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

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

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

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

by Ksenia Prassolova

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

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

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

Tolkien Apocrypha

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

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

"Art Belongs to People"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potter Comes to Russia

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

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

The People's Translation Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issue Four: The Problem of Intellectual Property

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issue One: Covering Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issue Two: The History of Remix Culture

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

McCrea

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

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

MORE TO COME

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

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL CTD.:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEIMAT

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

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

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

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

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

FANTEXT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTRODUCTION

Kristina:

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

MALE AND FEMALE FANNISH BEHAVIOR:

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

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

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

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

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

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. Lee Harrington: Hi everyone. This has been an interesting set of discussions thus far -- Sam and I are happy to contribute. We'll follow the general norm by beginning with introductions. I've been engaged in audience/fan studies since the early 1990s, with most of my work co-authored with Denise Bielby. Our interest in fan studies grew out of our long term soap opera-watching habit. I don't remember how long Denise has been watching, but I started watching soaps in the late 1970s and have been an enthusiastic follower ever since (mostly ABC soaps, with some years watching DOOL).

When I was in grad school at UCSB in the late 1980s (Denise is on the faculty there), we went to a General Hospital fan club luncheon, were fascinated by the entire experience, and decided to study the soap fan culture. Our book Soap Fans was published a few years after Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon- Smith's Enterprising Women, among other important work of the late 80s/early 90s, which heavily influenced the way I thought about audience/fans.

We wrote the book in the pre-widespread-Internet-use era (some soap fans were on BBSs but not many), and soap fandom has changed a lot since then (as you write about, Sam). Since Soap Fans, I've done work on the Bianca coming-out storyline on All My Children and have recently worked on aspects of global fandom (with Denise and Kim Schimmel), among other projects. Inspired by Chris Scodari's work, I've also become interested in gerontological issues in soap operas, though my project is in the very early stages.

I have to say that Denise and I are of the generation of scholars who did NOT identify ourselves as soap fans in our work....I think we may have mentioned our own love of soaps to people we interviewed for our various projects (memory is hazy) but I don't think we've ever declared our own fandom in print (memory is hazy here as well, unfortunately). In part this is simply a generational issue, as Henry and others have written/spoken about, in part (for me at least) it's how I construct my own fan identity (as private, rather than publicly experienced/expressed). Denise and I DO have a picture of ourselves in our book though we don't identify who we are in the caption (it amused us at the time, I recall, though it seems less amusing now for some reason).

I also have to say, as Sean Griffin mentioned several weeks ago, that I have not personally encountered the gender issues that launched this discussion series. I'm not quite sure why....maybe because most of my work is based on soap opera, maybe because the gender neutrality of my name leads lots of people to assume I'm male rather than female (a gender issue in its own right, obviously, and one I've dealt with all my life), maybe because I keep a very low profile at conferences and am a miserable networker, so don't end up engaged in some of the firestorms of academia.

Sam Ford: I'm honored to be contributing to this conversation with Lee, who was among the scholars whose work I encountered regularly while working on my Master's thesis. I am a 2007 graduate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, and I think my personal background is important in positioning me in this discussion of fan studies, since I have a much shorter duration as a fan studies scholar.

I graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree and four intersecting majors--English, mass communication, communication studies, and news/editorial journalism-- and a minor in film studies, in three separate departments (Department of English, Department of Communication, and School of Journalism and Broadcasting). As part of my undergraduate honors thesis, I was interested in tackling my own personal interest in professional wrestling as a self-professed fan through each of the three lenses that had been presented to me in these three departments.

My final project was primarily a collection of three essays on pro wrestling, each written through an advisor in a different department, and each with a different citation style and theoretical lens. One was a textual analysis of masculinity in relation to pro wrestling character/performer Mick Foley; another was an industry analysis of World Wrestling Entertainment and how the company diversified its output through multiple media platforms; and the third was a primarily qualitative ethnography of pro wrestling fans, gathered from interview 50 fans at five live wrestling events of various sizes. Each of those projects have been in various stages of publication during my time at MIT, since I came straight from undergraduate to graduate school.

When I came here, I decided to tackle another of my "lovemarks," so to speak, and the other side of perhaps the same gendered coin: soap operas. As those who follow the blog I run for the Convergence Culture Consortium or my guest posts here on Henry's blog in the past, I've found a variety of correlations between soap opera fandom and pro wrestling fandom, and the place of both in relation to both fan studies and questions of cultural taste.

I first encountered the CMS program here at MIT and Henry Jenkins' work through his essays on pro wrestling, which introduced me to Textual Poachers and the fan studies perspective from there. Henry served as a member of my thesis committee, and Convergence Culture was admittedly the major inspiration for my Master's thesis on the soap opera As the World Turns and soap opera fans, along with Nancy Baym's Tune In, Log On.

I have chosen in all my work to make my own fandom an explicit part of my writing, but that very much has to do with generational differences and the work that came before me. I struggled for a long time myself with notions of an "objective" and detached academic voice and my own need for expressing my fandom and my personal motivations for these studies. However, to be fair, Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise do admit to your own fandom in the introduction, even if it does not become infused in your writing as a whole.

Lee, in Soap Fans, you and Denise write, "Soaps are at the absolute bottom of the television hierarchy, lumped with game shows and professional wrestling in terms of their perceived moral worth" (5). You also write that you have not personally encountered the gender issues being raised in discussion here. I hope we will address these two issues, which I feel are quite related in greater detail, because I find that studies of pro wrestling fandom (and there are quite a few) and of soaps fandom have existed outside of the "mainstream" of fan studies research, and perhaps the gendered focus of both have colored their place in the history of fan studies.

Wrestling is at an interesting place between sports fan studies and media fandom, while being a male scholar studying soap opera fan communities has been illuminating. Of course, it's a farce that there is not a sizable female audience for pro wrestling, as well as a significant portion of male soap opera fans, but they are both quite gendered in terms of industry focus and the predominant fan base.

Finally, you mention your own lack of experience with many of the gender issues in fan studies that launched this series. I feel much the same way. Perhaps it's because I spent a significant portion of the past two years working within and looking at a predominantly female fan community and an industry in which women hold a number of key industry positions.

But I was fascinated, as I delved into these discussion of fan fiction and fan communities versus user-generated content and producer/consumer interaction that, in some ways, studying producer/ consumer interaction was considered by many to be a male perspective on fandom, as opposed to fan activities that are further removed from the commercial contexts of media production. Lee, I know that your book with Denise focuses on soap fans and their relationship with the industry and soap texts in a largely pre-Internet world, so I was curious about your thoughts on the gendered-ness of commercial and non-commercial examples of fan expression within fan studies.

C. Lee Harrington: Ah, so Denise and I *do* mention our fandom in the introduction of our book -- good! I guess I could have walked four steps and plucked the book off the bookshelves, but....thanks Sam. I think you're absolutely correct that studies of pro wrestling fandom and soap fandom have existed outside the mainstream of fan studies, and their gendered focus is an interesting question.

I've been intrigued by the various debates in recent fan studies about whether (or to what extent) genre continues to matter. I understand and agree that the fan experience (subjectively at least) can transcend the fan object but I also think genre still matters in shaping fandom. Twenty years into researching soaps, I'm still fascinated by how unique they are as texts (which you write about, Sam) and the kind of challenges that uniqueness presents both to the industry and to scholars (not to mention to fans).

To get to your question in a roundabout way, one of the unique aspects of open-ended serials is the relentless flow of the text, and I think soap fan expression has been constrained by that. The types of activities Henry and Camille and others were writing about in early 1990s -- fanfic, fan art etc. -- simply were not being practiced by soap fans. There was just no need. A new episode of the text was coming every day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. There was less need to "fill in the gaps," so to speak, so fans were engaging in other types of expression -- private fantasizing, gossiping with friends, reading mags, etc. The industry is in trouble in part because of this relentlessness.....Making time for a new episode every day (day after day etc.) is exhausting for people, even longterm fans like me. You do a

wonderful job with this topic in your thesis....The point being that in the early 1990s at least, soap fans' expressions had more to do with genre than gender (not to say the genre isn't gendered, of course). Has that changed, do you think?

I also wanted to comment on your observation that many in fan studies consider studying producer/consumer interaction to be a male perspective on fandom. One of the things Denise and I were fascinated by at the first GH fan club luncheon we went to was the level of intimacy between actors and fans -- some of it contrived, but not all of it.

I had just finished reading Josh Gamson's book on celebrity culture in which he uses a metaphor of the "hunt," which seemed entirely appropriate to the entertainment realm he was writing about and wholly inappropriate to the soap realm, where decades spent acting on soaps and decades spent watching the same soap lends to a different relationship between the production team and fans/audiences (with actors being in a weird middle realm). Producers have a different type of engagement with longterm Guiding Light viewers than they do with Lost viewers.....Perhaps the presumed gendered-ness of studying production/consumption relations is based on presumptions about the producer/consumer relationship, which might also be shaped by genre (gendered though it is)....?

And having typed this, I'm not entirely sure I addressed the question you actually asked.....

Sam Ford: Lee, I think the frequency and duration of soap opera texts certainly alters the fan experience significantly. Several of these debates about fan studies have centered on fan fiction in one form or another, but as you point out, fan fiction is not one of the predominant forms of expression within soap opera fandom. That's not to say that soap opera fan fiction does not exist at all, but most of the creative output of the fan community is centered on criticism, alternate storyline suggestions, parodies, speculation, nostalgia for prior storylines, contextualizing current events based on the collective memory of the fandom, etc. These are all creative activities, to be sure, but they predominate soaps fandom much more than fan fiction.

I think you may be right that genre has quite a lot to do with this, and primarily the frequency of the text. With 250 new hour-long episodes per year (for every soap other than The Bold and the Beautiful), there are much fewer holes to be filled into the text. Plus, while a lot of fan fiction served to humanize or explore the interpersonal relationships that were not the main focuses of many of the primetime shows that drew the most fan fiction, soap operas are explicitly about these relationships among an ensemble cast.

There are still gaps to be filled in, however, and soap operas are such immersive texts that they actively invite fans to do so, since they are what Robert C. Allen calls overcoded narratives. Since there are so many characters and parts of town fleshed out over the course of decades, but no explicit connections are made as to the geography of the town in many cases, fan activity and creativity often comes through group speculation about the fictional world rather than fan fiction or fan art. Fans make a collective effort in online forums to construct, maintain, and critique the writers' job of the most important aspect of soap opera storytelling to many fans--continuity. With such a massive text, the collective discussion of continuity takes up a significant portion of the creative energy of the fandom, much as they do in comic books and other immersive story worlds, to use a term from my thesis work.

You raise an interesting point regarding the producer/consumer relationship both in your book and in your response here, Lee. Perhaps because soaps are considered niche in terms of cultural taste, it helps shape this sense of camaraderie among fans and producers. That's not to say that soaps fans are not often quite critical of "the powers that be," or "the idiots in charge," and this aspect has probably become more pronounced and explicit now that the Internet facilitates discussions of the creative powers among a large group of fans who are more aware than ever not just of the on-air talent but the creative shifts behind-the-scenes.

Still, I have been to fan events in recent years and still agree that there is this sense of respect and familiarity between actors and fans at soaps events that does extend beyond that celebrity craze. Perhaps this is most true with actors, in that the actors on most soaps have been the constants, and fans are more connected to the actors portraying the roles, and the characters, than they are to the particular creative team, since many in the fan community may have been watching the show longer than anyone on the creative team has been involved with the program.

Thus, longtime characters, and their portrayers, share a veteran status with the show that even most of the creative staff does not have in many of these cases. And that probably explains why soap fans spend so much time guarding the continuity of their shows because of a perceived personal ownership of the text based, in part, on their own seniority in following and knowing the text.

But, speaking of these differences between gender and genre, I know that you have been spending a significant amount of time recently comparing media fandom studies with sports fan studies. Do you suppose many of the differences in sports fan studies to be based more on genre--"real" versus fictional, a higher level of cultural respect vis-a-vis soap opera fandom for sports, etc.--or on gender, since sports fandom has traditionally been considered predominantly male, in comparison to soaps fandom being traditionally considered primarily female?

C. Lee Harrington: Sam, I'm glad you brought up Allen's book -- it's such a fabulous exploration of both the literary and industrial aspects of soaps and seems under-cited in soap audience/ fan research these days. His observation that soap narratives are over-coded, and non-watchers assumptions that they're vastly under-coded, is one of the most interesting aspects of the genre, I think. It's always been difficult to explain to non-watchers how utterly complicated soap texts are, and because longstanding stylistic and production codes can make them appear simplistically plot-driven, their complexity often goes unrecognized. I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!! I really like your term immersive story

worlds in this context, by the way.

I agree with you that it's primarily actors and fans in concert who protect the continuity and integrity of the characters and communities, since production, directing writing teams change so rapidly.....I wanted to add that one of the interesting intimacies in the world of soaps (compared to other entertainment realms) is the place of academic critique within it. I have been surprised at times how welcoming the soap press is to academic commentary on storylines and issues. In part this helps legitimize the industry, of course, but to continue the metaphor of the family reunion which Denise and I used in our book, it allows academics (especially those sympathetic to the genre) to have a seat at the table.

In terms of your question re: sport/media fans, are we talking about the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fan studies or the gendered-ness of sport vs. media fandom? Or both? I have to say at the outset that I am NOT a sport fan scholar so anything I say here is my educated guess....and hopefully we have some readers here who can help us think this through (my recent work is very much from a media-not- sport perspective). Certainly in the West at least, sport fandom is historically male but contemporary fandom even of traditionally masculine sports no longer is, necessarily. Doesn't the NFL say that close to 50% of its fans are female? And I wonder what the gender breakdown is for fans of NASCAR vs. fans for indivdual NASCAR drivers.....? Maybe this is not so much about genre OR gender, per se, but about the increasing celebrification of sport stars....? Is celebrification generally understood as a feminine process (not in any essential way, of course)....?

MORE TO COME

Don't forget to check out the Live Journal site for active discussion of the contents of this post.

Catching Up on Fan Culture...

Converging Worlds

I have been hearing rumors for a while that Convergence Culture is being picked up and read by some of the Powers That Be (i.e. the producers and writers of cult television shows). This certainly seems to be the case on Heroes, according to this recent interview which Wonderland ran with Jesse Alexander, the Exec Producer of Alias, Lost and Heroes:

So you manage how the Heroes property moves through other mediums?

Yes, it was always seen as a transmedia property from day one. I read Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: you should read that if you haven't. To take a brand into the transmedia landscape.. a teevee show through the transmedia landscape, especially a serialized show like Heroes, well, we use a lot of techniques that are very germane to the way that videogames are made.

The writing of Heroes is done by 10-12 people, we come up with the stories together, and we write every episode together. That's an ensemble narrative,. One person can write a story for Peter over multiple episodes, and keep the consistency. What this allows us to do is to keep the whole team totally up to date and vested with the whole show, it harvests the hivemind focus, to deliver a quality narrative. We do rapid prototyping, we iterate on it.. It's that constant iteration and rewriting that gets things done.

The interview as a whole is worth reading. Alexander returns several times to the topic of transmedia entertainment and what it means in the context of a convergence culture:

Everyone knows I talk about convergence.. [...] These big media companies are looking for new ways to exploit their properties. ARGs. Comics. I'm lucky enough to be part of some shows where we worked on these things, and there's convergence with creators of TV and movies.. you have to understand how you can exploit your IP in all those spaces, in a way that's authentic to your IP and won't damage it.

With Heroes, we connect all the things we do with the brand, it's connected to the show. The comic book is part of the canon of the show, it has value. That's why we need the huge team, there has to be enough people to generate that content.

We've done .. It's difficult to call what we do in Heroes an ARG. Is it transmedia television? We're using ARG components.. and that's something that we look to expand in the future. With these large media companies, they desperately want to do this, to exploit this entertainment, and they're still trying to find the structure to actualize that....

Alexander also manages to name check Steven Johnson's work on complexity and Jane McGonigal's work on ARGS and collective intelligence.

Regular readers know that I have been on the Heroes bandwagon since last summer -- having caught an advance peek at the series pilot before it reached the air. Pulling this post together, drew me back to that original piece which read Heroes as closer to an indie comic in its tone and structure than to the mainstream superhero comics that have shaped most other television and big screen stories in the genre. I offered some hints about where I thought the series might be going:

These characters embody forms of longing and desperation that one rarely sees on television - if for no other reason than that the problems they face are unlikely to be solved by a bite from a radioactive spider or a burst of Gamma rays, let alone by mouthwash or toothpaste. And there are moments here which remind me of films like Crash or Grand Canyon, where people from very different backgrounds cross through each others lives and sometimes have unintended consequences. As the series proceeds, I have no doubt that these lives, seeming so separate at the outset, will become more and more intertwined. In the short term, though, viewers can enjoy looking for subtle -- and not so subtle -- hints of connections between them.

Its somewhat bitter aftertaste links the series more closely with Brian Woods' Demo than to most mainstream superhero comics. The characters here seem drawn earthward - more like suicidal jumpers - rather than skyward. None of them yet knows how to leap over tall buildings with a single bound and we are left with the sense that they are going to have to struggle to bring their emerging powers under their control and to make sense of their impact on their self perceptions. As with Demo, these characters aren't going to run right out and buy fancy new superhero duds anytime soon and it is not yet clear that any of them is ready to take on great responsibilities when they are barely able to solve their own inner demons.

Around the edges, there are hints of dark secrets, perhaps a government conspiracy, perhaps bad guys who are going to track down those with powers and force them to make a choice about where they stand, but the first episode allows the protagonists to wallow in their various emotional responses to the discovery that they are not like mortal men. This is a series which will provide lots of fodder for internet speculation and decipherment within the fan communities that it is apt to inspire.

