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

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

Kes:

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

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

James:

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

Kes:

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

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

James:

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

Kes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James:

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

Kes:

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

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

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

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

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

disowns all intimate knowledge..."

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

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

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

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

James:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soft Power and Shallow Consumption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 'Messiness' of Transnational Fan Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performing the National

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ownership and Desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labor and Value in Late Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing Futures of Entertainment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

future of entertainment.

Speakers featured at FoE2 include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander, Heroes; and Gordon Tichell, Walden Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

disciplinary boundaries.

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

affecting the contemporary media landscape.

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

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

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

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

www.convergenceculture.org.

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

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

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

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

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

Convergence Culture Consortium, at samford@mit.edu.

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

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

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007

5 - 7 p.m.

Bartos Theater

Abstract

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

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

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seventeen, Part Two): Melissa Click and Joshua Green

MC: How do we proceed in fan studies--what do we agree belongs in this category, and what should be left out? There seems to be an agreement (if only a reluctant one) among folks in this discussion on the idea that the category "fan" should be broadened. Concern has been expressed, however, that if we make it too broad, it will lose its meaning. Could we begin to try to nail it down by suggesting the ways "audience" and "fans" might be different?

JG: I'm really interested in this question as I think complicating the term "fan", and its use, can help us to start to understand how ideas about the audience itself is being transformed by the participatory moment that has arisen. This discussion has offered up a good range of ways to account for fandom that run the gamut from structures of feeling to productive consumption via a spectrum of viewing intensity (and the comments even offered up "fanatic" at one point). Theoretically pragmatic personally, I drew a lot from Anne Kustritz and Derek Johnson's deconstruction of fans as an object of study that can be generalized about, challenging the notion of the fan as necessarily determined by community, socialization, productivity, consumption, engagement, or outsider status. Their ultimate conclusion seemed to be that the fan as an object of study needs to be understood as a multiplicitous social construction and contextualized within historical and cultural specificity. That said, they also draw upon the notion of the fan as a sort of cultural logic used to describe particular categories of consumption for the purposes of patrolling 'normal' behavior. This is a classic position for the fan, historically positioned as atypical or anomalous in ways that permit the delimitation of acceptable media consumption and engagement habits.

In the current moment, however, where non-fan audiences (apologies for the clunky language) are bring increasingly described if not constructed through discourses of production, the fan seems to have been drawn back in somewhat from the edge. As the television industry, especially, attempts to make sense of the impact of inviting viewers to participate, losing control over the contexts of consumption, and realigns itself in an environment that seems likely to privilege multiple separate opportunities to view content, certain elements of the fandom look very tantalizing as models of audience practice worth encouraging. Of course, this is not unproblematic, and the industry seems mostly interested in promoting the depth of engagement and what I would characterize as the structures of feeling of fan engagement and hopefully not having to deal with the politics of ownership and production that emerge from fandom. But the fan as a model of a passionate consumer, a loyal consumer, a willing participant, a word-of-mouth marketer (or what Sam Ford regularly refers to as a proselytizer), an active participant in expansive storyworlds, and even a producer of additional textual elements (whatever sanctioned or tolerated form they might take), seems to be having an impact on the model of 'regular' audienceship, particularly as the behaviors once considered anomalous (such as archiving content, to pick up on Derek's own example) are wrapped into revenue models or normalized through cultural practice.

MC: I should confess (in case it's not yet obvious) that I'm in agreement with the folks who keep saying that they think there's something useful in studying audience members who do not behave as fans have typically been defined--as communal producers of materials that "rewrite" media texts. I support this perspective because it speaks to my experiences as a fan--and I find it useful in terms of understanding the activity I have seen in my study of Martha Stewart fans.

JG: Just quickly, I have to agree. I think understanding fans however defined is a useful activity to get at particular modes of consumption, but I do wonder sometimes if studies of particular genres that engage regularly with fan audiences (as opposed to studies of fan practice) over-represent the degree of fan consumers in a way that risks generalizing from the margins. I'm personally much more interested in the way cult properties, say, exist amongst a broader range of cultural and audience practices than I am the passionate investment of some audiences in these properties. This is not to belittle that work, but if we wind back the clock a little to consider the cottage industry that emerged around Buffy, I think much good work was either undiscovered or uncompleted because of the firm grasp cult and fan studies placed on the text.

MC: In my analysis of Stewart's fans, I found Jonathan Gray's ideas in "New Audiences, New Textualities" (International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1) to be really helpful--and think they are potentially really useful here (I have received no compensation for this endorsement). Jonathan writes about two categories of fans he thinks have been overlooked: anti-fans and non-fans. His discussion of anti-fans reminds us that there's a possibility that folks who are thoroughly engaged with a text--consumptively and/or creatively--don't always feel/act passionately because they like the text, its stories and its characters. So, anti-fans "strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel." I found this kind of hatred of Stewart and her texts in my work, and found that some of the haters knew more about Stewart than those who claimed to adore her. So, for me, the reminder here is that there's a possibility for many different kinds of involvement with a text--and maybe we haven't thoroughly examined that yet. I think there's a lot of value in exploring the terrain of "fan."

