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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soft Power and Shallow Consumption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 'Messiness' of Transnational Fan Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performing the National

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ownership and Desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labor and Value in Late Capitalism

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing Futures of Entertainment

Many readers attended last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, which brought together leading figures from film, television, games and virtual worlds, advertising, comics, and other media industries for an indepth discussion of some of the trends impacting our contemporary mediascape. If you missed this event,you can check out the podcasts here and read a report on it written by Jesse Walker for Reason online here. Well, we were so excited by the quality of last year's event that we decided to host a second Futures of Entertainment conference with new topics and a new cast of characters. The event is sponsored by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's some of the details:

The logics of convergence culture are quickly becoming ubiquitous within the media world. Audiences are being encouraged to participate in a wider range of sites. Transmedia principles are being adopted by content producers in a broad range of fields. 'Engagement' is being discussed as crucial to measurements of success.

Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications.

Co-hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Futures of Entertainment 2 (FoE2) takes place Friday, Nov. 16, and Saturday, Nov. 17, at the Bartos Theater, in the Wiesner Building at MIT.

This year's conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, audience measurement, cultural labor, fan relations, and mobile platform development.

The conference works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. This is not simply another industry gathering. The goal is not a

pitch or even a pre-prepaired presentation -- just serious conversations about the

future of entertainment.

Speakers featured at FoE2 include:

Mobile Media: Marc Davis, Yahoo!; Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting; Francesco Cara, Nokia

Beyond the launch of shiny new devices, the mobile market has been dominated by data services and re-formatted content. Wifi connections and the expansion of 3G phone networks enable pushing more data to wireless devices faster, yet we still seem to be waiting for the arrival of mobile's "killer app". This panel muses on the future of mobile services as devices for convergence culture. What role can mobile services play in remix culture? What makes successful mobile gaming work? What are the stumbling blocks to making the technological promise of convergence devices match the realities of the market? Is podcasting the first and last genre of content? What is the significance of geotagging and place-awareness?

Metrics and Measurement: Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group; Stacey Lynn Schulman, HI: Human Insight; and Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can "count" engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

Fan Labor: Mark Deuze, Indiana University; Catherine Tosenberger, University of

Florida; Jordan Greenhall, DivX; Elizabeth Osder, Buzznet; Raph Koster, Areae Inc.

There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web. The incentives which work to encourage participation in some spaces are alienating other groups and many are wondering what kinds of revenue sharing should or could exist when companies turn a profit based on the unpaid labor of their consumers. What do we know now about the "architecture of participation" (to borrow Kevin O'Reilly's formulation) that we didn't know a year ago? What have been the classic mistakes which Web 2.0 companies have made in their interactions with their customers? What do we gain by applying a theory of labor to think about the invisible work performed by fans and other consumers within the new media economy?

Advertising and Convergence Culture: Mike Rubenstein, The Barbarian Group; Baba Shetty, Hill/Holliday; Tina Wells, Buzz Marketing Group; Faris Yakob, Naked Communications; Bill Fox, Fidelity Investments

Migratory audiences and declining channel loyalty are seen as two key challenges convergence culture poses to the advertising industry. At the same time, campaigns that respond by capitalizing on the creativity of audiences prompt questions about the continuing role for creatives. This panel looks at the unfolding role for advertisers within convergence culture, looking at questions about the nature of agencies, transmedia planning and the increasing circulation of advertising as entertainment content. Does the agency structure need to be rethought? What are the implications of breaking down the distinction between content and advertising? What are effective ways to collaborate with creative audiences? How is convergence culture changing the value of different advertising sites?

Cult Media: Danny Bilson, transmedia creator; Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner; Jesse

Alexander, Heroes; and Gordon Tichell, Walden Media

Cult properties have become mass entertainment. Marvel's success bringing comic book characters to the big screen and the resurgence of the space opera suggest niche properties may no longer mean marginalized audience appeal. This panel explores the politics, pitfalls, and potentials of exploiting niches and mainstreaming once marginalized properties. How do you stay true to the few but build properties attractive to the many? What role do fans play in developing cult properties for success? Is it profitable to build a franchise on the intense interest of the few and rely on Long Tail economics? Are smaller audiences viable in the short term, or do we need to rethink the length of time for a reasonable return?

Opening Remarks by Henry Jenkins, MIT; Joshua Green, MIT; Jonathan Gray, Fordham

University; Lee Harrington, Miami University; and Jason Mittell, Middlebury College.

With fewer than 200 seats open for the conference, FoE2 emphasizes discussion amongst

panelists and interaction with the audience. Please note: While we were able to provide the conference free last year, there is a registration fee this year designed to help us recover our costs for the event. So please register early due to the limited seating.

Drawing a mixed academic and industry crowd, the conference boasts broad coverage of

the new media and entertainment space, and deep engagement across industry and

disciplinary boundaries.

It provides a unique opportunity to partake in a focussed discussion on the issues

affecting the contemporary media landscape.

The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) is a research consortium at MIT exploring

shifts in the media industries from an audience- centered perspective. Corporate

partners with the Consortium are Fidelity Investments, GSD&M Idea City, MTV Networks,

Turner Broadcasting, and Yahoo! Their Web site is available at http://

www.convergenceculture.org.

The Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT (CMS) is a graduate and undergraduate

interdisciplinary program centered in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social

Sciences. For more information on CMS, their Web site is available here.

The Wiesner Building is located at 20 Ames Street, Building E15, in Cambridge, Mass.

For more information on the conference, contact Sam Ford, Project Manager for the

Convergence Culture Consortium, at samford@mit.edu.

There will be a special pre-conference event on thursday Nov.15, hosted by the MIT Communications Forum. (You do not have to be registered for the conference to attend this session):

nbc's heroes: "appointment tv" to "engagement tv"?

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007

5 - 7 p.m.

Bartos Theater

Abstract

The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesmen are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamers, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this Forum, Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshow, producers from the NBC series Heroes will discuss their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audience.

I hope to see many of my regular readers in Cambridge for these exciting events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: Yadda yadda yadda high quality fan fiction --

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

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

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

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

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

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

K: How do you know? Brainwash victim.

M: ...

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

M: Look, a yak!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baseball, Doctor Who, and gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lowbrow culture

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

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

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

Fan expertise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Essex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Fourteen, Part Two): Francesca Coppa and Robert Kozinets

Techspressive Tools

Francesca Coppa: The two other gendered concerns I have are about technology and affect: technology in that it seems to me that there's a cliché of "men are techie" and women are not, but media fandom in general and vidding in particular go against that: fannish women have always been particularly drawn from the sciences, and vidding was pioneered by women who (by definition) knew how to program a VCR. So the history of vidding is important for exploding some of those stereotypes. However, these technical, filmmaking women didn't make ironic, distanced parodies; they tended to make emotionally invested music videos, and that's an affective choice with problematically gendered legal implications. Mocking male distance is explicitly protected by the Constitution, where female identification/emotional investment is not as explicitly protected, although it is certainly transformative. Even in these debates on HJ's journal, we see a kind of gentle mocking of slash, or trying to come up with "wild" examples, (say, Geoffrey Long's "a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader"); my own experience in fandom actually tells me not to prejudge such a story: the writer might have a reason for writing that. The story might be great: imagine how it might comment on gender and race.

Robert Kozinets: This idea reminds me again of recent developments in my own field, which draws a lot of inspiration from cultural theory and cultural theorists. Regarding technology, I've just completed an article on the ideologies that guide technology consumption. It's a deep tracking of the historical discourses that inform current narratives in the mass media and in consumer's own speech acts (and their practices/performances with technology). Some of the historical forms are quite familiar, such as the Technological Utopian ideology that associates technology use with progress, or the ideology that associate technology consumption with efficiency, productivity, and economic gains. But I also find a more hidden ideology, one that I think has come to the fore more recently. I call that one the "Techspressive" discourse, and it is about using technology in ways that are playful and self-expressive. Thinking back to when this ideology was really breaking into mass consciousness, in the 1990s, there were a number of female artists and authors who were pushing the boundaries of new digital technologies in very interesting ways, and others who were theorizing these developments. I'm thinking of the top of my head of Laurie Anderson, Pat Cadigan, Donna Haraway, and Kathryn Hayles, but there are many other examples. As groups that have had to function in inventive and underground ways, women have been at the forefront of appropriating new technologies and deploying them in new ways. I think that the positioning of vidding in this wider historical trend is right on target. No question about that.

Francesca Coppa: Oh, I love that word: techspressive! Yes, I think that's right; and in fact, you know, I wonder if women's tendency to adopt these technologies early is at all connected to the fact that women have always had a more mediated relationship to public space than men: we were not historically allowed to have an "authentic" or fully "expressive" relationship to public space. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that women were ignored in the first wave of subculture studies because they weren't visible on the streets the way teddy boys, mods, or rockers were; they were home in their rooms listening to Beatles records on the turntable and spinning fantasies to each other on the telephone. I wrote my first fanfiction longhand and sent it out via snail mail. Now we have irc and AIM and jabber and Skype; we have mailing lists and Livejournal; we make elaborate fannish banners and css design schemes for our webpages; we've got wikis and searchable fanfiction archives and iMeem pages for our vids. But we're not technological or anything.

The Fan Boy Reconsidered

Robert Kozinets: No, of course not. Some of my favorite women are cyborgs. I'll let you guess the details..;-). The other idea I wanted to raise has to do with maleness. My colleagues Doug Holt and Craig Thompson recently published an interesting article on the ideology of male consumption. Their findings were compelling to me. They found that contemporary American males had to negotiate between two idealized types of masculinity. The first was the solid-but-kinda-boring "breadwinner" model, the guys who is a good provider, solid friend, good husband, and so on. But in order to be attractive and interesting, men also felt a need to tack into a "rebel" model, who was a risk-taker, a hero, an achiever. Doug and Craig called the synthetic model, where men moved between both models of masculinity without ever settling too far into one, a "man-of-action hero model." Studying fan culture as I do, I'm not sure exactly where fannish expression fits into such a model. Men today work under constraints that are historically new, constraints and expectations that their dads didn't have (I certainly don't remember any pressure on my dad to moisturize and exfoliate). Being emotionally invested in texts and characters (particularly male characters) can be genuinely problematic for male fans. I've written a bit about the stigmatic side of fannish consumption before. So what have we got now? A social world where traditional maleness is somewhat stigmatized, where softy sensitive maleness is certainly stigmatized, and where fannish investments are stigmatized. What's a poor fanboy to do?

Francesca Coppa: My first thought when I noticed the rise of fanboy culture was, "oh, you guys are getting alienated from the means of production, too?"

Robert Kozinets: Oh yeah.

Francesca Coppa: When I teach mass culture, I like to use Richard Ohmann's definition, part of which of which is "produced at a distance by strangers." And while we have unparalleled closeness to TPTB, I think that at the same time, the gulf between producers and consumers has never been wider, and that there's a real underlying hostility to the idea of consumers becoming producers, and thinking like producers.

Robert Kozinets: I see that in action all the time. Despite all the talk about Web2.0, there is genuine misunderstanding, real fear, and as you say, genuine hostility to these ideas of suddenly "active" consumers.

Francesca Coppa: Because the American economy is dependent on consumption, and the mass media seems willing to actually exert force in order to get us to keep consuming at whatever rate they deem appropriate: I mean, I have twice in the last week heard the word "stealing" used to describe a failure to look at ads: once, vis a vis Tivo, and once, vis a vis "adblocker" software. And behind that word, stealing, is the criminalization of the act of keeping our minds ad-free, and behind that criminalization is force. In some economic sense, are we all feminized now?

Robert Kozinets: Bingo. Why are you peasants sleeping when you could be drinking Red Bull, watching TV, and shopping? Get to work!

Francesca Coppa: Absolutely, but to paraphrase Orwell, maybe some of us are more feminized than others. :-) But I do think we're all of us suffering from a culture that has professionalized, commercialized, and turned spectatorial all the kinds of fun we used to make for ourselves: not just storytelling (written and theatrical) and painting, but sports, singing, and even poker.

Robert Kozinets: Now you're starting to sound like a Consumer Culture Theorist. Seriously, there's a whole literature on this coming from the Frankfurt School and descending in crooked lineal lines into consumer behavior theories. My work on Burning Man and among consumer activists chronicles how people feel that their current culture isolates them and tries to render them passive. Movements like culture jamming, doofing and other post-raves, and the rise of major TAZ-like gatherings like the Burning Man project going on this week and the Rainbow Family gatherings all share in this ideological opposition to capitalist culture commercializing our stories and myths, and a sense that they need to be "brought home" again to the people.

Wikimedia and Archontic Literature

Francesca Coppa: I just finished reading your "Inno-tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia," [in the new Consumer Tribes book] and I really love it; I think this is going to be a really, really useful piece for explaining fannish issues to big media. I especially like your concept of "Wikimedia" (media content that has gone open source and begun spawning new content as a kind of ever-expanding collaborative text), which is similar to Derridean "archontic" literature (I myself use "supplement" to describe the same concept vis a vis theatre in my essay "

"Media Fanfiction as Theatrical Performance"). I think that it's important to emphasize the connection between Wikimedia and other forms of archontic culture; theatre in particular has been a useful model for me to think about what you've called brand "invigoration strategies" and what I'd call a theatrical production *g*. In fact, you nearly quote Alan Sinfield's essay on Shakespeare and cultural materialism in Cultural Politics-Queer Reading; Sinfield says that Shakespeare is relevant to precisely the degree to which he's interfered with by directors; leave Shakespeare alone and he dies, and Shakespeare is arguably the most successful brand in history.

Robert Kozinets: What a great, and classical, example. Absolutely. For me, the Bible, the Talmud, and exegesis in general have always been important working models, and the way Shakespeare's texts are sacralized in our culture is another powerful example. It seems like whenever people invest themselves in text and continue working with it, developing it, making it current and specific and situating it, then we have strong texts, meaningful texts. But somehow this never does seem to sink in at the level of the textual producer. It's funny, because it's the same in religion. Don't tamper with the text. We'll control the text. We'll control the interpretation. And then, there it is again at the level of brand management. The exact same tension. We'll control the brand meanings. Don't you tamper with them. But without the "tampering" the meaning fades out and dies. Damn those The Powers That Be (and you know who you are!)

Francesca Coppa: Vis a vis the gender argument I'm making, I would say that fandom has produced strategies that have allowed women to consume otherwise terrible (and sexist) mass media stories; we have done TPTB's work and made this stuff interesting to ourselves (to TPTB's financial advantage; I promise you, I would never have bought Stargate Atlantis action figures otherwise.) Let me give you links to two recent vids by Luminosity, one of our brightest vidding stars: one is a Supernatural vid called Women's Work (made in collaboration with Sisabet); the other is called Vogue and is a vid made about Frank Miller's 300. I don't think you'll have any trouble seeing these two vids as critiques of the source material. In the first, Luminosity reminds us that, to enjoy Supernatural (and its charismatic and sexy male leads) each week, we have to ignore the plot's dependence on suffering or murdered women; in the second, Luminosity punctures the violence of 300 by defiantly aestheticizing both the battlefield and the men on it. She conflates the battlefield and the dance floor, subjecting the men to a female and queer gaze and setting Madonna up as this world's reigning pagan goddess. Luminosity's epigraph for this gender bait and switch? "Bite me, Frank Miller." Together, you might think of these vids as: "This is how mass media looks to us without fandom" and "This is your television on fandom."

Robert Kozinets: This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing all of this, and for the conversation. As a member of multiple minorities and multiple tribes, expression and representation are all-important to me as well. They matter a lot, and I hope they matter to all thinking people.

Francesca Coppa: Thank you, Robert; like so many fannish activities, this has been both productive and a pleasure.

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

Fans and Consumerism DJ: Part of the project central to fan studies of rehabilitating the popular and academic image of fandom has often been an attempt to show how inherently different it is from those practices that comply with the economics and politics of consumer culture. To cast fans against consumer culture, we've gotten used to talking about them as producers. The texts that are often most important in fan studies are not the texts consumed by fans, but instead those produced by fans themselves and shared within their communities. Of course, these are important texts and I fully support bringing attention to them. However, it seems to me that we are often celebrating fans for being productive, rather than consumptive, and that doesn't always sit well with me--particularly in terms of gender. If consumption is gendered as feminine (though I don't think we should always make this assumption), it seems that we might be celebrating female fans for engaging with the media in more masculine ways.

Personally, I'm much more inclined to position fandom in relationship to consumption and consumer culture, not in opposition to them. Not to disparage productive fan activities--I have dealt with these too in my work--but I resist the assumption that productive activities are always "better" and preferable to consumptive ones. Sure, I'll "question consumption" as the bumper sticker asks, but as a part of that interrogation I'm not going to jump to the implied conclusion that avid consumption of the products provided by corporate culture is always bad.

So I find myself much more aligned with Sara Gwenllian-Jones, who calls for us to consider fandom not in terms of productive communities, but in terms of its relationship to consumer culture and the culture industries. The consumer practices of fandom, she writes, make it less the industry's nemesis, and more "its adoring offspring." To a latter-day Adorno, this would evidence fans as compliant dupes feeding a capitalist system. And honestly, this is an important point: I don't know that we could seriously support the claim that fandom has not been a boon to the industry. But without calling fans cultural dupes, I think that it is advantageous for us to recognize and acknowledge fan participation within the consumer culture offered by the industry, and not just as an alternative culture of its own. Regardless of their own productive activities, fans' relationship in and to the industry is one of outside consumption. Without a doubt this line between production and consumption has been blurred in many ways--and I'd totally cop to criticisms that I've once or twice artificially increased that line's resolution in my work to make the following point. Even when invited to participate in the industry's productive activities, fans remain subordinated as consumers due to their unequal economic and cultural power. So I guess I'm not saying consumption is necessarily "good" (i.e. empowering/resistant) either, only that it's an important dimension to fandom we should simultaneously explore alongside its communal and productive sides.

AK: As in my intent to define "fans" broadly, but study them narrowly, I agree that there is plenty of room within the umbrella of fan studies to look at both "productive" and "consumptive" fan practices, or "creative" and "as is" fans, as I've defined them in my own work. I place value in either sort of study; however I'd like to discuss whether one sees the fan activities themselves as valuable as a separate issue.

There's been some talk about the place of the resistance/incorporation model already in previous weeks of this debate, but I'd like to return to it for a moment. I'm interested in critiquing this sense that productive/creative/community type fan practices inherently deserve greater value because they "resist," insofar as I'd argue that "resistance" means little without specificity. However, I think that this is fundamentally a question of how academic work intersects with the political and social questions of our lives, because so long as I perceive the world as largely dominated by inequalities, I will also continue to value resistance to (or better yet, transformation of) the systems which reinforce those inequalities.

In practice, to me this entails thinking about fan fiction on several levels, each of which may align differently to different axes of power. Fan fiction resists capital at the level of production by evading professional systems of publication and retaining space for amateur, non-profit storytelling. At the level of content the picture becomes more complex, as fan fiction represents a plethora of ideological positions on any given question from gender roles, to militarism, to eugenics. However, on the whole, that very ideological incoherency also counters or resists the culture industry's ability to constrain the ideological content of modern storytelling. Depending on one's relationship to Marxism and the public sphere, these resistances could be valuable, or not. In addition to capital, I find slash valuable as a resistance to heteronormativity, which says nothing about slash's stance vis-à-vis other axes of power. Yet the mere existence of a genre or mode of writing dedicated to making visible the socially invisible (not just homosexuality, but bisexuality, transpersons, and a variety of ways to reorder the family unit and it's relationship to the state which might broadly be called queer) strikes me as a useful step in working toward social recognition of sexual variation.

I'd also like to tease consumption and consumerism apart, as a sort of side-door into the questions that you've raised here. Although they're intimately intertwined, I'd like to separate the consumption of narratives, ideas, and images from the question of spending money, because I'm concerned about a potential conflation between interest and devotion on an intellectual level and purchasing decisions. I'm not at all arguing for advertising's impotence, but I think it's imperative that we separate fans' role as consumers of narratives and as consumers of products.

I attended an unfortunate academic talk a couple years ago which purported to study the popularity of characters based upon the sales of their merchandise. While I don't deny that purchasing decisions have meaning and that it's important to study the activities of fans who primarily define their practices through consumerism, I'm disturbed by attempts to quantify love in dollars. Poor fans love things too, as do fans who prefer to avoid investing money in fan activities. Keeping in mind the significant secondary market for media products as well as the effects of sharing and copying even before the digital age, if consuming fans could be called dupes of the media industry (not that I would label them as such), they are not homogenously so in purely economic terms.

DJ: I'm not sure I see that argument as a critique of the idea of fan fiction as inherently more resistant and valuable than less "productive" practices (seems more like an endorsement), but you make a convincing argument about the value of fan/slash fiction as a practice outside of capital and heteronormativity. I'm certainly not prepared to make the same case about the kinds of fan practices in which I'm more interested: my concern for media franchising draws me to engagements that tend to be more capital-friendly--at least on the surface. The systems of narratives mixed with games, toys, and other branded products offered by the industry are a far cry from derivative but independent texts and genres produced by audiences for their own collective consumption. If I understand you correctly, it's not the consumption of the narratives offered by Smallville the television series that has value for you, it's the collective consumption of the slash fiction produced by fans in response to the series. In my work with franchise systems, however, it's much more difficult to separate the role of consumers of narrative from that of consumers of products. These franchise systems are designed by capital to transform narrative consumption into sales.

To some, this will further evidence the greater value of fan practices that entirely resist capital. But I'm not entirely convinced. Sure, action figure collectors might be complicit with capital in their amassment of the industry's products, but that capital-friendly product consumption could yet lead to your narratives of non-normativity (I can't count how many times the X-Men, Star Trek, and Star Wars toys in my office have been posed in non-heteronormative ways by my playful officemates!). You are right, of course, that certain exclusions accompany these capital-friendly and capital-necessitating practices, and in that respect I'd certainly refuse to celebrate them. But I'm interested in the fact that despite the power of capital, there are yet openings in its consumption systems for the non-normativity you seek. Not necessarily equal to or in excess of those offered by fan fic (I certainly couldn't say), but the potential nonetheless for some kind of non-normativity unexpected and unwanted by capital. Capital does, as you say, have the ability to constrain ideological content, but it doesn't have the power to fix it completely. I don't know that consumption means taking an overdetermined text "as is."

Further, I think that the question of value could be approached in a couple different ways. Is what makes a fan practice valuable from a socio-cultural standpoint the same as what makes it valuable to us as academics? You make a good point about the visibility accorded non-normative practices by the discussion of it in fan studies, but should fan studies only be concerned with studying the "good" fans? Collectors may be less valuable to a feminist set of research questions concerned with non-hetero communities, for example, but more valuable to more industrial (but perhaps equally feminist) questions about marketing and culture. Depending on our research questions, different fans might have different value to us.

But what really concerns me about the idea of either of us deciding what is valuable about fandom is our status as "acafans." Despite our de-privileged status as fans in our off hours, we simultaneously enjoy heightened privilege as academics to speak with power about what kind of culture has value. If you're writing about the kind of fan practices that you engage in, and I'm writing about the kinds of practices I know, and we're both presenting them as "valuable," I worry that what we're doing is self-aggrandizing. Should we, as scholars who are also fans, be in a position to celebrate ourselves? To look at our own cultural tastes and practices and say that they are somehow superior to those of the less enlightened? Perhaps this will sound far too traditional, but I wonder how objective we can be in measuring the value of fandom when objectivity means considering the possibility that our own practices are not really too relevant.