Throughout the year, I have admired the ways that the series has dispersed back story through imaginatively structured episodes and through the use of web comics as a platform of transmedia entertainment. And I was pleased that themes I saw in the characters from the pilot really took root and defined their interactions, including the prolonged focus on what it means to discover your powers and to define your "mission." So, I am personally very pleased to see Alexander describe my book as helping to shape his thinking on these issues.

"Wiki-Media"

I am always excited to see other academics who do important work in media or cultural studies get hit with the blogging bug. A case in point: Robert Kozinets. Kozinets is a marketing professor currently at ork University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Kozinets has done some of the ground-breaking work on brand communities and their relationship to fan communities. I served on his dissertation committee years ago -- his project centered around consumption and production within Star Trek fan culture. I rediscovered his work while doing research for Convergence Culture and his ideas informed my discussion of American Idol. More recently, Kozinets joined our Convergence Culture Consortium team and I was able to showcase his work on Star Trek fan cinema at the Society for Cinema Studies conference last spring.

If you don't know his work, you should check out his blog. He's hit on several topics of relevance to my readers so far, including several posts which share his insights into the history of Star Trek fandom and Star Trek fan cinema, which he reads through the lens of more recent concepts such as "brand hijacking" (Alex Wipperfürth), Lead Users (Eric Von Hipple) and Wikinomics (Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams). He shares an interesting excerpt from an anthology he has co-edited, Consumer Tribes, one which uses wikipedia to develop an analogy for thinking about fan movie-makers:

Star Trek has gone native or, better, it has gone wiki-it is now "wikimedia." Fans add to Star Trek and correct one another just like Wikipedia encyclopedia contributors add to the famously expansive universe of the online encyclopedia. By the term "wikimedia" I mean to describe a distinct media content form that has, either deliberately or unintentionally, gone open source and begun spawning new content through the efforts of non-profit, do-it-yourself, collaborative media creators acting outside of the structure of corporate, institutional organization or sanction. The existence and notioning of wikimedia has major implications for our understanding of contemporary consumer culture....

Kozinet's use of the concept of Wiki-Media seems relevant given the recent discussion here of "Wiki-Fic" as a way of thinking about the interface between fan fiction and transmedia storytelling.

Other posts to date have dealt with Philip K. Dick and Burning Man. Kozinet's blog will be worth following as he explores the social dimensions of brands and branded entertainment.

I am going to be taking the rest of the week off: there's no new gender and fan studies content this week and I am going to be enjoying the 4th with my family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Fiction as Literature?

Geoffrey: First, a giant 'mea culpa' regarding some of the things in my last email. For starters, my using 'slash' to describe a hetero hook-up was a big smack-your-head "duh, I knew that" moment. (I have officially revealed my outsider/n00b status in fanfic studies. Curses!) Also, to clarify, by 'devolve into real, true fanboy/fangirl engagement' I only meant shifting into more casual language and analysis instead of the more highfalutin' "academic" language. I share your attitude towards academic writing -- as Henry will certainly attest, the majority of my thesis was written as playfully and as casually as I could get away with...

As for the rest, you're right -- I could have picked better examples, and I could have made my case more clearly. Again, mea culpa! I'm having trouble putting my finger on what exactly it would take to make a piece of fanfic considered 'literature' in the popular sense -- not just to have fanfic as a form be recognized as having the potential to be literature, or to have a piece of already-qualified literature be understood as fanfic (as with March, which has now been added to my to-read pile, thanks for that), but to have a piece of Harry Potter fanfic be declared literature.

I'm wondering if the use of existing characters, especially contemporary characters, might prove problematic in the same way that Warhol's use of a can of soup, or Duchamp's use of a urinal, renders those works problematic to a certain audience. Some audiences completely accept those pieces as art, but others will never consider them to be of the same caliber as the Mona Lisa because of their unorthodox origins. Is that the distinction that makes it problematic? The 'quality' of the source material? Would fanfic about Jesus or the characters from Little Women be more widely accepted as viable literature than fanfic about Draco or the Winchesters?

I'm also struggling to figure out where something like Arkham Asylum fits into this. Arkham Asylum is, after all, "just" a Batman story, but the style and quality of its art and its language seem to make it more viable for consideration as art. It's not fanfic, of course, but it does use existing characters, so that might help us narrow this down a bit. What do you think?

Catherine: Since we're talking language, I have my own mea culpa: I should have clarified that I tend to use "literature" in a very broad "written prose, poetry, and drama" sense (and yes I know that's vague), and not as a term that marks artistic quality (i.e., "This isn't just a romance novel, it's literature!" -- a statement that makes me want to throw things). For me, fanfiction *is* literature -- it's written fiction -- that's not commercially published. I can see why there are those connotations, though; commercial publication lends such an aura of... respectability. It's been vetted by somebody, somewhere, who decided that *this* story was fit to sell. But "possibly commercially successful" and "aesthetically successful" are not the same thing. But the thing is, just because fanfiction hasn't -- and often can't, when we're talking about fanfic for in-copyright texts -- be commercially published, that doesn't mean it somehow isn't literature, and has no chance of being *good* literature, at that. All those recursive/archontic texts we've listed that have been commercially published are recursive to source texts that are a) out of copyright, and b) well-known enough to ensure a sizable clued-in audience. Also, the ones we named were all novels; while there are certainly a number of novel-length fanfics, there's an enormous amount of short stories, novellas, drabbles, even poems -- all of which are even more difficult to sell, even if they could be published.

There's also the fact that fanfiction is often not just responding to the source text, but to the *fandom* -- the conglomeration of fanfic, canon discussion, fanfiction critique, squee, character-bashing, and so on, that makes up the discourse of a fandom. Kristina will love me for this: a lot -- not all, but a lot -- of fanfiction is so deeply embedded within its particular community context that it's difficult or impossible to really understand it without *also* being embedded in that context. Therefore, a lot of fanfic can't be published because it appeals to a far too specific niche audience, sometimes one that only consists of only a few people, to risk commercial publication.

The audience for Supernatural is enough to support, say, a gen tie-in novel, but what about the audience for explicit Wincest? But just because it's "unpublishable" doesn't make it "bad literature," or, to my mind, "not literature at all." And it's not that published literature *doesn't* appeal to highly specific forms of cultural literacy: genre fiction is an obvious example, but so is, say, Joyce, for whom there's an entire cottage industry churning out guides to Ulysses ("first, read the Odyssey"). It's just there are certain forms that publishers are willing and able to gamble on, and a lot of fanfiction isn't it -- but that doesn't make it *bad*.

Geoffrey: Well, yeah, under that definition, sure, fanfic is literature! I'm glad you went into the concept of traditional publishing as a vetting process, since that was something that I really wanted to address. As you noted, all too often the 'traditional publishing process' simply fails to meet the interests of the reading public, for various reasons.

A lot of the time, a written piece of work is declined by a publisher not because it's particularly poorly written, but because the publisher doesn't perceive a market for it -- and, of course, this is in no way restricted to just TV shows. I think fanfic tends to get a bad rap because a casual fan might wander into a fanfic site, read some slash fiction and run screaming, or read a particularly silly piece of fanfic and not take the rest seriously. These are the fanfic sections that explore the more radical ends of the "what ifs", but what about fanfic that deliberately maintains the tone of the 'parent' text and simply fills a narrative void that whatever corporate Powers That Be simply don't view as sufficiently profitable? Obviously building a system to cater to explicit Wincest fans is tricky as hell, but if Supernatural's ratings were too low for the show to be renewed next season, how would you build a system for fanfic to officially serve as a continuation for just such a cancelled series?

Catherine: The thing is, is that I really don't know how much the idea of being "validated," as it were, by the Official Copyright Holders or whomever, is what most fans want -- or, at least, what they're aiming for. There is an enormous amount of pleasure to be had in the concept of *playing* with these characters, with this world, as a perfectly legitimate activity in and of itself; the stamp of canon approval might be nice, but it isn't *necessary*.

Fandom is a free space, in a way that commercial publishing is not, and many fans relish the freedom. This is why there are thriving online fanfic communities even for texts that are out of copyright, and therefore the fanfic *could* be published. Some fans would like to publish their fanfic, but I think it's very important to remember that not everyone in fandom is looking for that kind of "canonical support."

Wiki-Fic?

Geoffrey: True, such a system certainly wouldn't be for everyone -- while some musical artists like Trent Reznor are posting their tracks online for fans to remix and pass around, other musicians and fans alike find such behavior unimaginable. "We don't need your permission" is often a rallying cry for the fiercely independent (and go, folks, go), but some would-be creators do want permission.

Despite the object lessons gleaned from the widespread derision of Fanlib.com earlier on this blog, I think such a system could be developed to give fans of a property an official, legal way to share their creations -- and to give newcomers the encouragement they'd need to start. If I ever create a set of characters or a world that gains a strong fan following, after I'd told the story that I wanted to tell I'd be extremely interested in setting up a site where fans could not only write and share their own "further adventures of" stories, but perhaps have the opportunity to vote on what fan-generated stories would become canon moving forward. Can you imagine, as an author, coming back to your own creations one, three, five, ten years later and finding out what happened in your characters' lives? Further, can you imagine then having to qualify to write another story with your own characters? If Lucas had to undergo such a process before the prequels were greenlit, would we have been subjected to Jar-Jar Binks? How long would Jar-Jar survive in a democratically-determined Star Wars canon?

A similar situation actually happened to the Wachowski Brothers when The Matrix MMO went online. During the course of the game, a bunch of players managed to orchestrate the death of Morpheus. Under the "old rules", creators might have rebooted the server, ignored the event, or, as in the case of the assassination of Lord British in Ultima Online, banned the players responsible. The Wachowskis, however, were intrigued by this turn of events and simply made it canon. What would happen if that sort of attitude were more widespread? Would the generation, evaluation, and incorporation of fan contributions into narrative canon in effect become a plausible model for interactive narratives, and would we, as audiences, be willing to subject ourselves to this sort of "WikiFic"?

Catherine: I don't know - while I think, in theory, that that kind of collaborative world-building is cool, I have serious doubts about the way it would work in practice; I think institutionalizing the fanfic, holding the bone out to fans that their stories, if they're *really special*, might become canon is a way of shutting down creativity, because then everyone's competing to be Prom Queen. Not that fandom is all sunshine and daisies until a creator starts meddling, and there's certainly some jockeying for closeness to the creators in some segments of fandom, but. Something like that would really narrow down all that lovely negative capability that gives fanfic writers their space to work. Everyone loves seeing their pet theories/interpretations validated by canon, but not all fans are comfortable with the concept of that much cross-pollination between creators and fandom: some people have very strong views that canon is Their Space, and fandom is Our Space.

I think that's an extreme position to take; especially since, in genres that are known for accruing fandoms, like sci-fi and fantasy, lots of creators were participants in fandom before creating new material. I also think it's ridiculous to pretend that stories posted on the Internet for public consumption are somehow magically invisible to creators - and fandom is way too useful to creators, if they want to gauge how the most dedicated segment of their audience is actually responding to the show/book/etc. However, I do think the Their Space/Our Space people have a good point - things can get ugly in cases where there's lots of creator/fan interaction, especially when the creator objects to certain types of fan stories being told. It all depends on the circumstances, and the individual creators involved; I wouldn't want to posit your setup as some kind of ideal model. Even shoutouts in canon to fans skeeves some folks out. It depends on the fandom, the creators, the individual fans.

Anyway, it can be fun to see those nods, but it isn't necessary. Even if there were no shoutouts, people would still be writing the Harry/Draco or Buffy/Giles or Cuddy/Cameron, because they can and want to. In Harry Potter, people write EPICS about characters whose only appearance is in a list of names at Sorting Time. Fans don't *need* validation from the creators to produce their stuff - again, it's nice when your favorite character or ship or theory plays the way you want it to in canon, but *not* getting what you want from canon has yet to stop fans - that's often a motivating factor for fanfic in the first place!

Isn't that the whole point of negative capability -- that there are possibilities that aren't being explicitly addressed? "Wikific" - great term - could be a fun idea for some people in some circumstances, but I think trying to make that the norm would, essentially, cut fanfic off at the knees by robbing it of its anarchic power. And when you factor in that fanfic is primarily written by women, and companies that distribute creators' material are still dominated by men, even if an individual text isn't male-centered or produced - well, it makes getting co-opted by the Man uncomfortably literal.

Geoffrey: All excellent points, especially the bits about the phantom stories of VC Andrews. When I was a kid I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries, and I was shattered when I discovered that Franklin W. Dixon had not actually written hundreds of stories of Frank and Joe over the better part of a century. (There's a story right there -- the epic tale of an immortal children's adventure-book writer... Hob Gadling maintaining the same pseudonym for 500 years -- ONLY HIS PUBLISHER KNOWS... Hmm...)

I suppose, at the end of the day, what it all boils down to for me is the impossible cat-herding of getting everyone to agree on what degree of validation fanfic needs, or even wants. The camp that feels that any story set to paper (or screen or whatever) is equally valid as literature understandably screams, "Validation? We don't need no steenkin' validation!" These firebrands have a more punk, DIY mentality towards the creation of fanfic, and that's cool. Where I think we run into trouble is when this group gets aggregated with another, more traditional camp that wants to see fanfic considered as not just literature, but valid candidates for Literature, wants to see the integration of fanon into canon, and so on. I still think this latter camp faces the same challenges as Warhol's soup cans due to the popular shift in mindset required; just as the public struggled to accept Pop Art as Art, this camp faces an uphill battle getting fanfic accepted not as derivative literature but as Literature.

Personally, I have a foot in both camps -- I think that, just like comics, fanfic should be considered as literature, but in order for it to transcend literature and achieve Literature, the key is going to be artful execution and style, as is seen in March---- -or The Wind Done Gone. This, of course, teeters on the edge of the same intellectual wankery that's plagued Art and Literature and so on for years... Is fandom as a whole willing to surrender its punk respectability in exchange for consideration as Literature?

I think fandom should abandon this whole attempt to achieve acceptance and let its freak flag fly -- do its own thing, celebrate its independence and free-for-all mentality and focus on creating the greatest, craziest, most imaginative, most fulfilling, and just plain best work that it possibly can, and then force academia to recognize that as undeniably Art or Literature or whatever. That worked for Art Spiegelman and Maus, for Neil Gaiman and Sandman, and video games are trending that way with things like Myst, Shadow of the Colossus and even the Columbine game that got banned from the festivals.

As for negative capability, I think the fun is in filling in the gaps as a reader with your own imagination, and then seeing how closely the author's eventual revelations resemble your guesses. The desire to find that out drives further consumption and exploration of the author's work, which is both entertaining for the audience (minus missteps like midichlorians, of course) and fiscally rewarding for the author. I think the trouble that fanfic poses for this model isn't the sharing of these audience-generated guesses, hypotheses and explorations, but the attempt to obliterate the elevation of the author's position, of canon. If my story about how Draco Malfoy meets his death at Harry's hands is considered of equal value to where J. K. Rowling takes the story, then this 'game' loses its 'win' condition. It's more democratic, perhaps, but personally speaking I'd be really sad to lose that enjoyment -- and, as someone who has always wanted to be a storyteller, I think losing the elevated status of 'authorship' would be a sad thing indeed.

Finally, as for gender... Is my way of thinking about fandom and negative capability inherently colored by the fact that my reproductive organs are on the outside instead of the inside? Is my preference for stories that fill in the gaps about events, characters or places over stories that fill in the gaps about interpersonal relationships and contingencies somehow imprinted on the same strands of my DNA that make my arms and chest furry, or imprinted on my brain by the same social structures that taught me to wear black T-shirts and jeans instead of sundresses and flip-flops on the weekends? I honestly don't know. It's a fascinating, complicated and dangerous area of thought.

What I do know is that I'm a feminist, but I'm also a straight white guy. I'd like to sign off by asking that people remember to consider whether the gender-based assertions flying around the room mightn't be just as sexist as the systems they're railing against. Personally, what I'd like to see is a race- and gender-blind meritocracy, but I'm enough of a realist to realize that may be unattainable. Still, people should never be denied opportunities or respect just because they're female, because they're African- -American, because they're Asian, because they're overweight, because they're underweight, because they're redheads, because they're blonde, because they're Catholic, because they're Wiccan, because they're homosexual, because they're heterosexual, because they're male, because they're Caucasian, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. When we consider gender in fan studies, we all too often run the risk of making grand statements like "fanfic is written by women and the system is dominated by men, so this is clearly a case of The Man keeping womyn down", which makes us straight white guys cringe, no matter whose 'camp' we're in. As is everything everywhere, life is just more complicated than such oversimplifications can accurately represent ? and, at the end of the day, no one likes to feel like they're being reduced to an Other.

Catherine: I am totally punk rock, man. The do-it-your-own-damn-self mentality of fandom is its greatest strength, and the source of its freedom. But the thing is, I *don't* think that's incompatible with capital-l Literature at all; maybe it's because my background is in folklore, but I see absolutely no reason why institutional approval should function as some kind of prerequisite for serious consideration of something as a "legitimate" work of art. And the reason I keep harping on Respectable Literary Precedent for fanfic is to show that hey, using other people's characters is *already* something that capital-L literature does, and has been doing for a long time; therefore, it's disingenuous to try and keep fanfic out of consideration in those aesthetic wankery stakes. Because there is a lot of seriously good fanfic out there, and the writers deserve to be recognized as the artists they are.

And while it's nice to wish for a happy idealistic future where everyone sings "Up With People," I think it's extremely important to pay attention to issues of gender, race, class, sexuality -- all of these have affected who has ACCESS to that institutional approval that we've been tossing around. Fandom is a space where people who have historically been denied access to institutional narrative creation have said, "Well, then, we'll tell this story OUR WAY."

That's not to say that every single instance of fanfic is motivated by sticking it to the Man -- it is FAN fiction, after all. But the collective impact of fandom is forcing us to reassess what we mean when we talk about "authorial ownership," and who gets to benefit from that. The Internet has exacerbated fandom's anarchic tendencies, and all those old cultural hierarchies -- creator/consumer, male/female, straight/queer, art/crap -- are getting shaken up. And they have to be.

