“A Writer More Than . . . a Child”: A Longitudinal Study Examining Adolescent Writer Identity

Abstract

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.

Keywords

adolescent writing chronotopic lamination core identity fanfiction identity as position longitudinal case study

This article joins an ongoing line of inquiry in adolescent literacy research that examines the interconnectedness of literacies and identities as youth navigate different social spaces. Lewis and del Valle (2009) argue that we are in a time of overlapping “waves” of literacy-and-identity research, with identity in second-wave studies conceptualized as “negotiated and performative” (p. 313) and in third-wave studies as “hybrid, metadiscursive, and spatial” (p. 316). These notions of identities as highly fluid, multiple, and transformed in response to each new purpose and audience serve as responses to earlier conceptualizations of identity as singular, more stable, and the result of staged development. Our study reexamines the relationship between youth literacy practices and identity, reconsidering theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and youth agency as we investigate how one adolescent (Laura, pseudonym) works to position herself as a passionate writer over time and across various spaces. Through the insights gained from this longitudinal inquiry, we aim to recognize, revisit, and reclaim attention to more stable dimensions of identity that appear to be at work as young people navigate the multiple social contexts in which they write.

We find Lewis and del Valle’s (2009) three waves of literacies and identity research useful in tracing and situating relevant inquiry shifts in our field. In the first wave, Lewis and del Valle (2009) note that literacy research often tied identity to “cultural affiliation” (p. 311), indicating a more stable view of identity and the cultural norms to which this first wave was bound. Even further back, a social behaviorist understanding of identity emphasized a cognitive individual making conscious decisions about her own identity based on feedback from social others (Mead, 1934). With identity thus conceptualized as “stable and unified,” literacy research often examined experiences of “cultural conflict” when students encountered the “dominant institution of schooling” (Lewis & del Valle, 2009, p. 311).

Second-wave studies, usually set in nonschool contexts, have expanded what counts as literacy, documenting adolescents gaining fluency and accessing literate identities that are often invisible in school contexts (Alvermann, 2001; Moje, 2000). However, identity and writing theory during this time continued evolving and grappling with notions of social context and others’ influences on identity development. Studies emphasizing situatedness and context can be seen as reactions to the social behaviorist view of decontextualized, individual identity. Ivanič (1998) demonstrates this critical response and shift in literacy theory to a social construction view of identity, explaining, “writing is not an individual act of discovery and creation, but an act embedded in social context” (p. 96). From a psychological perspective, Erikson (1968) described identity as a linear, staged process that arrived, eventually and ultimately at an end goal—an “achieved identity,” and he emphasized the role of social interaction and context in the process of identity development. While Erikson’s acknowledgment of enduring stability resonates with our work, our research challenges his concept of achieved identity, which suggests a developmental end point after which identity becomes more fixed.

As literacy-and-identity scholarship enters the third wave, issues of mobility and connectivity have moved to the fore as researchers seek to make sense of “a complex landscape that is both global and local as well as participatory and exclusionary” (Lewis & del Valle, 2009, p. 311). Studying youth identities from a more hybrid, metadiscursive, and spatial perspective has, for instance, yielded insights into middle school girls’ identity work as they authored possible selves in science through their actions and their relationships (Barton, et al., 2013). Other research has taken up the notion of identity work to recognize that even when youth were physically in one space (e.g., school), “other social spaces are recruited and brought into” events (de Haan & Leander, 2011). Understanding the unique literacy-and-identity relationships afforded in online social spaces has also become important. For instance, Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) explored how gender construction shaped and was shaped by adolescent girls’ technology-mediated literacy practices. Like the second wave, third-wave literacy research, with emphases on identity hybridity, can be understood as a reaction to psychological constructs of identity stability.

Yet, figuring out how to account for agency as people move across socially constructed spaces has led to unresolved tensions around questions of stability and fluidity in identity theory. Particularly with third-wave research exploring adolescents’ participation in new media, interest-driven, or popular culture spaces, literacy-and-identity studies tend to “celebrate the agent as inventor of literate practice” (Moje, Luke, Davies, Street, 2009, p. 416). Often, these studies depict the adolescent as resisting undesirable identity positions (or stereotypes, such as “struggling reader”). Such undesirable depictions imply a view of identity where subjects define themselves primarily as affiliated with a particular social, cultural group, indicative of Lewis and del Valle’s (2009) first-wave identity studies that linked identity to cultural (often ethnic and racial) membership, which, by association, tends to be relatively stable. However, these studies also regularly describe participants inventing their literacy practices and claiming accompanying identities. On the one hand, as we grapple with tensions around identity fluidity, stability, and youth agency in our own research, we agree with Moje and colleagues (2009) that earlier social behaviorist perspectives can be a “dangerous” way to view identity because they cast youth either as independent meaning makers in environments devoid of contextual clues (that contribute to their understanding of what makes certain identity attributes attractive or unattractive to them) or as “nonagentic pawns,” vulnerable to “more powerful institutional structures and relations of power” (p. 424). On the other hand, we have concerns that celebrations of the agentic moves youth make, while important to legitimize and expand the field’s appreciation for a wider array of literacies, may overstate young people’s agentic possibilities without fully considering constraints they face in many social spaces.

Our purpose here is to recalibrate historically situated views that cast identity as individual and stable with more contemporary reactions to those views in an effort to offer a nuanced understanding of young people’s identity work as they attempt agentic moves through writing. To do so, we draw on data collected through a longitudinal case study documenting more than four years of Laura’s writing as a student in English classes, as a Broadway fan, as a creative writer, and as a playwright, actor, and director in theater productions. We analyze the challenges this writer faces as she invents her identities through literate practices within and across contexts, illuminating vivid examples of how youth literacy and agency work together to produce identities that are both flexible and stable, fluid and enduring, over time and across spaces. The following research questions guide our inquiry: How does Laura’s passion for writing manifest in different social spaces? What identities does Laura take up in various social spaces? How do these identities shape her practices and perspectives as a writer?

