Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (1 of 2)

This full interview was featured earlier this morning over on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog. The portions of the interview shared here today were originally published here and here, conducted by Sam Ford, who helps manage the Consortium. For those who haven't heard, tonight is the launch of a particularly compelling transmedia experience, the first time a major television franchise has driven its viewers into a virtual world to fill in the gap of a cliffhanger mystery that will not be resolved until next February.

CSI:NY, the New York version of the Anthony E. Zuiker television franchise, will feature an episode tonight in which a murder mystery takes the crime scene investigation team deep into Linden Lab's Second Life, with the mystery not being resolved until the concluding episode next year. The activities that take place in SL will build off what happens on the show and are planned to give fans the opportunity to get acquainted with a virtual world and also to have a new place to interact with and around the television franchise.

A variety of activities are planned, one of which will provide users a chance to continue investigating aspects of the narrative for the main show. As the Electric Sheep producers of this experience emphasize in the interview that follows, the virtual world experience has been designed to build upon and further the experience from the show, but it's not yet clear whether what happens in the virtual world will feed back into the conclusion of the mystery on the television show next February, as that will happen on the CSI:NY end. From a transmedia standpoint, one can only hope that something from this experience feeds back into the main show, even if in the form of inside jokes or references for those who participate in the virtual world experience.

For those who want to catch up on this collaboration, check out Duncan Riley's piece on TechCrunch detailing the collaboration, which also includes an embedded YouTube trailer about tonight's show. He summarizes, "The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) entering Second Life to pursue a killer who has killed a Second Life user in a case of virtual stalking gone too far. CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website."

Coinciding with this collaboration is the launch of OnRez, a viewer for Second Life that seeks to simplify entering the virtual world for new members of the Linden Lab universe. The viewer is commercially licensed by Linden and will be the window through which CSI:NY fans sign up for Second Life through CBS.com. Those signing up for the CSI:NY crossover will get a customized toolbar to "follow a mystery killer on the show through a series of interactive experiences in Second Life."

Electric Sheep CEO Sibley Verbeck is quoted in the press release as saying, "Our goal is to make virtual worlds easy and fun to use for the mass-market consumer. By launching a more intuitive consumer interface, we're allowing brands to maximize the appeal of their virtual world initiatives. The upcoming CSI: NY Virtual Experience is an innovative example of the opportunities for OnRez."

What follows is is an interview with two of the producers of this project for Electric Sheep, Damon Taylor and and Daniel Krueger, who worked with Anthony E. Zuiker and others to help launch this project. Considering that the project launches tonight, I thought a little detail about the background and the hopes of its creators might be of interest for those of you who, like me, are quite interested to see how much of CSI:NY's audience is interested in virtual worlds, and conversely how many Second Lifers might get interested in CSI:NY through this transmedia extension.

Sam Ford: To start off with, what do the two of you believe are some of the most compelling aspects of the CSI:NY/Second Life crossover that's taking place tonight, and what are the benefits for CBS and CSI:NY, on the one hand, and for Second Life other other?

Damon Taylor: This experience is compelling for users from two different perspectives. One of those perspectives is new users of Second Life, who are new to virtual worlds in general. The other perspective is for existing Second Life users. Potential new users who are fans of CSI:NY will care about this crossover because it will give them the opportunity to wrestle with CSI content in a way that has never been made available to them before. We have endeavored and achieved a true cross-platform experience where these fans can watch the television show, see the storyline that began on the TV show continued in-world, and then see the storyline jump back to the TV show next February when there is a sequel show that wraps up the storyline that starts tonight.

In the meantime, we give new users who have never been in a virtual world a closed universe experience where they can come into Second Life, familiarize themselves with this world and what it means to be in a virtual world, and play and interact with mystery game experiences that interest them. This crossover gives fans of CSI:NY a reason and an excuse to come into a virtual world and do something that is functional, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and that will also open their eyes to the utilities of virtual worlds as vehicles of entertainment and interaction with other people who watch this television show and may share similar interests.

Daniel Krueger: We have also come up with our new viewer for Second Life here at Electric Sheep called OnRez, which basically streamlines the somewhat confusing traditional Second Life interface with a nice, slick viewer that will make it a lot easier for new users to grasp Second Life quicker than they would have in the past.

Damon Taylor: That's a great point. What we are doing is taking a Web interface model that we are all familiar with and adopting it in the context of virtual worlds.

Daniel Krueger: What's important here is that fans of this show can now experience CSI:NY in a different medium. Usually, they sit in front of the show watching characters perform these tasks, so now fans can get to do these activities themselves and take on a role as a virtual crime scene investigator. While they aren't solving the same crimes that are happening on TV in many of these activities, they are solving fun and engaging Second Life virtual crimes. For instance, we have the Murder by Zuiker game, which will see a murder scene set up where users will go in and see what's going on and then write up, in 500 words or less, what they think has happened. They will post this onto a site linked directly to this game, and Zuiker, the executive producer of the CSI franchise, will read them all and choose the top 10 pieces. He will post those 10 responses and explain what happened in that particular crime, and each of the winners of that game will get a prize. This gives fans a different way to interact with the show.

Damon Taylor: Here you have one of the most popular franchises of all time. These shows are only seen once a week. CBS, led by Anthony E. Zuiker, the creator of the franchise, has 16 million plus viewers who watch CSI:NY, and now they get the opportunity to interact with the franchise every day if they feel like it. For CSI:NY, this gives them the opportunity to put the franchise in front of the fans as much as the fans want. For Second Life and Linden Labs, these 16 million viewers of CSI:NY can be used as a vehicle to to bring new users to Second Life and give them the opportunity to understand and grapple with the benefits and value of playing and living and doing business in virtual worlds.

Daniel Krueger: If you think about it, if there are 16 million viewers of this show and only 1 percent of them decide to come into Seocnd Life, that's a lot of new users.

The rest of this interview will be shared here on this blog tomorrow and are available at the C3 blog here and here.

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with David Hutchison, author of Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. In the first part, he discussed his ideas about the place of games in education and about the value of teaching young people to think critically about the games they play. Today, he takes up the question of the place of game design activities in school and addresses some of the criticisms about the pedagogical uses of existing game titles. This part of the discussion is timely since Katie Salens, a major advocate for teaching young people how to think like game designers, will be speaking as part of the CMS colloquium series this week. Watch this blog for information about the podcast of this event. Some of your exercises are designed to get students to tackle design problems and to begin to make their own games. This is very much along the lines of the kinds of design literacy which Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens have been advocating. What do you see as the value of teaching students to think like designers?

I would say that several of the activities can be used as exercises that aim to get students to think like game designers, but it is the Afterword that highlights the important role that game design can play in schools, if only in a cursory way, given that game design is not the main focus of the book.

I like to think of students as moving from being consumers of media, to being critics of it, and then creators of it, so game design is the natural next step once a number of the investigative activities in the book have been completed.

The value comes from seeing students as something more than "students" in schools. What I mean here is that teachers should consider casting students in a variety of creative roles, such as "authors" and "scientists" as they study language arts and science for example. A sixth grade student who writes a story is an author and he or she should be honored as such, perhaps by having their story published, illustrated, bound, and placed in the school library for other students to borrow.

It is a similar process for video games. By seeing themselves as a team of game designers, a group of tenth grade students can work through the very same game development stages that professional designers go through: brainstorming a story idea, pitching that idea to others, writing a story, scenario, and dialog, collecting and designing assets, programming the gameplay, and testing and distributing the game.

The above process certainly sounds daunting and of course it takes a great deal of time and commitment to produce a video game, but the good news is that are now a number of terrific educational game engines that students and educators can choose to use. Several of them streamline the game development process, so that students can focus on creative learning activities, rather than the minutia of programming their game in a professional C+ game engine.

Many educators might agree that games can be powerful motivators of learning but they also may communicate a great deal of misinformation about the world, especially given the fact that most commercial games are built for entertainment rather than educational purposes. How would you respond to this critique?

Even misinformation provides teachers with an opportune teachable moment in my view, if only to correct that misinformation and investigate how it came to be.

Consider the example of Battlefield 2142, the multiplayer first-person shooter which is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which the effects of global warming have reduced the habitable landmass on Earth to a fraction of what it is at present. The battle for control over what little habitable landmass remains is the basic premise that underlies the battles the player fights in the game.

Environmentalists and teachers may wish to take issue with the science that underlies the premise of this game, but the game itself provides teachers with a hook for getting students to consider the implications of dramatic climate change. Although there is now general agreement among scientists that climate change is occurring today and that humans are (at least in part) responsible for causing it, there are competing views among researchers as to the long-term effects of climate change on the planet - some of the changes may even be positive from a certain perspective.

What is represented in Battlefield 2142 may be an extreme view, but there are other dire predictions from climatology experts that teachers can reference as they talk about the issue of global warming with students.

Teachers can also reference the game as they discuss the ways in which the popular media represents scientific research more generally, as well as alarmist views of the future. A key question here may be the role that games, such as Battlefield 2142, potentially play in undermining serious research on climate change. My view is that the game highlights one of the most important social consequences of dramatic environmental change - the competition over increasingly scarce resources - which some environmental and military analysts - I think of Thomas Homer Dixon in particular - argue will lead to more wars in the coming years.

That's the premise of the game and it is represented, at least in a general way, in some of the futuristic military scenarios that see environmental change as a national security issue.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

For more information, check out his website at www.playingtolearn.org

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part One)

One of the many pleasures of running this blog is being able to introduce my readers to people who are doing cutting edge thinking about the many topics -- from fandom to serious games, from media literacy to civic media, from early sound comedy to transmedia storytelling -- that matter to me. Today, I want to introduce you to David Hutchison, the author of a recently released book, Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. Hutchison's book promises over 100 game activities appropriate for classroom use, a selection that spans across academic subjects (language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, history, geography, health & physical education, drama, music, visual arts, computers, and business) and grade levels (including both elementary and high school). Writers like James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, xx and David Shaffer, have made the conceptual argument for the pedagogical value of games; our own Education Arcade has been one of a number of academic research projects focused on designing, prototyping, and field testing games for instructional purposes; Hutchinson's focus is on what we can do in our schools right now, using projects already on the market, to tap student and teacher interests in games. In the course of the collection, the models many different conceptual approaches for thinking about games -- including many designed to foster core media literacy skills. The result is a book which will be valuable to classroom teachers or for that matter, parents who want to engage their children in meaningful conversations about the place of games in their lives and about how games structure the way we see the world.

I recently had a chance to interview Hutchison about his goals for this project and wanted to share his responses with you. In explaining the value of games for schools, I often say that "nobody is advocating bringing Grand Theft Auto into the classroom" and go on to point to a broader range of other titles which do seem more appropriate for school use. But Hutchinson makes a fairly compelling argument for why schools should be addressing Grand Theft Auto in the comments which follow. His arguments here is consistent with his perspective that just as traditional media literacy involves learning to think critically about mass media, games literacy has to include asking hard questions of this still emerging medium, questions concerning representations, ideology, and of course, commercial motives.

What motivated you to write this book? Why do you think teachers should be incorporating games more fully into their classroom activities?

I wrote this book in part because I enjoy playing video games myself and I am always looking for synergies between my play time and my work time as a teacher educator and university professor. So too, I was fairly surprised to see that a book like this hadn't yet been written given the long history of video games in American culture. I also couldn't find many video game-centered lesson plans on the Web which also surprised me.

I believe that video games should be referenced in the K-12 classroom for a variety of reasons. First, video games can provide teachers with an effective instructional "hook" since so many students are gamers in their out-of-school lives. Second, many (younger) teachers are also gamers. Through gaming, they have cultivated a knowledge base which can serve them well as part of their pedagogical toolset.

Despite this, most of the teacher-gamers I have spoken with over the last two years see a disconnect between their in-school teaching jobs and their out-of-school gaming activities. It strikes me as nonsensical that so many students and their teachers may be going home at night to play the same games, but then returning to the school the next day with no intention of ever sharing their mutual passion for video games.

I would also say that from a cultural point of view, I see some video games as harbingers of the future. They play with the "world" - past, present, and future - in ways that are impractical (sometimes impossible) in the real world. Some games purposefully bend the laws of physics in exploring new virtual gameplay ideas. Multiplayer video games (and the Internet more generally) experiment with new forms of social organization that go beyond our everyday ways of living.

All of this strikes me as pedagogically interesting and worth studying in K-12 schools.

Some previous books have focused on teaching about games, others on teaching through games, but your book seems to encompass both. What do you see as the advantages of each?

I would say that most of my book treats the "video game" as a cultural artifact that has a history, was created, is used in various ways, and is sometimes discarded for various reasons.

In this sense, I would say that the activities in the book are more focused on teaching using games. I have heard from a few video-games-in-education researchers who see the activities in this book as a good beginning point, but not necessarily the end point of where we need to go in integrating video games into education. To a certain extent, I would agree with this view.

For example, except for a couple of activities, the book does not focus on living life in a virtual community, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. Educating students in Second Life strikes me as teaching through games. But so does learning about military tactics by playing America's Army. James Paul Gee's work gets to heart of how playing video games can transform the learning experience and even supplant traditional ways of teaching and learning in schools.

I would say that my book is more focused on traditional teaching and learning techniques in which the video game is studied as a cultural artifact, rather than "lived through" as an embodied pedagogical experience. Activities which ask students to write a video game review or analyze the leaderboard statistics for a driving game in math class, for example, are fairly approachable by most teachers. They essentially treat the video game as a manipulative that can be utilized as a pedagogical tool by teachers in a wide variety of subject areas.

Your introduction suggests that you see schools as "one of the last remaining formal institutions that can mediate popular culture by examining it closely, holding it to account, and even transforming it at times." What is it about schools which enable them to play this role? What about the argument that schools have historically declared war on popular culture and thus have shown themselves to be anything but objective arbiters of its merits?

This is a phrase that I have also used elsewhere, including my previous book which explores the history of the idea of "place" in education.

I am on purpose expressing something of a idealistic sentiment here that harkens back to the early 20th century promise of a democratic system of public schooling, as articulated most famously by John Dewey and, even earlier, Horace Mann. The basic notion here is that the public school is responsible to the state (which in turn represents the citizenry) and that one of the important roles of the public school is to balance out the decentralized and largely unregulated influence of other social institutions, such as the family, church, private sector, and popular culture. Dewey argued that through purposeful social inquiry guided by the principles of the scientific method, schools could foster in students a democratic impulse that strengthened the social and democratic commons - hence the notion of the "common school."

Today, public schools are bureaucratic institutions that are generally underfunded, used for political fodder by both the right and left, and tasked with an overwhelmingly complex job. Yet schools still remain the last bastion of mandated community involvement in child socialization. As parents and citizens, we count on this bastion to mediate, counter, and offset the unchecked influence of other less formal institutions, such as the peer group, family, and popular culture, by providing a corrective or compensatory measure to a student's education. This role is fraught with difficulty and it is often contested - which is appropriate in a democratic society.

Such corrective or compensatory measures may only sporadically be successful, indeed, sometimes they fail miserably, but I would say that the idealism that schools can continue to play this role is still in place in the eyes of many adults - why else would so many battles continue to be fought over the role and purpose of public schools in American society?

Many teachers might want to "protect" children from exposure to media violence, yet some of your activities ask students to pay close attention to controversial titles, such as Bully or Grand Theft Auto. What do you see as the value of teaching youth to adopt a critical perspective on such games? And what do you say to those who might argue that you are putting them at risk by asking them to engage with these works?

In writing the book, I set it as a goal for myself to incorporate the Grand Theft Auto series into at least one activity. (The "Hot Coffee" controversy was brewing around me as I began writing the book :) The GTA activity I chose tasks students with creating their own kid-friendly open-world game that doesn't include all the adult content we normally associate with games in this franchise.

I also wanted to encourage teachers to deal with controversial ideas related to video games. There are contributed discussion articles in the book that address debates related to video games and violence, video game addiction, gender bias in video games, and health and video games.

My sense is that the book could have been roundly criticized - and rightly so - if I had chosen not to deal with the many criticisms made of video games - for example, that they produce obese layabouts with no social contacts in the real world who are prone to violence and live in a fantasy world 

Discussing the above stereotypes in class is worthwhile in my view. Studying these stereotypes by having students conduct research to test their veracity is even better. There are also activities in the book that aim to help students effect personal lifestyle changes related to their video game playing habits, such as paying close attention to their posture and reducing the amount of time they spend playing video games each week.

It seems to me that there is disconnect between gamers and those critics - Jack Thompson is a popular strawman here - who look at games from outside and see little of value worth highlighting. Since many students are gamers when out-of-school, it makes sense that turning a critical eye toward video games and especially social, medical, and legal commentaries on video games are appropriate topics for study in schools.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part Two): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

James:This leads me to the next point: the relationship between the female protagonist and the monster. The monster both represents the repression and is a doorway to allowing the female figure to escape the social boundaries placed upon her. I am thinking here of Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein. Madeline Khan's character is the frigid girlfriend of the doctor who is transformed by her "relations" with the monster. It is an interesting exposure of the relationship trope. By making it humorous Brooks is actually revealing another aspect of the monster. By being "other" the monster also allows those possibly inclined to be different to join in being different. The monster is the gate way to deviance. And this is what I find fascinating because it makes the monster a transformative figure. Simply by being exposed to the monster one can gain access to monstrous attributes or become monsters. I think this is why the monster figure resonates with both queer and disability communities. It is the irrational fear that one will be transformed by interacting with a queer or disabled person. The idea that one's difference is contagious. This is what the monster does. It acts upon the erotic nature of the other that destabilizes normalcy, be it physical or sexual. Like you said it unleashes the repressed. Think about the alien monster in John W. Campbell, Jr's Who Goes there? (1938) which is the source for John Carpenter's well known film The Thing (1982) as well as two other films The Thing From Another World (1951) and Horror Express (1973). Here the monster itself is the transformer. It is an amorphous "thing" that replaces and consumes the human characters. Each molecule of the alien transforms and consumes. It is a literal metaphor for fear. The thing represents what each generation finds terrifying. It is a tabula rasa with which the viewer can project their fears onto. It operates as tool for them to confront or identify with whatever socio-cultural fears are present. In Carpenter's film the thing is an amorphous blob that undulates and shifts constantly. It is in a state of transformation until it becomes something it can hide within. It plays upon the fear of the passing deviant. The Thing is the one that looks like us but isn't. And once again, like with the vampire, it is the blood that tells. The blood is alive and sentient, it infects. And then there is the fact that the story is female free. So the film also comments on the mutability of identity in the face of single sex environments and the anxieties that that can provoke. This ultimately leads to testing the blood in order to identify who is human and therefore normal.

Kes:

The same is true of that other great contagion movie, Aliens, which had been released a few years after Carpenter's The Thing. One of the things I love about both these movies--and maybe it's something that as a blind fan I am just particularly focused on--is the way the space these characters move through becomes an extension of their inner psyches. Carpenter takes the cold isolation of this snowbound military base and Cameron takes the inhuman darkness of the space station but both spaces end up being very gothic threatening spaces. The viewer isn't just given a text or dialogue, but sound, motion, a sense of the process of moving through these intensely felt spaces. It's something that a purely textual or psychoanalytical interpretation of these horror movies can't really address--their sense of virtuality. This is where Deleuzian theory comes in and gives horror media such a radical spin: because horror media is often very focused on conveying that sense of the experience as a process, as something transformative in itself.

Yet that element of horror manifesting the inner space as external space is not limited to horror films. I watched Aliens with my husband, who is a game designer, a number of months back and he commented on how much that movie influenced the look of game interfaces. It's not just the look though: it's the sound, from the sound effects to the music to the use of voices. Horror media is still very much influenced by its roots in old radio shows, with a strong focus on creating a sense that the audience is actually occupying this other space with the monster. And I think that is one thing which, as this Wired article "Gore Is Less: Videogames Make Better Horror Than Hollywood" points out, links the horror film to video games.

James:

Definitely. Space plays a large role in the construction of horror and science fiction cinema. One way to look at this is in terms of Deleuze's theory of the any-space-whatever. For Delueze this moment arises in cinematic scenes where the viewer is destabilized and unsure of where he or she stands in space within the sphere of the film. The consistent use of close-up shots in the absence of expansive wide angle establishing shots serve to isolate the actor/character in the narrative creating a claustrophobic feeling in the viewer. Aliens is a perfect example of this. You can probably count on one hand the number of establishing shots that occur in this film and when they do they are noticeable in the way they pull you out of the taunt, tense feeling of the film. These shots are actually jarring in that they both establish a setting for the viewer and at the same time eliminate some of the effectiveness of the close-ups. To jump back to The Thing - the whiteness of the environment adds to the sense of the isolation of the camp. It is literally a blank space - indefinable. This works in concert with the anamorphic state of the thing. Neither of them is solid or identifiable. This destabilizes the viewer. They are in any space whatever.

Kes:

And I think it is that sense of destabilization which draws so many horror fans. Horror as a genre is more about ambiguity rather than certainty, and that leaves a lot of room for fans to bring personal interpretations to bear in thinking of how such narratives relate to their own identity. In particular, horror seems to be fascinated with complicating subjectivity, and this seems to connect it not only with the monster-woman/queer alignment we mentioned before but with those virtual or Deleuzan spaces we were just talking about.

In her book Deleuze and Horror (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) Anna Powell discusses how the subject-object binary is blurred in horror films by using sensation and affect to subsume the subject and show it melding with the external world. Some of the most vivid horror--and here I am thinking of Cronenberg's Videodrome and Moore's graphic novel From Hell--show humans being penetrated by their technology and/or their technological spaces. This kind of surreal technogothic is an entire subgenre in itself, and I think one of the reasons it emerged as such a powerful theme late in the 20th century was that our technologies, which in the 1950s had been framed as such an uncomplicated salvation for the human race, called into question our traditional definitions of both technology and the body, and the questions which arose proved to be particularly relevant to disabled and queer individuals. Previously there was this assumption that the perfect body was one which was whole, completely self-reliant, free of technological prosthetics, and at the peak of its intellectual and physical abilities; in other words, a definition many would read as masculine. How many of us fit that description now? From contacts to prescription drugs to pacemakers, many of us are wearing technology beneath our skin, and we're all a little nervous when we consider how it might change us both individually and as a species. It has already radicalized our definitions of what is an "able" body and what is a gendered body.

James:

I believe that has also changed the face of contemporary horror. Much of today's horror films are centered on the destruction of the body: Saw versions 1though 3, Hostel and the like. These are films that use the threat of physical destruction in numerous ways under the rubric of horror. Of course now these are considered their own genre within the horror genre; they are snuff horror films. So in light of the extreme technological evolution we see a return to fears about the body. The destabilization and dismemberment of the body has remerged as a means of striking fear in the audience. I say re-emerged because some of the horror films of the early seventies also played with this genre albeit not to the extent we see today.

Kes:

We can trace those dismemberment stories back to the science fiction of Maurice Renard, who wrote the story The Hands of Orlac in 1920, which would become the basis for the 1926 film by the same name and also the 1935 remake Mad Love which starred Peter Lorre. Again, there is an entire subgenre of horror narratives involving dismembered/possessed body parts, but my favorite is Clive Barker's The Body Politic (I think that was published in 1984), in which a man feels that his hands are somehow working against him, as if they aren't sure they want to be part of him any longer, and this becomes a metaphor for how people are encouraged to think of themselves as body parts, with media images focusing on specific areas--breasts for women, muscles for men--as if the part can define the whole. Of course the surgeries which Renard focused on in his story have now become an entire technology for reshaping and redefining the human body and the technology of medical augmentation meets the technology of media until we all feel a bit disassociated from our own body parts, to a degree that shows like Nip/Tuck basically pick up the monster theme by promising us that ultimate monstrous wish: to swap one's monster parts for somebody else's.

But let me move to a more positive aspect of media technologies, one which brings us back to those definitions of genre with which we began this discussion, namely, how new media has opened up production and distribution channels for fans. Not only can artists distribute their own radical visions through the technologies of the Internet and new media, but fans can locate and access all sorts of media that not so long ago was completely out of reach. From classic movies to indie shorts, from new fiction to fan sites, female and queer artists are finding encouragement, inspiration, and their own fans.

As a closing thought, I just want to point out that this is in turn calling into question traditional methods for data collection, such as assuming that there are no female slasher fans because the researcher didn't see many at a movie premiere. Female and queer fans are meeting up online, or at indie film festivals, or just waiting until the DVD comes out on Amazon, and I think this is another way in which new media appeals strongly to fans who previously may, like female and queer comics fans, have felt pushed out of the more public forms of media consumption and fan events.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part One): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

Kes: I'm Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager, a 2006 graduate of the Comparative Media Studies master's program at MIT. I am a relative newcomer to fan studies, though I have been a lifelong fan of genre media, particularly SF and horror. My writing often explores the intersections of non-normative bodies and identity, with an emphasis on interpretations informed by both disability and queer studies (an intersection often referred to as crip studies). My thesis was on images of disability and technology in science fiction media, and I have also written about the theme of disability in Harry Potter fan fiction. I write about media, disability, and technology at my blog http://kestrell.livejournal.com.

James and I were grad students together in the CMS program at MIT, but since graduating, we continue to get together and discuss both theory and our favorite media, so our post here will probably convey that sense of this being an ongoing conversation between us.

