Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 3a
Connections, relationships and realities
Wednesday 8 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'Relating to Bart Simpson: interactions with and about fictional characters' - Katherine Davies (University of Manchester)
Young people’s interactions and relationships to/with fictional characters can pervade their everyday lives and relationships in significant ways. Drawing on focus group interactions about a clip from the popular cartoon series The Simpsons, I analyse the various ways young people related to the characters from the cartoon and discuss how this enriched my research project investigating the construction of the relational school self.
I look at young people’s intimacy with the characters, arguing that fictional characters in a long running series such as The Simpsons can become known others with detailed biographies – perhaps acquaintances or even friends. I also identify how young people empathised with the characters, tapping into emotional aspects of the school self that can be risky to narrate in other contexts and relating the characters and plots to living breathing others as well as themselves in different and sometimes rather limited ways. The Simpsons vignette encouraged dialogue and discussions on a highly moral level, in direct contrast to the embedded, situated relational practices discussed in other contexts (such as individual interviews). The paper concludes with a discussion of how relationships with and about fictional characters helped me to understand young people's lived, emotional, theoretical and moral understandings of how the school self works relationally.