In what follows, we articulate the theoretical perspectives that frame our analysis of Laura’s identity work, explain the design of our longitudinal study, and share findings that center on the different ways Laura enacts a core identity as a passionate writer, while also layering perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning in different social spaces. We conclude by returning to the concepts of identity fluidity and agency, and offer insights for third-wave literacy-and-identity scholars to consider.

Theories of Literacies and Identities

Literacy scholars have come to understand the interconnected nature of literacies and identities (Moje & McCarthey, 2002). Gee (2014) explains the relationship, saying, “any specific way of reading and thinking is, in fact, a way of being in the world, a way of being a certain ‘kind of person,’ a way of taking on a certain sort of identity” (p. 3). In this analysis, we use the following to understand Laura’s literacy practices and identity enactments: core identity (Gee, 1999, 2001, 2014), identity as position (Moje et al., 2009), and laminations (Holland & Leander, 2004; Prior & Shipka, 2003). Combining these three concepts focuses our theoretical exploration into identity stability through a consideration of temporal, social, and physical dimensions of writers.

Core Identity

When literacy scholars discuss socially situated, multiple identities, they sometimes discuss more durable aspects to identity by citing Gee’s (1999, 2001) “core identity,” a term he used to describe “the continuous and relatively (but only relatively) ‘fixed’ sense of self underl[ying] our contextually shifting multiple identities” (Gee, 1999, p. 41). In this view, core identity serves as an anchor to more flexible identity, offering researchers ideas about when and how identity can be consistent and durable (e.g., Armour, 2009; Marsh & Stolle, 2006; Moje et al., 2009). When considering dimensions of identity that are less susceptible to change, researchers (e.g., Compton-Lilly, 2014) invoke Bourdieu’s (1977) “habitus,” a concept that conveys “a system of lasting transposable dispositions” (p. 82) that individuals carry with them through their histories and bring to bear on every new experience. Similarly, in her theory of writer identity, Ivanič (1998) describes the “autobiographical self,” which—although constantly changing—is referred to as “the real me” (p. 24) by students, suggesting attributes of core identity.

Like Ivanič (1998) and Compton-Lilly (2014), Marsh and Stolle (2006) add nuance to the concept of multiple identities when they state, “we construct and reconstruct our identities as we attempt to make our way through varying environments and situations over time” (p. 49). Notable here is the point about time—and that reflexive, iterative identity construction happens as individuals move through space (“varying environments”) and temporal dimensions (“time”). Similarly, Moje and colleagues (2009) state that identity is “produced, generated, developed, or narrated over time” (p. 418). Hence, awareness of core identity not only serves to inform a situated theory of multiple, responsive identities, but also highlights the importance of the temporal dimension as we consider identity enactments, making the longitudinal nature of our study particularly generative in understanding both fluidity and durability of identity. By applying the construct of core identity, we observed how Laura worked to bring her passionate writer self into various contexts over time, providing empirical findings about core identity and increasing the explanatory power of this theoretical concept.

Identity as Position

Also informing our understanding of identities is the metaphor of identity as position (Moje et al., 2009), a perspective that focuses on social positioning as central to producing subjects and subjectivity. This metaphor acknowledges that it is always in social construction, in relation to others, that identity is “offered” or “afforded” to an individual who is “call[ed] on . . . to occupy the position” (Holland & Leander, 2004). Positioning subjects as active in their identity enactments characterizes identity work as a “productive” (producing identities) process. This metaphor takes into account multiple discursive social spaces and individuals’ dynamic movement among them.

With this in mind, our analysis pays particular attention to Laura’s relationships with social others—her parents, her English teachers, Fanfiction.net members, fellow actors, and authors whose practices shape her writing. The identity as position metaphor requires that we look for how Laura takes up and rejects, in part or in entirety, the identities offered in different time-space contexts. This sensitivity allows us to uncover evidence of her agency across writing contexts and also to see how, like Moje’s (2000) gangsta youth, she may confront obstacles as she moves among social spaces. We use identity as position to offer a view of agency in tension, sometimes celebrated, sometimes marginalized, always in negotiation.

Others have applied the identity as position metaphor to understand identity construction across a range of topics. In Yoon’s (2012) study of immigrant student identity and educational success, the metaphor helped illuminate how two adolescent Korean immigrant boys affirmed their immigrant identities to agentically position themselves as successful in their school setting—characteristic of the identity studies that celebrate the agent. Several studies have also applied identity as position to adolescent literacies, as we do. These include Hungerford-Kresser’s (2010) and Hungerford-Kresser and Vetter’s (2012) work to investigate Latina/o students’ social positioning and negotiating discourses of power during their first year of college. Similarly, Poveda’s (2011) two-year ethnography of secondary students participating in “reading hour” at their multicultural secondary school shed light on how students position their identities amid institutional categorizations inside school spaces while also drawing upon their positions in nonschool social spaces to make sense of their own and each other’s identities. While these studies, set primarily in school spaces, highlight positioning opportunities and constraints within institutions, our study not only explores institutional influences on Laura’s identity positions in school, but also gives attention to online social spaces as well as home and theater spaces in an effort to follow Laura’s identity construction more widely.

Laminations

In another theoretical move to offer stability and nuance to the socially situated, multiple construct of identities, literacy scholars have leveraged the laminations metaphor—or the “layering of identity positions one over the other” (Moje et al., 2009). Laminations are tied to identity as position, as different positions offer different identities that, rather than melt and meld into one another, “retain some of their original distinctiveness” (Holland & Leander, 2004, p. 130). Each new positioning encounter produces another identity layer, and certain positions repeatedly layer and thicken (Holland & Lave, 2001) through space and time, offering an element of consistency to a situated view of identity. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of a chronotope (time-place), Prior and Shipka (2003) applied and further developed chronotopic laminations to study writers and their literate activities. They describe chronotopic laminations in writing as “the dispersed, fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action along with the ways multiple activity footings are held and managed” (p. 181). Chronotopic laminations embody physical places, drawing upon concrete histories to imbue representational practices (e.g., writing or reading a newspaper). Using laminations to frame thinking about identity also has the potential to constrain identity into an inflexible entity that has congealed over time; therefore, we draw on an extension of this metaphor—“identity cubes” (Holland & Leander, 2004; Moje et al., 2009)—which conceptualizes identity as having multiple laminated sides, and opens our thinking up to recognizing both fluidity and stability.