In fandom, you don't have to be anointed by the Official Culture Industry to be an artist, to share your work and have it be appreciated. You don't have to passively accept the stories you're being told, but can take them and play with them in your own way. People have been doing that for a long, long time, but the only stuff we ever got to see was that of the cultural elites, who were allowed to distribute their work for reasons not entirely based on aesthetic merit. Now, *you* get to show your stuff, too. And while I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to plug yourself into Officialdom, the point about fandom is that you don't have to, and a lot of the time, you can't. And that can be a position of strength and freedom, and that's something that should be celebrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negative Capability

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

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

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

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

Geoffrey: I totally agree with you, and I think that you put your finger on something problematic about gender in fandom. If we consider those eighty gazillion unauthorized sequels 'fanfic', then it seems that we can no longer assert that "most fanfiction is written by women". Is that a direction that you think we want to go, as academics?

Unauthorized, Unpublishable, Unauthored?

Catherine: This is why I think it's important to articulate fanfiction's relationship to literature as a whole -- recognizing the fact that this does have a literary pedigree, but not subsuming it under the rubric of general literature without making what is unique about fanfiction clear. I agree with Abigail Derecho's approach: she identifies a category of literature, that she calls "archontic" (a term I find problematic for a number of reasons -- I prefer "recursive," and can elaborate on that if necessary), which consists of any literary text which makes extensive use of identifiable characters and plots from a specific pre-existing source that is meant to be recognized as such. That category includes all those literary works I listed above, and fanfiction. For me, the chief differentiation between fanfic and those texts is not what kinds of source texts they write from, but the *means of distribution*: fanfiction is any literary text which makes extensive use of identifiable characters and plots from a specific pre-existing source that is meant to be recognized as such *that circulates unofficially* -- that is, outside the realm of commercial publication.

Because fanfiction circulates unofficially, it isn't bound by the conventions and limitations of institutionalized publishing. And that's a big deal; it allows people to stake claims over texts that they wouldn't normally be allowed to if they wanted to publish, and frees them to tell the stories they want to tell. You can do things in fanfiction that would be difficult or impossible to do in fiction intended for commercial publication, such as experiments with form and subject matter that don't fit with prevailing tastes. This freedom is especially felt in representations of romantic and sexual relationships -- and this is a major reason, I think, why women, queer folk, and young people have found fanfic so appealing, because these are all groups whose sexual expressions have been heavily policed. It's a way of asserting rights of interpretation over texts that may be patriarchal, heteronormative, and/or contain only adult-approved representations of children and teenagers.

Freedom from standards dictated by particular mediums, and the issue of who has access to each of those mediums, seems to me to be a huge factor in transmedia storytelling; do you see anything like this going on?

Geoffrey: To me, the primary shared issue of transmedia storytelling and fanfic is the idea of canon -- and I don't mean that in the 'literary canon' sense of the term, but in the 'canonical continuity' sense. As I mentioned earlier, what sets Whedon's new Season Eight of Buffy comics apart from earlier Buffy comics is how events in the new S8 comics are very clearly and deliberately declared to be canonical. They are a continuation of the larger story of the Buffyverse -- and if the Scoobies were to return to television or film in the future, the characters would, could and arguably should make reference to events that occurred in this new series of comics. The events depicted in the other comics, such as the Tales of the Slayer and Fray, exist in a kind of 'alternate universe', and may or may not have any real impact on the 'canonical' Buffyverse.

George Lucas handles this in an interesting way with the Star Wars universe. He establishes multiple degrees of canon -- so that anything that happens in his films are de facto "hard and fast" canon. One step beyond that is a second degree of canon, which includes the animated Clone Wars miniseries and the two TV series currently in production. Beyond that is what Lucas calls the "Expanded Universe", which has to go through the Lucas empire for authorization before it can be officially released; this includes things like the Timothy Zahn Heir to the Empire trilogy and a number of the comics currently being published by Dark Horse. The events that occur in the Expanded Universe give George the right to 'pick and choose' what he wants to accept into official canon by incorporating it into future films or TV shows -- so it has the potential to become canon, but isn't truly official canon... yet. Beyond that lies further degrees of expansion, which might include things like the Marvel comics that were published in the 1980s, and even further out lies the unauthorized expansions, which simply aren't canon at all. I think this is where fanfic falls in the hierarchy. (Please keep in mind that I'm merely a fan of Star Wars and not a hardcore Star Wars geek, so folks should feel free to post in the comments here about how I'm getting the whole Expanded Universe/Star Wars Holiday Special thing wrong; I promise to take your advice to heart and improve in future articles.)

Do the fans have a right to stake a claim on the Star Wars universe? Do 'women, queer folk and young people' have a right to interpretation of the Star Wars universe, up to and including really kinky S&M slash fiction featuring Luke, Han, Jabba the Hutt and a crowd of cheering Jawas? Probably -- but just as how these degrees of canon are set up to keep the continuity of these stories clear, degrees of authorship and authorization are also required. The unauthorized are, in effect, unauthored -- which, as you noted, requires it to circulate unofficially.

Getting back to transmedia storytelling, I think it's this issue of canon and authorship that determines whether or not something qualifies as a transmedia narrative. I can't make a film sequel to Romeo and Juliet ("The Capulets Strike Back!") and call Romeo and Juliet a transmedia narrative, because I'm not "authorized" to do so. A transmedia narrative isn't a transmedia narrative unless the whole thing is authorized and canonical; that's what makes transmedia narratives new and exciting.

The examples I give here are mostly straight white guys, but I could just as easily create a comic book to serve as a sequel to any given work by Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid, Virginia Woolf, Nora Ephron, etc., and the same reasoning would apply. The question in my mind concerns this hierarchy of canon and rights to authorship, but I'm uncertain as to whether or not gender enters into this. Some proponents of fanfic seem to declare that anyone has the right to write anything about any character invented by anyone and the results should all be considered equally viable as literature, thus obliterating the hierarchy of authorship and canon, but this seems problematic for all sorts of reasons. What do you think?

Catherine: Well, I do believe that anybody should be able to write about any character and have it considered equally viable as literature. What do you mean by "unauthored"? But I'm in full agreement with you that it needs to have the Official Creator Stamp of Approval for it to become *canon*. And this is where we get into some interesting issues, because creator-approval/authorization is what makes a specific item -- a book, a comic, a film, whatever -- part of the official canon, but when it comes to what, exactly, those agreed-upon-as-canonical texts/comics/games/films are actually saying, especially about nuances of character and relationships... well, that's up in the air. As Mafalda Stasi puts it, "beyond the bare factual minimum, canon constitution and interpretation are a highly debated and controversial critical activity in the fannish milieu." What's canon, what's "fanon," what's a "viable" interpretation? Are House and Wilson/Sam and Dean/Remus and Sirius harboring a Secret Passion for one another? And that issue of canon/fanon isn't confined to fandom, even though the terms are fannish: Is Satan the "real" hero of Paradise Lost? What I find interesting is that, in fandom, the discourse of canon-interpretation and argumentation often includes appeals to authorial intent: the producer says House/Wilson is always a possibility! One of Supernatural's major writers calls the show "The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean," which means Wincest is (possibly) totally canon! (I am RESISTING making some lame crack about being of the Wincest party without knowing it... damn.) And I think those appeals to creators' authority aren't because those silly fans don't know that we've moved on from the intentional fallacy, but are part of that complex negotiation of claim-staking that happens when you're writing someone else's characters. How do you think transmedia storytelling affects those interpretations? (She says, looking at the Supernatural comics where I know that guy is Dean because Sam keeps calling him that; when did he become a blond?)

TO BE CONTINUED

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

Gender and Cult Texts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stereotypes vs. Prototypes

[KP] I definitely agree that taking the part as representative of the whole is one of the risks we take when we engage in studying fandom - it is so much more interesting to report on what is creative! Besides, for many years it has been a huge part of our agenda as fan academics to change the societal view of fans as of good-for-nothing infantile obsessive misfits, and in our noble... quest against pathologizing we became very eager in bringing out what's creative and playing down what's mundane and 'goes without saying'.

Yet it is so difficult for me to remember about those fans who don't create anything or engage in any communities when I write/talk/think about fandom and being fannish! This made me think about Rosch's prototype theory and its possible applications to this particular problem. If asked, I'd say that creativity and community engagement are central to what I have in mind when I think about the concept of 'fan', and when I encounter a fan who is passionate about their source text, but doesn't do anything or does very little about their passion, I have trouble calling them 'fan', and would go for 'admirer' instead. If we think back to Rosch's classic example: as 'robin' is closer to prototypical notion of 'bird' and 'ostrich' is further from it, a person who is involved in what you call 'easily-recognisable, visible, traditional fan behavior' is closer to my prototype of 'fan' than a person who does not display this type of behavior.

[WB] What's the distinction between prototypical and stereotypical, then? I might not be everyone's prototypical Star Wars fan because I don't live in my mother's basement, wear a Stormtrooper costume at weekends and speak fluent Huttese to my geeky friends (I can recite all of Greedo's dialogue, but that's it). Maybe I don't fit easily recognizable, visible, traditional fan behaviour.

But if we just concentrated on those people who fit the type of "fan" - and where does this type come from? Who constructed it? - we might just end up studying an unrepresentative group at the margins of a broad range of behaviour, much of which is less recognizable, less immediately visible, less striking, perhaps less exciting. But maybe our duty is not just to report on exciting, quirky, sexy fandom.

[KP] In reply to your question about distinction between stereotypical and prototypical: using stereotypes will not lead us anywhere; stereotype here is a pre-conceived notion of something, it comes 'as a package', and is either ignored or acknowledged. Prototype, however, shows where one's priorities are and allows to see how a phenomenon is constructed. To use your example, a statement 'a Star Wars fan is somebody who lives in their mother's basement, wears Stormtrooper's costume at weekends and speaks fluent Huttese' is a stereotype. Prototype is an analyzed stereotype: you can single out specific features (a. living in the parents' basement; b.wearing Stormtrooper's costume and c.speaking Huttese) and account for their relative importance in establishing whether and HOW a given sample 'fits' the prototype.

And here comes the interesting part: while stereotypes are normally shared, the construction of prototypes ('points of reference', if you wish) is less... collective. Even in this discussion, I am leaning to consider those who are 'creative' to be fans more readily that those who are what you call 'water coolers', while you keep reminding about 'those others', which means that in my prototype of 'fan' I place the notion of creativity higher than the notion of fascination with source text, while both notions are present in the stereotype we share.

Now, my understanding of fans and being fannish was shaped by lurking in Harry Potter fandom and by reading academic accounts of fannish activity. I wonder if a definite lean towards studying creativity of fans in major writings on fandom is partly accountable for the fact that many would agree - yes, 'real' fans are creative in their responses to the source text. It seems as if fannish creativity comes as a given, a default assumption that one has to struggle against when one accounts a fan who does not fit this prototype? And now that you have pointed out several times that creativity is not, in fact, a sine qua non condition, it would be interesting to see if this notion of 'creative' fan is only shared by women fans/fan scholars. For me, a non-creative fan is more of an 'ostrich' than a 'robin', but am I the only one?

Or is my assumption is informed by the fact that I hang around 'other girls' in my corner of fandom?

[WB] Where does the evidence come from about what boys and girls, (using these terms with gritted teeth), fans and scholars of different genders, are supposedly into?

[KP] Again, what are they into? So far the discussion in Henry's blog is very mild and not gender-charged at all. The way it was framed, however, one would expect sparks fly. They didn't - well, not about the gender issue. I guess that proves there are more misfits around, and certainly the categories - as many other expectations - are flawed and represent extreme cases of overgeneralization. I'd love to see them abandoned altogether, but that is probably just me and Will?

The Infantilization of Fan Discourse

[WB] The discussion so far has been mild and reasonable, but some of the comments on the Round 2 pairing have riled me with their ready assumptions about gendered behaviour - there seems to be a lot of "boys do this, girls do that." To pick out an individual post:

if you read gender communication theorists you know that men like to stick to the rules; women are far more situational. This is true in childhood play as well. Boys play on teams; they're into competition and hierarchy. Girls are far more likely to 'free play' and create cooperatively with their Barbie dolls and such...as in the childhood playground, male fandom is far more likely to play by the rules and not try to color outside the lines.

I mistrust this kind of absolute laying down of rules about what girls, boys, and by extension men and women "do" and "are". The comparison of grown men and women to kids in a playground also seems unhelpful - it seems part of this infantilisation of fan behaviour that leads us to Team Pink and Team Blue, and the labeling of academics as boys and girls.

[KP] As somebody with a background in cognitive linguistics I can't help but wonder how this infantilization came to be. I don't think it only applies to fans/ fan scholars - it certainly does in this case, but what if it is a manifestation of a more general ADULTS ARE CHILDREN conceptual metaphor (men and gadgets would often be described in terms of 'boys playing with toys'; adult women would often collectively refer to themselves as 'girls'; people who don't follow the pre-established and agreed upon pattern are usually described as 'not playing by the rules'; plus the examples you gave above). If we successfully establish that the metaphor is in place and working - that is, shaping the way we verbalize our experiences - the fact that grown men and women are compared to kids and academics are labeled 'boys' and 'girls' is not that surprising.

I honestly do think that infantilization of fans and Team Blue/TeamPink are two unrelated phenomena, the former being a trace of popular derogatory image of fans as social misfits stuck in their pre-teens and teens, while the latter is the verbalization of one of the conceptual metaphors that govern our perception of the world around us (other conceptual metaphors would be, for instance, TIME IS A COMMODITY, PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS, LIFE IS A GAME etc.).

The real problem in the passage that you quoted above, as I see it, is not the infantilization of adults, but the pre-conceived assumption about who does what. This assumption is so firmly in place that nobody even questions its credibility, but all evidence backing it up is more or less anecdotal. Even though we do have some statistics, we tend to forget, which corner of fandom those statistical findings apply to: I daresay that if one and the same quantitative study had been carried out on two platforms - Harry Potter Lexicon forums and a Livejournal-based Harry/Draco community - the results wouldn't be similar. And I wouldn't say that to collectively build a site like HP Lexicon is less creative (or one has to be less of a fan) than to write smut and post it on Livejournal. Speaking of statistics, here's a curious quote from Science Fiction Audiences (Tulloch and Jenkins, 1995): "One survey, cited on a television documentary about the programme's anniversary, showed that 53 per cent of the American public classified themselves as 'Star Trek fans'". How many of them were 'water coolers' and how many of them were 'creative'? How many of them were women? How many of them were men?..

The Primacy of Gender?

[WB] This stark division of the world into people who do one set of things because of their gender, and people who do another because of their opposite gender, made me wonder why we're focusing so much on this single aspect of identity as a shaping force in both fandom and in academic approaches to fandom. Are our interests in fandom (as fans, as academics, as fan-academics) really molded primarily by our gender? More so than our class, our education, our ethnicity and nation?

The standard objection that Nina offers in response is the one that "the emphasis on 'everyone's different' is one that's been used to counter any type of movement, and the focus on exceptions does the same." But I thought we hadn't agreed that those exceptions are definitely exceptional... I've not been convinced that men who are into creative use of the cult text are in some sort of minority. And why does it imply a position of privilege to be cautious of generalisations about "men do this, women do this"?

Nina brings up the history of early media fandom to show extreme gender imbalance and asks " Can you honestly say that the movement that shifted Sci-Fi zines into narrative explorations wasn't women driven? Likewise, can you really say that men are not more likely to do parodies?" And I can't say one way or the other, because I haven't enough evidence to judge... how do I know whether men are more likely to do parodies? How do you know, how does anyone know? Why should we want to generalise without sufficient proof? I haven't done sufficient research into male parody writing, and haven't read any research on it. Maybe I'm just under-informed, but I'd want to see quite a bit of evidence before I accepted a general rule about a whole gender. And I'm not even saying we should address race here, just that it's worth pointing out there are a lot of other factors what might define fan identity.

[KP] I do agree with Nina that the questions of class/education/ethnicity are mostly important in terms of access to fandom. Once a person is 'in', it seems that practices they engage mostly divide along the gender axis. From this point of view, language and culture would play more of a role in defining the practices one engages in (for instance, there seems to be more hostility and somewhat wary attitude towards slash among women in Russian fandom, for example, although there is a fair number of slashers there; men do write fan fiction, which is not only parody; for historical reason live action and on-line role playing games are central to almost any fandom...).

So far, most of the studies have been carried out on the basis of English-language fandom, I'd love to see what new perspectives the study of national fandoms would bring. I am currently working on my own piece about Russian fandom, which will be posted here in this blog, and it's a journey of discovery in itself - for all similarities (well, fandom as a concept is pretty much borrowed as is), there are striking differences in the way fandom is constructed and works. True, a lot of studies have been carried out on Japanese material, but it's more like the other end of the scale compared to English-speaking fandom. I'm more interested in not-so-subtle differences between seemingly similar phenomena. But I really don't think ethnicity plays any more of a role in construction of fannish behavior than, say, race within a given national fandom. Gender, however, is more of a global factor.

As is taste and preference, apparently: it is really interesting (and that's the other thing I noticed in my study of Russian fandom) how, for all cultural differences, we seem to like same books and shows. Harry Potter has been increasingly popular since 2000, but now Lost has taken Russian fandom by storm, and even Heroes has its own community of fans around several fan-sites (the show has not yet been aired/translated, so the sites also run their own translation projects).

Holding Out for Heroes

[WB] I would certainly like to move on to discuss Lost and Heroes, which Nina implied in her blog were "male" shows (or the focus of male fan-scholars) - this surprised me so I'd like to think about if this is true, and why, and what female fan-scholars are looking at in 2006-7 instead of two of the best TV shows of the decade.