AK: Perhaps I wasn't clear, but my purpose was precisely to deconstruct the "resistance" monolith so that in any given case one can speak of a particular activity as resistant vis-à-vis one vector of power, but perhaps not another. Your action figure example was precisely what I had in mind as an activity which does not resist capital, but could potentially be enacted as a resistance to heteronormativity (and thus potentially resistant to the culture industry's ability to control the ideological meaning of their products). Thus, defining action figure collecting as inherently "resistant" (or not), makes little sense to me without further specifying "Resistant to what?" and "Enacted in what manner, under what circumstances?" I'm interested in transforming and multiplying the basis upon which we ask about resistance (and value), rather than abandoning those questions altogether. This is a move toward an intersectional politics, as my frustration with celebrations of a given activity's "resistance" or "complicity" results from underlying assumptions that power functions only, or most importantly, along one axis of domination.

While I allow that franchises and industry invest in multiplatforming to transform narrative devotion into sales, I'd have to say that isn't my goal as a citizen, fan, or a consumer of narratives, nor is it my primary interest as an academic. Although I find studies which examine the industry's efforts to use narrative affection to create sales vital in understanding the modern media environment, from which none of us can completely "escape" or "opt out" as it increasingly saturates everyday life, I'm much more excited by the ways that people creatively evade and challenge systems of capitalist consumerism. Thus, I place value in the studies, but from the perspective of a funky post-structuralist Marxist, not in the aspects of those activities which increase the culture industry's ability set ideological agendas, or to subordinate more cultural and social space to market imperatives. Non-profit fan activities like fan fiction and vidding certainly cannot exist in a separate realm untainted by capital, as they depend upon mass mediated source narratives. Yet, I find their insistence upon free exchange important and hopeful in an era increasingly dominated by for-profit products fulfilling desires that communal fan-produced forums used to fill.

My study of Smallville as a locus of shared counter-cultural world making focused on the commonality that viewers construct by watching the program "against the grain." Without looking at fan fiction, I analyze such activities as productive of forms of identity and community, as in the experiences of generations of gay men who began to articulate their closeted identity through superheroes' secret identities. Thus, my division between "as is" and "creative" fans had less to do with dividing those who consume narratives from those who produce fan products, and more to do with different ways of being in relationship with canon, i.e. viewing canon as mutable on the one hand and viewing it as a closed system on the other.

With regard to academics' ability to champion their own tastes, I find that I'm not concerned so long as one provides ample explanation for the origins and purpose of assigning value. My tastes, fan practices, theoretical investments, and political orientation all converge in slash, therefore I've attempted to explain to what ends (i.e. toward what desirable imagined world) I find slash useful, personally, culturally, and academically.

Fan Academics and the Future of Fan Studies

AK: Overall, our conversation seems to suggest a shared interest in constructing the boundaries of fan studies broadly, but designing and generalizing individual studies narrowly. I'd suggest that imagining the future of fan studies as a collaborative effort between scholars of many subjects potentially offsets some concerns around the possibility of an emerging gender divide in the field, whereby only one type of fan practice could become symbolically central over time, ghettoizing the study of other sub-communities. I think progress on this level will require us to be very deliberate about building a fan studies canon through broad citation. This series of conversations offers visibility to a number of different approaches, and suggests an imperative to contextualize "our fans" within a wide conglomeration of disparate fan practices, none of which deserves reification as uniquely paradigmatic.

As fan studies progresses, I'd also like to see fan academics (and academic fans) push the complexity of the acafan construct. Partly, I'd be interested to see a more thorough engagement with the anthropological literature on native ethnography and identity, as many fan studies scholars come to anthropology as a second, third, or fourth discipline and afford it relatively little prominence in their work.

In addition, while interesting work has been done by examining academic and fan identity as the confluence or opposition of reason and emotion, there remains quite a bit of work to be done in unpacking both terms. Defining and understanding our own fan investments mirror the very work of the field, but I'd also be interested in seeing our academic identities treated with greater transparency. What are our theoretical and disciplinary investments? As mentioned by previous discussants, academic and fan investments develop through a similarly hybrid process of intellectual and emotional affinity, so in some ways analysis of disciplinary and theoretical affiliation finds a natural home in fan studies.

However, as we come to understand how our tastes in fan objects shape our studies of fans, a parallel process of understanding how disciplinary and theoretical beliefs shape our ability to think about fans also suggests itself. Particularly arguments about "resistance" and "value" in fandom elucidate a pattern whereby theorists invest fan studies with their individual arguments about the world. I'm not proposing that such a process is in any way avoidable or even undesirable, merely that acknowledging this process could allow us to begin unbundling the object of our disagreements when we disagree about fans; have we really come into conflict about the sociological or cultural reality of fan activities, or should we understand fan activities as merely one battle ground upon which we restage arguments about capital, gender, sexuality, pedagogy, identity, and citizenship, among other key debates?

DJ: I couldn't agree more with your overall conclusion. In some respects, I think that the controversy that inspired our ongoing discussion this summer has been in part trepidation about the prospect of the more multivalent fan studies we're proposing: a concern that amid new approaches to thinking about fandom, existing concerns and political coalitions--especially as they pertain to gender--will be lost, eclipsed by a new, masculinist dominant paradigm. But I don't know that there has to be any dominant paradigm, and I think that this conversation has intervened in that disagreeable possibility by establishing a greater network of communication between a number of scholarly voices all interested in fans for different political, cultural, and economic reasons. If anything, the range of opinions shared in this conversation evidences to me the difficulty with which any one approach to thinking about fans could now truly monopolize the field.

Moving forward, the challenge facing the kind of fan studies we're advocating seems to be maintaining broad citation as the field expands. If we push for specificity in dealing with all these different types of fans and fan practices, how do we simultaneously maintain a general connection to one another? If we're interested in entirely different models of fandom, what is the shared interest and point of commonality upon which we can build scholarly dialogues with one another? For example, I'll admit that I'm guilty as charged (early on in these debates) of infrequently attending conference panels where fans are examined from more productive, communal, celebratory, and/or extra-industrial paradigms. While I recognize the concern that these panels, particularly when comprised of female researchers, have been systematically marginalized (especially when scheduled against better attended "male" fan panels), the issue of my infrequent attendance has generally been one of perceived relevance. Given the differences in how we approach fans, I've often elected to instead attend panels that don't relate to fans per se, but speak to the formal, industrial, or historical contexts in which I'm trying to place "my fans."

Having more consciously interrogated this choice through our discussion, I'm now less likely to repeat it. So the challenge that I see is not to engage in the naive project of pursuing a unified theory of fandom, but to invest in the construction of a shared intellectual framework where the relevance between such disparate perspectives as ours can be made much more evident. It hasn't always been clear to me why I should engage in conversations with scholars who study entirely different kinds of fans for entirely different reasons (besides the utility of comparison), and if studies of your fans and of my fans are to cohere as something called "fan studies," it's that why we really have to articulate.

I think that you offer a very promising beginning to this question in asking "why/how do we as humans love things" as a central question throughout different kinds of fandom, but one additional thing I'd like to see us do in continuing to explore acafan identity is to try to specifically interrogate our own love as scholars in the process. At times I feel that fan scholars and scholar fans, while not always celebratory of fan cultures, are loathe to engage with the less savory elements of it. We love things as acafans--be they the media texts that our fandom leads us to study, or the fans themselves that we examine--but we need to make sure those amorous feelings can manifest as "tough love" when appropriate. We need to be tough--critical--not just of the fans and texts we study, but of ourselves, because as acafans, it is often our own tastes and practices that we are examining.

Lightning Round!

But enough longwinded theorizing! As a bonus, we've each exchanged two topics or questions of a more fannish nature and limited our responses to one sentence (creative punctuation allowed).

What has been your most formative fan experience?

DJ: I think that would be not a single event, but the realization later on as an adult that I was always involved in some fan "phase" even as I grew up: my early He-Man phase gave way to a Garfield phase in fourth grade, which gave way to a Darkwing Duck phase in middle school, which gave way to the still-not-over Star Trek phase in eighth grade.

AK: While I experienced a powerful sense of recognition and potential upon finding fan fiction, participating in on-line fannish spaces while living abroad provided my most intense awareness of emotional commitment in being a fan and of the radical promise of global cybercommunity.

Describe one fannish and one academic "character" about whom you're currently excited.

DJ: I'd say I'm currently most excited about Colonel Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica not just because I'm anxious to explore the implications of him being revealed a Cylon, but also because I know that regardless he'll still be a one-eyed bad ass; academically, I'd say Edward Castronova, who manages to talk about the formal aspects of designed video game spaces while simultaneously discussing their functions in politics, economics, and governance.

AK: I derive incredible energy from what one reviewer called Lauren Berlant's "superheroic" ability to swoop across intersectional categories of analysis with ease, while I'm currently fannishly involved in a project to rethink the role of characters of color in fan fiction by re-presenting Mani of Brotherhood of the Wolf.

What are you favorite and least favorite representations of fandom in the media?

AK: This is complex (ack, only one sentence!) because audience has an enormous effect, as when I watched Trekkies 2 at a con and felt such a surge of fannish affection but playing it for my class of freshmen bombed, but I'll say that I'm annoyed with programs which use villains to portray "bad fan" stereotypes, while I enjoy seeing little signs of fanishness pop up in unexpected places, against type, in the lives of complex characters.

DJ: Speaking of villains: my favorite would be the Evil Trio from Buffy (despite vilifying fans, they always made me laugh) and my least favorite would be the dorm R.A. Moe from Veronica Mars (did the Galactica fan who taught Veronica to say "frak" so adorably have to be a rapist-conspirator?).

What would you do if you weren't an "acafan"?

AK: I completed a B.A. in psychology (joint with cultural studies) which was supposed to lead to a career in clinical or criminal psychology, but at this point after completing a Ph.D. in American Culture with an emphasis in cultural anthropology I would probably end up doing American ethnography with activists, people on probation, migrant workers, or other border-crossers/border-dwellers - and then there's always the prospect of the Great American Novel kicking around somewhere inside all of us.

DJ: I'd be a script doctor: I'm not as good at coming up with my own stories as coming up with ideas for how to fix other people's stories.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part Two): Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills

And Matt's Half-dozen Questions: 1. To what extent are other cultural differences as significant as gender when thinking about the forces that act on fandom and fan studies? Should we be debating class identities and fandom here, for example?

CD: It seems clear to me that the significance of gender as a factor in fan experiences, fan identities, fan practices and fan communities depends a great deal on what we're discussing. For example, gender is crucial to a HPslash fan's experiences, identities, practices and communities in a way that's not necessarily true for a YouTube/MySpace-member who's a fan of The Decemberists. I'm not saying gender is ever irrelevant or even unimportant, but there are clearly degrees of importance. Or intensities, if you like. I think when we talk about "fandom" without acknowledging those differences we do it a disservice. Moreover, identity categories are far from the only factors that affect fandom. Taste, education and various types of literacy, for example, might be more important terms for thinking about what intensities matter to being part of some fandoms or fan communities than gender or class (and no I don't think taste, education and literacy can be reduced to class any more than to gender).

So I'm for being careful about what sort of fan practice we're talking about before we set up gender as the/a prime structuring principle. But even when gender is obviously crucial I still worry about being too structuralist about it. Let's say I belong to a particular HPslash-centric fan subcommunity - what and how gender matters to me, to what I produce, to that subcommunity, to its place in that fandom and relation to other fandoms is still a slippery and changeable thing. Gender will always be important, but not always in the same way, even just for me. Moreover, gender won't be important as something produced in "the world" and then responded to by me, my subcommunity, my fandom, but will be something we are helping to produce in not at all homogenous ways. If someone called me to account for exactly why I think gender is such an interesting way to approach fan communities it would be for the shifting slippery ways gender is produced by fan communities - sometimes as the grounds for their existence in the first place but in many other ways too. I could use the word dialectic here, as long as I get to mess with what it means.

When it comes to "fan studies" I think the question of how gender matters is very different and I think it's a serious mistake to confuse the two. Of course gender is a factor in all academic hierarchies, but I don't think the gendering of the academic hierarchy within fan studies is noticeably different than in most other areas of cultural/media studies. There are areas of "fan studies" where being a woman or being invested in gender as a conceptual tool are an advantage, and areas where they are not. I'm inclined to think it matters most as a methodological issue. Just trying to imagine how different my experience would be as a researcher if I presented myself as a man in any fandom I've studied is a little mind-boggling, not because of any enormous difference in how my work would be received - though I don't doubt there would be some difference, most of which would also come down to questions of method - but because of how I would be interacting with those fans. The fandoms I've studied have been dominated by women and intensely aware of and reflective on that dominance, so my being and presenting myself as a woman is a crucial element of how my research proceeds.

I think certain tendencies for women studying fan cultures may be becoming entrenched as primarily of interest to women and primarily about women, but I don't actually think those were shaped by the state of academic life per se but by the way the existing scholarship on fandoms/fans has been circulated. It seems almost a default now that working with fanfiction is to work in a particular type of "women's studies" that has always been perceived as academic work primarily done by women, and always positioned as slightly marginal because overly invested in its own identity politics. It's interesting to see the old debates about "women's studies" being played out in fan studies along lines that aren't all that radically different to how they used to be played out in "literary studies". I think that debate can still be interesting, but if we let the line between that discussion and the one about how gender matters to fans become too blurred then I think we lose the value of both.

MH: I agree that it remains important to think carefully and to an extent separately about the gendering in/of specific fandoms and the gendering in/of 'fan studies', insofar as this exists (since, as you point out, some of the work being done about fandom may often occur within or in relation to different academic subcommunities). And I feel that it would be (is?) a very real problem if certain types of work are becoming identified as primarily about, or primarily of interest to, women. Fanfic, whether it is slash or not, is something that has historically been of interest to those studying types of media fandom. My sense from lecturing and teaching on the subject is that actually, despite some mainstreaming of fan practices, the activity of creating fanfic - and most especially slash - is still viewed as somehow 'odd' or disreputable by both right-leaning and left-leaning students. It remains, in cultural common-sense or the cultural imaginary, something that students typically view with disdain, even those who are active fans in a variety of other ways. And this devaluing of fanfic is partly linked to gender lines - to the disparaging of feminised cultural sites and spaces - but it is also linked to what might be termed reactionary views on intellectual property, and to possibly even more ingrained concepts of 'originality' and 'authenticity' (as well as reactionary views of sexuality in some instances). To assume that any and all of these issues are primarily of interest only to women seems peculiar in the extreme. These are surely feminist-inflected (though not only that) concerns for any version of cultural studies and theory that remains interested in issues of cultural power - and for me, even if this is a 'game of greys' - I really liked your phrase to encapsulate that - then it's still a serious game, and it's still important to try to ascertain the different shades of grey involved.

I also agree that the importance of gender can't just be taken for granted, or assumed in advance, and hence that this remains an empirical question for fandoms and practitioners of fan studies. I guess my question was really trying to put a whole set of other cultural differences on the agenda, because one of my feelings about this debate has been, and still is, that where academic communities are potentially divided by a form of cultural difference (i.e. gender) then that difference can tend to become highly visible. Hence this whole 'boy'/'girl' thing. But at the same time, where other cultural differences may not be as prevalent as lines of division or tension within academia (I'd hazard the guess - and this is purely speculation - that the vast majority of those writing 'fan studies' are broadly "middle-class") then this academic sameness produces analytical silence. Why aren't we all up in arms about issues linked to class? That's really my question. Is it because we live in classless societies? Is it hell. And I'm still reading texts on fandom which mutter about a lack of work on ethnicity and fandom too - why? Relative cultural sameness in the academy producing yet more silence? Probably. Getting worked up about one specific axis of cultural difference - and I am absolutely not denying the importance of thinking about gendered differences - may nevertheless be an indirect and unintended outcome of the cultural identities at stake for those taking part in the debate. May be Henry and others will organise blog debates on 'fandom and class' or 'fandom and ethnicity' next time out, who knows. My sense is that along with the variant intensities (nice word!) of gender, we still need to dwell with equal time, energy, and intellect on other axes of difference and cultural identity.

2. Is the term 'fan' now more or less useful than it once was? Should we be studying specific types of self-identified 'fan communities', or groups of dedicated, passionate media users and consumers who may not even deploy the term 'fan' within their self understandings?

CD: Well I think "fan" still does mean, or at least it should still mean, "groups of dedicated, passionate media users and consumers". I don't know why the internal deployment of the label "fan" needs to be a criteria for understanding someone or some group or some site as "fans" in scholarly terms. If I try to think of reasons for jettisoning it I only come up with ones that reinforce some hierarchy of cultural activities whereby fan is popularly understood as undiscriminating and uninteresting.

There certainly are important distinctions to be made between fans who assemble in only loosely organised ways - occasionally exchanging value judgements over the latest bootlegged The Decemberists audiofile in the background of P2P sharing, for example - and those that participate in much more structured forms of assembly and identify themselves as forming a community. But I see no reason why the term fan isn't useful for the former: why it isn't still a term which identifies a history of relevant scholarship; why it doesn't work analytically to emphasise the significant difference of media use/consumption that is dedicated and passionate.

Clearly at least one of my questions is also trying to get to this issue. I think it does matter when people want to avoid calling such passionate and dedicated users/consumers/communities "fans". I want to know what's at stake in that disavowal for them.

MH: With this question, I was trying to get at the extent to which the cultural life and career of the term 'fan' may be ever more fragmentary at present. And it certainly appears to be a discourse which is structurally absent in some cultural arenas, and used with great variance across others. Plus numbers of scholars seem to have concluded that the term is highly problematic and thus requires careful contextualisation as a 'shifter' or a performative. It does also worry me that the term may be used to reinforce, within analysis, pro-fan cultural hierarchies - i.e. some types of dedicated and socially-organised communities are somehow more 'deserving' of the label "fan", whereas other, more loosely-organised 'consumers' may not be 'proper' fans, or may not be analysed as such. So with that in mind, I agree with you that the term may be useful across many different types of fan experience - and would add that, for me, not all of them would necessarily be communal or even group-oriented.

I also wonder if there is a industry question lurking here as well, given the sense that 'fans' - and not just fan communities - have increasingly become a target market for, say, TV producers, who have been carefully checking the buzz surrounding shows even before their launch, as well as monitoring the interpretations and responses of specific fan groups. 'Fandom' has become a cultural identity that is now self-reflexively engaged with by producers just as much as scholars. And this engagement (I'm tempted to say 'co-option') has also, I think, contributed to specific images and representations of fandom, whether it has been within the Star Trek franchise, or Buffy, or Doctor Who. Types of fandom remain 'good' and 'bad' objects for producers, meaning that specific forms of informational economy (and info-war) are being generated in the spaces between producers - duty-bound to protect the commercial value of 'their' product - and fans who frequently want 'spoilers' and behind-the-scenes information which could actually reduce or threaten (in the short-term) the commercial value of a programme 'brand'.

Fans may be specifically targeted, but they are also at one and the same time conceptualised by some producers as a specific type of threat to wider-scale commercial viability. These power struggles aren't so much about poaching (how the finished article of the show is 'read'), as about the temporality of information flows (who knows what and when about forthcoming series or episodes). So to the degree that media fandom has become something intently monitored by specific producers, it has also, in turn, become increasingly about the intense and almost real-time monitoring of production processes - the uncovering of information, the use of Agents' websites to uncover casting news, or writers' blogs to glean clues, or more generalised rumour-mongering. All of this can be the activity of a type of communal fandom, but it can also be fandom which focuses on sometimes-oppositional textual agency rather than textual poaching: on doing things with 'the text' (finding out about it in advance/speculating/learning minuscule details about its production), rather than reading it oppositionally. In fact, the final text may even be relatively and counter-intuitively unimportant: I've encountered Doctor Who fans who were greatly enthused by watching filming on the streets of Cardiff, and gleaning information about forthcoming episodes, but who then were far less interested in and about 'the text' by the time of its transmission. The fan 'excitement' or engagement surrounded the production process, and a sense of getting unusual access to the 'media world' (c.f. Nick Couldry's work in this area). So these might be other ways in which fandom is fragmenting and conceptually multiplying or moving in interesting directions which we can't always anticipate merely by thinking about community per se or somehow less-dedicated consumers.

Perhaps the crucial thing emerging here, for me, is that if the term 'fan' is still useful, it is now often useful in relation to a wider or longer-scale temporality of media production than previously. 'Fans' don't just arrive after a text/product is commercially 'out there'; they can pre-date, in a variety of complex ways, the official 'existence' of a text, and can inhabit a range of critical-oppositional and anticipatory-unfolding temporalities of 'fandom', even to the extent of not seeming to behave "like a fan" upon actual or eventual broadcast. Tulloch and Alvarado wrote about one of my beloved programmes as an "unfolding text" back in 1983 - "unfolding fandoms", with different hermeneutic and temporal horizons, now seem to have caught up with those sorts of production processes.

3. Why am I currently writing about Russell T Davies in a book about Doctor Who? Should I not be exploring a wider range of fandoms rather than writing as a scholar-fan who combines these hybrid identities, but only in line with specific taste cultures and gendered fan histories?

CD: As a general rule people don't ask specialists in other fields to shake off their taste cultures and gendered histories and field-specific knowledge and move on to, say, the Marquis de Sade rather than Jane Austen or the life cycle of fairy penguins rather than that of emperor penguins.

As long as your work is aware of that cultural and historical placement - and as long as you're not endlessly saying the same thing - then I don't see why changing to other objects where you will necessarily have less knowledge of the field is automatically a good thing. I think feeling compelled to move on to other examples is of a piece with other forms of accepting that fan studies are not valuable precisely because they give too much attention to things that lack some perceived innate value.

In fan studies, on the side of the supposed object and on the side of the tools and interlocutors we choose, we're just as subject to fashion as every other scholarly area of inquiry. It's fair to say that media and cultural studies--especially when it deals with popular culture--is perhaps more subject to fashion than other fields because fashion is part of its field. So there's also a certain need, I think, for there to be people in fan studies willing to take on longer projects, slower projects, and recurring projects.

MH: Yes, here lies the problem and the possibility of fashion-led scholarship. Just as temporalities of fandom may have shifted partly as a result of new media developments, so too have the temporalities of academia, certainly in my 'home' territory of the UK, shifted in response to practices of governmentality. Above all, the Research Assessment Exercise has led to a requirement to publish in a timely manner, but I'd say that academic publishers are also much more market-savvy than previously, and are happier to publish on 'hit' shows and 'buzzy' texts of the moments when they can see a fashion-led market, and a quick publishing hit which may not then be sustained. What is the life cycle of the typical academic book now, for example?

So the benefits of 'slow academia', like 'slow food', may need extolling. The US system seems to allow for this once tenure has been achieved, though the cost and pressure for younger scholars seems to almost entirely offset the gains that can be made once tenure has been acquired. And along with 'slow' academia would come, of course, not just "recurring" projects but more longitudinal projects on media fandom/communities/texts and so on.

