Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty One, Part One): Barbara Lucas and Avi D. Santo

INTRODUCTIONS ADS: I am an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. This is my second year out of graduate school. I graduated in 2006 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Radio-Television-Film. My dissertation focused on corporate authorship practices in managing transmedia brands prior to conglomeration. Basically, I analyzed how cultural icons like Superman, the Lone Ranger and Little Orphan Annie were licensed across media and merchandising sites and how their inter-textual meanings were managed. I also looked at how authorship rights were articulated by corporations over properties whose economic success rested on their seeming authorless and iconic. At ODU, I teach classes on critical race theory and media, international media systems, superheroes and US culture, and authorship and discourse. I am a co-founder of the e-journal Flow (http://www.flowtv.org) and current co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

Outside of academics, the first job I ever wanted was to be a soap opera writer (apologies for not using the term "daytime melodrama", but they were just soap operas when I was a teenager; a term that likely contributed to my eventual embarrassment over truly persuing this vocation). I watched Another World obsessively throughout my teens. I am a huge comic book dork. I primarily read revisionist superhero narratives that play at established conventions of the genre, but my pull list ranges from Fablesto Y The Last Man. Favorite TV of the moment: Battlestar Galactica, The Boondocks, My Name is Earl, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway.

BL: I have an MA in English from Case Western Reserve University with a concentration on British Renaissance literature and am a member of the adjunct faculty and Lakeland Community College. However, I've been a fantasy, horror, and (to a lesser extent) science fiction reader since I was a child. It wasn't until I was an adult that I returned to my passions as a field of study as well as one of pleasure. I have been a regular presenter at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (www.iafa.org), and I'm the Division Head for the new Community and Culture in the Fantastic Division that focuses on fan fiction and culture, video game theory, hypertexts, viral marketing, RPG's, ARG's, folkloric and sociological approaches to the fantastic. Basically, my division deals with new and emergent texts, texts that are non-traditional in nature. The deadline for this year's conference, held in March 2008 is close, and I am still accepting papers. I have calls up at the UPenn website. They can also be accessed at http://community.livejournal.com/ccfantastic/.

Outside of academic and corporate lives, though intersecting with my academic interests, I write fantasy fiction and poetry. I am interested in comics and graphic fiction and tend to be an eclectic reader who can bounce between Sandman (Gaiman's version),Preacher, Age of Bronze, Gloom Cookie, and A Distant Soil with no problem. The one genre I tend to avoid is "mainstream" superhero comics. I am the sort of gamer geek that feels like she is cheating on her Playstation when she is playing games on her Xbox. My television watch list includes Heroes, Pushing Daisies, 24, Project Runway, Top Chef, Lost, and Dexter (though my hectic schedule often results in my falling behind and catching up once I get the DVD's).

My primary scholarly focus the last five years or so has been on fan culture and fan fiction, especially slash fiction. My work primarily involves complicating early monolithic assumptions about slash fiction and slash fans, assumptions that have seen it as another sort of romance writing. While that notion does fit a lot of the work that is being produced, it works less well when considering fringe writing such as dark fiction or BDSM fiction, which shatters or explodes traditionally romantic (a la romance novels) notions. Like many aca-fans who work in the fan studies area, I practice what I study. I co-moderate a The Lord of the Rings fan fiction community and write fan fiction myself. My article (co-written with Robin Reid and Eden Lackner) "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh," which appeared in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, looks at the erotics of writer/reader and writer/writer interaction during the composition and circulation of collaboratively written erotic slash fiction. Perhaps we can talk a bit about collaboration processes?

EROTICS OF COLLABORATION

ADS: I'd love to hear more about your findings here. What are the relationships of the authors to the text they are slashing versus one another? Are the characters/stories being reworked the object of erotic fascination or is it the sharing process?

BL: It is a combination of the two. Not all slash stories are erotic in nature, by that I mean the level of graphic description of the relationships depicted in them; however, writers tend to focus on characters and actors (in media fandoms) that they themselves find attractive or arousing. This explains the tendency for writers to follow characters across films or series, adding new fandoms as their objects of fannish interest add to their resumes.

Fans do play with sexuality through slash and het fiction, expressing their own desires, which they perhaps show more frankly because of the distance they achieve through filtering them through fiction, fiction that is (at least on the surface) about male characters.

There is even a further distancing in that the fictions are not entirely theirs; they are borrowed. I don't mean to suggest that there is a simple correspondence between the desires expressed in fics and those of the fans. Certainly, some fics reflect nightmares (e.g., rape fics and dark fics) and others simply explore modes of desire the fan may be curious about but would not ordinarily want to engage in. If horror fiction provides its audience with ways to confront fears and terrors while remaining safe and sheltered from them, erotic fiction does the same with desire, and many fans use it as a means of playing with desire in that way.

The sharing process itself is also erotic, something that we talk about in the "Cunning Linguists" article. The more erotic content, sensuality and/or sexuality, a story contains, the more likely the writer is to get feedback that is flirty, passionate, and erotic in nature from her readers. However, I do not believe this is a hallmark of slash fiction so much as it is of erotic fiction. I am on several lists with professional writers of romantic erotica, and the commentary from their fans tends to be similar in nature. They are also similar in that romantic erotica featuring male/male relationships is very popular with female readers. Romance publishers like EllorasCave and Samhain Press, to name a few, have male/male fiction title lines. These are, for the most part, communities that are by and for women.

ADS: Is there less slash fiction written about female characters, or is the erotic relationship between writers and readers different? In the past, I've frequented a CSI fan-fic site that featured a lot of different romantic pairings, including lesbian pairings like Sarah-Catherine. These stories ranged from BDSM narratives that either punished one or both characters for their "frigidness" or celebrated their non-traditional femininities to stories that softened one or both characters in ways that conform to very traditional constructions of femininity.

BL: There is going to be a much higher percentage in Xena fandom than there is in Buffy and more in Buffy than in The Lord of the Rings. Within more mainstream publishers of professional romance/erotica, the same trend applies. In fact, while they welcome male/male stories, they specifically state that they are not interested in female/female stories. Again, these are spaces where the creators and audience trend female. While this tendency has been criticized as straight women fetishizing gay men, that reading is far too simplistic.

The percentage of femslash in fandoms definitely varies according to fandom, and the sorts of themes particular to it does as well. Most of the femslash I have read (and I will confess to not having read great quantities of it) tends to focus on friendships between women that deepen as an erotic component is introduced to them, which is, in essence, the most classic and traditional pattern for slash fiction. The feedback I have read on femslash stories tends to follow the same pattern as that for male/male slash, and the works I am familiar with tend to be single-authored rather than collaborative.

Overall, the collaborative writing process tends to be erotic in nature. Not all collaboration is erotic, but long-term collaborations between writers, as many are, that focus on producing erotic texts tends to knit levels intimacy between the writers as those same forces work on their characters.

In the parts of fandom I move in and study, fandom wife relationships develop between two women who are writing fic, especially erotic fic, collaboratively. The women really become "partners," a perspective that applies to their own relationship and how it is seen from the outside by other fans. While fandom wives can simply be good and fast friends, there are dynamics to the relationship that are not unlike those in a romantic relationship. A certain sense of possessiveness develops between the partners, and jealousies often arise if one partner wants to go on to write with someone outside the relationship. From what I've observed, a goodly percentage of fandom wives go on to other fandom wifely relationships when/if their current one ends.

The endings to such relationships tend to be messy and to be played out in front of the rest of fandom. I have been witness to several spectacular fandom wife marriages and divorces. In one, one partner lived on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast. The East Coast partner actually moved across the country to move in with her fandom wife, and their fandom divorce (spurred on by one's complaints that the other did not spend enough time with her and spent too much time online) ended up splitting many of their online friends between them.

ADS: This fandom wife dynamic you describe is fascinating, partly because of the gendered terminology fans use (are there no fandom husbands or fandom life-partners?), but also because it sounds so normative, even as it so clearly challenges assumptions about coupling.

BL: I agree. In fact, when it comes to tensions in fandom, some of the more fascinating ones exist between subversion and normativity, between exploding or reinforcing the status quo. Male pregnancy fictions are a good example of this. On one hand, they completely disregard the limitations of biological gender and are in a unique position to question and critique heteronormative assumptions about family. However, few fics actually do this. Instead, they reinforce many of the most pervasive, traditional, and heteronormative ideals, including ones that insist that jointly producing a child is the ultimate validations of a loving relationship.

ADS: My assessment is likely influenced by my own position within the academy, but I tend to read fan collaborations/the building and sharing of community as simultaneously desirable and fraught with tensions. This seems especially true when dealing with particular fan practices like collaboratively writing and sharing slash fiction, especially the more "taboo" kinds like BDSM or dark fiction, which not only refocus attention on particular relationships within media texts but also subvert power hierarchies (or call attention to them in new ways). The subject matter is often sexual and the sharing of fantasies that stretch the boundaries of what the official corporate authors of the text would find permissible (its amazing how lax many corporations are about fan-fiction until it "crosses a line" that has more to do with taste than profits - though these are often conflated in corporate rhetoric) seems to meld with the thrill of challenging cultural assumptions about "good taste".

For me, I see the conflation of breaking both legal and moral laws as part of the erotics here. Intellectual property law certainly cheats by trying to delimit how the public uses their cultural icons, so there is a thrill in ignoring these rules. Authorship is still largely imagined in official discourses as either a solitary act of creation or a corporate practice (Joss Whedon may be a genius, but we all know he didn't write every episode of Buffy. He had a writing team that was subject to some sort of rational assembly-line type production practice). Thus, fan collaboration seems to break down those dichotomies as well, making creation a shared experience that obfuscates the production process in favor of focusing on the content being shared. Finally, since cultural icons are often popular heroes in the Bennett and Woolacott sense that they are ever changing figures that embody (and neutralize) shifting cultural anxieties, the ability to play with these figures and tease out one aspect of their personas both unravels their function of preserving the status quo and actively engages the larger meanings of the icon, effectively shifting the tensions they are intended to manage. This seems simultaneously empowering and subversive, even as it confirms the middlebrow pleasures these icons/texts normally prescribe as desirable. The more I write here, the less I feel I know about the erotics of fandom, since I seem to have reduced this down to an instructional manual.

BL: The tensions between desirability and frustration apply to any collaborative endeavor. They are particularly acute for writers because our work is such a solitary labor. Collaboration adds a social element that can be a source of energy or vitality and a source of drama and anger. Naturally, building a community, fannish or otherwise, is also a collaborative venture.

I do not quite agree with your point that more taboo forms of expression necessarily represent tension points in fannish communities. In slash fandom, readers and writers tend to cluster around specific character pairings and specific kinks. For example, there are many slash fans who enjoy male pregnancy (MPREG) fictions. This is an acquired taste, one that has a loyal fanbase. Fans who do not share the same fascination avoid such fictions. Unless they are like me and decide to write papers on them. One of the icons I have on my LiveJournal says, "You have your kinks, and I have mine," which is often the prevailing attitude among fans. This is not to say that eruptions over personal kinks never happen, but they are not common in my corners of fandom. While we can talk about "slash fandom" as it was a monolithic entity, a more accurate way of looking at it would be as more discrete groups who crystallize around different discourses of desire.

ADS: I agree with you about the acceptance/celebration of different kinks that goes on in fan communities. I was thinking more of tensions that arise in relation to normative ideals. One's choice of kink is always in some way informed by knowledge of the social rules and the pleasures/ consequences of breaking them.

BL: Those tensions are actually playing out right now around a holiday fic exchange called Yuletide. The exchange cuts across fandoms, and this year includes over 1,200 participants. The first day of signups happened at the end of the Jewish high holidays, and one fan complained about this (even though signups lasted two weeks and there is no incentive for signing up early). The argument spiraled out into a debate about how fans will often organize events on Saturdays and resist the same on Sundays. The same sorts of complaints are voiced over these normative ideals, which tend to see slash fandom as female, heterosexual, white, and American.

ADS: As for how these ideas seem to connect with academic practices for me, the tenure process has made it very clear to me that single authorship is valued over collaboration. The denial of the community except as rational audience sitting in judgment transforms collaboration into a fetish for me, where new modes of academic publishing can reinvigorate community and focus on the processes of creation rather than the final product. Though a stretch, perhaps, I can definitely see these practices as erotic because they are both taboo and because they place emphasis on the act itself (no longer either masturbatory or a peep show where I show my body [of work] to an audience that I cannot see but I know is looking and judging me) rather than the final product (the money/tenure shot). The work I've done on MediaCommons and Flow are both informed by a deep sense that current academic publishing practices are limiting, but also that there is a liberating freedom that comes from sharing. Do I imagine fan community practices like slash fiction writing as similar? Somewhat. As media scholars, we typically seek to alter/challenge/tease out a text's meanings/underlying ideological assumptions/ institutional logics and constraints. Many fans do this as well, but they get to do this in forms that seem more like play (even though a lot of work often goes in to these creations) and sharing. Of course, part of this is the projection of my desires onto fan communities.

I'd imagine this works quite differently for non-tenure track faculty and as these discussions have clearly shown, there is a gendered component to these categories, with more women found in non-tenure track positions. I also know from working in a Comm department where half my colleagues are social sciency types who regularly co-author works that they find nothing erotic or exciting about collaboration. At best it is functional, at worst frustrating. They tend to fetishize the solo authoring process as much as I worship at the alter of community-building.

BL: I agree with the social science folks: collaboration on academic work is, well, it's work. It lacks the element of play and fun that is so much a part of fannish experience. Fandom can be serious play, but a portion of it, the part that poaches from and tests the canonical source texts, is playful. The relationships and intimacy between community members is often not, and tensions between fans who consider their experience all play and those who take their community and interactions more seriously do crop up.

I think attitudes about academic communication and community are shifting, like all things in academia, they will move slowly. I credit the Internet with this. As more scholars interact online in listservs and blogs and email, the more their interactions include personal and professional discussion and the more we become invested in each other as individuals. We move beyond being collections of ideas and methodologies. I have a personal blog (which is badly in need of updating) linked to my ICFA division blog. When I met one of my presenters on video game theory at the conference last spring, he immediately asked how my mother (who had been having health concerns, something I wrote about in my blog) was faring. It took me aback until I worked through to, "Oh, you read my blog." At that moment, our sense of community was built on more than our shared ideas, interests, and work.

ADS: This is very encouraging. I hope you are right.

STRETCHING THE CANON VERSUS CANONICAL FIDELITY

ADS: As you can probably tell, I am not a fan scholar per se. My interests are in the collective authoring practices and authoring constraints that accompany popular icons like superheroes. Within this lens, I tend to focus on how contemporary IP companies like Marvel Comics engage with fans and negotiate the various fan iterations of popular heroes in fan fiction, fan art, and various other collective knowledge initiatives. I also look at the ways that fans police the boundaries of authorship as often as they challenge them. I have studied the ways that superhero fan communities will often reject unauthorized stories as unprofessional, non-canonic, and out of continuity, while embracing certain professional writers and artists as part of the fan community (even as these individuals work for the very institutions seeking to police the meanings of popular heroes)

BL: Your experiences with the superhero communities and fan practices is very interesting to me, because there isn't quite the same sort of border policing in slash fandom. Perhaps it is because slash fans realize they are teasing very submerged meaning that is usually not intended out of the source text. That is, we accept we are going to be stretching canon, which makes it easier to accept some other distortions to or challenges of the source texts. However, there is a constant tension that exists between official canon and fan-defined canon/fanon. This permission to play with canon has its limits, and fans are not usually going to respond well to texts that totally shatter major canonical expectations, unless the work is clearly parody or crackfic.

At the same time, as texts grow more complex, defining what is canonical gets more problematic. In real-person fiction, for example, when the canonical source text is a person's like and persona, what defines canon? Some would say there is no such thing. I am not one of them. Canon tends to be an amalgamation of facts about an actor (or musician or sports figure), interviews with actors, commentary by colleagues, reading public persona and presentation, and a dose of the persona of fictional characters that actor has played in various roles. It is definitely something that is assembled, ordered, and prioritized by fans (and often contested by them) much more actively than canon in a fictional work is assimilated.

When we look at other texts that spill across media boundaries, the question of defining canon becomes even more complex as levels exist. Fans of Heroes, for example, can produce texts based on the canon of the television series, but they do so without having the benefit of additional information about characters that is revealed online in the Heroes digital graphic novel. If a fan wants to write about a character like Hana Gitelman, the woman who can mentally "hear"/intercept and communicate wirelessly, they have to access the digital graphic novels (soon to be released in a hardcover version), as her character is developed in cyberspace, not in the series. Hana also breaks out of the confines of the canonical television narrative by interacting directly with fans. My sister (who firmly insists she is NOT a fan) prowls the Heroes message boards and has signed up to get text messages from Hana on her cell phone.

ADS: Differences within communities over the rigidity or flexibility of the canon seems a valuable conversation. Of course, this is a question of degree, not an either/or scenario. Comic book/superhero fans definitely write fiction (general and slash) that potentially challenges the official continuity of their hero's universes, even as they also hotly debate what ought to be counted as canonical. My experience has been that many superhero fans privilege the officially produced stories over fan variations. Of course, this has a lot to do with the particularly close and incestuous relationship the comic book industry has historically cultivated with its fan base since the late 1960s. Henry Jenkins points out how over the past two decades the comic book industry has put out many elseworld-type variations of its own products, essentially creating in-house the narrative multiplicity that many fans otherwise create (with obvious limitations on certain subject matter). Partly, this can be seen as an attempt to reign in fan efforts to stretch the boundaries, but it is also partly an acknowledgement of those fan desires that many other media texts/ properties continue to deny.

Moreover, because the barriers for entry have usually been lower (and are still perceived to be) for the comic book industry, the perceived lines between creators and fans are blurred, so that many comic book writers and artists are not just fan-favorites, but marketed as fans themselves. I think this does two things: One, it reassures fans that their fantasies are being catered to because the people who create these texts are just like them (my point here is not whether this is true or not, but the way that the discourses of authorship and fandom that circulate blur the insider/outsider status so central to other fan community creative practices). Two, they encourage a detailed knowledge of the official continuity (and its official derivatives) because there is still the sense that this type of knowledge might be rewarded with a job or some similar form of cultural access. Thus, fan creations that push too far against the canonical grain are often devalued because there is a sense that this not only alienates the industry but also that there are already fan-insiders challenging that canon with an official stamp of approval. This seems similar to your assertion of the limits of fan openness to texts that shatter canon entirely without coding itself as parody or crackfic.

Of course, I am also massively oversimplifying what is often a very contentious and charged relationship between superhero fans and creators. What I wonder is, as digital authoring tools become more easily accessible, will we see this relationship shift with other media texts, as fans are both actively courted as potential creators by the industry and fan practices become increasingly integral to industry branding strategies? If television series started offering alternate variations of their plots (like those alternate universe episodes that occasionally pop up) would this change fan writing practices? And, of course, given the disparity within the industry in terms of gendered access to creative power, would there be a change along those axes?

BL: I think we are already starting to see the beginnings of a fan/creator convergence. In order to overcome the mid-season hiatus ratings slump, Heroes is set to produce 30 episodes. A number of them will be one-shots, focusing on a new hero not integral to the overall story arc of the series. Fans will get to weigh in on favorites, and the favorite will become a regular part of the cast. This very limited and restrictive sort of collaboration (where the boundaries and control is still rather firmly in the hands of the creators) is something that should fuel fan production, especially if a beloved hero is not renewed and fans want to continue his/her story.

While the new technologies offer fans more creative possibilities, I do not see creators giving much access to their power to fans in significant ways. However, I do see fans offering fellow fans more sophisticated (and competitive) alternatives to the creators' products. I'm thinking here of shows like Hidden Frontier, a Star Trek fan film series that released their episodes on the web and made the focus on the series the relationships between the characters, some of whom were gay. Of course, creators will likely take note of other popular and visible fan alternatives and popular ideas and themes may work their way into the creators' works.

Porn 2.0

I am a regular listener and sometimes guest on NPR's On the Media, which does a great job of covering new developments in news and civic media. One recent segment, featuring an interview with Regina Lynn, the sex and technology correspondent for Wired.com, caught my attention. The segment started with the oft-repeated claims that pornographers might be regarded as lead users of any new communications technologies, being among the first to test its capacities as they attempt to construct a new interface with consumers. We might add that pornography is at the center of the controversy surrounding any new media as the public adjusts to the larger shifts in the ways an emerging medium shapes our relations to time and space or transforms the borders between public and private.

The Medium Is the Message?

Indeed, I have long used pornography as an example to explain Marshall McLuhan's famous line, "the medium is the message," suggesting that the evolution of pornography can show us how different media can change our relationship to the same (very) basic content.

The word, pornography, originally referred to the writing of prostitutes. Prostitutes were among the first women to learn to write so that they could record their sexual experiences and pass them along to their johns, who would use these handwritten manuscripts to remember and relive their encounters. With the rise of print, these accounts could be mass produced and distributed, allowing people to vicariously experience the sexual encounters of others and creating a celebrity culture around particular authors. With the lowering of the costs of print, these stories circulated even further, reaching the lowest segments of society (indeed, becoming associated with the poorest of the poor and sometimes speaking from and to their perspectives.) Several historians have described how this cheap porn (especially representations of the imagined sexual proclivities of the elite classes) helped to spark revolutionary zeal in the working classes. Having read vivid fantasies which treated the Queen as if she were a common prostitute, these tales encouraged them to see the royal body not as untouchable but as debased.

Jump forward in time and consider what happens to pornography with the rise of photography: the movement from text to images, the ability to look "directly" as the naked bodies of total strangers or to record and preserve your own nude body or that of your loved ones (thus changing people's sense of their own sexual agency or allowing them to preserve the bodies of their youth from the impact of aging.) Or consider what happens with the addition of movement to the pornographic image -- or for that matter, the different relationship between public and private created around the male-only or male-mostly spaces where early pornographic films are consumed. Or consider what happens with the addition of video, whether as a tool of production (again, furthering the evolution of amateur pornography or lowering costs in a way which allowed new groups to enter the space) or consumption (enabling people to consume moving images in the privacy of their homes and thus paving the way for a couples market around porn). And more recently still, there has been the addition of digital porn (which has lowered even further the risks of being caught accessing or consuming erotic images).

For a good documentary series which traces the connections between pornography and media history (produced by the BBC no less), check out The Secret History of Civilization.

Porn and Disruptive Technologies

The On the Media segment took all of this back story as given and wanted to explore what is happening to pornography in the era of Web 2.0. Here's how Lynn describes how web 2.0 software (based on social networks and user-generated or manipulated content) might reshape our relationship with pornography:

Anything from rating the content, allowing users to take existing content and mash it up and create new movies and things, contests - you know, everybody make a minute-and-a-half porn movie out of all of this material. They add a bit of play and a bit of game and just a lot of interaction into it. I mean, it's basically taking porn and making it relationships.

But, in fact, she argues, the porn industry has been very slow to move in this direction:

For the main industry, it's really hard to incorporate that because you've got to think a whole new way. You have to think of your users with respect and as sort of partners in the whole experience versus sheep that you're fleecing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I was just wondering if there's something about the culture of porn that sort of works against community-building. I mean, I guess we always think of consumers of adult content as preferring anonymity and solitude.

REGINA LYNN: You can have community and a certain level of anonymity, because you're not out there with your Social Security number on the site. You're out there with your handle and your online self.

As they talk about the challenges of enabling a new kind of relationship between consumers and porn content, Gladstone and Lynn discuss a range of economic, creative, social, and legal obstacles, powerfully illustrating the ways that existing culture re-asserts itself in the face of potentially disruptive technologies. What emerges here is not the typical account of the porn industry as transgressive or experimental but also as deeply conservative, unwilling to change encrusted practices, and in that regard, no different from any other sector of our society (education or government, say).

When Women Make Porn...

A second interesting set of observations in the interview, however, suggests that gender constitutes a significant factor shaping the relationship between content producers and consumers:

If you want to build community in adult spaces, look to the women. The independent websites that women put together where they are the performers and they do the whole thing on their own as maybe their home-based business are all based on community and have been for more than 10 years - talking to their fans, talking to the visitors, building relationships with the fans, who then bring in other people and who then stick around. I know one Webcam performer who has had the same members for seven or eight years.

Here, Lynn's comments closely parallel some of the cliches about male and female fans which have run through our ongoing discussions about Gender and Fan Culture: the male fan as socially isolated, the female fan as relationship-oriented.

Porn and the Generation Gap

A third interesting idea to emerge from the interview has to do with an emerging generational divide in expectations about our relationship to porn, which parallels similarly claims being made elsewhere about the so-called "digital natives" and "digital immigrants":

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do porn sites really suffer or pay a penalty for being slow to adapt to this new evolving online world?

REGINA LYNN: I think they will. If you think of today's 12-to-17-year-olds who have not yet looked at porn, when they turn 18 and they look at their very first adult content, this is a generation who is so used to having complete participation and control in their media that if the adult industry continues to just sort of put out content that's intended to be watched passively, they're going to lose this entire generation.

Hmm. The biggest problem with this argument is that it takes as given the legal fiction that teens do not consume pornography. But if most current research is accurate, most teens have at least some contact with pornographic images on the internet and many of them become avid consumers well before they reach legal age. (Most teens of my generation were reduced to examining ancient back issues of Playboy salvaged from their father's underwear drawers, thus learning about sex and hyprocrisy at the same time.) We can argue that porn may not satisfy their expectations for interactivity, immersion, and participation, but it probably isn't true that they are going to encounter it first in adulthood and be bored then. They may simply become the primary purchaser of porn when they turn 18.

User-Generated Porn

Unfortunately, the interview ignores the fact that there is and has always been a large sector involved in user-generated porn content -- and I am not just talking about erotic fiction (whether produced by the fan community or the large number of women's erotic writing groups that emerged from Second and Third Wave feminism).

Consider redclouds.com (for hardcore content) and voyeur.com (for nudity without explicit sex), which every day publish sets of amateur produced pornographic photographs. (I am not linking to such sites or using sexually charged language here out of concern that my blog may get filtered from schools and public libraries. But you won't have trouble finding such sites on your own if you are so determined.)

The rise of digital cameras makes it easy for people to produce and share such images, uploading them to the web. The cameras built into mobile phones has helped to increase the number of images which get quickly snapped in public places, such as images of women flashing in shopping malls or parking lots. Indeed, these sites have whole areas devoted to such exhibitionist images (with extra value attached to those where there are bystanders caught by surprised by the spontaneous erotic spectacle). Of course, the wide spread availability of Photoshop and other digital manipulation tools makes it a real challenge to distinguish those pictures actually taken in public spaces from those which are digital composites, exhibitionistic fantasies, created in the safety of domestic space. As cell phone cameras become so commonplace and taking pictures becomes harder to distinguish from other uses of these same technologies, there has also been a troubling increase in photographs shot without the awareness of the subject so shots taken of strangers sunbathing on nude beaches or in their own backyards become another large theme for such sites.

Like many other web 2.0 enterprises, the site stimulates productivity by running contests, soliciting certain kinds of images, and deploying viewers to rank the results, all in the name of what are, at the end of the day, fairly modest cash prizes. More recently, voyeur.com launched a Wiki, which defines various sexual acts, and encourages readers to submit illustrations to support the evolving definitions.