[KP] I'd love to hear why Heroes is a male show, actually, since it is less stereotypically male-oriented than, say, Firefly, in my opinion, but I might be looking at wrong indicators (genre, the possibilities of romance etc). I personally find the show extremely engaging for a variety of reasons. The whole postmodernity of comicbook! Hiro's arc - his name, his having a side-kick, even the fact that when they speak Japanese the translation is not subtitles, but captions (which is really unusual - subtitles can jump, too, but it's normally in the lower part of the screen, in this case the lines appear right next to Hiro's and Ando's heads!).

I like the appreciation of geek culture in this, and the fact that the villain is a geek himself. He also has a purpose, which is a pleasant development and the fact that he sort of tried to step back and not blow up innocent people was really refreshing as far as villains and their behavioral stereotypes are concerned. The characters are clever and multi-dimensional and Claire is so much more engaging to me than Buffy! I could go on and on and on... But I think, in the end of the day, it's the clever play with stereotypes, homage to the geekdom and believable character, as well as the irony and very tongue-in-cheek construction of slogans ("Save the cheerleader, save the world?" Honestly...) that make me fall for this one head over heels.

Will, you said you thought it was one of the best texts in the last two years, what did you find attractive? Same things? Are we, to use Nina's turn of phrase, watching the show the same way?

[WB] I mostly connect with Claire Bennet, the cheerleader. As a lifelong reader of superhero comics, I like the play with those conventions and the often quite striking visualization of standard tropes like flight, phasing, regeneration and time travel. But I think Claire has provided the heart and in some ways the narrative backbone of the show - as the youngest main character, she's gone on the most dramatic emotional journey, and I think Hayden Panettiere's performance has convincingly sold some incredibly powerful, painful moments along that journey. I don't think I would dig the show nearly so much without her - she has provided the main point of identification for me.

Here's a bit of auto-ethnography for you by the way - look how careful I am to avoid saying Claire/Panettiere is an attractive woman, and to suggest that her attractiveness forms any part of my viewing pleasure. (Matt Hills illustrates this dilemma with admirable frankness in his own auto-ethnography, during Fan Cultures - he delays for about ten pages before blushingly admitting he watched X-Files partly because of Gillian Anderson). For a male fan or scholar to explain his fandom of a cult text in terms of "Claire Bennet is hot!" (even jokingly) would conjure up all kinds of negative connotations and sad stereotypes of a guy in a dark room with a screen full of cheerleader pics and a floor scattered with Kleenex. But it's not unusual for a female fan or female fan-scholar to add, perhaps lightheartedly, "and it doesn't hurt that the main characters are totally cute guys!" or admit that she writes slash because she's turned on by the idea of those cute guys getting it on. I wonder how it would sound if I said I wrote stories about Claire and her hot cheerleader friends romping in the locker room. I don't think it would be celebrated as an example of resistant fan creativity.

Anyway, I'm not complaining "girls do it, so why can't we guys talk about how we get off on fit girls" - I'm just examining my own self-censorship here.

[KP] I find it interesting and somewhat ironic that among the protagonists of the show (Hiro and Claire) each of us would name the one of the opposite gender as the one character we connect with most for reasons that might only marginally be related to our own gender/sexual preference. Claire Bennet is certainly hot, but it is not like she's the only hot girl in the show, so, as you write, it is mostly Claire's character and story, as well as the very convincing performance by Panettiere that come first in your assessment of the reasons behind your fondness.

Likewise, I don't connect with Hiro because I find him physically attractive (although Masi Oka is definitely cute) - there are plenty of attractive males in this show - but it's the geekiness, cluenessness and at the same time phenomenal strength of character that fascinate me. He certainly matures emotionally as the show unfolds, maybe not quite as dramatically as Claire (on the other hand, there is Future!Hiro to be taken into account), but visibly and convincingly. I identify with him a lot on different levels: being a fan, a geek, valuing friendship over everything else; even the fact that he's a true foreigner in America (as opposed to Mohinder, for example) and at the same time 'a citizen of the world' hits very close to where I'm standing.

As to your autoethnography here.... I wonder why you avoided admitting that you find Claire Bennet hot, among other things, while you have so readily admitted to having a male-crush on Nathan Fillion in our previous discussion about Firefly. Is the latter is admission different because it's somehow framed as subversive, while the former just brings up mainstream pornography ('Claire and her hot cheerleader friends romping in the locker room')?

[WB] Yes... you're right, and that's an interesting point. It was unconscious, but that was the reason, I'm sure. Saying I have a crush on Nathan Fillion frames me within the acceptable, even admirable fan-lust discourses of female Livejournal communities; saying Claire Bennet is hot would place me within a different stereotype of sexist, probably pathetic and lonely male fandom - or perhaps more broadly it would chime with men's magazine discourse, the sort of magazine that would run a soft-porn pin-up section on Hayden Panettiere with carefully-chosen quotations from her interview like "I often kiss my girlfriends" or "Some nights it's just too warm to wear pajamas" splashed across the pics.

And you're also right, her being pretty wouldn't be enough, at all, for me to be a "fan" (loosely speaking... I don't do anything active about it) of her character. Niki/Jessica is more conventionally glamorous, but she doesn't grab me in the same way, in terms of personality and performance.

[KP] On a different note - do you think the fact that Claire spends a fair amount of time running around in her cheerleader outfit is a nod to the similarity of her cheerleader uniform to a superhero uniform or an attempt to play around with the notion of schoolgirl fetish, given that the show has such a strong 'Japanese' connection? Or both? Or neither?

[WB] It hadn't crossed my mind, but the idea of cheerleader outfit as superhero uniform is a very clever one - it's actually not dissimilar to Supergirl's. And let's not always conflate being a fan with creativity. By that token, I'm not a fan of Heroes at all. I don't produce vids or slash about it, I don't roleplay it, I don't even imagine sexual pairings from its subtext, let alone write them down. I discuss it online when it's on, and I've written an academic chapter about it because that's part of my job. But I'm not participating in any of these more obvious and exciting fan behaviours - I haven't created a vid that shows the Petrelli brothers are secretly in love, I've just posted some comments on it every week. I don't want to assume that someone is only a "fan" if they fit these quite narrow and I think pretty minority categories of creating some kind of fiction between the gaps.

To be honest, I don't see how imagining the Petrelli brothers as an incestuous gay couple enriches the text. I've read theories that the two actors are deliberately having fun with the scenes where they hug and stare sincerely at each other, so I can accept that there are cues for that reading - but if it was explicit in the script that these brothers want to jump each other's bones, I'd say that was a pretty unlikely and implausible character trait, so I feel the same about it being read in there as a subtext. For the record, I don't feel the same resistance to "Qui/Obi" slash, because I feel that's more plausible within the story-world: we know Jedi are trained from an early age at an academy, that they form same-sex partnerships and work very closely together under strict discipline, and it doesn't seem unlikely that a padawan could develop an intimate relationship with his Master. Moreover, and I think this is a crucial point, The Phantom Menace is a pretty weak and unsatisfying story, so slash readings add something more subtle and interesting to flesh out that flimsy framework. Heroes, on the other hand, is a complex and to my mind, satisfying story per se - it doesn't need brothers fucking each other to make it better.

[KP] See, many would argue that Nathan/Peter is exactly the thing that this story needs to be perfect...

[WB] I guess I don't understand that notion of a perfect story. I wouldn't understand someone who thought that Claire must be sleeping with her brother, Lyle, to make the story complete, either. I expect there are some people out there who think the story would be perfect if Mohinder Suresh was secretly having sex with the little girl, Molly Walker, but I don't know if we'd celebrate them.

[KP] The gaps to fill in, I would say, are designed by fans who are doing the job, and whose choice of 'a gap' is informed by a number of factors: their education (Can they see all allusions? Can they discard the notion of authorial intent?); their fannish experience (Are they members of any fandom? What fandom? What do they normally do? Are they slashers?); their literary preferences (Do they prefer angsty stories, for example? Would they, then, find angst lacking in a situation where it is apparently not supposed to occur?); their sexual preference; their gender; their real life experiences, etc. - everything is potentially important.

Besides, while filling in the gaps, imagining the going-ons behind the scene and writing things back into original narrative are long-lived and time-honored fannish traditions, I do not think that, fundamentally, those are only the flaws or the original stories that we somehow need to correct by creating suggestive vids or writing fan fiction - large part of what we do comes from the fact that the story is so complex and fascinating, and its characters are ready-made for us to play with them!

[WB] To return to an earlier point, I wonder if anyone's currently studying that silent majority of fans who don't go "against the grain" of cult texts like Heroes - asking what pleasures people get from just following the story as the producers intended, without filling in the gaps? It would be harder to study these people, because they don't make themselves as visible; and they're maybe not doing anything that's as easy or fun to write about as slash communities, but I'd guess they constitute most of Heroes' viewers.

But hey, I'm a man and we're not risk-takers, apparently - maybe I should have had that schooled into me at kindergarten.

[KP] Here I'd argue that the question of 'what producers have intended' is the tricky one, especially with Heroes, where problems begin at the stage of finding the 'real producer'. If the actors who portray the Petrelli brothers insert some subtext, can we say that it is 'intended'? Are they the producers, because they are not only part of the production team, but they also create some meaning of their own and insert that into the story as opposed to simply acting out what the script says? And does it matter, in the end of the day? I would also like to see the study of that 'silent majority', and it is especially interesting if they all would share 'the one true intended meaning' that, as you imply, exists out there for us to decipher.

[WB] I take your point that if the actors are playing with that subtext, then yes, it's part of an intended meaning on the part of the "producers" in a broader sense.

[KP] I am not so sure about gaps, though. As Henry puts it, fan creation comes from the mix of frustration and fascination, and certainly frustration is not only fed by gaps in already existing canon, it is to at least similar extent fed by the fact that the canon is in progress. Where else could we attribute the apocalyptic anxieties that ripple through Harry Potter fandom now?

Of course, there is a question of what you are fannish about - about being in a community of fans whatever the source text or about discussing a particular source text in a conveniently existing community of fans? Certainly there are fans of slash as a genre that will be worried about pairing dynamics in the new show, and certainly there are fans - male or female! - who would read fan fiction in one fandom and won't even care about it in the other, where they would be content with collecting action figures and box sets.

Perhaps we could close with this comment from Wikipedia's discussion pages:

"This "fanboy" and "fangirl" nonsense... I don't even know anybody over the age of 17 who uses these words, let alone anyone who would consider them appropriate discussion topics in an encyclopaedia.

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

Fan and Academic Identities

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

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

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

Gender Infiltration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender and Slash

[WB] Getting back to the discussion as it began on Nina's blog, I think it was being suggested that, in contemporary fan-scholarship, women were studying more localized creativity, and men were more concerned with big economic alliances... and that the former - the fans, the fan-scholars writing about them, and the fan activities in question - were being overlooked or neglected.

[KP] Is that so? Maybe it's more of a field of study question? Not a gender one? As for overlooked and neglected - well, this comes down to a) who hangs out with whom at conferences; b) who references whose work and c) what's one's area of interest. Surely everybody references Penley/Bacon-Smith/Jenkins, but what about more recent stuff, or things that are published by independent scholars? They hardly get noticed, or do they? And I also wonder to which extent the blogosphere serves as a connector between the male and female academic networks now.

[WB] Interestingly, and perhaps depressingly, I got the impression last week with Round 3 of this summer event that Henry's blog was assumed to be a male space, and Nina's LJ mirror of it to be far more female-oriented: the comments section included the observation that "given that LJ tends to be not an acafannish male space, I'm not sure Sean will actually respond here. *shrugs*"

[KP] Also, the first studies of fandom that I have seen (mostly regarding Star Trek) tended to concentrate on 'female' activities in fandom and it sure looks as if we are given to understand that fannish communication network used to be predominantly female. Most of other studies of fandom also tended to single out female domination and female creativity. Your book on Star Wars is a very visible and interesting exception: and surely Star Wars fans can not be the only ones who watch the films together, for instance, or collect action figures?

Or is it not a fannish practice? Is it too mundane and obvious to document, not as exciting as researching slash, for instance? Is it where autoethnography fails us because we go for depicting what we, as fans and only after that - academics, like and understand and enjoy and find fascinating, and leave behind other bits that we think are not as interesting or controversial?

[WB] I am not under the impression that most academic writing about slash is by slash writers - that is, I don't think most writing about slash is autoethnographic.

[KP] I suspect my definition of 'autoethnography' is wider than yours. I don't think one has to be a writer of slash in fandom to write about slash in academia; it is positioning self as an insider as opposed to outsider in the academic study, and the increased level of reflection that make a difference. Basically, I'd say that while autoethnography means that the writer is also the subject of research, it does not necessarily follow that the very same writer must also be the doer of all actions that fall under academic scrutiny. Also, I'd argue that anybody who 'reads' slash extensively for pleasure is a slasher themselves, and that includes a fair number of academics who write about fandom - I'd call myself a slasher because I am a fan of the genre, but I'd never written as much as a word of a slash story in my entire life in fandom. I have translated one story, but that hardly counts.

[WB] By that logic, maybe someone who reads a lot of novels is a novelist; but OK.

[KP] I'd argue that even by reading slash one makes an effort to accept the often subversive and queer reading of the source text, and thus is participating in the process of creating a slash narrative.

[WB] Well, every reader of a novel is participating in its meanings and arguably helping to create the text, but I'm not going to give them the Booker prize for it.

I suspect slash has been so visible in writing about fans (eg. more than films and genfic) because it's creative, it's controversial, it involves issues of censorship, and it's about sex.

[KP] It is interesting how slash has become a somewhat comfortable ground to talk about fandom and the subversive in its readings and interpretations of source text, and at the same time a showcase for fannish creativity. It is so heavily advertised as 'The Thing to engage in' that I'd be really surprised to hear that there are fans in the known (female?) fandom who have been around for a while and haven't tried reading it. And because it's so vastly popular and, well, commonplace (and here, again, the popularizing studies have played their role) that many (female?) fans tend to appreciate new source texts through 'the slash lens'...

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

SG: I very much like how you have critiqued the emphasis in academia on fan-fiction supposedly stressing equality within relationships. I have always found that to be far too myopic--that a lot of fan-fiction, and fan-interest is often in exploring power dynamics, rather than trying to eliminate them. I know a lot of fans of the old Dark Shadows soap of the 60s that write slash fiction tend to focus on S/M-type sexual attraction rather than hurt/comfort stories. (Here's a plug for work done by my husband, Harry Benshoff, who got me to watch Dark Shadows and is in the process of writing a monograph on the series.) SG:And, while a number of fans of daytime soaps often talk about enjoying a good romance, most of the interactions and energy is expended discussing when a villain pulls a great scheme, or when the tables are turned, etc. So, I think Foucault needs to be applied much more to fan dynamics than I've ever seen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queering the Discussion Sean Griffin Faculty Page

Robin Anne Reid Professional LJ, Faculty Page

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GENDER ESSENTIALISM

SG: I read the first two conversations in this series, and very much get the sense that a big fulcrum in the current debate is over the hierarchy of fan activity (ie.,machinma is somehow "more" powerful/controlling/primary text/whatever than literary fan-fiction which is more than fan re-edits of videos which is more than fan discussion) and how gender politics factors into this sense of hierarchy. My first sense is trying to figure out who is establishing this hierarchy and who put them in charge? As someone who doesn't play video games--and as a soap fan that is never going to see "Worlds of Pine Valley" for PlayStation 86 ever come out--I have little connection to this. I'm much more interested in other forms of fan activity, and thus, place things (such as letter-writing campaigns, fan analyses of shows, in-person gatherings, and the somewhat rare activity of fan-fic from soap operas) higher in importance. Perhaps this sense of hierarchy is due to seemingly stronger connections to the "primary" or "official" authors/producers of the texts. If this is so, then such connections also come with the trade-off of being more likely to be fit into hegemonic patterns of capitalism and patriarchy --which is not necessarily something I'd envy.

SG: I grant that such discussions are often structured by how media industries conceptualize gender roles (and the assumed gender percentages of fans of certain texts)--and thus, as academics and fans, we have to react to such perceptions. But, it seems (feel free to tell me I'm way off base) that rather than critiquing such assumptions, many in fan studies deal in gender essentialisms. When I read comments such as (and I'm paraphrasing) "women want to explore the environments and extend the stories" vs. "men are more likely to do parodies," I don't know whether to cringe or laugh out loud. While the networks often engage in such blatant sexism about who they think watches soaps (I don't know how many times hosts at ABC's Super Soap Weekends at Disney World try to ignore/dismiss/ridicule the men in attendance), I never got that sense of gender division among soap fans in behaviors or opinions (some of the most witty and "snarky" soap fans who've been willing to satirize soaps have been female fans, for example).

RAR: I'm reminded of that fact of how many shows my housemate and I watch have commercials that try to sell us Viagra and *really* big trucks trundling over piles of rocks. These shows are basically the Law & Order franchise and sf shows (Lost, Battlestar Galactica). All my life, I've enjoyed texts created for a supposedly male audience (science fiction especially) and have not enjoyed *most* romance novels or soap operas (one year, working at home, I did get addicted to General Hospital, specifically falling in love with Emma Samms). However, I'd bet real money that the majority of fan fiction even in many of the male-authored/media fandoms that feature male characters have romance elements as a number of scholars have argued (most notably, Catherine Salmon and Don Symons in their 2001 work, Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality, published by Orion). I also know that soaps have been gathering a large male audience (from popular culture readings I assign my students) in recent years (and have read that soaps are more progressive as a group than nighttime tv in dealing with issues of women and professions, and even inter-racial relationships. The network positioning of both the soap opera audience and the sf audience is very much stereotypical and essentialist.

RAR: I would love to try to break down that essentialism--which nowadays is as likely to be cultural essentialism (women are all socialized to behave this way) as biological, but still as problematic. One of the best known parodies in LOTR fandom (Very Secret Diaries) is by Cassie Clare, female. The equating of males with parody really says more that male-authored parodies become better known/professionalized (Bored of the Rings comes to mind), and that one of the dividing lines here is those fen who wish to become pros vs. those who for whatever reason (often another career) wish to keep the activity as a hobby.