My own current work on Doctor Who is partly a product of all these sorts of institutional and publishing forces and contexts. I may have lived all my life as a fan of the series, but I'm still required to actually, physically write the book in a space of eighteen months or so, so it can't really be 'slow academia'. And I've read of Russell T. Davies being described as the new 'poster-boy' for fan studies, so I'm certainly writing in a 'fashionable' area - a slightly strange experience for a Doctor Who scholar-fan, it has to be said! All of these things do bother me. Not that I lie awake at night often, but I do ponder (with a disorienting element of distaste stemming from my cult fan habitus, I suspect) the strangeness of being/becoming part of a TV SF academic 'bandwagon to the stars'.

And I do feel that by being part of this 'fashion' I may be contributing to the canonisation of some texts and some producers over others, hence failing to be more adequately inclusive. It's not the case that I therefore won't write about my own fan objects at all, but instead, I would very much argue for the value of moving on to other objects as well where I would have less investment. I don't see this as being an acceptance "that fan studies are not valuable" per se - merely that my studying one object over and above others, because it happens to be fashionable and to fit with my white-middle-class-Southern-England cultural identity, may be part of a problem. Or that this may be limited and limiting for fan studies, at the very least, if such work participates in a wider pattern of canon-formation. So I think we're probably in disagreement on the specifics of this, but hopefully you can see from this answer (and from my earlier answers to your questions) what I'm getting at here.

4. Do I actually think of myself as a 'fanboy'? If not, is my lack of attention to my gender part of a problem in fandom and/or fan studies?

CD: I'm not a fangirl. Calling myself a "fangirl" isn't just paying attention to gender it's a certain quite specific identity claim. It means different things in different contexts but in the areas of fan studies where I work to call yourself a fangirl is to identify a particular fan identity linked to quite particular practices. I don't do enough of the fangirl things in any fan community to lay claim to the term. So, not thinking of yourself as a fanboy is not the same as not paying attention to gender. In fact, calling people who work in fan studies fanboys/girls strikes me as insensitively claiming a kind of subcultural credibility that's not in the term and should have been long left behind by the scholarly practices of fan studies.

However, let's say you don't pay attention to the way gender impacts on your status as a fan. Well, while gender isn't the only thing to talk about in relation to fans and fandoms etc I would think that never thinking about it would be a shortcoming, simply because you will never have paid attention to one of the key elements of one's cultural life that might impact on the kinds of practices, identities etc you choose, prefer or do not specialise in. So I think in every cultural studies project one has to raise the question of how and where and in what ways gender matters - it's just that the answer to that does not always bring gender to the foreground of any project.

As I understand it, part of the inspiration for this series was the opinion of some women scholars in fan studies that the "does gender matter" question was not being asked carefully enough by the most visible figures in the field of fan studies and, in general, by many men working in the area of fan studies. I'm prepared to offer a qualified maybe on that, but that doesn't mean that I think it would be productive to incorporate a "gender" subheading in every project or publication.

MH: I agree that any such mechanistic approach would hardly be helpful. By asking this question, I was trying to suggest that gender, as it is experienced and discursively re-circulated, can be a fairly fluid and complex matter. So even if I do not claim the identity of a 'fanboy' (which in any case feels as if it is slightly more a part of US-centric media fandom discourses than my experiences of UK fandom, but don't hold me to that!) my fan practices may still be highly gendered in certain ways, as well as being articulated with my sexuality and so on. Not thinking of myself as a 'fanboy' may be less a dematerialisation of gender, and more a way of engaging with specific discourses of gender. As a geeky male scholar who has more than his share of obsessive tendencies (they're vocational, honest), I can hardly claim to adequately align myself with hegemonic masculinity. But at the same time, I do feel at some distance from the discourses of the 'fanboy'; this is a partial resistance to what has historically been a relatively feminised stereotype of non-hegemonic masculinity. Between the non-existent stereotype and the unattainable hegemony lies all that shiftiness of a problematic engagement with ideologically-loaded gender identities. And even while I am intellectually aware of the issues surrounding hegemonic masculinity, there's still a fraction of me that wishes I could attain its impossibilities. But then perhaps that's the most perniciously hegemonic part of gendered identities: that they always seem to be about aspiration, and about striving to be something unhelpfully other.

Not identifying as gendered in particular ways is a way of doing gender. But surely it is not necessarily a 'reactionary' way, though it may be. Or, again, it may be part of a 'game of greys' of the kind that I characteristically seem to want to see everywhere. So I'd be in favour of more self-reflexive analysis of gender in fan studies which is also counterfactual analysis, i.e. that we should seek to ponder the ways in which we don't 'do' gender, and the ways in which we perhaps seek to disavow certain gender identities in relation to our fandoms and our scholarly selves, in order to better illuminate gendered practices. For instance, it seems striking to me that there is a marked cultural identity for the 'fanboy' - i.e. there is something transgressive or at least culturally visible about this as a mode of not-quite-hegemonic but perhaps recuperative 'knowing' masculinity - yet there is not quite a comparable 'scholarboy'. Given that historically and culturally images of 'the academic' have been gendered as masculine, why are there not discourses of scholarboys and scholargirls as there are fanboys and fangirls? Because gender has been interrogated more routinely or successfully within fandom than within academia? Or because 'fanboy' and 'fangirl' are infantilising discourses linked to popular culture, and academia's gendered terms are far less boyish and girlish?

Above all, would I be a 'scholarboy' if such a cultural category existed? Or would I be a 'fanman' instead of a 'fanboy'? Language can very quickly be made counterfactually and neologistically strange, of course, but in these strangenesses I think we can see our own cultural 'reality' for the specific construction that it is.

5. What's the most exciting work I've read recently in 'fan studies', and why?

CD: Actually the best piece of fan studies I've read lately was a meta post by LJ user "executrix". Of course, like all such posts what was great about it was not her post in itself but her post plus the communal conversation it spawned. However, as I'm sure you mean scholarly publishing, I'm far less clear about that. I tend to approach scholarly publishing in fan studies alert to things I don't agree with as much as things I do, so I can't think of the last time since NASA/Trek I put down a piece of fan studies and thought, "Wow, that was exciting". That isn't because Penley's stuff is just better than everyone else but because it was the first piece of "fan studies" I ever read.

Now, when I'm excited about fan studies in that scholarly sense it's usually because I read something not fan studies and come away thinking about its usefulness for fan studies - one from last year would be Chris Hilliard's book To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. I left that book thinking that democracy, literacy and community bound together made a fascinating framework for thinking about some of the historical specificity of fandom as a big concept covering a whole lot fields.

I could talk about what I think is still most influential in fan studies, and for good reason, but in the spirit of "recently" I'll try something else. I can see by your replies to my questions that you're very keen on Alan McKee's piece in NYU's Fandom volume from this year, so let me respond by choosing the piece that I found most interesting in that text and I hope that will do as an answer to this question. I was really interested in Derek Johnson's piece on "Fan-tagonism" because it was a step away from the continuing emphasis on consensus in fan studies of fan communities/spaces. While it's still framing fans in terms of producer-consumer relationships I was convinced that that frame was necessary to do the work it was doing and I appreciated careful attention both to a particular fandom with a particular history that's internally crucial. The fandoms I've worked in are defined by spaces for assembly, by webs of voices and interest, and by internal discourses on the fandom or fan community itself as much as on the canon of the source text. Entering Buffy fandom means entering the history of Buffy fans, which is no more consensual or utopic than any other.

MH: I love your answer, because it brings home to me very precisely and very acutely that I did mean scholarly publishing. I'm aware of meta - somebody once forwarded me a meta discussion of Fan Cultures, which was far more insightfully engaged with it as a text than some published academic work I've read. There did seem to be some anti-academic sentiments expressed too, mind you - along the lines of "why do academics use twenty words when they could use two" - which didn't entirely fill me with unalloyed hope and joy, but such is life.

I also have a PhD student at the moment who's very interested in writing about meta, so no doubt I shall learn more about it through that creative process. But despite having read some very good challenges to the academic/non-academic division from a range of writers, I must confess that I tend to read and cite published academia rather than meta. Nor am I part of any self-consciously meta fan group, though I do participate in some fan communities that discuss academic work, and concepts of fandom, without this being dubbed meta.

I'd actually like to read more meta stuff, but I honestly don't feel as if I have the time. I hardly have enough time to read the academic work that I'd like to, along with the sorts of novels that I'm appreciating these days (I've got the new William Gibson, Spook Country, awaiting my attention, and I'm reading David Peace's stunning noirish crime fiction too at the moment, which puts me faintly in mind of the famous BBC TV serial Our Friends in the North, only with even more police corruption, and additional bleakness).

As for my own answer to my own question (rather than an apology for the question's assumptions) - I wanted to get at the emotions and the passions that run through our scholarship in fan studies as much as through our fandoms. Hence my hope that work in the field may be quite literally "exciting" for both of us. I shall certainly take a look at the Hilliard text you mention, and I agree that sometimes an occasional 'eureka' moment can be had while reading outside fan studies and hence finding something that can shed new light on a specific object of study.

I've read some very energising things 'in' fan studies recently such as book proposals for textbooks explicitly on 'fan studies' and manuscripts dealing with TV, new media and participatory audiences (both by female scholars) - so I have a sense of things in the pipeline from other writers that I'm looking out for (anticipatory academia?). And in terms of published material, I asked Derek Johnson to contribute to an issue of New Review of Film and TV Studies I was co-guest-editing with Glen Creeber, and I was very impressed with what he came up with - a really careful, critical reading of the newfound proximity between producers and fans, and how fandom is still very much disciplined and managed by producers in particular ways. That kind of work is important, I'd say, as it doesn't lose sight of the dimensions of cultural power operating on fandom that were absolutely there and theorised in the work of John Fiske and then in Henry's Textual Poachers. Obviously, there's also Liesbet Van Zoonen's work that I've referred to in answer to one of your questions, and the collection that Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson edited, which I liked a lot because there's a sense in which it is both about media fandom 'now' (i.e. my undergrad and postgrad students can quite closely relate to it), but yet also covers the history and development of media fandom in a way that surprisingly hadn't really been analysed as directly before. And, yes, I always find myself appreciating the work of the likes of Alan McKee and Will Brooker (Will's been doing great work putting what I termed 'cult geography' a while ago properly on the map of fan studies, and Alan's stuff is pretty much always inspiring to me). Also having recently read Fandom, I found Henry's Afterword to be the most provocative of contributions, as it just makes me want to say "yes, but what about the dimensions of cultural power shaping those particular discourses, and non-discourses, of fandom?" Henry's work has a lengthy history of provoking me - the best work of all isn't that about which you can immediately say 'that's right, I agree' or 'that's just plain wrong', but is instead that which stays with you for a long time as you struggle to articulate why it feels incomplete, or why it rubs you up the wrong way, or how and why it's messed up your own favoured theories, or how it's said something you wanted to say but hadn't managed to before. So, in the end, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I tend to appreciate scholarship in fan studies that genuinely provokes me. Abercrombie and Longhurst's Audiences had that effect on me when I first read it, too.

On the whole, collections like Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Fandom (2007) surely indicate a very healthy state of affairs for 'fan studies'. And whether or not I get to be involved in it, I'm looking forward to someone publishing the first book explicitly and specifically on 'Anti-fandom' after Jon Gray's great work in that area.

6. What, for me, is the most exciting thing I've become a 'fan' of recently, and why?

CD: I was stuck on a plane recently with a selection of movies that I'd either seen and not loved or couldn't stand more than fifteen minutes of and I watched an episode of the most recent Doctor Who series. And I really enjoyed it. It echoed with several elements of the Doctor Who series I watched as a child in really interesting ways and I could predict so many ways in which fans must be responding to the new series and see so many interesting questions to ask about it, and about fans of it, in relation to previous series. I can imagine watching the whole series, and I can imagine going back to watch the series (plural) in order, because the history of that seems kind of fascinating.

None of that makes me a fan of it though. Usually, to become a fan of something I have to stumble over it and kind of fall in love. That's true for popular culture, for more generally valued cultural forms, and for intellectual/scholarly work. I think my latest fan crush was probably The Colbert Report, and I'd count that because I've repeatedly tried to convince other people to give it a try. That apostolic mode is definitely one thing that signals being a fan for me. But then I can think of any amount of academic texts or writers that I'm more apostolic about than Stephen Colbert. I can't think of the last time I taught a course which didn't have its getting people past the superficial image of Foucault and seeing why it's really great moment. Also, sometimes my fandom is not at all apostolic - we definitely do different sorts of things with different types of fandom. I'm also an immense fan of The Decemberists right now, but it's all about the music and me - I don't think I've ever tried to convince anyone else to listen but I certainly use it to do music obsession as well as any fifteen-year old bedroom culture cliché.

Fandom is, for me, always a social network. I got to The Colbert Report via The Daily Show, but I got there because I had friends who were huge fans and I was excited to be able to watch it "live" with them while I was living in the States the year The Colbert Report began. And I got to The Decemberists via my son, who got there via some online friends and knew I would love them.

Recently I was teaching a course in which a student said to me that they didn't think "fan" had to have anything to do with a "community" and I think it does. It's just that community doesn't mean only one thing and the relationships between fan and community can be formed in many different ways. I don't go anywhere to be with other fans of The Decemberists, but my circulation of information about work by them is still intensely social and overlaps via things like "Detect Music Now" options with communities which are formed around being a fan. I don't know that one can actually be a lone fan.

When I was thirteen I was an enormous David Bowie fan. I didn't have posters on my wall - I wasn't allowed. I never saw him live - there was never a chance. There were no other Bowie fans in my school. The records were not what made me a fan. It was weekend television and struggling every night to find a radio station in a far away city that might play Bowie. It was social. I was aware of the place of other Bowie fans in my experience of Bowie fandom. The fact that they were out there not only mattered but mediated my experience of it. I think being a "fan" requires not only the mass distribution of culture but also the mass distribution of knowledge of others' consumption. It's not the fact of records that allowed for Adorno's hated Caruso fans, but the fact of records in a network of information about other people's consumption of Caruso.

MH: I know these last few questions of mine have moved away from directly being 'about' gender, but I wanted to try to get access to our fan experiences (whether of fan studies or the media outside scholarly publishing) and then see if gendered issues and debates were thrown up via that entry point.

Your answer here contains yet another beautiful turn of phrase (one for me to add to my 'game of greys') - 'mass distribution of knowledge of others' consumption'. I like that. Yes, more than 'mass media' or the 'culture industry', there's always the matter of what other people are doing with it all, and whether we want to join in.

One of my recent fan objects resonates very strongly with that notion, as I think my initial entry point was a kind of mediation of others' fandom (and not even a mediation that I can validate or corroborate). Basically, I read a piece of journalism - I very much enjoy reading decent cultural journalism, of the 'Sunday broadsheet supplements' variety - which suggested that a specific BBC TV series called simply Bodies had spawned immensely vocal fans, and that audiences who loved this particular show really, really loved it. It wasn't a programme that I had ever watched, nor had it really been a resounding industry success, nor did it belong to a genre that I'd ever had much interest in (medical/hospital drama). Furthermore, its creator and writer, Jed Mercurio, had previously been responsible for a piece of television science fiction largely felt in certain UK fan circles to be one of the worst efforts in recent decades, Invasion: Earth. (My memory of it was that it was pretty ropey, minus one episode which I think was largely told in flashback black-and-white, and which I remember as standing-out).

Despite these misgivings, I resolved to give Bodies a try on DVD, having enjoyed a large number of BBC serials of late such as Funland, Conviction, Sinchronicity and others. My decision to start watching it, and to invest time in it, was based almost solely on this one piece of cultural journalism saying that the series had immensely devoted fans. Not even really properly "mass distribution of knowledge" of others' consumption activities, then, just an inkling of an intrigue thanks to a suggestive newspaper filler-piece.

Bodies scares me. Its near-hypnotic incidental music becomes a rhythmic and repetitive, integral part of its massively uneasy pleasures; its writing is both deeply idealistic and terrifyingly cynical; all its characters seem fully realised and convincing, and Keith Allen will never, ever play a role as perfectly Allen-esque as this one. It does the whole 'life and death stakes' thing that hospital drama tends to do, but without ever flinching and looking away from the darkness that is shown to be at the heart of the UK's National Health System, with its government-led targets and its management statistics, and its patients who are sometimes, for some, the least important part of the whole process.

Bodies is more meaningfully 'political' than most Politics Programmes which feature guest politicians having cosy or ritually-interrogative chats with 'star' presenters just as much a part of the establishment as they are.

Bodies is the most intense piece of television I have watched for years. I felt churned up by watching it. The suspense that it generates is astounding, and really puts a fair bit of TV 'thriller' programming to shame. There aren't ticking clocks or crack military units or explosives or sleeper cells or tough-guy gangsters. There's just couples trying to have children, and people trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Out of this comes black comedy and blacker tragedy. There aren't quite clear heroes and villains - so tick the box for moral grey areas one last time - but more than that, there are some huge dramatic reversals that really make emotional sense rather than being obviously 'plotted'.

Something else I've started to enjoy is Heroes. But my enjoyment of this is intertextually coloured by having watched Bodies. Heroes does feel 'plotted' - terrific twists and cliffhangers arrive bang on schedule, but there seems to be a deep sense of cynicism embedded in its bag of tricks. It feels like a fantasy drama of reassurance, beginning with an iconic 'falling man' apparently plummeting to his death from a tall building, and who believes he is special, and who turns out to be special. This time, this falling man lives.

Despite being self-reflexive about its 'everyone wants to be special' superhero plotlines, Heroes still seemingly manages to offer this narrative pleasure to a potentially regressive extent. And it courts an international TV market by setting part of its narrative strands in Japan and India, while still being US-centred (cheerleaders weren't a major part of my cultural life growing up in the UK). Its thriller components feel contrived and, much as I hate to write it, even faintly juvenile when watched through the half-light of Bodies. May be it's just that I've never been a huge fan of superhero narratives and characters, though I very much enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. But nobody is 'special' in Bodies; people just want to safely get in and out of hospital, and they want their children to be delivered safely. Nobody has special powers; staff simply try to do the work they are trained to do. And one Doctor who endangers patients through apparent incompetence is neither obviously misguided nor villainous; he too is trying to help, and trying to do his job. People die. Routinely. Their deaths are simply part of the performance statistics of the hospital. Nobody can regenerate.

When I thought long and hard about the opening episode of Heroes, I realised that I wanted it to be a drama where characters believed, in infantile terms, that they were 'special', only to be proven wrong. I wanted it to be a drama which didn't reassure its audience, and where superhero powers might not arrive, as expected, for our identificatory figures. Where nobody could guarantee their elevated status or narrative safety. I wanted a thriller that thrilled me by refusing to play by obvious set rules. Perhaps perversely, I actually wanted a version of Heroes where pretty Peter Petrelli died in episode one as a result of plunging to his doom. That would have been dramatic, scary, risk-taking TV. But may be I've got Bodies for that sort of thing. Either that, or I've been reading too much David Peace, and it's seriously disrupted my thought processes.

But still I'm watching Heroes avidly, and piling through the episodes, and I could very well be described as a 'fan', and I've read online fan discussions, and, oh, just the other day I thought idly to myself "may be I'll buy that SFX magazine special so I can read the episode guides and see which are the fan favourites." But I feel as if I'm a culturally-compliant fan, going along for the ride slightly against myself, watching because it's the sort of cultish genre show I "ought" to love, and because I know friends and family and colleagues will be watching. Part of me doesn't want to criticise the show, wants to validate it as a lovely bit of sophisticated pop culture, and yet another part of me really does think that it's deeply ideologically problematic and quite transparently a textual-formal outcome of the political economy of the TV marketplace.

But these tastes, and this wrestling with my own previous patterns of taste and my history as a media fan-consumer, are they gendered? I'm not at all sure that they are, though Bodies is very grisly, bloody stuff, and does perhaps partly appeal to me via my culturally 'masculinised' horror-fan-identity. May be my tastes in TV drama are in transition, away from 'cult' and genre material and towards more conventional 'social realist' and 'quality' tastes? Put like that, the change seems a rather tedious cliché: have I just been busy unwittingly internalising the taste formations of the canon-builders of TV Studies these past few years? I'm not sure, as I would still want to champion many versions and instances of cult TV over more obviously canonical TV, and I'm certainly still in love with Doctor Who. But recent UK efforts at self-conscious 'cult' status such as Cape Wrath (Meadowlands elsewhere, I think) have also left me cold. Weeks and weeks of 'eccentric' drama ending with a nonsensical conclusion, and featuring characters whose 'motivation' was telegraphed so baldly it was as if they'd been auto-generated in 'Screenwriting 101'.

I can think of one TV series I've recently enjoyed which did strike me as forcefully gendered, almost as if it had been designed by (a rather reactionary) gender committee: The Unit. I watched this because of its David Mamet pedigree, having enjoyed many of his plays and films, and counting myself as a Mamet fan, despite his work's sometimes hysterical maschismo. I would not usually bother with a militaristic TV drama, I have to say up front. Like Bodies, I ventured outside my genre comfort zones, this time to follow an acclaimed playwright rather than because I'd read about fan audiences. And though I enjoyed The Unit, especially an occasional episode written and directed by Mamet which became an almost formal exercise in suspense and misdirection, the show as a whole seemed by-the-numbers schizoid, as if purposefully designed to have 'masculine' plotlines with army blokes shooting stuff and blowing stuff up, running alongside 'feminine' storylines in which The Wives back on the military base occupied themselves having affairs or blowing the family's savings on bad investments. And it spent its series one finale ranting about how rubbish the French are, which you just couldn't and wouldn't get away with now in UK TV, but which seemed entirely acceptable in this apparently neo-con drama powered by little else beside gender stereotypes and national pride.

May be I just don't want to love texts like Cape Wrath that have been too obviously designed for me to love them, which would fit with the cultural identity of the wary (and 'masculinised') cult fan. And perhaps I'm also not quite part of the right national market or age-based demographic for Heroes, my ambivalent fandom of which could be less about gender, and a little more about my academic interests in cultural politics. What exactly are the academically 'progressive' and more celebratory readings of Heroes? And I'm certainly not about to uncritically applaud the straight-up gendered binaries of The Unit, which seems to have avoided being reactionary 'blokes' TV by being simultaneously reactionary in its depiction of both tough-guy 'masculine' and stepford-army-wife 'feminine' story strands. If equality means screwing over representations of men and women, then this programme format gets uncannily close to it. Having said all this, thinking about the media texts that I personally love right now, as well as those that I'm ambivalently fannish about, still seems like a useful way into debates over cultural tastes and identities.

There's no real conclusion here, of course. How could there be? But I would like to say how much I've enjoyed thinking and writing about all of this, and responding both to your questions and your elegant formulations. Cheers.

No, I can't imagine a conclusion either. But thank you. I've really enjoyed this and in reading and responding to your answers I've found some interesting new questions and inflections of old ones. Thanks very much to Henry too for setting up this series - it's a very generous use of the speaking position he's worked so hard on.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One): Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills

I think the format of these exchanges calls for us both to introduce ourselves to the blog's readers. So, we are Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, paired up for the purposes of this debate by Henry's magical 'fan studies and gender' discussion-partnering machine. Here's a bit more information about each of us, and how we came to be interested in fan studies: CD: I'm currently Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I first became interested in fan cultures while writing my first book, Girls (Columbia UP, 2002), which discussed scholarly and popular images of girls as fans and fans as girls. Since then I've written essays on fanfiction for Helleksen & Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Jane Glaubman's forthcoming collection on the Harry Potter fandom. While my forthcoming Modernist Cultural Studies (University Press of Florida, 2008) is more interested in the practices and ideas that made fan cultures possible than in fans themselves, Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online - which I'm co-writing with Melissa Gregg at the University of Queensland - uses online fan practices as a key example for thinking about online culture today.