James: I am James Nadeau, also a 2006 graduate of CMS. My own work is centered in visual art and technological evolution, specifically video and related technologies. My background is in critical studies, psychoanalytic and queer theory with a focus on Queer Cinema. I curate a monthly queer film and performance series at the Brattle Theatre here in Cambridge. On top of that I am a longtime comic book collector and science fiction fan. I am particularly interested in British post-apocalyptic graphic novels, mainly Judge Dredd, as well as Marvel produced superhero comics (pretty much why I landed at CMS). Like Kestrell I am fascinated by the possibilities that looking at horror and science fiction through the lens of queer and disability studies provides. Our conversations have centered on the similarities that both queerness and disability have when placed within the genre of horror and extreme science fiction. By extreme I mean the type of science fiction that operates as both horror and science fiction, be it from a gore or Lovecraft-ian "horror beyond the worlds" nature.

Kes:

I would like to open the conversation by exploring how genre becomes intertwined with gender through the process of defining what horror is. As a fan and a scholar, I have become increasingly intrigued by the representations of female and queer fans in horror fandom. Specifically, I am curious about what role gender plays in defining the horror genre itself and how deeply gender influences interpretations of horror, its purposes and its effects.

These questions were prompted by a pattern I noticed in how discussions of horror are often framed: In either an online or real-time discussion of horror, a panel of male writers and critics open the discussion by seeking to define "real" horror. One of the first things mentioned, usually with a laugh, is the dismissal of paranormal romance. Aside from the fact that paranormal romance is not a new genre (it can be traced at least as far back as the TV. shows Beauty and the Beast and Dark Shadows, both of which suffered from critical and marketing attitudes which devalued their female audiences), this dismissal is usually followed by adding more subgenres to the list of what isn't horror, with subgenres like gothics, ghost stories and even new horror such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream, etc. (refer to the work of Mark Jancovich

http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/pamphlets/pamphdets.asp?id=28 ).

This disavowal of specific subgenres and their female fans isn't limited to books or film, either: in horror comics fandom, the stereotype of a female fan is that of the gothy Sandman fan. No slight to Neil, but the linking of goth fashion and being female is another way in which I see female fans being portrayed as romantic and/or ridiculous, which comes close to reflecting the way the overly-sexualize and ridiculously romanticized has come to be associated with camp, another disavowed form of horror. There are films that are labeled camp which I am not even clear on why they are labeled camp: Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, which a number of horror producers such as Clive Barker, have listed as their favorite horror classic: why is that classified as camp? If,

as one definition of camp claims, camp is equated with being "effeminately homosexual," then I think we are seeing media being disparaged and disavowed not for its content, but for its audience, and that disparaged audience is identified as female and queer.

I can't help but feel that these attempts to restrict the definition of "real" horror are prompted, at least in part, by an inclination to define who the ideal reader/viewer is, and, for a lot of male

critics and scholars, that ideal reader/viewer is someone a lot like him. And yet you have artists like Alan Moore, Clive Barker, Angela Carter, and their works include elements of not just horror, but also fantasy, surrealism, the gothic, and yes, romance.

James:

I'd like to tackle a few of these points. First I think that you are correct in that camp is most often associated with queer culture. However, it is mainly thought of in terms of exaggerated behaviour verging on the ludicrous. To quote John Waters, camp is "the tragically ludicrous and the ludicrously tragic." It has been used on pop culture artifacts in this manner since Susan Sontag published her essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964. For Sontag camp was liberating. It is noteworthy for being both naïve (completely unaware of one's camp-ness is a requirement) but also it's extravagance. Bride of Frankenstein is thought of as camp because it is so over the top. One look at Elsa Lanchester's hairdo as the bride and you know there is something not quite right. As Sontag notes "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." I think that what we need to establish here is that for Clive Barker (for example), a gay man, having this as his favourite film is motivated by forces other than those that seek to feminize or demean. I would also say that Bride of Frankenstein is pretty commonly thought of as an example of camp even by those only marginally aware of what camp really is. But I think this is a good starting point to discuss the viewer. For the queer viewer of horror films where does camp fit in or does it even need to? There is a lot of classic (the twenties right through the sixties) Hollywood horror films that could be seen as campy by queer audiences. There is something decidedly fey in Max Schreck's performance in Murnau's Nosferatu. And do we even need to mention the homosocial Lost Boys or the lesbians in The Hunger? The vampire character itself has come to be known for outside normal sexual boundaries. And I agree with you that the vampire character is recognized as a romantic figure and it is consistently associated with the feminine. Is it this "feyness" or implied deviance that pushes it outside of the patriarchy and into deviance? I think that romanticism in horror and science fiction offers up an interesting opportunity to think about alternative identities within these narratives and how they relate to what audiences feel and desire outside of heteronormative paradigms. These films open our eyes to the possibilities that exist outside the hegemony of "the normal."

Kes:

I think your final sentence is very telling, and there seems to be a lot of evidence to support it around this time of year, when we seem to see a lot of these alternate identities, from the romanticized to the queer and campy, being literally tried on during the Halloween season. It's interesting that the mainstream seems to focus so much on the campy aspects of Halloween, from Elvira costumes to Dracula to drag: if camp is a combination of the overly-sexualized

and the naive, then it's okay to play with identity at Halloween as long as you maintain that element of camp, of emphasizing that it's all pretend, *really*.

Yet these exaggerated campy figures also seem to be a way of shedding the old worn out images of horror and replacing them with something that's still emotionally powerful and socially transgressive. Vampire fashions, or how the vampire is fashioned, may change, but each change seems to say something about the culture at that historical moment. Anne Rice's vampires may have come to be associated with the cliché of the overly romanticized erotic vampire, to such a degree that her stories have become *the* source for the stereotype of the Byronic emo boy which was often parodied in Joss Whedon's "new" vampire mythology of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but looking back there was a lot more going on in Rice's story, such as a preoccupation with the metaphysical, the transcendental, and the historical. There also emerges this theme of families and communities that are based on blood but are oppositional to the nuclear family. At times the erotic seems as much a means for making emotional connections as it is reflective of the strictly sexual.

Perhaps what Rice's vampires did most explicitly, however, and I think this is something which Clive Barker's horror and fantasy has always done very explicitly, is allow the monster a voice. Once upon a time Robin Wood could write the following prohibition:

"...Dracula must never be allowed a voice, a discourse, a point of view: he must remain the unknowable, whom the narrative is about, but of whom it simultaneously

disowns all intimate knowledge..."

That kind of vampire, however, is kind of the old school vampire, and it began to lose its potency at the same time that the women's movement and the gay movement began to really be heard. Unfortunately, a lot of what female and queer artists wanted and needed to express was still considered taboo, is still considered taboo, by many of the critics and gate keepers who get to officially define art and fiction.

Helene Cixous managed to link this feminist and queer art with a kind of monstrous mythmaking in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which she said

"Where is the...woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick?"

What horror of the '70s and '80s did--and I am going to return to my favorite trio of Clive Barker, Alan Moore, and Angela Carter-- what made it so transgressive, was it reclaimed that idea of the non-conforming body as a point of identity. It blurred the subjectivity between the female or male protagonist and the monster and it questioned how authority was physically located in the idea of the "perfect" most masculine, most normal, body. And from Carter's re-imagined Red Riding Hood to Moore's Swamp Thing to Barker's Nightbreed, identity as it related to gender, sexuality, and subjectivity intersected at the nexus of sexual relationships between women and monsters.

James:

There are a few things I want to respond to. To continue with the vampire exposition I agree that there is much more going on in Rice's books than a simple horror romance. She also touches upon the idea of creating a family as opposed to being born into one. This is a metaphor that resonates within the queer community. The notion of choosing one's family based not upon blood but upon social and physical difference in complete opposition to that nuclear family is something that the queer community has always done - out of a need for close social ties that have to replace those severed by identity. And of course the transformation can also be read as a coming out narrative - one that involves the severing of ties with one's former life (something unfortunately that is extremely common). I think these are some of the reasons that her books resonated with the queer community. Not to mention the transformative nature of the bloodletting and drinking. The fact that the vampiric traits are transmitted through the exchange of blood added another layer as her books gained popularity at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. I think that you are right as well in that the underlying erotic current of these relationships adds to their romantic nature. It also complicates it further with the inclusion of the "incest" or family taboo to these already "outsider" relationships.

Exploiting Feminism: An Interview with Stephanie Rothman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I shared the first part of an interview I did with feminist/exploitation filmmaker Stephanie Rothman. Today, I conclude the interview. But before I do, I wanted to share a few passages from my essay on Rothman which can be found in The Wow Climax. It sets up some of the issues we discuss below.

"I think films are a compromised and corrupted art form, a combination of business and art. And I think filmmakers who treat it completely as a business fail. A business-oriented film is too blatant. It must have something more. To me, films that succeed are those that are slightly corrupted, that attempt to be both business and art, knowing they can never be a full work of art and should never be a full work of business."

-- Roger Corman

Two women -- one white and blonde, the other black and wearing an Afro -- are harnessed to a plow, struggling to move forward through thick muck. Glistening sweat slides through their exposed cleavage and down their taunt, muscular thighs. Their expression is at once determined and humbled. They are dressed in tight cut-off jeans, halter tops tied off at the midriff, no bras and no shoes. Behind them, a man snarls, driving his human "cows."

This disturbing image is the core icon on the advertisements for Terminal Island. In the same ad, we see a stereotypical image of the black "buck," his broad chest bare, crushing a black woman's head into the dirt with his foot, "Welcome to Terminal Island, Baby!" The promotional campaign for an exploitation film characteristically reduces the movie to its most sensationalistic images, images that make its desired audience want to see more. Terminal Island is being "exploited" as a film where one can see beautiful women "put in their place" by powerful men.

Another image circulates around Terminal Island -- the only photograph I have been able to find of its director, Stephanie Rothman. Rothman, an attractive young woman with flowing black hair, is directing an early scene set in a television studio control-room. Her look is passionate, her expressive hands stretch wide, as she is delivering instructions to the actress who plays a documentary film maker in the movie. The actress bears more than a passing resemblance to Rothman herself. As a result, the image takes on a reflexive quality -- the woman director as artist producing an image of the woman director. The caption alongside this Omni magazine article reads: "Terminal Island is consistent with her other films in that it is about several men and women who unite, then live together as friends and lovers without sexual distinctions being made, or infighting and petty jealousies developing. Her ideal world is one of equality and harmony."

Omni identifies the elements in Terminal Island and the other Rothman films, such as Group Marriage (1972), The Velvet Vampire (1971) and The Working Girls (1973), which attracted feminist interest.

Omni's juxtaposition of these two images leaves unreconciled two contradictory accounts of the film's politics and its audience appeals. Images of women as chattel compete with images of women as artists. Appeals to fantasies of male control compete with appeals to fantasies of "equality and harmony." Any film which negotiates between these two competing discourses warrants closer consideration. Such films may help us to better understand the ideological fault-lines within the popular cinema.

As Christine Gledhill suggests, the political commitments of filmmakers often have to get "negotiated" through generic traditions for constructing stories and marketing appeals which sell those stories to demographically desirable audiences. Such "negotiations" produce ideological contradictions within the texts being sold, contradictions which, in turn, get "negotiated" by viewers seeking certain kinds of pleasures from going to the movies. In Rothman's case, a further series of "negotiations" occurred amongst feminist critics: after an initial flurry of articles advancing her case as a feminist filmmaker, references to Rothman all but disappeared. A generation of critics schooled in Screen theory and in Laura Mulvey's assault on "visual pleasure" found it difficult to resolve the ideological contradictions surrounding a feminist exploitation filmmaker. They stopped looking for signs of feminist resistance in such an unlikely place and recoiled with puritanical discomfort over her eroticized images. Rothman's Terminal Island suggests the complexity of the "negotiations" which occur between feminist politics and popular entertainment within the marginal commercial space of the exploitation cinema.

As more recent feminist critics have sought a more complex account of the pleasures of popular culture, a reconsideration of Rothman seems in order. Re-examining Rothman in the 1990s seems of critical importance, since the issues she poses are closely related to those raised by a whole range of contemporary Hollywood films which similarly seek to insert feminist politics into commercial genres (Aliens, Blue Steel, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, A League of Their Own). Many of these films were either directed by veterans of the exploitation cinema or were strongly influenced by its legacy. To fully understand the complex ideological negotiations within these equally "corrupted" works, we need to reclaim both the progressive generic traditions upon which they build and the critical tools by which an earlier generation of feminist critics sought to interpret and evaluate those traditions. This essay examines what may be at stake for feminism in the exploitation cinema, using Rothman and Terminal Island as a point of entry. Rothman "exploits" the progressive potential already embedded within the exploitation genres to get her liberal feminist messages to a larger viewing public; Roger Corman's New World Pictures "exploits" the topicality of feminism in the early 1970s and the volatile emotions which surround it to attract an audience of men and women filmgoers. Emerging in this context of negotiation and exploitation, Terminal Island will be analyzed as a "partially corrupted" film, one which resists placement in a simple ideological category but which never-the-less shows the possibility of expressing resistant politics within mainstream genres...

Now the interview:

Your works were embraced by feminist film scholars such as Claire Johnson and Pam Cook. Were you aware of their celebration of your work and if so, how did it impact the ways you thought about your films.

I was unaware of their interest in my films until fairly recently. I met Pam Cook for the first time about seven years ago and it was only then that I read what she had written about me. It was around then I also learned that my films were initially in favor and then later fell out of favor with some feminist film scholars and critics. For this reason,I am very grateful to scholars like Pam Cook in the English speaking nations and Verena Mund in the German-speaking ones for taking a serious continuing interest in my work.

I am happy that people have observed the thread of feminism that runs through my films. When I was making them, the main thrust of the women's movement was to establish equality in the workplace and the family, through law and custom. Since then, a more far-reaching body of thought has developed, some of whose concerns my films don't address.

Feminist critic Pam Cook argued that one of the most progressive aspects of your films is the way you play with and encourage our awareness of the stereotypes which were the basic building blocks of the exploitation cinema. For example, the key characters in Terminal Island are introduced through a discussion of the casting of a documentary. How did you reconcile the exploitation genre's reliance on broad stereotypes with your apparent interest to provide a more complex understanding of women's experiences.

First, let me say that I wanted to provide a more complex understanding of the experiences of both women and men. Men are also stereotyped in some exploitation films. While there is a feminist viewpoint in my films, it was not intended to be the only one. I viewed this initial stereotyping of both sexes as an opportunity, a starting place, from which to surprise and intrigue the audience, as the characters behavior upended the audience's expectations.

The introduction of the characters in Terminal Island with their prisoner identification pictures, or mug shots, and a brief summary of their crimes, was deliberately done for another reason besides stereotyping: It was as an efficient narrative device for introducing a large number of characters, so that the audience would recognize them when the story switches to Terminal Island itself.

Perhaps the one stereotypical element in the film that I have never been comfortable with is some of the costuming and makeup of the women prisoners. One of the exploitation rules I had to follow strictly was that the women must always look very attractive and "sexy," which meant they couldn't look the way women really would as prisoners on an island with harsh living conditions. I have watched Terminal Island several times in recent years with audiences who have an interest in seeing revivals programs. When they first see the women prisoners on the island, there is sometimes laughter at their unrealistic appearance. I don't take any offense at this, because it just validates my own uneasiness with the message sent by the way the women look.

When you left Corman and started your own production company, Dimension Pictures, you continued to produce exploitation films, even though you had much greater creative control over your work. Can you share some of the economic, creative, perhaps even political factors that went into that choice?

I stopped working for Roger Corman because he did not pay me a living wage. In his opinion he didn't need to pay one to his directors, since he was giving them the chance to have their work seen widely, which might lead to more and better paid work, maybe even with a major studio. And for a very few, it did. For most, it did not. My work was seen, and I received a few offers, but only to make more exploitation films.

Dimension Pictures was a new company, partly financed by the same regional film distributors who distributed my earlier films. My husband and I were offered a minority share in the company and a living wage. In return, we were expected to make exploitation films that we co-wrote, he produced and I directed. But we did not have final approval over the subjects, advertising, or distribution plans for them. In no sense, did I have greater creative control over my own work while I was working there.

Exploitation cinema no longer exists today--except perhaps in terms of direct to video production. Yet many of the genres which dominated the exploitation cinema have become a part of the commercial mainstream. What do you see as the consequences of this loss of the b-film mode of production?

I say let the commercial mainstream have the exploitation genres. Today, I don't think filmmakers need to start the way I did, working within the restrictions of exploitation films, because the same financial and work place limitations no longer exist. I can't speak about other nations, but in America the following changes have occurred.

Due to new laws, motion picture and television unions have had to open up their apprenticeship programs; they can no longer discriminate by race, ethnicity, or sex. Today more attention is paid to the work of outstanding student filmmakers by artists' agents and film and television studios, and some of these students even find work as writers and directors soon after graduation.

Then there are the film festivals that have multiplied worldwide, and that are open to exhibiting unusual and adventurous independent films. Sources of financing and distribution can be found at these gatherings that were either nonexistent or difficult to find in my time.

Arguably the most revolutionary changes are the new advances in technology, which among other things have brought increasingly cheaper camera equipment and computer programs for editing and special effects. This benefits everyone, including filmmakers who work independently, by choice or necessity, outside the system.

Finally, there is also the future potential of the internet itself as a method of distribution, not just for major production and distribution companies, but for self distribution.

With all the options that exist today, if I were beginning my career as a filmmaker, I would not choose to make exploitation films.

Exploiting Feminism: An Interview with Stephanie Rothman (Part One)

The Viennale (the Vienna International Film Festival) will be organizing a special tribute this year to filmmaker Stephanie Rothman. They will be showing a range of Rothman's works, including Group Marriage (1973), Terminal Island (1973), The Student Nurses (1970), The Velvet Vampire (1971), and The Working Girls (1974). Here's what they have to say about her work on the festival's website:

In the mid-1960s the young director Stephanie Rothman started to work as the first and only woman at the time at Roger Corman's "New World Pictures".

Rothman launched an impressive and highly successful debut with The Student Nurses in 1970, the story of a group of attractive nurses told in a previously unknown, ironic and intelligent combination of sexploitation and social criticism, nudity and a feminist brand of "girls and guns".

In the mid-1970s Rothman made her last film and then fell into oblivion - and with her one of the most headstrong and interesting women of American cinema of the 1960s and 70s.

Because I had written an essay about Rothman, which appears in The Wow Climax, I was invited by the festival's director to do an interview with her for the festival program. They have been nice enough to allow me to reproduce the interview here for my regular readers. Here, Rothman provides some interesting background on what it was like to work for Corman in the 1970s and about the claims made for her work by feminist critics.

If you want to get a taste for how Rothman's films were marketed, you can check out the trailer for The Velvet Vampire over at YouTube.

Roger Corman was an early mentor for you. What did you learn from your work with Corman?

Roger Corman was not an early mentor, he was the only mentor I ever had. It was he who first offered me work as a filmmaker and I will always be grateful to him for that. He hired me in the fall of 1964, when it was rare for anyone who did not have family connections to find employment in the film industry, in or outside of the jurisdiction of the labor unions. It was even rarer for a woman to be hired. It was traditional to exclude us from nearly all types of work behind the camera.

I met Roger because I was the first woman to ever win the Directors Guild of America Fellowship, which was awarded annually to the director of a student film. He hired me as his assistant and put me to work immediately on low-budget independent films that he was personally financing, or that he had bought completed but that still needed further improvement. I did everything: write new scenes, scout locations, cast actors, direct new sequences and edit final cuts. It was a busy, exhilarating time.

Roger did not teach me these skills, I learned them in film school. But he did share his greater experience with me, giving me useful criticism and, equally important, information on how to efficiently organize work on the set so that a film could be shot on schedule. The schedules he set were much shorter than those of the major studios. Since it was his own money he was using, Roger did not want a film to go either over schedule or over budget.

He also taught me a valuable lesson in psychology: he encouraged me, often expressing his confidence in my abilities, and I therefore tried to do the best work for him that I could. It worked to my advantage too, because less than a year after I began working for him, in the fall of 1965, he financed It's A Bikini World, the first full-length theatrical feature film that I co-wrote and directed.

Corman had a number of women working for his company in those days. Was there a gender divide behind the scenes or did the male and female directors, both of whom were emerging from the film schools for the most part, support each other's work?

There were no women hired by him to work in production, while I was directing. I was the first woman he ever hired to direct, and the very small number of women who directed films for him after me, made them long after I was gone.

There was no gender divide and no mutual support when I worked there, because directors met each other infrequently and it was usually in the process of passing each other coming in or out of meetings with Roger. We were all involved in our own projects and there were no shared working spaces, such as offices or sound stages. Furthermore, our backgrounds and areas of interest, judging by our films, were different.

Many of those who worked with Corman describe a kind of compromise--work within exploitation formulas and in return gain a certain degree of ideological and creative control over your work. How do you think that balance between genre constraints and creative freedom influenced your work?

In 1970, Roger started his own production and distribution company, New World Pictures. He invited me to direct the first picture to be made there. It was called The Student Nurses. My husband, Charles Swartz, co-produced and co-wrote the story with me. We made it while Roger was out of the country, directing a film of his own, Von Richthofen and Brown, so we were free to develop the story of the nurses as we wished, as long as there was enough nudity and violence distributed throughout it. Please notice, I did not say sex, I said nudity. This freedom, once I paid my debt to the requirements of the genre, allowed me to address what interested me--and continues to interest me today-- political and social conflicts and the changes they produce. It allowed me to have a dramatized discussion about issues that were then being ignored in big-budget major studio films: for example, a discussion about the economic problems of poor Mexican immigrants--who were and still are America's largest immigrant population-- and their unhappy, restive children; and a discussion about a woman's right to have a safe and legal abortion when, at the time, abortion was still illegal in America. I have always wondered why the major studios were not making films about these topics. What kind of constraints were at work on them? My guess is that is was nothing but the over-privileged lives, limited curiosity and narrow minds of the men, and in those days they were always men, who decided which films would be made.

But, to return to your question: How do I think the balance between genre constraints and creative freedom influenced my work? There was always a struggle in my mind between the two. I would have covered the same topics, but made the films very differently, if I had not had these constraints. I knew it then. But I tried not to be discouraged and, as I said in answer to an earlier question in this interview, I tried to do the best I could.

The Student Nurses was very successful. Some critics welcomed its unapologetic feminism. It made a lot of money for Roger and he wanted me to make a sequel to it, but I wasn't interested. I had said all I wanted to about student nurses, and so he hired a series of male directors to make the sequels.

I never watched them, so I cannot say if they contained any feminist ideas. But the lesson Roger derived from my film's success was that you could make exploitation films whose narratives included contentious social issues, including feminism, and he consequently encouraged his directors to do it.

What did it mean to you to be working within the exploitation genre? Were there aspects of that formula that created discomfort for you? Were there special opportunities you saw there?

I was never happy making exploitation films. I did it because it was the only way I could work. While I do not object to violence or nudity in principle, the reason audiences came to see these low-budget films without stars was because they delivered scenes that you could not see in major studio films or more supposedly ambitious independent American films. (Today, of course, you can see these scenes and more, but we are talking about standards operative in the mid-nineteen sixties to seventies when I was working.) Exploitation films required multiple nude scenes and crude, frequent violence. My struggle was to try to dramatically justify such scenes and to make them transgressive, but not repulsive. I tried to control this through the style in which I shot scenes. That was one of my greatest pleasures, determining how my style of shooting could enhance the content of a scene. Comedy was another method of control I used. I have always enjoyed writing and directing comedy-- I was, in fact, more comfortable working in a comic idiom than a dramatic one--and so I also used comedy to modulate a scene's tone. Visual style and comic invention were my personal salvation or, as you put it in your question, the "special opportunity" to escape what troubled me about the exploitation genre.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part Two): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Mastery and Expertise DS: There are so many overlaps between film and game fandom Lori, which I sense both domains are subject to some of the same conceptualizations. In my own experience, it was the depth of the fandom that brought new knowledge to bear in the pre-internet days. I remember, in particular in games culture, how anecdote and fuzzily understood Japanese names would circulate among our group, as a form of ill defined knowledge, which nonetheless enabled us to evidence our commitment to the medium. At a time when US and European game adaptations would feature designers and developers in the end credits using arcade-style acronyms, such as 'Maki1000', I remember the particular case of Yuzo Koshiro, the musician behind the Streets of Rage Series (Burning Knuckle in Japan), and other Sega games throughout the early-to-mid nineties. Koshiro was distinct in that his name was featured on the attract screen of the arcade machines for the Streets of Rage games. Knowing the name of a particular person within a Japanese games production, and being able to associate it explicitly with good practice (the music was particularly good!) meant that, certainly within my own limited childhood experience, there was a palpable sense of connoisseurship and expertise that emerged from what today I objectify as fandom. The 'scars' of Americanization were no longer naturalized into the mediascape we had become accustomed to. Our commitment to complexity, with its associated passion for knowledge concerning origins, authenticities, modes of production, was profound, and manifested in ways exactly reminiscent of what you describe in the language play in women's HK film fandom.

There was a discernable sense of a 'private contract', much like what Anderson calls 'communities of the imaginary', at the point these unknown authors acquired names and faces. I felt a powerful sense of authority that came from the absolute ignorance of my parents, whose views of Japan and Asia still chimed with wartime anecdote and tragedy. We felt like a collective of codebreakers, learning languages, both Japanese and those of semiotic media literacies, in the course of resolving the burning questions that arose from games as subculture. I think that the contemporary relationship to authorship in videogames is still inflected by the revelations of the nineties.

As a teenager, the gender and transnational dimension emerged in the ambiguity surrounding Japanese names to provincial British kids like us. Is it a boy's name or a girl's? From that ambiguity rolled out other questions (certainly compounded by my own questions surrounding sexuality), as a young aspiring artist; for instance, do girls make/like these violent beat-'em-up games? And likewise, are there boys out there designing characters with the sexual charge and ambiguity like Prince Ali in the Sega roleplay game Beyond Oasis, imagining new paradigms of male beauty and power which stepped outside the hyper-masculine fantasies of the British and American teen culture I had been exposed to until that time?