RAR:While I know anybody can be faulted for essentialism for making a generalization, I think that one of the problems is that the focus on gender, nobody's mentioning "race," ethnicity, sexuality, not even as an "academic" project or area of analysis (there are many reasons why someone who is not part of the heterosexual majority might not choose to self-reveal in their professional lives). But what I like about the book you co-wrote with Harry Benshoff, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, was the way that the work integrated multiple axes of identity--not just focusing on one. Essentialism includes the (unstated default) of whiteness, straightness, and middle-class status. If instead of saying that technology is gendered male, the defaults were stated, that would acknowledge how ethnic minority and working class males are excluded as well as all females and complicate the binary pairing. I'm aware that for many, this rhetoric is read by some as "blaming poor white straight middle-class males" for all the problems of the world, but it does start to deconstruct that universalist idea of gender.

Your piece you sent me, "All my Gay Children? Soaps, Sexuality and Cyberspace," does a wonderful job of looking at a single newsgroup and how the emergence of a gay character on the show led to some of the fans coming out and a range of discussions about sexuality, the show, and people's lives that avoided flame wars between people. I know that there are many debates around identity, queerness, and homophobia occurring in internet spaces (one of the ones that caught my attention--and I'm not in gaming at all--being the debate over a "gay friendly" guild in World of Warcraft.

The interactions that you discuss in your paper, including the existence of a cyber-soap opera created by fans featuring gay characters, reminds me of a fan production I learned about at the last International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, The Hidden Frontier, a fan-created season of Trek episodes featuring gay characters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERFACES, AUTHORSHIP, AND PLAY

RJ: I'd be curious to hear what you mean about the uses of interfaces vs. what the interfaces offer. Seems really pertinent to the point I'm trying to make in Pink vs. Blue.

LS: Well--we can either look at the interface on its own terms: what options a given interface allows, what tools it provides, how it interpellates the player/viewer, etc. Or we can look at how social users come to an interface from a specific social/cultural context, and what work they do with that interface, and what texts they create out of that interface. I should not put it in terms of either/or, actually, as I think that both approaches are important and looking at only one without the other limits the conclusions we can draw.

So, for example, The Sims 2 (TS2) interface offers storytelling tools and thus encourages storytelling. It provides an easy route to take still shots or to take moving images. Media fans using The Sims 2 (or simply TS2 authors, not emerging from other media fandoms) make use of both of these functions. However, part of the storytelling tools on TS2 is the upload to the official storytelling board. If one uses this dimension of TS2 interface, one has the ability to accompany an image with text, to label a story with one of a set group of genres, and to then share with a specific community within the official rubric of TS2.

However, what many TS2 storytellers do (be they creating stories based within specific media fandoms or not) is use only part of the options of TS2 still image storytelling--if any at all. Many turn to more flexible image capture programs, and then use other operations and interfaces (turning to Photoshop and Livejournal, for example) to create the aesthetic that they desire (and that may have evolved within a specific fan community or the larger fan community). As you point out, many of these Sims storytellers (and I haven't been discussing machinima here, but I just as well could have been) are female and are sharing their stories within predominantly female communities. But since they're substantially bypassing the interface offered by TS2--can we really link this prolific authorship with gendered issues of access and technological comfort?

RJ: As to the transformation of the text, correct me if I'm wrong but there certainly seems to be a desire to continually up the ante in production value on fan vids. The meticulous rotoscoping that fans do just to get the light sabers right would be a testament to that. And this may not be the case for all (and perhaps there's a gender divide along these lines as well), but trying to uphold those production values seems to have its own cultural commodity within certain fan communities.

LS: This is a very interesting point, and something I've been giving a lot of thought to--in terms of the divergent aesthetic values and narrative values in fan authorship and in fan authorship communities. Some vidding communities (including those who think of themselves as Vidding fandom) certainly aspire to high production values--although what they see as high production values shifts over time. For a long time it was a very close attention to sophisticated and seemingly effortless rhythmic editing and matching of motion and sound. However, recently other vids have come to the fore which draw on different interface options, layering image upon image and incorporating text and special effects in innovative ways.

Vids that circulate in different fan communities aspire to different sets of values--for example (to return us to machinima) the many Final Fantasy vids that one can find on youtube (slash and het alike.) These vids certainly draw from many of the same traditions and values as do the "vidding" vids I was just discussing, but they are often more invested in using Final Fantasy and whatever editing program they're using (often Windows Movie Maker rather than Final Cult Pro or Premiere) to map out an emotional romantic connection between the two characters on whom the vid centers. Such vids would circulate in related but subtly different networks of fans/players.

While we might want to say that the former aesthetic is more rooted in "masculine" modes of aesthetic value, while the latter has evolved within cultural discourses linked to femininity, to make such a divide seems deeply problematic to me as both sets of communities have long histories of female authorship and involvement.

RJ: What positions machinima as uniquely different (and I hope this doesn't sound like I'm over-privileging machinima here) is the capacity to replicate those production values in kind, calling into question whether or not I'm watching a fan production or the actual source (cut scenes designed by the developers). This is usually NOT the case, even in the accomplished series Red vs Blue, one gets a distinct sense that we are witnessing some "guys" playing around. However, the Roosterteeth's Sims based series The Strangerhood can easily be seen as on par with anything that was developed in that game. As a result, Roosterteeth has since been commissioned for Xbox promotional videos and EA has used them to create a series of TV commercial for its monster franchise Madden football. So while I understand that so much of what fan communities are about is not trying to become the established media producer, I wonder how many of them would raise their hand if they were given the keys to the studio. If they could actually come in and shoot their own episode of Battlestar Galactica How many would see that as just a continuation as to what they strive for in their fan fiction and fan vids?

LS: Oh--interesting... I think that how much fans might desire to control the original source text and its inception would vary across fandom(s); but many authors are instead invested in disseminating their engagement with a film or TV or book text across different media, with creating a fantext that is not bound to a single medium but made manifest in a range of media. They see the TV or film source text as a starting ground for a multilayered authorship. Would they love to have the actors to order around? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly part of the thrill of fannish play with The Sims or vids is the fact that one can create audiovisual texts that represent ideas that previously have only existed in words or manipulated (still) images. But I don't think that fans necessarily see such authorship as the equivalent of being able to create the television show itself, except in as much as they're contributing to the larger fantext in a visceral way.

Louisa Ellen Stein is an assistant professor of Television, Film, and New Media at San

Diego State University. Her research explores viewer and participant engagement with

contemporary media culture, including film, television, the Internet and videogames. She

is co-editor of the forthcoming collection Watching Teen TV: Text and Subtext, and is also co-authoring a study of fan textual creativity in new media, with the working title

New Media and Fan Artifacts.

Robert Jones is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Culture & Communication,

NYU. His PhD work focuses on machinima and mods as instances of transformative play

within video game culture. He is also interested in digital cinema as participatory

culture, Hollywood's convergence with the gaming industry, and the social and political

implications of video games.

MORE TOMORROW -- SAME BAT TIME, SAME BAT CHANNEL

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

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

5. Bridging the gender divide?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5.11] KLH: I don't see us talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not attempting to essentialize the process or the artwork or the fan's engagement to political practices; I'm attempting to create a consistent scaffolding for this conversation so we are talking in the same terms. It's always more interesting for critics to write about resistant readings, but a lot of work has only highlighted how not resistant certain fan activities are: lots of fanfic rehashes the tired romance genre, for example; and we can talk all day long about how subversive the genre of slash is, but its very existence only highlights and reinforces the boundaries it claims to transgress.

[5.12] I would argue that anybody who goes online (or goes to conventions, or subscribes to newsgroups, or buys fanzines, or whatever) and engages in discussion with others about something is pretty much a fan; and many, but by no means all, fans create artworks around it. This brings in a community component. An average viewer watches but doesn't feel the need to engage beyond chitchat at the water cooler at work, where the text is simply a pretext for social engagement unrelated to the pleasure of the text. Why is the latter interesting to study? (Or maybe the text is the interesting thing to study, and you want her reaction to it.) People who follow spoilers go online and get spoiled, but they get spoiled within a community that handily lays it all out for them, and suddenly, with no warning and without their really knowing how it happened, they're engaged in a fannish practice.

[5.13] JM: I actually do think the water cooler viewer is interesting to study. In my study of the talk show in my TV genre book, I surveyed people about their perceptions and practices involving talk shows, regardless of their personal interests & investments in the form. Casual viewers and even non-viewers help foster discourses about genres and programs, working to build cultural assumptions and norms about media. Additionally, I'm interested in understanding how different people can make differing investments in the same texts - the water cooler viewer might feel like they love a show as much as the fanfic writer, but they engage in distinctly different ways. Understanding why such various engagements emerge and what they mean culturally requires us to study & respect not only the hardcore fans, but also the mundane viewers.

[5.14] KLH: At its heart, fan activity attempts to make meaning and create pleasure. The structures used to study it rely on politics, sexual and otherwise; on notions of community; on ideas about creativity versus derivativeness; on genre; on authority; on gift culture; on text and subtext; and on a thousand other different things, some of which, such as authority, happen to provide a vocabulary that is useful for discussing these things. Ethnography, close readings of fan-generated texts, studies of reception and of community, queer studies - all have usefully been brought to bear on fans, whether hardcore or casual. You asked about the political issues of the acceptance of versus the othering of fandom, and I'd turn that around to ask about the political issues of the acceptance of versus the othering of the critic, and of the critical apparatus she uses, because that's the reason we're having this conversation: what's at stake when the critic makes her decisions about what and how to study? Gender is one of those things. Authority and power are others. We've come full circle, therefore: the acafan has been reconstituted and redescribed, just as she constitutes and describes her field of study.

[5.15] Politics, sexual and otherwise, can't possibly inform the totality of fans or the study of fans. We're not assimilating these structures; we're using them to create boundaries around a discussion because those boundaries are useful, and they provide a vocabulary to talk about these things that shorthands and compresses a whole bunch of meaning. I self-consciously chose the word authority to organize my thoughts about this issue because of the word's connotations, and because of everything we all understand goes into authority in our culture. Just uttering the word generates a form of meaning. Each discipline comes with a wonderful history, a fascinating methodology, a differently trained critic, a differently informed fan, someone in media studies and someone in English talking about the same thing but in different terms. Yet I would argue that these boundaries, which aren't set as firmly as the word boundary implies, and which can be manipulated, need to be manipulated in such a way that gender doesn't become a point of exclusion, and the way to do that is simply through critical practice.

[5.16] JM: And I would just add to your last sentence: ...and through dialogue, opportunities to talk across disciplines, genders, fan engagements, and mind-sets. It's been a pleasure!

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

As promised, we are going to be running a mega-event through my blog this summer -- an ongoing conversation among some of the leading scholars of fan cultures and cult media. This conversation has grown out of a perceived disconnect in the ways that male and female scholars are writing about this phenomenon, though I hope that it will evolve into something else -- a discussion of fan studies as a field, its theoretical groundings, its methodologies, and its most important insights. There has been an explosion in recent years of exciting new work on fan culture which is coming from an emerging generation of scholars -- male and female. I am hoping that this event will help introduce this work to a larger public and that this discussion can be seen as a sign that fan studies is really coming of age. Here's how it will work: Every Thursday and Friday, we will introduce a new pair of scholars, who will continue the discussion, seeking to explore commonalities and differences in the ways they approach the work. Jason Mittell and Karen Hellekson have gotten things rolling here with some thoughts about the nature of fannish and academic authority.

Our hope is that this discussion will spill over into other blogs as well and I will try to post as many links to these other discussions as possible. So far, for example, Kristina Busse and Will Brooker have started a public discussion in anticipation of the series which Kristina is running over at her blog.

I am also encouraging other participants to add their thoughts and comments here whenever something in the public discussion sparks their interests. Karen and Jason suggested the use of numbered units to make it easier for people to refer to parts of the exchange.

So, let the fun begin.

Authority

by Karen Hellekson & Jason Mittell

1. Academic authority

[1.1] KLH: It seems that every discussion about fan studies somehow has something to do with authority - not only with establishing who has it (apparently not the fans, unless they appropriate it), but indicating the closeness of the relationship with the subject matter (apparently being an academic means you're inauthentic if you're a fan, and being a fan means you can't be a properly dispassionate, disinterested academic). My problem with this led to my coediting, with Kristina Busse, a recent volume of new essFays about fan studies, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, all by academics who are also fans, because I think that this connection is a useful and good thing.

[1.2] Interestingly for this discussion, the academy does not employ me. I'm employed full-time as a copyeditor in the scientific, technical, and medical market - a good fit for me, because I prefer not to teach. My academic credentials include a PhD in English, with an emphasis in science fiction, and I've published some books and articles, some of which happen to be about fan studies. I write book reviews about SF titles for Publishers Weekly. However, I've found that a lack of an academic connection is terribly disenfranching. The simplest research project is fraught with annoyance and pain as roadblocks are thrown in front of me: it's ridiculously difficult to get the books and articles I need, thanks to all the limits placed on me by the library; and I don't have an affiliation to put on my abstract submissions, which results in their being kicked back to me for "completion."

[1.3] My work in fan studies includes literary and historical readings of fan texts and/or the bits of the Internet given over to fan community. I'm currently interested in notions of authorship; of truth-claims, authority, and analysis; and ideas about constructing and editing reality (as, for example, editing blog posts to alter the historical trace). I've also done some work on the idea of fandom as a gift culture. I blog occasionally about my academic-type thoughts.

[1.4] JM: My aca-identity is comparatively traditional - I teach Media Studies at Middlebury College, writing about television primarily in the forms of books (author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture [Routledge, 2004] and a textbook in-the-works called Television & American Culture), articles (essays on TV narrative, genre, discourses about television as a medium), and blog (JustTV, where links to many of my other writings can be found as well). I'm primarily interested in the intersections between television programming, industrial strategies, and viewer practices, and have recently been focusing these interests on the development of new forms of television storytelling emerging in the past decade or so in the United States.

[1.5] Importantly for this discussion, I do not consider myself a scholar of fandom; although occasionally my research does peer into fan practices, such as a new essay on spoiler fans of Lost, my motivating question in such research is not focused on understanding fandom as a distinct set of practices - I'm not the least bit hostile to such scholarship, but it's just not my primary interest.

2. Fannish authority

[2.1] JM: My fan-identity is a bit more muddy. While I'm an eager consumer of many types of media & popular culture (including TV like Lost, Veronica Mars, BSG, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, etc.; a lot of animation; much music; and a fair number of videogames), I would not self-identify as a fan per se. And to me, this cuts to the heart of the debate framing this discussion - what are the boundaries of being a "fan" and who is invested in the label as an identity? I'm interested in fans as part of my pedagogy, regularly teaching academic work about fandom and showing examples of fan creativity & engagement. I read fan studies, even blurbing the excellent new volume Fandom.

[2.2] But I have no real personal investment in the fan label, or the practices and communities that tend to coalesce around the notion of fandom. For me, fandom centers around three main aspects: fan creativity (paratexts, fanfics, vidding, etc.), fan community (in-person and/or online), and fan self-identification (prominent self-branding through fashion, online profiles, behaviors, etc.). I don't really engage with any of these (save for wearing a Red Sox cap on bad hair days), so that's why I don't conceive of myself as a fan. (I realize that many people would argue that my notion of fandom is too narrow - I invite more discussion about those boundaries as they're crucial to the debate.)

[2.3] KLH: I myself am an active fan, involved in newsgroups and blogs about my few primary fandoms. I write fan fiction under a pseudonym, and occasionally, I go to fan conventions. Although I'm a longtime fan - I was into Doctor Who first, in 1981, with a live-action fan club - I took some time off and got back into it in a big way in 2002, when I turned to fandom basically as a form of social engagement, because I live in an isolated, fairly rural area. I run a fanfic archive in my primary fandom. Within fandom, I do lots of large project type things - things that involve organizing the time and effort of others, because I can get such projects done. I spend fannish time in actor- and fan-specific newsgroups and in the LiveJournal blogsphere.

3. Gendered academic authority

[3.1] KLH: Although I don't think that my lack of an institutional affiliation or a tenure-track job has hurt my chances at publication - although it might if I decided to publish the results of a survey and didn't have an institutional review board to approve my methodology - I can't help but wonder how such a tenuous position affects so many women just like me, like lecturers without offices and freeway fliers without a single institution to call home. The gender split between those in positions of authority (professors, say) versus those in positions of dependency (lecturers) has been well documented by the Modern Language Association, among others, and I'm pretty sure independent scholars, those zany dabblers, aren't even on the list. To my mind, these gendered notions of power and authority tacitly underpin all conversations about acafans, as rank becomes linked to topic, and as texts written by professor scholars are treated more seriously than texts written by independent scholars, lecturers, or graduate students.

[3.2] JM: I agree with Karen's assessment about the gender splits within academia - even in a field like media studies, which is both invested in feminism and new enough that the old boys' network is less old and less boyish, power & authority is male by default. And the field itself is feminized within the larger academy, treated as a weak & flighty discipline compared to more traditional humanities, social sciences, and sciences. I would hope that within media studies, the gender divides would be less structuring than in older & grayer fields, but there's no doubt that divisions between tenure-track and adjunct, affiliated and independent scholars are gendered across the board. Even perusing the lists of Henry's invitees for this forum suggests that more women are in less traditional academic roles.

[3.3] In terms of the broader issue of the divisions within fan studies/fandom communities that stimulated these discussions, here's how I understand the questions & investments that have been articulated (in generalized & oversimplified terms): the technological & industrial shifts that Henry analyzes in Convergence Culture & on this blog are making fannish activities more mainstream and acceptable, but also more commodified and privileging fanboy over fangirl practices. Mirroring that shift, academic interest in fandom has splintered along gendered lines, with prominent male academics emphasizing fanboy & industrial practices, leaving many female academics on the margins to study & defend fangirl practices that have arguably been more important in the history of fandom; and like the old saw about children's programming, the girls will consume work pitched at both genders, while the boys only concern themselves with boy-stuff (be it machinima or G.I. Joe). Whether this reluctance to engage female fandoms & fan scholars from male academics is intentional or truly captures what specifically happened in particular instances is beside the point - the broad-based impression amongst the female acafan community that there is a gender split means that it matters & must be discussed.