MH: I'm currently a Reader in Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and my first published book was Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002). This was based on my 1999 doctorate from Sussex University, which in turn came about in part because I'd been a fan of various media texts, especially Doctor Who, since the age of about three.

Most things I've done since the PhD have had some relationship to fandom and fan studies, especially my books The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum 2005) and How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold 2005). I'm working on a number of books at present, and the next to be delivered will be Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century (Tauris, 2008).

***

So, having set out that very brief bit of context, we've decided to offer 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' by virtue of each of us posing six questions that we wanted to ask of fandom and/or fan studies at this moment in time. These questions were deliberately designed to be as open as possible, and to spark discussion. They don't always refer directly to issues of gender, though they frequently give rise to reflections on that theme. Having each set six questions, we then let the other respond to them before taking the opportunity, in turn, to enter into a dialogue on the thoughts and arguments that had been thrown up. It would be fair to say that each of us has some hesitancy about being fully 'committed' in print, and for all posterity, to what we say here, and each of us wrote this material and responded to it under time pressures. But no doubt these things will have been true for almost all participants in this series, so in the final analysis, we can hardly claim any special indulgences or allowances.

Catherine's Six Questions:

1. What is at stake in the way that fan studies either directly or by default returns to assessing degrees of resistance (or, by inference, conformity)? The words for this may change, such as talking about fan creativity rather than resistance per se, but there continues to be a fan studies investment in laying claim to something that amounts to social value in hierarchical oppositional terms where the opposite of creative/resistant/whatever seems taken for granted. Are we still thinking Culture Industry, or is it something else?

MH: My sense is that this has started to shift a bit, as both my own Fan Cultures and Cornel Sandvoss's Fans have critiqued the 'resistance' paradigm, and of course Abercrombie and Longhurst were doing that long before either of us, in Audiences. And as Henry likes to point out from time to time, he was hardly without ambivalence in relation to what's been termed the 'Incorporation/Resistance Paradigm'. I think that this mode of thinking is very ingrained though, as it has formed a key part of cultural studies' sense of its own distinctive project and identity, the fact that it (and supposedly it alone) was able to read for 'resistance', or assess the cultural politics of primary texts and audiences' responsive, tertiary texts. Christine Scodari, for example, has strongly argued that fan studies should still very much be about this assessment and valorization of specific fan practices, viewing my position in Fan Cultures as an abdication of cultural studies' and fan studies' 'proper' responsibilities, I think. It is as if challenging the IRP is sometimes assumed to mean throwing out the baby, bathwater, and probably the whole bath with them.

But I continue to think that we need to find ways out of the "Culture Industry = Badness; Some 'resistant' fan activities = Goodness" binary. Because it does still seem to occasionally be about finding strangely clear lines of division - what I'd call a 'moral dualism' - as if post-structuralism never ever happened. Alan McKee's work has charted one useful pathway, to my way of thinking, by refusing to treat 'the Culture Industry' as that evil, old monolith, and instead starting from the idea that industry producers can have cultural politics and cultural theories too. And that these aren't just markers of 'academic' cultural distinction and identity versus 'the Industry'.

In any case, changes within 'the Culture Industry' itself, moving in the direction of convergence and digital interactivity, mean that some of our views of 'resistance' really need further updating and revision. Will Brooker wrote about this some time ago in a piece in IJCS reflecting on Dawson's Creek fans, whose online fan activities could sometimes be interpreted as being almost 'programmed', pre-structured or directly facilitated by 'the Industry'. But even if this means that some fan activities blur together 'resistant' and 'conformist' elements, I suppose there's still a reinscription of that binary "proper resistance" versus "co-opted resistance" lurking somewhere. It is such a tough pattern of thought to shift.

May be thinking about 'the Culture Industry' and thinking about fan 'resistance' (or not) shouldn't be so closely articulated. Uncoupling or de-articulating them might open a few more interesting pathways of scholarly thought: do some groups of fans 'resist' some of the normative identities linked to 'what it means to be a fan', for instance, within their own communities? Some fan communities may be de-Politicized, and others may not be, such that 'resistance' might be directed at targets other than 'the Culture Industry'. There may even be forms of fan 'resistance' to the 'textual poaching' of academics - with not all of this resistance to multiple Others being clearly progressive or reactionary. The real problem with articulating 'resistance' and 'Culture Industry' paradigms, for me, is that we end up with not only very one-dimensional and thin depictions of cultural heroes and villains, but also that we end up with equally one-dimensional representations of cultural power, rather than perceiving 'resistance' as happening internally, within both 'the Industry' and 'fan communities', and even 'in' the academy in a variety of ways. I tried to develop this sort of decentred Certeauian and multiple approach in an article for Social Semiotics in 2005, in fact, in a meta-theoretical sort of vein.

CD: Yes it's true that many people have now paid attention to the problems involved in assessing fan activities and identities in terms of resistance, and yet I feel as if resistance has been mostly displaced by less political synonyms for the same opposition. I guess that means that I agree there's something ingrained and thus very hard to shift about such a pattern of thought. Cultural studies does have a longstanding attachment to seeing something other than "the mass" in "the popular". But as it gets taken up in the terrain of fan studies (and cultural studies work on fans is pretty much as old as cultural studies itself) I feel as if "resistance" has remained such an attractive distraction from paying attention to the diversity of what goes on amongst fans that I'm constantly tripping over new forms of it.

Yes, I think the answer is to have something other than an oppositional understanding whereby we just reverse which side of the binary is good and which is bad, but I don't just want to play a game of greys either, where such an opposition is reinforced but there's good and bad to be found on either side. Nor do I want to reinforce that opposition by showing how the (still separated) sides speak to one another. Instead, I would like to pay attention to the ways in which fans don't need to have a project or even a focused antagonism or call to arms in order to do something interesting. In which their relation to cultural forms is not perceived through an opposition between producers and consumers/users. That obviously misrepresents a range of important things, but in order to try and shake off the ingrained response I feel it's a worthwhile experiment.

I like many of your questions here, therefore, it's just that I don't see them being asked very often except as an aside to more expected discussions of resistance. So in my experiment I'd like to do away with any and all talk of resistance or subversion when thinking about fans - just to see what happens. Nina Busse and I once had an exchange about fandom being "not_subversive" that even resulted in a community with that name, but it was mainly a place marker for academic conversation rather than a fan community. Since then I've tried just abandoning the resistance/conformity questions when talking about HP fanfiction communities and was a little surprised to find that fan audiences seem to understand and appreciate that a lot more than academic ones. Some fan communities have an investment in being "subversive", but even when they do they're marking that out as something that differs from most fans. I'm not saying fans are "conformist", or more conformist. I'm saying the question is not at all to the point at this time.

2. Can "fandoms" be thought of as dependent on particular artefacts in the way we usually talk about them? Is it enough to talk of "subcommunities" within a fandom to cover the diversity of attachment and practice? There's not a Harry Potter fandom - there is a web of Harry Potter fan communities, and it's a very distorted web as well - frayed at the edges and tangled up with different "fandoms" entirely. I don't mean there's no common ground at all - there's JKR's "canon" - but it's not consistently important or utilised.

MH: This 'subcommunities' point is vital, I'd say, because it draws attention to the fact that talk of singular fan 'communities' is itself a bit of an academic fiction. There may be fan interpretive communities, but again, we're very much dealing with a multi-dimensional (sub)cultural field cut across by varieties of fan identities and practices. And what counts as 'canon' can even be contested more-or-less strongly in some media fandoms. So what we seem to need is a vocabulary that acknowledges fan 'community' as meaningful, up to a point, but which doesn't foreclose the massive variation in fan practices happening under that sort of banner. Bacon-Smith wrote about fan "circles" in Enterprising Women, of course, with these "circles" sometimes being more-or-less loosely interconnected, and that's one of the values of ethnography - that it can illuminate these processes of (sub)cultural affiliation and dispersion in more adequate detail. And Bacon-Smith's work also illustrates that this isn't an issue tied to the growth of online fandoms - it was already there in the pre-Internet days. Perhaps some of the later work in fan studies has been too quick to use 'community' as a starting point for scholarship without interrogating the limits and blindspots associated with the very concept, or without trying to think it through more rigorously, or even without paying due attention to the specifics of Bacon-Smith's work. I'm still finding and reading new books on fandom which seem to start and end with positive assertions of fan 'community' support, and to be honest it frustrates me more than a little.

Certainly fandoms can be 'tangled' up with and between an intertextual range of objects; fans may follow the different work of certain showrunners, writers, or performers. So to even nominate a fandom as "belonging" to one show or individual can sometimes be problematic. Or fandoms may be co-incident, but of intertextually unrelated artefacts. This was one of the reasons why I tried to carry out a very small-scale autoethnography in Fan Cultures, and I know that some readers have been critical of that (in its execution, I think, rather than in principle). I wanted to try to start teasing out the complexities of how our various fandoms may intersect (or not), and how fandoms could work in concert to realise a cultural identity, or not. For instance, some fandoms may be linked to discourses of gender for the individual fan concerned, whilst others may be disarticulated from gender identity - and this is an empirical question for me, not one we can decide in advance. I've read outstanding autoethnographies written by some of my female students, where they analyse how specific fandoms enable their femininity to be realised in 'resistance' to cultural norms, whilst other fandoms are culturally-conventionally 'feminised', and others seem not to meaningfully intersect with gender discourses, in their cultural experience, perhaps primarily linking to discourses of national identity and Welshness instead. All of which means putting 'resistance' into a more fleshed-out context, as well as reflecting on the subject's 'repertoire' or 'cultural portfolio' of assorted fandoms.

We have a situation, to my way of thinking, where fan studies shows a potential tendency to reify fan 'community' as well as reifying and unhelpfully abstracting singular 'fandoms'. This may be a matter of convenience; question: "what are you studying?" - answer: "oh, Harry Potter fans", but it is still a foundational problem. We need to be much more precise about the parameters of our research sometimes, studying specific forums or fan groups, or normative and non-normative fan identities, or fandoms which intertextually (or historically) emerge out of, or morph into, others. I thought about this a little bit in a piece for American Behavioral Scientist in 2005, where I wrote about "cyclical" fandom - that some fans might sequentially move through different fan 'objects', nevertheless displaying patterns of taste and distinction in their multiple, diachronic fandoms. Just as we could ethnographically (or autoethnographically) analyse various synchronic fandoms, it may also be worthwhile to diachronically analyse peoples' self-reflexive 'projects of fan-self' (to creatively mangle a bit of Giddens). I make another small start on this in my second book The Pleasures of Horror, where rather than thinking about horror fan 'communities' per se, I try to link discourses of fandom to people's biographical senses of self.

All of this makes me think of another of Henry's longstanding complaints -if he doesn't mind me using that word - about the reception of Textual Poachers. Just as the book was reduced to being a totemic representative of the 'IRP' when it was actually more complex, so too was it frequently viewed as being 'about Star Trek fans', when it was actually about fans of intertextual networks of TV shows (what we'd probably now call 'cult TV' fans). So may be this 'reading for singular fan communities' is actually more of a problem in the interpretive reception and promulgation of fan studies than an issue 'in' fan studies itself (though I'm not very keen on the boundary line I seem to be rhetorically creating here). It is a matter of how readers get a handle on the subject - with many academics, who may not be specialists in the subject of media fandom, using the notion of fandom common-sensically to mean 'fans of X'. It's a short-hand, a map of the territory, which occasionally seems in danger of becoming the territory in-and-of itself. It's a tendency which empirical and theoretical approaches to media fandom themselves need to 'resist' (another kind of contextualised 'resistance'), I would argue. We need to insist on the fragmentary nature of fan 'communities', divided by their axes of (sub)cultural power, and on the usefulness of not reifying fandoms as 'singular', instead working to try to see them much more "in the round", as it were.

So I'm completely sympathetic to this question, really. Does it mean that 'fans' are 'not dependent' on particular artefacts? Perhaps. Perhaps media fandom has enough of a cultural history by this point in time, that it would make sense to view some 'fans' less in terms of their objects of fandom, and more so in terms of their fan-cultural competencies, which are the skills of doing 'being a fan', and which can be transferred across texts. Again, it strikes me that the concepts of a longer-term 'fan career' or 'fan socialisation' may be of value (with all the disclaimers and qualifications one would want to bring to those terms). Garry Crawford's work on sports fans has developed an intriguing model that media fan studies could benefit from applying, in my opinion (I make some use of it in my third book, How To Do Things With Cultural Theory). Rather than fandom being 'about' specific fan objects, it could then be viewed as a way of using, or relating to, objects. But that's already there in the literature in fan studies, to a very strong extent, I suppose.

CD: Two sentences in I wanted to interject and say *no, not subcultural*, but I'm glad I had to wait and let you make your point. (I'm pleasantly surprised to find that's a real plus about this format.) I do want to talk about subcommunities, but not as if they are subcultural. I'd love to find some other prefix like nested (but less derivative) or intersecting (but less two dimensional). As it is, subcommunities seems most recognisable for now. I do like the word community, both because it begins with the twin recognitions of shared space and shared interests and because there's a long history of debating what communities are and how they work that I think fan studies still has a lot to learn from. But I entirely agree "fan community" is in no way a synonym for "fandom" and that's its value even if it comes with a lot of baggage.

You're right too about the shortcomings of thinking about fan studies as dealing with specific fandoms rather than fans/fandoms in general, but that's a very slippery set of problems. On the one hand a fandom is not, in fact, a fandom; on the other, erasing the crucial differences between fandoms that give rise to both variation and change in fan practices is not something fan studies can afford. Hence, I think we're stuck with sub- until we find some less misleading term for the network of communities and other modes of assembly that attach to an apparently singular object.

I think your "some fans" that are "cyclical" fans in fact comprises an extremely substantial set of "fans". I can't think of a single field in which fans don't do that in very significant numbers--not even football fans and certainly not academic fans. With media fans I think that's actually the overwhelmingly dominant norm.

3. Why does fan fiction seem to be such a dividing line in fan studies - as if to do "fan studies" with fan fiction means something quite different than to do fan studies that, for example, talk to TV audiences about their investments and interpretations of a show? It does seem to me that some of the conversations on Henry's blog have marked that distinction out and, in turn, gendered it.

MH: I agree that this seems to have become one of the structuring binaries in the debate. I find it slightly strange, to be honest, and I'm not at all convinced that it is as powerfully gendered as some seem to think. Now, it could be fairly said that in my work I've not looked at fanfic. Does that mean that my work is unequivocally gendered as 'masculinist'? Or as not being about 'fan communities' (with all the misgivings I have about the easy use of that term)?

On the contrary, I'd say that the whole notion of doing an autoethnography is strongly indebted to broadly feminist perspectives, while my critique of 'fan community' work has revolved around wanting to analyse fan communities as Bourdieuian hierarchies and overlapping/decentred social structures - it hasn't been based on any straightforward "individual" fan versus "fan community" binary. I certainly do argue that we should theorise 'fans' who wouldn't tend to be part of socially-organised fandom (fan 'communities', as they've been called), but for me this has never been an either/or.

In fact, I saw it very much as a corrective to the prior tendencies of fan studies, which at the point when I wrote Fan Cultures (and did the doctoral work it was based on) were very much not managing to theorise 'lone fans', or fans operating outside of what I would still argue tends to be a more narrow - or specific - strata of fandom where the practice of writing fanfic is a central activity. For me, again, this was not an either/or; it was, in intention, a more inclusive model of fandom - not accepting that the 'real' fans or the 'resistant' fans or the 'creative' fans were necessarily always to be found in more visible, subcultural spaces (though some might be there; yet again, an empirical question). But I never argued that work shouldn't be done on these types of fans - I simply didn't do it myself because many others appeared to be doing it, and doing it very well. There was no need for me to address the same set of concerns and topics in my own work - to duplicate labour, if you like - when instead of that, I could seek to argue for an expansion of the range of empirical and theoretical approaches to media fandom. Expansion and co-existence. Not an either/or!

So, although I've not directly written about fanfic (though I have written some, badly, many years ago now, for a Doctor Who Appreciation Society fanzine), it continues to be something that I teach on, am interested in, and appreciate reading others' work on. It isn't something I feel obliged or compelled to write about, because other fan activities interest me - activities which when I wrote Fan Cultures hardly seemed to exist in the literature, such as fans' use of cult(ural) geography, and practices of fan tourism. I think that to argue (or even to imply) that everyone should be studying 'X' or 'Y' in fan studies is a bit of a problem. It's probably a version of what I termed the 'fallacy of internality' in Fan Cultures - the notion that each individual scholar's work has to 'say everything', whereas it's really more important that scholarship as a whole covers the widest possible range of relevant material, so that we can read Sandvoss on neutrosemy, or Bacon-Smith on fan circles, or Jenkins on convergence, or Driscoll on fanfic; we don't all need to be saying everything (or even, necessarily, defining 'fandom' in the same way; or arguing that fandom is 'really' about community or individuality).

So the argument that there's a gendering of work on fanfic, or that 'lone' fans versus 'community' fans translates into a gendered binary, for me that seems a bit muddled. Henry Jenkins and Will Brooker have done major work on forms of fanfic, along with Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith. My own work is absolutely about fan community, and the uses and limits of that concept, even though I have chosen not to write about fanfic to date - because I wanted to widen the fan debate. But even if that narrative is overly selective, it still strikes me that to perceive these as gendered lines of division may be to take the contingent a little too quickly for a structured/structuring social fact. Numerically-speaking, more female scholars may write about fanfic (though even certain kinds of fanfic have been over-represented in the field), and some (some, not all) fanfic-centred communities may be gendered as feminine. We can take all of that as read, if you like. I can't see that it follows from this that the presence or absence of work on 'community' or 'fanfic' in any scholar's work is solely or determinatively gendered as feminine/masculine. This seems to be a monolithic reading - at best, a kind of structuralist-feminist conclusion, perhaps - which disallows the actual complexities of gender linked to a range of writers' work in fan studies. One problem with structuralist readings of all kinds is surely how they fix meaning in relation to key ideological binaries, then not considering how these binaries may be more-or-less fluid, deconstructed, or even internally incoherent within each of the terms in a binary.

So if I wouldn't want to take a strongly structuralist view of the supposed gendering of fan studies, I think a more post-structuralist view of the same may be useful. There are certainly discourses of masculinity appropriated in and by my academic self (which is only one cultural fraction of my self-identity). What I choose to write about - the fan objects I reflect on - are partly linked to cultural discourses of masculinity (which may not always be "hegemonic" masculinity, but may be in some contexts and in some ways). Writers in fan studies, I feel, almost invariably perform their gender in certain ways whilst ostensibly analysing specific fandoms or aspects of fan activity. But the little poststructuralist voice that speaks to me wants to say, "yes, but that doesn't produce monolithically gendered arguments, does it?" So, I can be interested in fanfic, and I might have written it atrociously, even while I haven't academically analysed it, for reasons that, as a cultural agent, I would argue were not discursively articulated with my performance of gender, but were instead about appropriating academic-communal discourses of 'originality' of topic or argument. (I wouldn't view this as strongly gendered, but I'm well aware this could be debated further).

Taking a poststructuralist stance on gender in/of fan studies, I think it is absolutely important for writers to seek to be self-reflexive, and to carefully consider why they are writing about what they are, and in the way that they are. It was this set of poststructuralist concerns that led me to attempt to write about fandoms I was not a participant in, as I felt that otherwise I was in danger of reproducing, within my academic work, aspects of my pre-academic cultural identity - my gendering, but also my classed identity. I was contributing to a 'canonisation' of certain fan tastes over others, and hence was implicitly helping to silence a range of fan voices rather than working to include a greater range and diversity of fandom within the multiple projects of fan studies.

So, as well as writing more about Doctor Who fans (because again, this wasn't an either/or; a virtue or a vice), I consciously decided to write pieces about Dawson's Creek fans (for the BFI collection Teen TV) and fans of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire (for the OUP book ITV Cultures), as well as then contributing a self-reflexive piece about academics' fan tastes to the 2007 NYU book Fandom. For me, the question isn't whether or not I'm writing about fanfic or 'community' per se; it's a question of which fandoms I'm writing about, and which precise fan activities within those fandoms, and why, and how, and ultimately whether or not that leads to a reproduction of one, narrow view of what it means to be a fan. And some of my work has done that, I would say; some of my work has definitely reproduced gendered norms and tastes within contemporary culture. Not only or necessarily or inevitably in relation to gendered fan-consumer tastes, but also in relation to levels of cultural capital. I just can't see this as something that's structurally a given, or happening behind the backs of the cultural agents who contribute to fan studies; it's something that can be reflected on, addressed, and which can also tend to be far more complex than simply being read off from specific presences/absences in somebody's work.

The question that I've increasingly been asking of my own work is this: does it broaden what we can theorise in relation to 'fandom'? This could mean trying to think about 'cyclical fandom' or multiple fandoms, or the divisions within fan communities, or fandom and autobiographical senses of self, or 'theory fandom' rather than fandom linked only to popular culture, or fandoms which have been under-explored in the literature, or types of fan who have been under-represented, or types of fan activity which have been less frequently investigated. Fan Cultures wanted to resist 'decisionist' narratives of resistant/complicit, good/bad in favour of suspending those moral dualisms. Given that the complete suspension of any and all moral dualisms whatsoever is probably a sense-making impossibility, and that therefore any such call or claim could only ever become self-contradictory (Scodari pointed his out quite neatly in her review of the book), I'd say that an inclusive ethic has become slightly more my concern as time's gone by: to strive to include views, versions, aspects, and empirical activities of fandom that have otherwise been excluded (sometimes by myself) in favour of the discursive and cultural reproductions of academia and its specific tastes/paradigms/schools. And I would also recognise, in line with my earlier work, that this cannot be singularly achieved; hence I would auto-critique some of my own work, and would fully expect others to find it limited in specific ways, or 'disappointing' to the extent that I don't evade the limitations of my own performative cultural identities.

CD: I'm entirely in favour - I'm sure I don't even need to say it by now - with paying attention to the specific fan practices that interest you. And so of course studying Doctor Who doesn't mean studying Doctor Who fan fiction. But I suppose it does leave a couple of questions unanswered.

First, where does one have to make a reference to the breadth of fan practices that make up a fandom? Can one write about Doctor Who without ever considering how significant fan fiction communities have been or are now within that field? At what point and in what way does that limitation on one's fandom "sample" need to be acknowledged? Fan fiction is more important to some fandoms than others, thinking in terms of numbers, in terms of perceived fan culture, and in terms of media visibility. I suspect this problem of acknowledging the limitations of one's slice of fandom is quite easily addressed.

But second, as fan communities often construct hierarchies within which fan fiction (sub)communities are sidelined and denigrated as the most fannish (in the sense of obsessive attachment and derivative deployment) of fans, where does not-doing-fan fiction turn into a similar sort of hierarchy? I ask that question already hearing an answer to it, in a way, because fan fiction is in the present tense so central to some parts of fan studies that it seems weird to picture it as marginal. And yet, when I pick up collections like Fandom I feel there's an obligatory fan fiction inclusion strategy at work, with the generality of fan studies doing something else less... what else if not less marginal?

Overall, no, you don't and no one should have to work on fan fiction, but perhaps it's useful to have this place to step back and ask what place does fan fiction have now in the schema of things published in fan studies. It's both foundational and yet somehow positioned as limited and specialised. For now I'm going to settle for saying that's... interesting.