And that's of course one of the threads in this blog extravaganza. One of the responses to that call, as we all know, is how to explore a range of fan identities while still being able to talk about "fans" and "fandom" as meaningful terms. For me, that's where non-fans come in.

Non-fans aren't really fans at all--and if we're going to retain the value of "fans" I think we have to define the term against something, and for me, that's the larger audience. Jonathan describes non-fans as "those viewers or readers who do view or read a text, but not with any intense involvement." These folks do have favorite programs, but "spend the rest of their television time grazing, channel-surfing, viewing with half-interest, tuning in and out, talking while watching and so on." Because these viewers are "the comfortable majority"--the TV audience--we should be able to use these folks to show how fans and the audience exhibit different identities, feelings and actions in relation to a text. This assumes in advance, of course, that there is in fact a difference. We'll have to do a bit of work to figure this out. In fact, Jonathan suggests (and I agree) that fans studies are in some ways more convenient than audience studies because fans of a text are much easier to identify than the audience for a text--plus they know the text more intimately and are more likely to make for more interesting interviews.

So, the push to widen the scope of fan studies is in a way a push to help us get a better view of the audience--and this is probably why it feels a bit like "fans" could be diluted in the process. But, if, once we've done some of this exploration, we can look at all we've found and have a better sense of what's really going on out there, I'm guessing we will have a way to talk about who's in a text's audience and who's a fan of a text. We have to remember to do that last step!

JG: At the risk of this sounding like a love-in, once again I have to agree. I think Jonathan's work on the anti-fan complicates our understandings of consumption muchly in valuable ways. If nothing else, the proposition of the anti-fan as something other than the fan-with-a-goatee works to break the binary of engagement that can too easily be (sloppily) applied to the fan/not-fan model of audienceship. I'm not entirely sure why you think this in some way dilutes 'fans' in the process. Doesn't it strengthen the idea of the fan as an object (however constructed) by enriching the models for engagement that circulate around the term?

MC: Good clarification question. I wouldn't argue per se that I think understanding fans as "multiplicitous social constructions" contextualized by the historical and cultural moments in which they were expressed will dilute the term "fan." I was voicing what I believe others have expressed in this dialogue. And I agree to a certain point that if everyone can be a fan, there's a possibility that then no one is not a fan--and that could lead to the term having less value or utility. Though I'm not sure that opening the term to new expressions necessarily means making everyone a fan....

PS: "fan-with-a-goatee" is fabulously funny.

JG: Not only a goatee, but driving a truck ominously across the desert! Okay, so here is my concern with where this is going, I can see two tensions in this overall discussion. One is about a desire to expand and increase the range of opinions and to have certain bodies of work and spheres of practice (and practitioners) recognized outside of what might be a marginal realm of participation. In this spirit, questions about what a fan might be and what fan studies might be constituted by are being posed with a hope to expand the functional definition and to generally share the love. The other tension, and there seems to be a defensive edge to this, is a desire from certain quarters it seems to quarantine off as 'proper' certain modes of studying fandom and of defining fans.

As I suggested earlier, I think one of the ways for us as a group, if we decide that we might comprise a like-minded body invested in putting on our "Gramscian hats" and moving this realm of discussion forward is to work out a way to support both these tendencies. Despite the fact I've placed these two positions in tension, I do think a fruitful way to advance this field of enquiry is to try and be aware of and promote specialization as well to make attempts to broaden the range of perspectives regularly brought to various tables. Does this sound like a pipe-dream or a recipe for trouble?

MC: Both--brilliant!

It seems to me that related to the topic of who counts as a fan is what kinds of media texts we are focused on as scholars. Certainly the distinction has been made that some folks are more interested in studying the texts produced by fans in relation to the "original" media text (and/or the communities in which they circulate), but some folks are interested in fans' relationships to the "original" media texts themselves. In either case, though, it seems that we're drawn into examining the kinds of fans that we do, at least in part, based on our own relationships to the "original" text. There a number of media texts that many folks here seem to reference repeatedly as being the important ones in terms of studying fans: Doctor Who, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. But what happens when we examine fans of texts quite different from these? What kinds of fandom might we see then?