Most studies that examine identity as laminated are implemented over an extended period of time (at least one year), although in his review of research on children’s identity and writing studies, Collier (2010) notes that there are few in the literature. In one such longitudinal study, Barton and colleagues (2013) relied on laminations to make sense of how middle school girls from nondominant backgrounds constructed identities, while doing science-related activities over a three year period. With a greater focus on space, Wohlwend (2007) appreciated how the laminations metaphor “strengthens and stabilizes . . . identity positions by repeating themes across layers” (p. 74). Studying writing and identity in digital landscapes, Buck (2012) used the laminations metaphor to make sense of an undergraduate student’s online identity management across various social media platforms. According to Buck, laminations are particularly useful to researchers who study “dispersed literate activity” (p. 12). These studies relied on a laminations metaphor for its “holding power” as identity tended to layer repeatedly across time, space, and among “key events” (Barton et al., 2013, p. 8).

Highlighting another advantage of this metaphor, other studies draw on laminations to detect the “heterogeneous” layers that can account for conflicting identity positions within the same activity. Both Wargo (2017), in his study of LBGTQ youth using selfies and producing lifestreams as tools for identity making, and Leander and Frank (2006), who studied youth identity construction through creating images online, used a laminations metaphor as it allows for the integrity of different layers which can account for “shifting and sometimes conflicting reads of youth identity” (Wargo, 2017, p. 572).

Like Holland and Leander (2004), we are “concerned not just with the layering or embedding of structures and resources, but with the stabilizing or strengthening afforded by lamination practices” (p. 132). We incorporate laminations into our theoretical frame to provide a more complex, nuanced way to explore how situated identities are both flexible and durable through space and time. Attention to laminations helps us make sense of the identity positions Laura takes up, resists, and refuses among contexts. Finally, this metaphor makes space for recognizing identity construction and representation through discourse, narrative, interactions, and artifacts.

Core identity, identity as position, and laminations overlap and work together to create a theoretical framework within which we can trace the more durable dimensions of Laura’s writing identity. Core identity, with its focus on the temporal dimension, helps illuminate Laura’s passion for writing, which remained prominent throughout the time of our study. Since this study follows Laura across multiple writing contexts (home, online, school, and theater), we draw on the identity as position metaphor to hone our gaze on how Laura’s relationships and interactions in these spaces shape her identity as writer. With identity as position, we pay attention to what each space offers and denies Laura’s literate activity, and what recurs across spaces. The laminations metaphor theorizes that written activity in any given moment draws on a writer’s temporal and spatial history to inform the literate act and, in turn, the writer’s identity. Underlying all three is a social, situated ontology. The spaces where Laura writes are social spaces; her experience over time is socially situated and she laminates her writing identity by repeatedly layering different sides of her identity cube as she moves through social contexts and temporal dimensions.

Study Design

For over four years, we collected data capturing how Laura’s writing and identity work in multiple contexts persisted and shifted over time. As we sought to explain, describe, explore, and critique the phenomena of writer identity, a qualitative approach aptly addressed our research questions (Marshall & Rossman, 2011). In conducting this inquiry, we assumed an interpretivist stance as we worked to uncover our participant’s perspectives on her everyday activities and constructed an instrumental case study (Stake, 1995) that represents the particularity and complexity of Laura as a writer. Through this case, we aim to contribute to the field’s understanding of adolescent writers by reexamining the literacy-identity connection, with particular attention to agency, fluidity, and stability as youth traverse multiple contexts. Detailed, “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of our data allows insight into Laura’s case and provides readers the opportunity to make “naturalistic generalizations” (Stake, 1995) to their own familiar worlds. Before continuing further into describing data collection and analysis, we want readers to learn more about Laura and why she writes.

Introducing Laura

At the time of this writing, Laura is a 19-year-old White woman attending a large Midwestern public university. We met her the summer she transitioned from middle to high school. At that time, Laura’s family—her father, a tenured academic, her mother, a pediatric nurse, and her brother, three years Laura’s junior—lived in a suburb outside a midsized Northeastern city; though two years into our investigation, the family relocated to Southern California. Her father described a 14-year-old Laura as independent, persistent, determined, and headstrong (Int. 2, 2012). In that same interview, her mother made the first mention to us about Laura’s passion: “whatever she decides to be passionate about, she is passionate about.” We came to understand Laura as a passionate actor, director, producer, dancer, singer, and writer who writes for various audiences and purposes across a number of different social spaces. Thus, though our relationship with Laura began because her father was a colleague who mentioned to the first author that his daughter wrote fanfiction, we found Laura’s writing practices more broadly served as an instrumental case in better understanding adolescent writers and their identities as they navigate multiple social spaces.

Laura experienced success as a student in secondary English classrooms. Her middle school teachers recognized her writing abilities and encouraged her family to advocate for early enrollment in Advanced Placement (AP) English courses when she transitioned to high school. The high school’s administration protested, initially placing Laura in a 9th grade honors English class. However, 6 weeks into the year, she transferred into AP English Language and Composition, becoming her district’s first 9th grader to take the class. Laura earned a 100% on her research paper (the first she had ever written) and an A in the course, and scored a 4 out of 5 on the AP exam. During 10th grade, Laura completed AP English Literature and Composition, again earning an A, and this time scoring a 5 on the AP exam. That year, she also took a one-semester Mythology elective. When enrolling in her California high school, Laura faced challenges filling her English graduation requirements, so she enrolled in an online credit recovery class for English 12 and took an online women’s literature course offered by the local community college, to earn the English graduation credits she needed.