4. Does it matter if one is invested in the fandom of the fans one studies? It's one of those recurring tropes of fan studies that the writer/critic stakes out their terrain in terms of attachment. This doesn't happen anything like as commonly in, for example, literary studies. Maybe it's obvious that this is about the role of ethnomethodology and ethnography in fan studies, but even where there are no human subjects to be "ethical" towards it seems to happen and so it strikes me as maybe more interesting than it looks. When people who study "fans" want to distance themselves from "fan studies" I think they're also making a statement relevant to this.

MH: I think my previous answer starts to hint at my emerging ambivalence about this question of investment or attachment. When I finished my PhD, and shortly thereafter, I was very much of the view that being a scholar-fan (a fan of what one is studying, or of the type one is studying) was a benefit rather than any kind of hindrance. This was undoubtedly partly the influence of Textual Poachers on me, but probably also the influence of dialogues and debates with the likes of Will Brooker's work. And I certainly have no interest or desire to retreat into what strikes me as a resolutely reactionary position (so, yes, here's another moral dualism that I cling to) - by which I mean the whole "scholar-fans can't be properly objective or distanced or critical" argument, which I continue to strongly think is simply arrant, modernist nonsense. Alex Doty dismantled that best, for me, in Flaming Classics, a book that lives up to its name. So, yes, I think it does matter, and very much, that writers are invested in the fandom of the fans they study.

However, I also increasingly think that this isn't enough in and of itself. Not if it leads to specific investments and attachments being overly reproduced in scholarship, where these tend to be attachments linked to specific taste cultures and levels of cultural capital. S. Elizabeth Bird critiqued this definitively, really, in her recent book on audiences for Routledge - pointing out that 'cult' and 'edgy' TV was getting lots of academic attention (and we could elaborate on this to suggest that fans of these sorts of shows also get more academic attention... plus they just-so-happen to share levels of cultural capital with many of the scholar-fans producing this work). By contrast, middlebrow TV or resolutely 'mainstream' TV, or shows targeting older audiences, weren't and aren't getting anywhere near as much academic attention, failing to be lit by the spotlight of scholarly buzz. So there are real limits to this process, I feel, and that's what my chapter in Fandom ended up being all about.

If we don't retreat from declarations of attachment - and I don't think that ethnomethodologically or ethically scholar-fans should; really, more should be made of this in pieces of work where it is relevant - then how do we avoid the pitfalls of cultural reproduction and canonisation? How do we avoid the problem of there being a journal of Buffy studies (cool, teen, hip, cult US TV), but not a journal of Heartbeat studies? (uncool, older, rural, mainstream, Sunday evening British TV). How do we avoid, as a scholarly community, producing a patchy and very skewed account of TV or the media which is perhaps linked less to our genderings and linked much more to our levels of cultural capital, as well as to generational identities?

I've already alluded to my own partial and non-solution: that it may be worthwhile for scholar-fans to deliberately seek to work on fandoms and shows that they are not invested in, while nevertheless bringing their knowledge of fandom and their expertise to the table. A variant version of this would be for academia to seek to recruit a wider range of participants and voices working on a wider range of scholar-fan tastes, but I'm verging on wishful thinking or idealism there, so I'll stick with a smaller-scale attempt at shifting the situation in this instance.

Of course, some writers on fandom may want to distance themselves from 'fan studies' altogether, as you say. If this means not reading up on the relevant literature, then that strikes me as somewhat foolhardy. If it means approaching fandom from a different disciplinary perspective, or through variant philosophies, then surely this can only work to challenge and strengthen fan studies. I had this sort of feeling while reading Steve Bailey's recent book on fandom. Though it was published in the same year as Cornel Sandvoss's Fans, it couldn't have been more different in terms of its intertextual affiliations (I've just recently reviewed the two side-by-side for the journal Popular Communication). Sandvoss's work is strongly linked to media sociology, and draws on fan studies as an historical area of media/cultural studies; by contrast, Bailey seems to be writing at one remove from the 'canon' of fan studies. Though for me this created a danger of 'reinventing the wheel', it also allowed Bailey's work to speak back to fan studies, if you like, and to start from unusual first principles. Types of 'rogue' knowledge can be very valuable and useful, once more acting as a kind of corrective to taken-for-granted or ossified assumptions/subject matters. Of course, not all rogue knowledges do this; some just spectacularly miss the point, otherwise there wouldn't be any value in building up one's awareness and knowledge of an academic field in the first place!

CD: I very much agree that the attachment to attachment in fan studies has resulted in quite overt negotiations of cultural capital through the fan texts one writes on. It's Buffy one year, Harry Potter the next; cult and edgy for some fan studies circles, "reclaiming" the massively popular for others.

I think where we might disagree is actually at the level of method. I've pretty much arrived at the point where I feel as if what's needed in fan studies is the kind of long slow careful ethnography that has become quite difficult to do in anthropological studies of lived communities as separate cultures. I want this now partly in order to see the importance of differences in attachment amongst fans - why for some fans a fan community is a way of life and for others it's some version of a bulletin board that one checks after a particularly good or bad episode. I'm aware that my position on this now has a great deal to do with the fact that I work exclusively with online fan communities and that it's a position I hold with reference to online culture as a whole and thus fan communities as a piece of that.

So while I can accept the value of rogue knowledges and, at the same time, feel the limitations of scholars who try to reinvent the wheel of fan studies, those questions feel less important to me than avoiding the drive-through mode of fan studies. Perhaps ironically, this does not mean I want more reflection on the position of the ethnographer in relation to fan communities. In fact, I want a lot less of that in order to avoid the self-referentiality that seems to pervade and dominate the field. I feel as if it is possible to do the necessary in terms of ethical clarification without turning one's ethnographic self into the coolest insider on the block.

5. Fan studies blur really easily into media studies and now new media studies. I know there is work that looks at fandom of "classic authors" etc but I do wonder if the difficulty of talking about my Foucault "fandom" as a fandom is not only about the presumed relationship to mass-produced popular culture that's set into the idea of "fan" now but also about the way fan studies is so often about studying the means of articulating fandom rather than its content. Academics both don't much want to look at academic attachments that way and would find themselves with an odd, if perhaps illuminating, focus if they tried. Maybe there's not a question there. Here's one - could academic reflection on its own institutionalised scholarly practices of research and citation perhaps learn a lot more than it has yet from fan studies. Something about community hubs and tiers, about canon (and fanon), about flaming and wanks... I could go on. Maybe it still isn't a question.

MH: Whether it is a question or not, it's certainly an area that needs more analysis and thought. Alan McKee has written playfully and productively about theory fans in Fandom, and I've written on the subject in How To Do Things With Cultural Theory, which I don't think has filtered into fan studies debates very much yet (and this is just one of the problems with there being an emerging 'canon' of fan studies books as well as canonical fandoms - when I look at some bibliographies underpinning articles on fandom, say, I'm rather struck by the impression that Fan Cultures has ended up in there because the writer thought their bibliography ought to be all "present and correct", and not because they've actually engaged with it in any meaningful sense. Similarly, I do wonder whether scholarly resources which might help particular arguments are neglected because they don't have an obvious 'fan' or 'fandom' in the title... this may also be partly to do with keyword-database-searching as a research strategy, and increased time pressures and an apparent rise in instrumental rationality... but now I suppose I'm sounding like a specifically gendered 'grumpy old man', so may be I'll shut up).

But basically, I absolutely agree with you, and have pretty much published along these lines. In Chapter Seven of HTDTWCT, as part of a section 'Exploring Theory Culture', I argue that work from fan studies can play a significant part in enabling us to theorise and think about academics' theory fandoms. I suggest that the reluctance to use this body of work in this way has been partly related to academia's need - and especially media studies' need - to culturally position itself as something Other to 'mere' fandom, and hence to legitimate itself as properly 'intellectual' and 'critical'. Of course, this cultural 'resistance' (again!) to discourses of fandom is also very much linked to the fact that 'fandom' is assumed to belong to the realm of pop culture, whereas academia is allegedly the application and understanding of 'Theory', itself thought of as an Other to popular culture. So the exnomination of 'theory fandom', I end up arguing, is one strategy aimed at authorising scholarly knowledge as being 'above' its objects of study. There are multiple Otherings and exclusions which this is based on, and these can be contested and deconstructed, which is what I set out to do. In essence, I take a poststructuralist position in relation to the binary of Theory/fandom, asking what happens if we no longer recognise this as an either/or. This involves extending and revisiting my autoethnography from Fan Cultures so that as well as self-reflexively analysing my pop-cultural investments in Doctor Who, say, I analyse my theory-cultural investments in the psychoanalysis of Donald Woods Winnicott (or, from DW to DWW). Alan McKee was quite right to criticise my first attempt at autoethnography for these particular silences and exclusions.

By recognising that 'theory fandom' may be a meaningful term, it is also possible to utilise further insights from poststructuralist feminism, arguing that forms of affect and embodiment have been written out of 'modernist' academia, and that even some versions of fan studies which have sought to challenge this (my own earlier work included) have nevertheless recuperated specific binaries of knowledge/affect underpinning academic 'authority'.

Another extension of fan studies work into unusual and productive areas, and one which aims to challenge the popular culture/high culture binary, is Liesbet Van Zoonen's Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. There's no obvious 'fans' or 'fandom' in this title either, but it really should be essential reading for anyone thinking about the cultural limits to discourses of fandom (which are also forms of cultural power, of course). Van Zoonen asks whether and how 'fandom' can be used as a concept to think about processes and practices of democracy. Can one be a 'Politics fan' as well as a 'theory fan', in other words. It is startling stuff; brilliant scholarship and innovative thought which pushes the reader to think differently about fandom, to broaden its range and scope, and to challenge its cultural definitions and discursive restrictions. I'm very nearly inspired to 'book envy' by it.

CD: I've read Alan's piece in Fandom, and yours. I think there certainly is a tendency for the newest work in fan studies to be less considered and less cited, but within cultural studies I'm sure we can see this as an unavoidable disciplinary phase. My students find you more readably relevant than fan studies that's fifteen years old and so I'm sure the canonical reference points are in transition.

Having said as much I hope it will not be too ungenerous to say that my difficulty with both yours and Alan's pieces in Fandom is the sense of a clear distinction between "academic" and "fan" that is not in the least undermined by talking about conflicts or negotiations between those two roles.

Let's take "meta" as an example, by which I'd want to refer to the broad range of ways in which fans self-consciously analyse their objects and their fan communities and circulate that as analysis. Paying attention to how those skills are learned academically, how academics working as fans can not only produce meta but then turn around and produce the same analysis as academic scholarship, and how debate generated by meta mirrors or even challenges academic debate, I think it's unhelpful to place academics as doing things (including thinking things) that fans do not. As one small example, I couldn't recall how many references to Foucault have been given to me by fans - sometimes with page numbered quotations, sometimes just as a general sense of things.

But yes absolutely with regard to everything else you're saying here. I think fandom has a lot to show academics about how they operate without really wanting to think about it too much - and I liked both your and Alan's pieces in Fandom for just that reason.

6. I'm rambling now, so a shorter attempt at # 6. Fan communities and the way they work are the most interesting part of fan studies to me when I think about fandoms academically. But if we attempt to study fans ethnographically, as communities, do we necessarily throw the objects they are fans of into the background, and does that matter? I guess this is question 2 asked in reverse.

MH: Hmmm, well, I think I've done more than my share of rambling in response to your excellent and thought-provoking questions. But I guess there is a possibility of work on community per se putting 'the text' (with all the provisos we need around that) into the background. Having said that, I'm not personally convinced that it happens much; writers examining fan communities tend to find that the values, meanings and 'poachings' made from fan texts inevitably seep into the performative fan identities constituting that community, whether it's Star Wars fans appropriating notions of rebellion, or Sopranos fans setting themselves up as the communal 'counsellor' or tough-guy. So the text/community opposition may be a weaker analytical division than first appearances would suggest.

I'm not sure that studying communities is "the most interesting part of fan studies" for personally me, though. I recognise that a lot of scholars are doing it well, and developing the theoretical depth of fan studies via community case-study work - I'm thinking here in particular of Rhiannon Bury's (2005) book and its excellent use of both 'heterotopia' (something a PhD student of mine is investigating at the moment in relation to online REM fans) and John Hartley's work on the audience as 'invisible fiction'. Academia can be a slow road sometimes, and I'm not sure Bury's work has fully found the wider readership it deserves, as of yet.

The notion of fan 'community' is philosophically and empirically intriguing to me, but I still don't feel that it goes anywhere near encompassing the diversity of types of fan experience. And bearing in mind Garry Crawford's timely warnings about the possibility of certain types of fan activity being implicitly (or otherwise) constructed as 'authentic' fandom - as 'real' fandom versus other implicitly inferior modes - for myself, I'd still rather explore other types of fandom which may be more 'mainstream', less subcultural, perhaps less spectacularly visible, and possibly gendered differently to some (not all) of the sometimes feminised spaces of socially-organised fandom. If, as Bury's study argues (2005:205), "there is no such entity as a fan" (and I argued the very same thing in the opening pages of Fan Cultures), then surely it falls to us to study the entire performative array of how and where discourses of fandom are both mobilised and exnominated? (And where this could far outstrip any sense of primarily studying fan communities, though fan community would be one cultural site where discourses of fandom would be intently performed and debated, and so would absolutely require careful study as part of what I view as a much wider project).

Actually, upon reflection, I think the most interesting part of fan studies for me at the moment is thinking about cultural sites and spaces where fandom could be used more widely as a discourse, but remains typically counterfactual - Politics (Van Zoonen), Theory (Hills; McKee; your questions here), and even social networking or Web 2.0 (see Henry's Afterword to the Fandom book, which for me just ends up posing the question of why fandom isn't being used as a discourse by certain cyber-gurus).

Where fandom supposedly 'isn't' is just as crucial a question of culture and power as studying where it self-evidently 'is.'

CD: Well, I actually don't have a lot to offer but agreement here. I don't think it happens much either, and I think the opposite is far more of a problem. Perhaps I was wanting to flag it as something to watch - a possible flaw in what I'm doing now. Because it would be ridiculous if, for example, Doctor Who turned into nothing more than a label for a space in which Doctor Who fans interacted. Looking at that sentence now perhaps it's not entirely ridiculous at all, but it certainly would miss the influence of the source text on fan practices.

I am most interested in communities when I think about fans, but I'm starting to suspect in the course of our exchange that what I mean by "community" is not necessarily what you do. I'm fascinated by the way in which fandom is experienced as a part of daily life, as an everyday layer of one's life with its own temporalities and modes of entanglement with everything else. Not as a bounded community, then, but as a set of mutable ideas and varying practices that are taken up by some as "community" and not by others. I want to explore the ways in which fandom is a terrain, a currency and a language for intimate knowledges of other people that comprise the experience of fandom.

Even for people who do no more than log onto discussion forums after a TV episode there's an everydayness to it and a specific place that the practice and the connections with others formed by it have in the fan's life. So I don't mean community in the sense of being a card-carrying Elvis fan club member, but community in the sense of a located community of interest to which people can have very different degrees of attachment. For me, because I otherwise work in communities no one doubts are communities (like country towns), I'm interested in how the patterns of investment and modes of belonging to fan communities are actually quite similar. In particular, of course, I'm interested in how the sense of community experienced through fandom might be shaped by the particularity of online platforms, but I don't think my questions are irrelevant to other kinds of fan culture.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part Two): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Articulating Attachment NB: I think people are often better able to articulate what stories mean to them in terms of the text itself: which characters they identify with (or don't), what they think about plot turns, etc. With music, it's very hard to find words to explain one's connection outside of the role songs played in that moment of one's autobiography. I have loved music more than stories most of my life but I can explain narrative conventions with some degree of competence and can't even begin to describe things like the common rhythmic or chord structures in the music that moves me.

AP: This is an interesting point, and I would readily admit that if someone were to ask me why I enjoy A. R. Rahman's music or why a certain playback singer's voice moves me, I would have nothing much to say. And as I quickly realized when I began speaking with fans of A. R. Rahman, this question doesn't move the conversation much. What would get me and other Rahman fans talking is this: tell me about your conversations and experiences interacting with other Rahman fans online. Attachment, in other words, was defined in terms of belonging in a community.

It is very important to recognize that this relates to taste hierarchies and the ambivalent status of film music in Indian public culture. The question of high culture vs. low culture fandom that Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson brought up is very relevant here. Given that music directors and playback singers are often trained in classical music and the fact that film songs draw on classical music, fan discussions do revolve around this. In the Rahman fan community, there are fans who are well-versed in the technical (or "formal"?) dimensions of music and go to great lengths to explain them to other fans. Needless to say, this expertise becomes a form of value and these fans quickly become leaders within the community.

In fact, film music's middlebrow status allows elite youth to claim a fan identity and belong in a fan community partly because it is not associated with lower class, lower caste, and "political" fan communities that form around film stars in south India.

NB: That's interesting, I don't see much of this in the music fandoms I spend time in. In fact, I think it's pretty unusual to see any fans talking about the formal elements that make songs sound as they do. When I read Daniel Levitin's (author of This Is Your Brain on Music) claim that the appeal of pop music is in the timbre, I had no idea what "timbre" meant, and I'd bet that most pop music fans don't. Musicians can have those conversations, but fans that aren't musicians rarely can, and I think this is very different from narrative where fans can not just articulate narrative conventions, but are often using them to write their own fan fictions. There is no music fandom equivalent of fan fiction except fan fiction about musicians, but that's a total form shift.

But I think it makes perfect sense to extend a fandom approach to "high" culture, and to look at how 'high culture' sorts of discussion permeate 'low culture' fandoms. On my blog, for instance, I've written about wine fandom and how that doesn't normally get considered "fandom" but that people who are into wine act just like people who are into a TV show or movie -- they hold gatherings, they read supplementary materials, they go on pilgrimages to wineries, they wear winery t-shirts and baseball caps, they try to connect with others who are into the same things (there are now at least 3 online wine-based social networking sites). I knew so many people who made pilgrimages to see Wagner's Ring Trilogy performed in its entirety on consecutive nights by the Chicago Opera.

Communities of Sound

NB: Another way in which the text at stake raises very different questions with music is how the social relationships formed around music differ from those formed around narratives. I love your point above that attachment is "defined in terms of belonging in a community." Music has ties to location in ways stories don't -- as you know! Where narratives have the fan conventions that bring the hardcores together, music has live performance that is integral to its very being and gets everyone from the hardcores to the curious together in place. This is again a huge contrast to, say, the fan con which is only going to get the hardcores together in space. How does music's connection to place affect the fandom that forms around it?

AP: I'm really glad you raised the issue of place.

As I said earlier, fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because film stars in south India have been successful at mobilizing fans along linguistic and regional lines.

Given that the Rahman fan community is first and foremost a community realized online, and that fans bring diverse stakes and affiliations to bear on their participation, mobilization along axes of caste or language is, at a basic level, rendered structurally impossible. For example, fans based in Malaysia, for whom participation in the Rahman fan community is part of a larger process of claiming a Tamil ethnic identity, share little in common with second-generation Indian-Americans for whom dancing to a remixed Rahman song at a club speaks to a very different set of concerns. Focusing our attention on the realm of film music thus allows us to challenge the romanticization of fan culture as subaltern politics. The realm of film music fandom forces us to acknowledge other ways of being a fan and modes of belonging in fan communities.

Of course, this does pose problems. For instance, members of the Rahman fan community appear unconcerned with questions of class and caste that have been central to fan-based political mobilizations. In the very first interview I conducted, the moderator of the group made it clear that the Rahman fan community shared nothing in common with "rowdy" fan associations and went on to remark: "we're online, not on the streets!"

NB: I think one has to really stretch the definition of "politics" to argue it's an important component of the fandoms in which I spend time, but place is core. One of the topics I've been intrigued by is the role of online fans and fan communities in taking music out of place. For instance, in the Swedish indie music scene, outside of MySpace (and arguably there to an extent) the work of exporting this cultural product is being taken on by (often unpaid) fans in America, England, France, and other countries. Songs that would never be heard outside of Sweden, and might not even get heard in Sweden, are getting international audiences through mp3 blogs and online webzines devoted to that (and the broader Scandinavian) scene. Online fandom is spreading music well beyond its locations of origin on an unprecedented scale, but their place-based nature remains an important component. In terms of the individualizing function of music fandom, being able to identify with a foreign music scene is great - I could frame myself as a big fan of local music (and I've done so at other points in life), but being a Kansan who strongly self-identifies as a Swedish indie fan has a lot more potential to start conversations and allows me a lot more potential to turn local friends on to bands they'd otherwise never hear. And on the other side of that, having an online community of people who are into bands as obscure as these are in America allows me to continuously find new music and to get in-depth expertise on the bands I fall in love with. Many fans in this particular fandom are far more likely to check out a new band if they are Swedish than not, regardless of where they live themselves.

Relationship Building

AP: Relationship building is definitely an interesting issue. Fans of A. R. Rahman have positioned themselves very clearly as a grassroots marketing team. Some of them have business degrees and work as consultants, a large number work in the IT industry, and they've taken it upon themselves to figure out new ways of distributing Rahman's music, tackling digital piracy and p2p sharing, and so on. Rahman, for his part, has acknowledged these fans' efforts and has begun collaborating with them on a range of projects.

In the Indian mediascape, these new kinds of relationships between fans and producers haven't received much attention. And it would be fair to say that producers are yet to figure out ways to tap into the vast space of participatory culture that has emerged online. Fans are being courted, but only because their serve as information hubs. As I see it, talent competitions on TV are the only site where fans are able to strike up conversations with music directors, playback singers, lyricists, and others in the industry.

NB: I see a lot of norms about sharing in music fan communities, most of which prohibit fan distribution of anything that can be purchased except in the context of mp3 blogs, which often operate with the tacit approval of labels. But as I say, fans are certainly acting as distributors and publicists.

Another element that's interesting here is the huge boom in online sites built to create social relationship amongst music listeners in the name of music discovery. There are new "Music 2.0" sites launching weekly. With music we have sites that are being built from the ground up to track everything people listen to and make personal connections and music recommendations based on that. That ability to track it all and create collective knowledge algorithmically seems to be operating at a whole other level with music. These sites raise so many questions about the roles of shared taste in relationships. Looking at Last.fm, whether or not a person shares musical taste is the core issue in whether or not someone will "friend" someone they don't already know, but how well does that predict whether they'll have anything else to talk about?

Boys and Girls

NB: Meanwhile, aren't we supposed to be representing some sort of gender divide? Or talking about gender?

AP: I should make it clear right away that the stakes here are very different. Given that fandom has been neglected for the most part by academics who have written on media in India, there is, at this point, little concern about who is writing about fandom. Having said that, I would like to point out that paying attention to the domain of music does create an opportunity to talk about gender and participatory culture.

So far, the spotlight has been on fan communities that meet at street corners, at teashops, or outside cinema halls. Participatory culture, then, has been circumscribed as that defined by working-class (often lower caste) male youth in visible, public spaces. Once again, turning our attention to film music presents a way forward. For both commercial and cultural-political reasons, every new medium - radio, state-owned television, satellite television (MTV-India, STAR, etc.) - has drawn on film music and developed innovative programs. These film music-based radio and television programs have had a large fan following, and women's participation in these sites has been very prominent and visible. I would argue that examining these sites of participatory culture is critical for opening up the discussion on gender and fandom surrounding Indian cinema.