JG: I think sometimes the fandom we see is not recognised as fandom as such. I have spent a great deal of time looking at television branding and identity spots, which I absolutely love. Fans of these artifacts seem to be more regularly constructed as archivists than fans, in part, I suspect due to the nature of the text itself, though admittedly it also has much to do with the way they practice, perform, or engage in their fandom. Many of the fans of this content actively position themselves as archivists, often aping the language, structure and form of cultural institutions as they set up online galleries of this content categorized by channel, station, country, or season. Some of these fans historicise this content, positioning it within larger pro-am projects of media history that record national broadcasting systems or the work of particular stations. I don't think they write fanfic about television idents, though I can imagine a few possible adventures the Peacock could have on the way to letting us know NBC is broadcasting "The Place to Be." I do know there are groups in the UK particularly who mash-up existing idents and create their own, sometimes for fictitious stations and sometimes as replacements or 'what ifs' for existing stations.

The question that comes to my mind, then, is whether there is a meaningful distinction between considering this as fan practice and considering it as archival practice. I'm not suggesting they're necessarily exclusive categories, and I realise the latter is an activity most probably motivated by the former. But I do wonder whether these consumers would ever self-identify as 'fans' of these properties or this genre? And is that even important to the recognition of a category of fandom that might describe this behavior?

Certainly, I think the archival mode adopted by many of these fans (and the more I think about it, the more I'm sure they are actually fans) is related to the short form nature of the content and its intimate ties to both its historical context and its origin. It seems to make some systematic or structural sense to adopt an approach that ties idents to their era of production, especially as this is a genre of content that is regularly updated, often by iteration, so comparison and contrast is a meaningful way to engage with the content. So too, the place specificity of this content, particularly where idents come from individual stations rather than networks or national broadcasters, makes the construction of an archive a particularly meaningful way to engage with the significance of the text.

Constructing an archive, however, also easily enables a form of display that demonstrates your wiliness or dedication to the task. Idents are essentially disposable television content. Not programming, not advertising, they're content that may not last very long and which is regularly overlooked by most viewers. This certainly is not true in the case of the BBC, which quite gloriously has public launches for new ident campaigns, but especially in the US and in the case of the commercial networks in Australia, idents are programming that often doesn't warrant a second glance. While the DVR has made obtaining copies of more recent idents easier, older idents, particularly those from the 1970s and 1980s can be especially difficult to come by. The fan archive, then, would seem a particularly sensible way to publicly demonstrate your prowess as a television ident fan, as much as other productive modes of fandom might demonstrate textual mastery or inventiveness with the property (please don't slam me fan fic people - I know it's more complex than that).

MC: Joshua, that's a fabulous example for what I was trying to say. Thanks!

JG: You're welcome.

MC: Alan McKee's comment about his anger with Adorno's and Habermas' scorn of non-academics' interest in popular culture resonated with me, and I wondered if we are making a similar mistake by assuming that only folks who relate to texts in particular ways are worthy of being called "fans" without really exploring the issue. While I appreciate and respect the reasons why the fan-fic scholars want to hold on to their definition of "fan," I think that until we've ventured out into mainstream territory to find out what's going on out there, we can't really speculate.

There was an article by Susan Douglas in The Nation (25 August 1997) that has always stuck with me. Douglas relays her feelings about her pre-teen daughter enjoying the Spice Girls. She discusses her own reactions to the group's lyrics and images (many of which are negative) and then takes a step back to consider how her daughter and her friends might read/use The Spice Girls. What she concludes, of course, is that her own evaluation of the group matters much less than what the group means to her daughter and her friends.

Jonathan Gray joked that "we are the cool kids, right?" While it was clearly meant as a joke, I think there's a reason to take this comment more seriously. Much like the fans we study, we make judgments about what texts are worth our time and attention. This was never more clear to me than it was at Flow, when I (admittedly out of the loop because of the aforementioned baby) sat through conversations that referenced programs I had barely even heard of--and because of my lack of knowledge about the "cool shows," I kept quiet (and just as an aside, the repeated references to the "cool shows" could work to exclude others from a range of important discussions--here and elsewhere).

JG: And some of the cultural biases that appeared at Flow were interrogated there and elsewhere subsequently (not all, I know). I have to ask, however, isn't that somewhat the nature of academic practice? And isn't it useful sometimes to be the one who doesn't get it, or doesn't know what the text is, in order to either prod or interrogate the perceived significance of texts or to take an alternative track? Am I missing a point here?

MC: Maybe we're talking on two different planes? Sure, that's the nature of academic practice, but I guess I wanted to challenge that a bit. My point is that it sometimes feels like we tend to focus on particular texts to the exclusion of others--and while that may be "normal" (especially given the ebb and flow of TV texts in the context of the industry), I think it keeps us from looking at the range of texts out there (just like we've been talking about the current limits of "fan"), and looking at a limited range of texts (I think) will inevitably limit the range of fans and fan practices we see. And btw, thanks for suggesting "not getting it" is a useful position--now I feel "cool" instead of out of the loop.