LHM: What you write reminds me of what my partner says about his own mid/late '80s anime fandom. He's Japanese-American, and says that he had a particular (and peculiar!) credibility among American anime fans at the time because he 'looked' the part of a Japanese person AND had some cultural knowledge to impart as well. This emphasis on cultural specificity (in contrast to, say, authenticity) seems to be a contrary impulse to what Iwabuchi describes as "odorless" transnational popular culture; fans' knowledge of the originating culture may be incomplete and even wholly 'inauthentic', but - particularly within the fandom itself - it still holds considerable cultural capital.

This seems especially the case with Anglo-American interest in yaoi fan fiction; slash writers have moved into yaoi fiction and make a distinction between the two (one that I don't wholly understand, but which seems to be based at least in part on yaoi's emphasis on 'beautiful boys'), but this is as far as their appropriation of the Japanese practice goes. For many such writers, the term 'yaoi' seems to have taken on a life of its own, independent of its Japanese origins. We might ask if the same is true within other Asian (eg: Korean) yaoi-style works, given the very different role played by Japan, as a nation, within those contexts.

Indeed, this is one problem with the monolithic characterization of transnational media fandom that you describe above: if our conversations are confined to comparisons of "Western" and, in this case, "Japanese" media and fans (with each being described in terms of the other), we are left not only with a limited understanding of how media circulates and is used by such fans, but also with narrowly defined points of origin and destination.

Soft Power and Shallow Consumption

DS: I want to return to the specifics of the transnational relation in my fandom in academic terms, but first describe an anecdote from my teaching that certainly supports my ideas. At Newport we run Japanese lessons as part of our community-learning program, and every year a large cohort of undergraduate games design and animation students sign up, passionate about anime, games and Japanese popular culture in general. As an evening class, it doesn't compete with their core study, and the class is almost always three quarters constituted by my students, with the remainder members of the general public interested in learning a new language. After a number of sessions, the numbers start to drop off radically, most after the first. We are left with a committed core that will go on to finish the complimentary program (it is interesting to note that those who generally remain are young women). While there are numerous explanations, including their study workload, and the first year undergraduate experience in particular, I have often thought about the particular relationship between fan knowledge and fandom generally, which in many cases brought them to undergraduate studies in these areas, and the acquisition of orthodox knowledge (such as learning the language) in these areas.

It reminds me of suggestions Koichi Iwabuchi was making in the mid nineties about transnational multiculturalism, in the particular case of relations between 'Japan' - and its constructed 'Japaneseness' - and the 'West'. He frames the discussion in terms of Self and Other, and discusses the construction of Japaneseness both by the orientalizing rhetorics of the West, and Japan's self-orientalizing position in relation to its perceived 'others', in particular America and its Asian neighbours. He writes that the West from Japan's view had been '...discursively created in a quite systematic way...' and that most importantly, '...what had mattered was the ideas of the West that the Japanese had created for the purposes of self-definition. The real West was irrelevant.' Much of what I see in the contemporary fandom for Japanese games, film and anime chimes with Iwabuchi's suggestion, albeit from the inverse position. The pattern of their consumption and the scope of their connoisseurship have much more to do with their own identity politics than with any substantive enquiry into another culture. The new mobility and accessibility of Japanese popular culture provides new imaginary negotiations with archetypes of gender, class and power which are highly attractive to contemporary young people, insofar as they act as a means to configure selfhood, and as a source of information from which cultural capital can be drawn and parlayed between sympathetic peers. I think that sometimes this solipsism is written out of the account of transnational media fandom, the idea that something so global can have such domestic drivers.

LHM: I have to say, I'm very intrigued by the fact that the majority of remaining students in your language curriculum are women. When I was a Japanese language teacher back in the late 80s, the bulk of our students were men, drawn to Japanese language study by tall tales of all the money to be made in Japan's then-booming economy. The parallels between this shift from Japanese business to cultural attractiveness, and from male to female students, seems worthy of study in its own right!

I both agree and disagree with last point above; or, rather, I think it's something that's less an "either/or" than "both/and" situation. I agree with you that while we've moved away from early work on Western anime fans, in which they are characterized as almost wholly divorced from any awareness of, or interest in, Japan, we have yet to fully integrate our understandings of what the specific "domestic drivers" of transnational media fandom might be in the conversation. Are there aspects of specific transnational media that resonate with specific fandom practices in the target country (slash and yaoi again come to mind here)? Particularly in the case of such apparently different countries as, for example, Japan and the United States, the question of what exactly it is about anime texts (and its modes of production and distribution) that is so attractive to transnational fans is one that had yet to be fully interrogated.

Yet the word "substantive" is a sticking point for me, insofar as it seems to ask fans to justify their interest in non-native popular culture - something that we simply don't ask of fans of domestic media. Failing this, critics such as Iwabuchi tend to dismiss what transformative work the fandom might perform, and yet my own experience and that of the women I've interviewed suggests that, for at least some fans, this work does in fact occur. This would probably be your "committed core" of language students; they may not represent the mainstream of anime fans (and not all of them may even be fans), but that even a few take a very personal interest and parlay it into something that exceeds their fandom suggests that, at the very least, the question of what constitutes "substantive" interest in the cultures of other nations needs to be revisited.

DS: I think you are right in the sense those who go the distance are transformed by their engagement with the subject, though the degree to which this relates to their capacity as fans or as learners is a conversation in itself. To come back to your point about the play of language, in the Q&A session at a conference a few years ago I heard Western anime and game fandom being described as an 'infinitely shallow pool', in which fans circulated information about the latest series of gameworld which incredible rapidity and energy, but that any single encounter with that media was not defined with particular depth. The anecdote of kids torrenting hours and hours of Naruto, Inuyasha and the like, but never getting round to watch it, constructed this contemporary archetype of the cable-internet-fuelled frenzied collector. While I don't find this sort of illustration particularly illuminating, writers like Thomas Lamarre have observed that contemporary otaku spectatorship can be understood as a process of 'scanning' a series, or vinyl figure, or manga, for affirmative traces of textual tropes, which chime with established genre and representation conceits, understood by the fan community. Extending from this, fans knowledge of the Japanese language follow its yoked association with signification important to the currency of fandom. And so, to return to that first Japanese lesson filled with my students, they will certainly know the word for cat, neko, since feline-eared characters are a mainstay in the manga/anime/cosplay world. The language of anime is the currency, not Japanese per se. Language and world are intimately bound in this fandom; is the labour intensive investment in learning conversational Japanese measured against its use within the fan community, when the rhetoric of fandom legitimates and even celebrates what to orthodox eyes is 'partial knowledge', but which, in the case of fan subculture, constitutes a world of signs all of its own.

So, in contrast to the picture you posed of conversations across borders, I think transnational fandom in animation and games is not so much the cosmopolitan conversation it might have been portrayed as previously. I think that the majority of young people in this country who actively hunt out Japanese manga/anime/games/film do so with a view to pursuing a passion (albeit an increasingly mainstream one) that provides them with a means to re-imagine themselves outside of the relative confines of their domestic experience. I am trying to speak from the perhaps mythic position of a 'general fan', and I think such a thing exists, since commercial culture is now configured so absolutely to provide consumers with a means to invest in an experience of fandom as much as a text in itself. The organization of comic book, music and media stores are optimized to create the sensibility of the collector, and with manga imports, invariably the pricing and sale pitching compound this effect. Rarefied media are no longer the golden chalice they once were, where transnational media relations were evidenced in import/export flows. Transnational dimensions to contemporary media are found in its production of meaning through narrative and representational cues, which assume unforeseen levels of literacy in a wide variety of territories, along with the serialization and multimedia distribution of franchised intellectual properties. In this space, fan endeavour is characterized by a systemic filtering of proliferating media around a core text. Finding the good stuff assumes that you know the bad when you see it, and implicit to this assumption, is that almost any franchise will not exist as a single series, film or manga, but will spawn unforeseen ancillary media texts claiming to extend its scope.

The face of popular culture is merging into one, with transnational flows moving with a frightening intensity. When I was a teen Japanese popular culture was monolithic and exotic, now kids have Korean Chinese and their own homegrown media, which has followed the Japanese mould. But still, most interesting to me are the generic realities of Japanese culture that are coded as gendered. Shojo and Shonen, girls and boys genres, and beyond that Seinen, Bishonen, Yaoi. The specification of genres featuring action stories for boys, or stories of beautiful boys for girls in Japan, or for British queer teenagers who revel in the Bowie-like anti-heroes, I think the enduring influence on fandom that has come from transnationalism has been the complication of archetypal gender roles. While the people I speak to consider themselves fans, they choose to operate in shallower waters than the first generation of fans that aimed for the stars, and they nonetheless return to the enduring influence, through games/manga/anime of these new subjectivities, and for instance the subversive power of explicitly queered male heroism. Its amazing to me how the image of young men nowadays, through bands like Fallout Boy/AFI/Lost Prophets, draw on the image culture of imported anime from the eighties and nineties. Not quite dandyism, since a certain sobriety is key, the hair and the attention to detail is suffused with anime influences, and the gender play most explicitly betrays this heritage. Through Japanese performers like Gackt whose influence can be traced in the contemporary 'scenester' and 'emo' aesthetics, the softening of male aesthetics is perhaps the most enduring evidence of how fandom went mainstream here in the UK.

Wrapping Up

LHM: Given the really nascent state of writing on gendered (and gendering in) media fandom in the transnational context, I feel like we've only been able to begin to think through some of the issues at work here. We seem to be performing a dance around issues of in/authenticity, transcultural and transsexual masquerade, and carnivalesque language play that I'd love to see picked up and discussed more in the comments. Thanks for a rigorous and thought-provoking discussion, David.

DS: Yeah, writing late in the gender and fandom series has meant so much ground has been covered, I have found myself drawing a lot on my own experiences. I think that the potential for a further discussion on issues of authenticity in fandom is huge, since it plays such a decisive role in the structure and hierarchy of communities. As you say, it would be good to take it further in the comments. It's been great fun Lori.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part One): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Introduction LHM: I'm Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, and my academically sanctioned biography states that I'm a PhD candidate at Indiana University, working on a dissertation that examines Japanese female fans of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Normally, I would not include the information that I just now plopped my daughter in front of an episode of Dora the Explorer in order to buy some time to write, but that information - as well as the fact that I'm presently seven months pregnant - turns out to be relevant to the ways in which I'm thinking about female fandom in my dissertation, as well as the ways I'm thinking about academia in my own life. In essence, I'm interested in unruly fans (and unruly academics).

My own fan experiences, like those of the women about whom I'm writing, are very much a product of personal transnationalism. I spent my formative years living in Hong Kong; there, I was a fan of Hollywood blockbusters and took every opportunity to fill Chinese embroidered scrapbooks with movie stills culled from the Japanese movie magazines Screen and Roadshow. Later, I paradoxically 'discovered' the unique pleasures of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, and, as a fan, I've invested my fair share of hard-earned cash in star and movie memorabilia, quaked with excitement upon realizing that the Hong Kong restaurant I happened to visit was the backdrop of a favorite scene in Peter Chan's He's a Woman, She's a Man, and shaken Leslie Cheung's hand at a concert in Osaka. This is all by way of saying that fandom, for me, has been - first and foremost - a very personal and highly affective experience. As with many of the female fans I've talked with over the years, it stems from passion - for a narrative, for a genre, for a star. The fans with whom I identify are messy - to borrow from Martti Lahti and Melanie Nash, we're "those girls": the ones who exceed predetermined parameters of fan/star interaction, who allow our lives and our fandom to commingle to an unseemly degree.

DS: My name is David Surman, and I am founding Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the University of Wales, Newport. Fandom brought me to university, where I studied animation, with a view to working in the games industry. I was chaperoned through childhood by a Sega Mega Drive, and as a teenager I was consumed by an expanded passion for Japanese animation, games and popular culture; I guess I would qualify as one of the first wave of UK game otaku. I was caught up in the cloud of excitement around anime and manga generated by Jonathan Clements and Helen MacCarthy in magazines like Manga Max and Manga Mania, at a time when British and American animation was a dust bowl. Even though retailers sold the limited number of titles available at mercenary prices, over the years I acquired numerous videos with my meager allowance. I came to them knowing something of the controversy but nothing of the pedigree in anime.

My own media mixing put Kaneda and Tetsuo headlong along the same highway as the Gunstar Heroes and Joe Musashi on horseback. Videogames, manga and anime became the counterpoint to boredom at school, and university provided me with an opportunity to deepen those interests in an almost-legitimate way. No sooner had I got there, my interests began to broaden, through a patchwork exposure to film studies and classic film and animation. I found a passion for European experimental and North American limited animation, and these in turn deepened my appreciation of anime. My masters and PhD work followed the path set during the degree; I have sought to bring film studies methods to bear on transnational videogame and animation cultures. I guess, in this process, I have been examining my own fandom. I don't think that my experience is in many ways idiosyncratic; it always amazes me how many of my students share biographical details, motivations, dreams and desires, having spent their childhood committed to the same mediums as me.

In several recent essays I have vainly vindicated my own abstruse feelings about games fandom. My film studies prejudices come to the fore in the essays on Fable in the Animated Worlds anthology, and on StreetFighter in Videogame/Player/Text. Until relatively recently game studies have tended to focus on matching the sociology of play to the dynamics of gameplay. Along with a few other guilty parties, some of whom have contributed to this gender and fandom series, I am interested in the relationship between game aesthetics and fandom, though I suspect aesthetics is sometimes too weighty a term. Game art, images, advertisements and merchandise fascinate me, in particular when they betray particular cultural and generic assumptions about gender and games.

The 'Messiness' of Transnational Fan Culture

Whenever I think, "what am I doing?," I remind myself of what I consider one of the great fan studies texts, Barthes' The Language of Fashion. His summary exclamation, 'The most seemingly utilitarian of objects - food, clothes, shelter - and especially those based on language such as literature (whether good or bad literature), press stories, advertising etc., invite semiological analysis.'

I have tended to work with an emphasis on close analysis within the systems of games representation. Like Barthes I guess, the sum of my interests in games, animation and fandom pass through another lens, sexuality, which shapes my thinking, and my consumption of images and play experiences. I think I qualify as one of your messy fans, Lori. In my recent work I have become interested in female transnational/transmedia character archetypes (phew!), as loci for fan investment, authorial refinement, and cultural commentary.

LHM: Actually, I'm intrigued by your parenthetical "phew!" there at the end of your self-introduction, since it really is a mouthful but, at the same time, something that's part and parcel of contemporary globalized (or transnational or transcultural), gendered fandom. Since we've both written on media fandoms in a transnational context, I think this is something we might be able to talk to in addition to issues of gender. In my own work, I've found that the sheer amount of exposition necessary to bring a more general audience up to speed in terms of the specific culture(s) I'm talking about often acts as a barrier to discussing those cultures in terms of broader issues of fandom. In an English-speaking Western conference setting, for example, comparatively little background information is needed for speakers and audience members alike to engage in fairly high-level theoretical discussions of, say, Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings fandom. But in the case of characters like Kaneda and Tetsuo (who I was pleased - and mortified, but only because it dates me - to recognize), theoretical discussion often seems to take a back seat to exposition. My feeling is that, as a result, such discussion tends to get ghettoized or relegated to 'specialties' within academic discourse on fan cultures.

DS: Specialties indeed; your description of the challenge facing new territories of media research chimes exactly with my experience over the past 5 years or so, as games in particular have entered the mainstream as a object worthy of intense scrutiny. The stellar growth of the games and animation research fields has not been matched by moderate methodology, and there is still a substantial problem regarding the sensitivity with which scholars and critics figure transnational relations, and even the principle of national identity, in their research questions.

For me, one of the crucial issues in fan critique is the discrepancy between the needs of industry, journalistic, academic and general fan opinion, in relation to the expression their views on subjects, for instance national identity, and oriental/occidental constructions. I recently commented on this issue on the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) listserv. Distinctions between East and West require sensitive disentangling in academic thought, and such demands aren't generally expected of those in other domains.

I think it is absolutely crucial in this sort of comparative discussion that the category of the 'West' is not positioned as a coherent singularity, where narrative/generic/ideological operations can be thought relative to opposing and equally pejorative notions of 'Japan', which is somehow taken out of its Asia-Pacific context. The conceit of 'Japan' juxtaposed against a singular 'West' depends on outmoded assumptions about the dynamic topography of transnational media relations. It seems essential to figure into aca-fan thinking the internal complexities within Western media culture, and to further measure those against a similarly nuanced discussion of Asia-Pacific media culture, within which Japan is placed. The uncomplicated singular construction of 'Japan' as a media producer recurs time and again in animation and game scholarship, and it's not useful, especially when justified in relation to an equally mythic West. Woeful industry, journo and fan conceptualizations of East and West should be left for them to ruminate. A discussion of transnational media relations needs to proceed from a more nuanced set of assumptions, am I right? You wouldn't get away with it in any other field...

LHM: It's the challenge of articulating heretofore discrete fields of inquiry - area studies, in particular - with disciplines that have only just begun to confront your "dynamic topography of transnational media relations." These days, it's become more difficult to talk about fandoms within the American television mediascape without at least a passing knowledge of shows such as Torchwood or Naruto (or even Are You Being Served? - and I'd love to see a paper that really delved into the apparently bottomless popularity of that dinosaur in the U.S.!), yet because of those persisting notions of national coherence that you describe above, we seem to have a hard time breaking out of a framework that emphasizes cross-cultural exchange at the broadest national (or regional) level. At the risk of appearing sycophantic, given the forum for this conversation, I would mention that recent work by Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins emphasizing "semiotic solidarity" and "pop cosmopolitanism," respectively, offers a means of making sense of transnational fan networks that takes us outside traditional notions of the individual and the nation.

Of course, once gender enters the conversation, we're confronted with an even more complex nexus of identity construction. These days, we're relatively comfortable talking about 'otaku' in the context of transnational fan cultures centering on anime, but it's generally a foregone conclusion that, in the Japanese case, 'otaku' are men and, thus, comfortably "Japanese." When the discursive construct "Japanese woman" is introduced to the conversation - along with centuries' worth of baggage about her ostensible subservience and cultural/political disenfranchisement - discussion about what role Japanese female fans might play in furthering our understanding of how fan cultures work across national borders gets shelved in favor of trying to understand the women themselves. Scholars such as Brian Larkin have written exceptional work introducing non-Western media fans to discussions of how transnational media are consumed across borders, but these fans are almost exclusively male; the conversation about non-Western women and media consumption seems to be stalled in debates about resistance and subversion - debates that the mainstream of fandom studies has called into question. And given the contested value of any kind of "cosmopolitanism" in fostering mutual empathy among media consumers within a framework that privileges resistance and, in particular, cultural authenticity, it becomes all the more difficult to break out of old models of national identity in attempting to make sense of globalized patterns of media consumption on the part of non-Western female fans.

Performing the National

DS: I remember reading Volker Grassmuck's early work on otaku culture, and being amazed when his first interviewee was a female game otaku. I think problems associated with women's fandom emerge from a complex historical construction of women's work, play, recreation and entertainment. Early games culture was profoundly male dominated, with only a few women of exceptional resilience able to stand the grunts and smells of the old arcades! I guess a comparative analysis of women's recreation between different cultural spaces would no doubt shed new light on how we conceive the operations of fandom. Like Lawrence Grossberg suggested, I think we need to bring it these sorts of issues closer to home if we are to see rich new avenues opening up. William Gibson has drawn some interesting parallels between British and Japanese culture, mutually juxtaposed against American culture, he writes that '...the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures.' Gibson has certainly contributed to the conceited picture of 'Japan' through his science fiction novels, but his statements in the Guardian are useful for illustrating the point that comparative analysis is best researched in discussions taking place closer to home than antiquated notions of East and West.

Making the effort to proceed from complicated beginnings might mean that, in the long run, we say much more sustainable and durable things about the subject in question, in this case gender and fandom. Work like Andrew Higson's early essay 'The Concept of National Cinema' in Screen from 1989 give a really sound explanation of why we can't permit brutish and uncomplicated discourse on the scale of transnational relations. A few lines are pretty useful:

'To claim a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings. The process of identification is thus invariably a hegemonising, mythologising process, involved both in the production and assignation of a particular set of meanings, and an attempt to prevent the potential proliferation of other meanings.'

My question would be, to what extend does English-speaking fan film/animation/game criticism need a represented Japanese mode of production to perform a particular set of codes (and by extension narrative and ideological functions), against which it can define itself within a particular set of its own traditions? In increasingly globalised and mutually intelligible film/animation/games production cultures, where different production traditions rub shoulders in elective spaces such as the Tokyo Game Show or cable television channels, are such national/occidental/oriental discourses evoked out of 'fear of cultural contamination', as Iwabuchi would suggest?

Does the need for a coherent Western fan tradition (see responses to Dr Who, LOTR) arise from the new transparency of transnational games culture? Is that need for coherence the driver rather than the cause? In this case, do differing national fan subjectivities exist as a textuality of sorts in themselves, which compete within commodified fan culture as a form of generic reconciliation (the fight for shelf space in retail comic book stores for instance).

LHM: This last question is very intriguing, and it gets me thinking about the ways in which fans perform both their own, as well as target, national identities within the context of, for lack of a better term, non-native fandoms. For example, one female writer of Torchwood and Doctor Who fanfiction who I know from my own X-Files fanfiction writing days assumes what might be described as a stereotypically British personae when talking about these particular shows on LiveJournal: exclamations of "La!" and observations that "I'm so knackered" seem to express a kind of delight in - rather than fear of - cultural difference. The beauty of one of her exclamations - "He's lovely!" - is especially nice insofar as it refers to a Japanese anime character; this isn't the rigid Anglophilia of the PBS crowd but, rather, a messy and decidedly incoherent revelery in transnational fandom.

Equally, this kind of playfulness is at work in the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong cinema, again manifesting itself in language. In this case, similarities between written Japanese and Chinese, which have typically been used to demonstrate discrete cultural affinities (often in the aid of arguments for the cultural "Asianization" of East Asia), become a site of excessive intra-fandom communication. For example, stars are referred to not only by their Anglicized stage names (ie: Jacky Cheung), but also by their Chinese given names (Cheung Hok-yau) and - most notably - Japanized versions of their Chinese names (Cho Gakuyu), which, in spoken Japanese, are intelligible only to other Japanese fans of Chinese stars. Japanese fans of East Asian popular culture have been used to illustrate Japan's rediscovered Asian belonging on the part of political and cultural elites, but such arguments are grounded in the maintenance of coherent borders between Japan and its East Asian neighbors. In contrast, this kind of play exceeds conventional understandings of linguistic and cultural coherence, and it emerges not from a perceived need to communicate across borders, but from the sheer pleasure and intimacy it fosters between both fellow fans and those fans and the stars they admire.

Given that this kind of transcultural play is especially evident in recent role-playing fanfiction (eg: Milliways bar on LiveJournal - http://community.livejournal.com/milliways_bar/), I wonder if this sort of thing is at work in transnational gaming culture, as well?

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part Two)

Some critics of the idea of participatory culture have argued that only a small percentage of people want to generate or share content with other people. Even advocates such as Bradley Horowitz have argued for a pyramid of participation in which a small group at top become creators while others help to circulate and critique what they create. Should we then accept that the new participatory culture is only modestly more democratic than what has come before? What do you see as the implications of these inequalities in participation? What does your research suggests about the steps which need to take place before someone begins to participate in these expressive cultures?

Absolutely, these issues are vitally important. If participatory culture is a site of cultural citizenship, but the most active participants are already a privileged elite, then we have a problem ­ a problem for democracy. You refer to this as the participation gap instead of the digital divide and reframing the problem this way is an incredibly important intervention. The unevenness of participation is not a consequence of lack of access to the hardware and software and internet connections, but a consequence of uneven motivations and literacies.

The digital storytelling movement is an explicit attempt to intervene in these issues creating situations where ordinary people can work with more experienced media producers to create considered works based on their own life narratives. Just a note for readers who may not have come across the Digital Storytelling movement before: the form of Digital Storytelling I talk about in my work is a specific tradition based around the production of digital stories in intensive collaborative workshops. The outcome is a short autobiographical narrative recorded as a voiceover, combined with photographic images (often sourced from the participants own photo albums) and edited into a short movie. For examples, have a look at the Centre for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org), the BBC¹s Capture Wales digital storytelling project (http://bbc.co.uk/capturewales) and one of our projects

here at QUT, the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project (http://www.kgurbanvillage.com.au/sharing/digital/index.shtm).

In comparison to Web 2.0 platforms for amateur creativity like YouTube or Flickr which rely on autonomous participation and peer learning rather than top-down training, digital storytelling works to broaden participation by connecting everyday vernacular experiences and practices (like oral storytelling) with professional expertise and institutional support. Common to all branches of this tradition is an ethic of participation: one of the core aims is to provide people who are not necessarily expert users with an opportunity to produce an aesthetically coherent and interesting broadcast quality work that communicates effectively with a wider, public audience.

But digital storytelling is mainly focused at the production end -- the creation of artefacts, albeit in an intensely social workshop setting. Much of what is so interesting in new media contexts does happen on the web, though, and those who are able to participate most effectively in those spaces are highly skilled in new and emerging literacies. In particular, I talk about network literacy -- understanding that participation in blogging, or vlogging, or in the Flickr community, or whatever, is not just about creating something great and broadcasting it ­ it's also about being part of social networks. In fact, the social and cultural value that is generated by these online creative communities is very much a product of both social networking and creative practice, in a convergent relationship. It¹s not just great content, and it¹s not just connectedness, and it's not just findability and relevance, it¹s all of those things. That's what Flickr's interestingness algorithm, as a way of re-presenting the most valuable images on the network, is all about. So the point is that ongoing, engaged participation in creative communities is just as vital for effective participation as the creative competencies and aesthetic literacies particular to your chosen artform, whether that's photography, music, vlogging, or whatever. And at the same time, those who want to learn more about photographic techniques, say, couldn¹t do better than to actively participate in a social network that¹s organised around photography, like Flickr.