Pornography is often criticized for the commodification of sexual experience -- but these porn 2.0 sites complicate this argument. Certainly, the owners of such sites use them to generate revenue (the same problem many of us have with the economics of other web 2.0 practices) but the photographers and models don't get paid unless they win contests. Many of them see the photographs in the context of gift exchange -- sharing themselves with others in their community or posing for and taking pictures as tokens of sexual and romantic feelings within a relationship. These sites may function as social networks through which photographers and models can find each other, getting together to take new pictures, and often documenting such occasions with collective images which in turn get shared back to the group as a whole.

Another common criticism of pornography is the objectification of women. this issue doesn't go away in porn 2.0 but it gets more complicated as women take greater control over the production and circulation of their images. The images often run with tags from their creators and models, describing what they felt or why they created these images, and thus reintroducing subjectivity into the equation. Certain amateur models create their own fan followings, correspond directly with their fans, and creating images based on requests from the community. All of this brings pornography back into the realm of social relations as compared to the anonymous images that circulate in commercial pornography.

User-generated porn also has broadened the range of bodies which might be seen as sexually attractive. While such sites often give special recognition to women who fall within the same physical range as dominates commercial pornography, there is tolerance and even enthusiasm for women who don't match those norms. The participants are overwhelming white (and non-white models tend to be exoticized) but the site embraces women who are plump or even overweight, who may be considerably more mature than you are apt to find in men's magazines. On these sites, women often assert their rights as models to feel sexy even if nobody wants to look at their pictures. Indeed, this sense of self determination in sexual representation becomes a central theme of the goth and post-feminist Suicide Girls website. The Boston Phoenix wrote about this group of women as "the naked sorority," a phrase which captures the very different emotional, political, and social context within which they operate from what we have traditionally understood as the porn industry.

All of this points to some of the claims which people have made about web 2.0: that it will result in a diversification of the culture as more people share content, that it will enable people to feel more personal stakes in the culture that they consume, and that it will add an important social dimension to the circulation of media content. Once again, using porn as a base line, we can see how shifts in media impact the culture that surrounds us.

I don't mean to white wash this process. Nothing about this is going to be reassuring if you see the production and circulation of pornographic images as itself a deeply problematic practice. There are still very real questions about consent surrounding these images, especially those which are taken of unwilling strangers, and there are certainly questions about how aggressively these sites police for under-aged participants. Whatever the context of their production, these images still circulate in a culture defined by the sexual exploitation of women and thus they can be read in those terms even when, in the case of Suicide Girls, there is an explicitly feminist project surrounding the site.

Yet, I think we can learn a fair amount about the ways that web 2.0 technologies are impacting our culture by examining how they function within the shadow culture/economy of porn.

For those of you who would like to read more of Regina Lynn's thoughts on this topic, you can read the article which inspired the On the Media interview here.

"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 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...

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

Last Spring, I ran two blog posts which described the curious process by which my decapitated head (or at least a replica thereof) ended up being used in a low budget horror film, featured in an experimental movie, and displayed in art galleries in London and New York City. The man who pulled me (and my head) into this fine mess was Christian Jankowski, a contemporary multimedia artist who largely works in video, installation, and photography. He has created a number of television interventions, including "Telemistica" (1999), in which he asks Italian television psychics if his new art work will be successful (the video he then created is comprised of recordings of these psychics answering his question), and "The Holy Artwork" (2001), in which he collaborated with a televangelist pastor. One of his early works, "The Hunt," is currently on display at Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art: in this video, he takes a bow and arrow into a grocery store, vowing to live only on food that he shoots himself.

My head was one of the featured attractions of "The Violence of Theory," part of The Frankenstein Set, a larger exhibit of his works which explored Horror films, their fans, and their theorists.

Given my rather intimate involvement in this particular exhibit, not to mention its clear relevance to those of us interested in fan culture and on the relationship between high and popular art, I had long hoped to feature an interview with him here about the work. Until now, his schedule has not allowed him to respond to my questions. But, now, as he is preparing the printed catalog for the exhibit, he has taken some time out to talk about the work, including his own version of the travels and tribulations experienced by my prosthetic head. A fuller version of this interview will be published as part of the exhibit catalog.

Some of what follows may scare you. Some of what follows may shock you. But all of what follows is true. This interview is not for the weak of heart. Nurses are standing by to attend to anyone who faints as a result of reading this blog.

The exhibition The Frankenstein Set (Lisson Gallery, UK. Sept. 2007) consists of three artistic interventions in and around Horror film culture. Can you describe your relationship to the horror genre? Were you a fan before you began this project? What drew you to do a series of works based on the horror genre? (*Note: the US exhibition title at The Kitchen in NYC was 'Us and Them').

When I begin working on an art project, it can start with a fascination about something I know little about, or am ambiguous about - but then it normally sucks me in. This time it was horror and I guess you can say now I'm a horror fan.

Although thinking more about it, bits of the horror genre were present in my life early on. When my parents first started dating they were shooting a horror short on 8mm in their spare time, a kind of thriller. They co-wrote the story, acted in it, and filmed it. I grew up in Göttingen, a little university town in Germany where the Brothers Grimm were once professors and my mother put me to sleep reading their folk tales of children being eaten by witches and of a little boy who went out into the world to learn about fear. Later, as a teenaged electric-guitar player, I wore black leather and used kohl eyeliner to shock my parents and teachers. My favorite book back then was Freaks and Monsters (which also inspired my first band name „The Freaks"), and I loved H.R. Giger and of course, Hieronymus Bosch. Some of the first films they showed us in art school were The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Un Chien Andalou. I also think the photographs I saw then from the Orgien Mysterien Theater of Hermann Nitsch and the other bloody performances of the Vienna Actionists may have guided me in the direction of performance art - which is still the base of what I'm doing today.

The horror project started when I attended a lecture of yours at MIT on horror imagery in Matthew Barney's work. There was this high level of interpretation given to these super-popular horror images. To my mind Barney took horror visuals and used freakish characters like a woman with a prosthetic leg or even himself as a Satyr and then filmed a big budget art movie in the Guggenheim Museum. I thought it'd be more interesting to do something closer to actual horror film productions, infiltrate their vocabularies and work within their world.

Historically, many would have regarded horror as one of the most debased of entertainment genres. What do you see as the implications of incorporating this genre into your work for a gallery exhibit? What relationship are you positing here between popular culture and high art?

'Low culture' and popular culture have been a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists, so I don't think that distinction between low and high necessarily stands in the art world any more.

I'm not interested in putting horror on an intellectual, 'high', bloodless level. The work has to be sensual experience combined with an intellectual way of seeing things that you might not have seen before. I thought in this overlap between theory words and gruesome images, something surprising could happen. It's a kind of collage.

You could say The Blair Witch Project is a fiction disguised as a horror documentary, and Angels of Revenge is a documentary disguised as horror fiction. Normally it's all fiction that the horror fans watch and like. In Angels of Revenge though, they get to see their own fantasies and real life stories entering this half-documentary, half-fiction movie. Of course, you're never quite sure where the 'real' and 'fiction' begins and ends in their stories, because these fans are so influenced by horror film characters they follow.

One of the Angels of Revenge cast members organized to have the film shown at this year's Fangoria 'Weekend of Horror' convention, so in a way the work now has a life in two worlds: the world of the galleries and the world of horror films.

For Angels of Revenge, you attended a horror fan convention and drew fans there into your film production work. What were your impressions of the convention? Can you describe your working relationship with these fans? What did you discover about the horror film audience through this process?

I came across the website of the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors when researching horror film productions. It's a yearly convention for the horror industry and fans with film screenings, panel discussions, presentation of new products etc. But the event that grabbed my attention was the advertised costume contest, which anybody could participate in. I imagined obsessed fans in elaborate costumes and figured it could be an interesting starting point for a project. So me and the cinematographer I usually work with, Max Petzel, flew to Chicago and arrived at this hotel in the middle of nowhere.

It looked deserted from the outside, but was packed. Three types of people were there: first, baseball fans. (I think there was a game going on). Second, groups of families going to bridal showers. And third, there were leather people, horror people, Goths. It was a pretty surreal mix of people.

The next morning, crowds lined up for tickets to the convention, and I saw the first fans in costumes. I met Anthony the Green Monster, who had a full face mask skillfully done by a makeup artist, so he could hardly speak. Another guy was the Butcher lugging around bloody body parts - I knew I had to have him in front of the camera. Some of them were there as fans, others were horror fans but also promoting their businesses - special FX make-up etc.

I approached various costumed fans, explained the project I had in mind and asked them to participate. We had built a small set in a conference room, a dark corridor that I wanted them to walk along towards the camera.

Before filming, I asked them to think of a person in their lives who had wronged them or disappointed them deeply, relive the experience and come up with a revenge fantasy. So part of the project was documenting their history, telling what had happened. And the other part was fiction, coming up with a just punishment for the betrayal or cruelty. Sort of a cathartic experience.

My favorite was the Anthony the Green Monster. His costume was crazy. It even had a remote control that could move something on his head for extra effect. He started talking about making horror costumes and how his former business partner stole his ideas and clients. He stood in one of his own costumes and told this self-reflexive story about the horror of the horror business. The costume had these big claws, but he was talking about using a little knife to kill this traitor. I thought, you are a big, green monster and you are going to use a knife? It was similar to the Butcher: Instead of chopping someone to pieces, as you'd predict, he talks about taking photographs of someone to blackmail them. This is where the projected image and their words go two different ways, which was absurd and great.

Some of them fell quickly into this stereotype of their characters' revenge cliché and not their own, personal stories. I'd give them the chance to rethink their revenge, some of them reconsidered and would reveal more personal details and the motivations that suited the revenge: Not only did you fire me, but I know that you're having an affair and I'll make that public as the revenge - instead of chopping your head off. Some were caught up in hate, I could feel it. In the moment, it was really sincere. I might ask them, 'You think this is a just revenge?' But in the end it was all up to them.

Part of my fascination in the horror genre is how it creates a free zone from these imposed social mores and standards, but ironically at the same time I found myself horrified at some of the revenge fantasies that the Angels cast members were voicing. Which of course was hypocritical because I had prodded them to do so, had created the free zone and was hoping for gruesome stories that would make for a good film; and on the other hand I was judging them by the accepted moral standards -- Girlfriend got stolen? They're going to rip her to pieces. Someone borrows money, doesn't give it back? He'll peel off their fingernails. So it also brought out the double-sided moral in myself.

I can't generalize horror fans. I met many fascinating characters but the most interesting to me were the people who had a certain personal approach. The last guy in Angels of Revenge had had a kidney transplant and thus had a distorted relationship to his body and the disease that had attacked him. It made him reflect on his body differently and to take uncommon things as normal. So horror could be a logical step to address a dysfunctional body or a trauma, or a way to deal with your own situation.

Horror deals with supernatural powers, and I think that many fans live very regular lives. I think horror films can help people break out of the power structures that they're in. And not by starting a revolution or riot, but for a moment in the theater.

Of course there is a certain body obsession with horror people; you see piercings, tattoos, physical transformations. And I'm sure you can easily get addicted to horror because of these incredible images you see on screen: another body opens up; you feel the thrills of excitement. And it's also a fascination with going beyond certain accepted human taboos. You get to rethink your standards, your moral standards, and pain standards.

The Second Part of this interview will run next Monday following the forthcoming installment of our ongoing Gender and Fan Culture series. It deals primarily with Lycan Theorized, the film which made use of my dismembered head. I will at last learn the details of what happened to my head when it, er, left my hands.

My essay on Matthew Barney and the horror film genre can be found in The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2006).

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Thirteen, Part One):Anne Kustritz and Derek Johnson

Biographies in Brief AK: I've recently completed my PhD in the American Culture program of the University of Michigan. Combining ten years of cybermediated and embodied ethnography with a variety of cultural studies theory, my dissertation discusses micro and macro socio-political and identitarian implications of slash fan fiction's construction of a multiple narrative space which sustains the co-presence of numerous possible "good lives." This work builds on articles in the Journal of American Culture, also on slash fan fiction, and Refractory, on queer subtext and citizenship in Smallville. I'm particularly interested in the representational politics of sex in professional and fan produced works, as well as relationships between modern storytelling, public culture, and social systems.

As a fan I've always been firmly grounded in the arts and letters crowd, comprised primarily of fan fiction, vidding, and meta-commentary, to the point that I consider myself a fan of fan authors and artists moreso than a fan of any given professionally published source. Although my academic work specializes in slash and queer readings, I also have a forthcoming piece on heterosexual fan fiction in Harry Potter fandom and participate broadly in numerous fandoms and literary aesthetics. While I discuss my fan activities in my dissertation, I maintain separate on-line personas for my academic and fannish pursuits; in this series of discussions most of my limited participation has taken place on Livejournal in my personal/fan persona.

DJ: As a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my dissertation combines formal analyses, political economy, fan studies, and media historiography to explore the organization of intellectual properties across platforms and over time as media franchises. What I'm most interested in is how the logic of franchising came to be used by industries and by audiences to organize media production and consumption, and how that use shaped cultural forms and practices. As a scholar, I don't necessarily place myself within fan studies proper; I certainly draw from and contribute to its discussions, but since the research questions I explore don't always pertain to fans, I see myself as operating in other fields as well. This has certainly been a gradual development in my work--when I first began grad school I was much more interested in the study of fans for their own sake--but now I tend to ask questions about fans insofar as they are related to industries and texts, not as objects of study or a field in their own right (I'm not saying they can't be or shouldn't be; I'm just explaining my orientation towards fans in trying to understand the media franchise).

My status as a fan is also much more reflective of the experiences of Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson--a fan by some people's definition, but not by others. My tastes and affection for properties like Battlestar Galactica, X-Men, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc grant me fan/geek status in the eyes of some, but according to some definitions of fandom centered on community and creative production circulating in this discussion, I would not so much count as a fan. Aside from one major exception (I co-founded a Star Trek mod for Starcraft back in the late 90s), I don't participate in organized fandom. Some might say that if I'm a fan, my lack of socialization makes me a "feral" fan--though I don't like the patronizing implication that I'm somehow in need of civilization by fan community.

Defining Fandom

DJ: That said, I'm not sure I have a better definition of fan practice available to clear up the confusion of my fan/not-fan status. This point, of course, has come up several times before in this ongoing discussion series, but it's one that I think deserves revisiting. I'm neither satisfied by the idea that fandom has to involve community and creativity (which contradicts my identification as a fan) nor the idea that fandom can be placed within a natural continuum of engagements with media texts ranging from casual to avid consumption (ignoring the forces that shape what "causal" and "avid" mean) nor the idea everyone is in some way a fan (denying the social meanings articulated to the difference of being a "fan").

Ultimately, my problem with our varying attempts to define fandom is an historical one. While I've been skeptical of the idea of fandom as an oppressed minority with a social alterity on the same level as the racially, gendered, or sexually de-privileged, an analogy to race seems rather useful here: whiteness has always existed, but at different points in time it has been defined in varying ways. Fandom, similarly, is a historically-contingent category. Fifteen years ago, for example, a look at the shelves in my living room would have at least strongly implied my status as a fan--who else but a fanatic would have an entire television series collected on video? Today, however, my practices as a media consumer probably don't come off as bizarre and different. The growth of the television-on-DVD market, for example, has increasingly made a place for episode collections on the shelf of the average consumer who may just find it more economical or convenient to have them at their fingertips. While I don't mean to suggest a technological determinism, I think it takes a little more nowadays for someone's consumption practices to raise eyebrows--is slash fiction even as "out there" as it used to be?

In the end, the best definition that I can provide of fandom is that set of tastes and engagements with culture that is at any one point in time articulated to and pathologized as extreme or excessive consumption. Again, though I hesitate to grant fandom the status of oppressed minority (how often are fans the victims of violent hate crimes?), there remains in fandom at least the suggestion of social non-normativity or extremity. In lieu of defining fandom according to a certain set of practices, I'm suggesting that we look at the way fandom has been variably defined by social discourse in different historical moments and cultural contexts.

So in my teaching I've recently introduced ideas about interpretation, discussion, community formation and audience activism, and the production of new texts in response to popular culture before making even the smallest use of the term "fan." That way, my students are introduced to a range of possible engagements with the media, and we can interrogate the ways in which some of those practices are labeled as different or abnormal through the fan category. This helps the students to stop and think about what fandom is--rather than just assume we're wasting a day talking about weirdos--because it points out to them the ways in which their own tastes and practices could just as easily be categorized as "out there", depending on where that line is drawn.

AK: After the latest in an endless series of sensationalistic articles about so-called "slash porn," yes, I'd say that slash is still pretty "out there." However, I do take your point that definitions of fans must take historical and cultural context into account.

Yet my concern with the way academics define fans has less to do with separating fans from a "mundane" audience and more with the implied identitarian, behavioral, and psychological coherency that the term suggests. This discussion series has nicely highlighted a range of topics within fan studies, which I think implies a certain imperative to ensure that when one speaks of "fans" that the argument which follows could robustly apply to the full range of people and practices that the term purports to represent. Repeatedly I've found myself reading works in the academic and journalistic press only to realize that when the author explains that fans do, say, buy, or consume in one or another way, he or she simply isn't talking about "my fans" at all

I think that your definition of fandom as extreme or excessive consumption offers an analytic lens for thinking about how society constructs and regulates (classed) taste cultures, but doesn't offer a useful rubric for articulating individuals' self-identification, normative fan practices, or those beyond the language of media or consumption. Rather, instead of attempting to enclose a master-category within which all fan activities fall, I'm more interested in clearly differentiating and limiting individual studies without allowing any one level of analysis to dominate the whole (for example, your definition would be much closer to my concept of "media fandom" than of "fans" writ large). While it makes sense to talk about the way that society constructs a notion of "the fan" as an out-group, I think it makes considerably less sense to study "fans" at a general level as, apart from a shared negotiation with shared cultural intuitions like the fan stereotype, individual micro-level studies of particular fan communities or practices often bear little relevance to each other and generalize poorly (i.e. knowing how fans in a crowded concert act doesn't necessarily offer much insight into the way that on-line creative groups or individual collectors function).

I'm suggesting that while determining how dominant discourses define "fans" is possible within a given space and time, the sociological definition of "fans" is unanswerable in the abstract because there exist a multiplicity of localized answers whose specifics vary immensely. Even studying only slash fan fiction, I struggled to represent dialectics between the fluctuating denotation of the term slash and the enormously variable experiences, passions, and identifications at play for each individual involved.

DJ: We both agree, then, that the scholarly enterprise of studying fans should strive for contextualization and multiplicity, rather some unifying theory of fandom. We have to account not only for the way in which ideas, ideologies, and values attached to the idea of fandom change historically, but also the multiplicity of practices and identifications contained within that single, over-determined category. I really like that you've responded to my call for greater contextualization with a call for even more, because I too, when reading academic works that engage with the idea of fandom, often feel that the subjects being discussed are not "my fans" either. Recognizing the differences between fans is often difficult because the term "fan" so frequently denotes difference already (from the "mundane" audience, as you put it). Fans are so distinguished from general audiences (and increasingly, from non-fans and anti-fans) that it becomes easy to forget the diversity of practices contained within fandom. So I'd like to see the field of fan studies expand a bit to engage more with the kinds of fan practices we don't hear about as much.

However, while I agree that my discursive definition of fandom is limited (indeed, still generalizing about a wide range of phenomena), I'm not sure that the social construction of fandom as a category isn't still somewhat useful in trying to understand individuals' practices and identifications as fans, since those processes don't occur outside of social discourse. Identifying and calling one's self a fan constitutes a negotiation of that cultural category. The category may be a social construct, but it does have real impact.

Your arguments about recognizing different kinds of fans and fan practices raises another important point in this regard: while fans tend to be socially marked as extreme and outside the norm, the significance attached to that difference can vary depending on exactly all the assorted types of fans you bring up. Some of my colleagues, for example, are huge indie rock fans, and claim solidarity with me and my television/video game/comic book fandom. They see parallels in the sense that people overhearing us talk about our different interests on the street might similarly raise eyebrows, but to me, our non-normative practices and taste cultures have very different social and cultural meanings. We're all outliers relative to social norms, but knowledge of music will grant them access to a different set of cultural capital than my understanding of the differences between a Mark II Viper and a Mark VII. And if I were to build models of the Mark VII, that would be an even different story!

AK: I didn't intend to imply that talking about normative constructions of "fans" as a social category lacks relevance, rather that negotiation with that term will happen at a personal rather than a macro level, and for me the process of negotiation, and thus the field, includes rejection by people who wouldn't self-identify as fans or be interpolated by the social category - people for whom we culturally reserve other names, like "connoisseur," aficionado," or indeed "scholar," seem to me equally relevant to fan studies as an academic unit as do more socially recognizable media fans.

Part of my interest, which I haven't yet explored in my scholarship, lies in thinking about incredibly normative patterns of behavior as fannish, and thinking of normative fan behaviors, and indeed part of convergence seems to involve normalizing and mainstreaming fan activities. However, in addition to a notion of "excess," I think fan studies offers a way into working through devotion and identity construction (particularly in relation to narratives) themselves. At the heart of fan studies are eternal human questions: Why do we love things? How do we define ourselves and find a place for ourselves within the on-going story of human imagination and society? I recognize that at a certain point opening "fan studies" to broader and broader topics of inquiry threatens to dilute the label beyond recognition, but using fan studies to think across eras, subjects, and disciplines offers considerable promise for interdisciplinary scholarship and a robust place for fan studies within the academy.

Fans and Public Sphere Theory

AK: Both of us, perhaps uniquely, seek to utilize public sphere theory in analyzing fan communities and practices. However, we do so from rather different perspectives and to different ends.

My interest in the public sphere builds largely upon feminist and queer critiques of Habermas by theorists like Nancy Fraser, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner. In my work I'm interested as much in the ways that the law and other institutions define "publicness" as I am in considering how people come to act as "a public." As I'm particularly invested in understanding representations of sex, Berlant and Warner's work on sex in public has been useful as a starting point for thinking about the process by which individual body parts, bodily acts, and desires may each become public through a number of different strategies, and through contact with a number of different institutions. Overall, I'm interested in how identities, thoughts, and concepts become publicly intelligible, knowable, and imaginable.

With regard to fan communities, my article on Smallville deals with the creation of a counterpublic based upon shared, subtextual interpretive lenses. In a prelude to my current work, the article dealt with writers' and producers' official attempts to structure fan investment into a kind of glorified, normative homophobia, while fans who invest instead in queer readings have the opportunity to construct a shared, counter-cultural identity.

My dissertation examines slash fan fiction communities as a spatial practice which secures a territory in which people may enact unpredictable encounters with the otherwise publicly unknowable and unspeakable. The publicness of slash fan fiction communities serves as a key consideration in my understanding of the socio-political implications of their ability to speak sex, bodies, and unique conjunctions between inter-personal investments and citizenship.

DJ: Like you, I'd consider myself as someone who launches from a rejection of Habermas--particularly, his insistence on publicity and public discourse existing in the realm of the rational and non-affective. Instead of endorsing Habermas' claims that commercial culture brought an end to the public sphere, I'm interested in the ways that media culture may have introduced competing models of publicness. I'd say my theoretical touchstones come much more from the work of people like Joke Hermes, who directly challenge Habermasian notions about what should count as political. I'm particularly inspired by Hermes' model of cultural citizenship, wherein our roles as citizens with rational political and economic interests are tied to our cultural lives as media spectators structured by the more irrational pull of affect. In addition to considering politics by mediated, affective means, I take to heart Couldry's recognition of the validity of "outs," wherein people disengage from politics because its processes do not serve them. Thus, I don't want to reduce media consumption to publicness and politics when it may often be an alternative to those social forces.

While I reject Habermas' conclusions, I think you'd be right to say I haven't given up all of his concerns. What really interests me with fandom in regards to the public sphere is the idea of debate and institutional oversight over the (political) realms in which fans have affective, pleasurable interest. So one thing I've explored is the way in which fans of a television program like 24, for example, develop interests as cultural citizens not just in real life national policy, but also post-national interests in the production of the series and in the alternate reality of the world being constructed by the series. Fans act as cultural citizens in the real world, the industrial sphere, and the fictional world. In consuming the series, fans critique the power exerted by real-life American institutions at the same time that they debate the institutional authority of both the producers who bring them the show and of story world characters and institutions like Jack Bauer and CTU. Should America torture terrorists? Should the producers ameliorate their representations of Muslim Americans? Is David Palmer weak on national security? Fans debate all these points, acting as publics in surveillance of institutional authority along a multiplicity of oscillating but interrelated cultural realms in which they are passionately interested. Again, very Habermasian concerns, but I pursue them in an arena of playful consumer culture (to the point of taking up citizenship concerns in a fictional narrative world) that stands in opposition to Habermasian ideals of public rationality (but perhaps not entirely incompatible with his more forgotten notion of the literary public sphere).

AK: I'd be interested to know how you conceptualize some media consumption as a way to opt out of politics. Although I'm dedicated to using public sphere theory to talk about fan communities, it strikes me that reifying artificial separations between politics and the everyday or privileging "formal" politics may be a potential danger of such analyses. While I realize that many academics place Foucault and Habermas in opposition, I employ them in tandem, so that I'm just as interested in repressive and ideological or micro and macro forms of politics (perhaps we emphasize different ends of this continuum). Therefore, I don't recognize any ability to "opt out" of politics, merely ways of moving between different forms or styles of politics. Warner and the feminist movement exemplify this strain of public sphere theory by enacting rival forms of publicness, and attempting to theorize the politics of privacy.

Within the fan communities I've studied I found that although some enthusiastically discuss slash as political, many deem "overtly political" fan fiction poor storytelling, or assume that their intention to enjoy fan activities without an overt political motive makes the community apolitical. However, in my work I've repeatedly argued that regardless of individual intentions, politics operate by implication in all human actions and interactions. The decision to believe one has "opted out" is itself a political decision on a "formal" level, whereby the refusal to vote or participate in caucuses or the like allows fewer people to control the political process, but on a cultural level as well as public and private expressions of detachment from "formal politics" affect the way that other people feel and think about political processes. In slash I've discussed the presence of the community in public as political because it offers passersby tools for thinking about sexuality and ways of relating, which may then be applied to both the macro-political realm of lobbying for legal change and the micro-political realm of everyday discussions and self-presentation.

DJ: Articulating media culture like fandom to the public sphere suggests to me the very opposite of a reification of the boundaries between the realms of formal politics and of the everyday. In any of its various forms, fandom is anything but formal politics (and especially not the kind Habermas prescribes). And while I agree that the decision to opt out of formal politics is itself a political one, I wouldn't assume that such a choice always leads to or constitutes an ongoing practice of alternative politics and/or publicness. Does disengagement with one style of politics and one type of public automatically compel engagement with another? I don't dispute your claim that all human activities and interactions are shaped by the political, but I'm not willing to assume that media fandom is an activity that is always publicly political. The choice to opt out can be a choice to explore politics by other everyday means via engagement with an alternative public, but it can also be an exit from participation in any kind of public (formal or otherwise). I could opt out of politics and choose to self-present and discuss other concerns in a fan public, but I could also choose to opt out and spend all my time watching TV alone without participation in a public. While I want to recognize the isolated modes of fandom generally ignored by fan studies, I don't believe the political dimensions of that solitude are the same as in more collectively public forms where fans actually interact. The difference between public engagement and disengagement, for me, is a difference between political practice and practices shaped by politics.

