehow being shameful. Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity and social media, and social media as a performance space, and performative identity theories.

In her 2009 article “All the World Wide Web’s a stage”, Erika Pearson discusses social networking sites in terms of performance spaces, which include actors, a perceived audience, a front-stage (in which public performances are expected to occur) and a back stage (in which performances or interactions are expected to be private). The barriers between these areas, Pearson argues, begin to collapse when we begin talking about social media spaces in which actors can be divorced from their identifiable identity, and audiences may be invisible or unperceived or inattentive (2009). This argument has strongly reminded me of one of my favourite discussions of performative identity, which appropriately enough occurs in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967). Continue reading →