Laura has been an avid reader and writer most of her life. Her family’s lore contained many stories of Laura reading—like the time she took her mother up on the challenge to read all of the American Girl books before receiving one of the dolls—and writing, including when she was 10 years old and used downtime in an airport on the way to a family vacation to work on a 20-page proposal for why the family needed a pet guinea pig. When we met Laura, she was writing a novel, which she later abandoned, though not before she had written more than 36,000 words.

Laura’s Broadway musical fandom led her to discover Fanfiction.net, when she was 11, looking online for stories about her favorite characters in Cats. Though she no longer participates on the site, for a few years, she read and wrote fanfiction based on the musicals she enjoyed, particularly Wicked, and the popular young adult novels The Hunger Games. She described fanfiction as a good opportunity to “explore the story” (Int. 1, 2012) or give lesser known characters a voice (Int. 6, 2015).

Relatedly, Laura also wrote to prepare for stage productions. She began acting in community theater at age 10. In our first interview, Laura told us of her dream to eventually work on Broadway, and she strives to make that dream a reality by honing her skills in acting camps and weekend Shakespeare intensives, acting in school and local musicals and plays, directing two productions, and pursuing a bachelor of arts in theater arts. Laura has written two original plays, one she produced, directed, and starred in with friends, which she called her “senior project,” a capstone experience for which she earned no official credit from her high school.

Data Collection

Recognizing, as does Compton-Lilly (2014), that we have much to learn from longer-term investigations of writers’ identity development, we designed this longitudinal inquiry to collect multiple sources of data for the duration of Laura’s high school career, while also capturing her earlier writing practices, through archived material on Fanfiction.net and writing samples Laura provided.¹ Longitudinal studies afford researchers invaluable opportunities to trace writers across time, but they require flexibility in methods to adapt to changing circumstances and respond to unforeseen directions in the participant’s practices. While we initially designed our study to explore Laura’s fanfiction writing, that focus shifted after our first interview when Laura talked at length about her writer identity, saying: “sometimes I consider myself a writer more than I consider myself a child, because I think over the years I’ve spent like more time writing than I had like playing outside” (Int. 1, 2012). Her family’s move to another state also required that we conduct our later interviews virtually, through Skype, rather than face-to-face.

Inspired by Leander and McKim’s (2003) call for methods that allow researchers to follow the “moving, traveling practices of adolescents” (p. 211), we generated qualitative data about how Laura positioned herself as a passionate writer over time and across various spaces. Specifically, we conducted semistructured annual interviews and exchanged emails with Laura periodically throughout each school year, during which our questions probed into a variety of writing-related topics, including asking Laura to describe her writing practices, talk about feedback she received from teachers and others, and to discuss writing samples she provided. We adapted Androutsopoulos’s (2008) guidelines to systematically observe her practices on Fanfiction.net, not only capturing all of the stories she posted there, but also noting changes to her author profile over time and recording the feedback she gave and received. In 2014, we attended a stage production in which she directed and starred. When Laura created a website devoted to her theater interests, we captured all of her entries and the comments she received. Thus, we gathered data representing her writing across a variety of contexts, over time.

While Laura is the primary participant in our research, we sought to include perspectives from others involved in positioning Laura as a writer, including her family and English teachers, though only her 7th grade teacher agreed to an interview. Table 1 illustrates the full data corpus, showing how our approach to data collection allowed us to trace Laura’s writing wherever it led.

Table 1.

Data Corpus.

Source	Dates	Data Collected
Interviews with Laura	June 22, 2012 August 17, 2012 August 27, 2013 June 19, 2014 November 19, 2015	Interview 1, 70 minutes Interview 3, 120 minutes Interview 4, 89 minutes Interview 5, 92 minutes Interview 6, 59 minutes (via Skype)
Other interviews	July 11, 2012 July 2012	Interview 2, 85 minutes, with Dad, Mom, and Brother 10-page email interview, 7th grade English teacher
Emails with Laura	August 2012–May 2016	14 email exchanges
Systematic observation of Fanfiction.net	January 2010–June 2013	2 “Author Page” entries (1 per account) 18 fanfiction stories 95 reviews posted by readers on these stories
English class writing	October 2012–June 2014	20 artifacts from 9th and 10th grade AP English classes and 10th grade Mythology elective, 11 with teacher feedback
Other written artifacts	August 2012 July 2014 Summer 2014 March 2016	Her novel (draft) “Director’s Reflections” in program An unperformed play (draft) Script for senior project play performed May 2016
Laura’s website	February–April 2016	About Me section, News page, and 10 blog entries 22 comments from readers

Data analyzed for this article included transcripts of interviews with Laura (referred to as Interviews 1 and 3-6) and her family (Interview 2), an email interview with her 7th grade English teacher, and numerous emails between the first author and Laura. We used the remainder of the corpus to enhance our understanding of Laura as a passionate writer and checked it to support statements Laura and others made about her writing practices.

Data Analysis

Our data analysis follows grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), a flexible approach that grounds emerging theory in “the data themselves” (p. 2). We followed the basic grounded theory guidelines of coding, memo writing, sampling, and comparative methods as we simultaneously collected, described, analyzed, and interpreted data at every stage.

After our initial read through of the first interview transcript, we were inspired by Laura’s discussions of her identity, and thus turned to the literature to understand how adolescent literacies and identities have been theorized. By waiting until data collection began before consulting the literature on literacy-and-identity studies, we avoided placing preconceived categories or codes on the data (Charmaz, 2006). It was at this point we found core identity, and the metaphors of identity as position and laminations, instructive. As such, these theories provided sensitizing concepts (Blumer, 1954), “suggest[ing] directions along which to look” (p. 7) as we continued to analyze and interpret data.

