Gender and Fan Studies (Round Five, Part Two): Geoffrey Long and Catherine Tosenberger

Where the Wind Blows: The Matter of Authorship

Geoffrey: Ah, so we've arrived at the point in this academic conversation when we both devolve into real, true fanboy/fangirl engagement -- what the hell is up with that Supernatural "prequel" comic anyway? The art is horrible and the writing isn't much better! I swear to God, I was so stoked when I found the first issue at my comic shop, but when I got it home and cracked it open I was so disappointed that I didn't even bother to finish reading it. Ugh.

A-hem. Back to the topic at hand...

I think this is one area where my own experience as a storyteller colors my attitude towards hierarchies of canon and authorship. When I tell a story, I'm creating a group of characters, a world in which they'll exist, and the series of events that will happen to them. I am the author of that story, and these are my creations. If someone else wants to tell a story featuring my characters, it feels like it should be up to me to determine whether or not the events they describe are actually 'canon' or not. If I accept those events as canon, I'm also granting that person the right to be considered an author of this narrative -- literally 'authorizing' them. If I don't, then I have options. I can sue, in an attempt to make sure that no one else plays with my toys, but I personally firmly believe that this is a bad way to go unless someone's making money off of my work illegally or that they're passing off what they're creating as official canon. A better option is to acknowledge the existence of that story as fan fiction, and recognize that it exists in a sort of orbit around the original creation. This is where things get particularly messy -- is it "equally viable as literature", or is it permanently tainted as a 'lesser' creation, since that person didn't invent that story from whole cloth? How much distance from the original creation is required for something to be considered viable as literature?

Bookstores are filled with accepted literature that openly declare themselves to be reinterpretations of a classic, but there's still a distinct difference between Margaret Mitchell's 1939 novel Gone with the Wind, Alexandra Ripley's 1991 Scarlett, Alice Randall's 1992 The Wind Done Gone, and a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader. Interestingly, while both books hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller lists, Wikipedia includes Ripley's Scarlett, which is a direct continuation of Gone with the Wind, in the 'fan fiction' category and Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of the story from the point of view of the slaves, in the 'parodies' category. This suggests that the popular perception of both works is as 'second-tier' creations, despite the fact that Publisher's Weekly referred to The Wind Done Gone as "a spirited reimagination of Mitchell's world, dependent on its predecessor for its context but independent in form and voice". To my mind, The Wind Done Gone is still lessened somewhat by its not being a wholly independent creation, but it is executed with enough originality and style that it can be considered viable as literature. In other words, it can stand on its own two feet. Scarlett, on the other hand, can't make the same claim, and therefore suffers from the same drop in perceived validity as most fan fiction.

Were I Margaret Mitchell, I would most likely insist that Scarlett is an unauthorized piece of fanfic and should only be distributed via unofficial channels, but that The Wind Done Gone is different enough that it's a sort of 'alternate reality' spin on my characters. I might still ask for a cut of the profits, since Randall is still using my copyrighted work as a jump-off point, but that it's a distinct enough creation that it's unlikely to be confused for my own stuff... Maybe. It's a fascinating hypothetical. Regarding the Scarlett/Vader slash, I think that such a thing would be hard to take seriously unless it was done very, very, very, very well. (Bonus points to the first reader who posts such a mash-up to YouTube.)

As for how transmedia narratives affect these interpretations, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. I tend to look at transmedia extensions along a primarily timeline-based set of axes, so that negative capability tends to refer to events in characters' pasts or futures that haven't been explored by the story yet. To my mind, most slash fiction isn't meant to be considered in-canon, whereas transmedia narratives use negative capability to hint at events that have happened (or will happen) in-canon. In particular, most slash fiction that I've seen doesn't aim to fill in chronological gaps so much as posit a kind of "What If?" re-interpretation, but I'm not at all comfortable making sweeping claims about this. What do you think?

Catherine: Oh, god, if we're going to talk about the comics, we'll be here till next MONTH at least. So I shall wrench myself away and ask, devolve? I'm usually in that headspace of fangirl enthusiasm, only changing my language to reflect the audience and circumstances; or maybe that's just my excuse for sticking a, well, "discussion" might be overstating it, but a something about "Luscious" Malfoy and his pimp cane into my dissertation. Pimp canes aside, I'm uncomfortable with drawing a strict demarcation between "academic" responses and "fannish" responses, because at least for me, they're really not all that different -- I respond intellectually *and* emotionally *and* libidinally *and* et cetera to things I'm interested in; as I said, the issue is one of language, and the context in which I use that language -- I pretty freely mix up stereotypically "academic" and "fannish" modes of discourse in both settings, usually unconsciously. (My academic writing has been criticized for being flippant, but I don't think that has anything to do with some kind of "inappropriate" leakage of fan discourse; my non-fannish dissertation director has a similar style, which means he doesn't stop me when I do it.) And I really wonder if we can even talk about fannish discourse as if it's a coherent thing -- there's the stereotype of pure emotionalism, sure, but intellectual engagement is as much a part of fandom as lustful/geekish squeeing. Fan discourse contains multitudes of acceptable dicourses, and the ratio of analysis to squee (or whatever) is determined by context and the individual fan.

As for issues of authorship and ownership, I am a hardcore reader-response person: if you want interpretive control over something, don't ever let anyone else see it. I think creators, as creators, get to determine what specific texts count as Official, but beyond that, very little. They create the planet, and get to decide what stuff is officially on the planet, but don't get to decide what others *think* of that planet, or from imagining all kinds of things about the planet. Once that text goes out into the world, other people get their grubby little minds all over it, and the creator loses interpretive control. As for how much weight I give a creator's reading of the text -- the creator is exceptionally well-informed, but that doesn't mean that her reading is the only one, or even the "best" one, whatever that means. I'm a storyteller too, and for me, the inevitable ceding of control does cause me anxiety, but it's also one of the most exciting parts of the whole process.

As for the concept of "lesser" creations, to my mind, you picked some not-very-good examples -- never mind Gone With the Wind, there are backs of cereal boxes superior to Scarlett! More seriously, I think it's interesting that your examples were a sequel and a parody, neither of which are really representative of the bulk of fanfic -- fanfic can certainly be a sequel or a parody, but many fans don't tend to present their work that way.

And you also named them as "interpretations" -- what's fanfic, then? Geraldine Brooks' March, which just won the Pulitzer, follows the exploits of a minor character in a pre-existing work, which is a classic fanfictional setup. Gregory Maguire's Wicked is villain-rehabilitation that would do a Draco fan proud. But then, I think "Sirius and Remus should totally be doing it" is an interpretation of the Potter texts -- whether the author frames it as a reading of Rowling's canon or as simply a setup for a story.

Also, Scarlett/Vader ain't slash unless one of them gets a sex change, through whatever means you desire -- slash is homoerotic romance. (I totally want to see that YouTube video, though!)

Whether it fills in chronological gaps depends on the writer, the story, the pairing, the fandom, etc. Slash is a HUGE category, and the only narrative constant is that it features a romance between two characters of the same gender. I know misapprehension of slash as practiced by female fans isn't, like, a generally or exclusive fanboy thing, but Will Brooker said a few days ago that he thinks of slash as being primarily about the writing -- his comment was, "By that logic, maybe someone who reads a lot of novels is a novelist; but OK." And that is in complete opposition to the way a lot of slashers understand themselves -- slash is about writing, but it's also about reading, of the text and of the slash fanfic. Slash fans who don't write fic are still "slashers," because they're still reading the text in a slashy way, and thinking and talking about it, and reading the fanfic. I think the engagement with fanfictional interpretations of the text is what distinguishes a slashy reading from a plain "queer" reading, though the two readings might look identical on the surface. As it happens, I'm both a writer and reader of slash, but I was a slasher before I wrote my first slash story.

While we're on the subject of definitions, it's funny how we're approaching the category of "literature" -- you're saying, "if it meets these aesthetic criteria, it's viable literature, even if it isn't 'original'" while I'm going, "Originality, of the 'I made it up all by my lonesome!' sort, is a seriously problematic criterion for 'viable literature.'" Forgive me if I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're positing "lack of original characters" as a defect that can be compensated for by good writing, yes?

My position is completely different -- I think the use of other people's characters, etc. can be a source of artistic strength, and enables writers to engage in particular artistic moves, and create artistic effects, that are difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish in "original" fiction. For example, recursive/archontic/fanfictional lit lends itself to feats of compression that would be impossible in a non-recursive text: a line in a Harry Potter story as seemingly innocuous as "Ginny was keeping a diary again," conveys, to a clued-in reader, an entire *world* of ominousness that would take a writer of original fiction a much longer time to set up. I quoted Sheenagh Pugh, earlier, who talks about the possibility for "shorthand, allusion, and irony" in fanfictional texts; it's not like original fiction doesn't make use of those, but you can use them *differently* when you know your audience knows the text you're responding to. It's the most extreme form of intertextuality -- all literature refers to other literature, nothing exists in a vacuum -- and fully exploits all the possibilities afforded by a knowledgeable audience. What do you think? Aside from the fact that we both need to stop ending our screeds with that phrase?

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Five, Part One):Geoffrey Long and Catherine Tosenberger

Introducing Our Protagonists

Geoffrey: Hi, I'm Geoffrey Long, and I recently completed my Master's degree from the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. Back in 2003 I read this article in the Technology Review about something called transmedia storytelling, written by some guy named Henry Jenkins. The piece really resonated with me, so I sent Henry an email to ask him some more about it -- never imagining that the resulting conversation would last for over four years and culminate in Henry being the advisor for my Master's thesis, which wound up being about, surprise surprise, transmedia storytelling.

For anyone who hasn't read Convergence Culture yet, transmedia storytelling is the crafting of a narrative that spans multiple media types. Chapter one might be told in a book, chapter two might unfold in a film, chapter three might be done as a video game, and so on. Telling a character's adventures in multiple media is nothing new, but until recently most cross-media storytelling was done either as adaptation or as franchising, and most of these extensions weren't considered officially in canon. Contemporary transmedia storytellers like the Wachowski Brothers or Joss Whedon are telling stories that were designed from the start as cross-media narratives, and are deliberately taking advantage of the strengths of each media type to enrich each project. The Enter the Matrix video game, for example, wasn't created just as a cheap grab for more money but as an actual chapter in the larger narrative of The Matrix, and the second and third Matrix films only truly made sense if you'd played the video game.

That's a complex example, but simpler ones can be just as rewarding: earlier this year Joss Whedon resuscitated his extremely popular Buffyverse with a new 'Season Eight' being told in comics. Whedon was excited not only to return to his characters, but to take advantage of the unlimited special effects budget afforded by comics; fans were excited because while there had been Buffy comics before, they hadn't been written by Whedon and weren't considered to be official canon.

Obviously, this distinction between canon and non-canon storytelling is an area rich with potential for academics interested in fan fiction and fan culture, but my thesis focused on how stories designed for transmedia expansion differ structurally from 'stand-alone' narratives. In my thesis I examined a number of narratives that gave rise to transmedia franchises, from the Jim Henson films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth to Star Wars, Firefly, Hellboy, Final Fantasy and so on. What I found is that most of these stories made excellent use of what the poet John Keats' called 'negative capability,' which he defined as the capacity for "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". In a narrative context, 'negative capability' can mean the reference to characters, events, or places that exist outside of the story, and rely on the imaginations of the audience to fill in the gaps until the author can return to those 'seeds' for later extensions. Examples of this include the Clone Wars, the Old Republic, and the fall of the Jedi in the original Star Wars trilogy: although Lucas only made passing references to these events, they took root in the minds of fans and created a rich mythology for hundreds of comics, books, games, TV shows, toys, and so on to explore until Lucas returned to tell their story in the prequels. In a way, these types of stories are what Roland Barthes might call more 'writerly' texts than more purely 'readerly' texts, which don't leave nearly as much room for fans to flesh out the worlds themselves.

I didn't really get into it in my thesis, but I'm extremely curious about how fans' expectations, contributions, and passions concerning these stories can be embraced, not ignored or, as is all too often the case, largely derided, and I'm also curious about what role, if any, gender plays in how fans engage with this type of text. Do women concentrate on the personal history of characters while men focus on the history of the world? Are men more concerned with canon and authorship, while women have a more fluid attitude towards those factors? That sort of thing.

Catherine: Hi, I'm Catherine Tosenberger. I have an MA in English (folklore) from Ohio State University, and as of this August, a PhD. in English (children's literature and folklore) from the University of Florida; just last month, I defended my dissertation on Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet. I had always been plagued with the desire to know more, more, more about my favorite characters and texts -- it's the reason I went to grad school in the first place -- but I didn't discover actual fanfic until 1999. I was a terribly vanilla Mulder/Scully shipper in those days, and read primarily as a respite from school. When I started my doctoral work, I initially planned to write my dissertation on fairy tales retold for young adults; I was still reading fanfiction -- I'd since passed through Homicide: Life on the Street and popslash, and had alighted in Harry Potter -- and mentioned this to my dissertation director, who encouraged me to write about fanfic instead.

I'm especially interested in fanfiction's connections to broader literary discourses, both in general and in specific fandoms; for example, how does Harry Potter's status as a text originally published for children affect the types of fanfiction written, and the various responses to that fanfic within the fannish community? I get very excited about the fanfictional idiosyncracies of different fandoms -- how fanfictional trends happen, which genres become mainstreamed or marginalized, and so forth. My current fannish obsession, Supernatural, is particularly interesting in this regard, because its two dominant genres -- incest narratives and gen fic -- are often minority tastes in other fandoms.

Negative Capability

The first thing I'd like to address, Geoff, is your concept of "negative capability" as applied to fanfiction. I think it's really interesting that you picked a term with such impeccable Western Literary Canon credentials to apply to the activities of fans, because it suggests that fanfiction is not some kind of freakish, marginal activity that bears no relationship to what we think of as "real" literature. That's something I'm very sympathetic to; while I love and appreciate that fanfic operates out of a specific community context -- as I mentioned above, the micro-level development of fanfictional literature within specific fandoms is a big hobbyhorse of mine -- but I think it's very important to recognize fanfiction as something that does not exist in isolation from literature as a whole.

As Joli Jensen points out, there's a strong tendency to posit texts which acquire fandoms as *lacking* in some way, and the activities of fans as supplements to texts that are fundamentally inadequate, which has a great deal to do not only with the hierarchizing of genre, but also acts as a commentary on the types of people -- fans -- perceived to engage in such activities. Jensen talks about the "aficionado"/"fan" divide, not just in terms of the texts fixated upon -- "aficionados" choose texts of high cultural capital to devote their energies to, while fans scrape the bottom of the barrel -- but also the manner in which each group responds to the chosen text: aficionados respect the authority of the original author, while fans get rowdy and stake their own claims on the text and characters. What Jensen doesn't say is that there is an enormous amount of literary precedent for exactly that kind of claim-staking, for texts both high and low. And that claim-staking isn't just limited to texts that "belong" to everyone, such as the Odyssey or Arthurian legends, but also to texts produced after modern ideas of authorial ownership come into being -- for example, David Brewer talks about the roughly eighty gazillion "unauthorized sequels" produced, in the eighteenth century, to works such as Gulliver's Travelsand The Beggar's Opera, and explicitly links those to modern fanfiction. You can also add all those 19th-century "alternative" Alice in Wonderlands; every Sherlock Holmes pastiche ever produced; Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea; Maguire's Wicked; Naslund's Ahab's Wife; Rawles's My Jim; Randall's The Wind Done Gone; Brooks's Pulitzer-Prize Winning March; and on and on and on.

Anyway, I think that concept of negative capability is an interesting way into some of these issues, since it talks about "gaps" in texts not in terms of *lack* -- with all the value judgments that implies -- but in terms of *possibilities*. It doesn't pathologize fans as deviants interacting in bizarre and unhealthy ways with inadequate texts, but articulates fans as belonging to a tradition of artistic innovation through explorations of pre-existing texts, both high and low. I think the insistence that fandom is an activity marked by its focus upon "inadequate" texts reifies the ghettoization of genre fiction, cuts off fanfiction from broader literary concerns, and renders fannish activities surrounding "highbrow" texts (such as Jane Austen's works) invisible.

Gender plays a *huge* part in these hierarchies, of course; most fanfiction is written by women, and if one paints the fanfictional impulse as somehow divorced from literature as a whole, it plays into misogynistic genre hierarchies; it's no accident that romance, which is written by and for women, is the most vilified of mainstream genres. I think fanfictional writing has enormous liberatory potential, not just for women, but also for queer folk, young people, and any anyone not plugged into the cultural elite; but I also think that exploiting the negative capability of texts needs to be understood as something that isn't *new*, but can be harnessed in new ways.

WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART TWO)

RETHINKING EXPERTISE

At a time when schools still emphasize the autonomous learner and most kinds of research collaboration get classified as cheating, the Wikipedia movement emphasizes a new kind of knowledge production Pierre Levy has described as collective intelligence. As Levy notes, collective intelligence exploits the potential of network culture to allow many different minds operating in many different contexts to work together to solve problems that are more challenging than any of them could master as individuals. In such a world, he tells us, nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment's notice.

Indeed, such groups are strongly motivated to seek out problems that are sufficiently challenging that they can engage as many members as possible:

"Members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore...Not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development....Unanswered questions will create tension with cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required."

What holds a knowledge community together is not the possession of knowledge -- which can be relatively static -- but the social process of acquiring knowledge -- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties. The Wikipedians bond by working together to fill gaps in their collective knowledge.

Wikipedian Kevin Driscoll proposes a suggestive analogy for thinking about such collaboration:

"The only thing that i can think of in my life that's similar in an "off-the-internet" kind of way is sometimes when you go to the beach there will be a bunch of people making a sand castle. And you can just come over and start making another part of the sand castle and then join them together. And then somebody sees like "wow those guys are making a huge sand castle." And then they get involved and then the thing gets so big, you might not even ask the other peoples' names. You still built the thing together. And nobody owns that sand castle. You all built it together. You're all proud of it. And you all get the benefit of each other's work so you're all really relying on each other. And Wikipedia is like that sand castle except no ocean is going to wash Wikipedia away."

Part of what young people can learn through contributing to, or even consuming, Wikipedia is what it is like to work together within a knowledge culture.

It might be helpful to trace some of the ways that this idea of a knowledge-generating culture contrasts with what Peter Walsh has called the Expert paradigm:

1. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which can be mastered by an individual. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence are open-ended and profoundly interdisciplinary.

2. In the expert paradigm, there are some people who know things and others who don't. A collective intelligence assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis.

3. The expert paradigm uses rules about how you access and process information, rules which are established through traditional disciplines. Within the collective intelligence model, each participant applies their own rules, works the data through their own processes, some of which are more convincing than others, but none of which are wrong at face value. Debates about rules are part of the process by which knowledge gets generated.

4. Experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual which designates them as among those who have mastered a particular domain, most often through formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system and knowledge that comes from real life experience may be highly valued.