So, in this discussion, many folks have called for more of a focus on the mainstream--and I guess here I'd like to underscore that. Will Brooker suggested that:

if we just concentrated on those people who fit the type of "fan" [meaning the productive and communal fan] ... 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.

My point, is this: if we don't explore what else is out there, there's potentially a whole range of fan identification and participation that we could be missing--and since we are "the cool kids" shouldn't we be doing that important work to find out what's there?

JG: To finish on a note that's underscored this discussion, I think I agree. Melissa, it's been a pleasure.

MC: The pleasure was all mine. Take care!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seventeen, Part One): Melissa Click and Joshua Green

MC: Hi, I'm Melissa Click and I'm completing my dissertation on Martha Stewart fans (at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst), teaching at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and am just catching up on my sleep after the wonderfully overwhelming experience of having my first child. Having one foot in the East Coast and the other foot in the Mid-West, being in the midst of completing my Ph.D. while developing my professional identity as a scholar, and trying to figure out how to balance my work life and newly changed homelife, means that I'm still catching up on my TV viewing (I heart Tivo), I don't usually blog, and I'm a bit more behind on academic reading than I'd prefer. As a scholar writing about Martha Stewart fans, I have argued that the women and men I interviewed were not simply audience members, they are fans (and anti-fans, for that matter). However, the types of fandom they demonstrated were different than many of the types of fandom discussed here: they didn't write Martha fan-fic, create Martha fan-vids, etc. My interest in their fandom overlapped with my own interest in/repulsion by Stewart's texts, and my allegiance with their behaviors as fans--my expressions of fandom mirror the behaviors gendered "masculine" in this discussion.

JG: Hello all, my name is Joshua Green. I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where I also run the Convergence Culture Consortium. At the Consortium we do a lot of work about the changing patterns of relationships between media producers - big and small, professional and amateur - media content and various audience formulations. We work with some "big media" companies (though not exclusively) to come to understand the changing environment in which their content circulates and the changing logics of the media space when you factor in participatory culture and the changing constitution of the audience experience.

Before I transplanted from Australia to the States, I was working on the recent history Australian television, particularly looking at the way the Australian television system resolved the presence of international, and specifically American, programming with discourses of nationalism. My (I suppose still recently completed) dissertation looked at the way Dawson's Creek was nationalized by industrial promotional strategies and received by a range of Australian viewers. I'm currently really, very interested in the ways we can understand the constitution and composition of television audiences as they're imagined more and more as media producers, or at least, as the role of media production is increasingly prescribed for those we used to understand as audiences.

MC: I'm not convinced that folks have really addressed one of the key issues that began this conversation: the perception that male interests and approaches are structuring publishing, conference participation, and the field in general. I'd like to pull us back to the pre-détente discussions that created the discussion in which we're now participating. Specifically, how can we begin to encourage ties between male and female scholars, and create more of a community in the field of fan studies? Everyone seems to agree that we can benefit from each other's work--but how can we begin to encourage that cross-pollination (or what Derek Johnson called "broad citation?").

JG: I think returning to this question is important, though I would like to point out that one of the things I have enjoyed most about this discussion on the whole is the diversity of ways people have responded to the "provocation." Some of the discussions around this topic have brought to the fore a range of important questions affecting not only fan studies but media and cultural studies practice itself. Prominent in this regard is the fervor with which this discussion has interrogated how we understand fandom itself. This diversity of topics is particularly appealing as I don't consider myself someone working 'in' fan studies. I'm not sure I've ever been a 'fan' of any distinct media property, certainly not in the productive way that has been defended by some discussants as signaling something unique about particular patterns of engagement or structures of feeling towards media properties. Likewise, while perhaps daily I come into contact with some of the practices, strategies, or politics of fandom, I don't consider myself necessarily studying fandom. That said, one of the strengths of this discussion is the role those of us who don't fall into the 'fan studies' camp have played in contributing to the debate. At a somewhat crude level then, perhaps this practice of pairing respondents has at least gestured toward a way to achieve this cross-pollination.

MC: Agreed. I think that a lot of good stuff has come out of this dialogue--making much more complex a lot of the issues that initially provoked the discussion. However, one of the really important points that I think the Busse camp (sorry, I can't do the boy/girl thing, though I'm not convinced the shorthand I'm introducing is much better) made in the pre-detente conversation had to do with how male and female fan scholars seemed to attend different conference sessions, use a different language, and adopt different methods. To me, this is where I do feel the gendered divide in the field (though I'll complicate that in a minute). This point has been alluded to numerous times in this discussion; many folks have expressed that they feel left out, or misunderstood, and I'm sure many more have felt this without expressing it (I have)--so *something's* going on here that I think we need to address.