There has been a growing body of criticism focused on the discourse of web 2.0 and its concept of user-generated content from the perspective of creative labor theory. Flickr has been seen as emblematic of this new creative economy. How does the corporate construction of user-generated content differ from or resemble your concept of vernacular creativity?

Let me say to begin with that I don't like the term user-generated content very much at all. First we're masses and now we're generators? Users isn't great either, but it's hard to think of a better term for the relationship it describes. I tried to use vernacular creativity as much as possible because it focuses on the practices of users in relation to their own lives; not as the sources of content in relation to online enterprises.

But to move on, I'm not really an expert in labour theory, but the debate around user-led content creation in relation to labour is really interesting because of how much it says about the unexamined assumptions of the left, more than anything else. I have to say here that some of the most interesting discussions of new labour theory in relation to network culture have been happening on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list lately (https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002698.html), and my colleague Melissa Gregg (http://homecookedtheory.com) is one of many

people doing very interesting work on affective labour in relation to new media technologies. I'm not talking about discussions that occur at that level, but the knee-jerk responses that frame almost any participation in commercial online spaces as just free labour. That kind of statement reveals how much of our thinking is still structured around the competing dynamics of oppression and resistance, not to mention industrial models of the economy, and doesn't allow for the idea that we may be seeing the emergence of newly configured, dynamic and volatile economic and power relations between the media ÂŒindustry and ordinary consumer-citizens, which may afford new forms of agency and opportunities for human flourishing as much as they do new forms of labour.

Of course, mainstream technophilic commentators like Wired and so on are

just as guilty ­ the hype around the idea of crowdsourcing as a source of free or cheap labour was not only pretty insulting to the agency of users, but pretty unimaginative, I thought. I think too much focus on the idea of free labour might obscure some of the most interesting and challenging problems around user-generated content. For example, considering that there

is no alternative at scale, at least right now, to the big commercial social network services and platforms, like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and so on; what about the challenge of getting the interests of the service or platform provider and their user community to align in a way that maximises the public good they produce as side effects? Is it possible to show that this care for social and cultural value is essential for the commercial success of the platform provider as much as it is for the interests of the community? And where do commercial imperatives create barriers to the public good? Flickr is really interesting in this respect because they have very

open feedback channels between the user community and the company ­ for better or worse! The moments where that cosy, we're all in this together relationship between service provider and user community appears to break down is the moment where any hidden problems in the relationship come to the surface (think of Flickr's recent issues around localisation and censorship, for example), and at least in theory they can be explicitly discussed and even transformed for the better. Or not!

You describe your stance as one of critical optimism. What did you learn in your research which left you more optimistic? What did your research show that forced you to become more critical of the prevailing rhetoric about a DIY revolution?

When I was first planning the research project that eventually became my PhD, back in 2003, a lot of the hype about amateur creativity seemed to be saying that ordinary people were overthrowing the expertise of the media industries and creative professionals within them ­ and for some people that was seen as a great thing, a revolution; for others, it has been seen as a very dangerous thing. And by the way, it seems little has changed, if Andrew Keen's impact on public discourse is anything to go by.

I didn¹t like that overblown revolutionary and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, because it seemed to be making a grave and ahistorical mistake--we always, always have to be very careful about what is actually 'new' about 'new media'. And I was just intuitively convinced there was something more subtle and interesting going on. I also wanted to get away from that amateur-professional dichotomy and think about the actual practices and social uses of user-led content creation, in their own terms, without serving a polemical agenda.

The main thing I wanted to explore and understand was the extent to which both lower barriers to production, especially because of cheaper and more available technologies like digital cameras, in tandem with networked mediation, especially online, might be amplifying those ordinary, everyday creative practices so that they might contribute to a more democratic cultural public sphere. I guess I was optimistic in that I went looking for evidence that might support that hope, and not defeat it.

But this is happening very imperfectly, of course, and it¹s not yet clear whether the mass popularisation of participatory media platforms will improve matters or not. The encounters that occur in the most populous, democratic media platforms, like YouTube, are not always a pretty sight. Just as much as YouTube supports the self-representation of minorities or the popularisation of evolutionary science, for example, it also supports hate¹ speech and religious fundamentalism. It isn¹t clear yet how the cultural normalisation of spaces like YouTube will turn out.

I found that the spaces that were most rich in examples of vernacular creativity were at the same time constrained in certain ways, and each context was shaped towards forms of participation that served the interests of the service providers as much as they serve the interests of the participants. So in Flickr, the most active, intensive forms of participation seem to be taken up mainly by already-literate bloggers, gamers, and internet junkies. In the digital storytelling movement, there is a certain kind of polite authenticity that is valued, and the workshops are incredibly resource-intensive, so that they aren't open to the ongoing, everyday participation that something like blogging is. There are always constraints and compromises, no matter how open a platform appears to be. So, I suppose, that's the 'critical' part.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part One)

I recently had the privilege of being an outside examiner on a dissertation produced by Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate in the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology on the topic of "vernacular creativity." I've long considered QUT's Creative Industries program to be a sibling of our own efforts in the Convergence Culture Consortium. Indeed, Joshua Green, who currently heads the C3 research team, is a post-doc who came to us from QUT. And we've seen a steady stream of visitors through the years (John Hartley, Alan McKee, John Banks, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess, among others) from down under. Burgess is now collaborating with Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and others on the C3 team on research centering on YouTube. I was quite taken by what Burgess had to say about "vernacular creativity" and its relationship with participatory culture, media literacy, and civic engagement. She talks about these concepts in the following interview:

Your dissertation focused on what you call vernacular creativity. Can you give us a sense of what this concept means for you?

I used the concept to talk about everyday creative practices like storytelling, family photographing, scrapbooking, journaling and so on that pre-exist the digital age and yet are co-evolving with digital technologies and networks in really interesting ways. So the documentation of everyday life and the public sharing of that documentation, as in sharing photos on Flickr, or autobiographical blogging; these are forms of vernacular creativity, remediated in digital contexts. These are also cultural practices that perhaps we don't normally think of as creative, because we've become so used to thinking of creativity as a special property of genius-like individuals, rather than as a general human -- some would say -- evolutionary process. I found the term really useful for focusing on the fact that there is much about the current explosion of amateur content creation online that has a long history, that isn¹t particularly revolutionary, and that relates to specific local contexts and identities. Vernacular creativity is ordinary.

But ordinary doesn't mean generic or boring, not necessarily anyway. Each example of vernacular creativity is also a representation of a specific life, a specific time, a specific place. Because of this specificity, the ordinariness of vernacular creativity doesn't necessarily equate to uninterestingness. The practices and artefacts of vernacular creativity are of course very rich and meaningful in relation to the social contexts in which they're created, communicated, and disseminated: think of your own family photo album, and then a complete stranger's family photo album from the 1960s that you stumble across in the back of a junk shop in a different country, for example. Both ordinary at the point of origin, both full of meanings and stories, but in different ways. The point is, culture doesn¹t have to be sublime or spectacular to be useful or significant or interesting to someone, somewhere. But what I find most interesting about vernacular creativity in the context of the new media generally and the Internet particularly is the potential to scale that immediate social context add up to social connectivity, and conversation, to individualistic self-expression. The two major case studies I explored in the thesis - the Flickr photosharing network, and the Digital Storytelling movement -- each demonstrate how that might work out in practice, but in very different ways.

How might a focus on participation and creativity, rather than resistance, change the agenda for cultural studies?

The focus on cultural participation as a positive thing is entirely compatible with a long tradition in cultural studies that was concerned with empowerment and social inclusion through self-representation and education. I think this is an agenda that has always been there, but perhaps was overshadowed by an alternative relationship to power - resistance, even as resistance was located in the everyday. The important thing for me is that a focus on participation shifts the questions that we need to ask about the cultural politics of media slightly sideways from being only about power, exploitation and resistance to questions of voice, cultural inclusion, and so on and those questions seem to me to offer more hope for pragmatic interventions.

Symbolic creativity and agency in relation to media, particularly, has a long history in cultural studies. Henry, you would know better than anyone that fans were very important for earlier investigations into participatory media because they showed how creativity and agency were possible even within the media landscape of the broadcast era. At that stage, fans weren't really understood as ordinary citizens, but rather as pretty extraordinary, intensively engaged media consumers. But at least the creative practices of fans demonstrated that there might be empowering uses of popular culture, and that audiences for broadcast culture were not -- or at least not all -- passive. And I also don¹t need to tell you or many of your readers that creative fan practices in new media contexts has often led the way for more mainstream forms of participation.

I thought it was time to consider the extent to which people who may have a much less intense relationship with mass media and popular culture than fans, might also be participating in culture through their own creative efforts.

What links do you draw between empowering people to create and share what they create with others online and the development of conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement?

Most of the time, when we hear terms like citizenship and civic engagement, we think of participation in the processes of formal politics ­ democratic deliberation, elections, and so on. These forms of participation are thought of as separate from everyday life, consumption, popular culture, and pleasure. But I think some of the most interesting forms of civic engagement occur where the everyday and popular collide with the political -- look how much there is going on in the Obama Girl video, for example. So as a way of getting at those ideas, the term I use most of the time is cultural citizenship, which is a way of talking about the ways in which cultural participation and citizenship might be the same thing, in certain circumstances.

So one of the core concepts I work with in the thesis is this idea of cultural citizenship¹. It¹s used in several different ways by different theorists, but what I mean by it is that culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging. Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it¹s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship ­ in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense. This idea -- that networked individualism in participatory media might actually be good for society in some way -- really seems counter-intuitive to those who have been convinced by people like Robert Putnam, who argues that the increased privatization and commodification of social life weakens the social fabric, e.g. of neighbourhoods.

One of the things my research emphasised in relation to Flickr was that cultural citizenship was not only constituted online, but through the articulation of the online social network with everyday, local experience. A lot of my research focused on the Brisbanites group within Flickr, and there¹s a good illustration of this from an apparently insignificant event that occurred there. At one stage last year, an Italian user known on the network as Pizzodesevo, who had lived in various cities around Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, started posting scans of old slides taken in the 50s to the group. Other group members showed interest in the photographs by leaving comments that ranged from expressing appreciation to offering technical advice about scanning, to discussion of the locations of the photographs and how much they had changed in the past 46 years. What was really interesting to me was that the connections made between users as part of this discussion resulted in one Brisbane-based member of the Brisbanite groups spontaneously creating a kind of game around the images: he began going out specifically to capture images of the same locations as in the old slides, and uploading them to his own Flickr photostream. Pizzodesevo then combined some of these new images side by side with the old ones in a series of double images. The simple act of combining them revealed some of the dramatic changes to the Brisbane cityscape that have occurred over the past few decades. This led in turn to more discussion about the ways in which the city has changed, blended with nostalgia for a past that many of the discussants had never experienced themselves. So there on a microscopic level you have vernacular creativity, remediation, social networking, and civic engagement threaded back and forth and adding up to something much more than just sharing photos.

Joke Hermes refers to the texts and practices of popular culture as providing some of the "wool from which the social tapestry is knit." I think of each of these apparently insignificant moments of participation in online social networks and creative communities as being very much like that "where they start to knit together," you see how the everyday individual practices of vernacular creativity could add up to something beyond the individual level. It's in making those forms of personal expression available as part of public culture -- however small the public turns out to be -- that the digital remediation of vernacular creativity starts to look like it has real potential for propagating cosmopolitan forms of cultural citizenship, albeit at a modest scale.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eighteen, Part Two): Julie Levin Russo and Hector Postigo

Technology and Control HP: One of the things we talked about during our meeting in Providence was how new media technologies, especially the internet, can potentiate changing conditions and relations vis a vis consumers and producers? I've sort of touched on this a bit above with my comments about how the web allows for mass broadcast of previously isolated products. So I think user production and fan contributions and their value (i.e their exploitability) are a function of the medium. Fan fiction for example, has been around for some time and their communities have been able to coalesce and remain together over time thanks to zines and fan cons and other social/communication enterprises. I think that the web adds an element of mass broadcast to fan production such that we are talking about fan products as content; as part of the commoditized information flowing out of the pipe. So I don't think we can any longer ignore the political economy of fandom. One of the interesting points that comes of all this is the question of control. If all this production is entering into some sort of relation with capital how is it controlled? The relations we discussed above are social relations but they happen through a technology so we could ask ourselves to what extent does the technology of the internet shape/is shaped by the productive relationships?

JLR: I'm so glad you asked! Control is a fruitful concept for articulating the economy with technology because, as the story of late capitalism goes, a new configuration of control is now coming to the fore: one which is just as horizontal, localized, and networked as the field of production on which it operates. Rather than enforcing prohibitions, it organizes possibilities and enables free movement within them -- often mobilizing technology to do so. In Protocol, Alex Galloway suggests that today we commonly experience hybrid grids of control, and offers the anatomy of the internet an as example: it combines the top-down architecture of DNS with the distributed architecture of TCP/IP. I often notice an analogous strategy at work in proprietary fan-driven content initiatives, where the confining threat of legal muscle is overlaid on a structured platform for creative license, striking a compromise that (when it's successful) is tolerable to both sides. What's clear is that, at this point, if we're looking out for hierarchical, centralized diagrams of power, we're going to sail right over the terrain of struggle. Web 2.0 is seductive in its user-centric mentality, but in exchange for the convenience and scale of social media we accept (literally, by ticking the box on the TOS) its given parameters, both technological and economic. Recently fandom is beginning to wise up to this dynamic and work towards building an infrastructure that is user designed, owned, and operated.

HP: I like the idea of alternative infrastructures that resist the commercial iterations of things like Web 2.0 driven social enterprises. I wonder to what degree power in this system of sociability/production/distribution is dependent on technological know-how. Will only those that can design infrastructure be able to challenge protocol with a counter-protocol? I would take a lesson from Langdon Winner and say that not all of us have to be technologist but it's in all our best interests to be concerned with the technological structures that consistently arise around us. We walk around in a state of what he calls "technological somnambulism" where before we know it we are moving through systems (social and technological) that were not democratically designed nor designed with the interest of democracy in mind. To what degree is this happening in participatory culture...to what degree has protocol taken shape around us without our input and without consideration to the values that users/fans/etc hold dear?

To get to the question of gender and technology it seems that these are not only pressing questions for participatory culture but also questions about how technologies embody gendered/sexist assumptions of what it means to produce in the digital world. Pointing to the troubling trend, when a technologies or professions become populated by women the economic rewards for the work decrease...the idea may be related to class too as for example when we say that a technology "is so easy to use anybody can do it" what we mean is that it's lost its elite status because not only college educated white men can use it but also everyone else of any class, educational background, and gender. In the logic of supply and demand of course this would dictate that the supply is increased and thus the value is decreased but I don't think this maps out in the area of cultural productions where conversations, reconstructions, and networks create value...in these cases the fact that anybody can do actually adds value but the elitist rhetoric holds it back when viewed from a market perspective.

JLR: Interestingly, this gendered revaluation can also move in the opposite direction: some occupations, such as film editing and computer programming, were initially understood as repetitive, detail-oriented labor that was thus feminized and performed primarily by women, and then later masculinized into elite technical skills. And while one sentence isn't much of a corrective to the white- and US-centric slant of this project, I'd like to note that there's a global dimension of inequality here too, as devalued forms of work are often relegated to the world's as well as the nation's "second-class" citizens.

One cause for optimism in the localized case of media fandom is that it's always been full of geeks -- women with highly-developed expertise in digital technologies -- and thus surfed the first wave of innovation throughout its decades-long history (thanks to Francesca Coppa for reminding us of this). Moreover, fandom is collaborative, so it's not necessary for us to be cultivating a counter-protocol on an individual basis when we collectively have a resevoir of competences to share. In any case, these are all good examples of the myriad ways technology intersects and intertwines with power, gesturing toward the merits of exploring, within our academic work, the particularities of its role in fan practice and fan/industry relations.

Ownership and Desire

HP: From the small clip I saw of your work it looks like you are looking at the content produced by fans and how readings of a text (TV show) inform fan production and how that production does or does not mesh with what we assume are the goals of the industry. In my experience with video games, I have not played close attention to content just its volume (i.e. how much of it there actual is). I would posit that the substance of the content (what it is actually is about) is in the aggregate less of a concern to media companies than the whole productive field. Which is to say that so long as the whole of the content has substance that can help meet the demands of selling that product then the media companies do (or should) live with the content that in substance is not "mainstream" that from a bottom line perspective this content does one of two things for the content owners. #1 Nothing or #2 something profitable. #2 is interesting to me because it says that in some way all content is profitable and this is why. Of all the content that is produced by fans some will be quite good, some may even bring some attention to the original work which then helps the media companies, some will be bad (poor quality which does nothing for the company) some will have readings that the company may object to. If the whole field of fan production is seen as a testing ground, a free market-research domain, then companies can't really loose. If they notice that everyone seems to like a particular reading then that is an intimation that perhaps that reading ought to be explored, packaged, resold. I think this claim runs into trouble when there are critical messages in fan created content such that they critique the media company where it would be believed that the content will actually be bad for the bottom line. This is all well and good for content owners but what about the fans. It seems problematic especially if the critical force of some content rests in part on marginal status.

JLR: In terms of content, I think there are some legitimate concerns among fans about the suppression of work that falls at the more extreme end of the continuum of "non-mainstream" readings. In these exceptional cases, there can be a #3: something perceived as detrimental to the value of the property or service. One recent and very visible example is LiveJournal's mass suspension of journals and communities accused of hosting "pornographic" works about underage Harry Potter characters, supposedly in violation of LJ's TOS. I'd argue that this is an instance where the substance of fan creations threatened the ideological underpinnings of the dominant system, albeit an oblique threat filtered through a series of legal and institutional mediations. The specter of such a crackdown hovers over the rich cosmos of derivative smut, the majority of which is currently situated within commercial social media platforms with official bans on "inappropriate content" (which they can interpret and enforce at will).

I wouldn't claim, though, that fan activities resist commodification simply by virtue of being slashy or critical -- the commercial media are becoming ever-more adept at self-reflexively absorbing such orientations. For the most part I agree with you that the salient conditions are structural and largely independent of the content of fanworks. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm saying that femslash challenges capitalism because it's about lesbians! However, I do think we can view queer fan production as form and not just as content. The widespread notion of "subtext" implies an open, plural, and dehierarchized model of textuality wherein diffuse and collective creative labor isn't easily contained by top-down intention and authority. I realize I'm risking a dubious move here, collapsing embodied queer sexuality into metaphorically queer textuality, but I'm committed to making this metaphor work convincingly in my project. Given the centrality of the mechanics of desire to the economic system, I don't think it's a coincidence that the representation of desire becomes particularly unruly. Considering that the value of media properties inheres in the libidinal labor of their consumers, corporate "ownership" is held in place primarily by the external fiat of intellectual property law. I think this is a foundational contradiction that fandom can productively stress.

HP: I find this last paragraph very interesting. It sounds like you are drawing a parallel between the drive to inspire a desire for a given commodity and the "unruly" representations of desire in fan production. ("Given the centrality of the mechanics of desire to the economic system, I don't think it's a coincidence that the representation of desire becomes particularly unruly"). Equally interesting is the claim that desiring the commodity gives it value (actually the interesting part is the consequences you imply). That this desire (wanting) is labor in itself that justifies a claim of ownership by fan communities (You statement that IP is a fiat that holds owners claims in place leads me to this interpretation...correct me if I'm wrong). I like both of these because they really de-center the rhetoric of IP that has governed western rationale for property ownership: the "mixing of labor" argument put forth by Locke. In your interpretation it is the mixing of desire (ironically constructed by capital to drive consumption) with the raw material of popular culture industry products that legitimizes ownership. You don't outright say this but I think you imply it. Also the first sentence I quoted above suggests that consumption driven by desire leads in some instances to re-writings inspired by desire. The link between the two can further be stretched to articulate with Jenkins' recent arguments for a moral economy of fan production and ownership...if we count desire as a valid "mixing of labor" argument (where labor is now desire) then the moral hold on property (which is in part the foundation of IP at least in political philosophical terms) is shaken. NEATO!

To further think about how your thoughts might de-center other lines of rationalizing about how IP gets legitimized through moral/philosophy rhetoric we might consider the notion that creative works are part of the self. Thus in the European tradition authors' rights tend to be stronger in terms of the control authors have over their IP because in a sense it is extension of the self. It would seem that desire as a vehicle for extending the self into the production of fan re-writings, for example, would create competing claims about self. In other words, authors' claims of moral ownership over a particular piece of IP rooted in arguments of the self conflicts with fans' claims of ownership over a re-writing based on the same arguments. In this sense it would seem that the claims of self from fans would be secondary to the claims of self by original authors. However, the scholarship of legal scholars like James Boyle suggests that in a cultural commons the original author is a myth. This has interesting consequences for any totalizing claims over IP.

JLR: First of all, thank you for this elaboration of my ideas! I'm still in the early stages of trying to articulate this thesis, and it's exciting that you can amplify it in ways that make sense. I'm pretty rusty on Locke and much subsequent political and legal theory, but I think you've captured the contradictions I'm getting at here. I love that you come around to the relation between creativity and selfhood -- of course the IP regime depends on a unified and bounded model of subjectivity wherein "original" artistic production emanates ex nihilo from individual interiority (which, as you mentioned in pt. 1, tends to be inflected as male/white/bourgeois). Working psychoanalytically, I'd go beyond competing selves to argue that any of the selves involved is internally conflicting, fragmented, and intertextual, further compromising the claim of "ownership" over expression.

Nonetheless, intellectual property law is held in place by institutional power (the tangible threat of debilitating lawsuits [Fair Use doctrine has been called "the right to be sued"] and the intensifying alliance between legislative and corporate sectors in extensions of copyright), often very successfully despite this conceptual incoherence (which grows ever more insistent as consumption and production blur together). What I find valuable about analyses of concentrated "moral economies," though, is that they can highlight the equally central role of discourse in this process. Copyright, which undergirds the economics of who can make money from what kinds of artistic labor, can't operate only by force -- its legitimacy requires an ongoing ideological negotiation (this should sound Gramscian). This is one example of how work -- both academic work and fan work -- that engages at the level of discourse is crucial. I hope that this series of "debates" can, at best, be an intervention on that very real terrain.

HP: I agree with your last paragraph. It seems that the discourse has been dominated by rhetoric that dominates IP law and policy. Such things as copyright as incentive, the balance between the public and the authors and the construction of users as pirates all tend to skew how we percieve the limits of use. The problem of course is that these are powerful tropes in US society and so alternative discourse is needed to challenge them. Well I think that wraps it up for me. Thanks go out to Henry for giving us the forum and thank you for engaging in these topics with me. Hopefully we can meet for tea again!

JLR: The communities that we work on and within, modders/hackers and fan producers, have certainly been dynamic channels for alternative economies, discursive and otherwise. So my optimism hasn't been disciplined out of me yet! I'd like to thank you, Henry, and the rest of the participants for this opportunity to ruminate and hold forth on some of the issues I'm passionate about. It's been a pleasure conversing with you, and very fruitful for my own process. Look me up when you're next in town!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eighteen, Part One): Julie Levin Russo and Hector Postigo

Introductions Due to some serendipitous travel plans, we had the opportunity to meet IRL two weeks ago to kick off the conversation below. It was a pleasure to find that we have quite compatible preoccupations and positions when it comes to fandom and convergence -- good matchmaking, Henry! However, in addition to applying our viewpoints to different specific artifacts, we're coming from different disciplinary orientations, which we'll attempt to detail below. One bent we definitely share is a commitment to political economy, so that will be the primary focus of this installment. And BTW, we chose to compose this post in a wiki page, and we wonder what effect that has, if any, on the shape of the discourse.

Julie Levin Russo: I'm a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. My interests span the intersections of technologies of representation, sexuality, and politics, and in grad school I've worked on topics such as media epistemology, cyberporn, and "privacy." My dissertation project, entitled "Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Lesbian Fan Communities," focuses on femslash fandom, taking it as an occasion to explore the larger negotiations and stakes of the struggle between unbridled participation and capitalist reincorporation in today's convergent mediasphere. In terms of my methodological approach, I'm situated squarely in post-structuralist theory and the humanities, and my deliberate and perhaps dubious approach to the gender axis is to tacitly assume that queer female labor can serve as an exemplar of broader transformations in media consumption. The body of my diss consists of three localized analyses of series-specific interpretive communities (Battlestar Galactica, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The L Word), discussing each across three intertwined registers: screen texts (television programs, though acknowledging their increasingly fluid borders), metatexts (ancillary online materials disseminated by TPTB), and fan texts (specifically, lesbian readings and writings). As is the custom in my discipline, I don't presume to offer a comprehensive and/or empirical picture of a field of practice, but rather hope to lay out three frameworks for diagnosing the nexus of convergence and desire: technologies of reproduction, politics of representation, and commodification of identity. My structuring question is: what aspects of fan production contradict or challenge systems of domination (capitalist and otherwise)? You can follow my diss as a WIP at my academic LJ -- I'm tremendously indebted to discourse with LiveJournal's community of acafangirls for any insights therein.