NB: Pop music fandom is so blatantly gendered it barely seems worth laying out just how. Short version: girl fans want to sleep with the bands, boys want to be them. (I wrote a longer piece about this here.)

It seems like gender is being taken in a couple of ways in the discussions in this series thus far. First is a question of authority in the academy -- those studying 'female' ways of doing fandom feeling excluded by more 'masculine' scholars. This is something I just don't identify with at all, and I suspect there are several reasons. One is that I align myself with interpersonal and online communication as my primary research foci, and see fandom as an important and neglected context in which to explore them. The study of personal communication and relationships is gendered female to begin with, so perhaps my internet-based approach is considered techie and therefore gendered more masculine than the norm. I do feel some frustration at the failure of fandom research to adequately address the interpersonal relationships I think are at the core of fandom. Perhaps that is inherently gendered since looking at the fan/fan relationship gets us back to the study of personal relationships which, as I said is gendered female. But in terms of academic authority, I've never felt that my focus on fandom or the way I approach fandom has lessened that.

Gender has also been brought into the question of how people engage texts -- to crudely oversimplify the discussion, girls explore nuance and boys create with a more business sensibility? The idea that an interest in the production/economy of fandom is masculine is again something I have trouble identifying with. I see many gender issues in how men and women engage music and with what consequences, but less in how they are conceptualized (though this gets back to the shortage of fandom research in music to begin with -- there's some, just nowhere close to that around TV). Sometimes I wonder if music fandom is itself so very sexist that anything we'd encounter in the academy seems negligible in contrast!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part One): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Who are we? Aswin Punathambekar: I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Dept of Communication Arts (media and cultural studies) and will be joining the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan this fall term. My research and teaching revolve around globalization, culture industries, and public culture in contemporary India and the South Asian diaspora. These interests were shaped very strongly by my own experiences as an immigrant, and my participation in online fan communities began back in 1999 when I arrived in Athens, Georgia for graduate studies. I made the transition from fan to aca-fan in the Comparative Media Studies program and needless to say, was shaped strongly by Henry's work. Over the next few years, I hope to carve out a space for the study of participatory culture within the larger field of scholarship on Bollywood and other domains of south asian media.

Nancy Baym: I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. I started studying fans when I became involved with the newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps in the early 1990s, a project that became my dissertation (I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1994) and which finally ended up as the book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. At KU, I teach courses about personal relationships, the internet, and qualitative methodologies. So far this decade, most of my published work has centered on the topics of online interactions in personal relationships and qualitative methodological issues in internet research (a book co-edited with Annette Markham on this topics is forthcoming from Sage Publications). Recently, though, I've turned my attention

back to online fandom, with my blog called, oddly enough, Online Fandom

(www.onlinefandom.com) and a just-published article about Swedish independent music fans

(http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/baym/index.html). I'm also just finishing up data collection for a study about 'friending' on Last.fm.

AP: I approach fan communities surrounding films and film music as a particularly compelling site for examining relationships among cinema, consumption, and citizenship in contemporary Indian public culture. And the specific group that I've been interested in is one that has cohered around a music director (A. R. Rahman) who composes music for Hindi-language Bollywood films, regional language films (Tamil and Telugu), diasporic films (e.g. Deepa Mehta's trilogy - Fire, Earth, and Water), and international projects like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams. This is an online fan community, and brings together hundreds of Rahman fans from around the world (www.arrahmanfans.com). While a majority of the participants are of Indian origin, a growing number of non-Indian fans have joined this group over the past few years (although they lurk for the most part).

Given the immense popularity of film stars in India and in a number of countries with large diasporic South Asian populations (Fiji, Guyana, U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.), and the large number of online and offline fan communities that have emerged around these stars, the question that comes up right away is: why do I choose to focus on a music director?

Raising this question leads me to a broader one: What new questions can we raise by shifting the focus away from films/TV shows/stars onto the realm of music?

NB: I like that your focus positions you as a bit of an outsider to what seems to be the dominant domain of contemporary fandom research, American and British television fans. I've done plenty of work about American TV fans in my 1990s analyses of soap opera fans on the internet, but have always come at fandom from the outside in that my interests are first and foremost about how people create the social structures that organize them into personal relationships and communities, and how they use the internet in these processes. So I would place myself within internet studies before fandom, and that brings with it some different assumptions and approaches.

Fandom is a fascinating context to look at these things, though, because fans are always at the leading edge of using the internet in creative ways, and because fandom is a site where interpersonal and mass communication merge, which is often one of the internet's defining qualities. Like you, my attention has turned in recent years to music fandom. I've been working on projects about the role of online fans in the export of Swedish independent music and also the nature of "friendship" in the "social music" site Last.fm. With a few exceptions, fan studies has little to say about music fandom and I'm not convinced it's the same beast (or menagerie) as other fandoms, so yeah, what new questions get raised by looking at music?

The Text

NB: One question is simply (or not) the nature of "the text." I find when I read much of current fandom studies, I have trouble making the connection between what they're talking about as 'text' with many of the phenomena that interest me. I wonder how well you think all that theory that's been built up around people engaging narrative fits music fandom? It's particularly interesting in your case since you are looking at music that is tied to a narrative in film.

AP: For more than a decade now, Indian cinema has served as a key site for academics to re-think and rework our understanding of narrative, spectatorship, and participatory culture. I certainly see my work as contributing to this larger body of work (for a good introduction, take a look at the opening essay by Bhrigupati Singh here [http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525.htm]). And you're right in pointing out that film music complicates the boundaries and definitions of a "text."

As is well known, songs have been an integral part of commercial films since the early 1930s when sound was introduced. While songs serve a variety of narrative functions within the film, it is critical to recognize that film songs have a well-defined circuit of production, circulation and consumption that is both tied to yet independent of the films themselves.

Film songs are released 3-4 months before a film hits the theatres, and are tied closely to publicity/marketing strategies. Clips of songs serve as teasers on numerous television channels, songs are played endlessly on FM radio, they are available on music websites such as musicindiaonline.com and raaga.com, and they are also circulated as cell phone ringtones. Songs circulate in the public realm long after the film itself does and song compilations (playback singer, music director, time period, actor/actress, etc.) sell exceedingly well. There are a large number of television programs around film music, and over the past decade, talent shows have become immensely popular (,em>Indian Idol, for e.g.).

The commercial value of film music has also meant that music directors and playback singers have occupied a key role in the industry from the very beginning. Film songs, then, are associated with music directors and playback singers just as much as with actors/actresses lip-synching on the screen (Neepa Majumdar uses the term "aural stardom" to argue that we need to think about ways to conceptualize stardom in the absence of glamour and the "invisibility" of playback singers).

All of these elements shape discussions in a site like the Rahman fan community. The "text," to put it simply, is never limited to a specific film or even to A. R. Rahman. Now, it is not enough to merely point out that the film song as a "text" is very different when compared to a film or a television show, or that the music director or playback singer is a different kind of "star." In the context of this discussion, perhaps the more relevant question is: in what ways do fan practices surrounding film music differ from those that cohere around, say, a film star? And for me, this involves challenging the dominant narrative of fan-politics in the Indian context.

Fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because of its explicitly political nature. In south India, male film stars mobilize their fan base to organize electoral campaigns and run for political office. Fan clubs are, quite often, grassroots political organizations (and almost entirely a male space). Online spaces like the Rahman fan community have been ignored for no reason other than their seemingly non-political nature. Focusing on music, then, opens up an opportunity to develop other stories of fan culture (more on this later in the discussion).

NB: I guess one piece of my answer would be that the three minute pop song as "text" challenges many of the notions ingrained in fandom study. What does it mean to fill in the blanks of a text that tells no story to begin with or - in contrast to film scores - has no connections to stories? There are concepts ("neutrosemy" seems to be an important one), that kind of get there, but I'm not sure that treating meaning making as the core fandom process works as well for music fandom as it does for narrative fandom. It seems that music is in many cases a much more direct emotional experience than narrative.

Again, I find myself shifting away from the dominant focus of fan studies - how do fans engage texts as collectives - and toward what I think are much more central issues in music fandom: how do people use music as a means of constructing their own identities and connecting with others? These are not untouched issues in fan studies, but they seem to get marginalized by what I'd consider a more literary/cultural studies approach that foregrounds what they do and don't do in engaging the text itself.

Certainly some music fans concern themselves with lyrics, but for all the years I've been following music as part of various fandoms, I can probably count on one hand the number of discussions about what the words to a song mean that really went anywhere. In most of the fandoms I follow, lyrical discussion never gets past "and the words are clever" or "the lyrics stink, but the hooks are so good you can overlook it" or "I guess their drummer's suicide really influenced these lyrics." These just aren't rich discussion topics. There's much more discussion of extra-textual issues like recording dates and information, discography construction, concert chronology construction, arranging trades or torrents of concert recordings, and so on. Even when you look at a site that is specifically discussing the songs, such as Pop Songs 07 where every REM song is being blogged, the discussion is mostly about the personal experiences people associated with a song rather than what Michael Stipe meant in those words or what key the song is written in. To an extent, that's meaning making, of course, but it's quite different from what I saw with soap fans.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Ten, Part Two): Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson

"Bardies and Bachmaniacs" Fans vs. Elitist Bastards

JG: Roberta's chapter in Fandom is in our "high culture fandom" section, and is a polemic calling for more studies of "middlebrow" and "highbrow" fans. This was a section that I really wanted in the book, since I think that fan studies could really get a lot out of studying a broader range of fandoms. So we'll kick off this second part by discussing why we think it's time to go looking for such fandoms.

My first two degrees were in English and Postcolonial Lit, but when I moved into media and cultural studies, I was somewhat shocked to see that the field had apparently negotiated a binding divorce settlement with English Lit. English took the Lit, and media and cultural studies took audience studies, and a court had clearly enforced the lack of visitation rights quite firmly. I wonder though why we can't do more to examine the audiences, and in particular, the fans, of Lit. To run with my divorce analogy, it's as if I've now grown up with media and cultural studies, but would like to know a bit more about my birth father (I'll gender Lit male since high culture is often seen as the more proper and masculine, and popular culture as peripheral and feminine). This springs from no animosity to my mother - I love television - but I don't know why I need to choose between them. Why is it, do you think, Roberta, that the move to popular culture has often by nature enforced a separation from Lit, classical music, opera, and other elements of supposed "high culture"? We've used this conversation to discuss boundaries around fandom, and this one seems to me one of the big barriers, yet one that has limited how we think of fans, and of how popular culture works in general.

RP: Now there's a huge question. You and I have a Polonius-like tendency to ramble on a bit so as Hamlet's dad says (speaking of birth fathers) 'brief let me be.' I think there are two reasons for the divorce between lit crit and its high culture siblings, one ideological and the other structural. As with fan studies, cultural studies started as a polemic, an attack on all things high culture that were seen as complicit with dominant hegemony. Now even to suggest that high culture might be worthy of study is seen as treasonous. This, coupled with the weakening of high culture as the central repository of a culture's identity and knowledge, means that fewer scholars are ever exposed to high culture, but are saturated with the popular. I think today's young scholars simply feel uncomfortable studying high culture because then they'd have to consume it and they don't have either the intertextual frame or the proper register in which to do so. It would mean attending a concert where you weren't supposed to get to your feet, hold a lighter aloft and rock gently to the music.

This is of course a bit of a polemic itself, but you get the point. What really bothers me though, is how short sighted this is. We know full well that you can't study 'blackness' without studying 'whiteness' or 'femininity' without 'masculinity.' You have to interrogate the dominant that structures the subordinate. While high culture is no longer dominant it's still a structuring force in a marketplace that increasingly blurs the lines between high and low culture in terms of production and marketing, or at least that uses the same tactics of marketing with the one as with the other. There are lots of potentially fascinating case studies out there, such as Britain's Classic FM, or classical radio lite as opposed to the more traditional BBC Radio Three (which has itself just gone through another redraft to make it more 'accessible'). I get into cabs where the drivers are listening to Classic FM and always attempt to strike up a conversation about why. Then there's the weirdness of the traditional Last Night of the Proms in which classical music (and some not so classical) gets appropriated in an orgiastic nationalist frenzy. And of course Shakespeare's all over the place, something that the lit crit types are indeed writing about. But I think that many cultural studies scholars, among them the fan studies set, would prefer to cling to their stereotypes of high culture consumers as remote and elite because it makes life easier.

Unitary Fandoms vs. Multi-Fandoms

RP: You ask why you have to chose between the high and the low. Of course you don't and I suspect that many other people don't as well. Most people undoubtedly range across media and cultural forms, intense fans of some and casual consumers of others. I'd like to see fan studies address the issue of multiple or serial consumption, if you will.

JG: Yes, perhaps this lack of discussion of multiple or serial consumption has also helped keep high culture fandoms "under wraps." If I accounted for all of my fandoms, I'd have to get to some Lit, art, classical music, etc. sooner or later, and I suspect many of us would. Heck, somewhere down the road, this may even be a good way to ensure that Lit and so forth still are engaged with by "those young people today." Both in the academy and outside, fandoms often demand corresponding anti-fandoms (I'm glossing Vivi Theodoropoulou here, by the way), as is most evident in sports fandom: you could never really be a fan of both Arsenal and Man U, the Yankees and the Red Sox, etc., right? But why not? Of course, sports teams actually compete, but how about Star Wars fans who are asked to dislike Trek, or Pullman fans who feel the need to establish his "excellence" on the back of J.K. Rowling's "mediocrity"? And this goes for media more generally, since being a fan of television, for instance, is often assumed to require a suspicion of, if not outright anti-fandom of, Literature and other high culture. We're asked to pick our team, so to speak. However, if bridges and continuums between fandoms were established, this may be more possible, less problematic. Hard methodologically, but a worthy goal. (Matt Hills has a neat piece on "cyclical fandom," though, in American Behavioral Scientist, and I'm sure others have done some work on this too?)

And, of course, Girls vs. Boys

JG: To return to gender, there are some fascinating questions to be asked of high cultural fandoms, seeing that high cultural genres like Lit, Art, and classical music have historically been considerably more male-dominated than the still very male-dominated fields of popular culture. So we've seen, for instance, how female fans co-opt or read around romance, soap opera, science fiction, or teen dramas, but how does this happen when the object of fandom is Milton, or Wagner, or Brueghel? And so on.

RP: You're absolutely right about 'team picking', athough Pullman is simply better than Rowling and there's no question to me of Star Trek's superiority to Star Wars. I'm being a bit facetious here, but one of the reasons I dislike Star Wars so much, as well as Bored of the Rings, for that matter, is because I see them as very masculinist. All those endless battles and so few girls! And of course, Pullman's hero is a girl. So my choice of fandoms is gendered. And certainly my reading strategies in some of my other fandoms are gendered. I value the Holmes canon for the friendship between Holmes and Watson and read Patrick O'Brien for the friendship between Aubrey and Maturin, skipping all the technical naval stuff. Really interesting question, then, about gendered reading strategies around Milton, Wagner or Brueghel, maybe even a question that might inspire some within the fan studies community to look at high culture.

Not sure you're right, however, about high culture always being constructed as masculine. In American popular culture, I think high culture is often constructed as other, the realm of the female, the effeminate male, and even the evil foreigner. There are of course certain exceptions, like my beloved Captain Picard whose fondness for high culture makes him the consummate civilized European, but against him there are numerous suave, slightly sexually suspect males who revel in their art collections or listen to classical music. But of course popular culture too has been stigmatized as female. There are real complexities here that need to be explored, not only in terms of the contemporary but of the historical.

To wrap this up (for now), I think the central theme in our discussion has been about boundary blurring - between fans and academics, fans and producers, fans and non-fans, fans of high culture and fans of low culture and, getting back to the inspiration for this whole exercise, boys and girls. Personally I'm always more interested in blurred boundaries than in binary oppositions (despite having staked some claims above to one or the other sides of those boundaries). It would be great if these debates could set a new agenda for fan studies more sensitive to these blurrings.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Ten, Part One): Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson

PART ONE "Why We're Not 'Fans'"

JG: Roberta and I agreed to work together for this "Détente" since we're both in the peculiar position of being considered by many to be "in" fan studies, yet neither of us are really fans. Or, rather, we're not fans in the sense of the word as it is often used within fan studies, and so we thought it might be provocative to discuss why this is, and what sort of fans - if at all - we are. This discussion led to some testing of the boundaries of fan studies, and to discussion of some of its governing binaries.

Fans vs. Non-Fans

JG: To "out" myself, I've never written fanfic, I don't make fanvids or machinimaa, I have only posted on fansites a few times, I haven't been to a convention, I am not a member of any discernible fan group, I've told people that I would wear a proper Boba Fett costume if they got one for me, but otherwise I don't have fan-related clothing (save for a Simpsons tie bought for me by my parents), and I suck at most fan trivia games. As a kid, I played with Star Wars toys a lot, and was definitely a fan of Star Wars and The Muppet Show, but these days I don't conform to a common definition of "fan" within fan studies, since I'm not a member of a fan community per se. I don't have problems with those types of fandom ("some of my best friends are fans"), but that's just not me.

But I do have strong engagements with texts, and these fuel much of my more involved conversations with people, and a fair bit of my daily "thought time." So I want to call myself a fan. But I'm often made aware of a hard perimeter around "community-based" fandom that isn't so keen on letting the likes of me in. The problem is, though, that I don't just "like" Lost, Buffy, The Simpsons, The West Wing, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Michael Ondaatje, and William Shakespeare. I like other texts, like CSI, for instance, or Harry Potter: if they're there and I'm there, I'll bite. If I miss them, I don't mind. But mere affect or terms such as "follower" don't cut it for my fandoms. And some of my own work into audiences is driven by an interest in this big gap that often exists in ethnographic work between "audiences" (often pulled in at random, or the researcher's students) and "fans" in the community-based, "creative" sense that fan studies often dictates. Fan studies at times monopolizes both audience studies (in the media/cultural studies tradition, that is, not the alligator-clips-and-magic-dials sense) and affect, but that leaves a lot of us unrepresented. And we'll get to this in due time, but I'm not convinced that the "us" in that sentence is gendered.

RP: Since you've begun by 'outing' yourself as a non-fan, I should probably do the same. I suspect that on the fandom continuum I'm closer to being a fan than you are, but might not be considered as such by some within fan studies, who insist on community and production as paramount markers of the true fan. My longest standing fandom is Sherlock Holmes, which began when I was in early adolescence, peaked when I lived in New York City and became actively involved in local Sherlockian scion societies, and lapsed when I moved to my first job in Pennsylvania. When I moved to New York to do my doctorate at NYU, I became a member of the national female Sherlockian society, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. I'm still in touch with a core group of Sherlockians whom I count amongst my closest and dearest friends - my life would be immeasurably poorer without them. I was probably then a 'real' fan by any definition: I attended meetings, wore my scion badge and even wrote Sherlockian scholarship and pastiches (fanfic to the rest of you). I've even been published in the premiere Sherlockian publication, the Baker Street Journal, in an article that claimed that Holmes was Jewish. I delighted in the companionship of fellow enthusiasts but even then felt a bit uneasy about some of the over-enthusiasts. For whatever reason, however, I ceased any active affiliation with local groups after leaving New York.

Of course, I'm also by some definitions a Star Trek fan. I've been watching the show since TOS premiered in 1966 and it's been a constant thread in my life both in terms of consumption of texts and of my social life - many of my closest friends share an interest in Trek. One of these close friends is Maire Messenger-Davies with whom I'm now co-authoring my Star Trek book. Maire adamantly resists being called a fan and to some extent I share her reservations because I'm doing research on Trek within an academic context which I see as somewhat different from doing research as a fan (and I know there's a whole long debate there that we don't have time to get into). My resistance to the fan label probably stems from the fact that Trek is both the most high-profile and the most demonized of all fandoms, and it's still difficult in some circles to have academic credibility if you're working on it. I've been teased by numerous colleagues about this research.

In terms of outing, I have to admit that I don't really feel comfortable with the 'aca-fan' designation; it seems a too easy conflation of separate spheres of activity designed to get us off the guilt hook. At any rate, while for awhile I happily attended Sherlockian gatherings, I never went to Trek cons or to any SF cons. But, having started on the Trek book, I did go to an SF con in Cardiff. It was there that I saw for the first time grown-ups dressed in Starfleet uniforms, which made me quite uneasy. The next time I saw grown-ups in these uniforms was when I spent a few days wandering around the Paramount lot doing interviews and had the privilege of spending a night on the set of Star Trek: Nemesis. Didn't have a problem with that (other than discovering that the comm badges just velcro on and that Captain Picard's phaser is plastic), but that's probably because I'm personally more interested in producers than in fans. Having read the previous entries in the debate, that interest in producers seems to be one of the complaints of the 'fan-girl' contingent, who see it as a betrayal. That might be an issue we could take up. If I wanted to be polemical about it, I might say that it's a lot easier to study fans than it is to study producers, and that the focus on fandom has kept the field from really interrogating the processes of production, in the way that Henry and others are now beginning to. Obviously however, these areas aren't mutually exclusive.

Aca-Fans vs. Non-Aca-Fans

RP: Like you, I'd consider myself a fan of lots of things; some sport, some television, and lots of high culture - Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, etc. My most staunchly non-fan friend, William Uricchio, Henry's MIT colleague and staunch non-fan, thinks I'm a real fan. I have a 'fannish' disposition, he says, by which he means that I have a strong and continuing affective relationship to lots of stuff. So here I am betwixt and between - non-fan to fans and fan to non-fans. I don't think that anybody within the fan studies community would want to study me. That's fine because I don't like being studied - that's why I resist the conflation of academic and fan because it gives up the distance that academic implies. Perhaps we should call my part of this dialogue 'confessions of a non-aca-fan'. My position may be offensive to some but it certainly raises issues of the psychology of the individual (as Jeeves would say) which should perhaps be of greater import in fan studies.

This takes us back to where you started, Jonathan, raising definitions of fandom. My above reflections are all quite personal, but between us we can offer two 'auto-ethnographies' which are in some ways very similar and in others quite different -- a useful starting point for our interrogation. For example, you told me on the phone that you've never gotten any stick for researching The Simpsons. Why do think this is the case? What does this reflect about the 'mundane' world's perception of fandom, particularly amongst academics? And why don't you call yourself a Simpsons fan? And if you would call yourself one, how do you handle being a fan and a scholar? Are you an 'aca-fan'?

JG: I'd say, yes I'm a Simpsons fan, and yes I'm an aca-fan ... and as with you, the non-fans out there call me a fan too. And the aca-fan label in particular intrigues me because I'm part of a generation that grew up saturated in media, and while many of media studies' founders didn't watch much television or film [announcement: Roberta is blissfully not one of these people], writing books about things that in effect they didn't know enough about, I think that we need to insist on the acceptability of studying the mediasphere from inside, in part to normalize affective relationships. Someone very close to Neil Postman told me that he secretly loved some television (The Simpsons), and you can see occasional lapses in others' media-hating that are presented guiltily, and I'd like us to be able to move beyond the guilt into honesty.

That said, maybe if I'm not allowed to be a fan, I can't be an aca-fan either?