(These ideas are developed more fully in the Survivor chapter of Convergence Culture.)

Learning how to weigh different claims about expertise should be part of Hobbe's "informed skepticism." We might, for example, ask young people to talk through the differences in the kinds of expertise displayed by a couch and a ballplayer, a librarian and a researcher, an actor and a director, a mechanic and a race car driver, an architect and a construction worker, or a biologist and a nurse. Some of these people gained their expertise from formal education, other through practical experience; they know different things because they play different roles in a shared process; and having all of these people contribute to the production of knowledge is likely to result in richer and more valuable insights than weighing one's perspective above the others. At the moment, I am playing the part of an expert in writing this article. Perhaps some individual readers see themselves as having greater expertise than I do and at least some cases, they may be right. But there's no question that there is more knowledge in the combined readership of this article than I have at the time I am writing it. The Wikipedia movement is allowing people with very different backgrounds to work together to share what they know with each other.

Of course, Wikipedia is simply one of a broad range of online activities that involve the collaborative and coordinated production and circulation of knowledge. For example, alternative reality games -- large-scale informational scavenger hunts -- are being designed so that they occupy the interests of several hundred players working together: any given problem might require a mix of skills and knowledge drawn across different disciplines and domains. Writers
like Steven Johnson and Jason Mittell have shown that television narratives are becoming increasingly complex, involving many different characters and subplots, as they are being consumed in very active and collaborative ways by online fan communities.

Games researcher T.L. Taylor has shown how the guild structure of a massively multiplayer game such as World of Warcraft may encourage people with very different skills to work together to meet challenges that are designed for this kind of coordinated activity; the community may develop its own mods and toolkits that help them to monitor and organize such large-scale activities. Similar tools, institutions, and practices have emerged around Wikipedia as the community has sought to flag problems to be addressed and identify people with the skills and knowledge needed to solve them. The Wikipedians we interviewed stressed the broad range of skills needed for the project to succeed.

Participating in the Wikipedia community helps young people to think about their own roles as researchers and writers in new ways. On the one hand, they are encouraged to take an inventory of what they know and what they can contribute. The school expects every student to master the same content, while Wikipedia allows students to think about their own particular skills, knowledge, and experience. Wikipedia invites youth to imagine what it might mean to consider themselves as experts on some small corner of the universe. As they collect and communicate what they know, they are forced to think of themselves writing to a public. This is no longer about finding the right answer to get a grade on an asignment but producing credible information that others can count upon when they deploy it in some other real world context.

On the other hand, participants are encouraged to see themselves as members of a knowledge community and to trust their collaborators to fill in information they don't know and challenge their claims about the world. Composition theorist Kenneth A. Brufee has emphasized the power of collaborative writing to change how young people think about the relationship between readers and writers:

"Most of us are not in the habit of thinking about writing nonfoundationally as a collaborative process, a distanced or displaced conversation among peers in which we construct knowledge. We tend to think of writing foundationally as a private, solitary, 'expressive' act in which language is a conduit from solitary mind to solitary mind....When each solitary reader in the socially unrelated aggregate reads what we write, what happens, we suppose, is that another mind 'absorbs' the thoughts we express in writing. Our goal is to distinguish our own distinct, individual point of view from other people's points of view and demonstrate our individual authority....Once we understand writing in a nonfoundational way as a social, collaborative, constructive conversational act, however, what we think we are doing when we write changes dramatically. The individualist, expressive, contentious, foundational story we have been telling ourselves about writing seems motivated by socially dubious (perhaps even socially immature) self-aggrandizement.... We use a language that is neither a private means of expression nor a transparent, objective medium of exchange, but a community construct. It constitutes, defines, and maintains the knowledge community that fashions it. We write either to maintain our membership in communities we are already members of, to invite and help other people to join communities we are members of, or to make ourselves acceptable to communities we are not yet members of. "

Contributing to the Wikipedia might encourage students to adopt the very different kinds of rhetorical goals and mindset Brufee claims emerges through collaborative writing activities.

Again and again, the Wikipedians we interviewed for our documentary made reference to certain shared principles that shapes the group's activities and offers a framework for adjudicating disputes. Rather than arguing each point, the group agrees to work together to insure that all points of view get heard. This is what Wikipedians call adopting a "neutral point of view", which is understood here as a goal or ideal shaping the writing process as much or more than it is seen as a property that can be achieved by any given entry.

This focus on neutrality takes on special importance when we consider the global context within which the Wikipedia operates. While Wikipedia projects are being created within a broad array of different languages, many of which are dominated by a single national context, all of these groups want to insure that their perspectives are fairly represented in the most widely consulted English language edition. So, we might consider the very different way than a topic like the Winter War, the Russian invasion of Finland during the Second World War, gets represented in Russian and Finnish history textbooks as opposed to the challenges of producing an account acceptable to Russians, Finns, Germans, Americans, and everyone else within the shared space of the English language Wikipedia. Mastering the protocols concerning "neutrality," then, might provide young people with good skills at navigating across the cultural differences that they will encounter elsewhere in the digital domain. Network culture is bring people together who would never have interacted face to face given geographic distances but who now must work together to achieve shared goals.

WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART ONE)

The following is based on the keynote lecture which I presented on Monday at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis. A more polished version of this talk will eventually appear in the media literacy journal, The Journal of Media Literacy, but I am offering this in a rawer, less processed form now in hopes of getting some more feedback from my readers and also of making this available to the conference attendees. Watch for a notice here later this summer when the exemplar about Wikipedia goes on line.

n Fall 2006, Vermont's Middlebury College found itself the center of a national controversy when its history department took a public stand against students referencing Wikipedia in their research papers. The ban had been inspired by one faculty member's discovery that a large number of his students were making the same factual error (dealing with the role of Jesuits during the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th century Japan) which could be traced back to a bit of misinformation found in one entry of the online encyclopedia. Despite the publicity that surrounded it, the statement was scarcely a condemnation of Wikipedia: "Whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful, it nonetheless suffers inevitably from inaccuracies deriving in large measure from its unique manner of compilation." Students were asked to take responsibility for the reliability and credibility of the information they used in their papers; Students were told not to use Wikipedia as a scholarly source.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, publicly supported the Middlebury History Department's decision: "Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested -- students shouldn't be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn't be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either. If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don't listen to rock'n'roll either." Despite Wales's statement, Middlebury's announced policy inspired a series of national editorials:leading journalists and scholars weighed in on the perceived merits of the Wikipedia and on the credibility of online information more generally. The Middlebury History faculty were cast as poster children in the backlash against Web 2.0 and its claims about the "wisdom of crowds."

Wales's analogy between Wikipedia and "Rock'n'Roll" suggests that the Wikipedia debate has also become emblematic of the divide separating the generation that grew up in a world where digital and mobile technologies are commonplace from their parents, teachers, and school administrators for whom many of these technologies still feel alien. As Jonathan Fanton, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, wrote in an op-ed piece published on the eve of this conference,

"The real gap between tomorrow's digital haves and have-nots will be a lag in competence and confidence in the fast-paced variegated digital universe building and breeding outside schoolhouse walls.... Today's digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem- solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too... In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing."

Responding to these challenges, the MacArthur Foundation has committed 50 million dollars over the next five years to support research which will help us understand the informal learning which takes place as children interact within the new media landscape and how we might draw on the best practices that emerge from these new participatory cultures as we redesign school and after-school programs. I was part of a team of MIT based researchers which drafted a white paper that accompanied the MacArthur announcement and sought to identify some of the core social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to be full participants in this new media environment. And I am the principle investigator for Project nml, a MacArthur funded effort to develop resources to support the teaching of these skills through in school and after school programs. As it happens, we are just now completing a documentary about the Wikipedia movement and an accompanying curricular guide. This documentary is one of a number of short films produced for online distribution through the Project nml exemplar library.

Here, I will draw on the interviews and research behind the documentary to explore what Wikipedia (and the debate around it) might tell us about the new media literacies. Through looking more closely at what young people need to know about Wikipedia, I hope to suggest some of the continuities (and differences) between this emerging work on New Media Literacies and the kinds of concerns that have occupied the Media Literacy community over the past few decades.

THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES

According to a recent study from the Pew Center for Internet & American Life, more than half of all teens have generated media content and roughly a third of teens online have shared content they produced with others. In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures. A participatory culture is one where there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, where there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others, where there is some kind of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced gets passed along to newbies and novices, where members feel that their contributions matter, where members feel some degree of social connection with each other at least to the degree to which they care what other people think about what they have created.

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these emergent forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude towards intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which kids will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter schools and workplaces.

Not all of these skills are dramatically new -- they are extensions on or elaborations of aspects of traditional research methods, text-based literacies, and critical analysis that have long been valued within formal education. In some cases, these skills have taken on new importance as young people move into emerging media institutions and practices. In some cases, these new technologies have enabled shifts in how we as a society produced, dissect, and circulate information. Those interested in reviewing the full framework should download the report.

While some have argued that these new media skills represent the different mindsets of "digital natives and digital immigrants", that analogy breaks down for us on several levels. First, the participatory cultures we are describing are ones where teens and adults interact but with less fixed and hierarchical relations than found in formal education. It is a space where youth and adults learn from each other, but it would be wrong to see young people as creating these new institutions and practices totally outside of engagement with adults. Second, the "digital natives" analogy implies that these skills are uniformly possessed by all members of this generation; instead, young people have unequal access to the technologies and cultural practices out of which these skills are emerging and so we are facing a growing participation gap in terms of familiarity with basic tools or core cultural competencies.

Even if we see young people as acquiring some of these skills on their own, outside of formal educational institutions, there's still a strong role for adults to play in insuring that young people develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about the place of media in their lives and engage in meaningful reflection about the ethical choices they make as media producers and participants in online communities. While the MacArthur researchers take serious youth innovations through media and respect the meaningful role that these experiences play in young people's social and cultural lives, they also value what teachers, parents, librarians, youth workers, and others bring to the conversation. We want to help these adults respond to the changing circumstances young people face in a period of prolonged and profound media change. It is our belief that these new media literacies need to inform all aspects of the educational curriculum; they represent a paradigm shift in how we teach English, social science, science, math, and the other schoolroom subjects. If these skills are going to reach every American young people, it is going to require the active participation of collaboration of all of those individuals and institutions who impact young people's moral, intellectual, social, and cultural development.

Our initial report raised three core concerns, which suggest the need for policy and pedagogical interventions:

1. The Participation Gap -- the unequal access of youths to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge which will prepare them for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

2. The Transparency Problem -- The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shapes our perceptions of the world.

3. The Ethics Challenge -- The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization which might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

Educators need to work together to insure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, has the ability to articulate their understanding of the way that media shapes our perceptions of the world, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards which should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities.

This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and afterschool programs to foster what we are calling the new media literacies -- a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.Just as earlier efforts at media literacy wanted to help young people to understand their roles as media consumers and producers, we want to help young people better understand their roles as participants in this emerging digital culture.

In the discussion of Wikipedia that follows, I am going to be emphasizing four of the eleven skills we identify in our report:

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

"Ephemera vs. The Apocalypse": Retrofuturism After 9/11

The following was written as a postscript to my essay on Retrofuturism and the work of Dean Motter, which was serialized in my blog last week. Some of this material originally appeared in Technology Review but it has been revisited in light of the more recent essay.

A poster for Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of the No Towers describes the book as "Ephemera vs. the Apocalypse," and that's as good a description as any of the functions retrofuturism and residual culture have played in the aftermath of 9/11. As Spiegelman writes in the book's introduction,

"The only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses to flood my eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers were old comic strips; vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the twentieth century. That they were made with so much skill and verve but never intended to last past the day they appeared in the newspaper gave them poignancy; they were just right for an end-of-the-world moment."

Comics entered American newspapers at a moment of rapid, profound, and prolonged change: the dawn of the twentieth century was met with an explosion of new technologies, not to mention significant dislocations of the population from the farms to the cities, from the south to the north, and from Europe to America. Comics spoke for the lower classes who had not yet reaped the benefits of those changes and for a middle class that felt disoriented by them. Characters like the Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan and Krazy Kat with their perpetual energy and eternally elastic bodies could neither be contained nor destroyed; their misadventures were being read alongside news reports of people suffering electric shocks from faulty wiring, dying in tenement fires, blown up at moving picture shows, or getting run over by streetcars. These comics helped turn-of-the century Americans laugh at things that otherwise felt hopelessly out of control.

Spiegelman reproduces a selection of early comic strips, including a remarkable Winsor McCay strip, published in September 1907, in which his protagonists are depicted as giants, trampling over buildings in Lower Manhattan, not far from where the twin towers were later built and then destroyed. The McCay cartoon is striking because of the contrast between the artist's detailed representation of New Yorks architectural wonders and his surrealistic images of giant cigar-chomping clowns climbing skyscrapers. Similarly, the cover of No Towers uses a realistic but shadowy rendering of the World Trade Center as the disturbing backdrop for cartoonish figures raining from the sky.

Spiegelman wants us to read these vintage images of toppling skyscrapers and falling people against the reality of what happened on September 11, transforming slapstick fantasies into chilling prophecy. He has explored this terrain before, depicting the horrors of the Holocaust through images from funny animal comics in Maus. No Towers is not as good as Maus but these images hit such a raw nerve at the time he created them in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that he had trouble finding a U.S. publisher.

If Motter's books can be seen as offering at least a critique of older imaginings of technological utopianism, more recent works have turned to retrofuturism as a means of healing wounds and restoring a world -- and a world view -- that was shattered when the Twin Towers fell. We see this project of restoration, for example, in the beautiful sequence at the end of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York which uses digital effects to take us through a series of detailed simulations of the skyline of Manhattan as it evolves across the late 19th and 20th century, culminating in a shot which shows the World Trade Center towering over the island once again. When I saw this sequence in the theaters, audiences cheered to see this digital recreation of these national landmarks.

Something similar underlies the project Grant Morrison undertook in the Manhattan Shield segments of his Seven Soldiers books. Morrison's book depicts a version of Manhattan that never quite existed, full of buildings that were conceived by the likes of Robert Moses or Frank Lloyd Wright, but never built. Lest anyone doubt the motivation behind this particular act of retrofuturist imaginings, check out Morrison's interview about these comics in the New York Times:

"I want it to be a more exalted New York, where things that were dreamed of were finally brought into reality....[These architectural wonders] are the kind of thing that would become a tourist haunt or a terrorist target. All of the buildings I've included are. They would have been icons of the city."

If Scorsese's Gangs of New York has the alibi of historical reconstruction, Morrison's project is retrofuturist to its core, revisiting the imagined city of the future as a source of historical consciousness through which we can understand our current moment. His monuments are completed so that they can serve as targets for imagined future terrorist attacks

Want to Work for Comparative Media Studies?

I know that a fair number of Media Literacy teachers and facilitators read this blog. So I wanted to flag for your attention a new position opening up in our programing working as the Project Manager for Project nml.

Official Job Title: Project Manager

Position Title: Comparative Media Studies/ New Media Literacies Project Manager

Payroll Category: Sponsored Research Staff/Administrative

Normal Work Week: 40

Starting Date: August 1, 2007

End Date: June 30, 2009

Salary: 50K- 60K annually full time plus competitive benefits package

Supervision Received: Henry Jenkins, CMS director and Sarah Wolozin, Program Manager

Supervision Excercised: New Media Literacies staff and students

Project: The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. This four-year project - through collaborations with MacArthur's "Digital Kids" research project at UC/Berkeley and a community of educators, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, academics and media professionals - will establish how to define new media education, how to implement it, and how to sustain it once the project is completed.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities (Essential Functions): Serve as primary contact and coordinator for the New Media Literacies Project based at MIT Comparative Media Studies, directed by Henry Jenkins (MIT), and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

Specific role will be tailored for qualified candidates, but minimum duties include:

-- Implement the vision of the Principal Investigator during Phase II of the research project, overseeing current activities, maintaining current collaborations, and forging new partnerships to facilitate upcoming project initiatives;

-- Ensure the dissemination of the project's key ideas and findings through publications, conference presentations, online communities, parent resources, and teacher training programs, and 1-2 NML conferences per year;

-- Oversee the development and management of project-related communications, including a new website and other media production in a variety of forms (i.e., written, audio, video, PowerPoint, etc.);

-- Guide the research process, ensuring a high level of team coordination to facilitate the process of refining pedagogical models and the continued production of multimedia curricular materials;

-- Oversee the processes of prototyping and testing project's curriculum materials;

--Develop advisory board and serve as primary contact; send out regular communications; ensure participation in project; organize annual or bi-annual meetings with board;

--Together with Comparative Media Studies Program Manager manage all administration for project including but not limited to overseeing and managing budget; resolving legal, contractual, copyright and IP issues; generating necessary reporting for funder, CMS program, and MIT; managing and monitoring all documentation and reporting for the program, including coordination of reports with the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects and the Office of Foundation Relations; ensuring project is in compliance with CMS program and MIT policy; handling personnel issues including hiring, training, and terminations.

-- Keep abreast of developments in media theory, educational design, entertainment, popular and youth cultures, and consumer electronics and bring such knowledge to bear on the development of teaching modules;

-- Communicate with corporate, government, educational, and academic leaders who traverse appropriate K-12 and undergraduate market spaces;

-- Coordinate regular communications and formal updates for the MacArthur Foundation and other stakeholders;

-- Present research findings at conferences and in publications.

Qualifications/Technical Skills: Experience in managing media research projects, developing learning environments, implementing educational innovations in media- and/or technology-rich classroom settings, and producing digital and multi-media projects, conducting quantitative and qualitative research, as well as possessing an understanding of the application of a wide variety of media in learning, especially to develop multiple literacies across media. Ability to communicate with a wide variety of contributors and audiences, including both university instructors, educators, designers, artists, comparative media specialists, and current and future sponsors AND young adults, teens, tweens, and children, is critical. Secondary school and/or college teaching experience, strong research skills and a commitment to publication agenda in education or media studies expected; experience in commercial media and/or product design and development preferred. Proven ability to bridge multiple research disciplines and apply theory to effective practice a must. Minimum of Master's Degree in education, media studies, instructional technologies, or related fields; Doctoral candidates with ABD status are strongly encouraged to apply.

Send inquiries to Sarah Wolozin, swolozin@mit.edu.

We will also be looking later this summer for:
Post-Docs to work with the GAMBIT Lab (for games research) and for the Knight Center for Future Civic Media.
A Research Manager for the Knight Center.
An Outreach Coordinator for Project nml.