As a fan, I'm a bit of an anomaly in that I participate exclusively in the femslash community, which is a minuscule (some would say marginal) enclave within media fandom at large. I'm a devoted writer and organizer, and while I try to maintain plausible deniability in the professional sphere, my fic is not difficult for interested parties to find. Excepting an avid swath of multifannish d(r)abbling, most of my work has been based in Star Trek: Voyager (beginning on a newsgroup/elist in the late 1990's) and Battlestar Galactica (which has essentially taken over my life since mid-2005) -- perhaps a testament to my utter helplessness before the combo of female leaders and female cyborgs. As the first fandom I've been immersed in almost since its inception, BSG femslash has been a particularly rich and rewarding experience for me, including mentoring and infrastructure-building (not to mention my metafannish vlogging and speaking).

Hector Postigo: I'm an assistant professor of new media studies in the Communication Dept. at the University of Utah. My research focuses on new media and society and I'm currently pursuing two lines of research. The first line is a study of social movements and their use of information communication technologies. Recent research in this area has centered on analyzing the digital rights movement's user-centered fair use campaign and the movement's deployment of hacking as a tactic in its extra-institutional repertoire of action. The second line of research focuses on value production on the internet. I was on of the first researchers to study video game fan communities that make valuable modifications to popular PC games (modders) and to study AOL's volunteer communities. My research on both these groups suggests that a large amount of their "invisible" labor contributes to the value produced in digital networks such as the World Wide Web. I've taught courses on the internet and society, information communication technology, and the new economy. Some of my publications can be found here. These are related to modders and their work on video games and AOL volunteers. I come to fan studies primarily as an observer of the productive processes that are the result of various fan community associations. I'm really excited to meld both my macro approach to a political economy of fan work with Julie's ground level understanding of these communities.

Labor and Value in Late Capitalism

HP: I've been working for some time trying to figure out value of modder productions from an economic perspective. I've started with some admittedly simple questions. From my perspective media corporations are motivated by return on revenue first and foremost so when I first started looking at fan production I asked myself 2 questions. 1. Why would anyone want to spend all of their free time making something for which they will get no money for and 2) why would media companies encourage this? Now I admit these are very simplistic questions. #1 assumes that people do things only for money and it also assumes that money is the only reward and that community, reputation, pleasure, and the gift economy have nothing to do with it. # 2 assumes that that the popular culture industry has only one internal logic "make money" but we know that institutions have all kinds of heterogeneity and that nothing is monolithic... The last thing that all this assumes is a very materialist Marxist perspective. #2 presupposes that at some point the media companies surrender control and that that surrender is calculated and that fans become cogs in some sort of post-industrial "social factory." We know that things are way more complex. Fans are active readers and their communities have internal logics, norms, and practices that are oppositional, conspiratorial, and/or neutral to the workings of popular culture and its industry. Fans are both insiders and outsiders in that respect. Regardless, one unwavering fact remains, at least from my experience in video games, fans like to contribute and video game companies for the most part encourage it.

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JLR: It seems the first thing you've done is debunk your own questions -- I'm with you so far. In order to launch our conversation from some common theoretical ground, I'd like to refer to Tiziana Terranova's work, which we're both very fond of. Her chapter "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy" was first published in Social Text (2000: Vol. 18, No. 2), revised for her book Network Cultures, and also appears in the downloadable volume The Politics of Information (I'm citing from this version). Her definition of the "digital economy" can offer a useful framework for the issues you raise above (and for fan studies at large):

It is about specific forms of production... but is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such... These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion... However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect... Rather than capital 'incorporating' from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always already capitalism. (104)

So first of all, she's proposing that we scrap this binary of money/not-money as the benchmark of capitalism. You could say better than I to what degree the entertainment industry has been able to institutionalize this perspective so far, but certainly new rubrics like "engagement marketing" suggest that it's beginning to move in the direction of consciously valuing and promoting activities that aren't directly monetizable. On one hand, we could read this pessimistically: I think a lot of us, myself included, are seduced by the vision of fandom as a "gift economy" or otherwise alternative system of exchange that resists or at least stands partially outside of capitalism. Terronova argues that this fantasy effaces the centrality of such non-waged labor to the post-industrial economy. There's a danger, as you point out, for this position to reduce to "fans are dupes" -- that is, if we're allowing the industry to expropriate the profits of our work, it must be because we're too naive to realize it. But that's an oversimplification ("Free labor," Terranova writes, "is not necessarily exploited labor" [112]). Both sides (insofar as we can still distinguish fans from TPTB) are interdependent, and both sides are capable of being equally calculating.

And on the other hand, I think there's a more optimistic way to view this interpretation: Terronova indicates that, rather than requiring a practice external to capitalism to constitute opposition (a tall order indeed), there are resistances immanent to the system -- I hope I can clarify this formation below. The key point here is that we're transitioning from a schema where work (waged labor) was considered distinct from leisure to a schema where work (waged or not) and leisure become increasingly coextensive and desire and the rest of the affective spectrum become a central productive force.

I admit to knowing almost nothing about gamers (and other communities of grassroots production outside of media fandom), and we agreed that a comparative study was not the most interesting direction for this dialogue. That said, the unique intensity of the collaboration between modders and game companies is inspiring, but I do think it's telling that this detente occurred within an almost exclusively male zone. The gendering of the permittedness and legitimacy of fan practices has come up many times in this series, and the selective valuation and compensation of affective labor along gender (and other) lines is a dynamic Terranova too acknowledges (as do you in the work you sent along to me). This further complicates the already tangled question you raised in #1 above about why (beyond the reductive "false consciousness" explanation) we (women in particular) continue to participate in this regimen. The more idealistic answer is that it's because the power formation isn't monolithic, and while our work remains complicit in some ways it interrogates and challenges it in others.

HP: I wouldn't say I debunk the questions so much as acknowledge that they are oversimplified approaches to getting at the nature of complex labor relations in this post-industrial world of production. I purposefully cite Terranova's use of the social factory a condition in which cultural production is incorporated into labor relations. Community, friendship, fandom, and their products (intangible and tangible goods that are the outcome of social relations as well as the "sweat of the brow") are commoditized. The question for me when I've looked at Terranova's paper/chapter has always been, "how are "the fruits of the collective imagination...originating within a field that is always already capitalism,''" exactly incorporated? I think that her quote above is grounded in her understanding that "Free labor is not necessarily, exploited labor" (which you cite above). I don't know if these processes were always part of capitalism...honestly I have to think about whether I agree that cultural production is always labor (even if it is not exploited) just because it happens within a capitalist system, ideology, potentiality...I think incorporation is key. It's almost as if everything we do is labor it's just that capitalism hasn't figured out a way to exploit all of it yet. I can see the value of that line of thinking since it helps us draw connections between cultural practices and the furtherance of the capitalist logic but can't we imagine some practice that is not ultimately exploitable? I hope so. In the spirit of drawing some boundaries and pinpointing when a cultural practice becomes exploitable I'll hazard a technological deterministic stance. I'll argue that the internet has created the means for establishing a categorical difference between the way cultural products were (maybe) part of capitalism prior to their ability to be placed on line, to a condition in which they are massively available, massively (re)produced and massively broadcast by a medium that literally creates the structure by which that culture can be exploited. From this perspective it wasn't until distribution of fan content for example, became wide spread that value became practically exploitable (even though the content was always valuable). I think Terranova starts to get at this when she discusses the differences in audience produced content on television versus the user created content on the internet (pg. 94-97 -- I'm using the book).

I also shy away from thinking that we ought to "scrap this binary of money/not-money as the benchmark of capitalism." I've spent long hours trying to discern the process by which all those mods, maps, skins, and other forms of modder generated content for PC video games actually translate into a bottom line. The fact that I don't have a definitive answer partly would validate your point and cause me to think that maybe I should stop thinking along those lines but yet something in me resists. The reason why I think this is because there is a practice on the part of video game companies of encouraging modders. For example, video game companies take risks with their very valuable intellectual property (yes even though it is protected by the all pervasive EULA), and that investment at the very least is perceived to be paying dividends. Perhaps the dividends take the form of hard-core gamer loyalty which ensures future customers for a game, perhaps modder productions prolong the life of the game and ensure fans won't drift away or perhaps by allowing for a creative space that admittedly is very crowded, game companies encourage an "incubator lab" for novel ideas for games. So for example, while number of mods that get "adopted" by the video game company and distributed are few, that small percentage of marketable product is a tolerable return because the company invested a comparatively small amount (an SDK, maybe access to the source code, and so on) to encourage a vibrant development community that takes risks, explores different content and potentially can yield a tested game variant proven to be loved by its community. Given all this I have difficulty believing that game companies are ultimately not dealing in and encouraging a commodity that will ultimately reduce itself to profit. The labor relation is still there it's just inside a host of layers that are unstructured.

JLR: Much of this is very close to how I (or Terranova) would look at it -- "the labor relation is still there it's just inside a host of layers that are unstructured" is a very elegant description of the diffuse nebula of cultural production. But I'd like to note that the entertainment industry is not equal to "capitalism." Capitalism is a set of structural conditions within which both producers and consumers must operate. Though corporations are still motivated in every explicit sense by financial profit, it doesn't necessarily follow that money is the sole operator of the system at large -- and your example bears this out, since most of what modders do falls outside of the company's "tolerable return." So then, as you suggest, once of the crucial ideological processes of capitalism is to make it appear tautologically as if activities that make money are more valuable in legitimate ways than activities that don't. Which is where a whole host of inequalities such as gender enter the picture.

Let me engage your question: "how are 'the fruits of the collective imagination... originating within a field that is always already capitalism,' exactly incorporated?" The first thing I'd point out is that other participants in this series, as well as Terronova herself, have cautioned against modeling the relationship between cultural laborers and the culture industry in terms of "incorporation." Now, I do think there are good reasons to deploy this concept strategically, namely that it highlights the different kinds and degrees of power enjoyed by corporations and fans, and thus offers a clear basis for resisting the troubling trends within this landscape. But another way of looking at it is through the concept of immanence, which is a buzzword in a lot of theorizing about late capitalism (tracing Terranova back through the Italian Autonomists to Deleuze+Guattari). This is a flat rather than stratified model of power and control which suggests that various contradictory positions can be coextensive. So for our example of fan production, the way I'd look at it is not so much that our free labor is "exploited" when it's channelled into the industry's financial economy, but rather that aspects of our free labor are always flowing into the dominant economy while other aspects are always flowing around and in excess of it. So the political project is not so much to protect the autonomy of fan communities from TPTB in a binary sense as to deflect the channelling and increase the excess.

That said, the question of precisely what the mechanism of these flows are is a fair one (the theoretical abstraction is what drives people nuts, right?). I think you're on the money to point to digital technologies as a crucial site for grappling with this issue more concretely. There's a leveling or disintermediation that happens here which aligns with the horizontal model I described: as you point out, the immaterial, instantaneous, non-rivalrous characteristics of digital media make it more practicable than ever before for the industry to mobilize fan labor in literal and direct ways (i.e. "user-generated content"). On the flipside, though, they also make it more practicable than ever before for fans to "exploit" corporate products directly (i.e. now that TV is going digital, a vast repository of it is available to me, freely and illegally, to use and manipulate as I see fit). I'm agreeing with you that technology and convergence make cultural labor more palpable and its value more immediate. In this context, the local variations in code, interface, and framing matter: one could compare how fan media could and does play out on YouTube vs. imeem vs. blip.tv vs. Revver, for example, because each of these instantiates a different set of possibilities and powers (within the given system -- of course, all of them are still ultimately for-profit services).

Finally, you ask, "can't we imagine some practice that is not ultimately exploitable?" I hope we can too, and I've groused about this before. But I've been forced to admit that the call for some "outside" position isn't ultimately so realistic or useful. I'd counter that the most productive positions at this point are hybrid ones that collude in some ways and resist in others -- and luckily a LOT of us find ourselves in this situation. I'd like to map out the PARTS of practices that aren't exploitable, that remain to gum up the cogs of capitalism.

HP: I not sure if I want to abandon the term incorporation even though as you note Terranova and others don't necessarily prefer it (interestingly she uses the term in scare quotes but uses it nonetheless). Maybe my understanding of incorporation is not what others are thinking or maybe there are layers which need to be teased out. I think there is the possibility to draw some boundaries between certain kinds of incorporation so that both a coextensive model and one that give a clear delineation of when/how content becomes effectively part of the labor relation. Ideological incorporation is one way to look at it I think. One can have content that is commoditized yet ideologically is still resistive....but I think the way I'm thinking about is economic incorporation (as in making the cultural production part of some direct/indirect labor relationship...waged or not). So my point is that once means are found to extract profit from a process/product it is incorporated into the relations governed by labor...the logic kicks in...there is no avoiding it really...you produce something...post it on line...I figure a way to squeeze a buck out if it and its part of the system...market alienable...questions of ownership, fair compensation and exploitation all come from this...despite the cautions I wonder whether immanence serves to improve our understanding of the processes that allow/disallow exploitation, incorporation or channeling? To say that "aspects of our free labor are always flowing into the dominant economy while other aspects are always flowing around and in excess of it," sounds theoretically interesting but how does it really work at the moment when it's exploited? If I imagine the field of all that is produced by fans and we feel that most of it is "in excess" or "around" why is that? Is it beyond exploitation? Why? Because of material constraints or content or something else? And I should be clear that when I say exploitation I'm mean a process by which the product becomes market alienable...some one can sell it...I guess for me that is incorporation.

Your point that the very same technologies that facilitate exploitability are also the ones that facilitate participatory culture is right on and I think points to a paradox in the way these technologies are used. On the one hand there is a strong drive to create technologies that lower the barrier to entry into a participatory culture (web 2.0 techs and such) while at the same time there is a drive to develop technologies that prevent or "lock up" the content (such as DRM). In the field of all this technological development, one question I like to ask is: What technologies are users themselves developing to allow for increased participatory culture? It seems that many of the technologies that are immediately associated with increased participatory culture on the Web are developed with market interests in mind. So I like to think of hackers as a great population of user/developers that are both insiders but also outsiders and thus have developed some really useful technology to facilitate participatory culture from the perspective of users not necessarily from the perspective of a market mindset. The anti-DRM technologies like HYMN, JHYMN, QTFairUse and even DeCSS come to mind.

I think your point about the gendered nature of modder and video game company relationship is right on. I think the problem is part of a wider issue in how we talk about what is valuable labor, and who gets to do it and part of a broader class issue as well. The rhetoric of the "professional" for example validates the work of programmers as worthy of a wage but not of amateur programmers (except within less then fairly compensated structures of crowdsourcing for example). When I looked at AOL volunteers I wanted to unpack the ideological baggage associated with the word volunteer and how that constructed the worker in a gendered fashion, disempowering claims for understanding what they were doing as work. I think rewriting texts to challenge and interrogate them is important I'd love to hear more on that from you though. Is the reason that you continue to participate an idealistic project or are there other reasons?

JLR: In the case of media fandom, acafans have pointed out that there's a gendered logic to intellectual property law, which functions to limit which instances of cultural labor can be waged. Notions of "originality" favor forms of production that are practiced disproportionately by men (this has come up elsewhere in the series, if I recall). Traditionally "feminine" labor, often associated with consumption and desire, is classed as "derivative" and thus of lesser worth (financial and otherwise). Now, I'm particularly interested in the centrality of desire to capitalism. Yes, one could trace this back to Marx's commodity fetishism; to put it most simply: you have to desire something to want to consume it. I like to call the work we do to make products meaningful to us libidinal labor (my roomie chimes in to say I'm just renaming cathexis). It becomes increasingly important in post-industrial capitalism because commodities themselves are increasingly immaterial ("brands" rather than widgets). Your point that we need to retain some of the financial specificity of terms like "incorporation" and "labor" is well taken, but I'm still not convinced that even this economic register of the "process by which the product becomes market alienable" is clearly bounded these days -- witness the retooling of the Nielsen rubrics in a rather frantic effort to fix engagement in some monetizable metric, for example.

So as for the impetus behind my own activities as a fan, fic ("rewriting texts to challenge and interrogate them," as you graciously put it) just materializes the labor ALL media consumers do. I realize I'm sidestepping the debates about how to taxonomize the diversity of fan activities, here, but I do believe there's a common ground in the axiomatic "active audience" framework. This is the sense in which my fan work sustains the industry (even though they're not profiting from it directly, even though it may be critical in content), because it elaborates and regenerates the desire that gives their texts economic value. But I am an idealist (don't tell my advisors!) and I also trust that there's more to it than that. This is where the question of what's "excessive" comes in. Desire is never going to be fully contained within the capitalist box, and that remainder stresses the ideologies (legal, economic, heteronormative) that hold the system in place -- though I'm not yet prepared to answer your reasonable query as to how, concretely, this operates. I think a lot of us feel like we can assert our ownership over these bright shiny objects by artistically reworking them, and given the instability of ownership right now that's not necessarily a delusion.

We run into a dilemma, though, when trying to prescribe the concrete (re)configuration of the relationship between fans and industry. Despite the fact that fan production is always integrated with capitalism, I do think that the partial disaffiliation of our communities from corporations and commercialism is valuable (as I said, the industry is not equivalent to capitalism writ large). I'm tempted to dub creative fans hermeneutic hackers, because our textual tinkering seems to fit your definition of "insiders but also outsiders [who] have developed some really useful technology to facilitate participatory culture" ;). At the same time, given the inequalities that circumscribe our unwaged activities, there's a certain class privilege implicit in celebrating non-monetary craft and exchange (I'm not the first to bring this up). Anne Kustritz emphasized that poor fans can and do take part in our "gift" economy, but nonetheless I wouldn't want to imply that it's "wrong" to want to be recognized and compensated in the dominant culture's financial terms for one's labor. What I hope is that these paths aren't mutually exclusive, and both can coexist within the diversifying and intensifying network of fan engagement. The choice between being marginalized and being assimilated wouldn't be a pleasant one.

HP: One thing I'd like to bring up before we wrap up this section is the idea of ownership. I think (related to your point over masculinized nature of IP) is that the very rhetoric of ownership seems to have a logic which privileges one gender over an other. The most obvious case is the differential privileges that historically have existed in the law which permitted men to be property owners over things and people. More subtley is the idea that "man" needs property to become a full human being which is rooted in Locke's arguments for property which can be (a bit simplistically I admit) reduced to "I own therefore I am." Thus by this logic all structure (legal, economic, social) that permits ownership helps fulfill the mandate to be a full human being. This of course is troublesome for gift economies and free things (like love, care-giving, libidinal labor or passionate labor as I've heard it called before etc).

JLR: Word! I'd love to delve further into the ideological underpinnings of humanistic notions like "originality" on which IP law rests, but I think that's beyond the scope of this blog post. So onwards...

"I'm So Hot My Husband Can't Get Fire Insurance": Interview with Grant Hayter-Menzies (Part Two)

Last week, I shared with you my enthusiasm for the opening sequence of So Long Letty, the film through which I first became aware of the remarkable stage, screen, and radio performer, Charlotte Greenwood. My feelings towards the film's conclusion was more ambivalent. Most of the comedian comedies of the period, those featuring male performers, end on moments of maximum disruption -- on a final anarchistic burst of energy that sometimes literally brings the house down. Think about the final moments from some of the Marx Brothers vehicles of this period. So Long Letty, on the other hand, ends on a moment of over-stated domesticity. Here's what I wrote about it in What Made Pistachio Nuts?:

So Long Letty ends with a dinner party, one contrasting sharply in its formality and sobriety to the wild party Letty threw just a few scenes before. The entire cast has gathered around the table with Uncle Claude seated at its head, smiling benevolently at his gathered relatives and friends. The prune-faced patriarch has at last been shown proper respect by the once-terrible woman. The young granddaughters announce their engagement to two men they met only a few scenes before; the uncle looks upon it all with approval. He even invites his now much-beloved niece to act as a chaperon for his granddaughter's impending trip to Europe, though she refuses in order to remain at her husband's side. All lift glasses and join in a reprise of "So Long Letty," a slow sentimental ballad strikingly different from the more jazzy numbers associated with Greenwood. Letty has accommodated herself to the demands of her husband and her uncle, having learned quite literally to sing a different tune.

A highly unsatisfying resolution, the exaggerated domesticity of this concluding scene and the abruptness with which it was obtained weakens its ability to restrain Letty's subversiveness. Letty seems to be robbed of a victory over her husband and uncle that generic conventions suggest she richly deserves... In the film's final scenes, however, Greenwood's performance still pushes against domestic containment. It is Letty, not the uncle, who presides over the table, offering toasts and dominating the dinner discourse. When the Uncle urges her to accompany his nieces to Europe, she initially babbles about 'mud packs in Paris,' before dutifully rejecting the offer. Her hesitation suggests that she retains the desires that had earlier led to her rebelliousness. When Letty joins in the chorus, she does so with the loud voice and broad gestures that have accompanied the other musical numbers, even as she sings about her own capitulation to male demands,"So Long Letty." Moreover, Uncle Claude seems looser, more lively here, as if he has been revitalized through his encounters with Letty; the capitulation may not have been entirely one-sided. Finally, it is significant, given the alignment of narrative with masculinity and performance with femininity, that the film ends on a note of performance, the singing of "So Long Letty," which simultaneously creates a narrative unity between the opposing terms. The song reconciles, if imperfectly, narrative and performance just as it reconciles, if imperfectly, male restraint and female pleasure. Even Uncle Claude, the motor of the narrative action, now joyfully joins the musical performance.

Grant Hayter-Menzies, the author of the recently released Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of The Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio and Film, offers a somewhat different take on the film's ending, which he repeats in the interview below. (I wish that the sequencewas up on YouTube so I could share it with you to make your own judgment.) To some degree, the differences in our interpretation are ones of emphasis. My analysis of the scene suggests some ways that Letty continues to assert a strong presence on the level of performance even if the narrative shows her seeming acceptance of male demands. I was reading the scene through a focus on genre, while Hayter-Menzies reads it in the larger context of Greenwood's career. This is one of the ways that his book helped me to place this film inside the body of her work in new ways.

As this interview also suggests, the book sheds light on many other important entertainment personalities. Here, I am especially interested in her work with Eddie Cantor (see this clip from Palmy Days to see how well the chemistry clicked between them).

Pulling this post together, I have been pleasantly surprised by how much Greenwood material is out there on the web -- especially on YouTube. Collectors are making obscure clips more readily available to the public. I had to trek to the archives to see some of these performances; you can at least sample them in your own homes. You can also sample performances by some of the other female clowns I wrote about in my book -- see for example this segment of Winnie Lightner . Unfortunately, I had no such luck finding any of the comic performances of Lupe Velez, another female clown, whose work I discuss in The Wow Climax.

You and I have some disagreement about the ending of the film version of So Long Letty. I have tended to see it as the capitulation of a powerful, free spirited woman to patriarchal authority, where-as you see Letty as manipulating things to the very end. Can you share your perspective on the film's ending?

I believe Charlotte's 1929 Letty is a woman of infinite resourcefulness, who far from being a disturber of the peace, actually is in control of the chaos she creates. This was a characterization Charlotte excelled at and would play, at various strengths, throughout her stage and screen career. The maternal instinct which glows in the role of Aunt Eller was, in Charlotte's youth, sort of like the Lucy personality from The Peanuts: she was the bossy big girl who in having her way created chaos for other people, but who was herding the sheep in the direction she wanted even as she was scaring them. The scene where Letty tells Uncle Claude that she is actually pregnant--answering his greatest wish--seems to me to be the final charm from Letty's big bag of tricks. She knows that there is no other way to repair the mess things are in except to meet Uncle Claude on his own terms, in his own language--telling him what he wants to hear, which is not a form of capitulation but of control. And for this reason I believe Letty, who presides over the celebratory dinner at the end of the film, is still very much in charge--a wiser Letty, if you will, but in no way a diminished one.

Greenwood worked with Eddie Cantor several times in the course of her career. What can you tell us about their relationship? What accounts for the chemistry they displayed on screen together?

Charlotte and Eddie Cantor were, as I've pointed out, two of the twentieth century's most popular comedians, but both had originally had no intention of going in the way of comedy. Cantor wanted to be a serious singer, as did Charlotte. Both came to comedy by accident, and both went with comedy because it was what gave them the greatest success. I believe this is part of what made for such a charming screen partnership. Charlotte also loved Cantor's family life, which was quite normal (he and his wife produced all girls), where he was the father, their children had a home-keeping mother, they ate dinner together every night, and so forth. That totally drew Charlotte's admiration and respect.

Greenwood worked with Buster Keaton on Bedroom, Parlor and Bath, at a moment when his career was undergoing rapid decline and the silent clown was giving

way to alcoholism. What do we know about Greenwood's perspectives on working

with Keaton during this period?

I wish I could say that I found something in Charlotte's memoirs that would shed new light on what it was like working with a great comic of the silents in decline in the talkies. But Charlotte was not particularly interested in film work (she abandoned Hollywood at the height of her fame, in 1933, for the London stage), and other than a few anecdotes about working with Keaton, or with Bert Lahr or Eddie Cantor, she does not give much space to her film work. She does record how in the big lovemaking scene with Keaton in Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, they made such violence together she ended up with a bloody mouth and he with a black eye. Beyond that, what happened before the cameras was not a big deal to her. The only actor she was paired with that she writes of wanting to work with again was Jack Oakie--and they never worked together again after making Shirley Temple's final Fox film together, Young People (1940).

Greenwood was a physically adept performer. How did her embrace of women's athleticism become part of the promotion for her performances? What do we know about her attitudes towards feminism more generally?