I really appreciate Derek Johnson's acknowledgement that at conferences he'd attended panels in many of the ways Busse suggested (and I'm sure many folks had this realization--I did, too). I believe Derek when he says he'll try to rethink that in the future--and think we all should. But I'd like to see us be consciously pro-active before we get to conferences to try to make our panels relevant for a number of different camps--and to promote cross-pollination.

JG: If we're going to go back to the beginning, I'm going to be especially (and perhaps foolishly) honest here, and acknowledge my own implication in some of the catalytic events of this discussion. I have a fairly certain sense I was a direct participant in some of the panels (and one in particular) that prompted some of the comments that initially brought this issue to the fore. I'm not sure if I would say I was shocked, but I certainly want to own up to being surprised by the responses some of these panels prompted. Perhaps I'm not as alive to the gendered distinctions that do exist within the field (and there subsequent implications in terms of power), and I think the first discussion in this series between Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell usefully laid out some of the ways in which "the field" might replicate larger gendered distinctions with regards to topics of discussion, modes of practice, academic and market activities. That said, I have to admit a sense of disappointment with the sometimes pessimistic tone present in some of the discussions featured as part of this series. I accept that there are substantial and entrenched issues of both equality and practice that need to be addressed, but more than once in the course of this debate I've been left with the sense these issues are intractable.

I wonder, then, if the response to some of these questions regarding exclusion has been to argue for the specificity of certain (gendered? topic determined?) fields of inquiry. Specificity brings with it its own form of exclusion, and the criteria upon which this specificity is patrolled is central to the questions under consideration. I'll admit I'm thinking out loud here, and I may well disagree with this proposition further down the track, but there is a part of me that thinks that some degree of specificity and exclusion is inherent to the art. I'm not sure, all up, whether I necessarily disagree with this proposition, as I'm not sure I have a problem with specificity, particularly in terms of academic practice, when it results from issues of subject knowledge. That said, I agree there are substantial matters that need to be addressed with regard to how we, as academics working from a range of different positions and working within a "field" that seems in some ways both pre-destined and necessarily "inter-disciplinary", interact in order to ensure "subject specificity" or "topic knowledge" doesn't privilege certain biases. All of which seems to bring us back to the germinal difficulties that led us down this path. A useful response, then, and perhaps the only one that seems tenable, is for us to regularly interrogate the way the forms of knowledge we produce, and the ways we communicate such, result in regimes of privilege.

MC: I agree that the specificity in our work does create a certain kind of exclusion (that I would agree is not necessarily a bad thing), and I agree that we should regularly interrogate our work and the way it's communicated. But how do we make sure we don't forget to do that?

I think that's what was going on a bit at Flow, especially at the Watching Television Off-Television roundtable (including Jonathan Gray, Henry Jenkins, Jason Mittell, Will Brooker, Joel Greenberg, Kevin Sandler, Derek Johnson, Daniel Chamberlain). I think feminist (and mostly female) scholars in the audience expressed frustration that approaches and conclusions were perceived to lack fruitful overlap with work women do and have done--and I think there was also a frustration that the panel (obviously full of fabulous scholars) drew a large audience due to the perceived importance of the scholars and topics while panels that were mostly women drew smaller audiences. I do think we need to talk about that.... But I also want to say that during and after my panel of mostly women at Flow, I felt excluded because my work was not on fans proper (in fact, it could have been that I still in the baby haze that has just recently lifted, by no means would I suggest that was my best work). So, I think that exclusion does cross gender boundaries--and like Jonathan and Kristina have both said, when panels end, we do tend to hang out with our friends.

That said, I think there's a pattern in which women seem to be the ones continually reminding folks that gender should be one of the foundations of all work--not just women's scholarship. So, much like my fabulous partner who does his best to split evenly our household chores often has to be reminded by me to do x, y, or z (reifiying that I'm charge of everything household), I think there's a way in which the burden of bringing up these issues has fallen on women's shoulders (perhaps in part because many of us feel regularly structured by gender divides) because they are perceived as women's issues. Hopefully that makes sense...?

JG: I think all of that makes sense, Melissa, and the fact the burden falls the way it does has to do with larger issues that people much smarter than me have discussed elsewhere during this debate. But let's talk about the panel at Flow for a second. I am aware of the concerns regarding the boundaries to participation being regulated along gender lines. Likewise, I can understand the consternation about the fact a "panel of boys" and a "panel of girls", both featuring speakers who in other instances may have sat on panels together, were placed head-to-head at Flow. I'm not convinced, however, that to point to that particular incident as evidence of a marginalization of female academic practice necessarily does anyone a service. While I think some good has come out of that moment, there was a particularly sour taste left all round, I think, with regard to the way the issue was raised which seemed sometimes to suggest an intent to exclude, or if you like tinfoil headwear, marginalize.