[3.4] KLH: I agree with this overview. Part of the gender/authority fault line is simply the result of what people happen to be interested in. But part of it is the deliberate invitation of various groups to perform or create artworks that lie within a gendered sphere. So George Lucas can invite fans to create vids within a certain very structured format by providing clips for mashups, as a kind of advertisement, while simultaneously shutting out derivative works created from sources like the films. Men are far more likely to respond to that kind of prompt than women. This gives the male-gendered activity the gloss of acceptability and pushes women onto the fringes, although I'm happy to say that Lucas has seen the light: he will permit fanfic type stuff in 2007. I see this kind of change of mind as tremendously hopeful, because it places the stamp of official approval on a marginalized fan practice, which will in turn permit more unrestricted free play. I like to think it's the result of the margin being erased. This ought to help with gender equity in responses, too.

4. Gendered textual authority

[4.1] KLH: When I think about a gendered divide, I think about men controlling the publishing outlets. I think about the volume I coedited, when two men, the outside reviewers, critiqued and approved work spearheaded by us, two women - and I think of how happy and grateful I am that they did. And I think about the academic privileging of creative over derivative artworks. "What fanboys do" and "what fangirls do" interests me less than the larger, completely entrenched worldview that privileges the work and authority of men over that of women, and much of this debate strikes me as something within the realm of a sex-divided culture war.

[4.2] For example, the polarizing FanLib debate, part of which is featured in this blog, involves an effort by outsiders (men) to gain financially by using woman-generated content, and there has been a call for (women) fans to take action, to seize control of their own work before someone does it for them. The fact that those who propose a business model such as FanLib think that the time is right to address certain legal and ethical concerns indicates that a change is coming in how derivative works are perceived, so the gender issue takes on a sudden new urgency. The disenfranchising is poised to begin, and the women who generate the content have been prodded into action. Activism is a good thing, but the gender lines here are obvious and troubling.

[4.3] Within the academic realm, part of the gendered split is, I suspect, the result of certain practical copyright concerns that affect publication - concerns that I, as a copyeditor and as coeditor of a volume that reprinted fan artwork, know to worry about. (I'm not going to discuss the whole "copyright and derivative artworks" thing. That can be left to someone in law. I'm speaking purely practically here: imagine simply that somebody wrote an article and she wants to publish it.) If a scholar (probably a man) writes an article about machinima, as one did for the volume I worked on, then he can illustrate it with screen shots. But if another scholar (probably a woman) writes about a vid, she gets hit with the double whammy: reproducing popular song lyrics costs big money, and so does reproducing screen shots [JM: as an aside, screen captures should be considered fair use, but that's another issue]. The prohibitive cost means that she probably can't publish her work intact, and it's hard to write a well-documented article about a songvid without quoting the song or the vid. In fact, it's very difficult in general to write an article about a text that hasn't been published in commercial outlets and can't be easily purchased on Amazon.com - like fanfic, or a vid, or other texts that the scholar may think she wants to talk about.

[4.4] The academic world isn't going to wait for major changes in copyright law or technology to rethink how it grants things like privilege and tenure, and publishing outlets aren't going to change their standards of documentation. Yet I would argue that part of the problem is that men are more likely to work on topics that are easier to publish about, because these topics are free of certain legal encumbrances; and women are more likely to present a paper orally, to give informal papers on texts that trouble those in authority, like production editors, who need to get their pieces of paper from the copyright holders before the article can see print.

[4.5] JM: This highlights how the gender issue is mapped onto the corporate vs. citizen divide as well - fandom has traditionally been outside the power of the industry, and now that media companies are trying to work with (or, less charitably, co-opt) fan practices, the female realm of fandom is having to deal more directly with the more traditional (read male) world of copyrights and licensing than back when fan creativity was via photocopies and conventions. As Jenkins discusses in Convergence Culture, the legal realm of fair use favors (perhaps by coincidence or maybe by deep-seated ideologies, depending on your theoretical stripes) the more masculine practices of parody over female extensions of storyworlds and relationships.

[4.6] KLH: This debate highlights how disenfranchising in general being on the outside is. This kind of split isn't unique to media studies. The discussion has reinforced my annoyance at the inflexibility of the structures currently in place, even as I'm employed in a field that asks me to police them. For example, I'm under orders to delete all popular song lyrics from the texts I edit, because my employers don't want to deal with the cost and hassle. At least copyright rules and the unspoken rules governing the appropriateness of documents meant for publication, no matter how inflexible or troubling, or are the same for everyone, regardless of discipline or sex.

[4.7] All of this comes back to the gendered nature of authority and its place in the governing structures that underlie certain aspects of our culture: the academy; the transmission of knowledge through (print) media; the policed ownership of content. The best thing about the red team/blue team debate is that we're talking about these issues. But it's out of my power to change things like copyright holders' demands, even as our culture lurches on, with mashups and songvids put up on YouTube faster than the YouTube copyright police can take them down. Music, TV, and movie downloads, and peer-to-peer file sharing - all of this permits easy access to copyrighted material that's in a perfect form to be co-opted and used in a new way.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW...

Chris Williams Responds to Our Questions about FanLib

As of a few minutes ago, I have received Chris Williams' response to the questions we collected here. I promised him that I would run his answers in full and I have accordingly made no changes here except to format this in a way that will make it readable on the blog. I should warn people that I am tied up with a conference this afternoon and this evening. I will put through comments from readers as quickly as I am able to do so but I may be off line for extended periods of time, so please be patient. As always, if you get an error message, send your comments directly to me and I will post them myself. THE ANSWERS

Dr. Jenkins,

Thank you for the opportunity to address the questions and share the unedited answers in full with your readers. I would like to apologize to the fan fiction community for creating confusion, being insensitive, sending some inappropriate communications, and acting in an unprofessional manner. I acknowledge that some of my answers below are repetitive but I wanted to make sure the answers are complete and in context for those readers that may only be interested in certain questions. Now to the answers...

BASIC BACKGROUND

What is your own background in fandom? Have you had a history of involvement in this community? More generally, are there people working for your company who come out of the fan fiction world and have an understanding of its traditions and practices?

I am a complete media junkie. I love stories and since 2003 I have involved over 100,000 people in online fan fiction events. Because of my involvement in these events I've definitely spent the most time with Harry Potter and L Word fan fiction. As you see from my response in the forums, I am not a great writer.

Several people in our small company come out of the fan fiction world. All of us are now involved in the community.

What led you to create this site? What first gave you the idea and why did you carry through with it? What are you hoping to achieve? What sold your investors that this was a good idea and that this was the right time to move forward?

I was deeply involved with the ongoing online revolution at Yahoo for a long time and I have always had a passion for film. In 2001, my friend and I had an idea, inspired by many people we knew with creative movie ideas, who didn't have the means or access to realize them. So we tried to create a collaborative event for fans to write an original script and produce a feature film from it. It quickly became apparent to us that online storytelling was about more than script writing: entertainment fans were also looking for venues to showcase their talent, and media companies were wrestling with how to best operate in a changing world. So we started by testing the waters with fans by running special online storytelling events and found that many of the participants loved fan fiction. We went to the media companies, talked to them about how they wanted to work with online communities and found that many wanted to connect with fan fiction readers and writers. FanLib started running special events in partnership with media companies and publishers in a moderated, controlled environment. These events were so successful with both fans and the media companies that we decided to create a venue for online storytelling based upon fan fiction.

In this broadly changing landscape FanLib (the company, not the website) is meant to be a positive agent of change for fans, media companies, and rights holders. I want FanLib.com (the website) to become a venue for fans who want to showcase and share their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in creative storytelling events.

Our investors recognize the tectonic shifts taking place in the digital/media/consumer/entertainment landscape. I won't fill space here with the facts and research about media convergence, user generated content (UGC) and personal media consumption and I certainly recognize fan fiction is not your "vanilla" UGC. I know you and your readers are very well aware of these modern media phenomena and changes that are occurring everywhere. Our investors believe FanLib can play an important role.

What is the basic value proposition you are making? Who is making money here? Why are the fans not being compensated for the work they produce? In what other ways might fans receive benefit from their participation in your site?

The value proposition for fans is a free venue where they can pursue their passion by creating, showcasing, reading, reviewing, sharing, archiving, discovering stories, and by participating in fun events in a community with similar interests. For those that are interested, they can also get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms through official special events we create with media companies, like we just did with the TV show Ghost Whisperer.

The value proposition for media companies and publishers is to connect, engage, and entertain fans of their media properties in a new online storytelling environment.

Right now, in the early stages, no one is profiting. We are on the leading edge of the changes, and this is an evolving model. Media companies pay us to create the special events that I've described and advertisers pay to sponsor them. Like many sites on the web, users don't pay us and we don't pay them. We want to introduce fans to online storytelling, where fan fiction plays an important role and where they can share in a particular experience provided at the website.

What does FanLib offer a fanfic writer that other ad-free sites run by people from within the fanfic community do not?

FanLib offers four things:

First, we provide a venue for people who want to showcase and share their stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events.

Second, for people who want it, we provide the opportunity to be recognized and discovered by a wider audience and by our media partners. For example:

- FanLib has run two online storytelling events resulting in twelve winning authors being published in e-books distributed by HarperCollins.

- FanLib is currently running an event where authors have their parenting stories produced into short video episodes with major stars that are distributed on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and online. These videos have already been viewed over 2,800,000 times online, and we are only on the second episode with three more to go.

- FanLib launched the first ever collaboration between a television creator and their fans resulting in an original episode screenplay for The L Word. One of the winning authors secured literary representation as a result of the contest.

- FanLib has given away more than $50,000 in prizes to winning participants in our online storytelling events.

- FanLib has secured local and national press coverage for winning authors of FanLib events.

We have many more special fan events coming. You'll see us shortly announce and launch: a fan event with a major media company around one of the most popular fandoms, a collaborative feature film screenplay and movie, a partnership with a major talent management company to identify star writers from the FanLib.com community and create opportunities for them.

Third, we have highly responsive customer support.

Lastly, no other site - whether they have ads or not - offers all of the features listed below. Our beta site also actively solicits member feature requests and implements them.

Features:

+ Massively scalable, reliable archiving platform (backed up daily)

+ Easy submission creation and editing, including:

o WYSIWYG editing

o Import from another website

o File Upload with support for .doc, .txt, and .rtf formats

o Auto-save (i.e., your work is safe if your connection drops or computer crashes)

o "Make Private" option (your fic will be completely hidden from all but you)

o Add chapters over time

o Easily assign up to three fandoms to each submission

+ Advanced searching and filtering tools: Easy to add multiple criteria and build a filtered query with simple clicks

+ Featured Fanfics and Members: They will appear on the site homepage as well as at the top of searches

+ Syndication and Sharing Tools: Including RSS feeds, invites, and the ability to easily embed customized promotional badges on other sites

+ Customizable Member Profiles: You can build your profile with your fanfics, favorites, descriptions and feedback, deciding which elements will be public

+ Story Views:

o Paginated with bookmarking

o Single-page (printer-friendly) and ad-free

+ QuickLists (save a fic for later viewing)

+ Favorites

+ Subscriptions (see the latest from your favorite fandom or author)

+ Fandom FastFind: The ability to type a few characters from the name of a fandom, hit return and go directly to a page with only stories from that fandom

+ Tagging of fanfics

+ Customized Fanfic themes and images (with the ability to disable themes when browsing and searching)

+ Auto-Recommendations

+ Private messaging

+ Full Featured Message Boards

+ Content blocking based on age ratings (e.g., mature-rated submissions may be completely hidden)

+ Star Readers and Writers

+ Rate submissions (1-5 stars)

+ Leave multiple comments

+ Strong search engine optimizations

And, coming soon:

+ Email notifications

+ Multiple Author submissions

+ Banning individual members from leaving you comments

+ Ability to associate other media (e.g., video, more images)

+ Social networking tools

To our knowledge FanLib.com is the only site with ALL of these features. Our site is designed so that you don't have to use all these features - in fact it's also a great private archive.

Who is the target audience for the site? Did you do a market survey and identify who they wanted, and what is the demographic breakdown of that audience?

The site is for people who want to showcase and share stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun online events. Let's call that the "site mission". Our market research showed that the site mission has great potential in a surprisingly broad demographic range. So the site design was not principally driven by a specific demographic, it was much broader than that and was designed for those people who like to use the new online tools and services. Obviously, anyone can use the site and we recognize that it is definitely not what the traditional fan fiction community is used to. Many of the features are a result of requests specifically from our ongoing beta test.

COPYRIGHT ISSUES

What rights is your site claiming over the fiction that gets posted there? What rights remain with the authors? Can fans post the same stories on other sites, for example, or are you claiming an exclusive right to the material? Fans note that the original terms of service implied you had the rights to edit the material or republish it in other places. Is this true?

FanLib.com members do not give up any ownership rights when they use the website. Neither do they acquire any additional ownership rights to characters and settings owned by someone else. FanLib does not own any rights to a member's content; the members only authorize us to share it on our own website and allow other members to make use of it for their own noncommercial purposes. By submitting a story on FanLib.com, they do not give up any rights to post it on any other website. FanLib imposes no restrictions on what you do with your content outside our website. The old beta terms of service (TOS) did have the word "edit," which caused a lot of confusion and has been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community.

Fanfic remains in a legal gray area because there has yet to be a precedent set stating that it is or is not, legal. Many fans worry that FanLib changes the terms by which fan fiction is being produced and circulated by charging money and pushing it further into the public eye and that this increases the risk of legal action against it. A court battle could adversely impact the entire fan community by basing case law on the most commercial rather than the least commercial forms of the practice. How might you respond to this concern? What risk analysis have you done here?

We have done an extensive risk analysis and are comfortable with supporting fan fiction through our website. As some of our members have already acknowledged, the landscape is changing. Fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers. For example, Lucasfilm, which has traditionally been conservative about fan-generated content, has even added, this year for the first time, a fan fiction category to their annual "Official Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge," and NBC has invited fans to submit their theories around the TV show Heroes.

We want to be positive agents in this change by working with fans, media companies and rights holders. We are going to do whatever is feasible to assure people that posting on FanLib.com does not somehow add to their liability. Our goal is build a great venue, open to everyone, that allows people to showcase their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events. We think that by building a collaborative model, we will positively impact the fan community and will avoid needless litigation. We believe that we will be seen as an online community that goes to great lengths to protect everyone's rights in a positive, collaborative way. For those members or prospective members who are worried, I encourage them to look at our new TOS, which we feel are very fan-friendly. FanLib.com is a free service for users, and we do not charge fans to read or post fan fiction.

Statements in the original FAQ and comments from FanLib representatives that "we assume fanfiction is legal fair use" and "it's not in the copyright holder's interest to sue" have many fan authors concerned. In some cases, you are publishing stories in universes where there have been explicit statements made by creators that they do not consider fan fiction to be fair use. Have you researched the individual fandoms involved or are you treating them each the same?

First, I want to apologize for our poorly written FAQ and our old beta terms of service (TOS), all of which resulted in an understandable uproar in the fan fiction community. We have posted a new FAQ [http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=faq.html] and new terms of service (TOS) [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do]

Our policy is to not accept submissions in fandoms for which the right holders have explicitly stated they do not consider fan fiction to be fair use. Since we don't actively police the site, as stated in our TOS, we will remove any such stories that come to our attention.

Yes, we have researched the individual fandoms, and no, we are not treating them all the same.

Your previous efforts around The L Word and The Ghostwhisperer involved working directly with production companies to authorize certain kinds of fan fiction. Why have you shifted strategies with this new initiative? And can you reconcile the two models?

The premise of this question is 100% false. We have not shifted strategies. As noted above, fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers and being pushed into the public eye. We want to be a positive agent in this changing environment by collaborating with fans, media companies and rights holders. We've already experienced significant success on this front through our series of special storytelling events, and we intend to build on that success with the FanLib.com venue where all the parties can participate in fan fiction. We believe we can help reconcile the two models, but changes are coming with or without us.

How is the site planning to deal with the (inevitable) first complaint from a copyright holder?

FanLib complies with the DMCA. Please see our http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=dmca.htm> for more details.

Your TOS requires writers to "defend, indemnify and hold harmless FanLib" in the case of legal action. What efforts do you plan to take to inform writers about the risks they are taking? Many fans are concerned that your company will make all of the money here while leaving fans to take all the risks. How would you respond to this criticism?

Again, our old beta terms of service (TOS) was not a good expression of our intent. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community, including this issue. Indemnification clauses are a standard part of most website TOS. For your convenience, here is the language from our new TOS:

"You agree to indemnify and hold harmless FanLib, its officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney fees) arising from any violation of the Terms. This indemnification obligation will survive these Terms and your use of the website for 12 months."

Our new FAQ also helps address some of these issues. [http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=faq.html] This is an ongoing process, and we know there is more work to do.

So, how would I respond to this criticism? I would respond by asking if you truly think that the fans are the only ones taking the risks. To accomplish the mission I've described above and be positive agents of change for all parties involved requires enormous commitment, investment and substantial risk for us. To some extent we've tried to mitigate the risk for fans by being extremely flexible in our new TOS, but we'll never be able to make everyone happy and there are always some risks.

CONTENT ISSUES

FanLib allows adult content under an "ADULT" rating, but the Terms of Service say that the website must not be used to publish any material "obscene, vulgar, or indecent." Isn't there an inherent conflict there? What happens when a parent finds his-or-her child reading an ADULT-rated Harry Potter fic?

These words, which were included in our old beta TOS and caused understandable confusion, have now been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects the input of the fan fiction community, including this issue. Naturally, we will do whatever we must to abide by law.

