Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice

Abstract

In this essay, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo explore new trends in reader response for a digital age, particularly the phenomenon of bending texts using social media. They argue that bending is one form of restorying, a process by which people reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse. Building on Louise Rosenblatt's influential transactional theory of reading, the authors theorize restorying as a participatory textual practice in which young people use new media tools to inscribe themselves into existence. The authors build on theorists from Mikhail Bakthin to Noliwe Rooks in order to illustrate tensions between individualistic “ideological becoming” and critical reader response as a means of protest. After discussing six forms of restorying, they focus on bending as one way youth make manifest their embodied, lived realities and identities, providing examples from sites of fan communities where participants are producing racebent fanwork based on popular children's and young adult books, movies, comics, and other media. Situating these phenomena within a larger tradition of narrating the self into existence, the authors explore broader implications for literacy education.

“See, Click, Fix”: Civic Interrogation and Digital Tools in a Ninth-Grade Ethnic Studies Course

“…Digital literacies are often conceptualized as the plurality of literacies in the digital age (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013;Bawden, 2008), spanning numerous technologies and media (Jocson, 2012(Jocson, , 2018Stewart, 2015). Critical digital literacies extend these conversations to include the critical "analysis of and participation in digital ecologies" (Golden, 2017, p. 374) and elevate the distinctive skill sets and tools that youth engage as they critically read their increasingly digital and racialized worlds (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013;Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). Ávila and Zacher Pandya describe critical digital literacy as having two goals: "to investigate manifestations of power relations in texts, and to design, and in some cases redesign, texts in ways that serve other, less powerful interests" (p. 3).…”

Adolescents Becoming Feminist on Twitter: New Literacies Practices, Commitments, and Identity Work

“…As sociotechnical scholar Tufekci (2017) wrote, "these technologies allow people to find one another, to craft and amplify their own narrative, to reach out to broader publics, and to organize and resist" (p. xxix). The suggestion that social media can support the storying process (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) aligns with educational research interested in the identities developed as young people learn how to author their own stories using digital media, embodied practice, and pop culture artifacts that integrate offline and online worlds (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2014;Wargo, 2017).…”

What’s Hot in Literacy: New Topics and New Frontiers are Abuzz

“…In fact, their relevance is perhaps more evident than ever during a global health pandemic and spans into every other topic in literacy including hot topics like the science of teaching reading, dyslexia, and social justice/equity in literacy. Recent impactful works have explored civic literacies in digital spaces (Kalir & Garcia, 2019); "restorying," or the reshaping of narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences often missing from popular texts and media (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016); and propaganda as well as the intersection of digital texts and critical literacy (Hobb's Media Education Lab's freely available resources https://mediaeducationlab.com/curriculum/materials).…”