If any of these sound like they might be a good fit for you, send e-mail to swolozin@mit.edu.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Four, Part Two):Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova

Gender and Cult Texts

[KP] Nina suggests that even when men and women (or would that be fanboys and fangirls) watch the same show, they may focus on different aspects. So I will speak of the shows I know... When I watched Firefly I vaguely wondered what slash pairing Mal/Simon would make, but honestly, I stopped looking for clues pretty early into the show and kept enjoying the adventures and witty banter just like the next guy. I certainly want more of this content, but I can't really bring myself to look into fandom (apart from mildly tapping into it), because I really am pretty satisfied with the source. Moreover, I would rather re-watch the series in a company of friends laughing at jokes we know are there than read a steaming fanfic featuring one of the likely pairings. Does it make me a fanboy of Firefly?

Because I definitely display more stereotypically fangirlish behavior in my reaction to Heroes (even before I finished watching it I already started seeking out lj-based communities, fan sites with fannish content and so on.) My Harry Potter experience started with me being a 'fanboy', went through my reluctance to even admit I was one of the 'fangirls', and ended up with my engaging more with 'fangirl' practices.

[WB] I like Firefly and Serenity too... someone can tell me if that is a "boy" or a "girl" text, and whether having a man-crush on Nathan Fillion makes me some kind of subversive!

[KP] Well, Firefly (and Serenity) is a Sci-Fi western and adventure story, so as a source text is very male-oriented (I am only saying this because it is supposed that boys like guns and adventures, while girls like romance and amassing Barbie merchandise). However, the hints of romance (mostly unresolved) and very engaging male characters portrayed by exceptionally cute actors make it very easy prey for female fans, stereotypically speaking.

[WB] Let's not fall into the trap (as you suggest, it's stereotypical) of thinking that the only women who like Firefly and Serenity are "fans", and more specifically, fan-slashers. What about the women who watch the show but don't have any interest in or knowledge of slash? I think we should resist any assumption (again, I think it is becoming a stereotype in fan-academia) that women's only entry into cult texts, or cult texts that are generically male-coded (Western, Science Fiction) is through trying to pair up the main male characters.

[KP] Actually, I didn't say a word in my previous passage about any male/male pairings or writing slash back into the story.

[WB] Good point - looks like it was me who fell into that trap! I automatically jumped from "female-fans-fancying-cute-actors" to "slash"... my bad. Maybe it says something about how accustomed we are to talking about this visible tip of the fan iceberg - that we only really tend to study the active, creative fans like slashers, not the millions of men and women who just sit there admiring cute actors, maybe discussing it with their friends, but not recording any of it in a concrete form: the watercooler fans, not the Livejournal ones. The advantage of online fandom, for scholars, is that conversation about cult texts becomes so easy to quote, analyse and discuss; ephemeral talk becomes solid text. But there are, again, millions of conversations going on in workplaces and homes about cult texts that never attain that more permanent status, and never enter our radar - because if they don't take place on the internet, they rarely cross that line between the personal and the public.

That's one of the striking things about sites like Livejournal for me - the way it places personal thoughts and conversation into a semi-public, semi-permanent arena - and the accessibility of blogs and discussion boards is obviously a gift for fan-scholars. But obviously, if we rely on those easily-accessible forms of fan discourse, we're also overlooking all the more elusive discussion that goes on every day in the living room or the staff canteen, and perhaps we risk taking the part as representative of the whole. Again, let's bear in mind that there are a lot of people, male and female, like myself - who enjoyed Serenity and Firefly but don't create anything about it or engage in any communities about it. A lot of people who value a specific cultural text and for whom that text is an important part of their lives don't engage in easily-recognisable, visible, traditional fan behaviour.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Four, Part One): Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova

Fan and Academic Identities

Will Brooker [WB] wrote three books between 1999 and 2004, on stuff he loved as a kid: Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon; Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans; and Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. He is currently head of the Film and Television degree programmes at Kingston University, London. His most recent articles include "A Sort of Homecoming: Fan Viewing and Symbolic Pilgrimage" in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and Lee Harrington's edited collection Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York University Press, 2007), "Everywhere and Nowhere: Vancouver, Fan Pilgrimage and the Urban Imaginary" (forthcoming in the International Journal of Cultural Studies) and "Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows On Download", scheduled to appear in an edited collection on Lost. His interests include cities, superheroes, online communities and television overflow; he also writes fiction.

Ksenia Prasolova [KP] is a visiting student researcher from Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad). With financial support of the Fulbright Program she was able to come to MIT and use Henry Jenkins' vast expertise (and, to somewhat larger extent, Hayden Library's and CMS's vast collection of resources) to concentrate on writing her Ph.D. thesis on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. Apart from Harry Potter, Ksenia is also interested in translation and interpretation, Heroes, and arguing with Kristina Busse. As to her fannish engagement, until very recently Ksenia has been a champion lurker in Harry Potter, Heroes, Firefly and The Sims 2 fandoms.

Finally, Kristina (Nina) Busse was our invisible third interlocutor in the debate, at times performing the curious role of Greek Chorus. She was already talking with both Will and Ksenia when they started talking to one another and somehow she became both conduit and the representative of gender constructions they'd both argue against. In a way, then, the conversation is clearly a continuation of the discussion Will and Kristina had as well as the continuation of many debates Ksenia and Kristina have had about how fan fiction should or should not be studied (literature or cultural artifact), what role gender plays in fan studies (none or a huge role), all the way to the exemplarity or exceptionality of Harry Potter (and luckily the discussion below stayed away from that).

Gender Infiltration

[WB] Just for starters, I should say now that I have some issues with this whole idea of "there's a war between boys and girls, let's try to dialog from opposing sides!" I find the notion of a conflict between "boys" and "girls" quite saddening and reductive. I also have reservations about calling any adult a boy or a girl, and the whole stereotypical pink (or red) vs blue color-coding is also kind of problematic to me.

However, from my conversation with Kristina, I'm finding I tend to identify more with the "girl" side of this gendered approach to fandom -- if that side means an interest in creativity, confession, autoethnography, autobiography and community -- with a particular focus on slash, genfic and films. Those are the things I'm most interested in, in terms of fandom. So if that's the "girl" angle, it's fine by me but I think a lot of my work, in that case, challenges the perceived gender boundaries that are supposedly dividing aca-fandom.

[KP] As it was already mentioned in discussion to the related post in Kristina's blog, 'fanboys' and 'fangirls', 'blue' and 'pink' etc. are signifiers of the going-ons in fandom - it is a fact that males tend to side with 'collecting', as it is a fact that females tend to side with 'creative' in fandom. I am not sure 'fanboys' and 'fangirls' are the most suitable terms in this case, but those are certainly the most handy ones to refer to a whole set of gendered assumptions and practices that are still very firmly in place. Or are they?

You say that you identify more with the 'fangirl' side of approach to fannish scholarship despite being a male, and I would argue that no matter which side you identify with as an individual, it is the fact that you are able to see these sides more or less clearly and label them as gendered that is relevant. I am sure both of us can give examples from our fannish and academic experience of what I would mockingly call 'gender infiltration' , but by providing these examples and thus challenging the rigidity of gender divide, wouldn't we reinforce the very same divide by acknowledging it?

[WB] I identified with what I was being *told* in these ongoing discussions was the "fangirl" side. When I talked about it with Kristina, I was actually quite surprised that the things central to my work on fandom - communities, discussion, slash, films, the way a text bonds people and provides them with a shared culture - are being grouped on the "pink" side. I've never thought of myself as being interested in "fangirl" stuff before. I felt it was ironic and amusing that on the evidence of my research, that seems to be the side of the divide I'm on - *according to the terms and territories I'm now being presented with*.

[KP] Somehow the *terms* that are in place, the structure of society, the dominant discourse or something else brought about the curious statistical fact - more women like the 'creative' aspect of fandom than men do, more men like the 'collecting' aspect of fandom, and both genders are more or less equally involved in canon debates. It would stand to reason that the academics who come from within a certain practice (more likely, female scholars when it comes to fanvids, or male scholars when it comes to comic books) would feel comfortable using autoethnography to discuss the practice, and would probably occupy the stance of 'impartial observer' (who cannot help but objectify the study subject-matter) when they need to discuss practices they are not personally engaged in.

[WB] It's true that you'd probably have to be a long-term comics fan to write reflectively and personally about them, and that as such, you'd probably be male. However, my own experiments with autoethnography (I am using this grand term for it... really I saw it as a kind of personal and reflective creative writing) can be found in my work on Blade Runner's city locations, Lewis Carroll's grave and Vancouver's streets, as well as the more obviously male-oriented Batman comics and Star Wars films.

Also, though slash seems still to be a predominantly-female activity, before I wrote my chapter about slash, I wrote some slash. I wrote it anonymously and had it discussed on a slash community. It's not impossible to at least try to seek some experience of and personal engagement with the thing you're writing about, although this won't compensate for years of committed immersion. You don't have to be obliged into an "impartial observer" role about certain topics -- you can choose to become more of a participant. But maybe that was a kind of gender infiltration again. I didn't intend it that way.

[KP] Likewise, Nina keeps on accusing me of not being a "good" fangirl. I've tried bunches of shows and disliked most of the ones that came highly recommended--even the ones that seem to have male and female audience appeal, like Buffy.

[WB] Well... what we have here then is me, not a good representative for fanboys because my work is about creativity and community, and Ksenia, not a good representative for fangirls... doesn't this question whether the categories are of any use? Are Ksenia and I gender infiltrators, or gender traitors? Are we exceptional?

[KP] I'd like to know, myself. While I can clearly see labels and gendered behavior etc. among fans (myself included), I still fail to see how fan scholars display the gendered behavior in their scholarly activities apart from falling into the obvious 'traps' of writing about what they know/like best, while their readers are falling into the obvious traps of thinking that the scholar has presented the situation objectively and in its entire diversity. I wonder if the fact that men were almost absent from the academic accounts of Star Trek fandom means that they were actually that absent from fandom itself.

What I have written above is myself - as an academic - describing my fannish behaviors. It is not myself - as an academic - thinking of how my gender influences my work as a scholar who studies fan fiction (I don't study fandom, not really). While I can talk about myself being a misfit fandom-wise, I am not sure how that applies to my academic practices apart from the fact that I'd love to avoid using any methods that have to do with ethnography or social science.

For instance, there is a part of my dissertation that is about slash, but I only mention in passing that most of the writers are female and that slash is thus the most studied and controversial topic in fan scholarship. What I concentrate on is the kind of literature slash is and how it relates to other genres in general and specifically to other genres in fan fiction. I think this stance has less to do with my gender than with my academic background, which is firmly in humanities... Academically, I am simply not that interested in the social dimension of the phenomenon, although it does not mean that said dimension is not important.

"The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part Three)

The Burden of Knowledge, The Burden of Dreams

Of course, these architectural wonders make little sense without digging deeper into the social vision that shaped them. Howard Siegel has traced the ways that a certain ideology of technological utopianism shaped the iconography of early science fiction, starting as a form of social critique of dominant economic institutions, but being highjacked and reworked by the 1939 Fair's corporate sponsors. As Siegel writes,

"Technological utopianism derived from the belief in technology -- conceived as more than tools and machines alone -- as the means of achieving a 'perfect' society in the near future. Such a society, moreover, would not only be the culmination of the introduction of new tools and machines; it would also be modeled on those tools and machines in its institutions, values and culture."

Technological utopians believed a more perfect society would emerge from a series of breakthroughs in transportation and communication technologies. Siegel explains,

"Connecting all sectors of the technological utopia would be superbly efficient transportation and communication systems, powered almost exclusively by electricity....The specific means of transportation would include automobiles, trains, subways, ships, airplanes, even moving sidewalks. The means of communication would include pneumatic mail tubes, telephones, telegraphs, radios, and mechanically composed newspapers."

Given this history, it is no accident that Motter refers to one of his cities as "Electropolis" and another as "Terminal City." Both names suggest the centrality of these imagines of power, transportation, and communication to his vision of the failed utopia. As one comic critics writes, "Terminal City itself is named for the fact that it lies at the crossroads of a number of transport routes...But the city also earns the terminal appellation in another sense, in that becomes the end of the line for characters like Quinn, marooned there with his reputation in tatters, or BB, the construction work she's seeking having long since dried up." The books lovingly detail the various transportation options - showing us what it is like to take a joy ride in a flying car, to arrive in the city via airship, or to walk through the lobby of the futuristic railroad station. At the same time, the books are fascinated with the various systems of communication, depicting what were once seen as futuristic breakthroughs, such as television which was introduced to the public at the 1939 Fair, as now obsolete and malfunctioning (depicted here in grainy black and white images). Motter's Terminal City still produces and consumes newsreel, Electropolis uses flouriscopes to search crime scenes, and Radian City uses a system of pneumatic tubes are used to deliver messages from building to building.

Presiding over Futurama, Democracy, Radiant City, and all of the other cities of the future were an army of engineers, city planners, architects, and designers. As Siegel explains,

"In utopia, efficiency would govern government as thoroughly as it would education and industry....Because technicians rather than politicians would run the utopian government, it would be technical rather than political in nature."

This technocratic vision saw central planning and social engineering as new kinds of expertise which might perfect human nature. This same celebration of efficiency and rationalism ran through the discourse of the 1939 Worlds Fair. Here, again, is the narrator from The World of Tomorrow: "City planners and architects believed they knew what the future had to be like and what ordinary Americans needed to learn to be able to live successfully in it."

This idea of the perfectability of human nature through the careful design of spaces and artifacts finds its expression through Motter's protagonist, Mister X and his theory of psychetecture, which the book describes as "a unified theory of civilization." The real power in Radiant City rest not with the political leaders, corporate executives, or crime bosses but with the seldom seen and cryptically described Consortium from the Ninth Academy, which Motter describes as "a roundtable of architects, engineers, photographers, chemists, and intellects. Big brains like Reinhardt, Eichmann, Von Stace, Riveuax, Rachmah Sheena, Templeton, Harbraun, Radiquiet....more of a cadre than a consortium." Mister X's new planned city embodied his belief that good design could enhance the mental health of its residents, but his designs were fatally compromised in their execution.

We first see Mister X upon his return to the city of his dreams, which he is experiencing as a physical space for the first time, despite having worked through every detail on paper. His fascination, however, soon gives way to horror as he realizes what they have done to his master plan: "They changed the original design! They cut down on the building materials, cut corners, used a lot of cheap substitutes! The psychetecture was ruined! God knows what effects the actual city is having on all our minds!" He is determined to either destroy the city or restore its balance.

At times, the book portrays Mister X as an all-knowing figure, someone who moves through secret passageways and tunnels, allowing him to come and go everywhere without being detected.

In a short piece contained in the back of one issue, Dave McKeen writes,

"He looked into each of the city's eyes, each of its windows and seemed to understand. Where I could see only questions, he saw answers. With each spire and corner, each curve, each cornice he studied. His shoulders became heavier with the burden of knowledge. The burden of dreams."

And in a dream sequence, Seth depicts Mister X as the very embodiment of the city he designed, his head a cluster of art deco skyscrapers. Read in that way, Mister X becomes a figure not unlike Howard Roark, the architect protagonist of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead who similarly refuses to compromise on his vision even if it means standing up against unyielding public pressure or destroying his own creations.

But the more time we spend with Mister X, the less certain we become about the value of his theories or even about the stability of his mind. Perhaps he, like the other residents, has been driven insane by "the shortage of right angles or prime ciphers," the imbalanced claustro/agoraphobic Ratio, or the distorted visual ambiguity quotient. Or perhaps it has been madness from the start. As the book continues, Seth's drawings become looser, more distorted, depicting this world as seen by an unhinged mind. McKeen's short story captures perfectly the disorienting qualities of the city and the impossibility of grasping it fully and completely within a single intellect:

"The city is one huge melting pot of time. During the day, a hazy structure that we must embrace in order to remain sane. But at night, in our sleep, we glimpse the randomness of it all. A city of pauses, fast forwards, stills, cues, and plays. Or is this again the abstract logic of my dreams."

In the end, the city escapes human comprehension and drives all those who attempt to grasp its complexities over the precipice. The only way to survive may well be to sleep walk along the rooftops, never adopting a panoramic perspective on the whole.

"The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part Two)

We can see this focus on historic "stuff" at certain points in Dean Motter's comics as well. There are some detailed frames created by Seth for some of the Mister X comics which include representations of a whole array of art deco bric-a-brac. Yet, more often, Motter and the artists who illustrate his stories, tap into iconography from older science fiction works as a kind of image bank from which to design their urban landscape. In an interview with the author, Motter commented that he was lucky to have identified artistic collaborators who were themselves fascinated with older images of the future and who therefore could work from specific reference points to older magazine covers or etchings of New York landmarks.

Where Tomorrow Is Today...
One recent book, Daniel H. Wilson's Where's My Jetpack: A guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived, might well serve as a guidebook or catalog for the cities depicted across Motter's books, given this shared pool of retrofuturist icons. Wilson shares with Motter the same disappointment that the future promised by General Electric and Westinghouse never quite came to be:

"The future is now, and we are not impressed. The future was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia - a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Our beloved scientists may be building the future, but some key pieces are missing. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? We can't wait another minute for the future to arrive. The time has come to hold the golden age of science fiction accountable for its fantastic promises...Today zeppelins the size of ocean liners do not hover over fully enclosed skyscraper cities.. Shiny robot servents do not cook breakfast for colonists on the moon. Worst of all, sleek titanium jetpacks are not ready and waiting on showroom floors ...Despite every World's Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book ever written, we are not living in a techno-utopia."

Wilson returns to the discourse of popular science, investigating how close we have come to these predictions and what has derailed them along the way, while Motter turns towards science fiction, examining what it might have been like to live in the city of the future and why such a future might have disappointed, even if we had achieved everything Futurama had predicted.

Motter's books move back and forth between technologies actually achieved in the mid-twentieth century and those only imagined. Consider, for example, this passage from an issue of Electropolis:

"Electra City was built at the very beginning of the Electric Age. It was an exciting, sparkling jewell that symbolized a nation's dreams of the future. 'Where Tomorrow is Today and Today's yesterday.' That's how they used to describe it. Sounds goofy now but I would envision its scintillating skyline -- shimmering the arcs of the colossal Van Der Graff Towers and gigantic Strickfadden machines, the air traffic flitting about like moths around a streetlight. I still get that impression from time to time but when folks began abandoning the city core, the underworld moved in and that image became obscured by grandiose, short-lived, and usually catastrophic ambitions. It would never be the same."

Motter wallows in what some have called the electrical sublime but in doing so, he blurs the lines between Van Der Graff generators of the sort one can see today if you visit the Boston Museum of Science and the mocked up mad scientist apparatus, often informed by a similar aesthetic, Kenneth Strickfadden developed for the Universal horror films of the 1930s. These books blur the line between what was, what might have been, and what were simply the figments of some pulp writer's hyperbolic imagination.