MC: Clearly the sour taste is shared by many--and nobody enjoys it. I think we all know we're all good people and that no one would hurt or exclude anyone else on purpose, but the fact remains that there are patterns there. Perhaps everyone is tired of talking about it (and if so, forgive me), but I think we need to make positive things come out of these confrontations and uncomfortable situations. I love Stuart Hall's description of the push to put gender on the table in early cultural studies projects as the CCCS. I'll paraphrase because I lent out my book with that particular article in it, but he suggests that feminists broke in during the night and crapped on the table of cultural studies. I love that because it suggests how shocking and violent the push felt--but look at how the field grew from that push. I'm not trying to compare this current situation to that, but I do want to stress that I've seen lots of great stuff come out of this dialogue, and I feel so much smarter for having read it--and I'm so glad to be a participant in it. I'm not, however, entirely satisfied by how this more direct stuff (that I think has more to do how we do our work and where our work takes place than it does with the content of our work), and in these last few weeks I'd like to see it more directly addressed. But I'll be quiet if no one else wants to talk about it....

My apologies in advance to those folks who will (rightfully) say that conferences privilege academics--they do. They are, however, an important component of the work that many of us do, despite the fact that our annual travel funds rarely cover even the costs of one trip to one conference. So critiquing conferences as a space of privilege shouldn't lead us to say that the work done there isn't useful or relevant (even fans have conventions, right, so something useful must be going on in these spaces?!). So, the deadlines for Console-ing Passions and the International Communication Association are upcoming. I'd happily volunteer to organize some panel proposals that would address some of the topics we've been discussing here--panels that would include male and female scholars and include folks studying fans with traditional and untraditional frameworks. If you're interested, please let me know.

I agree with Deborah Kaplan's suggestion that "surely a blog post gives a level of exposure unmatchable by presenting a paper to a room containing 16 overtired academics at an MLA conference," but it's become increasingly clear to me that while we started out with a robust conversation in this space, there are mainly "regulars" writing and responding, and in the recent weeks, responses have petered out. So maybe picking up the discussion in another forum would be useful?

What else can we do?

JG: I think you touch on a really important issue here, Melissa; that is, how is it that we can ensure we effectively make spaces of academic privilege accessible while preserving the value of these sites. I think this is the other side of your proposition that critiquing these spaces shouldn't result in a devaluing of the work that is done here at the expense of work completed elsewhere. I'm not sure the intention of the debate thus far has necessarily been to critique these spaces as producing knowledge that isn't useful or relevant, but rather to point perhaps to the inadequacies of traditional academic practice to both engage the range of scholars producing knowledge within the discipline of 'fan studies' (or should that be "about fans"?), and to actively capture the diversity of knowledge that is being produced about the topic. Certainly Francesca Coppa's intervention in this debate describes the politics inherent in the perceived necessity to create spaces outside of what has been formally recognized as 'academia'. That these are spaces where useful work is produced that should or could be included in studies published via more formal academic channels does not seem such a controversial contention.

In doing so, I think you point to one of the most practical and apparent responses to this debate - namely, to try and move this debate or at least the issues it has raised, to a range of different sites. In this regard, I think it is important to work via "micropractices" (to invoke Jason Mittell again) to attempt to open up the spaces we can influence to a wider range of content. Again, there is nothing controversial about this proposition, but I raise it to suggest an answer to your "what else can we do" question. I'm not sure the solution is necessarily striving for a gender balance on panels or a flocking to particular publishing sites. While I think these options are useful and important, I think it is equally important to encourage discussion across platforms, to support the development of a range of areas of specialization and to keep these in touch with each other - in short, to attempt to move the discussion beyond this forum and beyond this moment. In doing so, I think the questions Jason poses, "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?", are useful as points not so much of common enquiry but to begin to frame continued discussion.

Was Herman Melville a Proto-Fan?

Earlier this year, I proclaimed my ambitions to re-read (perhaps more accurately, read) Moby Dick this summer, having done a rather poor job of tackling this novel as a high school student. I am now a hundred pages from the end. What had inspired my own personal pursuit of the Great White Whale was my involvement through Project nml with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Ricardo has been working to get young people more engaged in Melville's classic story by encouraging them to rewrite it in a more contemporary setting. The result was Moby Dick: Then and Now, a remarkable stage performance which our team (especially Deb Liu) has been documenting. This fall, we will be working to create a teacher's guide for Moby Dick based on the idea of learning through remixing.

In anticipation of work this fall with Wyn Kelly, my colleague from the MIT Literature Section and a leading Melville expert, I returned to the scene of the crime -- reading the novel in the battered Bantam classics edition that I had failed to complete in high school. I must say that reading Moby Dick through the lens of remix culture has taught me a new way to experience this remarkable and idiosyncratic work: rather than cursing the various digressions from the core adventure saga, I have found myself reading them with renewed attention.