First of all we know that in the past J.K. Rowling has expressed her disapproval for certain kinds of adult Harry Potter fan fiction. We don't presume to know her boundaries about what may be acceptable or unacceptable in a Harry Potter fic, but if she notifies us we will take down the story. As it relates to the situation where a parent finds his-or-her child reading ADULT-rated Harry Potter fic, I can't speak for the parent. What we've done on the site is completely hide all adult content so that the user must actively seek it out by changing filter settings with explicit warnings. This far exceeds what a lot of other sites do, and our process will continue to evolve.

In your marketing brochure --

http://www.my2centences.com/my2c_new/FanLib_info.pdf -- you assure the copyright holders that FanLib is "managed and moderated to the max," and that "as with a coloring book, all players must "stay within the lines." Can you explain what you mean by that statement? One of the reasons so many fans write fanfic is so that they can deliberately step out of the "lines" and do their own creative thing without any interference from the copyright holders.

I'd like to clear up some confusion around the FanLib brochure you're quoting from. First, it was produced three years ago - in 2004. Second, as a company, we have two distinct parts:

1. The beta site, FanLib.com (launched in March 2007); and

2. Official online storytelling events. In this second part, which we actually started years ago, we work with other companies and sponsors to create special online fan events. Each event is governed by its own clear rules and terms of service that are separate from those for the FanLib.com beta site referred to above. This is necessary because contests, sweepstakes, prizes etc. need their own rules and regulations. The brochure that people are referring to was written for potential companies and sponsors and relates only to these special events and not the FanLib.com beta site. At the time we published the brochure, our URL linked to a site that essentially described the events for companies and sponsors in more detail. These special events are managed and moderated and "missions" are provided so that players "stay within the lines." This brochure has NOTHING to do with fan fiction submitted on the FanLib.com site, where we provide a venue for anyone to be as creative as they want as long as they don't violate our policies. We totally understand that general fan fiction doesn't fit in the process described in the brochure, which is ONLY for certain special events we create.

I hope that addresses the confusion.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS ISSUES

Fans note that someone named "Naomi" was used to send out the original invitation letters to fan writers, but fans have been unable to find out who this person is. Is it a real person or a sock puppet? Why was a female name used for this purpose, when the board of directors for the company seems to be all male? Why has the initial advertising with its play on the Charles Atlas bodybuilding campaign adopted such a masculine metaphor for what has been and remains an overwhelmingly feminine cultural practice?

I acknowledge the way we sent out certain invitations was flawed. Our objective was to invite fan fiction authors to participate in our beta test and, if they chose to, join our beta team testing the site and providing feedback. As I hope you can appreciate, I am not going to publicly discuss personal details about our employees. We do not use sock puppets, no gender criteria were taken into account during the process and nobody at FanLib is pretending to be of a different gender.

The advertisement you mentioned was one of four that we tested during the beta, and we ran it on a site targeting a younger audience where it performed very well. We also put the ad in a general rotation on our beta site as a "house ad." In my considerable experience in online advertising unless you do some profile related targeting you're going to expose an ad to people for whom it isn't suitable. Because this ad was in a general rotation unfortunately this is what happened. We pulled the ad in order to be sensitive to some of the complaints. We are acutely aware that fandom is predominantly female, just like the users of the FanLib.com beta site, who seem to like its design and features.

Many fans feel that the company has done a poor job so far in community relations. What steps are you taking to turn this around? Are you rewriting the terms of service and FAQ based on the feedback you've received? Are you planning to develop an advisory board composed of members of the fanwriting community?

I'll be the first to admit we've done an awful job with community relations. I think the good news for us is that we have lots of feedback from the beta site and community, far more than we expected. As a result we have rewritten our terms of service and FAQ. We've taken some extraordinary steps to make our policies more fan-friendly and we are currently putting together final plans for a fan advisory board, which will be published on our beta site shortly.

What, if anything, do you think you can do to enhance the credability and responsiveness of FanLib to the people who have invested their energy into fan fiction in some cases for several decades?

First, I want to apologize for my own idiotic post across multiple blogs and for my offer to open a dialogue that I was unable to follow through on due to overwhelming community response. As a first step, based on the feedback from our current beta test, we have rewritten our terms of service and FAQ, revised some of our policies, and are creating a fan advisory board. We are in this for the long term to make FanLib.com a venue where anyone who wants to, can showcase and share their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun storytelling events,

This last question is a bit awkward for both of us but it has come up a number of times and so I feel I need to ask it: Isn't it somewhat symptiomatic of FanLib's problems that the spokespeople are more willing to talk to a man with credentials rather than some of the female fan writers who have approached you?

I do think your question is a bit unfair, but I'll answer anyway. I am here because you hold dual citizenship in fandom and academia, you maintain credibility and integrity in both worlds, and you told me I you would get a fair hearing and you would share the unedited results of our interview in its entirety with those interested in the matter. Meanwhile, we've been listening to the many comments we've received from the community and taking action. For proof check out our new TOS and FAQ on our website.

We intend to continue the conversation with the fan fiction community through our developing fan advisory board and, as time permits, by responding to other inquiries, comments and requests that we receive from interested individuals - obviously, regardless of gender.

Thanks again for your willingness to be interviewed.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of FanLib

You say "User-Generated Content." We say "Fan Culture."

Let's call the whole thing off!

The differences between the ways corporations and fans understand the value of grassroots creativity has never been clearer than the battle lines which have been drawn this weekend over a new venture called FanLib.

FanLib -- "Where the Stories Continue"

I first learned about FanLib's latest plans about a week ago when Convergence Culture Consortium analyst Ivan Askwith reported on their efforts in our blog:

FanLib.com launched as hub for "fan fiction" writers. The idea is to provide a home for creators of one of the first "user generated" genres, fan stories written using popular movie and TV characters and storylines. Members can upload stories, embed promos and build communities around their favorite shows. FanLib, founded by Titanic producer Jon Landau, Jon Moonves and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh, is also currently sponsoring the Ghost Whisperer Fan Finale Challenge on the site asking fans to write their own conclusion to the show's two-part finale.

Ivan concluded his post with some concerns about whether fans were going to eagerly embrace such a project:

Since fan fiction seems to be one of the last traditional forms of fan creativity that hasn't been widely coopted and encouraged (within specific, copyright-friendly parameters) by the entertainment industry...My offhand guess would be that fan fiction, unlike mashup videos, tribute songs, and so on, are harder to 'control', and leave a lot more room for individual fans to take characters, or narratives, in directions that producers and executives aren't comfortable with.

FanLib started promisingly enough, courting the producers of programs like The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer, and getting them to run official fan fiction contests. Fans would be able to write in these universes, safe in the knowledge that they would not receive Cease and Desist letters. They even worked with a book publisher to try to put together an anthology of amateur romance fiction.

But, FanLib didn't emerge bottom-up from the fan culture itself. It wasn't run by people who knew the world of fan fiction from the inside out. It was a business, pure and simple, run by a board of directors which was entirely composed of men. This last point is especially relevant when you consider that the overwhelming percentage of people who write fan fiction are women -- even if there has been some increase of male writers as fandom has gone on line. To give you a sense of scale, there were more than 700 people who attended the Harry Potter fan convention I wrote about yesterday -- most of them readers, many of them writers of fanfic set in J.K. Rowling's world. By my count, there weren't more than 20 men in the group. That's about 18 more men than would have been there if this was a fan fiction oriented convention 16 years ago when I wrote Textual Poachers! To suggest how out of touch with this community they were, their original ads featured the transformation of fandom from a 90 pound weakling to a more robust and muscular form, leaving many women to wonder if this implied a move towards a more masculine conception of the practice. The company later did produce a female spokesperson who expressed confusion about why gender was an issue here in the first place.

Historical Background

Keep in mind there's a history here of previous attempts by companies -- some affiliated with the production companies, some not -- to create a commercial space for the promotion of fan culture. Most of them have ended badly for the fans.

Consider, for example, this story in Salon in 2000 which describes a company called Fandom.com ("by fans, for fans") which asserted a claim to have trademarked the word, "fandom," and then tried to use its corporate control of the concept to try to shut down any amateurs who wanted to share their public via the web. Salon reported on a cease and desist letter that Fandom.com had sent out to a fan named Carol Burrell. As Salon reported at the time:

Fandom.com serves as an umbrella site for numerous "fandomains" -- formerly independent Web sites dedicated to popular, merchandise-friendly topics such as Star Wars, The X-Files and Lord of the Rings that now run under the Fandom.com banner. Each site contains the same structure and design, and there's a large copyright disclaimer placed at the bottom of every page....

The initial premise of Fandom.com was straightforward: to protect individual fan site owners from studio censorship (and sell a lot of nifty merchandise and advertising in the process) ....Fandom.com seemed to make sense -- by joining together the little guys, it would create an institution that could defend itself from the heavy hitters. But Fandom.com's letter to Burrell appeared to indicate something entirely different. Fandom.com was accusing Burrell of trademark violation -- a fact that was ironic on at least two levels. First: Fandom.com may not even own a trademark for the word "fandom." Second: A company whose individual sites flourished by pushing copyright laws to the legal limit was now turning around and itself playing the role of intellectual property bully.

Which leads to the question currently raging in the fan community: Who will protect the fans from Fandom?

Or consider another such effort which Lucasfilm created to "protect" Star Wars fans, one which was described in more detail in Convergence Culture:

In 2000, Lucasfilm offered Star Wars fans free Web space and unique content for their sites, but only under the condition that whatever they created would become the studio's intellectual property. As the official notice launching this new "Homestead," explained, "To encourage the on-going excitement, creativity, and interaction of our dedicated fans in the online Star Wars community, Lucas Online is pleased to offer for the first time an official home for fans to celebrate their love of Star Wars on the World Wide Web." Historically, fan fiction had proven to be a point of entry into commercial publication for at least some amateurs, who were able to sell their novels to the professional book series centering around the various franchises. If Lucasfilm, Ltd. claimed to own such rights, they could publish them without compensation and they could also remove them without permission or warning.

Elizabeth Durack was one of the more outspoken leaders of an campaign urging her fellow Star Wars fans not to participate in these new arrangements: "That's the genius of Lucasfilm's offering fans web space -- it lets them both look amazingly generous and be even more controlling than before....Lucasfilm doesn't hate fans, and they don't hate fan websites. They can indeed see how they benefit from the free publicity they represent -- and who doesn't like being adored? This move underscores that as much as anything. But they're also scared, and that makes them hurt the people who love them."

As far as long-time fans were concerned, the announcement that FanLib was going to create a commercial portal to support the publication of fan fiction was read as more of the same. Under the circumstances, there was going to be healthy skepticism within the fan writing community no matter how the company approached them, but so far, the company has approached the fans in all of the wrong ways.

What Went Wrong

There's an excellent summary of the issues surrounding this venture written by a fan. I don't want to repeat all of the details here. But here's how Icarussancalian summarizes the company's initial pitch to the fan community:

The founders of FanLib.com saw no reason they couldn't cash in on the internet traffic. Formerly from Google, Chris Williams, the CEO and co-founder of FanLib, has an impressive resume. FanLib has corporate backing and $3 million of venture capital invested into the site.

"My colleagues and I want it to be the ultimate place for talented writers like you," Naomi of FanLib wrote to fan fiction writers. "In case you're wondering, FanLib's not new to fan fiction. Since 2001, they've been producing really cool web events with people like CBS, Showtime and HarperCollins to bring fan creativity into the big leagues."

FanLib did their homework. "We scouted for serious fan fiction authors on various sites and invited only a few hundred based on their writing and impact in the community," co-founder David Williams says, and fans agree that their search focused on popular writers. What's a "serious" fan fiction writer? A serious fan fiction writer could have anywhere from 30 to 100 stories, with upwards of 700 regular readers subscribed to their blogs or LiveJournal accounts. Currently, fan fiction writers do their own marketing through networking with other fans, posting in blogs, fan-run archives, and various fan fiction communities targeted to their readers.

Unfortunately, FanLib did little more than ask the writers to hand over the product.

FanLib's creators immediately ran into trouble with fans critical of FanLib's plans to turn profits on their freely provided fan fiction with no compensation to the authors, beyond t-shirts and prizes. Fan fiction writers were also unhappy at a clause where FanLib owned the rights to any fiction they posted...

This post also notes that FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel for all legal actions that might be taken against them by any production companies that felt that fan fiction was in violation of their intellectual property rights. Fans were going to take all of the risks; the company was going to make all of the profits, all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives. (Taken at face value, the company was trying to "cherry pick" the top writers from the amateur realm. At worst, they were imposing their own aesthetic judgments on the community without any real regard for existing norms and hierarchies.)

To add insult to injury, the company surrounded itself with self congratulatory rhetoric about taking fan fiction into the "major leagues," which showed little grasp of why fans might prefer to operate in the more liberated zone of what Catherine Tossenberger, an aca-fan who spoke at Phoenix Rising this weekend, calls the "unpublishable." Or the producers talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream." This is a debate which has long surrounded fan fiction. Some seek to legitimize it by arguing that it is a stepping stone or training ground for professional writers as if commercialization of creative expression was the highest possible step an author could take. Others -- myself among them -- have argued that fan fiction should be valued within the terms of the community which produces and reads it, that a fan writer who only writes for other fans may still be making a rich contribution to our culture which demands our respect.

FanLib had done its homework by the standards of the VC world: they had identified a potential market; they had developed a business plan; they had even identified potential contributors to the site; they had developed a board of directors. They simply hadn't really listen to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction.

Fan Fury

Well, if they hadn't listened to fans before, they were starting to hear from them by this past weekend. Fans were rallying where-ever fans gathered, constructing arguments, deconstructing the company's FAQ, proposing alternative models for how this might be done right, writing letters to the managers, and trying to hold them accountable for their actions. You can get some sense of the intensity of their arguments by checking out some of the many posts found at Metafandom, a site where fans gather to discuss the politics and poetics of fan culture or as they would put it, just "wank."

As one reads these fan voices, one hears some of their deep ambivalence about the ways that the corporate embrace of "user-generated content" may be endangering the grassroots culture they have created for themselves. Here, for example, is almostnever:

This is the reason I have been involved recently in arguments about whether our community should accept the monetization of fan fiction. Because I think it's coming whether we accept it or not, and I'd rather it was fan-creators getting the benefit of the $$$, not some cutthroat entrepreneur who doesn't care about our community except as a market niche.

I don't think FanLib is the one that's going to change things, but I do see change coming. There's a lot of happytalk in the entertainment industry about the money to be made by bringing your audience in under your corporate wing, the better to do market research, sell to them, and make $$ from their conversations about your product.

But if, say, Paramount brings Star Trek fan fiction in-house, it wouldn't be smart for them to allow competition from fan-run archives and sites. If Star Trek fans' only choice was to post to a site like FanLib or get a C&D, then things could get lonely for Trek fans, if only from people dropping out of fandom or going underground to avoid the hassles.

These comments suggest two debates which are currently brewing in fandom:

1. the issue of whether amateur creators should be compensated for the work they contribute to for-profit sites like YouTube. This is an issue I've raised here before and won't discuss in depth now.

2. the concern that as companies construct a zone of tolerance over certain forms of fan activities, they will use them to police more aggressively those fan activities that they find offensive or potentially damaging to their brand. Fans have long asserted their rights to construct and share fantasies that may not be consistent with the ideological norms of media companies. In an argument which parallels debates in the queer community, they argue that as long as some of their fantasies are being policed, none of them have the freedom of expression which drew them into fan culture in the first place.

Angiepen, another fan, walked through a detailed critique of the site's terms of service, showing both the ways that they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced and how they might threaten the uneasy zone of tolerance which surrounds fan fiction as far as at least some of the Powers That Be (the media companies and their executives) are concerned.

Almost everyone I meet in the media industry imagines we are moving towards a more participatory culture but the dispute surrounds the terms of participation. More and more media producers are adopting what I call the "collaborationist" model -- embracing fan creativity as a way of enhancing engagement with their properties. Others have adopted a stance of benign neglect -- willing to turn a blind eye to the proliferation of fan fiction online as long as people aren't making money from it.

As fans note, however, FanLib's efforts to commercialize fan fiction represented the worst case scenario: a highly publicized, for profit venture which left fan fiction writers even more exposed than they have before. Fans have long noted that there is no case law to determine what if any fan fiction constitutes fair use. They realize, however, that the "wrong case" could easily bring about the wrong kind of legal judgement on this entire space. Some, like AngiePen, went even further:

You know, this is probably just me being paranoid here but since the TOS prohibits any posting of material which violates someone else's copyright, they could in theory have set up this site to draw in as many fanfic writers as possible with the intention of turning around and smacking all of them for copyright violation, whether that means direct prosecution of people who are writing fics based on properties whose owners are represented on the FanLib board, or sending notification with names and e-mails and copies of stories to the copyright holders who are not associated with the site. I'm just saying.

How Not to Handle a Controversy

And so the debate continues. As icarusancalion notes in her summary, the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing and then trying to erase previous posts once they came under fire. For example, when fans systematically critiqued the FAQ for the site, the FAQ disappeared from public view, one hopes so that it could be reconsidered and rewritten but potentially to simply hide the history of the company's less than friendly interactions with fans. She quotes FanLib executive Chris William's post to the community as an example:

"hey everyone, I'm Chris one of the founders of FanLib. it's really late and i have been working on the site all day. I'm exhausted but i just realized what was going on here and all of the commentsts are making me sick. we're a small company with 10 emplyees who work 16 hours a day to try and make a great website. we're real people! with feelings and everything! we have been working on this and dreaming about it for a long time and you are just here to shit on it without giving us a chance. i care deeply about what you think but this is crazy. we're good people here and you make us sound like we're an evil corporation or the govt. sending your kids to war or something. we really are all about celebrating fan fiction and fan fiction readers and writers. im sorry this is so short and please excuse the fact that i am cutting and pasting this across a bunch of ljs but i gotta get some sleep."