Regardless of the reality behind them, these images of the future all fit together to form a coherent, consistent, and compelling construction of the city; we recognize buildings from one issue to the next, even from one comic series to the next, and each new element introduced adds to the integrity of the whole. These elements may be represented with varying degrees of stylization and abstraction as they pass through the pens of artists with such different styles as Paul Rivoche, Jaime Hernandez, Ty Templeton, Dave McKean, and Seth (just to mention those who contributed to Mister X) but we still feel that they belong in the same fictional universe because so many of these elements can be rooted back in the same historical moment in the evolution of the utopian imagination. Many can be traced back specifically to the 1939 World's Fair, which was that shining moment when so many of these archtypes stepped off the printed page and gained a material reality: the fair promised its depression era patrons that they would be able to see, hear, taste, and smell the future. As the narrator of The World of Tomorrow explains,

"I think that there are moments where you can see the world turning from what it is into what it will be. For me, the New York World's Fair is such a moment. It is a compass rose pointing in all directions, toward imaginary future and real past, false future and immutable present, a world of tomorrow contained in the lost American yesterday."

The Fair itself represented a strategic blurring of temporal relations.

"The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part One)

The following is the first part of my talk at the Berlin comics conference. This is a long selection which will be serialized over four installments. Be forewarned: this section mostly lays out the conceptual background for the paper; my discussion of Motter's work begins in earnest tomorrow. This is very much a work in progress that will eventually become an article. I welcome any and all feedback.

The protagonist of William Gibson's 1981 science fiction short story, "The Gernsback Continuum", is a photojournalist, collecting images for a coffee table book he plans to call The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. As he searches for ramshackle roadside attractions and other traces of the ways people in the 1930s and 1940s imagined the future, he encounters what Gibson calls "semiotic ghosts," glimpses of a parallel world where the euphoric dreams of urban boosters and technological utopians had come true:

"Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them [the residents] thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars."

Over time, the impressions fade until all that is left are peripheral fragments of mad scientist chrome flickering on the corner of his eye.

Gibson's story was a bold gesture from a brash new writer, sweeping aside the technological utopian fantasies that had emerged in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and shaped the science fiction genre throughout most of its history. As Bruce Sterling, the co-editor of the Mirrorshades collection where the story appeared, explains,

"Times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when science was safely enshrined - and confined - in an Ivory Tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control. Not for us the steam snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant."

Gibson and Sterling wanted to push science fiction in new directions and saw little use for streamlined airships. Exit the World of Tomorrow, enter the Digital Revolution.

Can We Imagine the Past?: Science Fiction and Historical Consciousness
Dean Motter's Mister X (1983) comics emerged from this very same context - at a transitional moment when shifts in the technological landscape and the emergence of the discourse of the digital revolution were transforming science fiction as a genre. A full account of this period would point to the close proximity between the release of Bladerunner with its fusion of science fiction and film noir in 1982; the publication that same year of Frederic Jameson's "Can We Imagine the Future?," an essay which posed questions about the cultural functions of science fiction as a genre; the release of the first Mister X comics in 1983; the publication of Mirrorshades and of Joseph Corn's important anthology, Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology and the American Future, both in 1986. We can understand these various efforts to reconsider science fiction's pasts and reconfigure its future in the early 1980s as responsive to a range of cultural factors. The approach of 1984, the year made famous by George Orwell's novel, was encouraging the culture to reflect on the issue of whether the last part of the 20th century had taken the shapes that people had project. Many were looking forward to the end of the millennium and looking backwards at the end of what people had called the American Century. The expiration date had come and passed for many of the technological and geopolitical changes predicted at such landmark events as the 1939 World's Fair.

As the society entered into a new phase of prolonged and profound media change brought about by the so-called "digital revolution," the nation's artists were trying to figure out what aspects of science fiction could be carried forward and which needed to be reworked to reflect all of these changes. Cyberpunk emerged as a genre that allowed writers to look forward - even if only 20 minutes into the future - while what I am calling retrofuturism represented a genre that allowed people to look backwards, examining older myths and fantasies against contemporary realities.

Frederick Jameson's "Can We Imagine the Future?" has long set the tone for the ways science fiction scholars understood retrofuturism, arguing that the recycling of older iconography in works like Bladerunner reflected a growing impoverishment of the imagination. Jameson wrote,

"We can no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly 'science-fictional' futures of technological automation. These visions are themselves now historical and dated - streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals - while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past."

The retrofuturism of contemporary science fiction suggested to Jameson that the genre may have outlived its usefulness as a means of making sense of the process of technological change; science fiction, he was arguing, reflected an old master narrative of human progress which no longer made sense in the context of a postmodern society. What was the value of a genre about the future, he asked, at time when people were discussing "the end of history" and when all the old signifiers were being emptied of their meaning. In the end, he concludes,

"What is indeed authentic about it [science fiction], as a mode of narrative and a form of knowledge, is not at all its capacity to keep the future alive, even in the imagination. On the contrary, its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future."

We might take two big ideas from Jameson's account of retrofuturism- that past imaginings of the future need to be understood as historical artifacts of older ideologies about human progress and that their remobilization in the present can be used as a means of reflecting on the failures of those dreams to become realities. While Jameson's work on postmodernism suggests that the redeployment of these older images of the future might amount to little more than an empty nostalgia, he seems to be hinting here that these images might function as vehicles of historical consciousness and thus as the basis for critique. Jameson's contemporaries were quick to explore the idea that "yesterday's tomorrows" might provide important clues into earlier moments in the history of the 20th century, a project reflected not only by the contributors to Corn's collection but also by essays like Andrew Ross's "Breaking Out of the Gernsback Continuum." But far less time has been spent exploring the contemporary deployment of earlier science fiction iconography as a way of working through the gap between an anticipated future and the lived reality of the late 20th century.

This essay will build on this idea of science fiction as a mode of historical critique, re-reading the retrofuturist project through the lens of more recent theoretical work on the concept of residual media. In doing so, I will be focusing primarily on a series of comic books written and conceived by Dean Motter over the past three decades (Mister X; Terminal City; Terminal City:Aerial Grafitti; Electropolis), all operating within a shared fictional world which is built from early 20th century representations of the "city of the future."

Motter, himself, has described his books in terms of "antique futurism," explaining during an interview with the author:

"Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our society has been predicting the cultural future via the machine. Whether in gigantic architectural visions such as the World Fairs, or the near-whimsical Popular Science covers, dreams of flying cars, household robotic servants, or jet packs. These visions, while engineering achievements of varying degrees of success and accuracy, were often oblivious as to how the culture would change. McLuhan (as well as the fictions of Orwell, Huxley and H.G. Wells) considered what would happen to humanity itself, not simply the evolution or devolution of our artifacts....So 'antique futurism' became my way of having some fun, while raising the questions."

For Motter, then, "antique futurism" has, among other things, to do with the gap between futures conceived through the lens of technological progress and the role that social and cultural factors play in shaping how we live and interact with technology. It involves the reassertion of human experiences and identities into the process of imagining the future. It also involves rereading the fantasies of the past through the lens of subsequent experiences and developments.

All of this requires us to pause for a moment and consider the varied temporalities of science fiction. Brian Aldiss has argued that science fiction only really emerges as a genre once the rate of change in our society becomes dramatic enough that people felt its impact within a single lifetime, beginning to see the future as likely to be profoundly different from the present. We can measure the heightened perception and acceleration of change in the diminished time spans of science fiction: the earliest stories felt compelled to project forward thousands of years in human history in order to imagine worlds dramatically different than our own; most of the representations of the future at the 1939 World's Fair, by contrast, were set half a century forward; and many recent science fiction stories, especially those in the cyberpunk, might require only a few years of separation from the present moment. In each cases, though, science fiction deploys the future as a way of distancing us from and reflecting upon the present moment.

From the start, however, science fiction has also functioned as a genre which enabled us to reflect upon the past. Time travel stories, such as H.G. Well's "The Time Machine," were among the first science fiction stories written, even though the metaphor of traveling back into history fit rather poorly within the rationalist scientific discourse that otherwise defined early science fiction as a genre. To tell such stories, one had to shed the idea that the genre was governed by reasonable and plausible extrapolation based on known science. Time travel stories, such as Orson Scott Card's PastWatch or Sterling's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," (also published in the Mirrorshades collection), continue to have currency. A second strand of science fiction, alternative history, takes us back to key historical turning points and asks what if scenarios, imaging how the world might have taken a very different shape if the outcomes had been different; alternative future stories, thus, imagine what would happen if the South had won the Civil War, if the United States had not entered World War II, or if Stalin had continued to dominate the Soviet Union down to the present day. A third strand of science fiction seeks to extrapolate based not on contemporary understandings of science but rather on earlier historical formulations, constructing science fiction stories based on ancient Greek, early modern, or Victorian conceptions of science. The term, "steampunk," was coined to refer to science fiction which built on Victorian society and technology, a genre inspired as much by contemporary representations of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as by anything actually produced during the late 19th century. Sterling and Gibson's The Difference Engine, explores what might have happened if Charles Babbage's experiments had been successful, paving the way for a pre-20th century version of the digital revolution. Finally, retrofuturism takes earlier science fiction as its raw materials, revisiting mid-20th century constructions of the future from a more contemporary perspective. For the purposes of this essay, I will be focusing on works that mobilize the iconography that emerged through Hugo Gernsback's pulp science fiction magazines, through Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon comic strip, through films like Just Imagine and Things to Come, and through the 1939 New York World's Fair, among other sources, but there are other retrofuturist works - for example, Christian Gossett's comic book series, Red Star, which built on Soviet science fiction and socialist utopian literature - that revisit other historical constructions of the future. These various subgenres suggest that science fiction may be as effective as a genre for imagining the past as it is as a genre for projecting the future or commenting on the present and the key point is that its social commentary works by reading one time period against another.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Three, Part Two): Robin Anne Reid and Sean Griffin

SG: I very much like how you have critiqued the emphasis in academia on fan-fiction supposedly stressing equality within relationships. I have always found that to be far too myopic--that a lot of fan-fiction, and fan-interest is often in exploring power dynamics, rather than trying to eliminate them. I know a lot of fans of the old Dark Shadows soap of the 60s that write slash fiction tend to focus on S/M-type sexual attraction rather than hurt/comfort stories. (Here's a plug for work done by my husband, Harry Benshoff, who got me to watch Dark Shadows and is in the process of writing a monograph on the series.)

SG:And, while a number of fans of daytime soaps often talk about enjoying a good romance, most of the interactions and energy is expended discussing when a villain pulls a great scheme, or when the tables are turned, etc. So, I think Foucault needs to be applied much more to fan dynamics than I've ever seen.

RAR:I used Foucault in my dissertation (constructions of "race," gender, sexuality in North American feminist theory and fictions), so I'm all for bringing his ideas to bear, especially because, as fans know very well, what often drives conflicts in fanfictions are inequalities of power, not just gender, but along a numbers of other axes of identity: age, class, nationality, ethnicity, planetary origin (have to toss that in!), experience, etc.

SG:That said, I think we can also talk about definitions of "fan fiction" and how that might apply to gendered roles--obviously LOTR and other fantasy/sci-fi texts have engendered substantial economies of fan-fiction production. Daytime (and domestic prime-time) soaps do not seem to have inspired anywhere near that level. I think it's partly due to the ever-expanding, without-pause narrative of daytime soaps, unlike the (relatively) completed texts of Tolkien's original novels (to take one example)--that makes it hard for fans to have time or space to rework or intervene. In place of that, though, I would argue that fan letters to the show (network execs, producers, writers, performers), as well as the wealth of internet chat could be regarded as a level of fan-fiction (granted, Henry and others has discussed this in a somewhat similar manner), in the soap text itself is often about characters gossiping about each other, so fans get into the conversation as well. (And from that more "classically defined" fan fiction sometimes results--of which I myself have been involved in at least two occasions!) Whether or not such levels are gender based is another potential source of discussion.

RAR: Again, we can completely agree on this focus: some of my scholarship focuses on texts other than fictions (I did a stylistic analysis of the "About Us" pages at two LOTR fic archives, one selective and one open, in terms of gendered discourse). Since I think of fanfiction as part of a range of interpretive moves, of reader responses (which range from attempts to mimic the source text, especially prevalent in book fandoms, to resistant readings against the grain of the text), I'm quite open to considering how fan letters and fan gossip work in similar ways (as feminist linguists have pointed out, that term is gendered--with the talk men do about themselves, their friends, colleagues, etc. being considered "not-gossip" by virtue of the speakers being male). I not only write queer academic papers on Éowyn, I am starting to write fanfiction about her, and her relationship with Arwen. I'm interested in bisexual erotics in fanfiction, so in one long WIP (not currently active, I'm working toward a foursome group marriage with Aragorn, Arwen, Boromir, and Éowyn--I write Alternate Universe fic in which Boromir lives). Éowyn was always one of my two favorite characters from the time I first read the novel (age ten, the other being Frodo). I'd also bring up for consideration the intense relationships between readers who comment and writers in fandom: the essay I collaborated upon with Barb and Eden was about the queer interactions between readers of their long, collaborative LOTRipS story, Words/Silence/Flesh (a hybrid fic that includes emails, gossip columns, diary entries, florist's order forms, rather than standard third-person narrative).

SG: I agree that the term "gossip" carries diminutive and gendered connotations, and I have worked to level the playing field in the classroom by discussing sports talk as gossip, and spectator sports themselves as a form of soap opera (emphasizing memory, ongoing narratives, etc.--my one claim to sports fandom is being a Cubs fan...so I know all about delayed gratification!), which usually causes delight in female students and chagrin in male students.

RAR: I *always* stage a class discussion comparing the media treatment of "sports fans" and "sf fans" as a way of getting students to think about gender and other issues: because even though science fiction is gendered masculine in many people's minds, the denigration of sf fans in the mainstream media (and in many of my students' perceptions) is much different than their attitude toward sports fans. I've had students gasp out loud when I revealed that I, their English teachers, was a Trekkie at one time, and am now a LOTR fan.

SG: Something else that I think often goes undiscussed is the evolution of fan communities--people's relation to texts and to each other are of course not stable, but again discussion often takes on an ahistorical sense. To take a basic example, to think that Star Trek fans consider and appreciate the texts in the same way in a post 9/11 environment as in the early 70s when the first conventions sprung up is ridiculous. In terms of my own research, the community at the Usenet ABC soaps group has very much evolved. People have left, others have come in--and the type of discussion has changed, not just because what's happening on the show has moved into new stories. As Usenet has diminished in importance and other internet avenues have gained greater accessibility (tied to Foucault and notions of power/knowledge, especially network's own web sites--http://soapnet.go.com/chatboards/index.html), that fan community has evolved. Thus, on multiple levels, fandom is fluid and complex.

RARI agree (no doubt our agreement on so many issues is related to the relative 'shortness' of the discussion!) about the fluidity of fandom; even in LJ, there are ongoing discussions of how "fandom" is changing, with generational conflicts, book vs. film conflicts, and debates over where we are (as I discuss here in my LJ, some people were thinking of leaving LJ because of what is now being called strikethrough07, the deletion of a wide range of journals because of distorted accusations of pedophilia). I think all scholars can do is acknowledge the very limited nature of what we call "fandom" in our own work, and keep emphasizing the subjective, partial, and incomplete nature of our scholarship.

SG:I think in terms of queer fandom, we can also talk about rereadings (and maybe camp), and how that interacts and sometimes antagonizes (but sometimes *doesn't*) straight fans--and the intersection of gender politics and lesbian/gay fans (for example, from a soaps perspective--do lesbian fans feel allied more with straight female fans or gay male fans--or is there any alliance between any of these groups.) My sense is that, while certain individuals might choose to unite together under a shared goal--responding to perceived homophobia is one example--it is usually difficult if not impossible to constitute groups, that (again) fandom is amorphous and diffuse?

RAR:I recall that Camille Bacon-Smith did an interesting analysis of the positioning of gay/lesbian fans in the earlier fandom groups, showing an eventual movement away from the fan identification to the gay/lesbian activist position. I think you've raised some incredibly complex and fascinating questions here that (as often happens) need to be developed (and I'm hoping people will chime in on the discussion). There have been a number of debates in LJ fandom, one of which I know Kristina wrote about very effectively in her essay in our anthology: "My Life Is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances," about debates over just that issue--especially "straight" women performing what could be read as "queer" behaviors with other women (for example, the tendency to give not only chocolates, as do the fans on the newsgroup, but hugs, smooches, kisses as well as declarations of love, proposals of marriage, offers to bear one another's children, all as general signs of approbation. I suspect (and here comes my favorite theory!) that just as offline, the interactions between online fans kaleidoscope, with, at times, the alliances following fandom/love for source text lines, sexual identity, ethnic/racial identity (there are recurring complicated and painful debates over the tendency of majority white fans to write certain characters of color in certain ways, perhaps reflecting the racism in the source texts (all those *white* planets in media sf!)), as well as individuals, sexuality, etc. So I think your question is one that should and could be the basis for more scholarship, and certainly can be developed in comments.

Reminder: If you'd like to add to this discussion, please feel free to leave comments here or over at the special Live Journal site which Kristina Busse created for this purpose. The goal of this series is to provoke community wide discussion of the current state of fan studies.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Three, Part One): Robin Anne Reid and Sean Griffin

Queering the Discussion

Sean Griffin Faculty Page

Robin Anne Reid Professional LJ, Faculty Page

Introduction

SG: It seems the best way to start is to identify ourselves and our place in the context of the discussion at hand. Probably the most obvious connection between my academic work and fandom has been my work on lesbian/gay (and other queer) fandom towards Disneyana, thus describing how such audiences initially used Disney films and TV in non-prescribed manners...but how modern queer consumers have to deal with a Walt Disney Company that is very aware of their existence (hence, perhaps, falling into marginal readings that have been planned by the corporation).

SG: That said, personally, I feel my strongest investment in fandom comes from an area of which I have only sporadically written academically--I have been watching the ABC daytime drama (look how well I'm trained NOT to call it a soap opera!) All My Children since 1973, when I was in 4th grade. I have given some conference papers (which I sent to Robin for her perusal before the present conversation began), and been interviewed for other people's work--and I do plan at some point to finally do a more exhaustive examination--but towards soaps I consider myself a fan first and an academic second. Other than gossiping in person with people who watched the show when I was in junior high through my undergraduate years, I learned how to navigate the internet in the early 90s by finding the Usenet bulletin board fan site for ABC soaps, discovering a whole community of like-minded individuals (including lesbian/gay fans)--which developed often into in-person meetings, and now in Dallas a monthly get-together with others in the area.

SG: One of the other reasons I have not written much on soap fandom yet is due to other projects that have taken me away from fan studies--and as such I am jumping into this current foray after not being engaged for a while. As such, I rather feel like the modern Major General in "Pirates of Penzance" who comes into the play blustering "What's all this, then?" While of course vitally interested in the issues, and empathetic to what seem to be the concerns and worries of those involved, I myself have not encountered the types of experiences that others are expressing (cue male-guilt persona at this juncture).