So while I myself do tend to act as a more isolated fan, what excites me about studying fans in more public forms is the potential for direct--but definitely not formal--political engagement. The potential for alternative public politics in fandom is so great, I think, because of the immense interest that fans hold within particular cultural objects. This is interest not just in the sense of curiosity and excitement, but more importantly in the political-economic sense of investment and ownership. This claim that fans can have over a particular cultural arena--a claim that can be contested by institutional authorities or other competing fan interests--can make it a site of overt political struggle between different factions and interest groups. Perhaps this concern for struggle over and between public interests in some fan interactions is closer in character to formal politics than the more diffused, dispersed, ubiquitous human politics you speak of, but the stakes of the debate are often well outside the bounds of what formal politics would find relevant or permissible. So I'm fascinated by the way in which issues of affect, fantasy, and play can become sites of direct political contention within fan publics in ways they cannot in formal politics.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Nine, Part Two): Derek Kompare and Cynthia Walker

Fandom Meets The Powers That Be CW: You make a couple of interesting points, Derek, some of which I've been pondering myself. The first is the need to get away from the idea of a rigid binary. TPTB have never been a single entity. We know there are conflicts between the producers and the various levels of the big corporations that distribute their work. Indeed, that's how all of this began. Roddenberry needed allies against Paramount and enlisted SF fans for support. He wasn't the first producer to make that effort (a similar alliance occurred in MFU) nor certainly the last. You mention Joss Whedon who has "fannish" credentials and attitudes. I'm sure most Buffy fans will remember when, in the wake of Columbine, the WB network delayed the airing of an episode involving a would-be student sniper in the U.S. In response, Whedon famously recommended that Canadian fans "bootleg the puppy."

Other producers (Chris Carter and J. Michael Straczynski and yes, Ron Moore, come to mind) have also represented themselves as underdog producers battling the "suits." Personally, I find these alliances between various creative professionals and the fans (which can be complicated and angst-ridden for all parties involved) quite fascinating and, with the internet, more and more common. I used to feel encouraged by them. Lately, though, I've become more pessimistic.

DK: I'm more ambivalent and skeptical than pessimistic, I suppose. My default position is that TPTB will probably screw things up (to wit, Star Trek), so ambivalence must be an improvement, right? This is a rapidly changing media environment, after all, so there's much here that is legitimately "new," particularly as far as the networks and distributors are concerned. I was encouraged by the deals worked out for Battlestar Galactica and Lost, for example, which essentially protect each series from future exploitation by networks/studios, but still leave doors open for fannish creativity. Still, it's a very open question as to whether that creativity will be constrained under various rules and (God forbid) EULAs, or just left alone.

CW: Marketing is certainly a factor now that TPTB have realized that fandom can be utilized for viral marketing efforts. I don't think fans mind all that much being used to promote their favorite source texts. Heck, we ourselves proudly admit to "pimping." The real issues are power and control. Producers and marketers are accustomed to seeking control over audiences or, at least, being able to predict their behavior. By comparison, fandom must seem very scary in its diversity and unpredictability. Although one can probably argue that there are some similarities between fandom and Hollywood in that they are relatively small, highly networked communities, ultimately, they don't operate in quite the same way.

The incursion of Hollywood into fandom reminds me of the European explorers encountering the indigenous population in the New World for the first time. We're talking about a clash of civilizations here with very different economies and value systems. We might get past the first exchanges of beads for land use, but eventually, inevitably, there are going to be serious tensions as interests conflict.

Linking this to gender, my experience is that, in general, male fans have been much more open ---even welcoming ---to these incursions into Media Fandom than (again, in general) female fans. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I have some theories. Prime among them is that the kinds of activities that guy fans are involved with --- collecting memorabilia, assembling non-fiction information websites --- are more likely to be approved by TPTB than some of the activities, like writing fan fiction, that are dominated by women. Also, at least in my experience, I find my guy fan friends are much more competitive with each other in vying for the attention of TPTB, are more likely to have connections to the professional and/or Hollywood communities, and seem to have a stronger desire to see their passion for the source text legitimized.

For example, because of my dissertation work and my professional ties to Norman Felton (we've both been involved in promoting media literacy), I'm often one of the folks that TBTB will seek out when they're looking for a representative of MFU fandom. There are other fans who fill this role as well, but they are nearly all male. I'm often the lone female voice, which is odd considering that our fandom is mostly run by women fans and is majority female.

Fanboys/Fan Girls Revisited

DK: I think you're right about the broad differences of gender within and between fandoms. Lots of quantitative and qualitative work (including yours) has pretty much borne this out, after all. Still, there will always be exceptions, in almost every fandom. Unfortunately, my experiences (and those of my fan friends) inside and outside fandom have shown how gender is often policed from within. "Fanboys" at comic cons alienate female fans by drooling after scantily clad cosplayers, or mounting loud, pedantic arguments about canon. "Fangirls" at fic cons alienate male fans by talking in code or banning them from slashvid rooms (as one of my female fan friends reported witnessing at MediaWest

back in the 90s).

Here's where, I hope, the emergence of female writers and writer-producers in the industry might help change things. Not in an essentialist sense, but in a sense of maybe projecting a kind of "fangirlness" (or at least not presenting "fanboyness") as a distinct, viable category for broader dissemination. We have a few prominent women writers on key popular and cult shows as it is (e.g., Jane Espenson, Carol Mendelsohn, Marni Noxon, Shonda Rhimes, Amy Sherman-Palladino), but they're very much the minority in Hollywood (and every other TV-producing community in the world, for that matter, unfortunately). I don't think more women producers would necessarily change the fairly fundamental split between men and women over who wants access to TPTB, but it might at least present some other possibilities for engagement, within the source texts and in publicity.

CW: No, I don't either. I don't see evidence that women producers and writers are necessarily more open to engagement with fandom than male producers. Those who are most open to interactions with fans seem to be those who, regardless of gender, have some experience with and/or strong ties to the SF community. This makes sense since the SF community has a long history, dating back to the early 1930s, of pros and fans interacting together and even folks exchanging roles at various times. I understand something similar happens in the Romance community.

But getting back to the fanboy/fangirl dichotomy, I'd like to see us get past this binary as well, although I'm not sure we ever will entirely. Despite the fact that women and guys (in general) favor different fan activities and do appear to have different experiences, I think it's in their (our?) common interest to forge some sort of alliance. In the end, as fans/users/consumers/audiences, we're all in the same boat.

I made this point when the discussions in this forum touched on machinima, which struck me, despite its reliance on images rather than words, as a reworking activity very similar to writing fanfic. At the media conference I attended in New York in May, one of the machinima panelists explained to me how the gaming companies, which are relatively small, are really open to their players altering the games and offer open source code. I then asked him what would happen if the gamers created a message which was critical of the gaming company or which was contrary to what the company would really enjoy or approve. He admitted that this doesn't happen much. But one would expect that, inevitably, a machinima artist will come along who will create a more radical piece that's not something the gaming companies can approve or ignore. What happens then?

The conversation I had that day also made me wonder if male fans seem more content than women fans to 'color within the lines' because most popular culture is created by guys for guys and women have to alter it more severely for their own pleasure. Are women fans more radical in their approach or does it just appear that way?

For example, I notice that machinima features a lot of violence, shooting and blowing up stuff, which frankly, seemed to embarrass the panelists who felt a need to warn the audience about it. It seemed to me the equivalent to how we have to prepare mundane audiences to accept and understand the existence and use of sexuality (both in slash and het) in female-dominated fanfic. Of course, at least in American popular culture, violence is more acceptable than sex and how feature films are rated reflects this.

DK: I think you're absolutely right that particular media forms and genres have a kind of gendered existence not because there's anything intrinsically "male" about blowing stuff up, but because "blowing stuff up" has become a prominent signifier of a culturally promoted masculinity. When the economics of the gaming industry are factored in, as well as the design history of gaming software (i.e., variations on controlling visual space), and the culture of computer science education, it all favors particular codes and possibilities, and marginalizes others.

Still, does this make these men any less "creative"? I'm not sure. I keep thinking of those guys in Trek fandom in the 70s and 80s who would create these elaborate technical blueprints of Trek technology, some of which might never have actually been seen on-screen. Not my cup of tea, but pretty impressive nonetheless, and categorically not all that different from women writing fanfic. Now, once you get into the actual content of the creativity, and its relationships to the source texts and wider culture, then substantial differences emerge. But still, blueprints or fanfic or machinima or vidding are all creative acts inspired by particular sourcetexts and supported by fan communities.

A big question going forward is this: do we (as fans, or acafans) want to crash the gates? Do we want to affect change in the way media is conceived, produced, and distributed? Do we want our cultures and perspectives to be represented in the source texts themselves? Or would we rather keep them to ourselves, build our own communities, and keep them exclusive? Setting aside the issue of fear of the copyright police for a second, do we still want to maintain boundaries between fandom and the mainstream?

As you pointed out earlier, the gates are being crashed anyway, to an extent, by TPTB arriving on the shores of fandom, and producers (benevolently) shouting-out to the fans. Accordingly, as academics and fans, I think we need to keep picking at all of these categories, "men," "women," "fans," and "producers," and learn better to think in other terms as well (most notably class, race, generation, and culture). We can learn an awful lot from the histories of these categories and interactions (as our scholarly work has shown), but we should also attend carefully to their flux at this moment, and look for opportunities, such as the FanLib debate, or these great discussions, to build new identities and relationships and/or defend old ones.

CW: You said: "But still, blueprints or fanfic or machinima or vidding are all creative acts inspired by particular source texts and supported by fan communities." Yes, they are, and personally, I'd like to see folks stop privileging one over the other. Like you, a lot of my academic interest and work is in media studies and also in the related areas of media literacy and media ecology. I'm a big fan of Marshall McLuhan.

And one thing we understand in media studies is that each medium has its virtues and limitations. Film is different from television, and television is different from radio --- but not necessarily better. We choose a medium depending upon the message and the intended audience. One of the first exercises I assign my students is to talk about the class to three different audiences in three different ways. They can write a letter, send an email, text a message, make a phone call, have a face-to-face conversation, whatever --- and then report back. They are always amazed at how the choice of medium shapes, influences, enhances or limits the message. Some media, they discover, are more effective with some audiences than others.

I think it's the same with the creative activities of fandom. I don't think we can privilege creating machinima over fanfiction or the reverse. Posting episode guides, creating technical blueprints, putting together a fanvid or writing a story all have their place and contribute to the commonly shared culture of a fandom. Instead of dismissing activities which we don't understand or in which we don't participate, I'd like to see more cross-community and cross gender communication. After attending that machinima panel, I, myself, wanted to explore, if only as a viewer, that particular medium. I wanted to hear more from the machinima fans.

I'd like to see more guy fans pursue fanfiction, if not as writers at least as readers. And while slash may make some guys uncomfortable, well, those sexy figures based on comic book characters (remember the recent controversy over the depiction of Mary Jane washing Spidey's outfit?) make some of the women uncomfortable as well. Maybe, as academics, we can be bold enough to sit on panels together and explore what makes us uncomfortable, gender-wise, as well as what commonalities we share in our fan activities. I think more dialogue ---more open but respectful dialogue --- is a goal to pursue.

As far as your next bundle of questions --- ie: Do we want to affect change in the way media is conceived, produced, and distributed?... Or would we rather keep them to ourselves, build our own communities, and keep them exclusive? etc. ---those are tough questions and the answer may be different for each individual fan. Is it possible for fandom to do both? As far as maintaining boundaries, can we somehow interact but still keep a distance? (And am I being too greedy in wanting my cake and eating it too?)

Moving Forward

DK: I agree that dialogue in many varieties is necessary, and here I'd hope that people following this discussion would lead the way in doing this (fans, academics, and acafans). If men are uncertain about slash, maybe gen fic is a place to at least start. If women aren't so sure about Halo, maybe try the Final Fantasy series. The next time you assemble a panel for a conference, try to find a different perspective. Discomfort is part of the process, and can be interesting in itself.

I think greater visibility is important as well, even if it is a double-edged sword. I honestly had no idea that LiveJournal was a vibrant hive of fan activity until the MIT 5 conference in April, and I don't think it would have come on my radar without people like Kristina Busse pulling me in. If we're invited to something, or are at least made aware of it within our usual haunts (online or otherwise), then we're much more likely to check it out. That's how fandom works, after all!

As Matt Hills wrote, fans are fans of being fans, and migrate between passions and mediums. We all have interests that overlap with what we might consider our "primary" fan identities, but which stoke our passions in different ways. I don't mean moving from Stargate Atlantis to Smallville or from Amazing Spider-Man to Ultimate Spider-Man, but to gardening, or reggaeton, or college basketball, or whatever. Perhaps we could open up as we migrate, and connect these areas, rather than treat them as islands of engagement.

As for connecting fans and producers, that's going to be a trickier process, but one that's already happening in many different ways. Ideally, producers should be free to "walk the walk" of fandom, and not just declare themselves to be fans (Ron Moore's ecstatic and immediate blog post reaction to the Sopranos finale-his first blog post about anything, in months--was a rare instance of this). Realistically, though contracts and network lawyers will keep them on a leash, and carefully monitor any kind of potential or actual IP exchanges between fans and producers. There are some situations that shouldn't happen (producers really don't want to hear your episode pitch in a convention hallway), but there are others that should happen more often (gabbing at the hotel bar about how much you both love a completely different show that the producer never worked on). The latter, thankfully, goes on every year at the Gallifrey con in LA, and it sounds like it works that way in U.N.C.L.E fandom as well, from your description.

At our end, as fans and acafans, we'll just need to continue to monitor these interactions, critiquing as necessary, but also recognizing possible positive developments. I suppose my ideal situation would be that each "side," fans and producers, could still continue doing their own things without interruption or aggravation (neither side should be beholden to the other), but could still find some spaces for collaboration or at least sharing their texts and viewpoints.

CW: Well said. To sum up, I'd just like to reiterate four quick points we've sort of made already. One is, that in any one of these discussions and/or debates, the "sides" are not a simple dichotomy but multiple and complex, often between and among collective parties. The second is that these parties are composed of real people. For example, both TPTB and Fandom (with a capital F) are made up of individuals with varying perspectives and maybe that's where dialogues and relationships might begin ---between and among individuals who then network with others. Third, that perhaps we aca-fen might provide a bridge to further understanding and cultural negotiation, as critics do between professional artists and their audiences. And finally, this is a good moment in time to develop and advance the dialogue and to support initiatives like Net Neutrality, because the boundaries are becoming more permeable and the shape of the Internet environment is still in flux. Change will come whether we're ready for them or not. It's better to be ready.

Thanks for the conversation, Derek. I enjoyed it.

DK: Those four points are an excellent plan moving forward, and they can all happen now. I'd also emphasize your last point, about the future of the Internet. We (as in all of us) have common interests in maintaining and expanding the openness of this resource, so we need to monitor possible changes carefully, and be prepared to mobilize with others in order to preserve and improve it.

It's been a pleasure, Cynthia, and I look forward to continuing this discussion here and elsewhere.

Answering Questions From a Snowman: The YouTube Debate and Its Aftermath

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman." -- Mitt Romney

I promised some reflections about the YouTube presidential debate almost a week ago but something has kept getting in the way. I almost decided to forget about it but in the past few days, the issue has resurfaced as the Republican candidates are doing a little dance about who will or will not participate in CNN's planned GOP YouTube debate in September. So far, only two Republican candidates have agreed to participate. I've been having fun challenging folks to guess which ones they are. The answer will be later in this post.

Some had predicted that the use of YouTube in a presidential debate was something of a gimmick or a cross-branding opportunity for CNN and Google. It was certainly both of those, but it may represent something more than that, a shift in the nature of public debates in the campaign process as profound in its way as the emergence of the Town Hall Debate format in the 1990s.

Let's consider the classic debate format where established journalists, sworn to some degree of political neutrality, ask candidates questions. This format has some strengths and some limitations. In theory, the questions asked are well informed because the people asking them are focused full time on following the campaign and the candidates and understand what topics are most likely to establish the contrast between the political figures on the stage. At the same time, the questions asked are likely to reflect an "inside the beltway" perspective -- that is, they reflect the world view of a specific political class which may or may not reflect the full range of issues that the American people want addressed.

The process maintains a certain aura around the political process: celebrity journalists ask questions of celebrity politicians in a world totally sealed off from the everyday experience of the voters. One consequence of this format is that the candidates tend to empty the questioner from the equation. One addresses the question; one ignores the person who asks the question.

This construct sounds more "rational" or "neutral" but it also makes it much easier for the candidate to reframe the question to suit their own purposes. There is no penalty for ignoring the motives behind the question because, in the end, the claim is that there are no motives behind the question. This has in the past gotten some political leaders in trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the famous moment while Michael Dukakis was asked how he would respond if his wife was raped and murdered and he offered a fairly bloodless critique of the death penalty as a matter of public policy. The questioner was trying to get at the human side of his perspective on the issue and he got criticized for being cold and calculating, yet the fact that he ignored the human dimensions of the question was in many ways a product of the presumed "neutrality" of the professional debate format.

In the 1990s, an alternative -- the town hall meeting debate -- emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question -- and why they ask it -- is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective -- the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can't get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses -- Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were "individuals" who "made a difference."

What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying "I feel your pain" a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

Clinton recognized early on the emerging paradigm of narrowcasting, using the town hall meeting in relation to specific audiences on specific cable outlets -- for example, African Americans on the Arsenio Hall show, young voters on MTV, or southern voters on the Nashville Network. In each case, he was able to signal his knowledge of specific issues and respect for specific challenges confronting this constituencies. People today remember Clinton playing the sax on late night television; they forget that it came at the end of almost an hour of thoughtful discussion of race and class in America in the wake of Rodney King and the LA Riots at a time when the mainstream media was only interested in asking him about his sex life. No candidate has ever been as effective at Clinton at responding to the particularities of the town hall meeting format but it has emerged as a standard part of the campaign process ever since and for good reason, because there is both symbolic and substantive importance to how well candidates interact with these diverse constituencies.

There are some core limits to this format. The questions come in a context which is deeply intimidating to non-professionals and thus it preserves an aura surrounding the candidates. Only certain kinds of questions get asked because only certain issues are appropriate to this format. The questions get asked with a certain degree of awe even when the voter is skeptical of the answers they are receiving.

So, this brings us to the YouTube format which seems significant in a number of levels. First, the people asking the questions are speaking from their own homes or from other spaces that they have chosen to embody the issues they want the candidates to address. The language is more informal, the questions are more personal, the tone is less reverent, and the result forces the political candidates to alter their established scripts. (And of course, let's not forget the role which CNN played in curating the set of questions presented. I was prepared to trash CNN for playing it safe but in fact, they chose some of the more provocative submissions here and these videos have emerged at the center of the controversy around the debate.)

here were moments early in the YouTube debate where the candidates were sticking to their sound bytes and talking points, despite the very different tone and context of this debate. More than anything else, this called attention to the gap between the ways everyday people speak and the lofty rhetoric of contemporary politics. What seemed relatively natural in a conversation between professionals felt truly disconnected from the YouTube participants. Then, as the evening went along, we saw the candidates one by one step out tentatively and then more assuredly onto thin ice, trying to find a new language by which to express their issues and to form a new relationship to the voters.

We certainly saw signs of the old townhall meeting format both in the style and tone of some of the more "serious minded" questions and in terms of the ways that the candidates were careful to address the person behind the question -- as in the constant salutes to the servicemen. But something else was also occurring, as when Joe Biden offered his relatively acerbic and unguarded perceptions of the gun lover who called his automatic weapon his "baby."

I was fascinated with the exchange about the minimum wage. One of the viewers asked the candidates whether they could and would live on minimum wage as president. Many of them were quick to agree to these terms -- my hopes that this might become a reality have been shattered by the fact that most of the mainstream media never even reported on this round of questions, focusing instead on the more conventional disagreement between Clinton and Obama about whether they would meet with foreign leaders. Chris Dodd won points for his honest response that he couldn't afford to support two college bound offspring on minimum wage, an answer that brought him closer to the level of the average middle class voter. And Obama carried the round by acknowledging that it would relatively easy for people who had money in the bank (not to mention free food and lodging) to live on mimimum wage and something different if you had no resources to fall back on.

By bringing the cameras into their homes, the voters were forcing the candidates to respond to the contexts in which they live. We saw this occur again and again -- not just the well publicized cases of the social workers in Darfur or the cancer patient who removed her wigs, but in the more subtle ways that we get a glimpse of the domestic spaces in the background of most of the videos. The result was a debate which felt closer to the lived experience of voters, which took on some of the informality, intimacy, and humor one associates with YouTube at its best.

To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of the broadcast came when the candidates were asked to submit their own YouTube style videos. Here, we had a chance to see how the campaigns perceived the properties of this new participatory culture. Some of the candidates did embrace the new political language (notably Chris Dodd and John Edwards, who both had fun with public comments about their hair) or tried for a more down to earth style (as in Hillary Clinton's use of hand lettered and hand flipped signs, which unintentionally mirrored the style of one of the user-generated videos on the same program.) Many of the others simply recycled videos produced for broadcast media which came across as too polished for this new context. And Dennis Kucinich, the man who once brought a visual aid to a radio debate, seemed to confuse YouTube for a late night informercial. Oh, well. He demonstrates yet again that he is a nerd, perhaps even a dork, but not a geek.

All of this brings us to the issue of the snowman which seems to have caused Mitt Romney and many of the conservative pundits so much anxiety. Keep in mind that the snowman animation was used to frame a substantive question about global warming. In this case, then, it wasn't what was being asked but how it was being asked or who was asking it that posed a challenge to establishment sensibilities. The snowman spot was a spoof of the whole process of having the questioner embody the issue and the whole ways in which children as used as foils for political rhetoric, as figures for imagined or dreaded futures for the society at large.

But it also represented a shift away from embodying issues and towards dramatizing them. I was surprised we didn't see more or this -- more use of video montages or projected images in the background, illustrating the topics in a way that went beyond what could be done by a live person standing in an auditorium during a live debate. I suspect we will see more such videos in future debates because they show the full potential of this new format. Now, keep in mind that political leaders have never had any problem dramatizing issues during their own campaign advertisements -- even the use of personification or animation would not be that unusual in the history of political advertisements. Such images have long been seen as appropriate ways for campaigns to address voters, so why should they be seen as inappropriate as a means of voters to question candidates?

From the start, it had been predicted that Democrats would fare better in this new format than Republicans, just as historically they have fared better in the town hall meeting format. This format is consistent with the populist messages that are adopted by many Democratic politicians and the format itself seems to embody a particular conception of America which emerges from Identity politics (though, as my example of the way Reagan used something similar to focus on individual rather than governmental response, suggests that this is simply one of many ways that this format might be framed). So, is it any surprise that Romney and other GOP candidates are developing cold feet about appearing in this much more unpredictable format.

Not surprisingly, while Romney and Guiliani have been pulling back, McCain is pushing ahead. This approach is closer to the old "Straight Talk Express" bus that he used 8 years ago than anything he had embraced in this campaign cycle. Right now, the guy needs a miracle just to stay in a race and perhaps being willing to engage with the public via new media may represent the best way to set himself apart from the other frontrunners. The other GOP candidate embracing the format is Ron Paul, the former Libertarian Party candidate, and the Republican who so far seems to be have a much stronger base of support online than off, in part because the web offers more traction for low budget campaigns and anti-establishment figures.

Within the GOP, the debate about YouTube debates is shaping into a referendum about the role of web 2.0 in the political process. Here's how Time sums up the issues:

Patrick Ruffini, a G.O.P. online political strategist, wrote on his blog: "It's stuff like this that will set the G.O.P. back an election cycle or more on the Internet." Democratic consultants are rubbing their hands together at being able to portray their general election rivals as being -- as one put it to me -- "afraid of snowmen" or simply ignorant of techonologies that many Americans use on a daily basis. Indeed, Governor Romney today, in the context of evincing concern over Internet predators, supported that suspicion: "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000," he said, mistaking the debate co-sponsor for the social network MySpace, which has recently done a purge of sex offenders from its rolls.

Hmmm. MySpace, YouTube, what's the difference?

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series from Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad). In the first section, she described the context in which Russian-language fandom operates including consideration of issues of intellectual property, translation, and the relationship of fandom to other changes in Russian culture in the post-Cold War era. In this next section, she deals directly with various forms of fan creative expression and the picture she paints shows both strong parallels to western fan culture but also significant differences. For those of you who are just coming to the blog through links on one or another Harry Potter fan site, you might be interested to check out my own thoughts about Harry Potter fan culture from earlier this summer.

"Professor Snape's Dungeons"

Translation was also one of the channels for fan fiction to find its way into Russian Harry Potter fandom: in 2001 fandom was mostly discussing the available four novels and their Russian versions, but by 2002 it already was busy reading at least two competing translations of Cassandra Claire's then work in progress, The Draco Trilogy. 'People's Translation' were among the first sites to open a fan fiction section, which hosted both translated fic and the infamous Harry Potter and Phoenix from the Order - written by the author named Constance Ice, this work is considered to be the first honest-to-Merlin Harry Potter fan fiction written in the Russian language (yet some claim that this title belongs to Harry Potter and the Order of the Broom, a parody fic posted by an anonymous author at Harry Potter Research Institute).

Approximately at the same time, a number of Snape fans joined efforts and started an on-line role playing game, which went on for a number of years at a site called 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'. The game's central character, Severus Snape - a brooding, Byronic hero - was mostly busy saving the world at various points in history and all damsels in distress he could find along the way. In the end, Professor Snape (or S.S., as he is referred to throughout the game) 'rebuilds the Tower of Babylon and finds Light'. This massive on-line project featured not only the text itself, but also some skillful artwork, analytical materials and carefully-collected soundtrack. The project also clearly outgrew itself: in 2003 the game, complete with sounds and fanart, was privately published as a set of 3 multimedia disks, and 2005 marked the appearance of a very impressive velvet-bound volume, Liber Lux et Tenebrae.

The picture below shows the book (part I) in its dust cover, and a random artwork spread; a curious reader will also make out the characters' names, which, for some reason, were left in English.

There are three reasons I am mentioning this project here: firstly, it included most of the fandom's big names of then (and of now); secondly, it set another mark as far as the tradition of publishing fan fiction is concerned; and thirdly, long before the appearance of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince it established a very specific interpretation of the character of Severus Snape - the one that would gradually become all but canonic for a multitude of Russian Snape fans, even though they might have never heard of 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'.

The Shock of Slash

By 2003 fandom was already flourishing: it thrived on sites and forums; it was writing and translating fan fiction; it had its own version of the infamous Restricted Section; and it had discovered slash. As many other fannish concepts, the concept of slash came as is: through reading and translating of Western fan fiction and analytical materials. The new genre immediately acquired both dedicated followers and avid haters, and while it would be wrong to say that it split fandom in two, it did cause some distress along the way. Some people never caught up, and the general level of intolerance to slash and queer readings of the source text is still higher in Russian-language fandom than in English-language one. Intolerance in fandom comes from intolerance in society: until 1991, homosexuality had been a criminal offence; no wonder many still consider 'queer' offensive, the ban might have been lifted, but little has been done to promote tolerance and understanding. Slash in Russia is not taken for granted and in most cases requires a very open mind set from its readers, but in the end of the day, it does help to change personal attitude to queer people outside fandom, thus performing this huge educational function that might not be central to this genre as it is perceived by English-speaking fans.