While our sensitizing concepts guided our line-by-line coding, we worked to stay “close to the data” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 49) by using action words and phrases, applying in vivo codes of Laura’s own words, and staying open as we compared data to data. Thus, even as we sought to code and understand instances of positioning in Laura’s interview responses, for example, we remained open to what else Laura revealed about her writing and identity. Our initial codes then directed further data gathering, for example shaping subsequent interview questions as we delved deeper into Laura’s writing contexts, her relationships with others, and how she saw herself as a writer across time-spaces.

In our second phase of coding, focused coding (Charmaz, 2006), we moved to “sort, synthesize, integrate, and organize” (p. 43) data by determining the most significant and frequent initial codes. Codes at this stage noted, for example, when and where Laura learned as a writer and how such learning occurred. We then applied focused codes across our data, supporting and refining them. This process helped us see recurring instances of Laura’s passion for writing being well-received and butting up against resistance in multiple examples across time and in different contexts. Finally, axial coding helped us make sense of how codes related to each other as categories and subcategories; and it was in this process that we conceptualized Laura’s passionate writer identity within a cube structure, defining and clarifying its various laminated sides—perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning.

Findings

In these findings, we illustrate how Laura enacts her core identity as a passionate writer. We explore how identity is positioned in social spaces, and how, as she responds to such positioning, Laura laminates different sides of her identity cube. Laura herself saw the connections between all of her writing and the characters she emphasized in her work, while also recognizing a core identity that informed her writing over time:

It’s so strange that . . . all of my writing is about the same thing in some way, it’s very weird to look at, you can see the evolution of yourself as a person and the things that you continue talking about, and it’s so fascinating. I think I’m . . . psychoanalyzing myself in a way because . . . the same things that I wrote about when I was literally four years old and doodling are the same things that I wrote about in [my novel] and the same things I’m writing about now. It blows my mind . . . [the characters] are sort of like incarnations of myself probably. (Int. 6, 2015)

In what follows, we explore Laura’s work as a passionate writer, sharing evidence of how she laminates perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning while strengthening her core identity as she writes in various social spaces. As the practice of laminating involves drawing on a trajectory that threads through time and space, each of the four sections focuses on how Laura brings her passion to bear in temporal, spatial, social dimensions to reinforce different sides of her identity cube. In other words, we draw on data from different times and spaces to illustrate each side’s lamination as Laura positions herself, and gets positioned, as a writer.

Laminating Perfectionism

In the creative writing Laura did for herself, she laminated the perfectionism side of her identity cube, which both fed and corrupted her writing process. Laura’s perfectionism often intruded upon her process, frequently distracting her:

I think sometimes it [perfectionism] keeps me from putting . . . my heart into it because I’m so concerned about the technical elements that I like writing everything down and I use all these big words and I think it’s all clean and nice and pretty and then I look back as it and I read it over and I’m like, “wait, what was it about again?” So I then have to go back and change it cause . . . all I was concerned about was the semicolons and the comma rules and capitalization. (Int. 3, 2012)

Laura’s perfectionism made her hesitant to share her work with others, as her mom explained: “She’s pretty private with it . . . I mean she had [her dad] read her novel. I haven’t read it yet.” To which her younger brother added, “I think it’s just because she’s a perfectionist, so she needs it to be done before anyone sees it” (Int. 2, 2012). In the social space of her home, Laura’s mom supported and showed interest in her writing while her father praised her expertise, explaining: “technically she’s a better writer than I am . . . she understands all the rules . . . she’s great at it.” Laura met that enthusiasm with perfectionism and privacy, guarding her work from everyone except her father.

During the first few months of our study, Laura’s writing focused on her novel, whose three female protagonists represented Laura’s resistance, embrace, and compromise with her perfectionism. She described the concept this way:

I mean, I got the idea [for the novel] because I’m . . . an extreme perfectionist and it sort of . . . tore away at my psyche for a long time and so eventually, I just wrote it down and it . . . blew up into this whole thing and I have . . . three different ways that I look at perfection. (Int. 1, 2012)

This writing project provided the most salient example of her laminating perfectionism as Laura was both troubled by it and keenly aware of her writing as identity work.

When Laura finally decided to share a draft of the first part of her novel with her grandmother, a retired English teacher, receiving her critical feedback both threatened and intensified Laura’s perfectionism.

[The feedback] was very impactful on me because I’ve never . . . set my work . . . that out in the open and told people . . . “Tell me what you think,” and when they did tell me what they thought I was like, I really did have a crisis about that, because honestly and it sounds really irrational, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that . . . something I’d worked on for so long and so hard and thought about at every moment of the day could possibly have flaws, like at all. (Int. 4, 2013)

In giving feedback in a way Laura characterized as “mean,” her grandmother positioned Laura’s personal creative writing as imperfect, causing a “crisis.” As her most serious effort as a writer up to that point, working on her novel was important to Laura’s passionate writer core identity. Confronted with the possibility that her writing was not perfect, Laura put the novel aside for more than a year, explaining that she “decided if I’m going to send my work out into the open . . . it needs to be completed work, it can’t be Part 1” (Int. 4, 2013), thus further laminating the perfectionism side of her identity cube. She later told us that “[the novel] IS BACK! . . . And so am I, apparently” (emphasis in original; Email, November 5, 2013). Again, Laura’s words convey the link between her writing and identity, both coming back to life simultaneously, albeit briefly; Laura later abandoned this novel, but not her perfectionism or passion.