SG: I have never worried about "coming out" academically--if anything, announcing I was gay in film/TV studies in the early 90s was a potential boost to being hired and/or published! And, while I have not published much on soaps, that was not due to thinking it was "unsavory" or "inappropriate" or "looked down upon." On the contrary, from the moment I started teaching about cultural studies, students have been able to glory in watching my own fan-produced videotape of me in (bad) drag as Reba McIntyre hosting a retrospective clip show of All My Children! If anything, putting myself up there HELPED me in getting tenure (it certainly made me stand out from the crowd)! Granted, part of this may be tied to the gender disconnect of a MAN invested in SOAP OPERAS--and I don't discount my white male privilege (thank goodness I can claim some subalternity in being gay).

RAR:I was asked to participate in this project as Dr. Robin Anne Reid, and I agreed. But in the course of thinking about this project in the context of the recent storms which have hit fandom (FanLib especially), I realized that I needed to identify my fan persona. Rather than just talk about generally about what I do in fandom, I decided to come out (and I use the term advisedly!) as Ithiliana. [My original introduction for this piece was far too long--no surprise to people who know me!--so I've posted it on my fandom journal here.

RAR:This discussion on gender, academia, and fandom event is not the first time I have come out. I came out in a collaborative essay for our anthology, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet not long after not long after a notorious anti-fanfic writer outed me a couple of summers ago. I've always been open about who I am with fans I've met. A number of people I've met at academic conferences are in LJ and are on my friends list. But posting about being Ithiliana under my professional name, Robin Anne Reid, on a blog that gets the traffic of Henry's is a different level of exposure all together. However, just as it's important for me in my work on gender and queerness in sf to acknowledge that I am a queer woman, and in my work on "race" and gender in sf, to acknowledge that I am Anglo, it is important in my fan scholarship to acknowledge who I am as a fan. In most academic essays it's impossible to write at much length about one's self, but this sort of hybrid space ("Confessions of an Aca-Fan" blending both academia and fandom, under the rubric "confession" which is a complex and fascinating term) seems to invite it although I also acknowledge that I am able to do write what I do here primarily because I am already tenured and promoted. Were I not, I would not be coming out because of the quite legitimate fear of it affecting my retention, tenure, or promotion prospects.

RAR: I received my doctoral degree from the University of Washington in 1992 and am a professor in Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University-Commerce where I teach composition, creative writing, critical theory, and am developing courses relating to new media literacies. Most of my past publications are not in the area of fan studies. I did feminist scholarship on science fiction for about a decade and then, due to falling in love with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (having been a lifelong Tolkien fan), I found myself "retooling" or re-educating myself in some film theory and methodology and in fan studies because I also found myself writing LOTR fanfiction starting in 2003. I have several essays due out this year on film adaptation (unlike many literature scholars, I *like* the film!) and fandom as a queer female space. The materials I sent Sean included a queer analysis of the character of Éowyn in Tolkien's novel, an argument about genre reading preferences (in film and original fiction including genre fiction) of female fans who read and write Dark Fic the genre term is unique to fanfiction, but a good definition by can be found here, a presentation on the different constructions of masculinity in fanfictions about the character of Faramir in LOTR, and some recent work on queering the fantastic (including a call for papers for an anthology I'm co-editing with Jes Battis and a proposal for a paper I'll be reading at Mythcon that argues "slash" elements can exist in original genre fantasy as well as fan fiction).

RAR: One note: I have always published under my full name, though I go by Robin Reid most of the time, because I found at age fourteen that many people assume anyone named "Robin" is a man.

The Pleasure of Pirates and What It Tells Us About World Building in Branded Entertainment

As a rule, one should never trust the opinion of an established film critic about a movie with a number after its title -- and one should multiply the level of distrust for each number over 2. The whole concept of franchise entertainment seems to bring out the worst high culture assumptions in the bulk of American film critics (and beyond the United States, it's pretty much hopeless). Franchises are understood exclusively in terms of their economic function within the Hollywood entertainment supersystem, as if Hollywood made any movies that didn't make economic sense. Franchises are seen as aesthetic abominations and critics show little interest in exploring what kinds of new experiences might be enabled by seriality. And critics respond to sequels with extraordinary conservativeness, assuming that all the film can possibly do is to reproduce as closely as possible the pleasures offered by the first film, rather than imagining the expanded canvas which is possible by allowing people to work within yet transform the generic expectations created by earlier works.

To be fair, a high percentage of franchise films are formulaic exercises which have little or no aesthetic rationale. But this is not true of all sequels and this doesn't fully account for the function sequels play within the new media landscape. For a good discussion of some of these issues, check out a recent conversation at David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's blog which featured Stew Fyfe; Doug Gomery; Jason Mittell; Michael Newman; Paul Ramaeker; and Jim Udden.

To be fair, most sequels are more susceptible to the word of mouth response than to reviews per se, because most fans of popular entertainment have learned not to trust critics on such topics.

All of this comes to mind as I reflect on the critical drubbing recently received by the new Pirates film: Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World's End. Check out the website Rotten Tomatoes which links to dozens of on-line reviews of the film, almost all of which are negative, almost all of which tapped the same theme:

1. The film is too complicated and demands too much from its consumers. We want summer movies to be big, loud, and dumb.

2. The film doesn't offer enough screen time to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow character, who seems to be the only reason they believe patrons would be interested in a film of this kind.

3. The film doesn't have a simple, straight forward plot trajectory but instead moves through a series of set pieces and digressions, most of which showcase secondary characters (i..e. anyone other than Jack Sparrow.)

This summary captures the substance, though not the tone of these reviews, which seem to be a critical referendum on what writers like Jason Mittell and Steven Johnson have described as the increasing complexity of contemporary popular culture. Consider a few examples, drawn more or less at random, for several dozen similar reviews featured at the site:

With so many loose ends to tie up, At World's End is so insanely plot-heavy that it requires scene after scene of exposition, and the whole thing sinks simply under the weight of the story. A complicated narrative isn't necessarily a bad thing - that is, if the exposition provides something new, perhaps a fresh direction for the characters that we've all come to love, but even with so many plot points being juggled at once, there just aren't enough clever twists or cool new elements in AWE to justify the 30 tons of story the audience has to slog through....Except for a few great FX moments, At World's End is practically ALL exposition, and fans are going to grow tired of the unnecessarily complicated story since there's not nearly enough action to keep them entertained for almost three hours....The creators of At World's End were so intent on basing their bleak storyline on the end of the pirate era that they forgot that the movie needs to be, first and foremost, a ride. The whole stupid Pirates of the Caribbean concept is based on a ride, remember? One out of ten fans of the Pirates franchise may truly care about the complicated soap opera of a story at the heart of At World's End, but the other nine just want to see something funny and fast-paced, and they're the ones who are going to be most let down.--Brian Tallerico, UnderGround Online

But even if I wanted to spoil things, I couldn't. This movie is too darned hard to follow. There's so much stuff happening, sometimes all at once, that it's hard to keep track of who's on whose ship, who's selling out whom and even who's getting killed, where and how. And it won't matter whether you've seen the first two Pirates movies or not. You'll still be confused. --Gene Seymour, Newsday

Unlike, say, Shrek the Third, which works perfectly fine as a mediocre stand-alone sequel, At World's End relies heavily on viewers' knowledge of the previous film, Dead Man's Chest. Seems fair enough, given how many moviegoers were willing to pony up for that one. Still, all the curses, vendettas, double-crosses, reconciliations, trinkets, negotiations and sea monsters longing to be human again gave me severe tired head before the two-hour mark. Summer blockbusters may have many goals, but tired head should not be among them....So yeah, At World's End has some fun stuff. If only it weren't so stuffed to the gills with moving parts. -Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

One longs for more scenes featuring Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's indelible and beloved character in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (* 1/2 out of four), and less of everything else in this bloated, overwrought and convoluted three-hour misfire.--Claudia Puig, USA Today

What I really craved was not more action or reversals of fortune, but a magic compass like the one that gets stolen and stolen again ad nauseam in the movie, one that always points the beholder to the thing he desires the most. In this case, it could have been a story map or just the peacefulness of the brig....Don't misunderstand. I like my action movies complicated, but At World's End is less a complexity than it is a high seas bazaar with everyone and everything vying for attention. Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

At the World's End certainly gets no credit for its ambitions here, no recognition for placing new kinds of conceptual demands on its spectators, and no praise for its craftmanship. Rather, it is being forced back into the box where critics place any and all popular entertainment. The perception that summer movies are mindless and motivated purely by commercial considerations is being forced onto this film; At the World's End is being whacked for every step it takes outside of the confines of a totally classically constructed film.

The problem is that At the World's End is not a classically constructed film. Well, don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that at a certain level of abstraction, David and Kristin would be able to demonstrate that it follows the modified structure of acts they see as the hold over of classical narrative technique on contemporary cinema; there's no question that the characters have goals, that there are causal connections between their actions, or that the film follows intensified continuity styles of editing. But, in many ways, the film's heart is not in telling a classical linear story. This film wants to explore a world and much of its complexity emerges from the fact that we have been able to accumulate and master more information about that world through the first two films. I saw At the World's End shortly before I left on my European adventures and was blown away by its attention to detail and its respect for the intelligence of fans. This is one of the best summer movies that I have seen in a long long time and a powerful illustration of the ways that convergence culture is reshaping how franchise entertainment operates.

In Convergence Culture, I explain that Hollywood has moved from a primary focus on stories as the generators of film pitches to a focus on characters that will sustain sequels to a focus on worlds that can be played out across multiple media platforms. This shift accommodates a much more active spectator who wants to watch favorite movies again and again, making new discoveries each time, and who enjoys gathering online and comparing notes within a larger knowledge culture. In the book, I use The Matrix as an extreme example of this tendency towards transmedia entertainment and towards films focused more on world building than on character or plot. The Matrix, in some ways, demanded more of spectators than they were prepared to give, stretching its material across films, animations, comics, and games, while providing little redundancy across the various platforms. The Matrix sequels fell into the blindspot of most critics who remain bound to a single medium and were not prepared to accept games or comics or animation as contributing to the same meta-text.

At the World's End adopts a somewhat more conservative strategy -- keeping everything within the three films (more or less) but insuring that the later films in the series achieve a density of information which would not have been possible in the first title in the franchise. The critic's preoccupation with Depp's Jack Sparrow suggests that they have missed a step in the evolution of the media franchise -- stuck back at the moment when sequels depended on the appeal of a single well-defined character.

Don't get me wrong -- Sparrow is a great character and Depp's is a masterful performance. Without Sparrow, the first film might never have achieved its broad appeal -- which is a strange thing to say about a character as queer, eccentric, and self-reflexive about this one. And yes, for my money, there's not enough of Depp in the third film -- which is funny to say given how there are several sequences here when Depp plays all the parts. But, from the start, the Pirates films have succeeded on the basis of an extraordinary ensemble cast of some of the best and/or most engaging performers in contemporary cinema (Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgard, Naomie Harris) and for the third film, we can add brief but memorable performances by Yun-Fat Chow and Keith Richards and a much wider array of character actors who are given one or two solid moments each to shine. We've met these characters over time, a few introduced in each of the first two films, and now the directors are able to bring them together, play them opposite each other, in a shifting set of alliances and conflicts. All of this keeps the film in constant motion and gives us an emotional hook for almost every shot.

Then, consider the build up of running gags that surround the various pirates (and their pets) on board the Black Pearl and consider the ways that the use of very distinctive but recognizable encrustations on the various crew members of the Flying Dutchman allows us to recognize and recall these minor characters each time they appear on screen.

And then consider the ways that the device of the Pirate's Council allows the film to hint at a globally diverse array of different pirate cultures -- Chinese pirates, South Asian pirates, Eastern European pirates, Spanish Pirates, French Pirates, etc. -- which can be evoked quickly shot by shot as we move through the film. I found myself intrigued by the suggestion that pirates, who take to the open seas rather than staying closer to land and following trade routes, establish a different set of contact zones than the nations with which they are embattled, and by the hint of the multicultural composition of Pirate crews (even discounting the somewhat politically correct impulses of representation and inclusiveness that shaped this particular representation of the process.)

Or consider the rich atmosphere created by the film's detailed reconstruction of 19th century Singapore which depends on a range of details that may or may not register consciously for many viewers but which suggests a specific historical and cultural context much larger than the actions of the film.

The principal figures are given story arcs which tie together plot strands from the earlier film and each is given at least one, perhaps more, moments of transition and revelation. The secondary characters rely heavily on what my former student Geoffrey Long likes to describe as negative capability -- they are well enough defined that we can imagine who they are, what they want, and why they are doing what they are doing, but much remains for the audience to flesh out from their own imaginations. The Pirates Council in particular invites us to draw together what we know from other sources while suggesting that the world of this franchise is much larger and diverse than anything we suspected so far. So much gets conveyed here through aspects of make-up, costume design, and art direction which evokes a whole complex culture behind characters who may never be given names and who may appear in only a few shots or scenes.

The film, in other words, throws a lot of stuff at us and expects us to catch it. The critics dropped the ball but the film plays fair -- there's a there there, a rationale or reason behind every element, and the parts add up to a satisfying whole if we connect all of the pieces. For someone really engaged in watching this film, the result is epistemaphilia, a mad rush of information being brought together and being clicked into the right mental category. I had this experience even though I saw Dead Man's Chest almost a year ago. I can only imagine the pleasures that await us when we watch all three films back to back in a DVD marathon or all of the telling details I will pick up on during a second or third viewing -- and that's part of the point. The modes by which we consume these films have shifted. Most films don't warrant a first look, let alone a second viewing, but for those films that do satisfy and engage us, a much higher percentage of the audience is engaged in what might once have seemed like cult viewing practices. Once we find a franchise which floats our boats, we will settle in for an extended relationships and we want to explore all of the hidden nooks and crannies. We want to know everything we can possibly know about this world and contemporary franchise films are designed to accommodate our interests.

In this case, one consequence is a heavy reliance on reaction shots, as we read what unfolds through the eyes of a range of different characters and feel sympathy for their various and contradictory points of view. In this regard, At the World's End follows closely what others have written about television soap opera -- the reaction is as important as the action -- though in this case, we may be seeing and trying to take in the reactions of three or four different characters within a single shot.

Another consequence is the development of objects which encapsulate relationships, conflicts, histories, and emotional investments. Again, this is the stock of film melodrama where lover's tokens may carry a lot of the affective weight of the story. But here, because there are so many different characters and subplots, we have a proliferation of meaningful objects (compasses, rings, "pieces of eight," flags, ships, treasure chests, hearts, ships, etc.) which carry different kinds of meaning and power and much of the action consists of the deployment and exchange of these objects between various characters.

A third aspect of the film would seem to borrow heavily from ensemble dramas on television -- each scene might bring together more than one character and more than one subplot with the result that the film moves forward through a series of intersections and interruptions of its plot developments. Plots cross each other: a choice which seems to bring resolution to one plotline opens up new complications for another; a decision which makes sense from one perspective seems enigmatic from another; and the reader must be alert to all of these different levels of development, must think about what the scene means for each character and each plot if they are going to get full pleasure from the story. What may seem like a digression at first may accrue significance as the film goes along -- consider how a series of localized gags and set pieces involving ropes, say, may take shape as the film progresses into a particular understanding of Jack's improvised and yet carefully calculated way of moving through the world.

But, then again, we can watch the movie as a series of set pieces, enjoying individual gags, or just taking pleasure in watching people blow shit up, and because there is so much going on here, we will generally have a good time. Like the first Matrix and unlike its sequels, the film is visceral enough that one can enjoy it on a surface level.

The problem is that people have some difficult moving between the two -- if they suddenly realize that the film is much more complex and layered than they anticipated, they may start to flounder and ultimately drown, which seems to be what happened to a high percentage of the film critics. They went into the film expecting a certain kind of experience; they hadn't successfully learned how to take pleasure from its world-building; they don't want to dig into the film more deeply after the fact, comparing notes online with other viewers, because their trade demands constant movement to the next film and a focus on their own private, individualized thoughts.

Watch a film with a group of critics and it is a rather chilly experience, each trying to suppress signs of their emotional response for fear of tipping their hands to their competition. They don't laugh at comedy; they don't cry at melodrama; and they don't know how to engage in fannish conversation around film franchises, which means that their professional conduct cuts them off from the shared emotional pleasures that are so much a part of how popular culture works its magic on us. For that reason, I trust film critics far more when they are writing about art films which demand distanced contemplation than popular films which desire an immediate emotional reaction.

All of this is to say that the critics were not inaccurate in their description of At the World's End: it is a complex, some would argue overly complex, blend of different story elements; it is pulling us in many different directions at once; it isn't focused around a single protagonist. Where we disagree is in our emotional experience and aesthetic evaluation of the features of the film. These are the reasons why At the World's End is my favorite entry in the Pirates series and are scarcely reasons to pan the finished film.

We might contrast At the World's End with Spider-Man 3, a film which I didn't enjoy very much. While at the World's End constructs a world with many points of entry and many different intersections between its large cast of characters, Spider-Man 3 fumbles a much smaller number of subplots, because they all need to be focused through the clogged pipeline of a single protagonist. We are constantly feeling the thwacking fist of coincidence and contrivance pushing us out of any immediate experience of the film. Each of the subplots follows the basic narrative structure of the contemporary yet still classical Hollywood film. It has to go through the same formulaic steps, more or less in the same sequence, more or less in parallel, which collapses the difference between The Sandman, Hobgoblin, and Venom, as characters who originated in comics during different eras and for different purposes. The film has many moments I could enjoy on their own terms but it keeps tripping over its own two feet and when a film of this size and scale lands wrong, it lands with an awesome thud.

I loved the first two films in the Spider-Man series but the third entry left me totally cold -- in part because it hasn't been able or willing to make this transition between character-centered and world-centered story, doing neither particularly well. In the case of the Pirates films, though, each new entry gave me more of what I wanted from the franchise, could start with an assumption of greater mastery and investment on the part of the spectator, and could push deeper into the complex world building that I have come to expect from transmedia entertainment at its very best.

End of rant. I will now return you to your regularly scheduled summer entertainment. Critics, you can turn off your minds again. Just don't expect me to shut down mine.

Gender and Fan Studies: Join the Party

I am sorry that there have been so many technical difficulties posting comments on the blog this week. People have been working behind the scenes trying to locate the source of the problems which have sent anti-spam messages to many of you who have tried to post. I can't tell you how frustrated I am by the situation which comes just as I am traveling in Europe with less than ideal internet access and just as we are trying to jump start this conversation about gender and fan culture.

In the short run, Kristina Busse has helped to set up an alternative location for us to have the more interactive aspects of this conversation. I will continue to post the main entires here and cross post them at the new space and periodically I will collect comments from the other site and run them in a digest form through the blog. It is a kludge, at best, a cobbled together solution, but it should allow anyone who wants to post to be heard. So, if you are enjoying the Gender and Fan Studies series here, check it out.