Moby Dick, I am discovering, absorbs all of the genres of writing and speaking of its own times, sucking up stories and cultures, juxtaposing them with each other in fresh and unanticipated ways. The abrupt shifts in language, the desire to record every detail of life on board the ship, to catalog every piece of equipment, to dissect the whale from skin to bones, to trace stories across every possible mode of representation and to question all existing accounts of the Whale, these all become part of the work's encyclopedic drive.

Somewhere around page 400, I came to another realization. We might see Melville as adopting a range of interpretive strategies and modes of reading which would be recognizable to contemporary fan culture. What if we looked at Melville as a fan of whales and whaling lore. After all, only a true fan would be so obsessed with every detail and would chase the damned "fish" all around the planet the way Melville does.

Speculating

Here is one of the many passages in the book where Melville examines the story of Jonah:

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:- He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head- a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless

.-- Moby Dick, Chapter 83

In this case, he is describing a process of speculation through which his fellow whaling fans -- the old sag-Harbor whalesman and Bishop Jebb -- try to make sense of contradictions in the source text, extending beyond the information given in order to try to reconcile what they know of whales in the real world with what the story tells them about Jonah's encounter with the Leviathan. Any one who has been in fandom for very long recognizes this conversation -- you take an element which doesn't quite work and rather than discarding it, you keep speculating around it trying to figure out under what circumstances it might make sense. Fans often describe such creative work as "repairing the damage" created by a distracted artist who didn't think through all of the implications of their own story and such speculation clearly leads step by step towards a whole scale rewriting of the narrative to better satisfy the fan's own fantasies and interests. What emerges is a kind of proto-fan fiction.

What if we imagined Jonah inside the Whale's mouth rather than fully swallowed -- maybe even inside his tooth? Ah, but we've already figured out that the Leviathan must have been a Right Whale, and not wanting to discard all of that earlier fannish labor, we want to preserve that theory and so we have to discard this new layer of speculation.

Nitpicking

In this case, the speculations also constitute a form of nitpicking. As I've discussed nitpicking here in the past, it involves a fan reading the text in relation to another body of knowledge. The example I used a while back was a site where doctors and medical students "nitpicked" House. Such nitpicking comes through most vividly when Melville takes on previous representations of the whale. Here, we see Melville boldly assert his superior knowledge and his desire to "set the record straight," both motives I recognize from myself and other contemporary fans:

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

But, before he can do so, he must clear away previous representations, in this case, focus on the anatomical inaccuracies created by artists who have had no direct experience of the living beast:

These manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young suckling whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

I am reminded of a recurring feature on Sequential Tart, a long-standing webzine by and for female comics fans, which regularly posts and critiques unlikely depictions of the female body in various superhero comics. Here, for example, is an excerpt from one tutorial on "Bizarre Breasts":

Bizarre proportions are nothing new to comics; be it the desire to cater to the cheesecake crowd or simply the preference of the artist, distorted anatomy has become commonplace. The fact that "professional" artists may utilize distortions in published works is a bit disappointing, but frankly, if they've gotten the job the odds are they aren't going to feel the need to change their style. That's fine, the world needs laughter. However, what does bother me is the possibility -- hell, the reality -- that amateur artists are copying this exaggerated anatomy and making these mistakes their own. So, in hopes of reaching those for whom this advice may actually have some impact, I have utilized my meager knowledge of anatomy and admittedly unpolished art skills to bring the world a brief tutorial on one of the comic artists' greatest challenges: the breast.

I don't want to push the parallels here too far but it seems to me that they are both fascinated with showing the absurd and inaccurate representation of anatomy which comes from artists who don't really understand the first thing about the subjects they are trying to depict.

Cataloging and Collecting

Melville, like modern day fans, refuses to restrict himself to a single text or even a single mode of representation. As he explains, "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." (Chapter 82) And indeed, some of the most productive modes of fan interpretation involve rampant interdisciplinarity and free association, creating unexpected juxtapositions of texts, tracing real and imagined allusions to other works, or simply doing the kind of "connect the dots" activity that is expected of readers of transmedia stories. Melville reads everything he can get his hands on -- ancient books, religious texts, paintings, scrimshaw, currency, tavern signs, even the stars in the sky, as he tries to find every available reference to his object of fascination. He exhibits here the fan's fascination with cataloging and collecting:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

I particularly like that last bit about becoming part of a "fraternity" of others who share his passions and knowledge for this touches about as well as anything I've read on the social bonds which link fan communities together. Doesn't this sound like someone trying to pimp his fandom?