Excellent question about feminism and athleticism, because Charlotte seemed to believe they went hand in hand--she strongly supported women's rights as well as the rights of women performers (she was one of the charter members of Actors' Equity in 1913), and she had nothing but disgust for men who two-timed or took advantage of women who loved them. (She had been hurt badly by the adultery of her first husband, Cyril Ring, to the point of never writing a single word about him or their marriage in her memoirs.) And Charlotte believed that part of a woman's strength was that she must keep herself physically fit, ready for whatever any man could throw at her. I include at the end of the book an exercise regimen Charlotte intended to be part of her memoirs, had they been published, the upshot of which is that the body be kept limber--no need to explain why this particular comic dancer needed an elastic body!

Greenwood was a deeply religious woman. How did she reconcile her beliefs with being part of the entertainment industry at a time when actresses did not enjoy a high degree of social respectibility?

Like her good friend Billie Burke, whose biography I am now writing, Charlotte was able to be religious, or at least deeply devoted to a religious belief, and still swim well in the "sinful" waters of Hollywood or New York, and I think, again, it had to do with the essentially nonjudgmental atmosphere of their early theatre training. Charlotte writes of being done her first kind service, as an awkward fifteen year old who had tripped in a hotel lobby, spilling her luggage and a potted plant, by the star Eva Tanguay, who did not laugh at her lying there on the floor but helped her up, at the same time remarking on her beautiful eyes. Everyone else--everyone out in the ordinary world, that is--had always laughed and jeered at this gangly girl. That meeting with Tanguay, Charlotte says, was when she knew that theatre people were her people, that they would never laugh at her but would always be there to support and help, and that ideal never died--even as she was herself always there for young performers, to help and advise and nurture, as she did with Shirley Jones in Oklahoma!

Part of Charlotte's high regard for the theatre was that what made all those people out there happy must be something almost sacred, which to her it was, even when prancing through the homoerotic antics of Porter's Out of This World or singing risqué songs in her Letty plays or doing "Her Morning Bath" routine on vaudeville, which essentially was a sort of threatened but never achieved striptease routine. These made happy the people who had paid good money to come see her perform, and Charlotte always saw this as a great privilege on her part. She never took her audiences for granted. So she did not judge, as far as I can see, what it was they laughed at, or what she said, sang or pantomimed to give them that pleasure.

Why do you think Greenwood has largely disappeared from popular memory when many

of her contemporaries -- Fanny Brice or Ethel Merman, say -- still exert such a

vivid influence on the public imagination?

Fanny Brice had the immortalizing good fortune of being a Ziegfeld Follies star, as well as being the subject of several films and television productions detailing her roller-coaster love life. Merman kept going strong well past middle age, even turning out a disco album, and starred in some major hits. Charlotte made comparatively few films, had few monumental hits on Broadway, had a very specialized set of gimmicks, and only really did what she wanted to--she had made a lot of money in the 1920's and invested it well. Much of her best work, per the critics, was on stage, where even the greatest performances evaporate as soon as the show is over. One of my most abiding intentions in writing this book was to breathe life back into that vanished world of Charlotte's stage work--that world where she was happiest, where she was able to be the actress and not always the clown.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Sixteen, Part Two): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee

art, Art, and aesthetics DK: Other acafen have told me that my fan fiction tastes are highbrow and shaped by external literary standards (see below), and my lack of appreciation for id vortex stories -- that is, stories which revel in extreme emotional connections to pain, romance, torment, and the like in ways that can be deeply satisfying to a reader but which we have been taught to despise as over-the-top -- is a weakness in understanding, appreciating, or analyzing fan fiction.

AM: This is a good example of my current obsession (as you'll know from the book) - the forms of discrimination used by non-academic consumers. It fascinates - and appalls - me that so much cultural theory - Left and well as Right leaning - is predicated on the assumption that non-academics consume indiscriminately. It makes me angry to read authors such as Habermas and Adorno claiming that non-academic consumers will take whatever they're given, and that the level of 'trash' in culture is due the producers forcing their wares onto a helpless public. Anthropologist Daniel Miller has analysed everyday purchasing decisions and shown the level of intellectual work that goes into deciding to choose, say, one band of meat pie over another. Fan cultures fascinate me because they provide well documented examples of such decisions, and particularly their aesthetic elements. Because there's much discussion between members about these decisions, the systems are both complex and accessible. What you're talking about here is clear example of an aesthetic system generated within fandom - not from within academia, but in direct response to it. Which is interesting. My own fan interests - Doctor Who is the strongest, and the fan culture with which I am most familiar - don't have anything like the same sense of resentment to 'traditional' literary forms of analysis. They don't really show up much in our aesthetic systems, either as good or bad objects. Although there's a lot of fun to be had making fun of Tulloch and Alvarado's Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, which is seen to be full of jargon, and to take the program far too seriously ...

DK: Nobody has told me that my taste in comics are too highbrow but I have to admit that I've been known to be unattractively smug that most of my comics are indies. Even more unattractively, if a trip to the comic book store has me buying only DC/Marvel comics, I've been known to pick up an independent comic that was lower on my shopping list just so I wouldn't be seen buying only mainstream publishers in a shopping trip (I will do the same thing if I realize that all of comics I've bought are written by men, and pick up something on my list which was written by a woman). Interestingly, it's not the act I find unattractive but my rationale. Making sure I'm supporting independent comic book publishers and female creators is admirable, but doing so because I don't want the cashier of my favorite store to think that I am a lowbrow reader is fairly ugly. (That being said, I've also been told that my taste in fantasy and science fiction books is entirely lowbrow. I don't have much of a taste for the classics, for the grand old wizards of science fiction. If you tell me to read Ursula Le Guin I'll pick Wizard of Earthsea (lowbrow simply by nature of being written for children, and don't even get me started on that problematic valuation) over The Dispossessed in a heartbeat. I prefer early David Eddings to Stephen R. Donaldson. I want my books to have happy endings, and can you get more lowbrow than that?)

AM: I often describe what I'm looking for in a film as 'singing, dancing and a happy ending'. I think that's one of the main differences between entertainment and art. And given the choice, I'll always go for the former.

DK: Though I absolutely love it when something is both!

AM: Ah. Here we go. The old definition - 'What is art'. I mean, I'm happy to say that the Buffy season 5 finale, 'The Gift' is art.

DK: Well, duh, she interjects, proving herself intellectually.

AM: A definition which simply means anything that is beautifully done on its own terms. But in the more institutional definition of 'art' - ie, that which is taught in Art History courses at University, or for which one can get an Arts Council grant - then I would have to demur. That kind of 'art' does everything in its power to make sure that it's never entertainment. Which is why I hate it so much. (have a look at this for a laugh - http://flowtv.org/?p=107)

DK: See, I agree with your Flow essay, but not with the way you phrase it here. I think a lot of the art which gets you an Arts Council grant is quite wonderful, and is often entertainment. For all my bragging about how lowbrow I am, I adored ballet as a child, and not just The Nutcracker Suite, but everything from Balanchine to modern dance. Just because The National Endowment for the Arts decided it was worth funding, doesn't mean it isn't Entertainment. The focus in your Flow essay is more the inverse, which I do agree with -- just because it doesn't get National Endowment for the Arts funding doesn't mean it isn't Art.

AM: But I think that when Art becomes entertaining, the ideological apparatuses that manage the sector swing into play to start stripping it of its status. There's a great chapter on opera in Jim Collins's collection High Pop. It points out that when Nessum Dorma was used to sell the soccer World Cup in 1990, and became massively popular, many opera critics despaired. The music had become familiar and unchallenging - in short, entertaining - and was therefore, no longer Art!

DK: There's this fascinating bit of Walter Benjamin where he makes the usual arts/entertainment division (regarding Germany's reading habits in the 1920s) -- and then goes on to attack criticism for being wholly concerned with the literature of the public sphere. It's exactly the same dichotomy we have now except with the critical lens focused in the opposite direction.

Kristina Busse and I have had a number of conversations that went something like this (and keep in mind I am paraphrasing her -- her end of the conversation is much more intelligent than I am probably making it sound here):

Me: Yadda yadda yadda high quality fan fiction --

Kristina: Hold it right there, buster. What do you mean by "high quality"?

M: [I ramble on about a number of things including technical skill, narrative consistency, character consistency, metaphorical layering, and a whole lot of other value judgments which have led Kristina to name me, much to my horror, a New Critic.]

K: And who decided that was the correct axis on which to measure the quality of fan fiction? What about the Id Vortex?

M: There's a conversation I could start here about how I think you need to use the master's tools to get the people who live in the master's house to pay attention, but that's not important right now. Why don't I just rephrase it as "I find it a more enjoyable reading experience to read a story which has both Id Vortex AND the measures that the academy would call quality."

K: That's just because you have been trained by the academy to think that way.

M: No it isn't. It's my aesthetic sense of what I find enjoyable to read and what I find to be quality.

K: How do you know? Brainwash victim.

M: ...

K: *looks victorious, or at least as victorious as a person can look over the phone*

M: Look, a yak!

So in some senses I am insufficiently aligned to the fangirl axis, or I am too brainwashed by the patriarchal academy. (Of course, when I phrase it this way with Kristina she gets rightfully disgruntled because that's not what she's accusing me of at all, but I'm speaking hyperbolically. Kristina, I hope you forgive me for any misrepresentations!)

AM: A better response would be: 'No - YOU'RE a brainwash victim'. And she would have said 'No - YOU are'. And so on, until you fell out and stopped being BFF...

This raises an important point for me, about the different between saying 'I like this' or saying 'This is good'. Again, back to my book - you've got the whole history of philosophy of aesthetics (spit!), dealing with this distinction, but not getting very far, because most of the philosophers want to find a way to make the claim of 'This is good' into an objective statement of fact - which it never can be. It makes more sense to me to see the desire to go beyond the simple personal response of saying 'I like this' to say 'This is good' as a desire to open up dialogue - to get other fans into a conversation about what criteria you might use in order to judge your favourite texts, to try to persuade each other ... and then it becomes about the conversation, about community formation, and about using the text, and your discussions about it, to form a shared system of making sense, and a community. The discussion itself is the point. And so my question is - was your conversation with Kristina, in itself, pleasurable? And if not, why not?

DK: Oh, of course it is pleasurable! Because the act of coming to terms with definitions and their flaws is itself a joyous part of literary analysis for me. Unsolvable, but so much fun.

AM: Exactly! It provides a space in which it is possible for the two of you to keep on talking about the common object which is one of the things that holds you together. In the conversation you cite, I see two points of possible friction. The first is the use of the term 'quality'. I've been tracing the uses of that word for some time now, and it seems to function quite explicitly as a synonym for 'highbrow'. And with that comes a simultaneous denigration of its implied opposite - 'trash'. It's tricky to try to explain why you think something is good, without denigrating other points of view - but it is possible. I think it involves a playfulness, not taking yourself too seriously. That's more possible when dealing with lowbrow culture than highbrow culture, simply because we know, as we discuss who is the best gay porn director, that there's something a bit silly about talking in those terms.

DK: And yet it's so meaningful, and as you point out in Beautiful Things, everybody does it every day. I could tell you what I think is the best porn, gay or otherwise, without even having to stop and think -- and it doesn't correspond to highbrow artistic style mapped onto the porn genre You're right, too, that this phrasing -- "highest quality porn director" -- provokes a double take. This moment of cognitive dissonance makes apparent the disturbing correlation between "quality" and our ideas of "highbrow".

AM: I think that when you start pulling in the language of the oppressors - which I think 'quality' is - it becomes harder to do that playfulness. From an empirical point of view, there's almost a 100% guarantee that when somebody says that something is 'quality' - quality television, quality film, quality writing, quality journalism - I know that I'm not going to like it. Whereas, if it is described as 'trash', there's a high probability it's going to engage, delight and excite me.

On the other side of your debate with Kristina, the idea that somebody's pleasures should be denigrated because of 'false consciousness' makes me pretty angry. Which is why I suggested the riposte of 'No, you are'. Cos that's the problem with false consciousness - it applies to everybody equally. There's nobody who's got true consciousness - or at least, who can prove to my satisfaction that their consciousness is true and mine is false ...

DK: Definitely. And if in my humorous paraphrase above I represented Kristina as someone who would denigrate someone else's pleasures, that is about the most extreme misrepresentation of her I can conceive of. But we have different tastes, different aesthetic senses, and it's valuable to me to be challenged on my definitions of objective quality. It's always startling to me to discover I have these; on the one hand I'm a relativist and a social constructionist, and on the other hand I'm a book reviewer who makes absolutist statements about the value of a text. I'm telling you, there's nothing that can shock a good deconstructionist literary theorist into analyzing her own assumptions more than being called a New Critic. *shudders*

AM: Which raises an interesting point. The only place that I make fully absolutist statements about the value of texts is in doing academic book reviews and refereeing journal papers (leaving the marking of student essays to one side - not because it's not important or relevant, but just because, as they say 'Don't get me started on that'. It's a whole other book about power, authority and knowledge). And even there, I have to admit, I'm getting more and more relativist. I learned a lot from editing an academic journal for eight years. Often I would send a paper off for blind refereeing, and get back one report that said 'Publish exactly as is', and one that said 'Must never be published, this is crap'. Getting that response, over and over again, was an eye opener ... so now I tend to say, 'This is a very good example of its genre ...' or 'The paper does not have a clear linear argument, but you may not feel that this is important'. On this last point, I'm a huge fan of the clearly made linear argument supported by evidence - but of course, that means that whenever I get a paper of cultural theory to referee, my first response is just to tick the box marked 'This is a load of nonsense'.

DK: One day I will send you this self-published science-fiction novel I had to review. Just when I think I am getting relativist about the aesthetic quality of texts I get a complete and utter pile of rubbish sent to me for judgment. (On the other hand, I work closely with a teacher who brings many of the young adult novels I review into her seventh grade classroom. Although for the most part I think her students are excellent readers with what I would call in any other conversation "excellent taste", I do get continuous reports about books I found mediocre which get gobbled up, and books which I found sublime which get ignored. Which brings me back to questioning what it means to be a reviewer, what it means to make objective statements about texts which are really more objective statements about my own taste.)

AM: ['excellent taste' = 'taste just like mine'. In my definition of the term anyway]. My response to this point is an anthropological one with a commitment to conversation. The decisions about what is good and what is bad can be entirely subjective - but if you are the only person who thinks that way, then we call you mad ('Gigli is the best movie ever made!'). But it gets interesting when you start looking at what communities of people agree are good and bad. And those decisions are never final, and change over time. Criteria alter. Finnegans Wake, for example, fails to be a good book on every criterion that is normally used to make those judgements. But there is a community of people who can make an argument that it is a good book in quite another way. At the moment, there may not be a single person who agrees that the utter pile of rubbish you had to review was anything other than an utter pile of rubbish. But it may be that in fifty years time it will have been rediscovered as a forgotten classic that showed us a completely different way to write such a novel. Or it may remain an utter pile of rubbish. You can't tell from the text itself. Which isn't to say that "anything goes". It depends on what the communities discussing the texts decide, and no individual has control over those. Your job as a reviewer is to play your part in this debate, to offer interesting and insightful and intelligent comments about the texts that other people can then engage with, and thus keep the whole game ongoing - the game of a community making sense of the world. And - importantly - don't get angry when people disagree with you. Delight in it and take it as an opportunity to make contact with the thinking of another human being. Which brings joy and makes life worth living. For me, at least.

DK: That does it, I'm sending you this book. Trust me, you will agree that there is at least one book in the world about which absolutist statements of quality are true. (Yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek; what you are saying is very true. And yet if in fifty years time this particular book has been rediscovered as a forgotten classic, I despair for the future.)

You conclude here with what for me is the most important part of any intellectual debate, conversation, or interaction. Delight, joy, the opportunity to interact with others and learn from them.

Baseball, Doctor Who, and gender

DK: I don't think there's anywhere to go with this unrelated thread, but reading the other conversations has gotten me interested in one other fandom with which I identify myself (and possibly the only fandom for which I am a participant but not a scholar): baseball. I am a proud and true citizen of Red Sox Nation, and the fact that it is a fandom I didn't choose but was born into by virtue of geography doesn't make it any less real and visceral for me. I think I fall in a place between highbrow (which in baseball fandom I would identify as following statistics, knowing what's going on off the team, reading all of the sports news and being aware of potential trades) and lowbrow (which I would identify as wearing "Yankees Suck" T-shirts and spilling beer all over a residential street). I'm fanatic about the team but without participating in any of either highbrow or lowbrow activities. Several years ago, when I lost my old blue Red Sox hat, I decided to buy a pink one. I was in the mode of branching out from my youthful "pink and high heels represent all that is evil about women's fashion" fashion consciousness, and I thought it was fun to have a pink hat. I came to love that hat, which I still have and wear.

And then about three years ago, the Boston sports media went on a rampage about the "pink hat brigade". The basic argument goes like this: Only women wear pink baseball caps. Women don't really like baseball, and they are only here because the team is winning and because they think that Jason Varitek has a really nice ass. [Editor's note: he does. He is also a fantastic catcher.] Fans who are here for the wrong reasons ruin the sport. If a woman says "I wear a pink hat and I have loved the sport and followed it religiously since you were a glint in the postman's eye, you asshat", she is required to prove her "real fan" nature by reeling off some statistics about players. At this point, if it is a public conversation and not a newspaper article, somebody else usually burst in with "well, I like the pink hat brigade, because they are eye candy."

Now, letting aside the fact that I HAVE followed the sport religiously for many, many years, I do find it interesting how gendered the assumptions of what ruins a sport become. Very few people rail against the legions of male fans who didn't start paying attention to baseball until the Red Sox won the World Series, and then bought up a factory's worth of "Yankees suck" T-shirts instead of "Red Sox world champions" T-shirts. Which makes me wonder if I looked around the much more female space of livejournal fandom if I would find people attacking practices that they think are particularly male. I don't think so, actually. Far more of the practices that get attacked based on unwarranted assumptions of the "bad fans" backgrounds assume that the bad fans in question are 16-year-old girls.

AM: So sports and academic cultures both attack feminised fan practices - I think that's true. Again, the Doctor Who comparison is interesting. I think there are gendered practices here too. I've never heard a female Doctor Who fan recite the production story codes for every episode of the program, but I know boys who can do it. And in the latest revamp of the program, the showrunner, Russell T Davies, made a point of introducing more emotional content to the drama as a way of locking in a female audience that previously hadn't been so interested in the show.[Of course, it's important to say in relation to this that some of the best known fan work has undermined these general trends, with the two most important fan writers who introduced emotional content to the program being Kate Orman and Paul Cornell, the latter of whom is definitely male - and, surprisingly, a heterosexual one at that].

So there are differences there. But I don't see the same kinds of attacks on gendered cultures in the DW community. Because of the revamp, we now have a huge number of female fans coming in to the Doctor Who community who weren't there before - and I haven't seen much evidence of resistance to that from the men. Indeed, I'd say there's almost a gratitude. For a long time we've been seen as sad, geeky nerds, in this exclusively male hobby whose very maleness seems to show how sad and geeky it is (it's very different from Star Trek fandom). And so the fact that women are joining the fan community - many of them focussing on the emotional relationships in the program - is seen as something of a relief - we are becoming like normal people rather than geeks.

But what caught my eye about your final comment wasn't the gender - but the age. 16 year old. Because although I haven't seen any resistance in the Doctor Who community to women joining, I have seen resistance to young people joining. There was recently a poll for 'the best Doctor', which was won by the current incarnation (David Tennant. Also a favourite with female fans for his 'floppy fringe'). This led to some venomous outbursts from older fans against the (presumed) young fans who had voted for him from a position of (presumed) ignorance. The young fans have become an enemy, without the proper historical knowledge of the program, who haven't been here for 40 years like we have, watching every story and learning the nuances of the program. (as I'm writing this, I can see that as many of the new fans are female, there could be an overlap between the hatred of young fans, and the hatred of female fans - but I can honestly say I haven't picked up any of this in the discussions that I've seen. The attacks haven't drawn on language that is gendered either in the imagined bad fan, or in their supposed interests in the series).

DK: I'm fascinated to see you say that. Mostly I've avoided online Doctor Who fandom since the new series began. I know the quirks of the female fan community which has adopted the show wholeheartedly, and I remember the craziness of rec.arts.drwho, and I was looking forward to watching those two communities meet like matter and antimatter. I know that there have been enough conflicts in my own off-line life between those who are fans of the old show and new show both, and those who discovered the show with the new series. Primarily we argue about 'shipping, about relationships and whether or not the Doctor can be romantically involved with a human Companion (the Eighth Doctor movie never happened I've got my fingers in my ears I can't hear you la la la la). And I know from tidbits I've picked up that our conflicts mirror many of the conflicts between old-school fans and new-school fans of the show in general.

But I have to admit I would have assumed the conflict would be more gendered in tone. After all, you've got a fandom that (me notwithstanding) is primarily male, heavily gay. And suddenly it's interacting with a new group of fans who are primarily female, many of whom eroticize male homosexuality. I guess I would just expect that to turn into a gendered conflict.

I'm also interested in your characterization of the new-school fans as "young". In the places where I've seen new-school Doctor Who fans, they're not necessarily any younger than the male fans -- they are just new to Doctor Who. I admit I see a very small corner of fandom, and like I said, I'm generally avoiding online Doctor Who fandom.

AM: You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a national difference here. The new Doctor Who isn't huge in Australia, but it's absolutely massive in the UK - always in the Top Twenty programs for the week on telly, often in the Top Ten, often the number one rating non-soap drama. And it's marketed as, watched as, and known as, a 'family' program - ie, the core audience are kids, with their parents watching alongside. I suspect that this isn't true in the US? Probably because of its positioning on the Sci Fi Channel - and also because there is a pre-existing community of female SF fans in the US into which Doctor Who can enter?

DK: That makes perfect sense, though I admit it's an unexamined point. It's not a "cool" show here, except among geeks, and I'd be surprised if it had a large child audience. But you're right, in the UK I know it's very much a family show. So my assumption is that any new fans are adult female media fans -- the pink hatters, I suppose, allegedly looking for attractive stars instead of good scripts. I assume, based on my unexamined hypothesis about the audience, and that the new viewers will fall into a certain demographic and any conflicts will follow from that demographic. But if I were in the UK I think I would have a very different set of assumptions.

AM: We have to leave it there. In closing, I'd just like to thank you for a conversation that was exactly what, I think, aesthetic discussions should be like. We don't agree on everything, but we've treated the differences between us as points of interest that we wanted to learn more about. You've made me think, you've made me laugh, you've delighted me by coming up with ideas and jokes that I wouldn't have seen myself. It's been a genuine pleasure. Thank you.

DK: And thank you, for exactly the same thing.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Sixteen, Part One): Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee

Introductions DK: I'm Deborah Kaplan, and I'm not actually working as an academic; for the last several years I've been employed in university digital libraries and digital archives. More than most in this conversation, I exemplify the insider/outsider, amateur/professional divide with which Karen opened the first-round and which Kristina later discussed as well. I'm one of the few in this detente without a Ph.D. or on track to get one. I have a Master of Arts from the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College (as well as a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the same institution, but I think of that as a professional degree more than an academic degree). I've published and presented on children's literature, fan studies, and media studies, and I've taught children's literature both to undergraduates and to Ph.D. candidates. Like Karen, I've found that not having an affiliation to place on paper submissions has resulted in confusion, and at conferences, I have found that having a name tag which says "independent scholar" leads to other academics being sweetly and patronizingly (and I'm sure well-meaningly) supportive. For this reason, I've started putting the names of my university employers as my affiliation, even though, as a librarian, I get no institutional support for my scholarship.

AM: And I'm Alan McKee. I'm a fully traditional academic - PhD, series of tenured academic positions at Universities, publications with University Presses. I'm not proud of that, although I do love having a regular income. And I appreciate exactly what Deborah is talking about - there's an authority and security that comes with being credentialed, and speaking from a tenured academic position. It means you don't have to fight so hard to have your voice heard - in the media as much as in intellectual circles. I believe that many very intelligent people don't work in the university sector, and many stupid people do. My research interests involve popular media, particularly television. The thrust of my work is bringing vernacular thinking into intellectual debates. Although we are finally getting female and Black voices in cultural theory, I'm particularly interested in the way that working class voices are still excluded, by means of a methodological inequality. We approach Art, Literature and Philosophy through the methodology of exegesis - let's explore the ideas presented here. And we approach soap operas, romance novels and pop music through ideological criticism - what are the hidden relations of power? I'd like to swap those around. Learn useful insights about how culture works from romance novels - and deconstruct Adorno for his hidden, ugly prejudices ...

My latest book was Beautiful Things in Popular Culture - a collection of essays by connoisseurs of various areas of popular culture describing 'the best' example in their area of expertise, and using that as a way into discussing the vernacular aesthetic systems by which consumers make such judgments - 'the best Batman comic'; 'the best basketball player'; 'the best action console game', etc.

Lowbrow culture

DK: Reading Beautiful Things shone an interesting light on many of my own experiences with consumption. I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children's and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don't watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people's) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don't read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women's literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I'm fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don't listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow. When I discuss romances academically, I've been told by some that because I primarily read romances by a particular group of highly educated, highly literate, occasionally-to-highly subversive romance novelists (Jennie Cruisie, Julia Quinn, Suzanne Robinson), my experiences of the genre are incomplete. As a reviewer and a children's literature scholar, I've been told that the books I recommend (Peeps, Queen of Attolia, Flora Segunda) are highbrow and high-quality but not what children actually read, since they would definitely prefer to read Captain Underpants (this, incidentally, is demonstratably untrue; young readers are extremely discerning about what they read but the measures they used to decide what is, in your words (or your mother's, in Beautiful Things), "shit" and what is not are their own and cross highbrow/lowbrow boundaries easily).