Whatever my automated technology may be telling you, I really want to hear what you are thinking about the issues raised by the Gender and Fan Studies series.

On Cities and Comics: Report from Berlin

I am writing these notes at the end of a three day conference in Berlin centering on the relationship between comics and the city. I am not certain that I can do justice to what has been a diverse and yet programmatic conference, one thatlooked closely at the place of the urban imagination in comics from Japan, the United States, and Europe.

For one thing, I have spent a good chunk of time the past few days in a kind of narcoleptic stupor - a consequence of fatigue from the end of the term, jet lag, and sweltering heat. (I suspect that the temperatures in Germany might have been one of the factors that convinced George W. Bush about the realities of global warming while he was here for the G8 summit). The only thing keeping me from simply melting into the floorboards has been a steady flow of iced Chai from the Starbucks around the corner. So, what follows will be a lose set of impressions rather than anything resembling live blogging or detailed notes.

The first thing I will note is the high level of sophistication about comics and comic culture running throughout the event - not simply the speakers who are some of the leading German (and American) thinkers about the medium but also the audience, which was full of bright and articulate young men and women who have developed a knack for thinking and talking about comics in all of their many manifestations. My friend, Greg Smith from Georgia State University, referenced the eagerness many of us have to find a comics homeland - a place where traditions are known and respected and innovative work is taken seriously. Might this be Brussells with its comics museums and festivals or Tokyo with its six story tall comic shops or San Diego, host of the Comicon to end all Comicons, or even the fictional Hicksville (where the library has all of those comics imagined and never actually produced by the grand masters of the medium)? Berlin might also be a worthy candidate if the conversations here were any indication.

At the same time, those of us who were here from the United States and speaking about American comics felt a kind of cultural divide. While it was clear this audience was passionate about various European comics traditions, especially Francophone comics, and about Manga, few of them knew much or cared much about the American comics tradition. Of course, the opposite is also true: I made a conscious decision some time ago that I could know American comics inside and out or I could try to sample comics from around the world. It's really been only in the past year or so that I have started to explore a broader range of national tradition, hence the writing I've shared here about Polish or Mexican comics. For me, a pleasure of the conference was learning more about writers like Tardi, Enki Bilal, or Marc-Antoine Mathieu, or to get an introduction to recent developments in Belgian comics by one of the country's leading comics scholars.

The conference made a very strong case for the centrality of the urban imagination to comics, across national traditions, and the centrality of comics as a medium for understanding how we have made sense of the experience of cities in the 20th and 21st century. The conference organizers Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, lay out the basic claims in their prospectus for the conference:

There is undoubtedly a link between the medium comics and the big city as a modern living space. This emphasizes the need to investigate on the one hand a) how specifically urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of cultural memorizing and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life) are being incorporated in comics, and on the other hand b) if comics have special competences for capturing urban space and city life and representing it aesthetically because of their hybrid nature consisting of words, pictures and sequences. Does the spatial inertia of the sequences in contrast to film, video or television result in a retardation in order to ease the saturation that has been attributed to the big city since 1900 (Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin)? This theory is backed up by numerous contemporary comic books and by the fact that the screen adaptations of comic books are limited to urban scenarios. Moreover, the history and the origins of comics support this theory.

From an historical point of view and against the backdrop of the modern age, comics are inseparably tied to the city: the history of comics begins - not taking into consideration the long history of combining pictures and words since the Ancient World and the tradition of illustration, caricature and picture stories in the 18th and 19th century - with the emergence of comic strips in American newspapers around 1900....
Parallel to expanding the comic strips successively to whole pages the space reserved for the city becomes bigger. Winsor McCay for instance uses the whole page as basis for his comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (1906-1914) in order to create fantastic worlds and real cities. Eventually, comics outgrow the newspaper world: when the new format of the comic book is established as an independent publication, new characters fill the cities with life. Will Eisner's Spirit, which started out as a comic strip in newspapers, lives in a nameless city, Superman inhabits the futuristic Metropolis (1938), and Batman fights crime first in Manhattan/New York (1939) and from 1941 on in Gotham City. Thus, various distinctive comic book series at the end of the 1930s explore the city and its function as living space and origin of modern myths. In particular, the characters of the superhero comics (Superman, Batman) and the detective comics (The Spirit, Dick Tracy) delve deeper into the aesthetic, atmospheric and scenaristic possibilities of the city. From then on, the city acts even more as the foremost setting for comics of all genres and stylistic variants. The city becomes an important plot element, even an atmospheric and symbolic protagonist, and suddenly the focus of attention in a whole lot of genres.

From this point of view, comics have a certain self-reflexivity, whenever they act as a genuine medium of the urban modern age and adopt the cultural prerequisites of this modern age in the big city. This self-reflexive nature of the medium in terms of its history, mediality, cultural environment and origin can be found particularly in comics that treat, narrate and continue symbolic manifestations of the urban modern age. By now, every modern metropolis in the world has been made the subject of comics: Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, and time and again New York. At the same time, many fictional cities from comics have found their way into the global cultural memory: Superman's Metropolis, Batman's Gotham City, the New York of Spider-Man, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four as devised by Marvel, Tokyo and the post-nuclear Neo-Tokyo of manga or the Duckburg of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

The authors and artists of the influential science-fiction comics from France and Belgium as well have incorporated urban space time and again into their narratives (Caza, Moebius, Bilal, Druillet, Adamov, Mézières). In doing so, they referred to patterns from other media and the whole repository of cultural history and iconography, which is occasionally exceeded and expanded: for instance, completely new narrative techniques are applied in Moebius' Le garage hermétique, or architectural universes are developed, e.g. by Moebius, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, François Schuiten/Benoît Peeters (Les citées obscures), also by Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), Dean Motter/Michael Lark (Mr. X, Terminal City, Electropolis), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Domo), and Enki Bilal (Nikopol), which exert their influence not only on cinematic settings (Blade Runner, Batman, Batman Returns, The Fifth Element, The Matrix), but also on postmodern architectural designs. The city as setting is also important because it acts as historical, significantly dense background (Tardi, Moore, Miller, Ware). In particular, the Franco-Belgian École Marcinelle, which is not limited to realistic series, has opened up the urban space for the so-called semifunnies (Franquin, Tillieux). Therefore, the subject of urbanity should obviously be explored in terms of connecting narrative strategies and visuality (horizontality, verticality, panoramic view), and certain urban qualities should be used in order to start an agenda for comics studies.</blockqoute>

This rationale statement offers a pretty good summary of the interconnections that emerged between the various papers presented at this event.

Jorn and Arno played an incredibly constructive role in planning this conference, asking the speakers to address urban themes through the lens of specific artists, while leaving each of us free to bring our own methodological and theoretical perspectives to the table. As a result, the conference covered a broad range of figures, including Will Eisner, Dean Motter, Alan Moore, and Outcault, as well as the European masters referenced earlier. This push towards a focus on specific artists, rather than broad theoretical claims, resulted in papers which combined close formal and thematic analysis of specific comics with broader conceptual frameworks about comics as a medium and about the various ways by which we understand and represent the experience of living within cities. And the conference was organized to offer contrasting perspectives on a range of different cities - including a rich paper on the ways the the Duckburg of Carl Bark's Donald Duck comics was translated into the very German Entenhausen for the German editions of his books and extending across imaginary cities like Gotham City and Terminal City as well as the very real New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Brussels. Surprisingly, there was no focus here on Berlin, the city which engulfed us, even as we were speaking.

The papers offered some glimpse of the ways that comics intercepted a range of other media forms, including discussions of comics in relation to architecture, painting, sculpture, theater, video games, the web, cinema, and literary storytelling. And the city was approached as a site of self-performance, as the focus of moral panic and social anxiety, as embodying our hopes for a more utopian future, as the site of estrangement and alienation, as a symbolic and mythic landscape whose monuments help to embody the lessons of the past, as a constantly changing and disorienting landscape, as part of a new globalized culture, as the space by which modern bureaucracies seek to rationalize human experience, and so much more.

From a formal perspective, we learned about the complexities of framing and gestures in the comics of Will Eisner (which Greg Smith traces back to both 19th century melodrama and vaudeville), about the complex roles which text plays in Outcault's early 20th century comics, about the mirroring structure of images in Alan Moore, about the bold play of color and narrational perspective in Bilal's Nikopol trilogy, and about the experiments in self-reflexivity which run through Mathieu's works.

Throughout, we saw how particular architectural features of urban environment leant themselves again and again to the borders and panels that help organize the space of the comics page, suggesting that the fit between comics and the city have as much to do with aesthetic as ideological reasons.

The issue of memory was another recurring theme that cut across the papers - from Scott Bukkatman's rift on the role that autobiographical perspectives have played in comics criticism through my own focus on the relationship of retrofuturism to the ways that the web has shifted our relationship to residual traces of older media forms and cultural practices, from the ways that Moore's work connects to the history of "memory palaces" to the ways that comics move back and forth across major transitional points in the culture, helping both French and Japanese readers understand the events of the Second World War as a lasting influence upon their culture.

The conference organizers are pushing to find a publisher for an anthology based on the conference. Normally, I am not convinced that most conferences cohere easily into a book but because of the strong editorial role which Aherns and Meteling brought to the organization of this event, I am convinced that this material would easily cohere into what could be a very important anthology on this topic.

I promised some of the European comics scholars that I met at the conference that I would help spread the word about what looks to be a fascinating new journal, Signs (Studies in Graphic Narratives), which centers primarily on the history of early comics and sequential art, from an international perspective. The first issue cuts across a range of national traditions, including a full color reproduction of an 18th century set of comic prints from Florence, a discussion of the prehistory of Manga in Japan (by Jacqueline Berndt), a consideration of Ally Sloper as a comic type by Roger Sabin, and some consideration of Imagerie Artistique, a series of prints produced for children in 19th Century France. I have not yet had a chance to do much more than skim through the articles but I see each as a valuable contribution to the growing body of research on the early history of graphic storytelling. The journal is lushly illustrated, reproducing scores of rare and hard to find images. As the issue's introduction explains, these articles each seem to offer "new pieces for the completion of the dispersed sort of puzzle that constitutes comics history." The editors are looking for possible contributors to their forthcoming issues as well as hoping that some American libraries will subscribe to the journal and make it available to their patrons. Interested parties can contact them at info@graphic-narratives.org.

From here, I am moving onto Helsinki to talk about media convergence and to Gothenburg, Sweden to speak about educational games at a conference which will also be attended by T.L. Taylor, James Paul Gee, and Helen Kennedy, among many others.

I will try to post at least a sample of my paper on Dean Motter and retrofuturism sometime early next week. So far, it exists only as a power point presentation and lives in my head. I hope to use the blog to nudge me into putting more of it down in writing.

What Makes Japan So Cool?: An Interview with Ian Condry

From time to time, I have shared with my readers some of the podcasts being generated by the Cool Japan Project, a joint research effort at MIT and Harvard, focused on understanding more fully Japanese popular culture -- especially anime and manga but also the culture around popular music and toys/collectibles. The project is sponsored by the MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies.

Today, I thought I would introduce you to the man behind the Cool Japan Project -- one of the coolest guys I know at MIT, my colleague Ian Condry. I had the good fortune to go on a tour of the Japanese media industry a few years ago along with Condry and it certainly opened my eyes to the richness and complexity of what's going on in that part of the world. Now a junior faculty member in the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures program who is affiliated with CMS, Condry was trained as an anthropologist and so his research into Japanese popular culture is shaped by extensive field work at sites of both production and consumption. His first major book, Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization came out earlier this year and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand contemporary hip hop music, the globalization process, or the links between Japanese and American popular culture. He is now hard at work on a second book project, Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Culture, which has taken him behind the scenes into some of the key studios producing contemporary anime and has brought key players in that space to MIT to speak as part of the Cool Japan program. In this interview, he talks both about Japanese hip hop and about the process which has brought anime and manga to the attention of American consumers.

If American youth are drawn to Japanese popular culture, your book explores the opposite phenomenon -- hip hop culture in Japan. Why were the Japanese drawn initially to this form of American popular culture?

Hip-hop music and breakdance were mind-blowing to youth audiences worldwide when both appeared overseas in the early eighties. The sound was so different (where's the band? why isn't he singing?) that it drew many people who had grown tired of rock and roll. So too with breakdance which had a competitive energy that was impossible to miss. Both offered the promise of liberation into an uncharted realm. The dynamics have changed, now that hip-hop is bona-fide pop music, but the transformative impact was unmistakable. Interestingly, the first audiences in Japan didn't understand what was going one, but they saw it was something different, and that sparked curiosity that kept growing. The early days of transformative early cultures are a mysterious and wonderful thing.

In your book Hip-Hop Japan, you suggest that the Japanese use this musical form to explore their own themes. What kinds of topics does hip hop address in the Japanese context?

Some of the most interesting recent rap songs in Japan are addressing America's misguided "war on terror," and the complicity of the Japanese media and the national government. The group King Giddra, for example, has a song called "911," which uses images of Hiroshima's ground zero after the bombing as a way of rethinking ground zero New York. The group Rhymester raps about America's hypocrisy in always telling Japan to "follow the path of peace" but then starts bombing Baghdad. By the same token, they see the Japanese government as little more than "yellow Uncle Sam."

Many rap artists are addressing other aspects of Japan's changing society, from women trying to find a place in a patriarchal society, to rappers questioning the failure of the economy, to criticism of the pornography industry, youth violence, and drug abuse. There is plenty of Japanese rap that tends to light and poppy, or even pseudo-gangsta and tough, but there are also some of the most striking alternative voices in Japan appearing in Japanese hip-hop music.

Can you describe something of the research process that went into this book? How
were you able to get such access to the Japanese hip hop world?

Fieldwork is an amazing thing. Going to the nightclubs week after week, month after month, over a year and a half (1995-97), formed the basis of my research. There I met the musicians, record company reps, magazine writers, organizers, and all manner of fans, from the deep b-boys and b-girls, with their hair and clothes just so, to the "first-time checking out a club" kids. It was clearly the interaction among these groups that built the hip-hop scene, from the largely underground scene it was then, to the expanding underground and mainstream elements that have developed today.

Hip-hop clubs in Japan are active from midnight to 5 a.m., with the live show happening around 2am, well after the trains have stopped running for the night. That means everyone is stuck at the club to the first trains around dawn. This turned out to be a boon for fieldwork. By 3am, most of the people had told all the jokes and stories and gossip they had to tell to their friends already, and many people were willing to come up and find out what this gaijin (foreigner) with a notepad was doing there.

Access to the hip-hop in Japan kept developing over the years following during periodic trips to Tokyo once or twice a year. Over time, I got to know some of the artists more personally. Watching their careers change and develop over almost the 10 year span of the book's research meant that I could see the struggles of artists coping with a quixotic pop world, where youthfulness is highly valued.

Something curious must be going on with race as an African-American music form gets taken up in an Asian culture where there are relatively few black people. What do you see as the racial politics of Japanese hip hop?

Race is very important for understanding hip-hop in Japan. Young Japanese (and many white Americans, too, I would add) are drawn to the "blackness" of hip-hop, most visibly in the clothing styles, hair styles, but also in a widening sensibility towards a particular musical style, born of verbal dexterity and polyrhythmic nuance, as well as the creativity involved in sampling and remixing.

The images of African-Americans in Japan tend to reinforce stereotypes, and hip-hop can be viewed as one of vehicles for these stereotypes. But at the same time, the fans who get more deeply into the music and culture are forced to deal with questions of race, questions of where Japanese fit into the matrix of white and black, questions of how Japanese racial nationalism still influences the ways resident Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans have been treated historically, and how they are treated today. In these ways, the impact of hip-hop on racial attitudes has been complex, at times contradictory, but, I believe, generally among hip-hop fans, moving in some right directions.

Your next project has you examining anime and manga more directly. What can you tell us about this new project?

My new book project is called Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture. I'm interested in "the making of" anime culture as an entire global circuit of media production. I spent the summer of 2006 in several Tokyo animation studios, primarily Gonzo and Aniplex, but also with visits to Ghibli, Sunrise, Aniplex, Studio 4 Degrees C. and others. I observed the collaborative creativity that goes into anime production, how they divide the process - characters, premise, worldview - and how the ideas about creativity become enacted, actually made real, through the daily practices of making anime, frame-by-frame.

To me, Japanese anime provides an important, non-Western case study of the ways media goes global, both by speaking across cultural boundaries while retaining a kind of cultural difference (have you ever seen so many giant robots or transforming schoolgirls?). Anime's connection to the world of Japanese comic books, woodblock prints and ancient picture scrolls is often deemed sufficient to prove a kind of cultural particularity, but at the same time, the development of Japan's anime industry was closely linked to American comics, Disney and other pioneering cartoon creators.

I also explore the ways anime fans, first in Japan and then overseas, have been integral to the expansion of anime culture. Too often we are told to "follow the money" when we analyze media production, but what I see is that the money follows the creativity of artists who are able to capture audiences, and, at the same time, audiences can rescue lost gems in ways that many entertainment companies seem not yet to recognize. By looking at the case of Japanese anime, I believe we can come to a deeper understanding of national differences and global synergies, the evolving worlds of media, digital technology, and the ways artists, fans, and businesses interact.

How has this growing interest in "Japan Cool" impacted the study of Japanese
language and culture in the United States?

The idea of "cool Japan" really took off with the publication of journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article "Japan's Gross National Cool" in Foreign Policy magazine. He argued that Japan had become a "cultural superpower," despite a decade-long recession that began in the early nineties. It has also changed the attitudes of American's interested in Japan

In the eighties, when I began studying Japanese language in college, my classmates tended to be Economics majors who planned to make a killing in international trade. They wanted to know how to bow and hand over business cards, but seldom seemed interested in Japanese history or culture Today, the majority, though not all, students of Japanese language and culture are drawn to Japan because of their experience with anime and manga. They are more interested in the culture, history, religion, and educational system of Japan. To me, it's a much more interesting group, more broad-minded, socially aware, and intellectually curious.

Some Japanese policy makers view the overseas interest in manga and anime as a vehicle for "soft power," political scientist Joseph Nye's term for political power that follows from the attractiveness of a nation's culture and ideals. I think the effect is in fact different. Manga doesn't convey "power" so much as it provides an entryway to a larger world, but one that is clearly conflicted and contradictory. The real power of popular culture is make stereotypes seems less compelling, and to force us to ask more complex questions about cultural differences.

Why do you think anime and manga have succeeded here while Jpop has largely
failed to generate the same level of interest?

I give American anime fans a lot of credit for driving the interest in anime through devoted, unpaid efforts to make the media available. In the eighties, they used VCRs, and today it's fansubs online through sites like www.animesuki.com.

Manga in Japan are such a powerful media because of the intense competition among manga artists. The largest weekly magazines carry about 15 serialized stories. Each week the publishers received about 3000 postcards, which list three most interesting and three dullest stories. A few weeks' of poor grades, and dull stories get cut. The manga stories that have survived for years are the ones that have maintained their edge. The fact that it is easy to read manga for free in convenience stores or borrowed from friends also means that fans are exposed to a lot of different manga and thereby become more sophisticated judges as well.