Though she laminated perfectionism repeatedly, Laura also worked to diminish the impact of perfectionism on her writing, recognizing its potential to disrupt her process. In one example, she told us about gaining wisdom from best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert, whom she heard speak at a local university. Laura explained that Gilbert

was talking about creativity and fear and that duality, and she said “my motto for writing is ‘done is better than good,’” and I was like “hallelujah.” Like isn’t that a beautiful, beautiful thing because that has been like a huge problem for me . . . that I’m like “no, I can’t finalize this page until I absolutely perfect this page and then I can move on to the next page,” and [Gilbert was] like “just finish it and then deal with it, and nothing you do is ever going to be perfect.” (Int. 6, 2015)

Incorporating Gilbert’s advice positioned Laura in a new way as she continued writing in the theater context. As a 12th grader in high school writing her senior project script, Laura tried to embrace this motto, telling us, “There’s no pressure for it to be a masterpiece. I don’t think it’s going to be a masterpiece” (Int. 6, 2015). She went on to finish this script, and to produce and perform in the play. Through these examples, we see Laura acknowledging and resisting her perfectionism as she pursued her passion for writing.

Laminating Expertise

In school and on Fanfiction.net (FFN) Laura enacted her passionate writer identity within greater constraints. The school context required her to write for teacher-evaluators and consider the expectations of assessments, as exemplified when Laura talked about her AP Literature course:

AP writing is just not how I write . . . it’s just very to the point . . . it made me reevaluate like my identity as a writer because I found that I wasn’t interested in writing that way and I wrote that way for the purpose of the AP exam. (Int. 5, 2014)

Relatedly, in sharing writing on FFN, she dealt with the expectations of the audience and fanfiction genre conventions (e.g., the “one-shot”—a single chapter story). Our analysis revealed that both contexts positioned Laura to laminate her expertise as a writer, as she and others often positioned her as better than other writers. Trying to foster her passion for writing in these contexts, Laura occasionally received encouragement and recognition, but more often met resistance and felt disappointed or unfulfilled.

Over time, Laura’s school experiences helped her to laminate the expertise side of her identity cube. Receiving high marks for her writing, such as the 100% on her research paper and her excellent AP exam scores, represented official acknowledgement of her writing abilities in this context. However, Laura often found school unreceptive to her passionate writer identity enactment. “Like sometimes my classmates, I think I’m kind of resented at school just for being like the writer girl” (Int. 3, 2012). Interactions she had in the classroom positioned her as more of a writer than the students around her, something her seventh grade teacher noticed: “Her answers were usually very different than my other students, because she had the maturity and forethought to articulate answers most students probably didn’t even know existed” (Email, July 1, 2012). Laura interpreted what set her apart from her classmates as passion, as seen in this example from her first year of high school:

I don’t think anyone really understood [my passion]. They were like “why do you like the Scarlet Letter?” and I was like it’s a beautiful masterpiece of language and prose and it was so beautiful, and they just saw it as . . . another [AP Language and Composition] assignment I guess. (Int. 4, 2013)

Even in interactions when peers seemed to appreciate her passion, Laura separates herself from them. Laura explained,

So I was really passionate about [To Kill A Mockingbird] . . . but then all the other kids . . . they would . . . actually ask me . . . questions about . . . To Kill A Mockingbird because they know I had read it [on her own in 7th grade] and I just approached it with . . . a different kind of vigor than they did. (Int. 4, 2013)

Repeatedly positioned as different from her peers, Laura laminated her expertise, which often felt uncomfortable or unsatisfying in the school context.

As Laura navigated how to earn English credits in her California high school, her request for receiving credit for writing, directing, and producing her senior project play was met with resistance. She enrolled in a grade recovery program the summer after 11th grade, which she described as “really rudimentary” (Int. 6, 2015), and she took an online literature course offered by a local community college in 12th grade. In the second course, Laura initially attempted to enact her passion when participating in discussion forums:

I was trying to be really . . . very detailed at first, and then I realized it was more about inciting discussion. It was less about giving feedback to what they [classmates] said. . . . So I think everyone sort of approaches it like I do [now] and they’re just like “I have to write something, so I’m just going to write something.” Like it’s not super thoughtful. . . . But it gets the job done.

Positioned by the school as a student who just needed credits, Laura laminated her expertise in these classes with misgivings, saying, “I’m not really learning.”

While not positioned as expert as often as in school, Laura also laminated her expertise in the FFN context. In describing writers who posted stories with spelling or grammar errors, Laura said, “the majority of . . . fanfiction writers are like not good and I find that to be a little bit appalling. . . . I’m just meticulous and I don’t like to publish things that are not good” (Int. 1, 2012). Even as she talked about talented fanfiction writers, some of whom indicated having master’s degrees in their profiles, Laura laminated her expertise as she questioned other writers’ purposes:

You find those writers and . . . those stories that are like really compelling and really good then you’re like “okay wait, so if you’re that good of a writer, why are you writing fanfiction? I’m 14 but you’re clearly not, so . . . what’s . . . the appeal of . . . fanfiction to you?”

Laura viewed FFN as a context that valued frequent posting and appealing to the audience more than writing quality, offering means of gaining recognition that Laura rejected. In doing so, she described herself as more expert than the most popular writer in the Wicked fandom, saying, “I think I’m better than her personally” (Int. 3, 2012). Laura explained,

Her stories are like long and they’re substantial and they’ve got predictable plot twists, but I don’t really see her as . . . this fantastic writer, which honestly she doesn’t have to be . . . but it does bother me sometimes that she . . . has over 200 reviews.

Thus we see how the FFN context, one that positioned successful writers as those who have the most readers, rather than the highest quality writing, allowed Laura to continue laminating her expertise as she used this space to foster her writing passion.

Laminating Risk Taking

While FFN’s expectations positioned particular practices as successful, it also afforded Laura opportunities to experiment with writing in ways she did not in other social spaces. Specifically, Laura found the anonymity available to her while sharing fanfiction “appealing,” explaining, “when you can anonymously put your things out there to be judged without putting yourself out there to be judged, then I think that’s really appealing to people because they don’t have to know who you are” (Int. 3, 2012). During the years she participated on FFN, Laura enacted her passionate writer identity by writing surreptitiously and anonymously, using known genres and familiar texts as source material, all of which allowed her to laminate a risk-taking side to her identity cube as she wrote.

