Making the invisible visible: affective engagement, guided interventions and craft in fan fiction-modeled storytelling

This thesis investigates how writers can use craft strategies common within fan fiction to promote affective learning and explore how interventions can be used to interject poignantly into existing canon. This was done through textual analysis, secondary sources and creative research by writing a 75,000 word hybrid novel (titled Avengers: The Privileged Few) set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and 30,000 word exegesis. The aims of this project have been to explore different ways to promote affective learning, to propose an affective learning paradigm and create interventions—Aboriginal ways of knowing, a critique of unremarked Whiteness and the exploration of coloured feminism, centring on ownership of women’s bodies. I have made an Aboriginal feminist viewpoint visible in the MCU, adding to Aboriginal literature in Australia. Throughout my PhD, I found that embracing the affective aspect and value system of fan fiction helped me create a proposed paradigm for affective learning, inspired by Anna Wilson’s work on affective and fannish hermeneutics. Through the writing of Avengers: The Privileged Few, it also showed me the craft strategies of free indirect discourse, domesticity and positive group dynamics could be used effectively outside of a fan fiction context, potentially bringing a comfort to readers when reading about emotionally challenging topics. These discoveries helped me make my three key interventions. I came to the conclusions that fan fiction and many of its associated craft techniques are an effective way of exploring hard issues. Fan fiction often promotes the comfort and affect suggested in affective learning as well as reaching wider audiences in a traditionally-action based novel that makes an Indigenous feminist viewpoint available where there wasn’t one before.