I think record companies in Japan haven't made much effort to break into the US market in part because US prices are about half that of Japan's, so they feel they won't make money. From the American perspective, Japanese CDs are simply too expensive, running about double the price of US albums. Both sides of the equation limit the flow.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Two, Part Two): Louisa Stein and Robert Jones

MEDIUM DIFFERENCES--ACTIVE PLAY OR PASSIVE SPECTATORSHIP?

RJ: I don't want to say that machinima is better, but I do want to say that it certainly places more power over the medium in the fan's hands than television. Essentially it comes down to tool sets. All these communities converge together on their need to tell stories, I'm not questioning that whatsoever. I'm simply suggesting that machinima requires a reexamination based on its tool sets that are made available to consumers exceeding previous media forms.

As to the transformative play of fan vids, I would absolutely agree that is what's going on. Because at its basic level, transformative play is about playing by your own set of rules, thus permeating the magic circle. If we understand the traditional role of the viewer as one of passive consumption, fan communities flip that on its head and actively play with the medium (the whole poaching thing). I guess my point about the fundamental difference between video games and film/TV was that the nature of these two are quite different. I can easily see how machinima manifests out of video game culture because it is one rooted in the interactive playing with the text. In that sense, machinima is just a continuation of play, reconfiguring the the magic circle. Fan vids on the other hand, have no direct connection to the relationship to the medium. We were supposed to JUST watch and enjoy. The people in Hollywood didn't foresee us really going beyond that, which is so very different from game design.

LS: On the point of film/TV as a passive medium I would definitely differ. Film and TV has had a long and bumpy road of imagining a spectator who is sometimes passive, sometimes active. To draw on Tom Gunning, the cinema of attractions certainly encouraged an active viewer, and while the development of the narrative code may have sent that active stance underground to some degree, it has never left cinema entirely--it has remained in the notion of engaging in the act of cinema going and the community of the audience, or in the confrontation of alternative cinema, or in the spectacle of big budget special effects films. This is even more so the case with TV; throughout its history people have been heralding the coming of interactive television, and images or sounds of studio audiences always highlighted audience engagement as somewhere in between passively watching and actively participating. Yes, how one could participate was limited, and perhaps doesn't compare to video games (I certainly don't mean to argue that the two are the same.)

This is just a long winded way of saying that film and television audiences have never been posited as strictly passive. But the active television viewer is now a highly contested subject, sought by some producers/networks and avoided by others, it seems. However the increasing cooptation of fannish culture (as we can see in shows on NBC, FX, Nickelodeon/The N, and The CW in the current moment, to name a few) suggests that TV producers and networks are not only soliciting active viewership but offering opportunities to supposedly influence the official source text itself. But, as Kristina Busse has discussed, this desire to go "pro" is not something that fan communities necessarily share equally, and is itself a contested and gendered issue.

RJ: I find this part particularly fascinating because I can fully see how this all plays out like a game for fans. I would just be cautious to clearify what we're talking about. The explanation of the video game as an interactive medium versus TV as a more passive medium was based solely on the medium, which has a prescribed way to engage it. What you're getting at here is what people do with that medium. In this instance, I would define that as a form of play, utilizing the TV medium. So the medium itself in this case does not take on the interactive or active qualities I want to reserve for games. However, that may be an unnecessary point to squabble over. The more important point to take from this, and a possible place where these two come together, is that there exists this need to "tinker" across gender.

LS: Yes, absolutely--but is the tinkering with the same purpose and to the same effect? I think that would be a fascinating question to explore more closely, looking at a comparison of machinima and vidding processes and texts.

RJ: I've always claimed that the engaging power of video games lies in the control it offers its audience. Fan vids represent a similar appetite for control over the narrative. Perhaps eagerly anticipating the next episode of a show only so that you can then take that content and use it as part of your own storytelling is no different than awaiting the next game engine to see what you can do with it. Both would constitute active engagements of play, the latter just happens to adhere to the relationship established from the outset by the medium. This is why the legal issues that often plague fan vids in the realm of IP suits has yet to really manifest in the machinima communities. Whereas TV and Film industries still cling to the need to control their properties, game developers have recognized the tremendous marketing potential that machinima offers (as indicated by the inclusion of machinima tool sets and filmmaking competitions just in the The Sims 2). The fact that they have not gone so far outside of the role that medium traditionally plays could be part of the explanation for this.

LS: I can see how the role imagined by the medium for the player/viewer might determine acceptable levels of interactivity, and how this separates TV/Film from video games--up to a point. But when TV and Film producers start to actively court fan involvement and fan authorship (which granted happens only marginally now but it does happen) this dichotomy gets muddier.

GENDER AND SCHOLARSHIP

RJ: Just trying to step back from all this, I can see that we both seem to come at this from a place that is close to us. Part of my argument seems to be privileging technology because I grew up as a technophile, playing games my whole life. And with your background in cinema I can see where your emphasis on narrative regardless of tool sets comes from.

LS: I wouldn't say I would emphasize narrative regardless of tools--I think understanding rather than ignoring the role of technology and interface is absolutely crucial--but I do think it's equally vital to understand the impact of those tools within the context of their cultural and social use.

RJ:So is the answer to this whole endeavor Jenkins is putting together just that simple? Men will continue researching video games because they spend more time there? And women will stick to fan vids and fan fiction based on TV because that's where they spend their time?

LS: I think that gendered spaces and familiarity may definitely be a significant part of this divide we're all noticing, combined with the gendered academic priorities that have shaped and continue to shape fan studies, as Jason and Karen discussed in their conversation this past week.

RJ: The shifting numbers I cite in my piece on the growing numbers of female gamers hopefully points towards a sea change that will take place. The Wii and the explosion of the casual gamer market are certainly good indications. This is where I can't help but think that Jenkins was onto something about gendered play spaces. Even in 2007 women spend more time online, yet still pursue computer science degrees in far less numbers. This is certainly part of the master narrative young women are given as to their roles in technology. Some of the fan communities that you and Kristina write about point towards a change in direction in that, but there's still a long way to go I think.

LS: Yes, but there are histories of women actively engaging with technologies that need to be written also... It's not just all in the future. From the evolving history of vidding to the female modding and authorship surround The Sims 1 (pre- the more accessible storytelling tools). Yes, there are changes in the works, but the same gendered discourses that may overall shape how women perceive their own relationship with technology also shape what fan histories get told, recorded, and listened to.

WRAPPING UP ON INTERFACE, PRODUCTION VALUE, PLAY, AND ENGAGEMENT

RJ: To return to your earlier comments on interface: this is one of the areas that I feel really helps to understand machinima. One thing I have not mentioned about machinima as an area of fandom is that in many cases it does not function the same way I understand other fandoms. When the guys at Roosterteeth decided to use Halo and create the Red vs. Blue, that was clearly a traditional fannish endeavor because they spent all their time previously playing the game. However, as trained filmmakers the ability to make films from games seemed to supersede their love of Halo- because they proceeded to migrate to other games like The Sims 2 and F.E.A.R. I don't want to say that they were not fans of these games, but I would say that for them and many other machinimators, the choice of game engine often depends on the power of that engine and what it can do.

LS: This notion of choosing a game engine depending on what the engine can do actually doesn't sound that different from much of fan authorship practice. Once they are already paricipants in fandom, fans often seek out texts that will give them the elements to create a fantext of the sort that gives them pleasure/matches values already circulating within the fan community. Within the larger fan communities, you can see shifts as individuals and groups realize that a certain program or film has the elements they would look for--that reflect the values and goals of their fan engagement. And so we see large growth in fandoms like Supernatural which match well with fannish focus on masculinity, seriality, and the familial. Granted I'm talking about thematic content and narrative form (not to mention aesthetic quality as fans--and especially vidders--choose programs that offer rich visuals). This type of choosing of source text may be somewhat different from a machinima author choosing a game engine based on what it can do, but I'm not sure that difference is a radical one.

RJ: The Sims 2 offers a powerful 3D engine, but manipulation of that engine is limited due to the way the interface makes it so accessible (similar to how Mac makes useful interfaces that don't really allow you to "get under the hood"). One of the residual effects of that has been the development of software tools used to work with TS2 to allow more control over design. I checked out one of the main sites for these tools and had trouble identifying many women as the creators of these tools.

There are many women participating in these sites, creating meshes and skins to customize their Sims, but the tools to do these things still seem to be something men are creating, which is part of the problem that I see with all this. Values are such an integral part of any design, and as long as men continue to design most games and most tools, they will continue to privilege those male values. I don't want to discount Sadie Plant's warning that we should not overlook that the history of technology DOES have women in key roles throughout its history; however, I would much rather see them in greater number both now and in the future. The hurdle that seems to stand tall against that, in my opinion, is the cultural discourses that engender a certain relationship to technology. For as many women how have tried creating machinima in TS2 and said "these tools are really limiting, I'm going to hack the code and create my own" I have to say they are far fewer than the many who felt the same way but did a google search to find a tool that does something similar to what they want to do.

This has nothing to do with intelligence or aptitude, but instead with power and permission. Modding breaks the rules, just as hacking. And by extension, so does machinima. Through a myriad of patriarchal structures, men/boys have been given greater liberties to play than women/girls. And since our relationship to technology has always been one of playing and tinkering, it makes sense why the power in that field would be so slanted toward males. The growing presence of women in machinima hopefully points this in the right direction, but until that presence manifests in the design side of the tools used to construct machinima there will always exist a substantive imbalance.

LS: Yes, there may be less women modding or hacking than men, and yes, this likely has to do with the gendered cultures that encourage or discourage technological expertise of different sorts. And of course it's a necessary goal to change these patterns--to see more women getting advanced degrees in technology related fields and shaping the values that then emerge.

However, we can't simply dismiss the female authorship that is occurring now because it's not modding or hacking, nor can we devalue it because it doesn't change larger official (commercial) systems. I would argue that fan investment and authorship is precisely about working within, through, and against external official structures. Media fan pleasure--at least of the female community sort --derives from an interplay with already existing realities. A fan wouldn't want to change the original source text, but rather to render it in her own image and the image of her community through other tools which may offer their on sets of restrictions to creativity. Many fans argue that this type of creativity within restriction (for example the exploration of an already existing character rather than an original character) is more challenging (and thus for the fan more pleasurable) than starting with a blank canvas. I feel like you're holding up a set of values to fannish authorship that doesn't match up neatly with the goals, values, and investments of those creative communities.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Two, Part One): Louisa Stein and Robert Jones

This discussion emerges out of a conversation about new media authorship that had begun to take place in publication and online. Robert wrote an essay on machinima (film authorship through video game engines) and Louisa wrote an essay which discussed the use of video game interfaces in media fan authorship; the two essays appeared side by side in the recent book Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Internet Age. We've both been continuing to think about these ideas; Robert has a piece on gender in machinima production which will appear in a collection on Machinma. For the sake of this discussion, an abstract of this in-progress article is available here. Louisa continued the discussion on her blog, discussing Robert's first piece and questions of gender and fan investment.

MACHINIMA VS. MEDIA FAN AUTHORSHIP

RJ: I'll be the first to admit that since "From Shooting Monsters to Shooting Movies" was the first piece I did on machinima, it definitely takes on a celebratory tone. I have since backtracked a little. In the Pink vs Blue piece I tried to tackle the gender divide head on. It's been met with mixed responses, interestingly along gender lines. So I'm very interested in your take on it as a female scholar. My intentions were to show a historical trajectory in technology and rhetoric around that technology that has culturally relegated women.

I want the piece to be a caution to the rhetoric around machinima as emancipatory when the reality is that it merely replicates the marginalization of women through technology. Feel free to let me know that I failed miserably at that.

LS: I don't think you failed miserably at all--it's an important warning, and I really like the history you trace out and the links you make. I did feel that it sidestepped some histories and contemporary examples of women engaging with technology.

I think it's important to look at not only what the interfaces offer but what people do with the interface. I hope we can explore that in this conversation.

RJ: As to your point about establishing a hierarchy in "From Shooting Monsters to Shooting Movies," I believe I do. Which in retrospect may not have been an ideal move in that context. But I was arguing that strictly from a technological standpoint and not the cultural point of view I believe you made your point about. Because to break it down to mere technology, machinima is an evolutionary step forward in the use of technology. When we talk about tool sets with fan vids (I'm assuming we're talking about the recutting of source materials and not things like Troops), we are talking about the basic tools sets of filmmaking, namely editing. Those same tool sets are part of machinima as well. So they both use that part of the production process: postproduction.

Machinima differentiates itself in its harnessing of game engines. So when we talk about the use of a source material in a fan vid (the television broadcast of a show) that is alterable only in the postproduction process. This is not the case for machinima. In fact, the control of these engines makes the transformation of the very source material possible, as we see in a derivative subculture of modding where the games become entirely new games.

This is why I adhere to the position that many video game scholars take on differentiating interactive media from more traditional media like film & TV. And I don't mean to adopt a hypodermic needle model of those media. I believe that audiences can engage them on creative and active levels. But the fundamental relationship to the medium is one of spectator-ship which in my mind is a "more" passive relationship than that of gaming. I can watch a film and stop watching the film and the film goes on with out me. It doesn't need me. When I play a game, the game only proceeds as long as I play. The moment I stop, so does the game. Therefore, I have to believe that when we talk about the active relationship between gamers and viewers they are not the same thing. And it is my conclusion that the interactive component that comprises the basis of the video game medium led to the development of machinima.

Again, I'm not saying that a fan vid has no larger impact of the source material; they certainly do. What I'm saying is that machinima is literally a transformation of the source material (not just playing with it). To do that with film or TV you'd have to be there on set, which is what makes the two so fundamentally different in my mind.

LS: I see the distinction you're getting at: transforming the actual source text for others to experience differently vs. reworking the source text in the creation of a new text. But I wonder at what level this distinction is significant in terms of how people experience/engage with media and technology. Fans making vids or even just writing fan fiction may not be able to actually change the source text (on set, as you say). But they also don't necessarily prioritize/centralize the source text above the fantext (that is, the shifting sets of texts that map out the fan understanding of the fictional universe with which they're engaging). So if fan-authorship transforms the fantext, and the fantext is the primary world-building text, then is that really different from the transformative play of machinima? It feels to me like a matter of perspective. Yes, machinima artists may alter the technology or the code, but fanfic writers alter if not the source text then the shared world of game play. Editing tools used for vids etc. are only the tools of post-production if we're centered in the official commercial production of the original text. If we're centered on the shifting production of the fantext, then the editing tools fans use are authorship tools plain and simple, and the productions alter the fantext that constitutes the creative space within which fans interpret and engage both "official" and "unofficial" texts.

For many fans, at least, their sense of the media text awaiting their participation is not that different from a videogame waiting to be played. Fans engage with the world of a media text as one would the world of a game. The comparison is easier to make with an Role Playing Game, but I think it extends to videogames as well. Media fans see that source text as elements available for their play, and as elements which set up rules to be followed or hacked or cheated or broken, depending on how they like to play. So while there may be more of a divide between gamers and an ephemeral sense of a generalized viewer, but I think that the relationship between media fans (especially those who participate within fan communities and author fan texts) and gamers is much closer.

RJ: What may be more interesting to us, per this conversation, would be the gender divide that happens. In "Pink vs. Blue" I make the case that this is an issue of accessibility. Women have historically been denied access to these more advance technologies based on cultural rhetorics that situate men as "masters" of technology while women merely use them once user friendly interfaces have been developed. That's why I cite the proliferation of The Sims machinima among women being a corollary to the development of user friendly tool sets shipped with that game, the same way Westinghouse made radio more user friendly when it needed to capture the housewives as its primary demographic. Some have read this as me saying that women are fundamentally not smart enough to utilize these technologies, which is so far from the case. The point I try to make is that the cultural rhetoric prescribed to women has created this assumption in many women's minds and thus stands as the barrier to them using them, NOT their own limitations.

LS: While I see this point and its validity, it overlooks a few things: first, the majority of women creating stories out of The Sims (either machinima or still images combined with text--the sort of narratives that circulate on Livejournal Sims storytelling communities) use the storytelling function offered by the game itself, yes, but must work around its limitations, as it is far from ideal for complex storytelling. These Sims-authors turn to additional interfaces as well for their authorship, from Photobucket to Livejournal to Premiere or Final Cut Pro. The same goes for vidding and all sorts of multimedia authorship happening in these female authorship communities. To a degree this experimentation is facilitated by the space of the community that encourages technological support. But this has been going on for decades, it's not a new development. Its history has been (as you point out) overlooked, and I fear may continue to be.

That's actually a concern I have underlying this fanboy/fan girl and videogame studies vs. fan studies gender divide that I've noticed at conferences over the years and that Kristina Busse blogged on (as did I ). Fan studies has been a place that looked at female authorship and innovation happening in female communities. Those communities used to be based on in person social networking through fan Conventions and such, yes, but they were always heavily technologically engaged, from the use of multiple VCRs to facilitate the complex process of pre-digitial vidding to the extremely belabored processes of putting out zines pre-internet, which were the lifeblood of female fan communities. Now that fandom has moved online, technological innovation and authorship within the context of female communities continues to expand, and yet its validity as a subject of study--not only cultural but also aesthetic, literary, and technological--still seems to be contested and unpopular, at least compared to the burgeoning field of videogame studies, which as you point out maps more easily onto traditionally masculine values of competition and innovation.

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be: An Interview with Comics Creator Dean Motter

Later today, I am flying to Berlin where I will be speaking at a conference on "Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence." The conference will include talks on comics creators from around the world whose work has been particularly shaped by their conception of the city. My talk will center on the concept of retrofuturism and the works of Dean Motter (Mister X, Terminal City, Electropolis).

I hope to be reporting on the conference in the blog next week but for those of you who are interested in what I mean by retrofuturism, you should check out this column I wrote for Technology Review a few years back, discussing the topic in relation to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Art Spigelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. Basically, Retrofuturism refers to a subgenre of science fiction which seeks to revisit older imaginings of the future. It is particularly fascinated with the iconography of the future city as seen, say, at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, on the cover of old science fiction and popular science magazines, in Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and so forth.

As I was getting ready to write my talk, I reached out to Dean Motter to see if he would be open to being interviewed (as part of my research and for the blog). What follows is the exchange, conducted over the past week or so, via e-mail. I have long been a fan of Motter's comics, which manage to be forward-thinking in their use of the comics medium and retro-thinking in their visual style, narrative elements, and themes. Mister X, which featured early artwork from the Hernandez Brothers and Seth, among many other collaborators, became one of the most influential American comics of the 1980s. His subsequent work has continued to explore the themes of that earlier work, pushing them in new directions, and personally, I think his exploration of what he prefers to call "antique futurism" reaches its peak in Terminal City, my favorite of the three series he has developed around this theme.