As for studying The Simpsons, I found it amusing how it was the exception for so many academics. But I'm also somewhat bothered by how it got let off the hook - yes, it's great stuff, but why should it and The Daily Show be the only fandoms to get a pass? (And let me interject that I'm not at all convinced that this is gendered: there are many many female fans of The Simpsons. Lisa is, after all, one of the best female characters in television history). I'm sure its non-serial structure allows many to see its fandom as less stereotypically "lost in the other world," and Simpsons fan groups are quite different in kind from other fan groups, given its non-seriality. Again, I doubt they'd be considered real fans by some in fan studies. But this points again (to me) to the exclusivity of the term "fan": I worry that we in media studies, and certainly society as a whole, aren't getting a full picture of what either fandom is or what it means to engage with television when Trek, Lost, and All My Children fans become metonymic of fandom as a whole. Of course, though, you've studied Star Trek (and Batman), so I'm interested in how you see the aca-fan/fan/non-fan rubric play out from that side of the barbed wire fencing.

RP: I absolutely agree with you about studying media from the inside and share your distaste for the Neil Postmans of this world. There's a whole American tradition of studying media, primarily television, in which you have to hate it to analyse it. That's the basic assumption of the very influential field of cultivation studies in mass comm., spearheaded by the very important, but ultimately unsatisfactory work of George Gerbner. The basic assumption of this approach is that television is bad for you - makes you stupid, makes you fearful. That's why the pioneering work of the first generation of fan studies, by people like Henry, is so important. It made it okay to like media content, and even to champion it. As many have subsequently pointed out, this polemical approach became a bit too celebratory and the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. But we can't gainsay the accomplishments here. Nor can we so easily dismiss the concept of the 'aca-fan' as I am guilty of doing above. But my uneasiness stems from some lingering attachment to the concept of objectivity - is it possible to step far enough away from the object of study to be critical as well as analytical? You mention Batman above. I felt capable of studying this object because, aside from some nostalgia for my misspent youth, I no longer had a strong affective relationship with it. Star Trek is different, since it has been an important part of my identity for so long and I still worry that my book will end up as a paean to the industry.

Fans vs. Producers

RP: Speaking of the industry, I must admit that I have some sympathy for producers who are a bit dismissive of fans as a small segment of the audience. Many of the Star Trek producers I interviewed said that they couldn't cater simply to the fans, but had to think about the larger audience. Those who were fans even said that sometimes, for this reason, their own fandom could get in the way of what they were doing. And this takes us back to your original point about the definition of fandom and what we're actually studying. I again absolutely agree with you that we need to broaden our focus to include something other than hardcore fans as defined by hardcore fan studies. For this reason, my Star Trek book will have a chapter on audiences but not a chapter on fans (and not only because the world hardly needs any more about that particular fandom!).

JG: To me, an exciting development in recent fan and non-fan studies is the interest in fan relations with producers, since it holds the potential to break both the exclusivity of fandom as singular sphere, and the exclusivity of production as singular sphere. Kristina Busse has expressed concern about this shift, worried that the "fanboys" are getting excited about meeting the stars and producers, so to speak, and leaving the "scribbling women" once more in the margins. This certainly is a potential problem. But perhaps we might also see how fandom and production are much more closely wed. For instance, authorship has long been idealized as starkly new and original expression, when in fact it always begins with some form of fandom. If we could see television creators, for instance, as fans, this would wed production and consumption more convincingly. And if we could see how production requires fandom, at multiple levels (I think here of Terry O'Quinn actively posting on The Fuselage until he needed time away to work out his own idea of his character, an obvious sign that the fans were influencing his construction of John Locke), then fandom can't be ignored or shunned as much as it continues to be, both inside the academy and outside.

My own vision for fan studies is that it should invade mainstream media studies, exploding silly myths about production, text, and policy as being divorced from affect. Aswin Punathambekar's chapter in our collection, for instance, makes a great argument that Bollywood studies need to account for fans. Production cultures also need to account for fans, as Derek Kompare's recent work is saying. And so do legalities, as Rebecca Tushnet's work argues. I think some are wary of moving fan studies into the center since they're invested in fan studies being a cool kid's club on the side (and hey, we are the cool kids, right?), and they're (rightfully) concerned about who and what will be left behind, but at least a vanguard needs to be sent, since ultimately this is about more than just fans: it's about media studies as a whole. The field needs a broad, not exclusive fan studies, so let's give it one. To reintroduce gender to the discussion, if fan studies has always been seen as somewhat feminine and feminized, that's all the more reason why we need to establish more of a beachhead in the often painfully masculine and masculinized field of media and communication studies.

RP: You're right that fandom and production are closely wed, just as to some degree fandom and academia are closely wed (after all what are Shakespeare scholars but Bardies?). But closely wed doesn't mean co-extensive. They still remain different fields of cultural production. Moving from one side of the screen to the other necessarily gives the Brannon Braga's and Russell T. Davies's of the world a different perspective. They can't just indulge their fannish impulses but have to think about the larger audiences of non-fans, followers, enthusiasts, what have you. Both these guys had to recharge long-standing franchises and to do so they necessarily had to appeal to the core fan base through references that newbies wouldn't get. But they also had to attract the newbies and they couldn't do this by disappearing up their own metaverses. Braga failed miserably with Enterprise and Davies succeeded magnificently - he's made Dr. Who mandatory tea-time viewing for a whole new generation that previously didn't know Gallifrey from gadfly. Another danger of overly blurring these fields of cultural production is that the producers still ultimately have the power. O'Quinn can decide not to read fan posts precisely because he, together with the writers and the other production personnel, is given the final responsibility for deciding how to characterize/play John Locke.

That's why it's so important to study production, because without producers there would be no fans. But this does raise the issue of the starstruck fanboy, or perhaps fangirl in my case, even though I'd resist the label. I have to admit that for a life-long Star Trek fan wandering around the Paramount lot and seeing people in Starfleet uniforms was simply amazing and that Maire and I did spend a bit of time behaving like giggling teenagers. On the other hand, we had extensively prepared for each of our interviews and when the time came tried to behave like professional academics, if only out of respect for the very professional production personnel whom we were meeting. We also made it clear that, while we liked, even loved Trek, we weren't intending to write an uncritical celebration. So I guess I'm saying that it is indeed possible to be both fan and academic. You can have a hybrid identity that involves shifting between the two but you can't perform both simultaneously. Not sure whether being a boy or a girl makes any difference here.

You say that we need to establish a fan studies beachhead on the masculinised field of media and communications studies, but of course these guys have always studied audiences (cf. Gerbner above). If I can use another spatial metaphor, I think we need to establish a two way bridge between the two fields. Media and communications studies needs to acknowledge the important contributions of fan studies, particularly with regard to affect (and with regard to their own affect toward media texts). But fan studies needs to consider more general audiences. And this brings us back to where we started, seeking a broader definition of fan and fan studies. So over to you!

JG: This seems like a good place to end Part One, actually (though I'd mention quickly that Gerbner wasn't studying fans - he was pathologizing them). In Part Two, we can talk about high culture.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part Three)

In many ways,Lord of the Rings turned out to be a watershed project in terms of the relations of movie producers to their fans. Why do you think Jackson was so successful in building partnerships with his fans? What do you see as the benefits of this relationship? What lessons do you think the film industry has taken away from this experience?

Tolkien's novel had a fairly large fan base already, though it could only form a relatively small portion of the world audience such an expensive film needed. The fact that existing fans and non-readers both needed to be appealed to forced New Line to create an innovative and carefully planned internet campaign. Obviously they were very successful, but they had a lot of help from fan websites.

Peter is quite amazing in his understanding of fans and his ability to communicate with them. Back in 1998, when New Line announced the production, Peter's decision (not approved by the studio) to do Q&A sessions online with the fans was brilliant. Many people who were aghast that a splatter-film director was making LOTR got won over. He was also the one who persuaded New Line to allow big sites like TheOneRing.net and Ain't It Cool News to have limited access to the filmmaking. The online "Production Diaries" that he created for King Kong took his approach a big step further. Other directors are now imitating him and going online to communicate with the fans.

Peter has often declared himself to be a fan who makes movies for other fans. I don't believe that's just a publicity ploy.

One hallmark of your book is that you treat the cultural productions of fans alongside those of the commercial producers as all part of the story of the Lord of the Rings films. Can you describe how you approached fan culture in this book? Do you consider yourself to be a LOTR fan? Why or why not?

From early on, when I was first trying to outline the chapters for the book, I knew that the internet campaign would be one of the main topics. I took a broad view of what "campaign" meant, and I included fan sites as well as the official and quasi-official ones. Ultimately I got so much cooperation from various webmasters that the internet chapter became too long, and I divided it in two: one dealing with the official sites and the fan sites that New Line cooperated with and the second dealing with wholly unofficial fan sites and fan activities.

Given how vast the internet is and how many LOTR sites there were, I coped with it by creating a typology of LOTR-related websites and doing case studies of each.

Since I couldn't interview anyone at New Line, I didn't have access to Gordon Paddison, who ran the official online campaign. He had, however, written up a long case study himself in a textbook called Internet Marketing (which no one writing about LOTR seems to know about). McKellen.com unexpectedly served as a sort of quasi-official site. Ian McKellen already had this site, and when he started adding LOTR content, New Line wasn't entirely happy, but they didn't try to stop him. I interviewed Ian and his webmaster Keith Stern, so that site gets a case study. I also interviewed three of the four co-founders of TheOneRing.net and Harry Knowles and Quint of Ain't It Cool News for other case studies.

For the second internet chapter, I interviewed one fan webmaster, Lilith of Sherwood, and got to know her fairly well. She lives in Chicago, but I couldn't really travel all over the world doing face-to-face interviews with all the fans I mention, so I depended on email for the rest.

To learn about fanfiction and fanart, I obviously visited archives, but I also joined Yahoo! groups. (Luckily for me LiveJournals and fanfilms were still largely a thing of the future, which helped make all this doable.) I would join a dozen or so, stay on each for a few months, and move on to others. I communicated via email with some of the moderators and contributors. I also attended one major fan convention, the One Ring Celebration (ORC) during its first year, 2005. All that allowed me to get a pretty good sense of fan creativity and interests, I believe.

Given that you have pioneered the study of fan culture, I know you've done comparable sorts of things. But I'm amazed that so few of the people in media studies who claim to be interested in reception have done much with the internet. I've just reviewed a couple of anthologies of essays on LOTR for the annual Tolkien Studies (Volume IV, which came out in May), and the approaches to fans reflected in them are largely condescending and very limited. Questionnaires and face-to-face interviews are used, which I think would yield a very artificial notion of how fans behave among themselves.

I have obviously been a fan of the books for years. Like many long-time fans, I was dubious about the films and went to Fellowship with a fear that I would hate it. And, like many others, I found that I enjoyed it. Indeed, at the end I was ready to sit through it again immediately. Not that I agreed with all the changes that were made in the script, and there were many, great and small. The writers themselves have said that no fan would approve every change. So, yes, I'm a fan of the films as well. I don't collect nearly all the products or go to fan conventions (except for the one I mentioned, when I was researching the book).

Objectively speaking as a historian, I should be able to do a case study like this one dealing with a film that I don't care for. Realistically, to keep one's enthusiasm and determination up for years, especially in the face of long delays and obstacles, one has to be able to live with a film for years, and that means you have to like it.

Much of your work on Hollywood cinema has emphasized "typical" films and norms. Yet, in this case, you are devoting an entire book to a single film/franchise, something you haven't done since your initial study of Ivan the Terrible. Do you see the Lord of the Rings films as "typical" or "exceptional"? What can you tell us about the place of

such an extended case study of the production process within your larger body of work on contemporary and classical filmmaking?

This book is quite different from what I've written before, it's true.

Still, as you suggest, it does fit into one thread running through my work. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema (written with David Bordwell and Janet Staiger), I examined the original formulation of classical guidelines for style and narrative that was done in the pre-1920 period. That book as a whole stopped its coverage in 1960, mainly because of industry changes rather than because we thought the classical approach to filmmaking ended.

Storytelling in the New Hollywood was my attempt to examine classical narrative principles as they continue to exist in modern American studio films. That covered the period from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In a sense, The Frodo Franchise follows on and comes up to contemporary Hollywood, even though I barely touch on the question of whether or not LOTR fits my model of narrative structure. But it is an attempt to talk about how industry pressures and the digital revolution have helped shape filmmaking, marketing, and merchandising.

I consider LOTR to be both exceptional and typical. The great Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovski (who from my grad-school days on has influenced my approach tremendously), wanted to write an essay to discuss the concept of delay, or "stairstep construction" as he termed it, in literary narratives. He chose Tristram Shandy as his case study. That's obviously a unique and eccentric work as novels go, but it also uses delay in a very obvious way; it's really the novel's dominant device. Shklovski chose it because of that, because it would be a very clear way of explaining what exists less obviously in all novels. So for him Tristram Shandy was both exceptional and typical.

I took a somewhat similar tack in Storytelling in the New Hollywood. I took films that were successful with the public and respected for their story structure by critics and filmmakers--like Back to the Future. They aren't typical films, but they use typical techniques so skillfully that they display the norms in an ideal way. That is, if we take norms to equal guidelines, then these are typical, because most filmmakers want to make movies that conform to good Hollywood practice. Most would aspire to make films as good as Back to the Future or Amadeus or Hannah and Her Sisters or Tootsie, so the techniques as displayed in those films are normative.

LOTR offers that sort of example, the ideal to which others aspire, but on the level of the franchise rather than the single film. It was not only a mega-hit theatrically, but it provided a model of an effective internet campaign (even though New Line was learning how to do that as they went along, and there were some missteps). Its licensed products were mostly successful, including the video games, products which have become increasingly central to franchises. The DVD supplements set a new standard, one which has not been surpassed. The fact that the film was made at a sophisticated set of facilities that had recently been built in a small producing nation had implications for the future of international filmmaking. Its method of financing, with 26 overseas distributors forced to help finance the film in exchange for the local rights, was an extreme case of how independent films (which LOTR is) are ordinarily financed.

In short, LOTR embodied almost everything that's new and important in Hollywood practice these days. People could read about it and get a pretty good sense of why things are the way they are in Hollywood today, and they could also find out a great deal about a film they love. It's an exceptional example because of its enormous success, but everything I discuss is done on a lesser scale for typical franchises.

Your book also features an extensive discussion of the games which have been developed around the LOTR films. Historically, we would have seen games simply as another form of licensed merchandise around the central film franchise. How central do you think the LOTR games are to our understanding of the franchise as a whole? What kind of creative collaboration emerged between the games company and the film producers?

For the LOTR franchise as a whole, the video games are a big factor. Studios pick up a significant amount of money by licensing tie-in games. It's not as big as one might expect, and I do debunk the persistent myth that on average games now earn more than films. Far from it. Still, games are also a way of extending the income beyond the end of the film and in keeping up interest in case the studio someday wants to make more films in the franchise.

Right now, the LOTR franchise is still alive, even though the films stopped coming out more than three years ago. It's considerably smaller, of course, but products continue to appear. Both Sideshow and Gentle Giant are making new collectible statuettes and busts, Topps continues its trading-card game, and the third CD set of Howard Shore's complete music is yet to be released (alongside a licensed tie-in book about the musical score). On a recent trip I checked some airline bookshops and found rows of the mass-paperback copies of the trilogy volumes with publicity photos from the film on their covers. In terms of income, though, the video games are at the moment the core of the franchise. Electronic Arts initially had the rights to base games on the films, and later it bought the book-based rights as well. Now they can go on making Middle-earth-based games as long as they want to (though the licenses would need to be renewed occasionally).

The collaboration between EA and the filmmakers was unusually close. For most films, very little material is provided to the game designers. In this case there was a person from EA in charge of requesting "assets" (sound clips, photos, helmets, whatever) to be sent to EA's studios. It's hard to remember that in those days actors, particularly stars, seldom did the voices for their game characters. Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, a lot of the actors did one or more LOTR games. I was lucky enough to interview both the EA executive in charge of requesting assets and the Three Foot Six archivist in charge of filling those requests, so I got a good feel for the nuts and bolts of their procedures.

EA handles all its film-based games in the same way now, and I would imagine other big games companies do. So LOTR had a distinct influence in that area.

What insights might your research give into the breakdown of relations between Jackson and his production company? Given the credit given to Jackson to the series success, why are we unlikely to see a Jackson-produced version of The Hobbit any time soon?

Before responding, I should say that have no inside knowledge. I haven't tried to contact any of the people I interviewed back in 2003 and 2004, since I know they wouldn't be at liberty to tell me where things stand now. What I have had to say on this topic and will say here is educated speculation.

Since last October, I've been blogging at intervals of a few months, trying to piece together the hints that appear in interviews and trade-paper stories. Those entries give a more complete rundown than I could possibly do here (and I assume you'll link to them), so I'll be brief.

Editor's Note: Here are Links to the posts she mentions:

The Hobbit Film: New Developments

The Hobbit Film: Faint Signs of Movement

Once more on New Line, Peter Jackson, and The Hobbit

Cautious, that's c-a-u-t-i-o-u-s optimism concerning The Hobbit

Peter's lawsuit has gotten a high profile, of course, especially after Bob Shaye statement in January that Peter would never make The Hobbit while he runs New Line (which Shaye founded in 1967 and has been president or co-president of for its entire existence). But given the creative accounting of Hollywood studios when they're dishing out money to the people who own percentages of the receipts, lawsuits are not uncommon. New Line has dug in its heels about this one, but it also has reason to know that Peter is a very determined man and one of the few individuals who can afford lawyers of the same standing as those working for New Line).

As things stand right now (June 17), we're not likely to see a version of The Hobbit produced by Peter or anybody else soon. Pre-production and script-writing take forever these days, and those processes haven't started, as far as we know. Peter has one card up his sleeve, in that Weta Workshop designed Hobbiton and Rivendell and so on for LOTR, so it would make sense to continue with that company. And though the props and sets belong to New Line, they're in storage in New Zealand as far as I know.

The only director who has been rumored as a possible replacement for Peter, Sam Raimi, has said he would only direct The Hobbit with Peter's approval. New Line says they have the production rights until 1909. Presumably they only need to have launched a project by that time in order to retain the rights. To get a finished film out by then without undue rush would mean they should have started already.

MGM holds the distribution rights and will co-produce. They want Peter to direct. Michael Lynne, co-president of New Line, has recently said that he thinks the legal dispute can be worked out. Saul Zaentz, to whom the rights would revert in 1909, wants Peter to direct. Ian McKellen has strongly hinted he wouldn't play Gandalf again if Peter doesn't direct. Certainly the vast majority of the fans want Peter for The Hobbit. I suspect just about everyone except Shaye wants Peter to direct. His name attached (possibly even just as producer) would be worth at least many tens of millions of dollars. Unless New Line is hiding some terribly big sums of money that they owe Peter, settling with him makes sense. And if they are hiding money, it might well come out anyway if the case goes to court.

So I don't think I'm being wildly optimistic when I say that, knowing what we know now (I'm writing these replies in mid-July), there still seems to me a good chance that Peter will ultimately direct the film, or at least be asked to. Who knows, he might turn it down, though he was enthusiastic enough about it before the lawsuit business turned ugly. And if he were to produce and hand-pick the director, I expect the fans would settle for that. Still, I don't see any obvious reason why he couldn't direct. His Lovely Bones adaptation, which is a relatively modest project, is due out in late 2008, and despite many other possible projects, he hasn't committed to any specific one beyond Bones.

Of course all this could change tomorrow.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began a three part interview with Kristin Thompson, noted film scholar and author of the new book, The Frodo Franchise: Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. For those of you who would like to learn more about Thompson and her work, here are some relevent links:

The publisher's website about the book.

Observations on Film Art, the blog which Thompson runs with David Bordwell.

What can you tell us about how the Lord of the Rings films were conceived?

According to Peter, it happened in the wake of his making The Frighteners. Although that film was not a success--in part due to a bad release date--it had a huge number of CGI shots for its day and allowed Weta Digital to build its computing power up considerably. Peter says that he was looking around for another effects-heavy film to make, and he and Fran came up with LOTR. It's quite a leap from a relatively modest ghost film to an epic trilogy, but that's basically what launched the project.

How was it possible for Peter Jackson, a then little known New Zealand filmmaker, to get control over such a large scale media franchise?

I go into the convoluted history of the filmmaking rights for LOTR in the book, and I don't want to give too much away. But basically Peter had a Miramax connection, because they distributed Heavenly Creatures in the U.S. Saul Zaentz, who owned the LOTR rights at the time Peter got interested, had a Miramax connection because they had rescued his English Patient project when Fox pulled the plug on it. It was far from a speedy process, but Miramax eventually bought the rights for Peter to make LOTR.

Eventually the project went from Miramax to New Line, which had relatively little choice but to take Peter as part of the package, for reasons that I'll leave for people to read in the book.

What long term impact has Jackson's success had upon the film industry in New Zealand? What does this suggest about the impact of globalization on media production?

When I made my first research trip to New Zealand in late 2003, the issue of how LOTR was affecting the country's own small film industry was a somewhat tense one. Some local filmmakers claimed that having a huge production like LOTR and perhaps other epics to follow (at this point the final decision to film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in New Zealand hadn't been made) would drive up the costs of labor and supplies. Another fear was that the industry would become too dependent on these big films coming in from outside the country, a flow which could dry up abruptly if the exchange rate changed or sophisticated post-production facilities were built in other small producing countries.

It was also not clear whether Film New Zealand, the agency that works to bring productions in from abroad would be funded adequately. The scheme for tax rebates for foreign productions hadn't been passed, and so on.

By my next trip, only about seven months later, it was a whole new situation. Film NZ was funded adequately, the Large Budget Screen Production Grant had been approved, and the mood was generally much more upbeat. The large pool of skilled labor left behind by LOTR was also recognized as an enormous asset.

It's a bit soon to gauge the long-term effects, but New Zealand's national feature-film production is probably healthier than it has ever been. Many of the Kiwi directors and other personnel who went abroad for work returned during the making of LOTR. Enough large-budget productions have decided to film in New Zealand and use its state-of-the-art post-production facilities that "Wellywood" seems well-established. I think James Cameron's decision to make much of Avatar in New Zealand was like the final stamp of approval. If one of the top effects-centered directors chooses Weta Digital, surely others will follow.

As to the impact on international media production, The Frodo Franchise ends with a discussion of the growth of these technically sophisticated filmmaking centers in small producing countries. A big complex is being built in South Africa, for example. I'm not sure that the films, commercials, and TV shows that will be made largely abroad will be all that much different from what we're familiar with. Did being animated in Korea for years affect The Simpsons?

On the other hand, I definitely think one reason why Peter had a relatively high level of control over the making of LOTR is that the production was happening in a country that's a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles. Some directors may opt to make their films in remote locations for precisely that reason.

Previously Hollywood studios sent filmmakers abroad for principal photography to save money. Now post-production work, even sophisticated special effects, can increasingly be done overseas for the same reason. The result may be that less of the work of actual filmmaking will be done in Hollywood, which, along with New York, will become more a center of film financing and distribution.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of fantasy films being produced in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film franchise. Do you think the film industry has taken the right lessons from the success of these two series?

The industry has taken the lesson that fantasy sells--for now, anyway. Genres go in cycles, and sci-fi films seem to be in decline as fantasy films rise. The question is whether Hollywood executives will continue to make fantasies if a few of them fail. Eregon was a potential franchise that fizzled, despite the popularity of the book--but the critical consensus was that it was a pale imitation of LOTR. Will Hollywood blame the genre rather than the film? I suppose a lot is riding--certainly for New Line--on The Golden Compass. I think Phillip Pullman's trilogy is fantastic, but in a way even more difficult to adapt than LOTR. And even if it's a hit, there just aren't that many literary fantasies out there on that level. Still, there are two more Harry Potter films to come, and I just read that the third Chronicles of Narnia film is going into pre-production.