Those of you in the media business will understand the frustration expressed in this post but it also can come across as sounding like the student who wants a good grade because they worked really hard on the assignment and not because of the results. Williams ignores the fact that a significant number of the fans involved in this dispute had worked for a decade or more, some for many decades, to generate a community around fan fiction and that's precisely why they didn't want outsiders moving in and trying to turn it into a revenue stream for their companies.

Alternative Models

As the conversation continued, fans began to come up with their own proposals for ways that they could achieve the value of this venture -- a central hub for fan fiction -- while keeping the cultural production under the control of the fan community itself. Here's part of one such proposal for "an archive of our own" by astolat which is starting to get some real traction among the fans I've spoken with the past few days:

We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people's IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it.

I think the necessary features would include:

* run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers

* with no ads and solely donation-supported

* with a simple and highly searchable interface and browsable quicksearch pages

* allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult -- with a registration process for reading adult-rated stories where once you register, you don't have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read

* allowing the poster to control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)

* allowing users to leave comments with the poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie, lj style)

* code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories

* giving explicit credit to the original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status

It's not hard to see the contrast between what these fans want and what the company is offering them. Given the speed with which this debate has grown and the skills held collectively within the fan community, I wouldn't be surprised to see such a site emerge from this fray.

What's Wrong with the "User-Generated Content" Model?

I have focused here on the fan's side of the story. It is worth keeping in mind that there may be, almost certainly is, a considerable gap between the ways that FanLib's directors see their venture and the ways that it is being perceived within the fan community. If FanLib is smart, they will take seriously these complaints which come from people who are at the center of the existing fan communities and will be trying to rework their plans to respond to this feedback. It is not clear to me that they can avoid some fundamental problems in the ways that their business plan intersects with the grassroots communities which they claim they want to serve and which some fans fear they want to exploit.

I hope that other groups entering the space of what the industry likes to call "user-generated content" study this story closely and learn from FanLib's mistakes and missteps. Perception matters. Community relations are make or break. You can't serve a community if you don't understand their existing practices and their long-standing traditions.

Let's start with the concept of "user-generated content." The industry tends to see these users in isolation -- as individuals who want to express themselves, rather than as part of pre-existing communities with their own traditions of participatory culture. FanLib's rhetoric seems to be caught between these two conceptions of the "user," talking about fan traditions but dealing with fans as isolated individuals and not respecting the community as a whole.

Second, the industry tends to think of "content" as something which can be commodified and thus isolated from the social relations which surrounds its production and circulation. Yet, fan culture stresses the ways that this material emerges from a social network of fans who have their own aesthetics, politics, and genre expectations. And for many fans, the noncommercial nature of fan culture is one of its most important characteristics. These stories are a labor of love; they operate in a gift economy and are given freely to other fans who share their passion for these characters. Being free of the commercial constraints that surround the source texts, they gain new freedom to explore themes or experiment with structures and styles that could not be part of the "mainstream" versions of these worlds.

Of course, there are already a large number of fans who are deciding to participate in the FanLib site, for whom its services do seem to represent what the corporate world would call "added value," and we probably need to develop a better understanding of why they are making that choice. I don't mean my discussion here to suggest that fandoms speak with one voice on this or any other matter. I only want to suggest that FanLib is bucking long-standing convictions within the fan community when it seeks to move fan fiction into the commercial realm.

A Public Invitation

That said, I would welcome response from the executives at FanLib. I would love to conduct an interview with them on this site in which they actually responded to the fan criticisms of their ventures. So, Chris Williams, if you or anyone else at FanLib is reading this, get in touch.

Update: Chris Williams has accepted my invitation to be interviewed in the blog. We are still working out the details. In the meantime, I wanted to solicit from my readers questions you would like to see addressed in such an exchange. My goal is to allow him to tell his side of the story and to speak to the concerns which fans have raised. Either send me your questions via the comments section here or via e-mail at henry3@mit.edu. Thanks. As always, my spam filter can be a little wonky so if you are getting error messages, send your questions directly to me.

Everybody Loves Harry?

The following comments are reflections upon a really intense and delightful weekend spent at Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter Conference held in New Orleans. Thanks to my hosts and to all of the other fans I met at the conference. I am sure that I will be having further reflections on what I learned this weekend in future posts.

Harry Potter in the Mainstream

Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans, I was interviewed on camera by a producer for Dateline. Among the many questions he asked me was whether we would ever see something like the Harry Potter phenomenon again in our lifetime. The question was relatively banal but for some reason, it caught me off guard, as I realized that according to many theories, we shouldn't be seeing anything like the Harry Potter phenomenon now. Harry Potter is a massive mass market success at a time when all of our conversations are focusing on the fragmentation of the media marketplace and the nichification of media production. There has been so much talk about the loss of common culture, about the ways that we are all moving towards specialized media, about the end of event based consumption, and so forth. Yet very little of it has reflected on the ways that Harry Potter has bucked all of these trends.

I got into my taxi from the airport and had the usual conversation you have with a taxi driver in a convention city. He asked where I came from and why I was in town -- as if following a script -- and then asked me what kind of conference I was attending. But when I told him I was going to a Harry Potter conference, his eyes brightened up, his voice grew more intense, and he told me how very very much he was waiting for the final novel to come out this summer. I checked into the hotel and went across the street for some late lunch and played out more or less the same conversation with the waitress. When she saw I had a conference program, she brought several of her friends around -- including some from the kitchen -- who wanted to flip through the program, who wanted to sneak across the street and attend a session or two, who wondered aloud who I thought might be killed in the final installment and whether or not Snape was an evil person. Some of them had stories of the lengths they had gone to celebrate their affection for and affiliation with these books. These folks weren't simply the readers of a best-selling book series; they had all of the passion and at least some of the expertise one associates with the most hardcore fans of any other media property, only they had no direct affiliation with any kind of fan culture or community.

I tried explaining this to the television producer, worried that the final documentary, when it airs later this summer, will fall prey to the usual stereotypes of crazed and obsessive fans, totally outside of the cultural mainstream. But statistically speaking, the people who are not fans of Harry Potter are outside of the mainstream. According to Wikipedia, the six books have so far sold 377 Million copies and been translated into more than 63 different languages. Harry Potter will be widely recognized by people all over the world, including many who have not read the books but watched the movies or simply read a newspaper over the past decade.

A fair number of those Muggles are very aware that the new novel is coming out in a matter of weeks and many of them will race out to the stores or put in an advanced order so that they will be sure to get a copy the moment it becomes available. More than 500,000 pre-orders had been placed at last count and those numbers are continuing to grow everyday. One can't help recall the stories of the mobs that swamped the docks awaiting the latest shipment of Dickens serials from London. And a fair number of them also know that the new film is coming out this summer and plan to wait in long lines to see it on opening day. Each of the films claims a place on the list of the top 20 money-earners of all time. All of this is part of the Harry Potter phenomenon which suggests the mainstream nature of its success. The conference brought together some of the people responsible for that mass market success including Electronic Arts' Danny Bilson who has helped to supervise the Harry Potter games.

Harry Potter as Niche Media

But in many other ways, the success of Harry Potter demonstrates the power of niche media. Start from the fact that this is a children's book, after all, and a fantasy, two genres which historically have attracted only niche readerships. Scholastic surely wouldn't have predicted this level of popular interest when it chose to publish the original novel. By traditional industry talk, much of Harry Potter's success came from so-called "surplus consumers" -- that is, consumers who fall outside of its target demographic. Traditionally, much of fan culture involves these kinds of surplus consumers -- female fans of male-targeted action adventure series, adult consumers of children's media, western consumers of Japanese popular culture, and so forth. Indeed, it is this attraction to works that are in some ways mismatched to our needs that encourages fans to rework and rewrite them.

At the same time, passion for the Harry Potter books has emerged as a generational marker, with many of those who attending the conference first becoming active within fan culture in their early teens. Some older fans have criticized my discussion of Harry Potter fandom in Convergence Culture for not giving them their due. I certainly would never imply that Harry Potter only attracts young fans -- indeed, much of the early coverage of the fan culture was fascinated by the fact that so many adults were becoming a fan of a children's franchise -- but I also think that the young age of so many of the participants in this global fan culture is a striking feature. I am used to going to fan cons where my wife and I are well within the average age bracket and here, the participants were much closer to my son's age.

Fan culture historically prides itself as being outside the mainstream. Catherine Tosenberger, a newly minted academic who specializes in the study of children's literature and whose dissertation dealt with erotic writing set in the Harry Potter realm, deployed the term, "unpublishable" in her discussion of fan fiction this weekend. She wanted to argue that much of fan fiction was "unpublishable" not in the negative sense that it is not worthy of being published but in the affirmative sense that it breaks the rules that set limits on what kinds of stories can be told within a commercially produced text: it experiments with new themes, it pushes the relationships in new directions, it adopts new forms, it embraces its own aesthetic, and it addresses audiences not considered commercially viable. In that sense, fan fiction represents the ultimate niche product -- one which emerges from a subculture, even if that subculture is now producing and circulating fan fiction on a scale which would have been unimaginable to those of us who first starting writing academic work on fan fiction almost two decades ago. The internet has increased the scale and expanded the distribution of fan produced content. Reading and writing fan fiction may not yet be a "mainstream" activity but it is starting to push the limits of our conception of what constitutes niche success. (By the way, one hallmark of this and other Harry Potter conventions is the healthy mixture of academic and fan experts, often on the same panel, and the eagerness with which fans soak up academic analysis of their culture and of the books.)

Wizard Rock?

Suzanne Scott, a Ph.D. candidate from the Critical Studies program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, shared her analysis of a decisively more niche practice -- "wizard rock" -- which she read in relation to earlier Do-It-Yourself music movements and to subcultural theories more generally. Wizard Rock is a form of music which takes its themes and inspiration from J.K. Rowling's novels; it may take many different forms, musically, including hard rock, new wave and punk, folk, and Emo. Much of it has a satirical edge but one born of a deep affection for the material.

As Scott notes, we might see wizard rock as a fandom specific outgrowth of the much older practice of filk music within the science fiction and media fan world. Filk is a word that emerged from a typo in a fan convention program that turned "folk music" into "filk music," but it caught the fancy of many fans and took on a life of its own. Filk defined itself initially as folk music about the future (as compared to traditional folk which is often about the past) and later as folk music about mass culture content more generally.

When I wrote about Filk in Textual Poachers, I was describing a form of music which was most often performed live and was largely shaped by communal sing-alongs. In the 1980s, though, we were starting to see the emergence of some filk performers and composers who were developing a kind of celebrity within fan culture: there were small scale companies that produced and distributed their taps, primarily in con dealer's rooms or via the mails. Not surprisingly, these companies made the transition from tape to cd, once it became possible to produce and distribute such recordings at relatively low costs. I was pleased to see some of these filk songs show up on Napster and the other torrents and more recently, some of the classic filk songs started to appear at the Apple iMusic store so that fans of filk could download them onto their iPods. Wizard rock artists have been quick to realize the values of MySpace as a distribution channels, deploying social networks to spread their reputations to more and more of the Harry Potter fans worldwide. Some in the audience suggested that there were now more than 300 Wizard Rock groups with their own MySpace pages.

A number of the leading Wizard Rock bands -- Draco and the Malfoys, The Parselmouths, The Remus Lupins, and the Whomping Willows -- performed at a special Friday night concert in a classic Storyville nightclub along Bourbon Street. Not all of them were "good" by traditional industry standards -- they might approach the level of "unrecordable" to build on Tosenberger's apt concept -- but a sizable segment of the audience had memorized their song lyrics and were singing along and they were doing a healthy trade in t-shirts and cds.

By almost any definition, wizard rock is a niche media form, though as Scott suggested, it is not clear whether we want to read it as a resistant subculture in any traditional sense of the word. Their tendency to personify the "evil" characters from the books and to tell the story from their perspectives suggests a play with moral inversion which has long been part of fan culture and songs with titles like "Voldemort Can't Stop the Rock" build on the ways rock music has long cast itself as an oppositional practice. Many of the groups do adopt an anti-censorship stance which grows out of the long struggles to defend the books themselves whose place in the classroom and in libraries have consistently been challenged by cultural conservatives, as I document in Convergence Culture.

Ships that Pass in the Night

In another sense, Harry Potter fandom is composed of a series of niche audiences, each interpreting the books on their own terms. We see this for example in the intense battles which have sometimes surrounded the various "ships" (relationships) in the novels. Fans may often draw sharp battle lines between those who believe Harry should end up with Ginny or with Hermione, not to mention those who would root for Draco or Snape or ... Fan fiction websites may be divided according to the preferred relationships, though there are some general sites such as FictionAlley which runs fic of all denominations. J.K. Rowling herself stepped into the fray around the release of the last book when she suggested in an interview with The Leaky Cauldron, a leading Harry Potter news-site, that Harry and Ginny had been the "obvious" pairing from the start and many hurt fans of Harry/Hermione fiction wrote her angry letters. Fans talk about the OTP (One True Pairing), though many fans remain open to a good story told about any possible relationship in the books. There are subgenres of fan fiction, especially those which surround Harry Potter erotica, which may also sharply divide the fandom into smaller and smaller niche publics. (The less said about some of those feuds here, the better.)

In the past, it would not be hard to imagine each of these fan cultures taking shape and continuing to operate with little or no awareness of each other's existence -- a series of localized reading practices or small interpretive communities. But the world of the internet has pushed them into contact with each other and the organizers of conferences like this one have to think carefully about how to create a harmonious balance between fans with very different aesthetic and moral sensibilities. One of the most heavily attended events of the weekend was a debate about the moral character of Snape which pit fans with fundamentally different theological commitments against each other. As I spoke to some fans afterwards, they had converted to the other side based on what they saw as sound and unassailable arguments.

On the other hand, we could also argue that it was the web that made some of the smaller niches within Harry Potter fandom possible in the first place -- fans of less likely pairings or more obscure subgenres of fan fiction would not have found each other without access to the kinds of social networking tools available today and would not have sustained their work without access to LiveJournal and discussion forums. During my comments on the plenary panel, I reminded the audience of the state of fan culture in the 1980s when discussions of television shows took place at cons or through letterzines (zines which assembled letters of comments and distributed them every three or four months). We were once excited to read what a few other people thought of that television show we watched months before. Now, the web allows instant response and prolonged interactions with fans scattered around the world. Ideas emerge, get elaborated upon, get debated, even become widely accepted in a matter of days. And the rhythm of the Harry Potter books' publication allows new orthodoxies to set in and be overturned many times while everyone is waiting for the next book in the series to appear.

Harry Potter and the Media Revolution

Harry Potter fans have been early adopters and adapters of new media technology in their efforts to connect with each other. It was announced at the conference that one of the long standing Harry Potter fan groups was launching its own island on Second Life where fans could gather to discuss or enact aspects of the books. Several different groups were producing podcasts at this event. I was, for example, asked to perform the part of Dumbledore in Spellcast's radio theater production of The Three Trials of Severus Snape which was being recorded at the convention. These podcasters have close relations with Warner Brothers and Scholastic and some of them are sponsored by Borders, the book chain which has made a major investment in Harry Potter fan culture. Borders also sponsored the field Quidditch competition, another suggestion that Harry Potter straddles between mass and niche media. Indeed, fans cite Rowling's implicit and sometimes explicit support for her fan culture as one of the factors that has paved the way for the enormous explosion of grassroots creativity the series has inspired. This is a case of the perfect storm where an engaging and immersive text and a welcoming author has met a new generation of fans eager to exploit the emerging new media platforms that have become so much a part of their lives.

And there were signs to be seen that these fans are starting to recognize their potential power as political force. On my plenary panel, we spent some time discussing the Defense Against Dark Arts movement, a fan effort to stand up to Warner Brothers when they sent Cease and Desist orders to Harry Potter fan websites worldwide. As I explain in Convergence Culture, this may have been the first successful movement of fans to challenge the rather blanket copyright assertions of the major media producers and they were successful at getting the studio to stop and reassess its response to fan culture.

Indeed, when I speak to media executives today, they cite two examples of franchises which helped to alter their understanding of fan culture -- Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. (It is striking, of course, that mainstream journalists tend to stress the Lord of the Rings story, which keeps alive the myth of the powerful Fan Boy, and not the Harry Potter story, which would require them to pay much more attention to Fan Girls as a cultural and political force.)

Around the edges of this con, there were signs that at least some fans wanted to move beyond this victory to embrace a larger target. I sat on a panel which helped to explain to fans the stakes in the current debates around net neutrality and the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act; I also attended several panels where fan/lawyers were proposing reforms to current copyright legislation which would provide greater protection for grassroots creative expression. A team of fan vidders were taking to the streets of New Orleans to do interviews and produce a documentary designed to raise awareness of what still needs to be done to help the city recover from Katrina. Everywhere you turned there were debates about sexual politics, with fans that had been reading and writing slash (homoerotic fan fiction) finding themselves more and more involved in debates affecting the rights of sexual minorities.

Many fans just wanted to have a good time this weekend but others were arguing that they should exploit their skills as media producers and distributors and take advantage of their massive numbers to make a difference in society. One could argue that this vision of fandom as a political movement might reflect the ideological construction of the books themselves, which encourage us to stand up for what we believe in, to question authority, and to take strength in our own communities. It would be interesting, indeed, if the Harry Potter books turned out to have shaped the political beliefs of the next generation, much as they have shaped their cultural imaginations. I told the reporter that it was no accident that the success of the Harry Potter books has occurred primarily in a Post-9/11 world and that it has paralleled the success of Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. Both books encourage us to see our lives in a larger context, to seek out and pursue a larger purpose than our own self interests.

So, can all of this happen again? Yes, but then it depends upon what level of the phenomenon we are talking about: the Harry Potter, which represents perhaps one of the last gasps of the old mass culture, or the Harry Potter, which represents the emergence of new forms of niche culture.