All three books, though, deal with the idea of a fallen utopia -- a great city, built with futurist intentions, which has stiffled in the face of social and cultural change, never achieving its full potential, and in fact, becoming deeply destructive to the people who live there. In this way, he is able to read the iconography of the technological utopians, which shaped early science fiction, through the lens of its critics, who have been influential in more recent work within the genre.

As I have dug more deeply into Motter's background, I quickly became interested in the fact that he was a student and intellectual ally of Marshall McLuhan, a connection which I still hope to explore more deeply when I turn my conference talk into a published essay. Motter has also worked extensively in publishing (where he helped to protect the literary legacy of some of science fiction's early masters) and in the design of record covers. In the following interview, I focus primarily on his images of the city but it also provides a good introduction to some of the central concerns in his comics career.

I was intrigued to read in the bio at the back of Terminal City that you "studied at Marshall McLuhan's Institute for Culture and Technology." Did you work directly with McLuhan or was this after his death? What drew you there to study in the first place?

I studied MEDIA under his son (and ghost-writer) Eric, while enrolled in a progressive art and media course at Fanshawe College in London. After I graduated I moved to Toronto and did continue to work with Eric, as well as his father. I was considered the resident expert on comics art the institute, consulted in a modest way on his final book The Laws of the Media, and was an invited participant in many, many seminars. McLuhan loved talking about comic art and its relation to iconics. (He loved Pogo, L'il Abner, Superman and always compared them to the Altamira Cave drawings, the stained-glass designs of St, George & the Dragon, and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks. It always made some kind of sense to those of us who listened. And still does.) He was a wonderful avuncular acquaintance and mentor of enormous influence.

What influence do you think McLuhan's ideas have had on your later work?

At his most popular, McLuhan's detractors (and they were everywhere- from faux-intellectuals like Walter Cronkite to his fellow Canuck Pierre Berton) were many and obstreperous--and all proven wrong today. They scoffed at his ideas as 'bad science-fiction.' His ideas simply could NOT be credible! (hhmph.) Imagine a world of electronic interactive media, where phones and television had merged into a seamless media, where every household had a terminal that connected them to some kind of 'world wide network.' Crackpot ideas. Could his critics have been more unimaginative? Marshall represented the worst low-brow 'Buck Rogers' stuff to the effetes who were thinking so last-century. Imagine! An electronic society where any citizen could one day broadcast their own videos to nearly anywhere in the world in some kind of crazy 'You-Tube 'venue.'. Where the printed version of the W.R. Hearst-style newspaper would shrivel into near impotence. Where the 'Global Village' (Marshall's own term!) was considered frivolous. Cronkite and Berton have been proven the gigantic ignoramae, Simply because they were supercilious stuffed -shirts. Not because they weren't informed.

I digress. I try to recast some of his notions in the vernacular of the technology- or the imagined technology of the 50s- when he first wrote The Mechanical Bride and Understanding Media. In the prescient words of Tom Wolfe back in the 70s - "What if he's Right?"

Oh, Tom....

Vintage science fiction authors and works have been a recurring theme across your work in a number of media -- going back to the comics you helped to produce for Andromeda comics, which adapted the works of Arthur C. Clarke and A.E. van Vogt. and continuing through your role as Editorial Art Director at Byron Preiss Visual Publications where you worked with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. What connections do you see between this work with classic science fiction authors and texts and the themes that emerged through Mister X, Terminal City, and Electropolis?

Working 0n Andromeda and more importantly at Byron Preiss Visual Publications with so many great authors, especially Asimov, Bradbury and Ellison gave me a deep appreciation of how well-written science fiction could be 'exploited' by the then largely adolescent-male oriented media. At Byron's I also art-directed many great artists (Wayne Barlowe, Ralph McQuarrie, Matt Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Rian Hughes, David Lloyd, the list is almost endless, and I even had the chance to work with Eisner and Kurtzman. It was akin, it its own way, to sitting at McLuhan's feet and learning from true visionaries. )

You have coined the phrase, "antique futurism" to refer to the ways you base your fictional worlds on the utopian visions of the future from the mid-twentieth century American imagination. Can you explain what you mean by this phrase and how it relates to your work?

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our society has been predicting the cultural future via the machine. Whether in gigantic architectural visions such as the World Fairs, or the near-whimsical Popular Science covers, dreams of flying cars, household robotic servants, or jet packs. These visions, while engineering achievements of varying degrees of success and accuracy, were often oblivious as to how the culture would change. McLuhan (as well as the fictions of Orwell, Huxley and H.G. Wells) considered what would happen to humanity itself, not simply the evolution or devolution of our artifacts. The same kind of mystery that the ancient Egyptians pose for us would certainly puzzle our descendants if civilization came to a sudden stop as it seems to have done for eons. So 'antique futurism' became my way of having some fun, while raising the questions.

What is it about these particular visions of the future which have so captured your imagination? What relevance do you see these visions having for our present society?

It's a kind of funhouse mirror of our persistent state of naivete when it comes to technology. Our blind faith in the idea that technology can act as a cure-all? I love how that concept is reflected the impossible Rube Goldberg contraptions and hallucinogenic reversals that have bent the standard laws of physics. Be it Gates & Jobs or Nikola Tesla.

How would you characterize the attitude your works take to those earlier visions of tomorrow -- nostalgic, ironic, campy, or some combination of all three?

Definitely the combination. Each approach has different nuances- different modes of entertainment. Some dramatically different from the others. German expressionist film, the 50's version of the 'house of tomorrow combined with a hard-boiled gumshoe pastiche-VERY different genres, but very compatible. In my mind, anyway. While exploring 'vintage sources' I have begun to think anything is game. Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre had the best take on it; in his introduction to Terminal City -- A city being imagined in the 30s, built in the 40s and stalled somewhere in the 50s. I'd add that is was forlornly recalled in the 80s ('dreamed in other men's bodies, I think he said'.)

Mister X (1984) appears at about the same time as Mirrorshades:The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) which included William Gibsons' "The Gernsback Continuium" and Rudy Rucker's "Tales of Houdini," both of which evoke themes I associate
with your comics. It is also telling that the phrase, "retro-futurism" that is often used to describe your work was coined by art critic Lloyd Dunn in 1983. Was there something in the air at the time which was leading to this reconsideration of "yesterday's tomorrows"? Is all this just a product of the anticipation that surrounded the year, 1984?

Of course, for me, there was approach of 1984, also the millennium looming on the horizon. But also it was the rise of Punk Rock and New Wave pop culture, the sudden ubiquity of synthesizers in music, 'theoretically' giving a single musician or two the power of an orchestra, the artistic mastery of technology and a non-chaotic, almost 'Aryan' control over their art (as opposed to the found art of Warhol, or action paintings of Pollock a few years earlier.) Very 'futuristic'-- combined with the Orwellian proletariat underpinnings of Punk Rock. It was an exciting time. Certainly Gibson and Rucker were operating in a milieu I was reading (Gibson's. The Differential Engine is one of my very favorite novels of all time. But J.G. Ballard, Thomas Berger and Harlan Ellison remain my literary patron saints. )

Happy (Belated) Henry Day

Yesterday (June 4) was my birthday. I'm not telling how old I am. But I figured the world would excuse me under the circumstances if a)I didn't write a lot for today's post (which was actually put together last night) and b)I was a tad self-centered. So today seems like the best time to share a few things that have come in my mail over the past week.

The first are some doctored (as in "improved") images of me that are making the rounds of the internet. Several people had called to my attention a shift from the phenomenon of LOL cat pictures to LOL theorist pictures. There's even a site where people regularly post pictures of theorists, such as Foucault, Brecht, Jung, even Dewey (of the decimal fame) with pithy comments. And to my astonishment, yours truly has become a favorite target in this new academic pass-time. My students have long considered my face an icon upon which they can test their emerging mash-up and remixing skills so I am delighted to see these practices extended into the culture at large. Anything which will further the cause of participatory culture.
So here are two examples of the theory in action.

Most of the rest of the objects of these tributes are not around to respond, let alone post them to their blog so I should say thank you on behalf of Barthes, McLuhan, and Eisenstein, who I have channeled in my lectures often enough to know would have enjoyed these tributes every bit as much as I do. Thanks to Nancy Baym and Selki for sharing these links with me.

On other fronts, I wanted to pass along a link to the podcast of the slash panel from Phoenix Rising, "Shipping the Velvet: Slash Fandom, Convergence, and Why You Should Care About Harry Potter Mpreg," which Spellcast is making available to the world. Participants in this session included Aja, Erica George, Henry Jenkins, Mathilde Madden and Catherine Tonsenberger. I will confess to being a tad intimidated about participating in the session since I had not read very much Harry Potter slash and most of my work on the genre was done more than a decade ago. But Erica and Aja organized a really fun session and I learned so much from the other participants. Don't let the title of the session throw you -- there's not that much about "Mpreg" (a genre of fan fiction depicting men getting pregnant and having babies together for those of you who are uninitiated) though I do stir up a little controversy by suggesting that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein might be considered as an early contribution to the genre. There's even less explicitly about convergence, so the title may be a tad misleading. :-) But a good time was had by all. By the way, this panel got specific, though less than fully supportive, mention in Salon's recent article about the con.

Finally, let me at last acknowledge that reader Angela Thomas wrote me a while back to say that she has given me a Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks for the recognition, Angela, and all I can say is that the end of the term left me less thoughtful than usual so it has taken me a while to get around to acknowledging the recognition here. I promise to pass along the honors to someone else soon.

So, for now, Happy (Belated) Henry Day!

Reading the UpFronts: A Conversation with Media Analysts Stacey Lynn Schulman and Alex Chisholm

Last week, I previewed a CMS course description for the fall 2007 semester, Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the fall 2007 Television Ecosystem. As a follow-up, Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman, the course instructors, started a dialog around some of the dominant issues in the television marketplace as they create the syllabus. Much of the discussion here follows upon the recent upfronts, an annual event during which each of the networks announce their plans for the coming television season. Their perspectives illustrate both the urgency of change and the breadth of historical perspective these two will bring to students at MIT this fall.

Characterizing the State of Primetime Television Performance

AC: This year's television season was, at best, lackluster. Despite some really great promise, especially with the arrival of many new and expanded extension strategies, there wasn't much to get excited about. Viewers either tuned in or didn't show up at all -- there didn't seem to be much of other networks catching the "run off" when a proven or presumed hit didn't deliver. Even juggernaut hit American Idol ended the season down in year-to-year ratings despite a strong early showing. Ratings that used to guarantee a show would be cancelled (anywhere between 4.0 and 6.0) are now regarded as highly respectable (the CW seems to be sustaining a business with shows averaging 0.5-2.0). At face value it seems that the sky is falling...

Meanwhile, with DVRs, online extensions, iTunes downloads, and advertiser-supported streaming video at network sites, we're seeing a significant shift in how people consume television content. While actual numbers aren't available because they're proprietary,
I believe that during the Tuesday and Wednesday following the broadcast of the Heroes series finale, NBC set a network record for the total number of page hits and video streams it served. Heroes was arguably the biggest new hit of the season.

SLS: The current season's performance is actually part trend, part business-as-usual. Keep in mind that new season successes are few and far between -- very few shows make it past the 4th quarter (October - December) and even fewer are picked up for the next season. Each year around this time I present the new season to advertisers and make the same point -- networks are in first place this year with ratings that would have left them in third place just a year before ... and what constitutes a "hit" is relative to the network (i.e. CW). This trend is unavoidable in a fragmented entertainment market where the average home receives 102 channels. So, these observations have been fairly standard in TV analysis over the past 15 years. In the past, the industry has blamed cable as both thief and benefactor of disenfranchised network TV viewers. What is different about this past season, as Alex correctly points out, are new challenges facing programmers in a universe of time- shifting and on-demand viewership. Nielsen reported in April that DVR penetration had reached nearly 18% of the TV population and networks began full-force efforts to provide multiple viewing windows on air (in repeats) or online (on demand) throughout the season. Subsequently, the "live" TV audience for many established hits appear to be waning - and new shows are being sampled, but in totally new ways. Unfortunately, without good cross-media metrics, we still can't tell whether the online (or alternative view) audience is the same or different from the TV audience ... and if their viewing once or multiple times. Here the question of actual audience size comes down to an old metric of reach and frequency ... how much of your audience is unique or unduplicated? And which environment is better for advertising - one in which you CAN skip the ads or one in which you CAN'T?

Look at how HBO's long-awaited final season of The Sopranos has declined every week from its premiere. The network wants to explain it away by the multiple windows they're
providing throughout the week to catch the show (on air)... but one has to wonder whether the bloom is far off the rose when there is significant audience erosion on the first original airing each week -- clearly not a water- cooler event!

Gender and Fan Studies (Round One, Part Two): Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell

Yesterday, we launched my big summer long discussion of fan culture with an exchange between Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell. Today, I bring you part two of that conversation.

5. Bridging the gender divide?

[5.1] JM: I want to raise some practical questions. What can be done? Overturning the patriarchal systems of the academy and copyright isn't going to happen anytime soon (if ever), so let's put on our Gramscian hats - what ground can be gained to lessen the gender divides within the realms of both fandom and fan studies? What micropractices might we be able to achieve in our tiny corners that could overcome some of the issues that have been raised? As faculty in a teaching-oriented college, my mind turns to pedagogy - what can I teach my students about fandom that would help make the next generation of media consumers & producers more inclusive and accepting?

[5.2] KLH: Teaching your students well is always a good thing, but in a way, this just pushes the problem onto someone else - although just leading discussion may lead to helpful debate that will show students that the field lacks consensus. Particularly since I don't teach, I'm far more likely to just do something myself. Yet my own attempt to create a publishing opportunity for aca-fans got very few submissions from men. Part of the problem is self-selection, or selection from within a gendered network.

[5.3] How desires circle! How little headway has been made in more than 15 years! Here's Donna Haraway, from her Cyborg Manifesto (1991): "We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender" (181). We are at an historical moment of upheaval where we stand united, ready to read new things in new ways, and yet given a creature as fabulous as a cyborg, we return to intractably gendered structures to organize how we do it. It's too easy to exhort everyone to cast them off. Such change is difficult, even with all the new technological tools we have at our disposal, men with joysticks at World of Warcraft and machinima, and women with keyboards at fanfic and songvids.

[5.4] Exhorting people to spread their networks wide, and doing so oneself, is perhaps one step in the right direction. So is this project - the debate in this blog. Conceiving and executing projects, like publishing opportunities, should attempt gender equity when it comes time to craft the contents and call for submissions. Further, I would ask more women to talk loudly, in unlocked forums, and both inside and outside their networks about things that concern them.

[5.5] JM: OK - since we have this open forum across gendered communities and traversing some aspects of the aca/fan divide, here's a set of questions that I grapple with: what is the relationship between the fan viewer and non-fan viewer? When we study fan practices, are we looking at people who consume differently in degree, or in kind? My own sense is that fans (of the creative/community variety) engage in a distinct kind of viewing practice, consuming for different reasons and investments than most viewers; but interestingly my students see it more as a matter of degree - even though few of them self-identify as fans in any significant ways. So what do acafans think of this central issue?

[5.6] KLH: I'm with your students: we engage for so many reasons that only degree can explain it. For things like the creation of fanfic, reasons for engagement may include the following (I'll not cite them, but all these ideas have seen print): Fanfic is written as a way to fill in the gaps of the text. Fandom and fanfic are ways to appropriate media texts and provide power to the consumers, not the producers of the media, so fanfic is written as a form of empowerment. Slash fanfic permits an equal-power relationship because the two principals are of the same sex, thus reinscribing certain gendered cultural concerns about sex and power. Fanfic is a feminine appropriation of masculine power. Fan texts are results of a consumer culture, with the passive consumer turning into an active fan, so fan writing is a way to obtain meaning and pleasure. And fan texts are part of a community-based fan engagement, where the artifact (the fanfic, the vid) may not be the point of the exercise. All of these ideas attempt to provide motivation for the creation of a fan-created artifact, and right there, we're excluding fans who don't engage in these practices but who are, by dint of practice, members of a fan community.

[5.7] JM: While I see all of these motivations as good explanations of what fanfic creators/readers do, I see most of them as atypical & exceptional practices, not extensions of mundane engagements with media. Let me go on a brief theoretical detour: even though I was intellectually forged in the fires of cultural studies, active audiences, and textual polysemy, for me one of the missteps of this facet of the field has been an almost totalizing politicization of everyday life. While we need to be aware that all cultural practices occur within systems of power relations and thus everything is potentially political, the political is not ultimately determinate of all practices - we need to consider more than just power relations to understand practices like media consumption. There is no space outside of politics, but there are many things under the umbrella of everyday life that cannot be reduced to politics - everything may be political, but politics cannot explain everything. In this way, the forces of domination & resistance have taken the structuring place of Marxist economic determinism within the analytic lens of much cultural studies.

[5.8] It seems that power relations matter a great deal within the fanfic community, for both producers & consumers, but I don't think similar forces are as central for most media consumers - most people don't watch TV to appropriate, invert, or mock power relations. So what other elements of cultural consumption might be considered beyond political struggle? I think that emotional engagement, narrative comprehension, interpersonal relationships, and cultural rituals are all key components of how we consume media, and that they are not primarily determined or motivated by politics - I'm not claiming they exist outside of power relations, but that they cannot be explained away as mere manifestations of domination or resistance. These other elements matter for fans as well as mundane viewers, but it seems that the political engagement of fans is an added variable.

[5.9] Looking at my own recent research on Lost spoiler fans (which crossed gender lines pretty evenly) - these viewers, unlike Henry's Survivor spoiler fans, are not in battle with producers or actively protesting the hegemony of television or forging communities through assembling spoiler info. They love the show and are trying to extend their experiences via paratextual consumption, not reading against the grain. Many do read spoilers to manage their own narrative experiences in differing ways than network scheduling, but I'm loathe to explain this behavior in the political terms of institutional control versus emergent resisting poachers. In fact, many suggest that spoiler consumption is something that they wish they could stop, but they lack the willpower to refrain from peeking ahead - they are disempowered by the very act of "resistant reading"!

[5.10] Back to my point - if fanfic communities are self-defined in politicized terms (although there might be a chicken-egg question here as to how much of the fandom is using the analytic terms provided by fan scholarship to justify, legitimize, & explain their own practices...), these spoiler fans seem to consume media in comparatively non-politicized ways. And I'd say for most avid consumers of media, political rationales are not centrally determinate in what they watch or how they watch it (again, I'm not suggesting that media is just escapism/entertainment/etc., but rather that politics doesn't necessarily explain why people watch what they watch). So this is why I see the practices of active fan communities as a distinctive and atypical mode of consumption, more explicitly politicized than average viewers. Politics seem to matter more for fans invested in their own practices as tied to media, rather than people whose engagement primarily starts & ends with the primary text.