AM. I don't get the same comments. My tastes are pretty standard - my favourite Doctor Who stories are usually in the top ten as voted by fans, and my tastes in gay porn are pretty standard (eg, I avoid Genet). This raises an interesting point for me. There's a useful article by Simon Frith and Jon Savage called, 'Pearls and swine' (New Left Review 1993) which chastised academics who did fan studies for pretending to be just like other fans, and called on them to acknowledge that they are different. That never made sense to me. I know that I'm an academic - after many years of resisting the label, I've now come out and admitted it to myself and others (although I still don't put it on my Gaydar profile, as it does put guys off wanting to have sex with you). But for me, the difference this involves from other fans is in terms of the time I am granted to study these issues, the resources I have access to, and the authority my pronouncements are given. I don't see much evidence that my tastes or my engagements with the texts are that different from those of other people. I don't like opera, or philosophy, or literary fiction. I don't have to pretend to like Big Brother. I genuinely embrace it. And I often feel quite inadequate when I look at the amount of work done by non-academic fan scholars, whose knowledge of an area, their understanding of its relationship to wider culture, and the sheer amount of research they do makes my own work look shoddy by comparison.

Fan expertise

DK: As a scholar, I'm also often overwhelmed when I look at the incredibly intelligent responses nonacademic fans give to their favorite source text, whether it's a television show or a sports event. Certainly there are plenty of responses which aren't trying to be thoughtful, and I'm not saying every thoughtful post is brilliant. And certainly nonacademic fans often don't have access to prior discussions about the fields that interest them, but assuming that a fan's response is going to be less thoughtful than an academic's is asking for trouble.

AM: Amen to that! I'm always amazed when I hear this argument - 'But a lot of fan writing is badly researched and badly written and poorly thought out'. Well, yeah. And so is a lot of academic writing (have you ever read any Adorno?). But some academic writing is insightful and full of interesting information and beautifully written. And so is some fan writing. Neither academics nor fans have any monopoly on bad writing about culture.

DK: I remember a couple of years ago a segment of the livejournal fandom (the blog service livejournal.com, in which a female-dominated segment of media fandom has made its home) started asking "is there such a thing as queer heterosexuality" -- completely unaware of queer heterosexuality as an emerging, cutting-edge theme in queer theory. Fandom's thoughts on the topic are often as or more thoughtful than the scholarship I have seen. I'm not saying that every bit of meta-discussion that emerges from fan communities is useful or productive (nor is all of the scholarship which emerges from academic communities, to be fair). But I am saying that at last year's Popular Culture Association conference, I heard a number of papers on currently popular television shows which were less insightful than many a fannish reaction blog post.

AM: And I recently refereed a paper written by an International Relations scholar about using TV programs to think about politics - interesting and thoughtful, and with no idea that cultural studies had been thinking about this topic for thirty years. And I'm sure that the same is true in reverse of cultural studies scholars who know nothing about the work taking place in other disciplines. Similarly, I think it would do no harm for academics interested in community, identity and politics to have to watch both seasons of the British version of Queer as Folk. If they haven't seen it I think they're well behind on thinking about the relationship of ambivalence, passion and love in community formation and politics.

DK: This is reminding me of Peter Walsh's "Expert Paradigm". I'm not thinking of it as it's discussed in Convergence Culture, with traditional expertise held in opposition to the collective intelligence of the Internet -- the Wikipedia model, say. Rather, I'm thinking of the Internet's ability to both expose and hone the expertise of the non-credentialed. Exposure: surely a blog post gives a level of exposure unmatchable by presenting a paper to a room containing 16 overtired academics at an MLA conference. Honing expertise: a community of intelligent, thoughtful individuals sharing their cultural reactions acts like an advanced graduate seminar for the participants. I can't even count how many times I've seen teenagers on livejournal posts thoughts on culture or media which I couldn't have even approximated until graduate school. These communities, these discussion groups comprising teenagers, tenured faculty, professionals, laypeople who just like television -- all of their thoughts and responses feed in to this massive intellectual crucible, creating a wonderful, vibrant, dynamic pool of uncredentialed experts.

DK: My first published essay, on the children's fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, reportedly provoked Jones herself to take the piss for my overly-academic interpretation of her work, and particularly for using the phrase "rooted in fluidity" (which was intentionally self-contradicting, I'll have you know!). I'm always trying to find a balance in my own scholarship between jargon and accessibility. My bias is towards accessibility but because I write in fields which are heavily denigrated by the academic establishment I always feel an invisible pressure to make my work seem more highbrow. My essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet is probably the most jargon-filled essay I've ever written, much to its detriment, because while writing I felt a hypersensitive need to prove myself as a serious scholar. Even within fan studies my work is unusual, in that I focus on texts rather than fans. (I'm not sure who I'm trying to prove myself to; one big advantage of being an outsider in academia is that I don't have to convince a tenure committee of anything.)

AM: I'm going the opposite way. Probably my most jargon-ridden piece of writing was an article I published early in my career in Cultural Studies that drew on Baudrillard's notions of banality and fatality (everybody who knows the current version of me will be wearing shocked expressions right now - philosophy? Moi?). It was a necessary piece of badging (you can't get into Cultural Studies unless you 'do' jargon, preferably with some literary theory, focussed on a philosophical or art object). Now that I'm tenured Associate Professor, I don't need to do that any more. Now I work on the assumption that if you can't express at least the basic outline of an idea to first year students using everyday language then you don't really understand it.

"I'm So Hot My Husband Can't Get Fire Insurance": Interview with Grant Hayter-Menzies (Part One)

While I was doing my dissertation on early sound comedy, I would book time as often as possible at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which has one of the best film archives in the country. Over the four years I lived in Madison, I was able to work my way through most of the comedies produced by Warner Brothers and RKO in the late 1920s and early 1930s. My goal had been to extend the discussion of early sound comedy beyond the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields to include a range of now largely forgotten performers who had made their way to Hollywood via Vaudeville and the Broadway Revues. One day, I happened to book a film called So Long Letty, knowing nothing about its lead performer, Charlotte Greenwood, other than that she had been a stage performer before appearing briefly on the screen. By the end of the first sequence, I knew I had made a real discovery. I can share some of what I saw through the magic of YouTube! Someone has kindly posted some segments from this film. So Long Letty and Charlotte Greenwood ended up being a key case study for my book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

Earlier this year, I got e-mail from Grant Hayter-Menzies, an art and music critic living in British Columbia, letting me know he was publishing a biography of Greenwood for MacFarland Press. Now that Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of the Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio, and Film has been published, I wanted to share with you some of his perspectives on this remarkable and now largely forgotten female performer. As the title suggests, she was a transmedia personality, probably best known in her own time for her stage performances, but someone who did memorable work on screen and on radio.

Here's a brief segment from my account of her career and personality:

Claude Gillingwater's balding head and sunken eyes make his Uncle Claude the very image of a fossilized patriarchal order. His slow, stiff movements and nasal speech contrast sharply with Greenwood's rapid-fire delivery and rambunctious gestures. With her ear-piercing voice and thrashing movements, her lack of respect for proper authority and her steady stream of slang and wisecracks, Letty is a dreadful negation of everything he regards to be proper and ladylike: 'Take my advice and don't become too intimate with that terrible woman,' he warns his nephew. What is different about So Long Letty is the surprising way in which the film reverses the normal assignment of gender roles in this scenario. We are offered here a sequence in which a spontainous woman liberates two young women from the control of male authority and invites them to pursue their own pleasure. Letty's engaging performance encourages spectators to judge and ridicule the stiff old man through the eyes of three lively young women in a reversal of the tripartite structure -- male jester, female object, male audience -- that Freud saw as characteristic of the smut joke. The woman, by becoming the clown and casting the patriarch in the traditional killjoy role, forces the anarchistic scenario to speak for female resistance, offering women utopian possibilities most other comedian comedies reserve for men only....

Letty spends her time at the Ardmore Hotel, earning free beauty treatments by drumming up new customers for the salon. What makes Letty "so hot that my husband can't get fire insurance," as she brags at one point, is her willingness to put her own bodily pleasure (and her economic self-sufficiency) over her wifely duties; she abandons her home to "rack and ruin" while she indulges her desires for physical pampering...Ironically those traits that make Letty such a frustration for her husband and a threat to his uncle are precisely those qualities that make her such a delight to the audience -- Greenwood's directness and vitality, her high energy style, her flamboyant gestures and loud voice, her colorful use of language, and especially her unorthodox physicality. Greenwood was a woman who relished her mastery over her own body, frequently challenging local women (and sometimes, men) to footraces as part of the publicity for her vaudeville tours and generally offering women a model for a more fit and limber style of femininity....Alexander Woollcott described Greenwood's performance style in a 1919 review of Linger Longer Letty, one of a series of Letty plays she performed on Broadway and n tour throughout the 1920s: "The lanky Charlotte sings and romps and bays at the moon. She steps over high walls and walks on all fours and strokes the ceiling." A publicity flier for one of her stage appearances features a cartoon of Greenwood, her face dominated by enormous eyes and mouth, and her long arms, crossed, dangling limply in front of her thin body. Greenwood herself often bragged that she was 'the only woman in the world could kick a giraffe in the eye.' Such representations capture both the illusion of gracelessness and the display of virtuosity that made her such a fascinating performer.

As Letty, Greenwood exploits many of these same qualities. In one scene, Letty, juggling a huge pile of packages that block her vision, steps effortlessly over a white picket fence, a movement underscored by exaggerated creaking sounds and by her bungling husband's inability to cross this same fence without tripping. Letty slides down the hallway of the Ardmore hotel, using her outstretched leg to spin her around when she comes to the corner. She paces about her house, crossing the room in only a few strides, and when she dances at the party, her arms and legs seem to fly off in all directions. She stands, bowlegged, her knees bent slightly and her arms dangling limp or flung broadly to focus attention on their length. Her gestures and movements are too large-scale to be comfortably contained within the domestic spaces where the men wish her to remain, suggesting a high-spiritedness and spontanaety that will resist all restraint (self-imposed or otherwise). Greenwood's enthusiastic acceptance of her own odd appearance transforms what could be a pathetic or threatening figure into a celebration of spontaneity and self-confidence. Greenwood is most attractive and engaging in those sequences where she strays the furthest from the norms of traditional feminine behavior and causes the broadest disruption of the patriarchal order (her humiliation of Uncle Claude in the opening scene, her 'clowning' in the party sequence."

As I have learned more about her memorable performances in The Gangs All Here and Oklahoma, I've discovered that she maintains some of this same vigor and physicality well into her mature years, offering not just a limber image of femininity but also an alternative image of maturity. Check out this remarkable sequence from The Gangs All Here where an older Greenwood teaches a young man a thing or two about how to do the jitterbug.

In this interview, Grant Hayter-Menzies tells us more about his efforts to focus more attention on a performer who is increasingly being written out of the history of American show business. Enjoy!

Your introduction begins with Charlotte Greenwood's performance as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma for good reason since I've found that if she is recalled at all today, it is for her work in that film. Why do you think this has become her most memorable screen appearance? What place did this film have in the context of her career as a whole?

As I point out in my book, the role of Aunt Eller not only came to Charlotte Greenwood with perfect timing--after a career of fifty years, when she had had as much experience of living, and then some, as the character she played--but also for two other reasons. The role called on everything Charlotte did well: comedy, drama, singing, dancing, which by that point in her career had achieved the ultimate in comic timing, emotional depth, and sheer characterful panache. Charlotte also had by that time many role models in her memories to call on as inspiration: the most powerful of them was her mother, Annabelle Higgins Greenwood, a hard-working woman who heroically brought up this girl abandoned by her father in infancy, a child racked by sicknesses and challenged by constantly interrupted schooling, who bequeathed to Charlotte not just her imposing physical looks but her ramrod strength of character. Charlotte also emulated friends like actress Jobyna Howland, who was tall, not conventionally pretty, often of battering ram aspect, but always warm, wise and witty.

These are all reasons why Charlotte Greenwood is so fondly remembered as Aunt Eller because these are all details of the portrait Charlotte paints of her. Perhaps, though, the most important reason Charlotte is remembered for this role is her compelling skills as an actor. If you can watch this film and not sense Charlotte Greenwood's presence even in scenes that don't include her, you aren't paying attention.

Most people don't realize that Greenwood enjoyed an extended and high profile career on stage, film, and radio, before appearing in Oklahoma. What can we learn about the interconnectedness of the American entertainment world in the early 20th century by studying the trajectory of her career?

I think the greatest lesson of Charlotte's career is that a girl who had had only a few music or dance lessons, and no contact with the theatre outside the magazine articles she read, could by dint of sheer willpower and consuming love for the stage become a recognized star only a few years after her first appearance as a fifteen year old chorus girl in 1905.

I point out in my book that Charlotte was very much an accidental comedian. She had had no intention of becoming a funny girl--she wanted to be an opera singer, a great tragedienne, a balladeer. When comedy kept knocking (often knocking her over in the process), she finally gave in to it--much as did Eddie Cantor or Sophie Tucker, both of whom had originally wanted to have serious careers. As Charlotte wrote, "The greatest lesson to be learned as an actor is that of subjugation of self," and she did that, to great acclaim as a comedy specialist. But all the while she was studying opera, taking acting lessons, reading great literature, developing discerning taste in art, and never giving up on her dream of becoming a serious dramatic artist (and lauded as such by critics who, as I write, normally did not waste ink on the less than worthy--Alexander Woollcott, James Agate, Hannen Swaffer, Amy Leslie, Claudia Cassidy).

Where radio is concerned Charlotte was a perfect fit, because if any radio star could act with her voice alone, it was she. She had studied serious vocal literature, but her singing voice was always as big, muscular and comic as her body, lacking all subtlety. Charlotte's spoken voice, however, was full of shades of many colors. Once you heard her on The Charlotte Greenwood Show, you never forgot it, not least because it was, in time of war, a voice full of comfort and warmth and wisdom that rolled like a combination of mink and steel from the radio speaker. I think what made Charlotte so open to all the various entertainment media developed in the twentieth century was her stage training, which prepared you for whatever might be asked of you, under any circumstances. Those people of the theatre never knew what was waiting for them when the curtain parted, and like adepts of judo they knew how to go with the flow of energy, tacking their sails to whatever strength or direction public feeling happened to be blowing in, and harnessing it to their own benefit.

Charlotte's first and last great love, however, was the theatre. She had worshipped in the holiest of the holies--the Victoria, the New Amsterdam, the Nixon, the Empire, the El Capitan, Drury Lane--and it just didn't get better than that on earth, as far as she was concerned. It is the obsession of her memoirs, far above anything else she did in any other medium.

Central to the writing of this book was your discovery of an largely completed draft of an autobiography as well as other assorted correspondence that Greenwood had written through the years. Can you tell us how you came into contact with these materials and how they influenced your decision to write this book?

Just a few months before she died, in late 1977, Charlotte gave playwright William Luce a box containing most of her memoir materials: several manuscript drafts, typed and handwritten, hundreds of handwritten notes and letters, memorabilia and photos, which she hoped he could fashion into a stage work. Despite all her best efforts, up till the early 1950's this veteran of half a century's worth of entertainment experience and star of both stage and screen could not get any publisher interested in her life story. Bill Luce had known Charlotte and her husband, the songwriter Martin Broones, for almost twenty five years at that point--he had started out writing lyrics for Martin's songs written for use by the Christian Science Church, and ended up the son they'd never had. Bill also inherited many things from Charlotte's Beverly Hlls house--furniture, books, music, silver, crystal, you name it.

I knew Bill and his partner, the artist Ray Lewis, since I was in my teens; they had, in fact, adopted me in all but name, much as Charlotte and Martin had adopted Bill. I therefore grew up among Charlotte's furniture and personal items, and had had ample opportunity to look through the box of memoir materials. These papers were in such a mess that, several years ago, I decided they needed organizing. As I did so, I realized that while the materials were not in such form as would make them publishable without heavy editing, they would make first class source materials for a long-overdue biography of Charlotte. Voila, I had found a dream project for my first biography.

I have pointed out that I grew up among Charlotte's things, which is true, but I also learned that I was a writer living and traveling with Bill Luce, stage biographer par excellence. It was his gift (aided and abetted by Julie Harris, Zoe Caldwell, Christopher Plummer and others) to breathe life into Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Lillian Hellman and John Barrymore that gave me the inspiration and model for how to do so as an author. As a friend of long years standing of Charlotte's and her husband's, Bill was also an invaluable source of information about the real Charlotte and Martin--outside the articles or books or even Charlotte's own memoirs--how they really lived at home. Bill can attest that the couple's fame as one of the happiest married pairs in Hollywood was well earned.

Our correspondence suggests that you have become a collector of Greenwood related materials. What can you tell us about your collection? How were you able to get your hands on some of these materials?

The Greenwoodiana, as I call it, that I brought with me to my new home in Canada came to me through Bill Luce. He'd moved to a smaller house from the large oceanfront place he had on the Oregon coast, and did not want to sell these things outside the family. So he told me to bring a moving van down to his place, and I returned with it to Portland, where I was then living, with a whole Charlotte Greenwood Museum of things--everything from one of her velvet and gilt boudoir chairs to several of her Peking carpets, her sealskin opera cape, pieces of costumes from her film and stage work, jewelry, silver, glass, mirrors.... the list goes on and on. I really should write it all down.

So Long Letty, on both stage and screen, became closely associated with Greenwood, and she would appear in a number of stage plays with Letty in the title. What was the connection between these shows? Does she play the same or a similar character across them? What aspects of her personality did she bring to the part of Letty?

Charlotte's Letty character got its start with a supporting role in the 1914 musical show, Pretty Mrs. Smith. Fritzi Scheff was the star, but Charlotte, who played a gangly, man-chasing young woman named Letitia Proudfoot, stole the show. Audiences couldn't wait till she was on stage, and she got the most applause. This inspired Charlotte's producer, Oliver Morosco, to adapt plays already written to fit the character, which was always named Letty. People began to confuse Charlotte with this character, to the point of calling out to her as "Letty!" on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Paris.

The interesting thing about Letty is that Charlotte was not like the character at all. As she told a reporter in 1922, wouldn't it be awful if she really was like Letty, barging into the parlor and slapping a perfect stranger on the shoulder in hearty greeting? Letty was a barnstorming spinster, climbing over furniture to pursue some reluctant man, always ready with a one-liner (funny or not) and yacking a mile a minute. Charlotte was a quiet, refined, basically shy person off stage. As actor George Gaynes told me, when I interviewed him about working with Charlotte in Cole Porter's musical Out of This World in 1951, it was hard to believe that such an elegant lady could bring the house down with those mile-high kicks of hers--those kicks that everyone associates with Charlotte, which with her splits, Camel Walk and other vaudeville moves she discovered through accidents early in her career and kept because they made her audiences so happy.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen , Part Two):Bob Rehak and Suzanne Scott

RDM and Mrs. Ron or: How we can't seem to stop worrying about textual authority BR: Hmm - a paragraph or two can make all the difference, and for whatever reason I now find myself feeling more upbeat about fanification, complexification, and all those other n-ifications I was grumbling about earlier. I agree with you that the productive conversations coming out of Lost, and before it Buffy, and before that The X-Files (just to reiterate my own path of entry into acafandom) are to celebrated, not disparaged. Indeed, the work that you and I and our colleagues do is a crucial part of this. (Another dimension of acafans I'd love to address at some point is the function of a fan-oriented pedagogy: surely it's meaningful for undergraduates that they can now take courses in fan culture, soap opera, or videogame culture, with professors and graduate students who not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.)

But your question brings up one of the most interesting points of our initial conversation: our shared fascination with - and skepticism toward - the "author-gods" who seem increasingly to sit at the center of the textual webs we acafans explore: Tim Kring of Heroes, J. J. Abrams (or really, Cuse and Lindelof) of Lost, Russell T. Davies of Doctor Who, and of course Ronald D. Moore of BSG. We're both interested in RDM and the way he's positioned himself as both "the decider" of all things Galactica, and a regular ol' fan like - I suppose - us. Perhaps the notion of a fan-who-is-also-an-author is not as chimerical as it seems; I seem to recall us starting this chat by swearing that such binaries were a thing of the past. And Moore's fan/author hybridity might be said to echo the undecidable nature of the vast quilt that is the Galactica text, embroidered as it has been by so many different creators, critics, viewers, debaters, and celebrants over the years. At what point does the canonical give way to something more collaborative and open-ended? I'm not sure, but the diffusion is homologous to RDM's Janus-faced mode of authorship.

That said, I don't trust him. He's got too much power: not just the power to make Lee fat or shuffle Baltar and the Cylons offstage for too much of season three or decree that the inside of a Basestar looks like a disco rec-room, edited like Last Year at Marienbad and accompanied by an endless loop of cheesy piano muzak. I don't trust him because in those blasted podcasts, to which I am more addicted than I am to Cheetos and Pringles combined, he insists on answering questions to which I kind of want to know the answers but really, on another level that likes to imagine possibilities freely, don't. Moore's not just an author-god, but a fan-god; he's like the friend I ate lunch with in high school who had memorized the complete text of The Lord of the Rings and who therefore possessed Neo-like argumentative skills. That guy's word was law, because he was acting as an agent for another kind of law, J. R. R. Tolkien's. RDM collapses the functions of author and interpreter into a single beast, and in so doing gets the final word on what a character was "really" thinking, or what "really" happened after that cutaway.

But as I say: I do listen. I enjoy the sense of intimacy and participation that Moore's side-industry of authorial commentary gives off like narcotic fumes - I get a kind of contact high from the podcasts' immediacy, the sense that I too have am puffing on a cigar, sipping whiskey, and interacting with my kids when they walk through the room while I discourse about "my" show. So when you ask, Suzanne, whether you should focus on the enrichment and expansion of fan experience through producer-approved content, versus viewing it as just another guise of "access," I have to say: let's do both at the same time! The example of RDM, whose cunning is no less insidious for being so genuinely forthright and self-deprecating, demonstrates that de Certeau's distinction between tactics and strategies needs to be rethought along with everything else. And the class of being that RDM represents - the showrunner - marks a distinct evolution of ancestors like Gene Roddenberry and J. Michael Straczynski. (Does this model make Joss Whedon a missing link?)

SS: Well, it's no secret that RDM was the author-god (or fan-god) I had in mind in my last post, as I share your addiction to his podcasts and your wariness of his self-positioning as both fan benefactor and textual authoritarian. Hearkening back to Cynthia Walker and Derek Kompare's discussion of the powers that be, I feel compelled (perhaps by my gender) to point out the boys club you've assembled above. Thus far, we haven't been tackling gender, because we both seem more concerned with the conditions under which contemporary fandom is functioning for everyone than how those conditions stand to effect fanboys and fangirls differently. As we've arrived at how TPTB are shaping these conditions, and RDM's podcasts in particular, I think a number of gender-specific issues need to be addressed.

Our mutual, avid consumption of the podcasts might point towards their gender neutrality (at least in terms of who the intended "audience" is, or who is actually comprising the audience). Likewise, our mutual concerns about how the podcasts' function to reinscribe authority and restrict our play with the text is something that's clearly being interrogated by both gendered "teams." The issue for that might be fangirl-specific, building off of Cynthia's take on TPTB, is how these authorized/official (and, noting your examples, almost always masculine) texts ultimately bolster fanboyish creativity/production while making fangirlish modes of creativity/production more difficult (or, at the very least, canonically invalidated).

And here's where we might see a gendered rift forming: with every bit of information RDM passes in those podcasts, he's further authoring the canon text (resolving its ambiguities), and authorizing a narrow interpretation (namely, his own). I'm glad you invoked de Certeau's strategies and tactics, as RDM is a both master of collapsing the categories between author and interpreter and often appears to collapse de Certeau's categories in the process. The discourse surrounding RDM's webisode battle with NBC Universal is the prime example- by framing NBC Universal as the Empire to his Rebel Alliance, RDM's positioning within the very strategic system he was fighting began to seem secondary to his tactical struggle. In fandom, I think we tend to associate tactical responses to the text with fangirl-oriented practices, and the more these male creators strive to frame themselves as "one of us" (gooble-gobble), the more they seem to poach our ability to poach.

As you note, the podcasts' intimacy, their blatantly amateurish aesthetic, makes them attractive to fans (myself included) and makes me question their intent. This intimacy is literally embodied in the many of the podcasts through the vocal presence of RDM's wife, tellingly referred to as "Mrs. Ron." Funnily enough, RDM and Mrs. Ron often appear to fall neatly into the essentialist definitions of "fanboy" and "fangirl" we've all been striving to complicate and/or debunk. Mrs. Ron is a fixture on the Scifi.com forums (often in the role of running interference between her RDM and the fans), and I find her "role" in the podcasts supports this. She focuses on character development, frequently asks the burning questions you or I might upon an initial viewing, and has enough "insider" awareness of the community to vocally acknowledge when one of RDM's asides will stir debate or controversy. What we should make of this (potentially performed) binary, and the fact that so many fans express annoyance with her "intrusions" on RDM's commentary, is something I haven't quite sussed out yet.

Finally, it's interesting that you should bring up Joss Whedon, as I've spent some time thinking about why I find his breed of masculine authority endearing and Moore's occasionally condescending, or why I rejoice over "canonized" Buffy season 8 comics but take Moore's BSG webisodes as a mixed blessing. To use fannish parlance, just as you've traced an authorial evolution to Moore (who has collapsed the binary of creator and fan), fans have evolved from being Jossed to being Moored. Fanfic authors don't just have to contend with the evolving source text, but podcast episode commentaries and creator blog entries and forays into transmedia storytelling. Worst case scenario, this trend could become the equivalent of the "no girls allowed" sign on the clubhouse, as more and more of the ambiguities we fangirls love to, say, write/read fanfic about are elucidated and weighed down by creative/canonic (and, importantly, male) authority.