It was not only slash that came into Russian-language fandom through translating fan fiction and participating in English-language communities: most of the terms (in/out of character, Mary Sue, hurt/comfort, etc.), popular pairings and pairing names (Pumpkin Pie; Snape/Hermione; Harry/Draco), clichés and ideas were also borrowed almost instantaneously. In October 2003, in the steps of Nimbus 2003, the first-ever Harry Potter fancon, the Institute of European Cultures at the Russian State Humanitarian University organized an unofficial academic Harry Potter event for adults, entitled Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the Philosopher's Chamber. No more than forty people gathered for the conference, most of them were presenters, only three people were presenting on the issues of fandom (the rest were deconstructing canon) and only two were not from Moscow. A very subdued and, at the same time, fascinating event, it still remains the only Harry Potter conference of its kind ever held in Russia. This past spring a number of Snape fans did gather in St. Petersburg to discuss their favorite character and present some few papers on the subject, but the event was not exactly advertised or open.

Russians And Global Fan Culture

While fan fiction and translation are thriving, and even vidding has recently become very popular, fanart is virtually non-existent in the Russian Harry Potter fandom. Those Russian-language artists who create something of interest prefer to participate in English-language communities for want of greater audience and appreciation: they may speak Russian or be physically located in Russia, but in reality they do not belong to this particular national fandom. Fans, on the other hand, troll foreign sites and communities for art they like and therefore do not really have the need for fanart that is produced 'domestically'. Since not everybody can speak English and thus navigate a foreign fanart site, since 'art belongs to people' and 'everything belongs to everybody on the Internet anyways', until very recently it has been a common practice to share your findings with your part of fandom; normally, the sharing would take the form of mass hotlinking, which brought the wrath of several well-known foreign artists on Russian fandom in general.

Russian fans are gradually catching up with essential netiquette, but sometimes still forget to ask when taking a fan fic for translation, for example: the most recent scandal involving translated fan fiction and Russian fans revolved around the 'table of proposed translations' that somebody had fished out off fanrus.com forums. A more detailed account of the run-in can be found here. It is fascinating how quickly Western fandom assumes the position of copyright holders whose rights have been violated and starts issuing C&D disclaimers in Russian against possible offenders. On the other side of the conflict, many of community moderators and site owners who cater to Russian-language fandom try to enforce the ask-first-translate-later and no-hotlinking rules to the best of their ability, and explain as clearly that 'grassroots communism' does not really apply to the way fandom operates on-line. In general, however, Russian fans still exercise more collective ownership towards the texts they are fannish about - be it canon or fan fiction: much as translation is a Pavlovian reaction to any text in foreign language (for a variety of reasons, including the language teaching methods practiced in Russia), taking and sharing with their own is a similar type of reaction to any text or piece of art that we are fascinated with; and in this respect translation is central to Russian fandom as it is the ultimate act of possession and making something one's own, domesticating it.

Potter-Mouthed Jokes

So far, the only popular fannish practice in Russian fandom that falls outside the pattern of translating, role-playing, or borrowing is telling various jokes about characters from canon: a practice that has deep historical roots, since jokes have always been an integral part of people's popular narrative in this country, and there is hardly a historical figure, popular character, or politician who hasn't made it into joke. In fact, it is considered that one has not become truly popular until there are jokes made about them. One of such popular Potter-related jokes takes on the connection between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter:

"Frodo throws The One Ring into the flames. He exhales deeply and turns to go, as a bespectacled boy on a broomstick sweeps by, clutching something in his fist. 'Got' ya!' shouts Harry Potter with glee."

Another joke explores the complex relationship in the house of Malfoys, raising the theme of infidelity:

"'Narcissa, a couple of words'

'Yes, Lucius?'

'Avada Kedavra!'"

There are countless of other jokes: some original, some of them versions of older jokes with names substituted to fit new canon, some of them popularized sentences from various collections of quotes from badfics. Every fan fiction site nowadays hosts a collection of Potter-related jokes, those jokes are frequently exchanged between fans both on- and off-line constitute a powerful comic relief device: a number of Book Seven jokes are already circulating among the disappointed fans.

Parody is another 'specialty' of the Russian Harry Potter fandom and industry. In fan fiction, 'crack fics' (humorous stories exploring this or that fannish cliché) are a more common occurrence here than there are in the West, and source text parody is not unheard of: by some accounts, it was exactly the parody of the yet unwritten Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that became the first ever fan fiction written in Russian for this fandom. A more curious - and somewhat transcending fandom - case is presented when we look at the Harry Potter parodies that are published professionally in this country. There are several books written in the recent years that position themselves as 'anti-Harry Potter' or 'Harry Potter for Russians', yet there are only two whose authors claim parodies: the Porry Gatter series and Tanya Grotter.

The Strange Case of Tanya Grotter

Although Porry Gatter may not strike just everybody as particularly witty or funny, that it is a parody there can be no doubt; it is Tanya Grotter, first written in 2002 by Dmitry Yemetz and published by EKSMO publishing house that raised serious concerns of J.K. Rowling's representatives both in Russia and abroad. While there are numerous jokes in the text, Tanya Grotter does look more like a re-write, not unlike those by Volkov or Tolstoy: the first two Tanya Grotter books repeat the corresponding volumes of the original Harry Potter series verbatim, only the school of magic is located in Russia and the main character is a Russian girl. ROSMAN publishing house had initiated linguistic expertise of the text, which concluded that Tanya Grotter was a plagiarized version of Harry Potter, yet EKSMO dismissed all allegations, and no domestic legal action taken against them had ever been completed. EKSMO and Yemetz had to stand trial, however, when they made an attempt to translate the book and sell it abroad. The 2003 trial in the Netherlands ruled copyright infringement and banned the book from being sold outside Russia. Later Tanya Grotter books bore little resemblance to the original series, Yemetz continued in this stead for a couple of more years and eventually started a new series about a different character.

The story of Tanya Grotter doesn't end here: During the years this book has acquired a small fandom of its own - in parts, it overlaps with Harry Potter fandom (in a sense that a fan of Tanya Grotter is almost always a fan of Harry Potter as well, and the sites that cater for Harry Potter normally have a section dedicated to Tanya Grotter), in parts, it establishes its own presence, but it does exist and it does produce fantext. This past spring EKSMO publishing house had selected several of Tanya Grotter fan fics for publication and printed them in one bound volume that was released under the general umbrella of Tanya Grotter franchise. Whether or not the authors of fan fics were asked or informed about this is still unclear: when confronted about that during the Q&A session held in one of the stores, EKSMO representatives immediately proceeded to answering the other question. Moreover, the fics were published as is - that is, no editing had been done, out of context, and with no introduction save for small blurb (along the lines of 'fan fiction is fiction written by fans') on the cover. The book was thrashed by critics and not embraced by fans: a failure by all accounts, but a fine and interesting conclusion of a long-established tradition of published fan fiction in Russia.

Postscript

As I am writing this, the Russian Harry Potter fandom is still in uproar. The anticipation had been extremely charged and with the arrival of the final installment, tensions ran even higher. Some hated the new book, some denied its existence to the point of publicly burning their copy (this last movement raised a little wave of both approval and outrage of its own), yet most of us loved it. Many got their books lining up with other fans at midnight in bookstores across the world: I myself had extended my stay in the U.S. until July 22nd and invited my best friend so we could join the party and get the long-awaited copies. There was a feeling of 'being in this together', and in this respect - despite complicated translation games, the history of publishing the 'unpublishable', the 'art belongs to people' that still governs our attitude to all things fannish - we are not much different from all other Harry Potter fans across the world, not really. We would also like to join all other fans across the world and wish both J.K. Rowling and Harry a very happy birthday:

С Днем Рождения, Гарри и тетя Ро! Спасибо за книгу!

***

For more information on the history of Russian-language fandom in general, see fanhistory: it really is a fantastic resource for those who are curious about further details and want to know whether their fandom is represented in Russia. The site is in English.

I also encourage the members of other national fandom to take a look at the new project, fanlinguistics, and contribute to its development.

I would like to thank my speedy betas and everybody who has participated in this somewhat lengthy discussion of the mysterious ways of the Russian Harry Potter fandom. I would also like to thank Henry for this opportunity to talk about my fandom, and for his patience: this article should have seen light long ago.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part One)

In honor of J.K. Rowling's birthday, I will begin the week by running a two part series about Harry Potter fandom in Russia, written by Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad), where she is completing her doctorate. It is perhaps fitting that the last time I saw Ksenia, we were both waiting in line together at the MIT COOP bookstore around midnight, waiting for the clerks to pass us our eagerly awaited copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. When I got my copy, I wandered off into the night in a daze and forgot to say goodbye. My wife and I took our his and hers copies back to Senior Haus with us and climbed into the hammock we have in our backyard, reading by flashlight as late into the night as we could muster, and then waking up at the first daylight to push on through. Our son was nice enough to bring us meals so we could shut out the entire world and just immerse ourselves into Rowling's world. And I am happy to say that we finished the books before the day was over.

Upon returning to Russia, Ksenia has sent me a long awaited series of blog posts describing what she calls Russian Language Harry Potter fandom. It's a fascinating account of what cultural theorists like to call glocalization -- suggesting that while Harry Potter is read around the world, local conditions of production and reception, including in this case especially issues around copyright and translation, shape how it gets read and in what contexts. Ksenia's first installment takes us through the history of Lord of the Rings fandom in her country which in many ways set the stage for what happened with the Potter books and then discusses the centrality of translation to sustaining and energizing the fan culture. (Of course, it helps that Ksenia's primary research background is in translation studies.) Next time, we will get deeper into fan fiction and other forms of fan cultural production in Russia.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom

by Ksenia Prassolova

The first thing that should be said about Russian fandom is that it exists. It may come as a surprising and as a somewhat baffling statement, but not many people within English-language fandom realize that fandom is an international phenomenon, and even those who do understand the international part would still cling to the "exotic" image of Russia that doesn't really go together with something as native to the Western grassroots culture as fandom. Truth is, however, that ever since the Iron Curtain fell Russia has been doing its damnedest to catch up with the West: legally, politically, and culturally; new values were both imposed from the top and picked up eagerly by the young people who didn't exactly want to associate themselves with the Soviet past and had no romantic recollections of it.

Because both the concept of fandom and its practices were borrowed as is, what we now know as 'Russian fandom' is not, on a general level, that different from its American counterpart. Demographically, we share the same patterns: people of both sexes and of all ages discuss canon, those who are involved in writing fan fiction are mostly female (according to anecdotal accounts), and those who write slash are almost exclusively female. Most discussions and creative work used to concentrate on several sites and forums, but with mass migration to blogs Russians moved to livejournal.com and diary.ru (a Russian blogging facility). In fact, in Russia we rarely even call our fandom 'Russian', we call it 'Russian-language', because this implies that fandom is a universal concept that merely varies to a larger or lesser degree from one national 'incarnation' to another. Harry Potter fan fiction posted on hogwartsnet.ru is very similar to that posted on fanfiction.net - genres, clichés, slash and all; fanart is scarce, but fanvids created by Russians are pretty similar those created in the West; we do have ship wars just like everybody else and just like everybody else we were eager to find out whether Snape was good or evil.

I would be very far from truthful, though, if I said that there were absolutely no differences between the way fandom works in Russia and the way it works in the English-language community, borrowed concept or no. The differences are firmly in place and are due to a combination of historic, linguistic and cultural factors. In this post I will try to concentrate on the most notable of them. I will be mostly talking about the Harry Potter fandom, since this is the one I have first-hand knowledge of, yet one has to start somewhere, and in 'our' beginning there was Tolkien. The beginning, however, didn't happen until 1975.

Tolkien Apocrypha

Fandom-wise, Lord of the Rings was for Russians what Star Trek was for Americans. It also happened much later, and the gap between the emergence of canon and appearance of consolidated fannish activity around this canon was much wider in case of Lord of the Rings in Russia. This canon that started them all entered the Soviet scene gradually and in a most fascinating way. The first Russian translation of Lord of the Ringswas started in 1975 by A. Gruzberg, a linguist from Perm, and appeared in 1978; the entire trilogy was written by hand and was only available to friends and acquaintances of the translator. Later on it was transported to Leningrad, where it was published in Samizdat in 1981 (source). The first attempt at official translation followed shortly - in 1982 - and was comprised of two books, The Hobbit and The Fellowship, translated by by V. Muravjev and A.Kistjakovsky. This translation was abandoned, and the official Russian version of the trilogy was only published as late as 1990. By the time it happened the trilogy had already acquired a fair number of followers (those responsible for the non-official translations, for one) who would engage in a variety of fannish activities: from song and poetry writing to live action role playing games, which became extremely popular among the fans. In fact, the Hobbit Games of the beginning 1990-s were so well known that 'being fannish' is still associated with role-playing and Lord of the Rings in certain circles of fandom.

There are many reasons for Lord of the Rings to have become popular when it did in the Soviet Union and - later - the new Russian Federation. It was the only source of its kind available to Russians at that time: while the Soviet readers had enjoyed the long and rich tradition of science-fiction and gathered around what was known as KLFs (Clubs of Science-Fiction Readers), the genre of fantasy was relatively new. With it came new feelings and new attitude to the source text: I am not saying that the possibility of escapism was the only reason Tolkien's work became popular with Russian readers, but the bread lines of the late 80-s and early 90-s definitely were part of the equation. Apart from role-playing games, the fans of Tolkien would write verses and songs, learn Elven languages, and write what they called 'apocrypha': fan fiction that fell under the category of alternative history or alternative universe. By that time fan fiction had already been widely known abroad, and Western fandom started the colonization of the Internet, but international cross-fandom communication was scarce, and the name for this practice was re-invented rather than borrowed. The term 'fan fiction' has later been re-introduced into the Russian fandom, and there is now a lot of confusion as to whether 'apocrypha' are, in fact, fan fiction or fall into some specific category of fan writing. The debate continues, and no definite conclusion has been reached.

"Art Belongs to People"

An even more interesting question arises when we examine how those apocrypha/fan fiction works were distributed or, really, published before the Internet came along. Again, let us consider the history: the oft-cited quote of Vladimir Lenin's, "Art Belongs to People" pretty much determined the attitude to common cultural property in the Soviet Union. Communism in general (in its part where private property was dismissed) and that 'art belongs to people' motto in particular, became a convenient excuse for translating and/or re-writing ideologically safe yet culturally important content from the West. Two most notable examples of re-writing original content under the new name were Volkov's Wizard of the Emerald City trilogy, based on the Wizard of Oz, and Alexei Tolstoy's Buratino, based on Pinocchio (both published in 1936).

The interesting thing about the two was that although original creators were credited in the books and the tales were more translations than re-writes, their covers still bore those Russian authors' names. Many Russian kids, me included, first learned that there had been some Western original only long after reading the stories themselves, or never learned at all. In other, not as dire, cases the translators would get if not all, but at least as much credit as original creators. Thus, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Russians would distinguish between 'Zakhoder's Alice', 'Nabokov's Anya' and 'Carroll's Alice in Wonderland', the latter being a common referral to a bunch of academic translations.

This mindset, in which culture was considered a common good for everybody to benefit from, held fast and strong even after the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention 1793. Moreover, the 70-s and the 80-s brought the flourishing of 'Samizdat' - a non-official publishing and distribution network reserved for rare and censored literary and research content. Samizdat took many forms, from almost professional copying and binding to photographing pages and distributing the resulting pictures. Although Samizdat was a full-bodied publishing and distribution network for the underground, it was mostly used to deal with 'serious', 'original' content. Thus, while fans were able to write and share stories between themselves, they were - for the most part - unable to turn their individual networks into fanzine production because they simply didn't have the access to the necessary equipment. When the 90-s came, and suddenly the market was flooded with start-ups looking for profit, it was only logical that some fans sought to bring fan fiction to the printing press. Profit was, of course, as much of a consideration for those fans as the lack of an adequate fannish distribution network. By that time, the laws had been changed (and the new legislation had been adopted - almost verbatim - from the West), yet the values stayed, so the new publishing houses didn't think twice when presented with an opportunity to publish work based on popular sources.

The first fan fiction published in post-Soviet Russia was a collection of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories from the Novossibirsk society of Conan Doyle fans. This precedent, the lack of fannish distribution network, and a certain disregard for the new law lead to the appearance of a far more curious publication: Nick Perumov's Ring of Darkness - a novel-length fan fic set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Here is what Nick himself has to say on the process of publication:

"On October 16, 1991 , the contract on my book was signed with "Kavkazskaya biblioteka" publishing house. Royalties for my book amounted to a huge for that time sum of 75000 rubles, calculated according to the norms of Writers' Union . Many times I was asked one and the same question, how it could be possible for an unknown writer to be published without any connexions in the publishing house; be published in the period of total collapse and food cards. Now, ten years later I can't give the proper answer. I guess that such a phantastic affairs was possible due to the chaos and disturbance of early 1990s. Another favourable moment was in 1996, it was the First boom of the Russian fantastics. Anyways, "The Ring of Darkness" then caled "Pescending of Darkness" was published in "Kavkazskaya biblioteka". How it could have happend is another pair of shoes. " ( source)

It is interesting that while the content of Perumov's published fan fic is still a subject of fierce debate among Tolkien fans and followers, the legality of the publication is rarely questioned, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no legal action against Mr. Perumov or his publishing house(s); moreover, his Tolkien-based novels are still popular and are re-printed on a regular basis. The initial 1993 publication set another precedent, and other Lord of the Rings fan fiction shortly followed after The Ring of Darkness, most notable of them, of course, is Black Book of Arda - a Silmarillion-inspired alternative universe that tells the story of Arda from the point of view of its Evil.

As of the end of 1990-s Russian fans migrated to the Internet en masse. Shortly after that we finally caught up with Harry Potter, and then it was about translation all over again.

Potter Comes to Russia

First published in Britain in 1997, Harry Potter only appeared in Russian in 2000: Maria Spivak founded the 'Harry Potter Research Institute' (formerly located at www.harrypotter.ru) and posted the Russian translations of books one and two; Pauline started the 'People's Translation Project' and her team came up with their version of book one; and, finally, ROSMAN publishing house hired Igor Oransky to create the official version of the first book in Russian. Of all three translations, it was the official that was the sloppiest in its quality and latest in its arrival: by the time it was published fandom had already finished reading Spivak's rendition of Chamber of Secrets. Thus, two things happened in 2000: ROSMAN had lost the moment forever, and translation games began.

ROSMAN could not account for the relative unpopularity of Harry Potter in Russia (compared to the Potter-craze that took over the world, the success of this book in our country was modest at best) and kept changing translators: Oransky was dismissed after book one, and Marina Litvinova, a well-known Shakespearian scholar and a professional translator herself, was hired to work on books two through four. Of the three volumes she had translated, only The Prisoner of Azkaban did not receive annual mock award for the worst translation (Chamber of Secrets) or the worst editing job (Goblet of Fire). After it became known that Litvinova had not translated book four, but instead turned it into a seminar for her students (effectively letting her students translate it for her), a scandal broke out and ROSMAN was forced to change translators yet again. This time, Viktor Golyshev, Vladimir Bobkov, Leonid Motylev - all famous for their work as translators of sci-fi classics - were asked to do the job. They did a fine enough rendition of book five, but didn't linger for book six: to translate Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, ROSMAN invited Sergey Ilyin, who was best known for his fantastic work with Nabokov's texts and Maya Lakhuti - a very talented translator of children's literature. Again, this team did a good job and a decent translation, but by that time it had already been six books too late.

The People's Translation Project

In the meantime, fandom was eagerly looking for flaws in official versions and engaging in translation projects of their own. Inspired by Maria Spivak, the 'People's Translation Project', high regard for translators in our country and the nagging 'I can do that, too' feeling, fans started to create both individual (Fleur, Yuri Machkasov) and collective (Snitch, The Phoenix Team, Harry-Hermione.net, HP Christmas Forum) translation projects, and by the time Half-blood Prince was released in Russia in December 2005, there had already been nine (sic!) independent translations on the Web, some of them completed not a week after the July 16 release of the English version. When the final Harry Potter book leaked five days before the official release, a new translation project made it their goal to have the initial job done by July 21.They succeded, which sets a curious record: an amateur translation appears before official translators' names are announced. This is a new project, too, the one that has not been working on any of the previous Potter installments. We already know of at least four projects that are continuing their work, and of two projects that have just started with book seven, and it is safe to assume there will be more of them. Understandably, amateur translation is a widely discussed phenomenon, and two main questions arise in all discussions: that of legality and that of quality.

Under the provisions of article 19 (p.2) of Federal Copyright Law, translation is 'fair use' as long as it is done for educational purposes and the length - or amount - of the translation suits the immediate educational need. That is, I can use Harry Potter in classroom during my 'Theory and Practice of Translation' class, but I am not supposed to have my students translate the entire series. One can, however, justify translating the entire book for the purpose of self-education: in fact, I know of at least three individuals who did translate books five and six to learn English better, and succeeded. While you can, arguably, translate books one through seven and get away with it, you can not share the result of your work. As of 2003, representatives of J.K.Rowling have been sending out C&D letters to various translation-related sites, which always resulted in the removal of translations from public view. At this point, however, sending C&D letters is like trying to stop an avalanche: the amateur translation projects multiply against all odds. For a number of reasons (the poor quality of the official translation; its late arrival; the translation tradition in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; a growing number of Russians with a fair command of foreign languages; etc.), translation has become one of the games fandom plays: it is now as integral part of what we do as fans as fan fiction, fan art, filking or creating fanvids. In fact, once the name of the project, 'people's translation' is now a name of the practice that spread across fandoms: it applies to any fan translation project, in which not one, but several individuals are doing a fast collaborative translation and editing work. Normally, there would be 10 to 20 people working on a translation, the same people would then beta-read and edit each other's work, then a draft version would be compiled, which goes to the final editing and proof-reading performed by one or two individuals - usually those who are in charge of the project. It is their job to ensure smooth communication on the forum, to find substitutes if one or more of the translators have dropped out, and to mediate conflicts; and whether the team produces quality results depends on the leader.

People engage in amateur translation for various reasons: some want to improve their English, some want to improve the overall quality of the Russian Potterverse, some find that translation is a good way to participate in fandom. Whatever the reason, the issue of the quality of the result is quite important. The thing that is important to understand here is that not all amateur translation is done by amateurs. Many of the fan translators I know are also professional translators in their non-fannish lives, so they, at least, know what they are doing. As shown by Oransky and Litvinova, it is not always that a professional translator will produce good results: one also needs dedication and fascination with the source, and fans do tend to have those aplenty, so when it does come down to amateurs doing the job, their lack of skill or knowledge is often compensated by extensive teamwork, networking and overflowing enthusiasm. The results vary from 'extremely unreadable' or 'unfinished' to 'way better than the official', and each non-English-reading fan often finds themselves supporting this or that amateur translation. The choice has to be made, for instance, when writing fan fiction - because names are translated differently - or when just discussing the source text: it is considered traditional in our fandom to stick with one or the other translation and defend it against the opponents when the time comes. Nowadays there is a growing number of people who prefer reading the original and are able to do that, but some of them, too, fall into temptation and either side with one project or start their own.

Most of those translation projects exist online and do not overstep the boundaries of fandom. To date, there are only two exceptions from this general rule: a translation of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, made by the Snitch project, which was stolen from the translators, printed in Latvia and sold in Belarus a couple of months before the official Russian release; and a fan-made Russian version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, printed, bound and distributed in Israel. The appearance of the latter is especially curious if one takes into account the fact that neither of Rowling's Comic Relief books has been translated officially: the only two existing versions available to Russian-language readers come from the People's Translation project and that unknown Israeli source. The pictures below show the comparison of the spread and cover of the fake (top) and real (bottom) editions of Half-blood Prince.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part Two): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea

Issue Three: Race, Nation, Sexual Orientation, and Fandom Derecho: In Round Three, Part One, Robin Reid wrote, "nobody's mentioning 'race,' ethnicity, sexuality, not even as an 'academic' project or area of analysis." I'd like to investigate these topics within fandom from an autobiographical perspective, but I hope that you'll jump in (and others will, too, in the Comments section) and contribute your own analyses, either autobiographical or not, of these issues.

I'm Filipino-American, first generation (though I usually call it Gen 1.5, b/c we moved to the U.S. when I was three years old), and from the start, my media fandom was informed by (inter)nationalism and race. The Philippines was a colony of the U.S. from 1898 through 1946, and U.S. media has long been extraordinarily popular and influential in Filipino culture. My older siblings were avid fans of Star Trek, The Big Valley, The Green Hornet, Wild, Wild West, and other syndicated U.S. TV shows for years before they stepped foot in the U.S. Star Trek was singled out by my family as our totem show, and I'm certain that for young Asian children, engaging deeply with an American TV show about long-distance travel, and a U.S.(S.) starship where there was assumed equality not only between races and sexes, but between humans and aliens, plus the fact that one of the featured characters was Asian (Sulu) and another was Asian-esque (Spock), factored into their enthusiasm for emigrating to America. Popular media was the first way that my three brothers and two sisters understood the U.S., and media continued to guide our decisions (we decided to move to L.A. because of Disneyland, of course) and to inform how we navigated U.S. society and culture. I grew up in a very racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood, and pop culture was my go-to resource when encountering difference (when you're six years old and you eat different foods than the kid next door and you can't pronounce each other's last names correctly and you don't understand the languages that your respective parents speak, all you've got is your Raiders of the Lost Ark Atari game, and that counts for a great deal). A lot of recent Filipino and Filipino-American media productions address (directly or indirectly) the huge role that American media plays in Filipino/American life, and U.S. sci-fi/fantasy in particular has deep roots in Fil/Am culture. I am eager to write a substantial piece on how American sci-fi influences the immigrant imaginary, both before and after immigration, because there's something deeply poetic and simultaneously troubling about how a media text like Star Trek can offer first-generation Americans so much hope and so many advantages, some of which turn out to be real, and some of which turn out to be cruelly illusory.

As for my experiences of race and sexual orientation in fandom: I must say that it's wonderful to enjoy fanfic that ships non-white/interracial (sometimes non-human/interspecies) pairings, just as it is to enjoy fic about same-sex ships. I've never read slash fic (amazing, I know, but true), but I am a fan of some fem-slash, and some of my favorite ships involve non-white characters. And why did I write that "it's wonderful to enjoy" such fics? Not only because experiencing pleasure from stories (or from anything) is terrific, but because, as a non-white person, I am asked so often to identify with white characters, to feel deeply for them and become attached to their psyches and emotions, that I think it is important for fan producers (whether white or not, whether in fic or vids or any other genre) to play around with diversity, and allow fans ample opportunity to cross-identify, and to find pleasure in those cross-identifications, occasionally in the way that I *have* to all the time. Because fan productions are where marginal characters and marginal or non-canonical pairings can get lots of play, plenty of "airtime," loads of attention, analysis, interpretation, dissection. And I think when I, a straight woman, find myself identifying with a female character who feels desire for another woman, that (for me) non-normative desire teaches me to be more humane, because I can be more sympathetic with lesbian desire irl. And I think when a white person finds himself or herself identifying with non-white characters, that can teach him or her to be more humane as well. I may be overestimating the power of both desire and identification to change people's deeply embedded knee-jerk beliefs about people who are not of their race or sexual orientation. But I want to make the point that fan productions are about play and emotional affect, and I think that irrational and subconscious biases about race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation will more easily dissipated through play and affect than through official channels of education, or through any legal measure that censors speech. Fan productions have the power to liberate people from the prison of their "normal" desires. Fans' enthusiasm for concentrating on the abnormal and marginalized, their eagerness to develop the minor characters and to explore potential (but as-yet-unrealized) pairings, gives them a special and wonderful power, which I hope more and more fans use. Fan productions will not be sufficient to save the world from irrational prejudice, but they can possibly play a vital role in expanding the worldviews of individual consumers of their works.