So fantasy might have staying power, as other genres have had. 2001 gave sci-fi films respectability, and Star Wars gave them popularity. Sci-fi films have been a prominent Hollywood product until very recently. The Godfather gave gangster films both respectability and popularity, and gangster films are still with us. Now thatLOTR, and to a lesser extent Harry Potter, have given fantasy respectability and popularity, it may also be a genre that remains important for decades.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of fantasy films being produced in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film franchise. Do you think the film industry has taken the right lessons from the success of these two series?

The industry has taken the lesson that fantasy sells--for now, anyway. Genres go in cycles, and sci-fi films seem to be in decline as fantasy films rise. The question is whether Hollywood executives will continue to make fantasies if a few of them fail. Eregon was a potential franchise that fizzled, despite the popularity of the book--but the critical consensus was that it was a pale imitation of LOTR. Will Hollywood blame the genre rather than the film? I suppose a lot is riding--certainly for New Line--on The Golden Compass. I think Phillip Pullman's trilogy is fantastic, but in a way even more difficult to adapt than LOTR. And even if it's a hit, there just aren't that many literary fantasies out there on that level. Still, there are two more Harry Potter films to come, and I just read that the third Chronicles of Narnia film is going into pre-production.

So fantasy might have staying power, as other genres have had. 2001 gave sci-fi films respectability, and Star Wars gave them popularity. Sci-fi films have been a prominent Hollywood product until very recently. The Godfather gave gangster films both respectability and popularity, and gangster films are still with us. Now thatLOTR, and to a lesser extent Harry Potter, have given fantasy respectability and popularity, it may also be a genre that remains important for decades.

One of the accomplishments of LOTR is that it overcame critics perceptions that fantasy films were "overly reliant" on special effects and achieve recognition for its performances and scripts. Do you think critical hostility to special effects has been misplaced? Are digital effects simply one new technique among many by which filmmakers shape our experience of their work?

I think it's absurd to make sweeping claims about computer effects, whether for fantasy or other types of films. People still care about character, as witnessed by the huge popularity of Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series or of many of the characters in the Harry Potter films. If critics don't like a big fantasy film, they often focus the blame on the special effects, even though other techniques and the script may be equally to blame.

It would be interesting to turn the critical eye back on the critics and look at all the clichés they resort to. I've become distinctly cynical about popular press and TV coverage of films since researching my chapter on modern publicity methods--press junkets, electronic press kits, and the whole rise of infotainment. Critics devise a shared story that is easy to write. If an animated film flops, it's "Is there a glut of CGI animated films this season?" Never mind that four of the ten highest grossers of the year turn out to be CGI animated films. "Too much dependence on special effects" seems to be just one of those convenient tropes that critics have in their limited repertoire. It's a tired argument by now, but it's easier than actually thinking about a film on a tight deadline.

How do you think the emergence of digital effects is impacting film production today?

Digital technology as such is affecting films in subtle but pervasive ways. Mixing digital soundtracks allows a minute attention to details and the use of dozens, even of hundreds of tracks to create the finished product. The result, in some cases at least, is a new density and complexity of sound. Digital means are used in editing, design, storyboarding, and a whole variety of phases of filmmaking.

In terms of digital special effects, there is currently a sort of race to use the highest number of effects shots and the most complex technology. Large numbers of effects shots are touted in publicity. It has to end somewhere, since, as Variety recently pointed out, effects houses are being stretched and some films risk missing their release dates because their effects are being done up to the last possible minute.

And, while digital technology is a money-saver in some areas, CGI shots and things like color grading on digital intermediates have become some of the highest cost factors in filmmaking, alongside burgeoning stars' fees. If studios seriously want to cut budgets (which they so far talk about but don't do), rationing digital effects would be one key way to do it.

Critics have historically been disdainful of sequels or franchises, yet the general perception is that the three films here formed an integrated whole.

That's partly because LOTR was exceptional. Tolkien conceived his novel as a single book, and it was published in three volumes because the publishers thought it was the only way they could recoup their costs. (The editor thought that the book might well lose money anyway and yet went ahead and published it. Those were the days.) As I've mentioned, Peter approached the film in the same way, treating it as one continuous story. He even refused to have summary crawl titles at the beginnings of Films 2 and 3. Now, with DVDs, one could watch the films back to back, skipping the end credits and head logo and title, and they would flow together reasonably well. (The Two Towers would flow on quite nicely from Fellowship's ending, though the opening of Return, with its flashback to Gollum's downfall, would be a little jarring after Towers' end.)

That kind of coherence was possible because of Bob Shaye's decision to make the three parts simultaneously. They were shot out of continuity in one giant period of principal photography. Apart from the fairly evident growth in the number and complexity of the special effects from part to part, there's not much that would go against that feeling of the films being an integrated whole.

So far no studio has had the nerve to do the same thing. The first Pirates of the Caribbean ended with the filmmakers not knowing what would happen in part 3, for example. The Chronicles of Narnia series, New Line's His Dark Materials trilogy, and others all wait for the first film to succeed before moving on. Still, presumably films based on existing literature can have a sense of coherence somewhat comparable to LOTR. It will be very interesting to see what happens with The Golden Compass. Can New Line manage to create a unified trilogy, as Pullman's novels do? From the start they have modeled this new potential franchise on LOTR--except for making the first film separately.

What steps did the producers take to insure the integrity of the series as a whole? How central do you think this more integrated approach is to the public perception of this series?

One thing that I find remarkable about LOTR is how quickly these three long films were released--almost ten hours of effects-heavy film in a two-year period. When you think of the years it took Martin Scorsese to makeGangs of New York, with its many delays, Peter really achieved a feat. When the film was announced by New Line in August of 1998, the press release said, "The company may release the trilogy as a Christmas-summer Christmas event during the 2000-2001 calendar year." That was obviously a little too ambitious, and once the full scope of the project became apparent, the three-Christmas release was settled. Even that is ridiculously ambitious by the standard of modern Hollywood, and I can't think of another case where three release dates were announced at once and so early. (Return's release date was committed to about four years in advance!) How many directors could make those deadlines and create an epic set of films this polished?

(Of course the extended DVD versions contain a full 120 minutes of additional footage, much of which was shot during principal photography, so the whole thing is even more amazing.)

Again, compare this with the slower release of the Harry Potter films. Those are very ambitious films, but they're shorter than the installments of LOTR. I can't think of any series of comparable size that has come out that fast. The second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films were released a year apart, but that's largely because the producers imitated the LOTR production and shot them more or less at the same time.

So that's one reason I think LOTR was perceived as an integral film. The release dates were announced long in advance, and the parts came out at almost exactly the same time each year, mid-December. Knowing in advance that all three were coming probably played a big part in making fans not perceiving films two and three as sequels. Also, the extended-version DVDs of the first two films were timed to come out shortly before the next part's theatrical release, so the rush to watch them presumably made the three films flow together in an atypical way.

The regularity led to a sense of Christmas being LOTR time. During the 2004, 2005, and even the 2006 Christmas season, I read comments in the popular press about what a pity it was that no new LOTR installment was appearing. Earlier this year Entertainment Weekly, which assigns grades to trailers, gave the one for The Golden Compass a B+, remarking, "points off for so shamelessly trading on our Lord of the Rings nostalgia"--more than three years after the trilogy ended!

Another reason would be that in the publicity, Peter and others of the filmmakers stressed that this was one long film, so a lot of people presumably thought of it that way as well.

Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that the first two parts don't end on the traditional cliffhanger that one associates with serials. Both end with Frodo and Sam trudging along on their trip to Mordor, where we can glimpse Mt. Doom in the distance. Despite what critics might claim about LOTR being a succession of battles and action scenes, it's the journey of those two Hobbits that gives the narrative its shape. As so often happens in classical Hollywood films, goal orientation is a major unifying factor.

The trailers played up the journey aspect of the plot. The Fellowship one is most concerned with setting up the basic core story element, the destruction of the Ring, and it ends by simply saying, "The legend comes to life." But the Towers trailer ends, "The journey continues" and near the end of the Return trailer, we hear "The journey ends."

On the lack of cliffhangers. There's a promise of considerable action ahead in the first two films' endings, but Sam and Frodo aren't in imminent danger in either case. In the novel, Fellowship ends in the same way, with the hobbits in the Emyn Muil making their way toward Mordor. Tolkien's Towers, though, has one of the killer cliffhangers of all time. After following Frodo and Sam for the second half of the volume as they slowly progress toward Mordor, Tolkien ends with the aftermath of the Shelob episode with one terse, powerful sentence: "Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy." The filmmakers were no doubt right in moving that episode into the third part, but they lost a great moment.

Contrast that with the Harry Potter series, where there's a continuing goal across the seven books (though it develops and becomes focused slowly), but they are structured around the cycle of going to Hogwarts at the beginning and returning home at the end. They're more self-contained than LOTR. Spider-man has continuing elements, but a new villain or villains each time, while LOTR has Sauron from start to finish (and Saruman to link films one and two).

As a production, the film itself has a built-in unity, of course, and I think that shows in the final product. The same crew worked on all three parts, and bringing in Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe assured that all the design elements worked together seamlessly. One crucial factor was Howard Shore's music, which was conceived as a single piece with leitmotifs running through all three films. All in all, I think it would be hard to point to a single factor that would encourage people see these as three self-contained films. Again, that sets LOTR apart from other franchises, where for the most part the individual films are self-contained to a considerable degree. At the end of the X-Men films, for example, we know that tensions between the two mutant groups has the potential to lead to further conflicts and adventures, but we don't know what those will be.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part One)

For those of you in and around film studies, Kristin Thompson requires no introduction. Her historical research and close formal readings of film have helped set the agenda for our field for the past several decades. For many of us, Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, both co-authored with David Bordwell, represent a first introduction into core concepts in the field, yet both books are more than the usual textbook rehashing of familiar content, managing to be groundbreaking work in their own terms. Also with Bordwell and with Janet Staiger, she wrote the monumental Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, a book which became the focus of debate for the better part of a decade, pushing for a new paradigm which fused close stylistic analysis with institutional and cultural history. As a solo author, she has expanded upon that argument with Storytelling in the New Hollywood, a book which explores what does and does not change about the structure of narrative in contemporary films, and Breaking the Glass Armour, which is a book I push upon any CMS student whose thesis work requires close reading. Thompson, thus, is one of the most established scholars in our field. She is also, though she sometimes contests the word, a fan. When I was in graduate school in Madison, she took me to some of the meetings of the local Tolkien Society and introduced me to some of the leaders of the city's fan community. Her newest book, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, brought her roles as fan and scholar together. There are few books that take us as deeply into the thinking behind a major motion picture as this one does. Thompson seems to have talked to literally everyone involved with this production and distilled it all into the epic story of how one of the most important film franchises of recent years came to become the phenomenon it is today. This is so much more than a really literate Making Of book, though, given her ability to place what occurred on the set in New Zealand into a larger picture of global trends impacting the film industry. And, for once, what fans create -- their fan fiction, art, and online discussions -- are treated seriously and alongside what was generated by the Powers That Be. I have argued that two media franchises have transformed the relations between Hollywood and its fans: the first, Harry Potter, has been discussed here a lot lately, Lord of the Rings is the second, and Thompson helps to explain the strategies by which Peter Jackson won over skeptical fans and brought them into the center of the production process. For those interested in transmedia storytelling, there is also a lot to like about this book which takes us deep into the production of the LOTR computer games and the development of the DVD package, among other topics.

Today, I begin the first of a three part interview with Thompson about her experiences writing the book, about her relationship to fandom, and about the things Lord of the Ring might teach us about branded entertainment in our transmedia and transnational era.

Can you tell us something of your own personal stakes in this project?

What led you to do a book about the Lord of the Rings films in the first place?

Like so many people of the Baby Boomer generation, I had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. The Ballantine editions came out in 1965, and I read them right away. So I was there when a book that had mainly been popular in the U.K. suddenly became a campus craze in the U. S.

I loved the books, of course, and I have re-read them at intervals thereafter. Being of a scholarly bent, I read some essays about the books, as well as a biography of Tolkien, the volume of his letters, and the various drafts that his son Christopher has published at intervals.

In fact, when the films were being made, I was in the early stages of writing an analytical study of The Hobbit and LOTR. I had amassed quite a few notes by the time the films started coming out. Writing literary criticism may sound odd for a film historian, but it isn't as implausible as it might seem. I've written a book on P. G. Wodehouse, and I have one published essay on The Hobbit that gets cited occasionally.

When New Line announced news of the film project in 1998, I, like many long-time fans of the books, was highly skeptical that an adaptation could do the books justice. Still, I had no doubts at all that the film was going to be hugely successful. (I won a $20 bet that Fellowship would gross more than $600 million internationally.) Still, I didn't pay much attention to the film until the spring of 2001.

That was when New Line showed a twenty-six minute preview of the film at Cannes, including much of the Mines of Moria segment. I read about the rapturous reception of the film and how it was changing people's doubts about LOTR into enthusiasm. That Cannes event fascinates me because it was such a dramatic turning point. For my book, I managed to interview ten people who were there in a wide variety of capacities, and there's a section on it in the opening chapter.

At that point I started clipping material related to the film from trade papers like Variety and pop magazines like Entertainment Weekly. I didn't have any idea what I might do with them.

Then Fellowship came out and was such a tremendous success. It was like the 1960s craze all over again, but now on a huge international scale. It was amazing to watch something that I had loved suddenly have this international reception.

Still, it didn't occur to me to write a book. It was really during 2002 when I started realizing that so many aspects of the franchise were cutting-edge and successful. New Line's official website attracted so much attention, the selling of all three parts of the film to international distributors was unprecedented, and so on. That was when I realized two things. First, one could learn a lot about how franchises work by studying all the main aspects of LOTR--not just the film, but the DVDs, the internet, and so on. (The videogames as well, of course, but the first one hadn't been released when I was pondering all this.) Second, LOTR was rapidly becoming one of the most important films ever made. Its impact on New Zealand, for one thing, affecting a whole country's economy and international image. The elaborate DVD supplements, the internet buzz. I decided that someone should try to capture all that before it slipped away and people's memories faded.

I should stress that writing the book was my own idea entirely. Neither New Line nor the filmmakers knew anything about it until I contacted them. I have no license or any other legal relationship to either group, and it's certainly not a tie-in book. It was a purely free-lance project, and I wrote it without having a publisher lined up.

Your project has depended on building close relationships with many of the key production people involved in the films and the related products (the game company, for example). Can you share with us some of the process by which you built these relationships? What has been involved in an academic getting inside the production process to this degree?

I knew from the start that I couldn't write the book I wanted to without interviewing many of those involved. So little of what happened was reported in print or on the internet, and most of its never would be. I also believed that I had to begin the interviewing process while the film was still being made. Once everyone had scattered, it would be impossible to talk to as many of them as I could in Wellington. My ideal would have been to go to Wellington while the main pick-up filming was going on during April to July of 2003.

I started out not knowing any of the people involved directly or indirectly with the films. My assumption was that I would have to get in touch with one of the key people. There were only three of them who seemed powerful enough to make the decision to cooperate with my project: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie Osborne.

In late 2002 I was still wondering if I could manage that. Fortunately I happened to be at a film conference in Adelaide, Australia, and met a film editor named Annabelle Sheehan. She was familiar with my work, and she said she could put me in touch with Barrie. (Shortly after that Annabelle became an executive at a talent agency in Sydney, a company that represents, coincidentally, Cate Blanchett.)

I don't know exactly what she told him about me, but clearly she vouched for me as a serious, well-established scholar. That probably wouldn't impress a lot of Hollywood producers, but Barrie is a very smart and well-educated man. He went to Carlton College here in the Midwest, and I think he had some idea of what I was proposing. (I was always afraid that I'd be taken for someone like Peter Biskind, looking to dish the dirt on the production.) Barrie gave Annabelle permission to give me his email address. Once I had sent a description of the project to him, he said he was interested but would have to run the idea past Peter and New Line.

That happened in mid-January of 2003. My hope at that point was to go to Wellington during the time the cast was back for pick-ups and additional shooting, which would mean roughly April to July. Most of the main crew members would be reassembled at that point, so I figured getting a lot of interviews would be relatively easy.

Establishing contact with Barrie turned out to be the perfect first step. I have to admit, however, that I was very naive at the beginning. I figured that Barrie's interest would be enough to get me access to the filmmakers for interviews. It didn't occur to me that everyone involved had of course signed confidentiality agreements with New Line, which had to OK that sort of access. I gather those agreements were particularly strict for this film. Barrie said he'd need to clear it with Peter and with them before we could proceed.

I never heard that Peter OKed the project, though I assume he must have or it would never have gone forward.

I won't go into the lengthy negotiation process that I went through with New Line, but it lasted from February to August, scotching my chances of being in Wellington during pickups. In late August I got the word that New Line was probably going to cooperate. That was enough for me to decide to go to New Zealand if possible, and witness some of the post-production, tour the facilities, interview people, whatever. I contacted Barrie about it, and he said I could come down. I booked my flights, bought a really good digital audio recorder, and by the end of September I was in Wellington.

Those two moments--Barrie's decisions to cooperate and to let me come down before the film was finished--were the crucial points, and I must give Barrie enormous credit for trusting and supporting me. I doubt that the book would exist if I hadn't had that support.

I went to Wellington not having any interviews with filmmakers lined up, though people at various government agencies--Tourism New Zealand, Film New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission--had agreed to talk with me. Of course Return of the King was still being worked on, but by then that involved mainly the computer animation, the color grading, and the sound mixing. The designers and various other people I wanted to interview had moved on to other projects, but most of them were Kiwis, so I hoped they would be in the area and accessible.

Barrie assigned me a point person, Melissa Booth, the main publicist at that time. She and I sat down on my first day, and she was terrific. She picked up right away on what I needed and made up a list of people and made the first appointments for me. After that I had the contact information and mainly made the appointments myself. Basically, once Barrie had made it known that I was doing the book, virtually everyone involved in the filmmaking whom I wanted to interview cooperated and indeed were very friendly and open about the whole thing. I talked with Ngila Dickson (costume designer), Richard Taylor and two of his designers (Weta Workshop), Matt Aitken (in charge of model scanning at Weta Digital), and others.

One stroke of luck was that I ran into Michael Pellerin, producer/director of the supplements for the extended-edition DVDs. I interviewed him and watched him at work for an afternoon. Although Peter obviously didn't have time to be interviewed at that point, he did let me watch him supervising some of the final sound mixing on the Shelob sequence.

Despite the fact that I was there at the very end of the filmmaking, everything that was going on was fascinating to witness. They were even still doing some pickups, though not involving the stars. It was mainly orcs being filmed against a blue screen to be jigsawed into special-effects shots. I got a tour of the Stone Street Studios and stayed to watch about half an hour of the filming.

Everyone was trying frantically to finish Return by the deadline, and there was a sense of excitement--and a bit of panic--everywhere. The whole interviewing process went so well that my planned three-week stay was too short, and I added an extra week.

After that first visit, I returned to New Zealand for two more rounds of interviews. The next was in June of 2004, and things were much quieter. King Kong was in the writing and pre-production stage, and there was activity, but nothing like the frantic rush of the first time. Peter was working very hard, of course, but he managed to squeeze in an hour to talk with me. I also got to interview Philippa Boyens, Grant Major, some of the tech people, and so on. A third trip, in November/December 2004 was partly to finish up the round of interviews I had planned and to update with some of the people I had previously talked to.

I did many interviews elsewhere, of course--Peter's agent in LA, the producer-director of the making-ofs for cable TV, the Danish distributor of LOTR, Ian McKellen in London, etc. Basically the fact that Peter and the other filmmakers were cooperating was enough to convince them to talk with me. One thing that came through time after time was how excited all these people were that they had been involved in this unique enterprise. It was like an era coming to an end, and I think most of them were happy that someone was recording it for posterity.

At first I thought I would be able to interview heads of departments at New Line, but in the summer of 2004 they informed me that they had decided against it. I don't know why. Maybe they still thought of me as a sort of glorified journalist snooping around for secrets to do a Biskind-style hatchet job on them. I was disappointed about that at first, but now I think it was probably better this way. I got to talk with the filmmakers, but I never had to sign a confidentiality agreement with New Line--or with anyone. My relationship with my interviewees was always on the basis of trust, and all of them had the option of reading the drafts of chapters where I quoted them and requesting that I change passages. That didn't happen much, but I felt it was only fair to these people to make that offer--plus I hope it made them feel freer to say things without having to be overly cautious about violating their own confidentiality agreements.

I think it was really only after the first trip to New Zealand that I started trying to think of any comparable book that had appeared: a study of an entire film by a film historian, as opposed to a journalist. I couldn't think of any.

Now that the book is coming out, I can see why. I look back and think that getting the access I needed for my research was so close to impossible that I wonder if another such book can ever be written. The thing depended so much on some incredibly lucky coincidences, on dogged determination, on Kiwi friendliness and hospitality, and certainly on Barrie's support. That complex set of circumstances is so unlikely to come together again. I'm convinced that if I had tried to undertake a comparable project relating to one of the big franchises that are made in Hollywood or London, it wouldn't have gotten to square one.

On the other hand, if people in the industry read The Frodo Franchise, maybe some will recognize that it's really great publicity for them. I would like to think that it would inspire studio officials to give greater access to bona fide scholars. It would be somewhat like the studios' learning curve on how to deal with fans on the internet, I suppose.

What did you learn through this front-line perspective about how contemporary films are being produced that complimented or expanded what you had come to understand through other methodologies (close reading, studying the trade press and production manuals, etc.)?

The stages in production are so familiar that in a way I didn't learn an enormous amount about that side of things. Certainly I saw techniques being used that I had only written about. Peter Doyle, who was one of the inventors of the digital color-grading system used on LOTR and other films, sat down with me for 25 minutes and demonstrated how the grading had been achieved on a few shots from the trilogy. It's a surprisingly beautiful process to watch.

But I learned more about some of the activities around the filmmaking that have never been studied. Certain aspects of the publicity, for example. How do making-of films get onto cable stations? It happens all the time these days, but when I asked, nobody could tell me, and there's nothing written about it. I was quite curious about that and finally found out through some of the interviews. We all know about press junkets in general, but when did they start? When did they become as big and elaborate as they are now? Again, the history of press junkets hasn't been written, so I sat down with Roger Ebert, who has been in movie journalism during that entire period, and he gave me enormously helpful information.

So this was the first project I've done that depended really heavily upon interviews for material that couldn't be gotten any other way. It was also the first project where I used the internet. (My previous book was on Ernst Lubitsch's silent features, and despite the fact that lots of people think everything is now on the internet, it isn't. I didn't learn a single thing for that project on the internet.) In part it was a research tool, but the internet's relationship to LOTR is the topic of two chapters.

This project has involved vastly different sorts of research and topics than I had dealt with before. I think coping with the wide range of topics that the franchise entailed was possible due to that basic historical approach that you and I and all the other film graduate students all learn at the University of Wisconsin: start out by formulating your core topic as a small set of questions. Then you just have to figure out what you need to do to answer them.