BR: Brilliant points, and I'm glad that gender is back on the table - I'm aware of my tendency to sideline the more challenging and politically provocative aspects of my chosen objects of study, lest they threaten my fanboy comfort zone. As Lacan pointed out in relation to Freudian parapraxes, multiple discourses are always contesting control of the tongue, and my appetite for digression clearly has its symptomatic side.

Looking more closely at the RDM/Mrs. Ron dynamic, then, is it possible that what makes certain fans uncomfortable is the sense that some basic binary is being liquefied - a binary rightly or wrongly tied to gender difference? We confront with the uneasiness that Derrida observed of the zombie (both dead-and-alive) a entity both male-and-female. If the Moores really do bring together fanboyness and fangirlness at the Galactica text's point of origin, then this can be seen (fascinatingly, in my opinion) both as a strategy of incorporation (a text that is both male and female) and a tactic of resistance (a text that is always in conflict, or at least negotiation, with itself).

In saying all this, I think it's important to keep the performative and culturally-constructed definition of gender uppermost: we are not talking about "real" men and women (or what was termed "biobodies" in an earlier post), but conventional understandings of what it means to relate to texts from male and female perspectives. I like to work from Judith Butler's performative definition of gender because it lets us talk about our fannish affiliations as themselves a kind of performance and identity play: my choice of text enables me to (temporarily) play at being a different kind of fan/boy/girl, as does the way I read the text and the relationships I form around that practice of reading. It's fandom as a kind of masquerade - of transvestism - with all the polymorphous perversity that dress-up gives us.

So are BSG and the pair-of-Moores at its center emblematic of how gendered difference is being remapped, exploded, and/or reinforced by new media? Thanks to podcasts, webisodes, wikis, and other transformations of the commun(ication)al, Galactica permeates popular culture in a different way than, say, its late 70s prototype was able to. Looking back over our discussion, the image I see is that media evolution may have gotten us to a point where (A) many texts come pre-fitted for fannish investment (whether or not they are successful in seeding those investments is another question - cf. The Nine or Driven); (B) many audiences arrive at these texts already enculturated as fans, already liberated and "out of the closet" (and hence, as some critics have accused the beneficiaries of feminist and gay-rights struggles, no longer quite conscious of themselves as such); and (C) the tools and technologies of new media have both created spaces for the amplification of authorial control and riddled that authority with gaps from within.

Amid these fundamental shifts and reorientations, gender increasingly seems to be up for grabs, even as it persists (for better and worse) as a way of getting our bearings. Speaking as aca-fans of the new millennium, is it presumptuous to compare transformations in gendered fandom to the way in which the chromed robot Cylons of the original series, so reliably identifiable as different, have been transformed in the new series into something much more subversive, omnipresent, and unsettling?

SS: I'm fascinated by this analogy, especially given the cold/masculine force of the centurians on both incarnations of BSG and the current series' comparatively (and literally, check the sexy LED spinal cord) "warm" female skinjob models, with their alternating emphasis on their predatory sexuality and matriarchal attachment. But that's a whole other can of worms...

Looking at your summary of our conversation above, I think the general shifts in textual production and consumption we've been discussing impact all fans (regardless of gender, degree of "activity," etc.), but some fan practices more than others (and, thus, perhaps some "gendered" categories of practice more than others). Looking back over the conversations this summer, your final summary point ("the tools and technologies of new media have both created spaces for the amplification of authorial control and riddled that authority with gaps from within") seems the most charged in terms of gender. The issue of women and fangirls being written out of technological histories has been brought up on a number of occasions (I believe mostly in terms of machinima and its vidding roots, but certainly should be in terms of normalizing girls as gamers as well), and I worry that these oversights only stand to be compounded by the amplification of male authorial control we've been discussing. We're running short on time and space here, and this is clearly an emergent issue we're both invested in exploring further, so I'll leave the rest to be debated through comments and responses.

In closing, it's been a pleasure conversing with you Bob. Hopefully we'll carry on informally as BSG comes to a close, RDM gets his creative closure, and fans (hopefully) continue to complicate and expand the text on their own terms. Many thanks to Henry for providing the forum, and to all the other contributors this summer (and on into the fall)- it's been thought-provoking, to say the least!

BR: I second those sentiments wholeheartedly, Suzanne. This was a fun and exciting discussion that pushed me to think in new ways, even as I hauled some of my cherished axes out for a good grinding. And yes, let's stay in touch: Razor arrives soon, with the riveting Admiral Cain at its center - talk about grist for the gender mill!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fifteen , Part One):Bob Rehak and Suzanne Scott

Bob Rehak: *tapping mic* is this thing on? OK, I'll kick things off with the usual self-disclosure: I'm an assistant professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College, where I'm starting my second year teaching classes in introductory media studies, animation, television and new media, video production, and fan culture. I've published here and there on videogames and special effects (reflecting my M.A. and Ph.D. interests respectively), but the most relevant bit of textual cred is probably my article "Lara Croft and New Media Fandom," which appeared in Information, Communication and Society in 2003 and is being reprinted in the upcoming second edition of The Cybercultures Reader. In terms of fandom, I'm one of those who stands on the sidelines, self-identifying as a fan even though I don't really "do" fan things, create fannishly, or consort with other fans (except in online fora of questionable pedigree such as Aint-it-cool.com). There are several ways to read this - as another kick at the dead horse of disengaged "man-style" fandom, or maybe more productively as part of the aca-fan trend in which scholarly activity substitutes for, augments, or mutates traditional fan engagement - positions my preliminary chats with Suzanne suggest might well come up later in this conversation. For now, let me just fan the deck of my media passions (Stars Trek and Wars, Battlestar Galactica, the many paneled and animated incarnations of Superman, computer games ranging from the Apple II era to id's first-person shooters) and signal that my preferred mode of engagement with these things tends toward the solitary, obsessive, and archival. I'm the guy who builds model kits and wonders who would win in a fight, the T-800 or a Cylon Centurion.

In terms of where this dialogue might go, of course that's up to us and the Brownian motion of the discourse. My sense, though, is that Henry put us together because we share an interest in how fandom is being reconfigured by the dynamics of new media, especially "transmedia" and "collective intelligence." In this online plasma of spoiler-swarming, social networking, and long-tailing, lots of venerable signposts are dissolving, among them binaries central to the debates on this blog: expert/amateur, author/reader, text/context, official/illicit. To this upending of oppositions we now add the pairing female/male. Now I'm a closet structural linguist, so all of these terms seem to me to exist primarily in negation of each other: we recognize each for not being its partner. But that stance only gets us halfway, to the kind of dull essentialist standoff that many of this summer's conversations have worked at unraveling. I think the place to go from here is to ask how new forms of difference (since I believe we can't make sense of things without difference) are nowadays coalescing and coming into being; what traditions of power are being broken with or inherited; and to what degree - since I'm also a closet "ideologist" - these transactions are themselves disavowed and softpedaled, even by, yes, we well-meaning critics who purport to see and speak clearly and honestly.

Suzanne Scott: Clearly, there's something pressing that needs to be addressed before I make my official introductions...the T-800 would probably win the fight, but would undoubtedly suffer from endoskeleton envy. In short, style points go to the Centurion. Now that we've settled that, down to business: I'm currently a doctoral candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, working on a dissertation exploring Harry Potter fandom and new media narratives. More specifically, I'm interested in the shifting cultural significance of canonization, how a literary fan community embraces or rejects the openness of new media texts, and what this might say more broadly about our shifting relationship to media texts. My involvement in the HP fan community led me to serve as Chair of Programming for Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter symposium designed to encourage dialogue between academics, professionals, and fans. As even I need a break from JKR on occasion, I recently completed a chapter for the upcoming collection Cylons In America on the potential effects of the Battlestar Galactica's webisodes and podcasts on fan production.

Given the definitions of "fanboy" and "fangirl" that are being used, I find that my alignment with one title or the other tends to be fandom-specific. In terms of Star Wars, or various horror properties such as Army of Darkness, my engagement skews blue, whereas my involvement with Buffy, BSG and Harry Potter has been far more communal/creative in nature. I'd be needlessly shooting a few rounds into the aforementioned dead horse to say that these poles don't function neatly for me. My growing consumption/critical interest in comic books and video games should be noted, as should my lack of interest in slash (though I find studies of it fascinating), but I primarily find my thoughts turning towards what I might cynically call the corporate appropriation of fan practice, and its effects.

Fanification, Complexification, and Categorization

SS: Bob, you tossed out a few reasons why were paired up, and I have one to add: we're both in the privileged position of coming up through the ranks of academia in an age where aca-fen aren't experiencing the derision they once did. I think this is intricately bound with the current critical fascination with new media's dissolution of the binaries you've noted above. I'm certainly not alone in perceiving fans as spearheading these cultural shifts, and perhaps the fact that fan studies troubled these binaries long before we were all talking excitedly about user-generated content has made them a more acceptable scholarly pursuit. Granted, I have yet to experience the perils of the job hunt. Maybe my n00b aca-fan romanticism will be dashed, but I think there's something to be said here about fans as early adopters and our own abundant inheritance as new fan scholars.

Taking this idea about the increased popularity/reputability of fan studies one step further, something that stuck with me after our phone conversation was your comment about the current "fanification" of the audience. As so many of the conversations here on the blog this summer have been invested defining who has the creative/communal/consumptive credibility to take on the mantle of "fan," I think you and I might agree on a more flexible definition. This isn't to say demarcations shouldn't be debated (they should, and have been eloquently all summer), or that a hierarchical model of fannish activity is pointless (quoth Buffy, it's entirely pointy), but that the general "fanification" of contemporary media users means that we need to drop some of the baggage about how "active" a consumer must be to be equated with a "good" consumer/fan. What do you make of the fact that activity and creativity/fan production are still being conflated, given how even casual consumers are engaging with texts in broader, more "fannish" terms? To my mind, it's becoming increasingly impossible to neatly delineate between, say, the creator of a Star Wars: Legacy discussion board, a poster on that discussion board, someone who lurks on that discussion board, and someone who just avidly reads the comics.

BR: Well, as someone who did recently jump through the multiple hoops of the job search, I can testify to the apparent lack of friction/hostility triggered by the more fannish elements of my research profile. If anything, building my job talks about Star Trek and Star Wars seemed to win warm approval from most of the audience, some of whom were familiar with the literature and already took aca-fandom seriously, others of whom seemed simply to enjoy having their inner fan validated. (If I had a brick of gold-pressed latinum for every person who came up afterward and said, "I'm a Trekkie too!" ...) Of course, the friendly reception likely had other ingredients, including the selection process I'd already gone through - they knew what they were getting when they invited me to campus - and, more troublingly, the unearned authority a deep-voiced white man with a beard presumably brings to whatever he's babbling about.

I do think that the majority audience has undergone fanification in the past 10-20 years, and that this transformation feeds into both positive and negative aspects of the contemporary mediascape. On the plus side, the level of intensity, focus, and sheer memory we now bring to media texts has been matched by an increasing complexification of those texts. Serial dramas and comedies, as well as multi-sequel media franchises and transmedia storytelling systems, just wouldn't work unless we had all grown very good at collectively paying attention in the way that fans do. Ah, but who is this "we"? Well, the "we" doesn't really matter - which is the problematic part of the equation. Instead of the good old days in which small tribes of readerly hunters-and-gatherers stumbled across rich groves of cult texts and absorbed them into a way of life, texts now come fandom-ready, dense with continuity, haloed with enigmatic online tie-ins, and packed with casts of characters varied enough to ensure that somewhere, someone will find a point of identificatory purchase. Mass texts, in short, have learned to present themselves as anything but, enjoying a prefab and illusory fringe-ness.

An edge seems to have crept into my voice here. I suppose that's because I'm enough of a purist at heart to resent the cooptation of fannish affect and modes of reading/writing by culture industries all too eager to sell us anything we'll buy. Fans used to put money into the system, sure, but there was always a kind of grass-roots perversity to it, like voting for Nader in 2000. As much as I love Heroes or BSG or Doctor Who, to be a "fan" of these shows means constantly pretending that I'm in a much smaller and more elite group than I really am.

So my mood at this point in the conversation is rather grim: I see the breakdown of categories like those in your Star Wars: Legacy discussion board example as evidence that those categories nowadays don't make much sense - or else make sense only in terms of an older, now obsolete formation of fandom which we now resurrect as contrarian myth in order to disavow our always-already complicit role.

But before I disappear into my Frankfurt-School navel-gazing, let me ask you for a reality check on my pessimism. Does your work on the openness of new media texts point in a more optimistic direction than what I've outlined here?

SS: Well, you've hit directly on the catch-22, and my increasingly conflicted feelings towards our contemporary fan-savvy mediascape. I'm all for increased narrative complexity, as it provides fans with a plethora of analytic and creative ways to play with the text. Of the mass-masquerading-as-fringe trend you're noting, Lost might be the ultimate prefab creation (having taken a page or two out of the Twin Peaks playbook), but I think that the critical acclaim is warranted despite how calculated or contradictory its positioning as a "populist cult" program might be. As a big proponent of the Everything Bad is Good For You school of thought, I think that a widespread cultural acknowledgement of media texts as cognitively challenging (particularly videogames, and I'd offer Bioshock as evidence) has yet to occur, and these shows are fueling productive conversations. Because of this, I'm less pessimistic about how these texts tout their diversity as a selling tool, and more interested in fan culture's increasingly niche approach to theses prefab texts.

Admittedly, this is a chicken/egg dialectic, but I think it relates to your response to my Star Wars: Legacy model. While such categorization might be a nostalgic attempt to cling to the "contrarian myth" (love that, btw) of analog fandom, it also seems to be a direct response to the vast, ephemeral nature of online fan culture. Defining a space of one's own through (often highly specific) textual affiliations in an overwhelmingly populated online fan community such as Harry Potter, for example, makes participation in the larger community more manageable. The Hogwarts house model functions similarly (and is a key tool in how the HP fan community functions and its members shape their identity): creating micro-communities within the macro school community. While I wholeheartedly agree with you that fandom can never return to its elitist "secret clubhouse" model, I see the desire to keep that illusion intact as a coping mechanism for the modern fan rather than mass disavowal of our complicity. A sense of participation and community is a strong draw for fanboys and fangirls alike, and being a generalist fan in this day and age poses problems on both fronts. In short, the categories may no longer make sense or be relevant, but to garner a localized sense of stability within a fan community, categorization still serves a vital purpose.

Though I'd paint myself fairly utopian, I'm growing less celebratory of the openness of new media texts, especially when it comes to the powers that be. The increased textual flexibility and agency consumers have come to expect means that producers are finding new ways to concurrently indulge (or appear to indulge) these cultural shifts and still retain a sense of authority and control. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the relative openness of the texts you describe above is illusory, I do worry about how the narrative territory we frequently affiliate with encouraging fan creativity is being steadily encroached on by producers and transmedia storytelling systems (which, if they're aiming for consistency of vision, are more about delegation than collective creation to my mind). So I'll see your pessimism regarding the corporate cooptation of fannish affect and raise you a paranoid theory on the culture industry's plot to quell fan production through increased consumption of their own "authorized" fannish texts.

Again, as with the case of increased narrative complexity, the abundance of ancillary online content being aimed at fans would superficially seem to be a positive thing: more "direct" contact with the show's creators though online Q&As and podcasts, a more detailed look at the creative process through blogs and streaming video, supplementary narrative content in the form of free online comics and webisodes, etc. Ultimately though, I wonder about motive. Sure, it's unabashedly promotional, but I also can't help but feel this is the new media-savvy equivalent of sending covert cease and desist letters. The fangirl in me, knowing that the author-god behind this content is male in most cases, chafes at this reinscription and dispersal of canonic masculine authority over the "open" aspects of the text as questions that would have prompted discussion are answered definitively, as narrative ambiguities are resolved concretely. And, since it seems that gen fic is being read as a team blue trait, the fanboy in me is wary that "downloading" has started to replace "doing" when we talk about DIY fan culture.

I don't want to fall into the activity=productivity trap I rallied against earlier in my call for a looser definition of "fan." So it's my turn to ask you for a reality check- should I be focusing on how this producer-approved content enriches and expands how the average fan experiences the narrative? Or is this guise of "access" just another prime example of fans trying to feel like they're part of an inner circle?

PART TWO WILL RUN ON MONDAY.

The Art of Horror and the Horror of Art: An Interview with Christian Jankowski (Part Two)

Due to some miscommunications, there will be a delay in posting the next installment of the Gender and Fan Culture series. We hope to have it up by tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am continuing to share with you the strange saga of how my head ended up in a glass case in an art museum. Enjoy! For Lycan Theorized you worked with theorists who had written about horror film and asked them to give you impressions of various body parts. Can you give us a list of the theorist and body parts involved? Can you describe the range of responses you got from theorists to this request?

Lycan Theorized is composed of two parts: one is my film that piggybacked onto a B-movie horror production called Lycan. My film incorporates lines of dialogue that were taken from horror academics' writings and emails. The second part of Lycan Theorized is sculptural, and consists of the prosthetics used in the film that were molded directly from the bodies of the participating theorists. When you see Lycan Theorized, you have the film and then a vitrine that encases these body prosthetic body parts.

The Lycan script had basic scenes that climaxed in the horror moment, the moment the body is destroyed. I had the actors recite bits of horror theory in the seconds before they are killed off. In this moment, the actor would drop lines of theory as if in a moment of enlightenment, representing the moment between life and death, and a transition from actor to theorist, even philosopher. Immediately after the body part gets chopped off, the actor would continue as usual, according to the script.

Prosthetics are of course a big part of horror film productions. The producers know they'll need a hand, a leg, a neck, ear, etc. for the special effects of the killing scenes. I thought that instead of using just basic props, it would be nice to load these objects with a more specific meaning.

I gave each film character an alter ego in the world of horror academia. The werewolves were cast as the founders of horror theory: Robin Woods, Barbara Creed, Nöel Carroll et. al. Marc Jankovich (who edited the horror reader that guided me through the entire project) became Kwan, the werewolf hunter.

To have theorists' physical involvement in the project, and not only their words, we cast their bodies for the prosthetics used in the film. When asking their permissions to use their texts AND make prosthetic casts of their bodies, most of them were thrilled by the chance to see their heads roll across the screen

One of the strangest moments I had was with Vivian Sobchack. I had asked her if we could cast her leg. Her initial reaction was weird, then she said, 'You know one of my legs is a prosthetic, right? I lost the leg in an accident. But you're welcome to make a cast of the other one." Knowing this changed my reading of her work.

I decided to exhibit all of the body parts. As they were cast from theorists, it was 'Frankenstein-esque' to put all of them together: an ear from Brigid Cherry, a head from Julian Petley, a neck from Linda Ruth Williams, your head, all of the thinkers together under glass. It symbolized the quotes that were chopped out of their bodies of text, and re-formed into a new body.

On another level, the prosthetics inform the audience. Next to the prosthetics table there is a list of the theorists and the academic institutions where they teach. If you only see part of the film and see a head flying, you could reference the body parts and their labels to help you identify the quote and their cinematic alter ego.

Fingers: Melissa Ragona, Assistant Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon University

Right leg: Vivian Sobchack, Professor of Film and Television, UCLA

Spine: Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies,

University of Essex

Head: Cynthia Freeland, Professor of Philosophy, University of Houston

Head: Julian Petley, Professor of Film and Television, Brunel University

Right ear: Brigid Cherry, St Mary's College, University of Surrey

Neck: Linda Ruth Williams, Professor of Film Studies, University of Southampton

Head: Henry Jenkins, Professor and Co-director of Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT

Left arm, right arm :Dr. Raiford Guins, Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of the West of England

Hand: Linda Williams, Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Can you describe in some detail the specific use you made of my head in the film and in the exhibit?

I clearly remember your head being shipped to the studio and the weird sensation of pulling the head out of a box. On my way to London and the installation of the exhibition I carried your head in my hand luggage. The security at the airport put it all through the x-ray machine and one guard joked to the other, 'Hey, this guy is carrying a chopped-off head in his bag!'

When I altered the Lycan script for Lycan Theorized, I kept your thoughts on stealing ideas from high and low cultures in mind. Lycan had a scene about theft, where a group of vandals try to steal copper pipes and get caught (and of course, punished) by a werewolf. Since I like to think of you as the vandal between high and low culture, you became Vandal 1.

Ultimately they cast an actor for the role who was bald, so they had to shave your prosthetic head. When they finished up, they let it roll on the asphalt for the decapitation scene. I had a very intense moment when I thought, this is not cool, because it seemed disrespectful and weird to treat an exact replica of someone I knew, so casually. It became a very physical experience of looking. But then also remembered filming one scene where your character says, "In horror films, this is the way the most radical ways of seeing the world can be accepted.' And that made me think, It's okay. It's okay to chop off Jenkins's head.

You also drew on excerpts of theoretical writings to form the basis of dialog in the film. Explain. So, what use did you make of my quotes?

In the original Lycan script, Vandal 1 is a thuggish thief. The actor who plays Vandal 1 has to say things like 'What the fuck...' or 'Leave us alone, man!' In Lycan Theorized, you're still a thief, but you talk about theft in a different way. Using your words, the same actor would say, 'The word 'theft' here is problematic. Let's think of it as like a dialogue or exchange. High and popular artists borrow from each other all of the time.' Actually, these lines are not direct quotes from your blog or an essay, but taken from your email responses where you discuss the link between pop culture and fine art. Your fellow Vandals in Lycan Theorized quote, and in a way become, Raiford Guins and Vivian Sobchack. And you all get attacked and killed by the werewolf, no matter what you say.

You worked with an existing film production as part of this project. What relationship exists between the film they set out to make and the film you have produced using the same sets and actors?

The films are like brothers. The goal of one is to be very popular as a feature film (straight to DVD feature), and the other aspired to be an art installation. Mine is a reflection about the multiple aspects of horror film and I use the visual aesthetics of their work and mixing them with theoretical writing. But some scenes appear in both films. The theorist body parts, including your head, made the final cut of the Blockbuster version.

The Lycan producers tried to reach a commercial horror audience, so they had to play by certain rules. The considerations were definitely on sales and that werewolf movies were popular right then. And the higher the body count, the more explosions there were, the more screen-time the monster had - the better the sales.

They had a young, enthusiastic, low-budget director team to make the horror production, but wanted a commercial film to sell to a big studio; which in the end, they did. The filmmakers were realistic about the limited budget, so they did a lot with their enthusiasm. They didn't have the funds to hire professional actors, but they wanted to do a funny horror movie, and part of the humor is the acting. They wanted to entertain the audience with killing, gore, a bit of sexiness, and aimed the film more at teenagers.

I remember the fights between the directors and the producer because the werewolf didn't look like a "real" werewolf; they thought it looked more like a big hamster or the Abominable Snowman. It seemed funny, but I know there was serious tension between them, because the producer wanted to see a lot of werewolf in scenes but the filmmakers thought. not too much -- because you might laugh instead of being scared.

I wanted to layer the film production system and the landscape of theory on top of one another. If you have a female monster who talks self-reflexively about the presence of a female monster, you see a very condensed image of meaning. I thought it could be scary, funny, and informative at the same time. I thought that this horror film would "throw back" theory that was normally superimposed onto it. Theory normally comes after the horror film arrives. This time theory would be thrown onto the audience instead of only body parts.

Also, theorists normally have this academic distance. If you want to analyze something, you need a certain distance from it, and I wanted to erase that distance physically by using their body parts and theories as a script. The normal forum for theorists is the essay, book, or conference. Instead of a conference or panel discussion, what if we gave them costumes and special effects, and have this discussion in front of a camera during a horror production.?

How have gallery visitors responded to the more horrific aspects of the exhibit? Do you think the exhibit is having an impact on the ways they perceive the horror film genre?

The openings were crowded until the very end, so I couldn't have scared too many people away! But I remember two days after the New York show, I toured the show with a group of museum trustees and collectors. I started with a group of thirty, and after they walked into a very gruesome scene in Lycan Theorized, I lost about a half of them. I hadn't even started talking about the project; it just seemed like they couldn't handle these images. Another scene came on, using a quote from Raiford Guins, "The libertines dancing around the tortured bodies are Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush," and the question up came up about how political this exhibition was.

I used this quote because it was one of the few quotes that see horror as something related to present-day politics. It is the opinion of one academic, but I felt that we could not leave such an extreme voice out, because it represents a whole tradition of horror writing linked to politics, Nazism, photos of corpses in newspapers, and consumer-zombies in shopping malls. For me, it was only one way to look at horror and the exhibition. But it's an important, and a possible reading.

I remember at the (Art Basel) Miami fair, a bunch of younger people came over and over to see Angels of Revenge. Maybe they liked the shock value of it, and the weird stories. I suspect that a lot of people didn't consciously re-think their perceptions of the horror film genre (after viewing Lycan Theorized), but maybe they think more about how horror exists in their own lives, whether it's in politics or even when the cell phone gets stolen. If horror impacts you individually, then you know it's not just a fantasy.

How does this exhibit relate to your larger body of work?

Looking at the whole body of my work, the horror pieces might be a brain tumor: linking the gruesome with the physical, and affecting thought.

I've used similar strategies in the horror works to works I've done in the past, but each experience becomes its own story. I usually participate directly in the artwork, I infiltrate an existing production, and the element of chance always plays a huge part in the outcome of a piece. There is a performative element, a cinematic element, and a self-reflective element. I've worked with pop-culture genres like televangelism and karaoke to structure the projects, and when I learn about another culture, there are fun collaborators who guide the way.