McCrea: I come from a mixed-language background grew up in a number of different places - and I'm very much a subscriber to the notion that media fandom creates cross-cultural forms of communication by which people can inter-relate, as I had to negotiate different languages at an early age. To this day, I find a strange affinity with cartoons in languages I cannot understand; what is left is a supersurface of images, sights and experiences that have to be read physically before they can come in culturally. This has translated with a continuing fascination with say, music videos from the Middle East or European community television. All you have is aesthetics, until the language begins to sink in. So it was through these sliding layers of aesthetics that media gender became a bit unstuck for me early on; there was no one image of men or women by which to grow up around and reflect, but many across different culture and countries; there was the weird obsession of the English with the quasi-mythical Jimmy Somerville, the bizarre fixation of the French on Serge Gainsbourg and the Australian adoration of Paul Hogan. Culture was a costume play; nothing could be truly 'genuine' because everything seemed so cultural and staged early on. And so fandom was always underwritten by a search for not so much identity, but citizenship. The idea of a nostalgia without a origin-place (as I've talked about with reference to Jiwon Ahn's article on manga and anime) is very dear to me in that sense. This is not to suggest anything as severe as Brian Benben's character in the 90s show Dream On, who could only relate to the world through semblences to Gilda, Hogan's Heroes and Gilligan's Island. Moreso a deference to the situations of fandom in order to know where you were in the first place. Like many teenagers of the time, something clicked in me when I was first exposed to the hyperviolence of Manga Entertainment's first wave of video releases in the West - an event which is yet to be unpacked properly - although I have just began to read Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination by Anne Allison which looks spectacular in that regard.

I've never delved into the world of fan-fiction much, simply because my chosen fandoms probably don't inspire people to write - I came into science-fiction too late and the spectre of happening across slash fiction always chased me off the proverbial reserve. I spent some time going along to events such as live callback screenings such as those for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blues Brothers or more recently, Showgirls and Starship Troopers, and found that this kind of hyperkinetic cross-text fandom was closer to how I saw and felt my way through media. Comic fandom is interesting in this regard, because so many of those who regularly read comics consider themselves able to participate, or are actively participating in the culture by writing, drawing, putting out zines, websites - to a large extent, being a comics fan (or say, RPG player) requires a depth participation model. A marginal but highly pertinent practice is Youtube Poop, which is highly condensed, lowest-common-denominator video mashups using lowest possible grade source material (full-motion video clips from bad video games and television spin-offs) until you're left with something that chases a notion of zero-sum fandom. A show, a feeling, but little else. Its now a cottage genre on Youtube, populated by a cadre of master poopers and a few dozen more wannabees (myself included). What I like about this type of fandom is that the anarchy of media sensations is immediately registerable.

Derecho: Before I riff on your excellent insights, I just want to clarify something about my earlier post. I'd like to state, for the record, that I am well aware that there is a lot of stereotyping, exoticizing and sexualizing of Otherness in fandom and fan productions; of course, as with all cultural creations, many authors infuse their works with bias and prejudice. And we all know that fan texts are not always resistant (as several participants in this discussion have already mentioned), but often reproduce existing social conditions. However, beyond the "many" and "often" are some very interesting opportunities for cross-identification and perspective-shifting in fandom.

I really enjoy your ideas of "culture as a costume play" and "nostalgia without an origin-place" b/c they are so counter (and complementary) to analyses like Paddy Scannell's, Jesús Martin-Barbero's, John Ellis's, and John Hartley's, which all emphasize mass media as the site of national identity. "Television is one of the prime sites upon which a given nation is constructed for its members," Hartley wrote 30 years ago, and Martin-Barbero (about 20 years ago) wrote about communication technologies allowing "a space of identification," providing "the experience of encounter and of solidarity" with fellow citizens. Of course, all of these ideas build on Anderson's notion of imagined communities (so widely accepted that I think the phrase no longer needs quotation marks). But what do we make of the international, cross-language, queer-identification fandoms? We who know fandom know that the idea that U.S. mass culture permeating other national cultures is not a one-way street; many nations' media are reaching other nations' audiences and finding fans. Witness the rise of Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, and more to come next season) and BBC comedies and reality shows (Footballers' Wives, The Office, Pop Idol) being repackaged and "Americanized" - "glocalized," as Yeidy Rivero and others say - for U.S. networks. I'm intimidated even by the notion of a project that would attempt to quantify how much influence Japanese media has had on American youth culture in the last 20 years (although that project probably does exist and is being carried out successfully as I type this). Does this mean that media production is a new global currency, that "cultural capital" is rivaling other kinds of capital (and cultural capital definitely translates into financial capital, media products being of supreme importance to national export revenues)? And where does this currency market leave countries that are net-importers of media? It's interesting that the U.S. is no longer holding the only hypodermic needle, but does that mean we should throw out every aspect of the needle model because of that? India, Japan, China, Britain, and Colombia (and other Latin American nations) are now major exporters of media; are these nations affecting other national cultures in the same way that the U.S. did during its long reign of media supremacy? Are Indian or Japanese "values," dreamscapes, and hero-types becoming more broadly known and aspired-to? It would be very interesting if this were the case. However, I feel like a stronger argument could be made that the master currency is still American, that just as Hollywood Westerns adapted and translated Japanese samurai films and appropriated the values encoded therein, American media continues to filter in the messages from outside that it finds suitable, leaving American sensibilities for the most part unaffected by its touches with foreign productions. Even as I hypothesize a "filtering" process, however, I am not even sure how the mechanics of such "filtering" work. In the selection of which works get wide distribution? In the fact that the kung-fu and Hong Kong action movies that Americans can buy on DVD are the ones that Harvey Weinstein (as educated by Quentin Tarantino) likes? And if so, is that selectiveness so bad (I personally think Tarantino has excellent taste in kung-fu films)? Of course, the fact that much of the world's media now exists on pirate networks - and is therefore accessible outside of official mass distribution channels - allows those who become hard-core fans of any one national cinema to bypass any filtering done by their "home" nation, and access the types of texts they love much more directly and quickly, in far greater volume. So, once again, fannish interest - the drive of the collector, what Derrida calls "archive fever" - seems to open up spaces and experiences where more global sensibilities (more than average, anyway) can form.

McCrea: Great points, and this is the flipside to the piracy debate. Underneath all of this prevaricating about who owns what, there are genuinely massive shifts in media consumption occuring. As recently as last month, there were 40 people seeding a torrent file of Kenneth Anger films taken from various sources, and I wondered to myself who these 40 people were, on one hand sharing some amazing films with the world, on the other causing the legendary struggle of Anger to get recompense for his work to go on.

Media is a nation. I am a big fan of Hartley and Ellis myself and find myself still referring to them for precisely these passages about nationhood for a key point of technological change - the dawning of the VHS era. I'm lucky enough to have a bundle of old Sight and Sound issues from the late 70s and early 80s in which you can witness stories of technology overwhelm the stories of Britishness. A reader's letter in the first issue of 1979 mentions that film is 'an American technology built for the American mind' and as superstitious as that is, I find myself thinking about media technology's naturalism and own belonging-ness. One book I can highly recommend on this is the somewhat weird but utterly brilliant The Death of Cinema by Paolo Cherchi Usai, which details how cinema comes to chase an ideal image.

Language is still the viral path along which culture travels; here, Australian television is American television with a side-dish of local content. We even have our own public figures like Mark Philipoussis unable to get a show here shipped over there to make a reality television show to ship back to us as late night dross. And yet, locally made shows still dominate ratings if not the schedule, even if they are glocalised formulas.

Finally, with our friend Quentin, you are right - his film taste isn't so bad. It is however, somewhat concerning that films needs a 'Quentin Tarantino presents' sticker in order to be accessible or readable. The process is as you say, Derrida's archive fever, where his films (and those of Kevin Smith and the other nerd-gen directors) become nodes of references for films which then feed and harvest the cult energy. A re-release of the Sonny Chiba classic The Streetfighter featured a yellow and black background to capitalise on the popularity of Kill Bill, closing the circle of referentiality. Its here that you see fandom cross position descriptions with the curator and all kinds of re-internationalising take place.

Issue Four: The Problem of Intellectual Property

McCrea: I consider the continuing adherence to the term 'intellectual property' to be one of the most delirious elements of contemporary media scholarship. Whose property? Is there a deed involved? Why should I respect it; to whose benefit do I curtail the movements of my intellect? Even more disturbing is the subtle shift to use the term 'IP', which is not, I would argue, a mere abbreviation. It is the turning of a concept into linguistic voodoo - suddenly Harry Potter is not a universe, a realm, a world or a space - its somebody's IP. It belongs. It is owned. This runs counter to so much that media scholarship has been pointing to as the open, democratic states of fandom that we're faced with a media landscape that is so much more open than it was 20 years ago in many sense, but for some reason we have allowed corporate marketing terminology to permeate right through to the membrane of our work.

When Sara Andrews, a player of the online game/life destroyer World of Warcraft advertised for a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in-game, the powers that be at Blizzard Games moved first to censure her (and later relented, it should be said) on the grounds that her discussion thereof breached the bounds of their intellectual property. It was merely shorthand for an unwillingness to accept diversity; play, but don't really play. Experiment, but only within the frame. Make friends, but only in character. This abuse of the very concept of a cultural product needs to become a discussion again, because it feels that while we have so much more access to so much more media, our ability to intervene in media along the lines of fandom, parody and social interaction may actually be less available than it was a generation ago. The largest tension is, as always, gender and sexuality subversion - read, but don't read too much. Of course there has been a great body of work since the early days of fandom on how we negotiate with those who produce mainstream culture, the owners of this property - but there is still a great deal left in order that people acting creatively with products that were advertised into their lives are permanently left alone. The freedom of interpretation seems so inalienable, but for a disturbing amount of people, especially those without the benefit of a Bill of Rights, it has to come second to the arcane needs of some nervous legal department whose own grasp of the culture they influence seems so often ill-informed.

Derecho: This is a huge issue, and Lessig and Boyle, and their articulations of "free culture" and "cultural environmentalism," have been critical for scholars (of both law and culture) who are interested in fighting media corporations' extraordinary expansion of the concept of copyright and Intellectual Property over the last 30 years. I'm sure the work of Creative Commons, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse are well-known enough to go without mentioning, but I mention them anyway b/c they offer some of the best resources for fans who receive Cease & Desist letters or just plain want to know what's already been written and done about incidents like the one you mention, where players/users/readers/viewers/consumers find their media interactions restricted, constrained, and otherwise censored (or at least threatened, as Andrews was, with censorship).

Your plea for fans to be "left permanently alone" summarizes in three words the structure of feeling of most active media users' discourse. I love your pointing out that the insidiously "subtle shift to use the term 'IP'" is "linguistic voodoo" - that reminds me of Marx's critique of words that name money, like "pounds," "dollars," "francs," as "cabbalistic signs," which gives an incredible power to the signifier (money, or in your example, the term "IP") and distracting people from thinking about the signified (value, or in your example, rightful possession). I would like to add one plea to yours; mine is directed at all of the terrific media scholars participating in, and reading, this discussion. Even though cultural scholars have written a lot of great arguments regarding, as you say, the "open, democratic states of fandom," and legal scholars have written a great deal about the necessity of better legal protections for media fans' "fair use" (or, conversely, less power given over to media corporations by Congressional Acts like the DMCA and the CTEA), media scholars and legal scholars need to talk more to each other. The work of Sida Vaidhyanathan and Andrew Ross has been really useful for demonstrating how "cross-overs" can happen, but more people need to build on their examples. It is absolutely critical that the next time a case as important as Eldred v. Ashcroft comes before the U.S. Supreme Court, the representative of fans/users/consumers is ready with a response to a statement like the one Justice Kennedy made to Lessig, which was basically that he didn't see how copyright extension "has impeded progress in science and the useful arts." Lessig has written that he feels that he missed his opportunity to win the Eldred case when he responded to Kennedy. His response was, "Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all." Lessig tried to redirect Kennedy's question, rather than giving (this is a quote from Lessig) "the right answer [which] was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm." It's the job of media scholars, much more so than lawyers, to clearly define what is at stake for culture and society when cultural productions are unfairly restricted. I hope that, over the next few years, our field manages to publish so many great and powerful arguments for media users to be "left permanently alone" that any lawyer handling an IP or copyright case will have those arguments on the tip of her tongue when going before a court.

McCrea: That is really the key issue; availability of public discourse. Recently, an Australian man called Hew Griffiths was extridited from his house in country NSW and thrown in an American jail, for the crimes of piracy through his group DrinkorDie. The charges claim that millions of dollars worth of software and media files were served from his computers and no doubt the powers that be will follow the criminal case with a civil one. There is one extraordinary element:

Hew Griffith is not American. He has never been to America. He has no relations in America. Most of the people downloading from his site were Australian. So how is it that the RIAA and MPAA were able to subvert the very notions of citizenry and sovereignty all the way from their star chambers deep underground in the US? How is it that no sane person stood up in the courtroom and pointed out that by alledging illegal downloads to have the same monetary value as a physical object you devour any notion of collective decency attached to the navigation of the media landscape?

The potential space of academics is as you suggest, to be the authority that helps protects fans from these outfits. It would be grand if we turned around to the RIAA and MPAA and quite sternly reminded them that they own and sell cultural products, but that is all. Their unwillingness to even properly recompense artists and producers of the income they illegally press gang out of radio stations through their SoundExchange program is just another recent example of their ghoulish, baroque concept of their rights over the media they sell. We should terrify them, and right now I doubt that any significant figure involved in letting billionaires sue the poor would consider an academic public figure any speedbump to their vampirism. And yet even children could work it out; all use is fair use unless you begin to make money out of it. Then you're a thief. Not before.

Fandom is a key staging ground for all of this, as its a type of fandom that is being sold and reinterpreted and another type that is being squashed. The type that articulates itself through a thousand official products is exalted while the creative, anarchic, sometimes weird acts of fans is thrown into the pits below. There is nothing subtle about that shift; its an ongoing degeneration of our media landscape - piracy issues and fandom regulation are dovetailing unpleasantly.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part One): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea

Introductions Abigail Derecho: I am currently completing a dissertation at Northwestern University in the Comparative Literary Studies department. I am a media studies scholar, specializing in digital culture, and therefore, while most Comp Lit grad students at NU have a home department in a national language/lit (German, French, Slavic, etc.), my home department is Radio/Television/Film. My dissertation is called "Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Early Digital Remix," and it focuses on two of the earliest remix genres and their origins in minority discourse. Digital sampling was innovated by African Americans, and online fan fiction was pioneered by women, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. I examine how both remix genres were subjected to a great deal of censorship, both external and internal, very soon after they appeared, and I tie the censorship of remix to censorship discourses that circulated in U.S. culture and society at the same time that remix was being invented (the crack/gangs/guns panic that fueled anti-rap and other anti-music campaigns, the anti-pornography movement whose arguments were echoed in flame wars around explicitly sexual fan fiction). I will begin a tenure-track position at Columbia College Chicago, in the Cultural Studies program, this fall.

In addition to being an active fan and fan fiction author for many years, for the past two years I have been working on something called "Media Theater." I have written and produced two multimedia plays that are attempts to combine live performance with new media in ways that foreground how intricately multiple media are incorporated into the everyday lives of millions of people - how we perceive reality, how we form memories, how we learn to love and despise each other. Some of my fan fiction is accessible here. Some of my academic work, and information about my media theater productions, is accessible here. Also, I was fortunate enough to have an essay of mine, "Archontic Literature" (very kindly referenced in an earlier Round of this discussion by Catherine Tosenberger [Catherine, please e-mail me about your theory of "recursive" literature]) included in the terrific collection edited by K. Hellekson and K. Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. I'd like to express my gratitude to Kristina Busse and Henry Jenkins for organizing this important discussion, and for inviting me to take part, and thanks also to all the participants in this discussion (past and future), including those who have posted or will post comments, for making this such a productive and valuable exchange.

Christian McCrea: You may know me from such films as "Virtual Murder" (probably co-starring Micheal Nouri) and "The Second Life of Christian Lefebvre"....ahem. I am also in the twilight phase of a PhD dissertation, duly supervised by the very patient Angela Ndalianis in the Screen Studies department of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. My PhD is called "Playland: The Sensory Materialism of Computer and Videogames", which undertakes to form a critical account for the sometimes invisible but always vital relationship between the aesthetics of technologies and the cultural traces left by people using them. Using games as a point of first contact between the two, I am also deeply interested and invested in the cultures of technology, research into fan cultures, the poetics of technology, opportunities afforded by digital art and pranksterism, piracy and information control pressures, etc.

I have recently taken a position at Swinburne University of Technology here in Melbourne Australia, as a Lecturer In Games and Interactivity. The Swinburne Games program is the country's leading games school, and I will be working to expand the types of work students do into serious and critical games. I have published work on games and other media in a variety of academic fora, and also work as an writer and essayist for sites such as The Escapist, curatorial writer for the Australian Centre of the Moving Image and maintain a website, Wolves Evolve.

Issue One: Covering Women

Derecho: I'd like to address gender bias in the media industry, in "mainstream fan" writing about media, and in academic writing about media. I'll give an example of bias in each of these fields:

1) I saw Live Free or Die Hard recently. As a "die hard" fan of the first film in the series, I thought LFoDH was a thoughtful and exciting return to the elements that made Die Hard a classic. Leaving the theater, though, I realized that one of the key aspects of the film that made it pleasurable for me was the character Lucy - John McClane's now-grown daughter - who, whlie serving as a key plot point (the usual "damsel in distress"), did not have very much screen time. Another part of the film I liked was the new character Matt Farrell, the hacker-geek who becomes McClane's sidekick. And I read several critics' reviews pointing out that Matt is basically the fans' stand-in. Matt expresses the awe, fear, and affection for McClane that the audience feels, and for the most part he is "tagging along for the ride," just like the audience does. Matt also gets to have a little hint of a romantic spark with Lucy McClane, who is basically a younger female version of her father. So I thought, Huh, Matt is a stand-in for all fans, male and female, b/c both men and women fans are techies, like Matt (much of fandom taking place on the Internet), and both men and women fans love McClane and want to go along for the ride. But only male fans get to see themselves up on that screen in the persona/avatar of Matt Farrell, and they get to see their stand-in "get" (romantically) a McClane of his own (we women used to have Holly, John's wife, to identify with, but since Die Hard 3, she's been literally out of the picture). Women fans, otoh, have to do the usual queer identification, seeing our desires acted out by a young male character. And/or, we can see ourselves in Lucy, whose persona and story we would have to greatly develop/augment using our own imaginations (by ourselves, in conversation with other fans, or in fanfic) due to her underdevelopment in the film. Either way, women fans don't get very much consideration in this, or most, action films. It's clear that our dollars, our attention, and our interest are being courted, and that Lucy, Matt, and their incipient romantic involvement, are, at least in part, aimed at us. But while male audience members get huge chunks of meaty text thrown at them, stuff they can relate to and easily identify with, stuff that reminds them of their own libidinal desires and fantasies and offers them vicarious fulfillment of these wants and needs, women in the audience get scraps. We make the most out of these scraps -- that's what imagination and fan productions are for -- but the studios, for the most part, doesn't think to throw us more than these.

What troubles me about this long-standing situation is that women definitely go to, and love, action movies. Have we had an alternative in any given summer since Jaws and Star Wars? Either we love action blockbusters, or we don't go to the movies. So when I think about how women make the most of the few female characters and their supporting-role status in action films, I think we're doing a lot of work, and doing a great job creating a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of very little. All the female fan concentration on Arwen and Eowyn in the LoTR films, on Linda Hamilton's buff and awesome (but still supporting) character Sarah Connor in T2, on Rogue and Mystique and other X-Women, on Trinity in The Matrix, is about making the most of the tiny shout-outs to female audiences that big action movies - the biggest-grossing, and thus most important (for the industry) products generated by the motion picture industry today - give to their women and girl fans. Of course, lots of women don't care about whether there are well-written and significant women characters in a movie, they don't need that to have fun at a film. They are the lucky ones, since the movie industry is therefore giving them what they want and all they need. But the rest of us are grateful for the Alien series, for Keira Knightley's character in the PoTC movies, for Princess Leia, who is central to the plot of SW and always proactive (unlike her wimpy mother). If Disney, of all studios, knows enough about girl and women audience members to allow a character like Elizabeth Swann to develop and mature over the course of a trilogy, if Disney can allow a black woman to be a powerful goddess and can stand to have two women pirate captains (and one of them Chinese) in the council of pirates, then other studios and other producers can try just as hard. Jason Mittell, in Round One, Part One of this discussion, summarized what he called "the old saw about children's programming": "girls will consume work pitched at both genders, while the boys only concern themselves with boy-stuff." If this is true, then girls are by far the more valuable consumers of media (since they will be good customers of twice the volume of stuff as boys), and media corporations should take the wishes, proclivities, taste cultures, and interests of their best consumers into account.

2) In the latest issue of WIRED (July 2007), Optimus Prime, my favorite character from my favorite cartoon ever, Transformers, is on the cover. Here are some excerpts from the article about the new Transformers movie: "They started as toys for boys," "Boys ages 5 to 11 -- and it *was* boys -- faithfully tuned in week after week to watch the saga of these doughty bots," "For nearly two decades...sons of Prime waited for Papa Bot," "Thus [with Transformers] began the cyber-outsourcing of masculine heroism, a process that would eventually, inextricably, link Y chromosome to Xbox," "man-children of a certain age look to this Transformers movie...for redemption, as men." So, I, a hard-core fan of Transformers ever since I was a little girl, am excluded over and over again by this article. It's not just this one article or writer that concerns me, it's the way this environment of geeky, technologically-themed, toy-oriented pleasure is often assumed to be a 100% masculine domain. I don't think the statement "Girls like robot characters" would surprise anyone. Girls like all kinds of characters; they play video games; they watch sci-fi/action/adventure movies and TV, they read comic books. And then they grow up to be women media-studies scholars ;). But the mainstream press, written by non-academic fans, consistently associates certain media - and I don't just mean films, here, but technology of all sorts, from Blackberries to C++ to robots - with masculinity. What is sad about this is how much potential mass media has for serving as common ground between people of differing genders, races, ages, nationalities, sexual orientations, geographic locations, political affiliations. When I read, in the Transformers WIRED article, the writer's opinion that "Prime practically step-parented the latchkey kids of the mid-80s," I related to that. I remember that feeling of being home alone, just me and the TV, and those awesome giant robots, and how Optimus Prime taught me so much about what was right and wrong, what was courage and what was cowardice, when to show mercy and when to be strong. I thought, If I met that writer, he and I would have a lot to talk about, since we have some deep and important childhood experiences in common. But when the writer went on to define Prime as exclusively a role model for young boys, I stopped having that thought of common ground and mutually resonant experiences. Mass media fandom can and should be the grounds for discussions in which many, many people (masses of people, in fact) can participate. But there are gender-based, race-based, nationality-based, and sexuality-based assumptions and stereotypes that permeate media journalism which cuts such possibilities short.

3) Some recent media scholarship also shows these biases. Last year, a well-respected media studies professor from a prestigious U.S. university visited Northwestern, and I heard his paper on how a critically acclaimed television serial drama resembled an intricate and complex game, because certain plot elements repeated every season (though in different guises), and because the viewer had to keep track of everything that had happened in the past in order to fully comprehend each new episode. I asked him how his "game theory" regarding this television show differed from the basic structure of daytime drama (soap opera). He had no answer for me. Why? Because he had not considered that the aspects that he most enjoyed of an Emmy-winning, "quality" primetime cable television program were actually appropriated from cultural productions that have much less cultural capital in the world of media studies: soap operas. I very much agree with C. Lee Harrington's statement in Round Six, Part One: "I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!!" I would like to see, in accordance with some of Kristina's arguments in her review of MiT5, more male media studies scholars engaging with media analyses of women's genres and women's styles of media consumption/engagement/participation. Of course, many men in media studies do this already. But currently, male scholars can still ignore huge areas of women-oriented media scholarship without thinking or blinking - their ignorance is still very normal.

And to bring this back to the first example of gender bias I gave, that practiced by movie studios and media corporations: Daytime drama has undergone a serious decline in ratings over the past decade, and I attribute this mostly to network executives' lack of investment in, and lack of knowledge of, the soap genre. As a result, soap fans (of which I am one) have engaged in more heated battles, meaning mail/e-mail campaigns, phone campaigns, and massive flame wars online, over the last 10 years, than I have ever seen in any other fandoms. Soap fans fight TPTB (producers, writers, network execs) for story changes, and they fight with each other because they feel that no one is really getting the quality or kinds of storytelling that they want, so fan groups that have different interests are mutually regarded as "competition" for the networks' attention. So far, the networks haven't responded to fans' demands for improved (i.e., better-written) stories and for more respect for show history. The soaps continue to go down in quality, and viewers continue to tune out. Meanwhile, all of prime time has co-opted the technique of seriality which daytime dramas spent decades developing and enriching - all reality shows are soaps, most prime-time dramas are soaps or have some serial elements, and many prime-time sitcoms (Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother) have multi-episode, sometimes multi-season story arcs. Millions of women fans spent years and years contributing to writers' knowledge of how to make seriality work. Their input and feedback, manifested in a multitude of activities from their mere viewership to their fannish activities, helped to build up that store of knowledge, helped to program those data banks. Not only do those fans get zero credit, but the soap-y shows that women now watch on prime-time - Prison Break, 24 - are much more geared towards male audiences and male interests than towards women audiences and women interests. Again (see my above point), it isn't that women can't or don't enjoy male-oriented programming. But women fans lost good soap operas, which were dramas dedicated to women's enjoyment, and we did not gain the equivalent in serial prime time.

McCrea: I'll expand in turn on the major points you've explored, Abigail; I think you've traced some of the most interesting elements of media culture for this discussion. First, action cinema, then Transformers and tech culture, then the gendering of media culture in academia and finally, television culture.

Action Cinema: Leading up to the release of Live Free or Die Hard (or bizarrely, Die Hard 4.0 for non-Americans), I was pondering some of the same issues - it was obvious that these younger characters had been supplanted to build a bridge between the necessary elements of Bruce Wills and large things being on fire and a more modern audience for whom things being on fire doesn't mean what it used to. I wonder if a similar committee process went into Terminator 3; "oh these aging men don't appeal to anybody anymore, but we need them for the brand - let's stick in a couple of young people." It all seems so neat and pat by comparison to the situation presented in the first Die Hard; trashy white-bread American thrashes European chap who has read a book or two. In the new iteration, it barely feels like the same 'man' is being pressed into the situations. So I wonder to whom precisely the film is directed, or to who the 'fan' is in the discourse of the Die Hard universe. I'm sure that for the marketing boffins involved, for whom the Die Hard IP (I term I want to come back to later), there was a sense of needing to create generational upheaval, and character multiplicity. This may not seem like the most obivous of connections, but I felt a similarity to Blade III: Trinity, where younger, hipper characters stood in for fans of the first films. Nor it is explicity new, as later films in the Death Wish and Dirty Harry series began to expand their fictions beyond the original frame to talk to fans more directly. Robocop 3, Aliens Vs. Predator and a few others are barely readable outside of this rearticulation-through-fandom. I think what you've identified is that this gendering - or repurposing of gender - is often the first port of call. In many instances, the role of women in driving narrative is complicated as the primary male characters age and give way to older generations.