Laura admitted that part of the pleasure she got from initially participating in FFN stemmed from having created the account as an 11-year-old, two years earlier than the site’s terms of service allow, and without her parents’ knowledge. “I was like ‘Oh I do it without my parents knowing; it’s . . . my little thing that I do. It’s . . . cool and I go home and check my fan fiction’” (Int. 5, 2014). Just as FFN’s anonymity allowed Laura to laminate risk taking, so too did its digital access, which allowed her to participate outside the rules of the site and hidden from her parents.

Adding to the covert nature of her participation, much of Laura’s FFN writing took place in the overnight hours: “Half of my fanfictions have been published at 2:00 in the morning” (Int. 1, 2012). Late at night, Laura relaxed her defenses and protectiveness around her writing and risked exposing it to a wider audience. Laura often turned to writing as a preferred activity, so the 24-hour availability of FFN made it an accessible context for her:

I’ll . . . just start to write kind of . . . for fun when I’m bored . . . I think once you start you just can’t stop and then I think you’re a little bit irrational at 2:00 in the morning, so then you think that it’s good enough to publish . . . but then you wake up in the morning and you’re all groggy and then you read it again and you’re like “Wait did I publish that?” (Int. 1, 2012)

Though FFN’s functionality could have allowed Laura to remove a story she later regretted, she explained, “I usually just leave it there. I know who I am so it’s like ‘let’s see how people react.’ I mean it’s usually not terrible but it’s like maybe I could have done [something in the story] differently.” Laminating risk taking helped Laura push against her perfectionism and enact her passionate writer identity as she expressed her fandom.

Laura openly admitted that she did not take her fanfiction writing as seriously as her novel, plays, or academic writing, and thus wrote in more “dramatic” ways:

I would always write . . . these dramatic sentences . . . big tearful interactions . . . things that I would only write in fanfiction. There are certain . . . sentences that I have characters say in dialogue that I’m like “wait would you really say this?” It’s fanfiction, so it’s fine. (Int. 3, 2012)

Fanfiction provided an opportunity to play with writing, while the anonymity of her FFN “pen name” meant her fanfiction writing could only be associated with the limited identity she presented on the site. Furthermore, the one-shot genre provided comfortable boundaries around Laura’s fanfictions, confines within which she laminated both perfectionism and risk taking.

[One shots] are easier for me to post because I can easily write them and then perfect them. Then it doesn’t—since they’re just so brief—it doesn’t take as long for me to . . . edit them meticulously and feel as though they’re good enough to post, and they usually have been brewing for . . . months before I actually write them, let alone post them. (Int. 4, 2013)

The contextual particularities afforded on FFN helped to explain Laura’s willingness to risk sharing her writing in this space, even as perfectionism dictated that she “edit” her work.

Laminating Learning

While we saw evidence of Laura enacting her core identity as a passionate writer across contexts, the theater context uniquely positioned Laura’s passion as essential to her success while encouraging her to laminate the learner side of her identity cube in ways that continually fueled that passion. Though Laura’s family supported her passion, her perfectionist identity position could take over and caused her to abandon personal creative writing projects. In high school, Laura’s passion went unreciprocated, and on FFN the measures of success did not always align with her values as a writer, thus she laminated the expert side of her identity cube in these social spaces. Finally, while Laura took risks and played with her writing on FFN, she did not find enough passionate writers to sustain her participation. Only the theater context encouraged Laura to laminate the learner side of her identity cube as it positioned her as a welcomed community member, who not only learned how to build relationships with peers and mentors, but also how to hone her writing to serve her roles as actor and storyteller. In the theater, unlike her other social contexts, Laura’s passionate writer core identity thrived.

She and her parents acknowledged that making friends in typical peer and academic spaces had been hard for Laura (Int. 1, 2012; Int. 2, 2012). Then, during the fall of her 10th grade year, Laura had a conversation with a theater mentor: “She told me I needed to not focus so much on my pursuit of excellence and all that jazz but rather that I needed to focus on socializing and building relationships and things like that” (Int. 5, 2014). Laura acknowledged the perfectionism and expert sides of her identity cube, but she made the decision to prioritize building relationships, upon this mentor’s advice. This was the first time, two years into our study, that Laura identified a mentor. From this point forward, however, Laura named several more, always within the theater, in each instance laminating learning.

As Laura began to “connect” and make friends in the community theater, she reflected, “I sort of connected with that kind of group more and it was less of like a relationship of circumstance and more of a relationship that I had like chosen to cultivate” (Int. 5, 2014). Laura recognized how social spaces positioned relationships differently, and acknowledged her agentic act to “cultivate” connections in the theater context. Her efforts resulted in greater opportunities for her growth, as this next example illustrated. In response to a Facebook post in which she declared her love for the musical Children of Eden, Laura learned “that there was this whole group of people who have the same passion for the musical,” many of whom were friends she made in the local theater scene. These relationships provided a catalyst for her first opportunity to produce and direct this musical before moving to California:

I found those people and decided to work on those relationships, and then I eventually ended up . . . directing a musical, which I cast. . . . Last year I would have . . . nowhere to start if I wanted to cast a musical . . . now there are . . . 24 kids in the show that are closer with me and that were willing to come and take on this endeavor with me which is really kind of big.

In having the intention to build relationships, Laura laminated the learning side of her identity cube as she casted and directed her first production.

She continued this practice within a theater company in California, explaining: “some of the people that I’ve made connections with are really . . . more like-minded. . . . They’re fun, so those are the people I think I’m most connected with on an intellectual level. . . . They’re definitely my people” (Int. 6, 2015). When Laura understood her interactions with others as both “fun” and “intellectual,” she felt more comfortable in this space. Laura again found a director whom she described as “a visionary” and a mentor, as she further laminated learning in this context.