Theories of and around action films that consider gender (and I'm thinking of the work of Yvonne Tasker and Robin Wood first but not exclusively) situate the crux of things in the appreciative look of the audience - and as you say, filmgoers looking for female characters in action films often have to make a great deal out of very little. Which is precisely where the most energetic forms of fanwork emerge. I used to call fan-produced media 'antimedia' because they act much like an antibody to the processes of the original text, but more interesting is this semiotic chase. Anime fans chase the unarticulated sexuality and imagery; Lord of the Rings fans chase the unexplored world detail - each fandom weaves according to the material its given. Which is why, returning to Die Hard, I almost felt I was watched a 'fan generation' film, a post-Tarantino and Peter Jackson - cinema that can never be formed without a knowing wink.(Henry Jenkins' article on Tarantino and digital cinema got me thinking here) Len Wiseman's other directorial work being Underworld, and Underworld: Evolution, you can see that he has been there to witness Hollywood's push to re-gender action cinema. But how successful are Lara Croft, Resident Evil, Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet as new approaches to gender? Since I'm not a fan of leaving rhetorical questions open, I'll just go right ahead and score them a D minus. And in each case, you can see similar patterns; films with strong female heroes aimed at a fannish audience (some more sexually precise than others), and then, non-existent fan interest. At least Red Sonja got a cult thing going.

Transformers: As a latch-key kid myself whose family moved a great deal, the common ground of toys and computer games was the first and most important bridge to building any friendship with other kids. The fact that I had a small number of Transformers with me meant that I could instantly communicate through that common reverie and instant nostalgia. There is a fantastic and little-read article by Jiwon Ahn on anime that uses the phrase "common nostalgia latent across boundaries". The upshot is that morning cartoons are not (or were not) so neatly divided across gender lines. I'm not sure how to navigate the terminology, but while Transformers is less gendered than some other series of the time (the farcical ultramasculity of Centurions: Power Extreme, GI Joe and M.A.S.K., for example, is stark), the inclusion of Arcee and Elita One in the Transformers universe hardly counts as a even distribution of archetypes. (side note: the "Female Transformers" page on Wikipedia is worth a visit.)

Media Culture and Academia: I was lucky enough to speak at MiT3 in 2003. I landed in Boston without a working credit card and so sat in my hostel's common room experiecing first-hand the wonders of late-night inner-city television as I pondered my fate. What had been romanticised my entire life, etched marvellously by the "I'd Buy That For A Dollar" guy in the first Robocop, was first and foremost an incredibly gendered experience. The undulation of girls, of both the regular and 'gone wild' persuasions, on and around Snoop Dogg, actually took up what seemed like hours for some baroque and indiscernable DVD purchasing scheme being advertised. In between, grimy-mustached salesmen demanded I bring in my used cars for "Caaaaysh!" What struck me about the kind of television being studied by the participants at MiT3 across the river, was that it was, by comparison, very safe. Buffy, Angel, etc were reaching a kind of critical mass and people spoke of them with a kind of reverence and awe - look at the progressive themes these shows offer, look at the kinds of people who invest so much in them. That kind of scholarship is still very very important, but I could not but wonder why the orgiastic hyper-sexualised world of Snoop Dogg didn't get a mention, or even Jackass for that matter. In the final keynote session, which was stunning and remarkable for many reasons, was a panel between a pair of experienced executives and Toby Miller. Someone asked a question about why the conference was so gendered; why the guests were men, why there was no discussion of gender power in so many of the panels, etc... (I know these questions can bore a lot of people but I always think its great to hear that discussion come up.) While the other panellists demurred a little, Toby Miller did something which I consider extraordinarily brave - he answered the question head on. His response was that, for the most part, televisions are assembled and moulded by women in Southeast Asia. They come to the West, on which all our shows and our fandoms are generated. Then, they are shipped back to the daughters of the women who assembled them, so they can pick diodes from the quarter-mile deep piles of electronic rubbish for just enough money to pay for their parent's healthcare. In a final session that had some strident questions, this was met with a kind of slow dawning applause - definitely a WWE-style "holy shit!" moment. His point was that way underneath even the most nuanced approach to the content of television, we still have to account for the materiality of culture.

Television Culture: Your analysis of the shifting relationships of producers and fans is absolutely spot-on. I think books like Convergence Culture by our friend Henry do a great job of highlighting all the key movements in these as-yet unformed forces; but its the type of shift in aesthetics that fills in the gaps and the outcomes of those shifts we will see first. I am a fan of 50s-60s-70s television, especially action and mystery serials from the UK like The Prisoner and The Avengers, from which my understanding of modern television is still deeply affected. There was then, and I think its visible again admist the web of ARGs, online polls, semi-official blogs, a deep insecurity on the part of television producers about how to keep an audience interested. Soaps have always been at the cutting-edge of audience relations, because changes can be brought on rapidly, characters changed to suit responses with no disruption to 'flow'. And soon, the soap model may be all that traditional television has left, now that the DVD virus is infecting so much else. I maintain that one of the most complex and least understood television forms is professional wrestling. Despite its visibility and notoriety, wrestling has garnered very little critical attention with the notable exceptions being thankfully of exceptional clarity and depth. The gendering of wrestling is absurd, carnivalesque, grotesque, implies horrifically regressive roles for women and all non-masculine figures - and is still leagues ahead in terms of sexual reference than the bulk of television. I certainly subscribe to the notion that wrestling constitutes a masculine melodrama - and the deaths of Owen Hart and Chris Benoit are necessarily included here - as the drama of the 'kayfabe' stage rotates and wheels in independent ways to the actual televisual frame. Sometimes we are allowed to peer behind the curtain, other times it is reinforced. However, melodrama isn't merely a gendering type of address, it is a pervasive method for the production of genre itself - under melodramatic sensibilities, all kinds of other spaces can open up. So when you scratch the surface (or the baby oil) of wrestling, you find legion upon legion of female fans, running websites, organising events and working throughout the industry. The type of experience you're talking about when Bull Nakano almost decapitates her opponent at Summerslam is obviously very different than an intelligently thought out drama series, but no less vital in the articulation of our appreciation of culture.

Derecho: Christian, it's a pleasure to read your thoughts on these matters. Our opinions overlap on many points, for instance, your (generous) grade of D minus for studios' attempts to build female-action-hero franchises. In a sense, those films are the exceptions that prove the rule: If *that's* what the industry produces when it greenlights movies that put female action heroines front-and-center, no wonder they do such a botched, half-assed job with the girl (I use this word purposefully) characters they throw in to male-action-hero films. I'm well aware, though, that female action heroine movies are built to attract male audiences, not to give female viewers opportunities for identification. There is a sense in which the placement of girl characters (love interests, damsels-in-distress) in male-oriented media function in a similar way to product placement. Corporate sponsors get a shot or two of their product; women get a few lines of dialogue from a female character; and the rest of the movie, which is most of the movie (the guy-kicking-ass part) is the "real" fiction, the core, authentic text. You mention T3 and Blade:Trinity, in addition to the new Die Hard, bringing in younger characters in order to create a bridge between older fans and newer audiences. One thing that is striking about all three franchises is that, while one of the younger characters added is a woman, none of the older characters are. In both the Terminator films and in DH, there was, at some point, a leading woman who was a peer or opposite of the leading man. Well, I know it's no surprise that in mainstream U.S. films, older women no longer even count as viable plot points - this just reinforces the fact that all the younger female characters in T3, B:T, and LFoDH, while I found all of them to be written as "strong," "tough," and "capable," are there specifically because of their hot bods.

It's interesting what you say about morning cartoons being not as neatly divided across gender lines. We should really ask Justine Cassell more about this, she's the expert on childhood play, gender, and technology. I know she has co-written on the subject with HJ, and her article (written with Meg Cramer) on "Moral Panics about Girls Online" might be interesting to you. I checked out the Female Transformers page on the main Wiki, and was struck by the fact that someone has tagged it with the infamous "fancruft" label, and therefore the page may be deleted in a couple of days. Of course, tons of stuff gets excoriated for being fancruft, but for some reason I was particularly peeved that this page, which simply lists the female Transformers, when and in which cartoon series they appeared, and their roles in various plotlines, as "not encyclopedic." The Wiki pages on the male Transformers are less well-organized by far than the Female Transformers page, but the ones about the males count as "encyclopedic"? Luckily, Teletraan-1 (the Transformers Wiki) has no such flags on their several pages regarding Female Transformers (individually and as a "species"). It always amazes me how fan communities have to continually splinter in more and more specifically focused groups, just in order to avoid being censored in some way. Just to enjoy the freedom to like what they like, fans create enclaves for themselves that are narrower and more exclusive all the time. How much can matter be broken down? Into a gazillion quarks? By the time we're all done, there will be more fandoms than quarks in this universe. I mean, multiverse :).

You end with sports and wrestling and female fandom, and it's great because it's very close to the point I made earlier about women and "guy" movies. Yes, women watch sports; many women love sports; many women are huge fans of sports. Sports, action films, much of primetime serial TV, and those commercials you saw (Snoop and his "orgiastic hypersexualized world,"), and Jackass (which you mentioned as having a relationship to the commercials - interesting!), all are performances of hypermasculinity. You used the term "carnavalesque." There is something beyond - in addition to - the repetition inherent in ritual, and the community element of being a fan of these displays, that attracts men and women. The emphatic enactment of hypersexuality is clearly a lure to both men and women. And so I am intrigued by your notion of wrestling as a "masculine melodrama," because I think there is something in that which could explain so much of how and why women are (learn to be?) fans of male-gendered media texts (which constitute the vast majority of all media texts). Perhaps girls and women learn to play with, and learn to extract pleasure from (it is both play and work), male-oriented media by constructing melodramatic narratives from, in, and around them. Perhaps this is the one "sop" that male-oriented media has learned to give to women: to give women the tools to read maleness and masculinity as equally melodramatic as any soap opera, even while insisting that it must be consistently male/masculine performances that women watch. And perhaps at some level (as you say, "under melodramatic sensibilities, all kinds of other spaces can open up"), women fans appreciate the fact that they can read these texts as yielding a kind of satisfaction classically associated with women (melodrama) at the same moment that the texts hyper-perform, over-perform, masculinity. For some fans, perhaps this is an appreciation of irony; for others, it might just be an appreciation for opposites uniting, the point at which men's love of violent spectacle and women's love of psychological and emotional drama touch.

Issue Two: The History of Remix Culture

Derecho: I'll begin this topic with my "soapbox" speech, a statement of one of the central claims of my dissertation: digital remix culture owes a substantial debt to minority discourse. Three genres of digital remix were pioneered between 1986 and 1996: digital music sampling, video game mods, and online fanfic. Of those three, the first was the invention of African American men (most of them were men, not all) and the third was the invention of white American women (most of them were white, most of them were women, not all). It's very important to me, and other feminist (male and female) media scholars as well, that the history of women's new media innovations does not get buried. In Round Two, Part One, Louisa Stein wrote that "female authorship and innovation in fan communities...were always heavily technologically engaged, from the use of multiple VCRs to facilitate the complex process of pre-digital vidding to the extremely belabored process of putting out zines pre-internet...Now that fandom has moved online, technological innovation...w/i the context of female communities continues to expand." It is vital that we media (especially digital media) scholars depict accurately the history of women media fans as not only highly competent, but inventive in their uses of a wide array of technological platforms and tools. There is nothing "belated" about women fans' involvement with technology; in fact, as Louisa and I argue, women fans were making good use of the most sophisticated tools at their disposal prior to the advent of digital culture, and as soon as new media became available (and Usenet was not even widely available), women thoroughly exploited its possibilities. For all who might think that posting X-Files fanfic to the ATXC board did not really constitute a technological innovation, I say this: the ATXC and its successor, the Ephemeral/Gossamer archival system, have proven over the last dozen years that a simple open-source PHP archive of HTML documents will outlast a lot of other hypermedia creations. While gamers hunt down emulators, fans of hypertext literature long for a working installation disk of Mac Classic OS, and digital historians cry over numerous broken links and four-year-old Flash animation that just never loads all the way, readers of online fan fiction sit back and enjoy the plain-and-simple HTML, reliably archived and presented in neat rows and columns for their pleasurable consumption for years to come. If that isn't technical genius, I don't know what is.

McCrea

: In the arena of games, the gendering of media is - still - perhaps the most pervasive and least addressed aspect of cultural influence. Just flicking through T.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds highlights just how affronted producers of games can be when you point out that loaded imagery limits access. On the flipside, female game fandom has become a corporate product via funded clans such as the Frag Dolls. It is precisely at the point of production, or remix, that new ways of thinking about digital culture open up. There is a sense in Taylor's book, and I think its quite true, that the gendering of technology is not just particularly male, but more to the point, 'invisible-male'. For a producer of technology, remixer or otherwise inclined media activator who also happens to be a woman, there is still as of 2007, a persistent cloud of gender surprise. Gender surprise is something we could classify as a news-borne toxin by which part of the undertow of their work will have to be superscribed with 'its not just for girls anymore.' If this were limited to publicly-visible news reports or the like, this would be fine, but the toxin still exists across fields of art and academia as well, as I think you've highlighted in your earlier discussion of television viewing habits. Being a sort of self-proclaimed intellectual and political carbunkle, I have the inclination to say that part of the position description of a media academic or researcher is the continuing struggle to evolve the discourses in the public sphere - in other words, bring out the hammer when stupid things are said, and make a noise when something substantial arrives. So I really want to underline with a thick pen what you began with: "digital remix culture owes a substantial debt to minority discourse." Its worth printing out and nailing to the wall of every institution and academic hall that has any investment in technology. The only thing to add is that these aren't seperate issues - gender positioning, race vocalisation and technology - no matter how hard we may try to dehistoricize them like that; the energy and force by which remixes and all forms of contra-digital experimentation happen simply won't, can't, will never come from wealthy people getting wealthier. It's people that got cut out, cutting their way back in - cheaply, quickly, running across back fences and leaping across borders in ways that seem alien to anybody working within a strict system of cultural distribution. The reason I skipped between games and these thoughts is because its so visible there; when I played artist and curator Rebecca Cannon's machinima film The Buff and the Brutal to third year students in one of my courses, many of them responded with "well, its clearly just a feminist take on game culture". The operative word being 'just'; what an extraordinary position for students to be in; their access to game aesthetics being stitched to an assumption that all non-standard, non-white, non-male referents are protestative, 'just' exterior and minor. Talk about there being a lot of work left to do! The male-invisible subject reappears, and I don't think equipping the discussions of technology as phallocentric is enough; what we're staring at is the growth of a new generation whose reflections of technology may in fact be less equipped to concieve of equal gender and race access than our own. I think about this a lot, and I hope I'm dreadfully wrong. DJ Spooky's new essay and song coming out of the Venice Biannale is a great adjunct to this discussion.

Derecho: Word, word, and word to all of that. I appreciate a great deal of DJ Spooky's work, and thanks so much for the link to The Buff and the Brutal. I wish that Chinese-Austrian video artist Jun Yang's remix videos were more widely available, they are similar to Spooky's in that they are essays in which Yang narrates, over all these disparate clips, his experiences as a bicultural migrant consumer of (predominantly U.S.) media. One issue I run into when teaching and writing about digital remix is that often, race and gender are not explicitly foregrounded by the "non-standard, non-white, non-male" producers. I love works by "non-standard" remix artists that *don't* make the author's race, gender, or nation of origin immediately apparent, because that's a different kind of invisibility (maybe one that can even be interpreted as a critique of, or response to, the "invisible-white-male" kind) that disallows a kneejerk reaction like the one your students gave to Cannon's piece. On the other hand, the reason why I call it an "issue" in teaching and writing, is that with pieces that announce their authors as minorities, the reader can grab hold of something in that text right away - your students know at least to start their brains thinking about feminism. When I teach Shelley Jackson, Anne-Marie Schleiner, or Public Enemy, discussions of race and gender in digital culture spark to life right away. But when I show Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's DAKOTA (a remix of Pound's Cantos), or DJ Qbert's Wave Twisters (this is a link to an article in Remix, not to the content from the CD or DVD), or Brian Kim Stefans' Vaneigem Series (a "detournement" of NYT articles using text from The Revolution of Everyday Life), it's harder to get learners to think and talk about how those works emerge from a female (in the case of [half of] YHCHI), Asian, or Asian American experience. Of course, it's way more rewarding, too - but it takes work to prevent the discussion from falling right away into a New Critical approach ("This isn't about race or gender or nationality, why bring those into it?").

MORE TO COME

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. What follows is the second installment. I am being pressed for time this morning but hope to add a few comments to this post later today about last night's debate. You only briefly touch upon the rise of news comedy shows like The Daily Showand The Colbert Report. Do you see such programs as a positive force in American democracy? How do you respond to those who feel that the blurring

between news and politics trivializes the political process? What role does

comedy play in the kinds of popular politics you are advocating?

I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As someone on the Left it is refreshing to see a progressive viewpoint expressed (even if only expressed ironically) in a way that makes me laugh and gives me pleasure. I also think that Stewart and Colbert's use of humor can be deeply subversive: they use ridicule to show how ridiculous "serious politics" is, much in the same way that Jonathan Swift's "modest" proposal in 1729 made the "rational" case for solving the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating them. The political process is already a joke, these guys are merely recognizing it for what it is.

In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth. However, it's still unclear that ironic joking leads to the sort of popular response I'm hypothesizing above. It can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for it to get a good laugh out of it all. To paraphrase the philosopher Walter Benjamin: we can learn to find pleasure in our own destruction.

However, I think we need to take Stewart at his word: he's just an entertainer. It's really up to the rest of us to answer the questions he poses. Sometimes I think we ask too much of culture: we expect it to solve our political problems for us. I don't think it can do this. It can create openings, give us insight, provide us with tools, but the rest is a political process that counts on all of us.

You contrast the ways that FDR spoke to the American public with the ways that George W. Bush addresses us during his weekly radio-casts. What do you see as

the primary differences? Most contemporary politicians who attempt to

"explain" complex policy issues in the way FDR did get accused of being

"wonks." What steps do you think could be taken to create a new political

rhetoric which embraces the ideal of an informed public but doesn?t come

across as patronizing or pedantic?

The brilliance of FDR is that he and his New Deal administration, like King and his fellow organizers, recognized the necessity of spectacle in politics. Because of this they worked hard to re-imagine spectacle in a way that could fit progressive, democratic ends. The 1920s were an era much like our own in its worship of celebrity: a mediated world of movie stars on the silver screen and sports heroes in the new photo-tabloids. But instead of merely condemning this state of affairs, New Deal artists and administrators re-imagined it, using photographs sponsored by the Farm Securities Agency and murals painted by artists of the Works Progress Administration to recognize and display a different sort of American: the dust bowl farmer, the southern share cropper, the factory worker, the rootless migrant. By creating these counter-spectacles they tried to turn the public gaze from stars to everyday (albeit romanticized) people, essentially redefining "The People" in the popular imagination. Make no mistake, this was a deeply political move, as valorizing everyday people was essential for garnering political support for New Deal political and economic programs.

Roosevelt's "fireside chats" also put the lie to the myth that spectacle has to run against reason. Over thirty times during his presidency FDR addressed the American public on the radio. He would always begin these speeches with a warm "My friends." But what followed this simple greeting was a sophisticated explanation of the crises the country faced: the banking collapse, currency concerns, the judiciary, world war. This was propaganda. The speeches were scripted by playwrights who dramatized the case for the president's politics, and FDR spoke to people's fears and desires in a folksy, personalized language, but these fireside chats also took for granted that citizens could be reasoning beings with the ability to understand complex issues. In other words FDR believed that rationality and emotion could exist side by side.

I wish contemporary politicians would learn from this. Instead, we get the "man of reason" like John Kerry, or the "man of fantasy" aka George W. Bush. Politicians need to understand - in a way that I think many producers of pop culture already do - that you can speak to reason and fantasy simultaneously. It's an Enlightenment myth that truth is self-evident: that all you need to do is lay out the facts of your argument and immediately people will acknowledge and embrace it. What FDR and King understood is that the truth needs help. It needs stories told about it, works of art made of it, it needs to use symbols and be embedded in myths that people find meaningful. It needs to be yelled from the mountaintops. The truth needs help, but helping it along doesn't mean abandoning it.

You discuss the public desire for recognition as the flip side of their

relationship to celebrity culture. What lessons might progressives draw from

reality television about this desire for recognition?

If there are two things that those on the Left love to hate (while secretly enjoying) it's celebrity culture and reality TV. These play to the our most base political desires: celebration of an ersatz aristocracy and cutthroat competition; the driving fantasies of Feudalism and Capitalism respectively. True, true. But it's a mistake to write them off as just that, for they also manifest another popular dream: the desire to be seen. What do stars have that we don't? Wealth and beauty, yes, but also something more important: they are recognized. What is reality TV about? The chance for someone like us to be recognized.

What sort of a politics can be based in a recognition that we desperately what to be recognized? First off, policies that make it easier to be seen and heard. Community TV, micro radio, free internet access, net neutrality, and so on. If the populist Huey Long once called for a "chicken in every pot," in the mass mediated age our slogan ought to be "every person an image." But it goes deeper than this, for the popular desire is not just about being seen as an image on a screen. This, in some ways, is just a metaphor for a far deeper desire: being recognized for who we are and what we are, our opinions and our talents -- and this is the core of democracy.

The democracy we have today has little place for our opinions and talents. Our opinions show up as abstract polling data, and the only talents our political process asks for is our skill at forking over money to professional activists and campaigns or our dexterity in pulling a voting lever. This professionalization of politics, whereby democracy becomes the business of lobbyists, fund raisers, and image consultants, has fundamentally alienated the citizenry from their own democracy. It's no wonder that we turn to culture to find these dreams of recognition expressed.

This issue really gets to the core of my Dream. My book is about learning from popular culture and constructing ethical spectacles, but the lessons that I hope are learned will lead far further than making better advertisements or staging better protests for progressive political causes (though that wouldn't hurt). What I'm arguing for in my book is a reconfiguration of political thought, a sort of "dreampolitik" that recognizes that dreams and desires, ones that are currently manifested in pop culture, need to be an integral part of our democratic politics.

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)

Tonight, at 7 p.m. est, CNN will host a debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, aired live from South Carolina. There have already been several previous debates during which American citizens could get an early look at Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the other contenders for the nomination. What makes this debate interesting is that average citizens were invited to submit their questions for the debate via YouTube. Last week, I appeared on Talk of the Nation with David Bohrman, the guy from CNN who has been given the task to select the questions that actually reach the air, and Joshua Levy, a political blogger (TechPresident.com). We learned that there had been, at that point, more than 1500 questions submitted and that the CNN staff was shifting through them to decide which ones should be asked the candidates. You might want to take some time today to sample the kinds of questions submitted in their raw form. They reflect two of the dominant modes of production for YouTube. On the one hand, there are straight to camera confessionals -- often deadly serious, frequently deeply personal, made by people who embody the issues they are discussing. These videos reflect the ways that Americans are taught, via television, to speak to presidential candidates and more often than not, they reflect the same agenda that has shaped previous debates. The CNN spokesperson did say that there were certain topics, Darfur for example, which cropped up much more often among viewers than among professional journalists. But, for the most part, these questions reflect the prevailing tone and style of American political discourse. The second set are parodies and satires -- often bitingly irreverent, borrowing the language of popular culture to challenge the pomposity of the debate format. Sometimes, they spoof the very idea that citizens should be made to embody their questions -- as in this video where a guy dressed like a Viking asks a question about immigration or consider this question from a LA based "celebrity". Sometimes, they make fun of what kinds of questions deserved discussion in this format -- as in this video about alien invasions. Sometimes, they make use of borrowed footage -- as in this JibJab style segment featuring a George W. impersonator.

It is going to be interesting, then, to see what kinds of selections the network makes amongst all of this material: will they naturally go towards those that adopt the discourses of respectful citizens and identity politics? Will they ask more or less the same questions that we've heard in the previous debates, only this time spoken through the mouths of YouTube fans? Or will some of the more wacky segments make their way into the air? And if they do, how will the candidates react and how will the pundits respond? As I wrote last week, we are seeing a consistent insertion of the discourse of participatory culture into the political process this campaign season in an attempt to reach voters who would normally tune out debates and that's what makes this particular set of exchanges so interesting.

To help us get into the spirit of the YouTube debate, I am featuring today an interview with Stephen Duncombe, the author of an important new book about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy which I have mentioned here several times already -- Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. I have incorporated this paragraph from Duncombe's book in a number of talks I've given over the last few months and it is suggestive of the provocative nature of his argument:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

Duncombe's previous books, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, have been important contributions to our understanding of contemporary cultural politics, albeit aimed at academic readers primarily. Duncombe himself has been active in a number of key political movements in New York City, where he teaches, and describes some of those experiences in Dream. With this book, he has produced a text which will be read well beyond the academic realm and could provide us with a handbook for understanding why this current campaign is making such vivid and interesting use of a rhetoric informed by our experiences with participatory culture. Check out his website for more information on the book.

Throughout the book, you embrace a politics based on spectacle. How do you

define spectacle? What do you see as the defining characteristics of

progressive spectacle and how would it differ from more conservative forms of

spectacle?

I guess I'd define spectacle as a dream performed, or perhaps, a fantasy on display. Spectacle animates an abstraction and realizes what reality often times cannot represent. But I also like to use the term in a broader way: to describe a way of making an argument, not through appeals to reason and fact (though these certainly can, and should, be part of spectacle) but through stories and myth, imagination and fantasy. This definition covers what I call ethical spectacles, but also describes spectacles with less scruples: those engineered by the Nazis at Nuremberg, conjured up by creative directors on Madison Avenue or staged by Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. So what separates my "ethical" spectacles from these? It's a complicated question and I spend about a third of my book exploring it, but if I had to sum up the core value of an ethical spectacle in one word it would be this: democracy.

Most spectacles are anti-democratic. They are about one-way communication flows and predictable responses. "They" engineer the look and feel and message of the spectacle and "we" - the spectators - respond in a predetermined fashion. If this type of spectacle is successful we give our consent or support: we march in lines and vote for the Party or buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it is always someone else's dream. Ethical spectacle follows a different formula. It's a spectacle where the lines between those who create and those who spectate are blurred, one which is dreamt up, executed, and acted upon by its participants. This makes for a sloppy sort of spectacle, one where spectators are also actors, where the mechanics of the staging is obvious to all involved, and where meanings and outcomes are not predetermined, but isn't this also the definition of democracy?

There's also another key difference between the spectacle I'm advocating for and that which we are used to experiencing: reality. Most spectacle is using fantasy as a replacement for reality. Think of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln. This was an attempt (imagineered by an ex-TV producer named Scott Sforza) to replace reality with fantasy: our president is a warrior prince, not a combat dodger; the war in Iraq is won, not just beginning. The approach I'm advocating for deals with reality differently, using spectacle to dramatize the real, not cover it over.

A great example of this is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. He went into Birmingham knowing the violent, racist reputation of the chief of police. In fact, he counted on it. And "Bull" Connor acted out his part: jailing school kids, turning fire hoses on picketers, letting dogs loose on peaceful protesters, and so on, creating those iconic images of the civil rights movement, and publicizing to a world media the reality of racism in the United States. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil Rights Act passed the next year. It's also no coincidence that the footage of Top Gun W couldn't be used by the Republicans a year after the staged landing; the deadly reality of the continuing war had leaked through the staged fantasy. As the presidential namesake of the aircraft carrier that Bush landed on once said: "You can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Ethical spectacle fools no one. It is at its best when it is obvious what it is: just a spectacle. Like the architecture of Las Vegas or the campy performance of pro wrestling, one can also stage spectacles that don't pretend to be reality but wear their constructed nature on their sleeve. They are spectacles which present themselves as spectacles. As such, these dreams performed become, in their own way, real. Illusion may be a necessary part of politics but delusion need not be.

Your book poses some sharp criticisms of the kinds of political rhetoric which

has emerged from "mainstream" perspectives within the Democratic Party. For

example, you characterize progressive critics, such as Hillary Clinton or Joseph

Leiberman, who embrace a "culture war" rhetoric as playing into conservative

stereotypes of "well-mannered, well-dressed, liberal elites,"

"busybodies" and "condescending experts" who want to use the power of

government to enforce their tastes upon society. Why do you think Democratic

leaders have been so quick to embrace a form of politics which is so strongly

opposed to popular culture and what do you see of the benefits of shifting the

terms of the debate?

One of my friends, the activist David Solnit, once said: "all politics is theatre, just some of it is bad theatre." When it comes to popular culture, the Democrats seem clueless about their public image. Take Senator Hillary Clinton's press conference condemning Grand Theft Auto for example. Here she was, before an international media, playing out the Right's stereotype of the Left: a bunch of superior sounding, out-of-touch, elites telling the rest of us what's good for us, and then using government regulation to make sure we can't decide for ourselves. Karl Rove couldn't have asked for anything better (Nor could Rockstar Games since that press conference likely sold boku copies of GTA/SA as people hurried out for a taste of forbidden fruit).

Why the Dems are so clueless is a bit of a mystery. Part of it has to do with the history of Liberalism in this country which comes out of elite reform movements like Prohibition (a once progressive idea, along with eugenics!) as much as it arises out of labor and social movements (both of which are more interested in equality and justice than morality and culture). But this shying away from pop culture, I think, also has a lot to do with an abiding Enlightenment faith in the superiority of rationality and reason, and a deep suspicion of desire and fantasy - the very things, of course, which drive pop culture. This is a political problem since so much of politics is based in fantasy and desire and Liberals these days are simply not very skilled in operating on this terrain. This split between rationality and fantasy is also a false one, these forces don't inhabit separate spheres, they coexist and intermingle in all of us. It's the old, and tired, mind/body split. It's time to move on.

You describe popular culture as a "ready-made laboratory" for studying the

"dreams" of the American public. Why do you think progressive politics have

been so disdainful of popular culture? How do you respond to critics who might

argue that your arguments place too great a trust in market forces? You write,

for example, "If culture stays, and sells, it means that it somehow resonates

with the popular will. And anyone interested in democratic politics ignores such

enthusiasm at his or her peril."

The biggest problem with ignoring popular culture, politically speaking, is not that you turn off this or that group of fans (the Dems could alienate every single NASCAR fan in the entire country and still sweep the elections), but that you ignore this powerful indicator of people's dreams and desires. As the great political commentator Walter Lippmann once argued, politicians don't need to think much of popular culture, but they do need to think a lot about it.

I have a lot of problems living in a consumer capitalist culture, and my own cultural upbringing was in the decidedly anti-market world of punk rock, but even I recognize the value of appreciating popular culture in a society like ours. Unlike culture patronized by the aristocracy or funded by the state, commercial culture has to appeal to a wide enough audience to make it a profitable business. Yes, this appeal is not pure: marketing and star power can make any movie a hit the first weekend, but for that movie to still be selling the second and third it had better resonate with the popular will. So if you want to figure out what ideas and aspirations are resonating with the public a good place to start is with popular culture.

But, and this is a big but, the hit movie is not what we should be paying attention to -- we need to dig deeper. What we really need to explore are the dreams at the root of the hit movie. That movie is only one manifestation of our desires, and a commercially acceptable one at that, we need to think of others. Take a hit movie like the original Matrix. As a fan I can appreciate it as exciting entertainment, but as a politico I'm interested in what it says about us as a people: our striving for personal power and to be part of a rebellious community, our desire to stick it to the man and reveal the truth, (not to mention our love of cool toys and stylish outfits). Once you understand these forces you can do other things with them. Pop culture is just one expression of our dreams, a progressive political system that empowers people, builds community, fights power and reveals the truth -- might be another.<.blockquote>

So far, we are seeing some signs of a more playful style of activism is having

an impact on the upcoming presidential election. Witness the spoof of the Apple

1984 campaign, "Obama Girl", or for that matter, the video in which Hillary

and Bill spoof the Sopranos. What do you think this YouTube based politics

might suggest about the potentials or limits of a politics which draws its

images and language from popular culture?

I think you explore this far deeper, and far better, than I do Henry, but it seems to me that accessible media production technology, the semiotic tool box we've all built from our life-long immersion in pop culture, and the new distribution apparatus like YouTube, have immense political potential. MoveOn.org demonstrated this in their "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign. They asked their audience to make an anti-Bush advertisement -- and received more than 1,500 of them, many of them better than anything a professional production house could create. This demonstrates the awesome power - and talent - of the "audience." This is, um, "poaching" at its best: political "fans" tapping into popular desire and, using pop culture language, delivering, a different message. At its worst this pop culture poaching leads to the Hillary Clinton Soprano's ad: using all the style of popular culture but ignoring the deep seated reasons that such a series was popular. Clinton's approach is just using pop culture a gimmick.

One of the things that interests me most about the explosion of media production is the multiplicity of messages and meanings that political campaigns have to contend with. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy (George Washington was accused of being the corrupter of a washerwoman's daughter), and the swiftboating of John Kerry was just a high-tech version. What is new this election cycle is the direct impact, not of opposing professional campaigns, but of political fans. We've already seen how fans of Barack Obama have used pop culture tropes to make him into a sex symbol and render Hillary Clinton as Big Sister. Political campaigns are just going to have to make peace with the fact that they can not control their message, and that the message is going to be determined, in part, by their fans. This means that "unacceptable" material is going to be part of the political discussion and decision making.

We can either bemoan this fact: the debasement of the political process and so on, or we can look for what might be more positive aspects. It could be argued that one of the things that's wrong with electoral politics today is that what is considered "expectable" is determined by professional pundits, big media and those who make large campaign contributions. Consequently, what is of interest to the majority of us is left out of the discussion. Certainly, Obama Girl isn't opening up a substantive political discussion of anything, but it's very existence, and its popularity, suggests that we, the people, want something else, something more, than the sanitized, pre-packaged, content-free politician packages we've gotten in the past.

There's no doubt that reducing serious politicians like Obama to a stud and Clinton to Big Sister debases politics, playing into old stereotypes about the sexuality of Black men and the controlling nature of professional women. But as the means of mediated spectacle production and distribution continue to be democratized, I have faith that what will develop is a sort of bell curve of meaning. There will be offensive and malicious media spectacles as outliers on either side, but the critical mass of the center will open up substantive issues of political interest to the majority of citizens. Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? This is merely democracy in the age of the mediated image.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seven, Part Two): Kristina Busse and Cornel Sandvoss

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL CTD.:

Kristina: Moreover, I worry that it'll be impossible to talk about the subcultural phenomenon that I would define as fandom if that term is already used for a much broader, less intense engagement.

Cornel: I would argue the answer already lies in what you are saying here though: if we want to talk about subcultural phenomena, let's call them precisely that: subcultures. On many occasions fan cultures and subcultures correspond, even become interchangeable, but there are clearly also fans and aspects of fandom that do not fit into a subcultural mold. So I fail to see the benefit in equating subculture and fan cultures a priori.

Kristina: I do understand that the psychological engagement with a text can be very intense, even in the absence of others to share that particular affect, that obsessional focus. Moreover, both community interaction and this affect exist on a continuum (changing between different people and even within a person over time). And I understand that it is important to study the individual and how emotional investment in a text gets created, played out, shared. I think it's important to look at the range of fannish engagement and affect, but why can't we do so with the community rather than the individual at the center? If I look at the lonely fan reading/watching/enjoying their text, I think of them as fannish because they're participating in an imagined community of other fans. [The best example in my area would be lurkers, who do not actively interact and are thus not part of the community per se, but who very clearly often think of themselves as part of the community--I guess we could think of it as parasocial relations with other fans?]

Cornel: If we speak about psychological categories such as affect, pleasure and fantasy, these are of course by definition constituted on the level of the individual. This doesn't mean that there cannot at least potentially be a communal context to the constitution of fan pleasures but ultimately it is manifested on an intrapersonal not interpersonal level.

Kristina: I don't want to sound like I want to forego the study of the individual fan in favor of a sole focus on the community, because that's not really what I'm saying here. What I'm worried about in terms of research focus is actually the fan academic parallel to what I'm worried about in terms of definitions of fandom: focusing on the more mainstream, more palatable fan may risk the erasure/ignoring of the less easily acceptable or explainable one.

Cornel: I understand and share your concern, but I just wonder what's more palatable here. Within the context of media and cultural studies, the study of the 'mainstream" (whatever that exactly may be) seems to me in fact much rarer and more adventurous as it appears to be often irreconcilable with dominant paradigms and ideological positions in the field. Where, for example, are those studies of Britney Spears fans, those of Hello and other celebrity gossip magazines or of Hollyoaks (a painful teen soap on British Channel 4 that lends itself rather less to forms of cultural appreciation than say, Dawson's Creek)? Or to hammer home the point, studies of fans of the various call-in quiz channels that have mushroomed in Europe in the past five years?

Kristina: Likewise, I fear that studies of the individual fan and his affect may eclipse those of fan communities, especially when the former may focus on male fans and the latter on females; especially when the affect in the former is individual and personal and in the latter is collective and communal (and, in collectivities that form around responses not valued by the dominant culture, may quite often become political as a result); especially when the former is done by male academics with status in the academy and the latter by females more likely to not have that status.

Cornel: I really don't see the need to compare or benefit in thinking about one eclipsing the other - this would imply a strange scarcity of spaces of academic debate. And I don't think this reflects any sort of structural and gendered power differences with higher education. I think we are hard pressed to find many people engaged in fan studies with any particular status in the academy in any case. And I know you are not suggesting it, but just to be categorical about this: I think it would more than insulting if anyone suggested that male scholars in our fields would disregard the work by female colleagues. Of course there are academic fashions which come and go in circles but I would suggest that we can't explain them in terms of gender, nor is work on fan communities being marginalized. On the contrary, I think following Henry's work, it still very much shapes the canon of the field.

Kristina: I'm only beginning to look into the role of affect and its potential political agency, but my friend Alexis Lothian, with whom I just finished writing an essay (together with Robin Reid) on slash as "queer female space," has been influencing my thinking on the social and political implications of shared/sharing affect. She argues, for example, "that communal articulations of affect, where reactions are shared and discussed, might be locations where the political implications of affect can get hashed out." In that vein, we are rethinking, for example, how "squee"--all too often seen as infantilizing--can actually be a site for embracing one's emotional responses, especially for women who've always prided themselves in their analytic abilities, maturity, etc. Especially when looking at fandom as a space for articulation of non-mainstream ideas and emotions, the role of affect intersects with the political. And I wonder whether it can be so on a purely personal level or whether subcultural characteristics are already communal and community-focused.

In particular, then, I am interested in the way affect functions in conjunction with others, either by sharing one's emotional investment in the text with the community or, even more interesting, I think, the way the community filters, increases, and shapes the text and the fannish affect. (In other words, watching a new episode for me gets affected by my knowledge that I will have others who may also have seen a particular moment and I will be able to share it. Moreover, it is in the analysis and talking and squeeing about it, in the rewriting and the iconing that the text itself becomes *more*, and it is via this shared discussion and shared emotional engagement that the text itself changes.]

Cornel: I don't disagree here....but let's come back to that when looking at texts.

HEIMAT

Kristina: One of the most often heard narratives in my corner of fandom (i.e., slash media fandom) is that of coming home. I like the way you've established the notion of Heimat in Fans, but I think I'd like to add that a sense of "coming home" quite often is intimately tied up with other fans (i.e., I feel like coming home often occurs in the finding of likeminded people--even if that community is totally imaginary). Moreover, I'd consider Heimat by definition a thing of some permanence, so that the narratives I've told and heard is by fans who are FIAWOL, who have found their tribe, so to speak and know they won't leave.

In my essay on the topic I linked to above, I connect being a fan to identity politics, and I think it could be useful to look at the debates in other areas that have had to face the theoretical and personal issues connected to identity politics. In the essay, I was mostly concerned with matters of inclusion and exclusion (are you a fan because you say you are/others say you are/what is gained and lost by declaring that identity/ etc.), but here I'm wondering whether the identity construction of being a fan may in and of itself create an affective space of belonging.

And I think it is that space that I may be vigorously protecting here. I fear that by expanding the terminology of fan to include virtually everyone (whether by including all sorts of fannish behavior as Jenkins does or by redefining it to focus on individual behavior so that most passionate textual engagements become "fannish"), the danger may be that 'real' fans are marginalized yet again. In other words, by focusing on what Rebecca Tushnet has called "normal-folks-with-benefits," I see my own more involved and more invested community fully overshadowed (as has happened with vidding vis a vis machinima) or be redefined as outcasts yet again. That latter fear is what I tried to describe in my short paper for Flow:

As media texts are more widely disseminated and construct their audiences in ever more fan-like ways at the same time as fannish activities become both more visible and more legitimate, the distinctions between creators and viewers, between casual viewers and fans is changing. It would be easy to see these changes as having the potential to create an idyllic convergence playground. The fannish community, however, would have to disavow those parts that do not please the owners of the media product (J.K. Rowling, George Lucas). Certain groups of fans can become legit if and only if they follow certain ideas, don't become too rebellious, too pornographic, don't read the text too much against the grain. That seems a price too high to pay. (source)

Cornel: I agree with your instance on fandom as a space worth defending from commercial interest - even if this might be ultimately a futile struggle. However, I would also add that Heimat is an ambivalent term. It is of course not only 'home', but an imagined space, a vision of belonging - ultimately a fantasy, if one that is indispensable in creating a necessary sense of security; and hence it is ultimately a fantasy that therefore, even if constructed in a communal context, is an inherent individual act of imagination. But what matters more - and here I would point to Dave Morley's recent work over the past decade in particular - home and Heimat are also always rooted in forms of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, of creating an (imagined) Other, which is excluded from the space we call home. And it the potential lack of engagement with the textual Other in fandom, which I am interested in Fans: The Mirror of Consumption.

FANTEXT

Kristina: The other term that really drives home to me just how different our approaches and goals are is the concept of the *fantext*. In fact, it was upon reading your definition of the fantext and comparing it to mine that it suddenly occurred to me why I felt like we disagreed at a most basic level even though I'd nod along when reading Fans most of the time. I think our object of study is ultimately different, or rather, the focus of what we find central is different: you are interested in the individual and his/her relationship to the text while I'm interested in individuals as members of a community and their relationship to that community.

In a way, then, the source text has shifted emphasis and moved into originary (in some cases, only catalyst) function whereas fan discourses and interaction are what continues to sustain the fannish investment and affect. And I'm beginning to wonder, if we're somehow looking at two related (and clearly intersecting) groups that nevertheless differ not only in modes of engagement but also objects of affect. A solitary fan, after all, remains attached to the source text itself only. A community may do so as well, but added to that are the investment in other fans, the shared affect with its increased feedback loop (i.e., shared squee tends to be louder).

At the most extreme end, then, is the fan I'm most interested in, who's ultimately more invested in the community than the source, the fan who defines herself as a slash fan rather than a show specific fan, the fan (like me?) who'll take the fanfic rather than the show on the island. It's those fans I've studied in my research on popslash where I've argued that it is the fan-fan interaction and friendships rather than the para-social interaction between fan and celebrity that is central in popslash fandom("I'm Jealous of the Fake Me"). As such, I view the community as a social network that encourages fans to explore their identities, desires, and sexualities, more so in relation with one another than with the star himself.

So, while I'm really interested in what you say about affect, to me the investment in the community must always be acknowledged (even if that community is virtual or the interaction wholly one-sided) alongside the involvement with the source text. [Because I'm not sure one would exist without the other, i.e., I'm not sure if we could conceive of fans if all we ever saw were individuals. Or, said differently, while a specific fan's engagement may only be in accessing web sites, reading spoilers, etc., someone who more than likely *is* more community connected created those web sites, found and shared those spoilers.]

Cornel: I am not sure I follow your conclusion in the last paragraph. I think you are right that we have focused on different segments of the fan spectrum, but I don't, for example, have a sole interest in atomised fans. Moreover, I think whatever the levels of communal engagement are in an individual's fandom, there are communalities that mean that the term 'fan' has conceptual currency across the spectrum and the process of reading, crucially, is one of them. This leads me to one what I see as a central challenge of contemporary fan studies and indeed audience studies as such (and this is a point on which I think we agree): the need to reconceptualise the notion of texts and textual boundaries in mediated communication. Slash and fan fic you mention are of course texts as well, whether we call them paratexts or give them a different term (indeed as you suggest they often replace the urtext as the focus of fans' reading. Jonathan, for example should be credited out for a range of insightful articles and chapters on how we can conceptualise and address (fan) texts in intertextual space of (mass) media consumption and I should mention others here such as Matt Hills, Chris Scodari, etc. In many ways I think reconceptualisng the text as object of fandom in the triangle of individual, its social networks and different media is the real challenge we face - gender of course shapes and informs this triangle but I don't think it is the single outstanding theme at heart of understanding contemporary fandom and fan cultures.

On that note, having opened with an unashamed plug, I will end with yet another one: It would be great to continue these insightful and lively discussions online as well as offline and I would like to use the opportunity to invite individual papers and panel proposals on this and related fields for the next conference of the International Communication Association in Montreal in May 2008 for which I am the programme planer for the Popular Communication Division. The number of sessions available to us will as always depends on the number of division members we have, so to all those who are ICA members already and those considering joining (you get not only cheaper conference registration but an awful lot of journals for your bucks!) please join the Popular Communication division or renew your division membership if you already are a member. Included in the annual fee of $8 is also a free online subscription of Popular Communication. I hope both the division and the journal will provide additional spaces for these debates - helping to makes sure that rather than feeling that different foci and traditions in the field of fan studies need to compete with each other, we create a forum in which different and diverging voices are heard.

Kristina: Thanks, Cornel, for responding in depth to what was, in effect, a monologue on my part (though hopefully engaging with your previous writing). I am very much looking forward to having a dialog with both you and the readers in the blog/LJ comments. I do want to complement your plug with another, however: many of us--be they grad students, independent scholars, or fan scholars not actually affiliated with academia at all--cannot afford conferences. What many of us have and are doing instead is use the Internet and its ability to connect and allow us to have these conversations and debates. In fact, to me these summer debates have been doing exactly that--connecting people, and I hope they'll continue to do so and that these unconnected spaces we've been inhabiting will continue to merge.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seven, Part One): Kristina Busse and Cornell Sandvoss

INTRODUCTION

Kristina:

I have a PhD in English from Tulane University and teach as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. I have been reading and writing on fan fiction since 1999 and have published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan culture, including on Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction, popslash, and fandom as queer female space. I coedited with Karen Hellekson, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland 2006) and am currently coauthoring a book-length study with Louisa Stein on fan artifacts and new media. I write about fan fiction and fandom and fan communities incessantly on my fannish LiveJournal.

The fact that I am an independent scholar is, in many ways, central to my work, because I have specific and quite personal reasons to be interested in the line between professional and amateur, fan writing and pro writing, and the way these get defined in various communities. Despite my disciplinary training and record of publication, I am not paid for my work, which makes me an adjunct--in my academic work of teaching as well as research. In a way, then, my academic work functions like fan work: I do not receive any financial recompense nor does its ideal value (line in CV) contribute to my gaining material benefit.

So, I straddle the line between amateur and professional in a keener way than most. Also, my central mode of fannish engagement is through meta, the grass-roots version of academic criticism, where I am seen as an academic outsider by many fans. By contrast, I cannot quite partake in the proper academic channels and thus feel fannish outsider within academia. This ambiguous position makes me keenly aware of the way my academic work replicates the contested relationship to capitalism and professionalism that fan work (and the fans creating it) exemplifies.

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Cornel: Hello, I should briefly introduce myself as well at this point. I have published on fan audiences in a number of articles and three books, A Game of Two Halves (Routledge, 2003) which focuses solely on football (soccer) fandom - a possibly rather alien topic to most readers of this blog, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Polity Press, 2005) and more recently had the good fortune to be asked by Jonathan Gray and Lee Harrington to co-edit an anthology previously mentioned here and entitled Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007) which features a wide range of, I think, important contributions by many scholars in the field. In fact Lee, Jonathan and I enjoyed the experience so much that we have gone on to follow in the footsteps of Sharon Mazzarella and Norma Pecora as the editors of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture. I mention this here as we initially thought that we might attract a greater number of papers dedicated to the study of fans and fan cultures given our own backgrounds, but this hasn't quite materialised yet. So please see this an invitation to all scholars out there to consider the journal as a potential publication outlet for their research in the field - needless to say, whichever side of this debate they are on (if indeed there are sides...)!

I am also Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Surrey (UK), but, like Kristina, I am a German exile. I'm not sure this actually matters at all - or rather hope it doesn't (though that is admittedly a rather German thing to say) other than in two respects: a.) in terms of the conceptual and theoretical foundations which in my case tend to draw fairly heavily on German literary, cultural and social theory such as the Frankfurt School and Constance School and b.) in giving us an outsider perspectives on many of the dominant Anglo-American (and let's add Australian) discourses in the field. There are of course always differences in personal taste and genre preferences but I am always struck at how certain instances of popular American television are assumed to be universally known and appreciated. I say this not to complain about a lack of intercultural awareness of fan scholars to whom English is their native language, but because it has shaped my interest and journey through the field. Over the years I have read many studies of fan cultures whose central texts I were and sometimes continue to be been unfamiliar with. This may be a rather heretical admission, but I have to out myself as someone who had read Matt Hills's or John Tulloch's work on Dr Who, long before I had ever seen a single episode. And just to offend the American crowd here as well, when reading the earlier rounds of this discussion, I had to google 'Firefly' - I simply had never seen it. I would like to plea that none of this is ignorance - indeed it would not deter me in the least from enthusiastically reading a study on, say, Firefly fans. But it does mean that my interest in this study and others is not one in particular fan audiences or cultures in and for themselves, but about what these studies tell us about the micro and macro conditions and parameters of (everyday) life in a mediated world and the interplay between structure and agency that takes place within such frames. Anyway, we can return to this kind of Sinnfrage of fan studies later, if you like.

Before we kick start this week's debate, I should say a word or two about the format, however. Owing to my own unavailability earlier this month (the usual excuses are other publication deadlines, exam boards, etc.) and the fact that Kristina was much more organised in writing up her thoughts an earlier stage (and is currently travelling in Europe) the following takes the shape of Kristina outlining her thoughts on the debate and my post hoc replies. Kristina is thus left with the power of agenda setting whereas I enjoyed the right of the last reply.

MALE AND FEMALE FANNISH BEHAVIOR:

Kristina: I feel on some level like we are the exemplar of what I've been shorthanding as the fanboy/fangirl split, and I think it might be useful to both articulate what those differences might be but also to complicate them once we've done so. One of the complaints I've heard most about trying to divvy up fan studies along gender lines (or even daring to suggest that gender might be an issue!) is that that there are too many exceptions to even try to establish categories or definitions. Moreover, I'll start by making a quite enormous collapse that we may have to discuss down the line, namely, I sketch behavior onto gender. In a way, when I personally talk about fanboys and fangirls, it's much less about actual biobodies than it is about certain ways of engaging with source texts and certain ways of theorizing and studying fans. And I may be totally wrong when actually looking at demographics!

But in my home, fannish behavior looks as follows: my husband watches Doctor Who quite passionately. He taped every episode when younger, bought all the tapes, and now owns all the DVDs. Most evenings more or less as long as I've known him, he will sit and watch a couple of episodes--in recent years with our kids. When my older one turned 4, he wanted a Doctor Who birthday party, and it was hard to explain to him that the doctor and Buzz Lightyear weren't quite the same *g* My husband also collects D&D material, less for playing and more as a collector's item. He certainly is quite invested in these texts, both emotionally and financially, but it is the texts and objects rather than other fans that are the center of his focus. Meanwhile, I started defining myself years ago as "a fan of fans," i.e., while I have fallen for a number of media texts over the years, most recently, Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural, my primary fannish engagement is the community and its products, my primary investment time and my primary reward friendships and fannish creative and intellectual artifacts. Or, said differently, when I answer the often voiced question of what I'd take on the proverbial island, it's always the fan creations, never the TV show.

Now, clearly the dynamic in our household is neither universal nor generalizable, but reading Textual Poachers and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities on the one hand and Fan Cultures and Fans on the other, I do begin to wonder whether my family's gendering is not that unusual after all. Now, fanfiction communities are particularly invested in community and fan-created artifacts, so that using that as my measuring stick might be unfair and methodologically problematic. After all, what about the many communities that are predominantly male? What about the lonely fangirl reading her favorite book over and over again all by herself? And even dividing it into a blunt collecting/analyzing versus creating might leave out entire communities of women who debate technical details and men who create emotionally involved works of art.

Cornel: Yes, I think these are very valid points. I actually struggle with the usefulness of introducing gender here as the key dividing line between fans and fan scholars alike and can only echo Will Brooker's earlier comments. I think there are two different questions: The first one is whether we can distinguish between types of either male and female fan behaviour or, secondly, between types of male and female approaches to the study of fandom. Both, in my eyes, are unsustainably essentialist suggestions which I outright reject. You already mentioned a few examples as far as fan behaviour is concerned and we could compile an almost endless list here: consider for example Vermorel and Vermorel's (1985) distinctly private fan fantasies written more often that not by female fans (or indeed fan girls given their age!); conversely, communal consumption contexts are at the heart of many distinctly male fan cultures in, say, sports fandom. Very much the same applies to the academic study of fans and fandom: if there are distinctly male and female approaches these would not correspond with respective foci on individual fans on the one hand and fan communities on the other - let's not forget that Henry has of course laid the foundations and established the canon in the study of fandom as an interpretive community. Even if there was a correlation between these positions and the gender of particular scholars, it would be a yet greater challenge to argue that this is not a coincidental correlation but grounded in quintessential gender differences.