Relationships also helped Laura enact her core identity as a passionate writer in the theater. She explained how friendships motivated the play she wrote for her senior project: “I wanted to write it for them [the cast members/her friends]. So I am writing it with them in mind, so I’m sharing my vision with them as we go along” (Int. 6, 2015). Here we saw how the theater community helped Laura not only laminate learning, but also enact her core identity as she wrote her original play, connected with friends, and shared her passion with a wider audience.

Laura also laminated learning as she studied the characters she played and directed other actors. She explained, “I write a lot for my acting work. I do a lot of character study” (Int. 5, 2014). When Laura prepared for an audition, as she did for the character of Agnes in Agnes of God (“I wrote a lot in Agnes’ perspective because she’s a fascinating character, extremely”) or explored a relatively minor role, as when she played Mary Magdalene in Last Days of Judas Iscariot (“I elaborated on it by writing an extra scene so it was actually dramatic and it was actually very fun to like write extra dialogue between the characters”; Int. 6, 2015), Laura’s core identity as passionate writer found purpose as she continued to learn and practice her craft in the social space of the theater. This context offered Laura a community that inspired her to learn with passion. She found reciprocity and embrace of her core identity as a passionate writer, allowing her to laminate learning as she wrote, directed, and explored characters.

Conclusions

Through this study, we sought to interpret how an adolescent writer maintained her passionate core identity as she moved through time and space. In the process, we found it necessary to revisit theoretical understandings of identity. By employing the identity as position and lamination metaphors in our analysis, evidence of Laura’s multifaceted identity cube became visible. We saw how her core identity enactments met with friction in response to her grandmother’s feedback on her novel, as she displayed her passion among peers in English classes, and as she sought writing and writers with expertise in the FFN context. As Laura reinterpreted her core identity in response to the positions afforded, the identity cube concept helped us make sense of how she laminated perfectionism, expertise, and risk taking. This concept also allowed us to recognize her passionate writer core as remaining central to her writing experiences in these spaces. In addition, we gained insights into how the theater context aligned with and strengthened Laura’s core identity as she developed relationships and interacted with peers and mentors, thus layering and thickening the learning side of her identity. Here again, in a space that welcomed her core identity as purposeful, even necessary, the notion of an identity cube enhanced our understanding of how all sides endured even as particular aspects strengthened. Thus, Laura’s case serves as a rich description of core identity not as inflexible or rigid, and identity fluidity not as random; rather, this case illustrates identity as multifaceted and durable, responsive to positioning over time and through space. For researchers in third-wave literacy-and-identity studies exploring the implications of movement and context on youth and their writing practices, the identity cube facilitates the examination of enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes.

Additionally, unlike the work Moje et al. (2009) critiqued for celebrating youth as agents and literacies inventors, particularly in interest-driven and new media contexts, this study offers a more sober examination of how an adolescent writer’s agentic moves meet resistance in social spaces and get repositioned through interaction with others and their expectations of writing and writers. Bringing her preferred writing style into the AP English classroom resulted in Laura questioning her identity as a writer as she felt constrained by the accepted forms of displaying competence in this context; though her grades and AP exam scores demonstrated that she ultimately conformed, she did so only for the purpose of context-specific evaluations. Similarly, in her online literature course and on FFN, Laura’s practice of offering genuine written reactions to what she read, either as discussion board responses to classmates or reviews for fellow fanfiction writers, seemed not to be valued, and thus she adjusted by tempering her participation to get the job done. Even in her personal creative writing, we saw evidence of Laura’s agentic practices bumping up against conventional expectations of narrative writing as her English teacher grandmother critiqued her novel draft, causing Laura to abandon this project. Therefore, while researchers continue to explore the many new forms of writing recruited for participation in ever-evolving social spaces, we argue for the continued importance of recognizing the implications of contextual expectations, such as genre conventions and shared values, and beliefs about writing that participants bring with them from other contexts. Doing so promises to offer nuanced and useful depictions of socially situated agency.

Finally, our work answers two distinct calls to the field’s researchers. First, in offering this discussion of how our conceptualization of identity facilitated our understanding of the relationships between writer, context, and identity, we respond to calls for such transparency (Gee, 2001; Moje et al., 2009) and encourage other writing researchers to continue self-conscious and specific examinations of literacy-and-identity. Only in continuing to make the implications of our chosen theoretical constructs clear can the field meaningfully work through the tensions surrounding our understanding of identity. While we have not yet settled the issue, we believe, as noted above, that the identity cube construct equips researchers to account for stable and responsive aspects of a writer’s identity. Second, our description of Laura’s identity enactments through writing across the entirety of her high school years answers Compton-Lilly’s (2014) call for longitudinal inquiries that build the field’s knowledge about the identity development of successful writers. Cultivating a long-term relationship with Laura and her family afforded us the opportunity to trace her writing experiences within varied social spaces that included schools, an online fanfiction community, home, and the theater, even as she moved across the country. As such, we were able to explore core identity, identity positioning, and lamination practices with a degree of attention and depth that shorter, more localized studies cannot. We agree with Compton-Lilly that having such an extended time to get to know a writer can lead to understandings not initially considered, as our initial impressions of Laura as a passionate writer became more nuanced as we developed a sense of the impact contextual positioning had on her core identity. By using a longitudinal approach in concert with our particular combination of literacy-and-identity theory, we offer researchers an example of how to uncover the flexible and enduring elements of adolescent writer identity, and we argue for continued work in pursuing nuanced depictions of youth agency across social spaces.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Jayne C. Lammers is an associate professor in education at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester and the director of the secondary English teacher preparation program. Her research examines youth literacy practices, particularly as they traverse multiple, networked spaces. Her recent scholarship has appeared in Research in the Teaching of English, Literacy, and Teachers College Record.

Valerie L. Marsh is a visiting assistant professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester and the Assistant Director for the University’s Center for Urban Education Success. She researches adolescent new literacies, particularly the connections between online learning spaces and physical classroom spaces, and teaches courses in English teacher preparation. Her previous scholarship about Laura appeared in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.

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