In the earlier rounds of this discussion, the question of gender and fandom was linked to race by one contributor who remarked that however commendable it may be not wanting to distinguish on the grounds of race, it nevertheless constitutes a very real barrier in people's lives. This is of course true, and I think the analogy is interesting, but the conclusion is ultimately erroneous. Let's think this analogy through for and imagine we would suggest that there are forms of 'white' and 'black' fandom. This would be nothing short of utterly racist! However, this doesn't mean that race and ethnicity are not one of the many socio-demographic lines that structure given fan cultures, impact upon audiences' choices of objects of fandom and inform cultural and cultural hierarchies associated with fandom (remember Thornton's revealing documentation and analysis of the discrimination faced by black adolescent males in 1990s UK club culture). Equally, gender (alongside class and other vectors of social stratification) is one of various important social and cultural parameter that structure fandom, as it is indeed a faultline in the divisions of power in contemporary society and hence naturally constitutes a key concern of fan studies. Yet, this is a far cry from overburdening gender by making it the organising principle of a fundamental and essentialist dichotomy of fan audiences.

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL:

Kristina: And yet I can't shake this (possibly mistaken) belief that there *is* a gendered tendency--if not in the fans then maybe in the academics? Given that you and I probably fit into both categories, it seems like we should maybe begin by defining our terms, because that's where for me the first (and possibly biggest) disconnect and differentiation takes place. You define *fandom* as "the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text" (8). In so doing, you clearly shift the emphasis from community to individual: "this focus on communities and tightly networked fans fails to conceptualize important aspects of the relationship between the modern self, identity and popular culture which forms my particular concern here" (5).

To me, on the other hand, the terms mean quite different things. Fandom, to me, requires a community and participation in that community--and possibly self identification with that community. [And I feel the need to insert here that when I talk about "community" I clearly do not think of it as a monolithic entity but rather as always a collection of different and differing, complex and contradictory communities, where fans may be members of many communities over time and even simultaneously.] I'll just cite myself here since I think my short essay Fandom-is-a-Way-of-Life versus Watercooler Discussion; or, The Geek Hierarchy as Fannish Identity Politics articulates my very objection:

I want to suggest that we distinguish between fan and fandom as well as acknowledge that there are different trajectories that combine into levels of fannishness. In other words, an intense emotional investment in a media text that is wholly singular may create a fan but does not make the individual part of a larger fandom, whereas a person enacting fannish behavior may not define him- or herself as a fan. It thus might be useful to consider the overlapping but not interdependent axes of investment and involvement as two factors that can define fannish engagement. Moreover, we need to consider models that can differentiate between people who are fans of a specific text, those that define themselves as fans per se, and those that are members of fandom.

Cornel: I actually don't agree that I shift the emphasis from communities to the individual. I tried to broaden our definition of what we call fandom and who we call fans, yet in doing so I do not exclude the established body of work focusing on fan communities which is in particular associated with what Jonathan, Lee and I have described as the 'first wave of fan studies'. Rather I, as have indeed others, included fields of audience studies which, to my mind, are also of importance and warrant further study. And I think there is a certain logic in accepting to recognise those people who call themselves fans - whether they meaningfully participate in interpretive communities or not - as fans, as indeed others who may shun the label but display very similar forms of textual attachment, communal engagement or textual activity.

I think while widely used, Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst's (Audiences, Sage 1998) highly useful taxonomy of different fan audiences deserves yet greater attention in this context, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic (from a UK vantage point that is). While Matt Hills has rightly pointed to some issues concerning the terminology Abercrombie and Longhurst employed, they provide a very useful map of the last field of popular audiences which helps us to juxtapose and position various studies of different fan groups and cultures meaningfully in relation to each other. In some of these studies, in particular those focusing on whom Abercrombie and Longhurst describe as 'enthusiasts', the emphasis will be very much on community, in others it won't. I think both are about fans, both are engaging in different forms of fandom, but at the same time, they are different forms of engagement with different social and cultural consequences. I think this only underlines the significance of studying fandom across the spectrum of audiences or popular media.

Kristina: On the other hand, there is also a spectrum between the individual fan who has a deep investment in the beloved text and the people with a more casual enjoyment, and it is that distinction that seems crucial to me. As a result, I do wonder whether just liking a show, following a sports team, or listening to a band isn't a type of activity that is so universal that the category of fan becomes emptied out. I don't want to border police and define who gets to be called a fan and who doesn't, but I fear that an all-too-inclusive definition would become useless for any study or categorization if the definition were so wide that noone would *not* be included. If fan simply denotes someone liking something, then there's really no need to create a separate category.

Cornel: I am not sure why the fact that many of us, maybe all, are fans in one form or another "empties out" the term. I would make a similar point here as in my discussion of Fiske's (1992) essay that moves towards a normative definition of fans: I can't see any benefit in using a definition that corresponds with pre-formulated expectations. Put more crudely than you are suggesting (but it illustrates the point), if we define fans as "good consumers', then naturally only "good consumers" are fans!

I think this is not so much a question of who is a fan but when we are a fan. Saying that most of us are fans doesn't mean we are all fans all the time, but rather that being a fan describes a particular segment of our engagement with media and those around us - an engagement that I would argue derives its significance not least from the fact that it spills over into other social and cultural fields, in the way the reading position of the fan is more and more evident (or maybe we just more and more realise it is) in other fields of cultural and political engagement (see Jonathan's essay in Fandom for example).

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series elaborating on comments I made to Mother Jones as part of their special Democracy 2.0 issue. Today, I take up a few more of the many implications of this interplay between participatory culture and participatory democracy. Democracy and the Participation Gap

While I remain firm in my belief that, as I explained here some months ago, the rise of participatory culture has the potential to renew participatory democracy, I remain concerned about the participation gap, those who lack the technical access, the cultural competencies, and the sense of empowerment needed to fully participate in this new political culture.

MJ: Are there elements about the use of technology that could make the political process less democratic?

HJ: If the central conversation about the election is only online, rather than through broadcast television, large numbers of people will simply not have access to what the candidates are saying. So, for some people, this campaign is going to be more accessible than ever before. They have access to more information; they can drill deeper; they can maintain regular contact with the campaign; they can interact with other supporters and so forth. For others, who have no access or limited access to the Internet, moving all this activity online suggests that they don't count, their voices don't matter. They have no access to the information to make reliable decisions. And it's not the campaigns who are doing that, so much as broadcast television, which is decreasing the coverage that it provides of the party conventions. It's local newspapers that are cutting back the number of pages devoted to candidates for office. Those are the things that make the use of new media less democratic, because they are falling back on the presence of the new media to justify cutting back on basic information sources that citizens who don't have online access would rely on to follow the political process....

Whenever we look towards new and emerging platforms as a resource for democracy, we must at the same time consider who is being left behind. And I do see dangers at a moment when mainstream media is cutting down on its news coverage of the presidential nominating process and much of the information is moving to cable or digital media. The people who are going to have to work hardest to get access to information and participate within the process are going to be those who have historically felt the most disenfranchised in the first place. The move towards digital campaigning may capture the imagination of many young voters but it may also exclude many low income participants.

Social Networks as Political Interfaces

My conversation with Mother Jones turned towards the use of social networking sites, another major innovation in this year's campaign:

HJ: I think some of it has to do with the use of MySpace by the Obama campaign, which is something that I don't think is necessarily being [deployed] by the other campaigns as effectively yet--[Obama's supporters show] an understanding of how you use social networking to reach young voters. It's not about bringing people to your site and keeping them there; it's about giving people the resources to take your message with them wherever they want to go. It's allowing people to befriend the Obama campaign via MySpace and the other social networking pages. It's really clever because it makes the social affiliation of the campaign much more visible, and it allows all those people to connect to each other and feel a sense of affiliation, as opposed to simply receiving a message from on high. That's why the anti-Hillary 1984 campaign commercial that circulated was so much more credible than the one that reacted to it, because there is a sense of the Clinton campaign speaking to us from a contained space as opposed to breaking free of that and creating a new relationship with the voters.

In many ways, the interfaces campaigns adopt model their idea about the relationship between political leaders and citizens. I have long felt that the most authoritarian candidates tend to have top-down structures built into their web presences, where-as those candidates who want to establish a more dialogic relationship are drawn towards community-building and networking capacities on their sites. Most of the media attention on the campaign's use of MySpace has focused exclusively on the direct links the campaign is creating with individual voters, but it is part of the nature of social networks that it is also enabling supporters to connect to each other without going through a central hub and it remains to be seen how this impacts the campaign. It's interesting to think about Hillary's use of campaign videos in this way. Supporters see these videos as the later day equivalent of the Fire Side Chat. I get the analogy. FDR used radio, then a relatively new political platform, to speak directly to Americans in their living rooms and adopted a frank, informal, and conversational tone appropriate to the nature of such an exchange. In many ways, Hillary Clinton is adopting that same tone in her confessional-style videos -- which would seem totally appropriate for an era of broadcasting but which now seem much too one-directional to work in a networked culture.

Credability, Partisanship, and Wiki-Politics

As the interview continued, Mother Jones asked me about issues of credibility given the ways that videos and other content now circulates well beyond its original context and given what I have said here about the likelihoods that many of the videos will attempt to mask their origins.

MJ: What effects is this going to ultimately have on how people filter the information that they're getting through this media? Eventually, will they simply disbelieve anything they see?

HJ: I think there's going to be skepticism and not cynicism. We should be skeptical of the sources of information that come to us via these grassroots channels. At the same time, we've seen these emerging knowledge cultures, these sort of large-scale grassroots communities that pull in information and debunk these things in very quick order. The turnaround is really fast, and for those people who are wired, that flow of information is surprisingly effective, what people are calling "collective intelligence," the ability of people to collectively pool their knowledge and share what they found. And I think that, actually, collective intelligence is a profoundly democratic process. It's social at its root, and it allows people to form communities around debating political issues and how the candidates are representing themselves to the public. It makes us less susceptible to negative campaign advertising than we've been before.

MJ: How sophisticated do you think online media consumers are at this stage? And to what degree are these collective intelligence systems currently up to the task of catching misleading information?

HJ: The answer to the first question is relatively sophisticated. If we make our political process more like Wikipedia, then I think we create the space that's needed for people to pull knowledge and form a consensus and weed through conflicting evidence. I think we're not quite there yet. I think the interesting thing is how much this next campaign cycle accelerates the process of people moving from playing with collective intelligence to deploying collective intelligence as a source of political power. I think that's what we're going to see unfolding in the next couple of years. And I don't know if we're ready for the task yet, but I think we're going to grow up pretty fast.

The reference to Wikipedia, here, picks up on something I said earlier in the conversation which is missing from the web transcript but was quoted in the print magazine:

The blogosphere has done a really bad job in general of finding a common space between disagreeing parties. It probably does contribute to the further partisanization of American politics. Wikipedia represents the alternative model, one where people from different political backgrounds could work together. But it depends on the willingness of the candidates and the campaigns to try to come up with a purple strategy as opposed to a red-vs-blue strategy.

Without idealizing Wikipedia, the group has developed a series of ethical norms about how to deal with conflicting views or competing claims which could be a good model for how people of good will but opposing perspective might work together to reshape the political process. We have created a climate in this country which makes it difficult if not impossible for either political party to govern because both are preoccupied with winning.

My reference here to a Purple strategy is a gesture towards a well publicized map produced in the aftermath of the last election which tried to represent the balance of votes in each state based on a blending of red and blue. No state is pure blue or red, despite our most common ways of depicting election results. In fact, many of the individual states are closely balanced. Showing them as purple states helps reveal some of the commonalities between different regions of the country rather than focusing purely on divisions. And so some political commentators have started to talk about "purple strategy" and you can see signs of this "purple strategy" emerging from candidates such as Obama in the Democratic Party or Hucklebee in the GOP. My fantasy was that campaigns might use wikis to try to identify points of consensus which could be used to broaden their political base, rather than deploying bloggers to try to draw blood from the opposing camp.

Interestingly, Mother Jones also spoke with Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales to get his perspective:

JW: One of the concerns people have had about blogs is that they are going to have a very divisive influence because people only read blogs that they agree with, and they won't get their news from the mainstream media, which are supposed to be neutral. But you see a couple of things happening. First, blogs are hardly the only form of new media. People come to Wikipedia all the time, which is quite clearly as neutral as anything can be, I think. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. At Wikipedia itself, we are now seeing a large volume of information being created that has been put through an extensive process of compromise, with people from very diverse viewpoints really hammering away at it to find some compromised view that everybody is satisfied with.

Also, you see people who are really active in reading blogs do end up reading opinions that they disagree with because bloggers get into arguments and link up back and forth and have those debates. So people do get exposed to alternative viewpoints, far more than they would if they had one source of information. I think it's pretty clear that people are getting better information than they used to.

I hope to write more about the use of new media in the campaign in the coming months.

A Valuable Resource

In parting, let me do a shout out to a very interesting project focused on the role of media in presidential campaigns, produced by Project Look Sharp. If you are an educator, you can download here a range of images, sound files, and videos going back across the entire history of the nation, which you can use in talking with your students about the political process. I was lucky enough to see a presentation by Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp at the Alliance for a Media Literate America last month and being the political campaign buff that I was, had a grand time seeing the materials they had collected -- from images of 19th century street parades to the fireside chats, from Nixon's Checkers speech to Saturday Night Live spoofs of the presidential debates.

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part One)

I am proud to be featured as one of the experts on new media and American politics featured in the August 2007 issue of Mother Jones, alongside such notaries as Howard Dean and his former campaign director Joe Trippi, A-list blogger Jerome Armstrong, digerati Esther Dyson, legal theorist Lawrence Lessig, conservative icon Grover Norquist, Moveon.org's Eli Pariser, Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales, and author David Weinberger (Everything is Miscelaneous). The magazine is taking inventory of the ways that new media tools and techniques are reshaping the campaign process, looking back at the 2004 campaign and forward to the current political season. Even if you read the printed edition of the magazine, you should check out their web edition which includes more extensive versions of the interviews quoted in their articles. I was bemused that the quotations from me they selected for use in the magazine emphasized some of the concerns I have about the current shape of online democracy, leaving me looking like one of the crankiest people they interviewed. I have to say that playing the part of a pessimist in a publication like Mother Jones is a most familiar position for me, given my reputation as a critical utopianist. But, I tend to spell out the positives and negatives in interviews -- most of the time, they go with my most wide-eyed comments and this time, they emphasize some of my worries. I thought I would share some of what I said here and offer a few more thoughts about the role which new media is playing in the presidential campaign so far. Some of it builds on ideas I first introduced in my Technology Review column, "Photoshop for Democracy," and developed more fully in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

One thing to keep in mind: campaigns are often early adopters and adapters of new media technologies as they seek new interfaces with potential voters. The most innovative use of new and emerging technologies comes from insurgent or dark horse candidates who are trying to get their message out with limited funds and have less to lose from taking risks. If what they do seems to work, you will see it taken up in the next campaign cycle by more established and thus more tactically conservative candidates. So, for example, last go around, Howard Dean's campaign staff went for broke in their use of platforms like Meetup to organize face to face meetings with voters, of blogs to give voters a greater sense of access to the candidates and the campaigns, and the use of the web to raise money from smaller donors. By this election cycle, all of these tactics are taken for granted and they are being used by pretty much every candidate in the race. This go around, the newer tactics have to do with social network sites, such as Myspace, to create a stronger sense of affiliation with the campaign and the use of YouTube and other video sites to distribute content. Further out on the horizon might be the use of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, to allow candidates to "meet personally" with key leaders scattered around the country or the use of Wiki software to allow citizens to play a stronger role in shaping the candidate's platform and position papers. (So far, we are not seeing major candidates adopt these later approaches, but the campaign is young and anything can happen.)

Politics YouTube Style

All of this, however, frames this from the wrong angle though, since it keeps us focused on what the candidates and their campaign staff is doing, while as my response to this first question suggests a lot of what is most interesting in the campaigns is emerging bottom up -- from citizens taking media in their own hands.

MJ: What areas do you think are going to be the most ripe for experimentation and innovation?

HJ: I think a lot of it is not going to be through campaigns but through loosely affiliated organizations. We saw this last time with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Texans for Truth. Those are examples where the candidates lost control of their own campaigns to some degree, or at least maintained a level of plausible deniability. I think the most interesting work I saw during the last election cycle came out of True Majority, an organization that was using appropriation and transformation of popular culture to reach younger voters in a hipper way. I wrote about the role of what I call "Photoshop for Democracy," which is the use of Photoshop collages as a kind of grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. What happens when you tap popular culture, you pull politics much closer to people's everyday lives. So, I'm very interested in the ways those kinds of new uses of media touch both campaigns and citizen groups and the uneasy relationship between the two. The positive side is that it gets more citizens involved; it develops a more playful language; it produces a more engaged electorate; it transforms the language of politics. The downside is that checks on negative campaigning break down completely, and that's what we saw the last time with the Swift Boat Veterans: They went lower faster than any campaign would have been able to do on their own.

A key phrase in this passage was "plausible deniability." I think the rise of citizen media makes it possible for campaigns to keep certain supporters at arms length, allowing them to do some of the dirty business of the campaign while allowing the candidate to deny any and all association. Candidates are required to verbally endorse all paid advertisements sponsored by their campaigns, where-as these are the kinds of spots they can deny. We don't know for sure what, if any, involvement the Obama campaign had, for example, in the distribution of the anti-Hillary mashup of the Apple 1984 campaign, though Mother Jones includes an interview with Phil de Vellis, its creator, who had this to say about the video:

MJ: I'm sure you are aware of the skepticism surrounding the situation-that people just don't believe that there was no campaign involvement. You lived with an Obama PR flack.

PD: I'm friends with people on every campaign. Politics is a really small world-it's really like junior high. The [Obama] campaign was not involved in it at all. As soon as they found out, I left the company. I think Obama's a great guy, and I think he's running a great campaign, but that doesn't make me officially part of the campaign. But am I connected on one of these trees that connects all the great rock bands-like the drummer of Pink Floyd is also in Supertramp. Yeah, there's some of that. But I have the capability to do that on my own and the ability to get it out there. I'm kind of a utility player. I can do it all. I can also just shut up and watch the fireworks go off and that's what I did.

MJ: In your response on Huffington Post, you said you wanted to express your feelings about the Democratic primary and also to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. And in light of what's happened recently with Obama's MySpace page, how does a campaign harness the power of that citizen without it getting completely out of control?

PD: They can't-the game really has changed. They can't exercise the same amount of control over the campaign. During the Dean campaign, nobody ever said, "Oh, look at what your crazy supporter did." Reporters were interested in the technology and never really read anything people were writing-and they were writing really crazy things. So I would say it's probably best to encourage supporters to go out there and be advocates and at some point, [candidates] are going to have to distance themselves if it's not what they intended.

I suspect we are going to be tracing story after story like this throughout the forthcoming campaign -- videos produced by supporters who may or may not have direct links to the campaign. Such videos will have the look and feel of those produced on the most grassroots level, even if some of them -- like the notorious Al Gore's Penguin Army -- turn out to be produced by top-flight agencies. In the past few months, we've seen some fascinating examples of how videos can function in the campaign -- from the sexy Obama Girl video to the videos being produced by Firefighters to challenge Rudy Guiliani's attempts to capitalize on his role in 9/11. (Could firefighters be the new Swift Boat Captains?) Interestingly enough, we are even seeing the idea of "fan parody" move from the fringes of the last campaign to the absolute center -- witness Bill and Hillary's participation in a video spoofing The Sopranos (which was itself a promotion for their do it yourself campaign theme song competition.) These videos are both interesting because of their style (the use of parody as a vehicle for mainstream political discourse) and because of the mode of their circulation (becoming something that supporters can actively spread across cyberspace). As I told Mother Jones, "The video's becoming the modern equivalent of the campaign button -- something you wear, you display on your blog to spread the message to your friends and neighbors."

Lawrence Lessig also discusses the role of parody, appropriation, and grassroots video production within the political process:

Lawrence Lessig: The campaigns are realizing that if last election was defined by Swift Boat, this election there will be a million Swift Boats. There will be content showing up that will be much more interesting and watched by many more people than what the campaigns are creating. That changes the way that presidential campaigns are defined, where they buy up as much of the speaking space as possible. No one yet knows how this is going to play out.

In the analog world, it wasn't really that anyone was stopping ordinary people from becoming political actors, it was that the costs of doing so were so much larger. The technology is unleashing a capacity for speaking that before was suppressed by economic constraint. Now people can speak in lots of ways they never before could have, because the economic opportunity was denied to them.

MJ: So what does that mean for the quality of the conversation? Not that it's a really high bar.

LL: If you look at the top 100 things on YouTube or Google it's not like it's compelling art. There's going to be a lot of questions about whether it's compelling politics either. We can still play ugly in lots of ways, but the traditional ways of playing ugly are sort of over. This medium is only a medium if people are interested, and we'll get as good as we deserve.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Six, Part Two): Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington

Sam Ford: I know that a lot of the people following this debate might not be that interested in soaps in particular, but I am interested in the differences in discussing fan culture when it shifts from being a conversation primarily about fan fiction, which many of the back-and-forths have so far. How do we measure creativity in relation to fan communities? My understanding is that most people would agree that fan fiction only retains its full meaning and resonance within the community that it is produced in, and the social specificity of creative output is no different in the soap opera fan communities we have been discussing, but the output is often much different--criticism, debate, parody, discussion, continuity-maintenance, historical perspective...these are very creative processes that seem to be the prevalent forms of fan output for soap opera fandom. To move toward your discussion of sports and media fans, I think the question you pose is one relevant to this series as a whole and one which various contributors have touched on in one way or another. Are we looking at the difference in male and female fan responses or in the responses of scholarship on fans, or can you really separate the two? As you imply in your question, there is some difficulty in separating the two, and perhaps the body of academic work on soap opera fandom, television fandom, fan fiction communities, sports fandom, and so on are shaped greatly by the gendered perspectives, and the respective genders, of those who have been most prevalent in those fields. It is important to realize this may be the case, while not making that the totalizing explanation for differences in sports fandom and sports fan studies, when compared to media fandom.

My work on pro wrestling goes between the two, in that it is sports entertainment, a blending of media fandom and sports fandom, and a blending between male-gendered sports and female-gendered soap opera. In wrestling, I have found that there at least seems to be a significant amount of fan fiction compared to soaps, even though the WWE likewise has five hours of weekly television content, perhaps because wrestling does provide a lot of negative capability, to steal a term from Geoff Long's posts two weeks ago, for fans to fill in, because it does not provide the off-stage relationships among characters and/or their portrayers. As Sue Clerc has written about, wrestling fan fiction plays an interesting blend between concentrating on the characters and the "real people" who play their parts, just as wrestling blurs those distinctions itself.

Of course, it's important to note that the fan fiction of wrestling is a very largely driven by females, while male fan expression in online fan community form has often

manifested itself in a blend of role-playing and fantasy sports in which wrestling fans enter fantasy leagues and role-play various wrestlers to compete with one another. These e-mail federations, or fantasy leagues, involve quite a bit of creativity, but it manifests itself much differently than in the off- screen relationships so often portrayed in the more explicit fan fiction. These, of course, are very gendered responses to the program, and there is very little formal overlap between the two wrestling fan fiction communities.

You raise some interesting questions about celebrity in relation to sports as well. I don't particularly know that "celebrification" is necessarily gendered female, although there is often more talk of "role models" when it comes to male celebrity. But I do think that you are right that the particular pleasures or draws of sports may be seen as different. In the wrestling world, John Cena would be a particularly good example.

Because some more traditional fans view him as lacking the technical skills of some

other wrestling stars, he is actively disliked be a particular portion of the crowd, his

"haters." To another very large portion of the audience, often identified as primarily female adults and younger fans, he is greatly loved and admired, and the theory has

often been an emphasis on skill among the active adult male fan base and an emphasis on star image and charisma among female fans, children, and more casual wrestling fans. I'm not saying it breaks that easily into those binaries, but it is intriguing in relation to the question you pose.

C. Lee Harrington: One of the dimensions of creativity often left out of discussions is fan fantasies -- here I mean those that take place only in the confines of one's brain, not shared with others via discussion, fiction, debate, research interview, etc. We all know fantasizing exists but unless it manifests itself in some

representational form visible to others we tend to overlook it (in recent research particularly).

Most studies of fandom tend to rely on at least some form of visible expression. I wonder sometimes about the (in)accessibility of fans who experience and express their fandom only to their own selves......and I'm one of those people, mostly. I'd rather watch my favorite TV programs alone than with others, I don't talk about them online and rarely with friends (though our office staff and faculty have regular Wed morning discussions about Dancing with the Stars and American Idol, perhaps my proudest accomplishment as department chair), and I don't participate in most other creative activities that tend to be the hallmarks of fandom. I wonder if my own research design approach would capture me as a fan :-) Auto- ethnography, anyone...?

To go back to the gender question, yes, the gender of scholars vs. gender of fans vs. gendered nature of texts etc. raise all sorts of complicated questions, and the discussions these past few weeks have been really illuminating. I guess I was thinking with celebrification (in the context of sport) that once we're down the road of transforming athletes into stars, we somehow move them from the world of sport to the world of celebrity, a gendered shift in many people's eyes.

I'm remembering the Olympics a few rounds back (I'm forgetting the year) when the network (NBC?) for the first time did "behind the scenes" of athletes' lives to draw in female viewership. Novel at the time but it's obviously become standard because it altered demos exactly how producers wanted. Not hard to speculate how Emmitt Smith's appearance (and well-deserved win!) on Dancing altered his public perception and fan base. Obviously some of our readers out there know much more about celebrification in the sport context than I do.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I know you share my hope our back- and-forth has been useful for those involved in the discussion this summer and those following the discussion. Since soap opera fandom, sports fandom, and pro wrestling fandom are quite different than many of the fan activities and genres that have been discussed here in the past few weeks, I at least hope that we have emphasized that there is some great work on fandom in the body of work on soap operas and pro wrestling, and that there is a whole other world of sports fandom out there that speak to many of these issues and that would be of great interest.

When the precursor to this series started after the Media in Transition conference and through Kristina Busse's site, we started discussing how my own focus on soap opera

fandom provided a much different perspective on many of the media-related questions posed in this discussion about fandom. I have taken a Convergence Culture approach to what is primarily a female genre, soap opera, which would seem to some a male bent on a female fandom. However, as your work pointed out over a decade ago, a producer/consumer perspective is quite different in the fan world of soaps. While it is quite true that fans often set themselves against TPTB in soaps for not respecting a show's history, this relationship also manifests itself in relation to soap opera's marginality, just as pro wrestling fandom does. Even as producers and consumers bicker about one another from time-to-time, they may very well be the first to defend the others to outsiders. That produces that "family reunion" atmosphere and that much different dynamic.

Soaps also have a larger proportion of female creators in executive and high creative position to correspond with the large female fan base, so gendered discussions of producers and consumers and the power dynamics of their interaction is quite different than in a variety of fandoms in which examining interpersonal relationships in greater detail is reading against the text. Further, the volume of soaps text mitigates the need for fan fiction to fill in the gaps, so fan creativity manifests itself in so many other ways.

Sports and pro wrestling provide the other side of this coin, but as Henry's work points out, wrestling marries a predominantly male fan base and cast to a feminine serialized drama form. And I think it's important to realize that there are a significant portion of soap opera fans who are male, just as there are a large portion of female wrestling fans. These surplus audiences, in the eyes of those worried about target demographics, are still important parts of the fan community and must be included in these discussions, rather than stereotyping the audience as somehow monolithic.

I know that this conversation exists in some ways as an outlier to a fanboy/fangirl discussion, but I hope that will be its strength rather than its weakness. Lee, I know that you are headed out for travels, so we'll end the conversation at this point, and I'll continue the conversation through the comments on Henry's blog and in LiveJournal.

Lee will be joining us in the comments section when she returns from her travels later this month.