Appropriation and Transformation

So far, I have shown Melville to be in many ways a classic fan boy -- trying to master a complex body of knowledge and show off to his fellow fans by nitpicking less satisfying works. Nothing we've described so far would be out of place on a contemporary discussion list -- although this last passage suggests that he sees his fandom in terms of his relationships with other fans and not just as a personal quest towards knowledge. Yet, there are brief passages in these sections of the novel that he may also be more openly rewriting classic stories to better satisfy his own fancies and that act of rewriting pushes him closer to contemporary fanfic practices. Consider, for example, how Melville manhandles the canon in his retelling of the story of St. George and the Dragon:

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda- indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it- is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowers we are much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

Fans might describe what Melville does here with St. George as a kind of Alternate Universe story: what if St. George had been a sea-faring rather than land-loving man? Indeed, we can see him here as involved in a struggle with another fan community over which one of them "correctly" captures what is interesting about this character and his adventures. Why should we not be surprised that Melville was involved in a battle with another "ship"! :-)

But like many later fans, Melville also struggles with how much fidelity the fan writer owes to the original. The author discusses the ways that multiple whalers approaching the same creature determine who can assert ownership over it, declaring some whales to be "fast-fish," that is, already harpooned and bound by a particular ship, and others to be "loose-fish," that is, free of any binds or constraints and thus subject to being grabbed by whichever ship approaches them first. Melville, then, extends this metaphor to talk about the work of the imagination: "What are you, reader, but a Loose-fish and a Fast-fish, too?" (Chapter 89) In other words, Melville is exploring to what degree we get hooked into a story and thus get captured by its authors and to what degree our imagination remains unmoored, capable of taking the story where-ever we want it to go. In a sense, that's exactly what fans are trying to make sense of when they debate how much they need to follow canon and to what degree they can construct their own fanon.

Read in this way, we can see Moby Dick, often described as the Great American Novel, as a piece of fan fiction which grows out of Melville's fascination for the whale and his mastery over whaling lore. Drawing on a range of stories, responding to competing representations, Melville constructs his own original fiction, which he asserts better captures what fascinates him about man's eternal struggle against the natural order.

Melville was one of us. Pretty cool, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: Yadda yadda yadda high quality fan fiction --

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

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

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

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

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

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

K: How do you know? Brainwash victim.

M: ...

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

M: Look, a yak!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baseball, Doctor Who, and gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lowbrow culture

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

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

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

Fan expertise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fanification, Complexification, and Categorization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO WILL RUN ON MONDAY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Essex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Techspressive Tools

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

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

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

The Fan Boy Reconsidered

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

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

Robert Kozinets: Oh yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikimedia and Archontic Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introductions Robert Kozinets: I'm not a cultural studies scholar, or at least not one who works in the field of cultural studies. My field is Marketing, so I work in business schools, but my tools and theories do come mainly from anthropology and cultural studies. I came to fan studies early in my academic career, during my thesis dissertation, when I decided that media fans, Star Trek fans in particular, would be an interesting thesis topic for a marketing dissertation. I've been working in fan communities ever since, and finding increasingly that the boundaries between fan communities and brand communities, or product communities are blurred and indistinct. So, for example, I published an article a little while ago in the Journal of Marketing where I studied Star Wars fans alongside "fans" of cars like the Volkwagen Beetle. In related work, I looked at coffee connoisseurs and breakfast cereal aficionados and I found that they engaged in very fannish kinds of behaviors, and acted collectively on the internet in communities that were very reminiscent of fandoms. So for about ten years I've been busy blurring the distinctions between media fans and other types of loyal consumers. A big part of the orientation for that is that we live in a highly mediated society. So you don't really have many things that are "just" a freestanding product or service without their mediated representational components. Starbucks is a superbrand, not merely a cup of coffee. Lucky Charms is a mythological creation, not simply a box of sugary wheat bits and colored marshmallows.

Francesca Coppa: I'm Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where I teach dramatic literature and performance studies. I've written articles on fandom for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and the Women's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. More recently, I have been writing and presenting on live action media vidding. But I come to fandom studies primarily as a fan; I started writing about it because I didn't like how other people were doing it. Given my druthers, I'd rather be in fandom than writing about fandom.

Affect and Gender

Robert Kozinets: I hear what you're saying about fandom, and also was originally attracted to the field and the research by the participative element. In fact, one of my big gripes about ethnography in general in my field (marketing and "consumer behavior") has been the affective distance that business school researchers have had from their topics. People would write about extremely interesting topics like advertising, the media, addictive consumption or ethnic consumption, but so often they would write from such distance that their own emotional investments were completely invisible. As I later learned, a good part of the reason for this was the academic journal review process, that tended to excise all introspection from ethnography in my field. Fortunately, we had some pioneers in our field that broke through those barriers, people like Beth Hirschman, Morris Holbrook, Stephen Gould, and of course my poetic friend John Sherry.

Francesca Coppa: I would argue that erasure you're talking about is gendered and actually worse both for women fans and for women critics. What many women want from narrative is often framed as embarrassing or shameful: we're told that we shouldn't value what we value in stories (high emotions, deep friendships and strong relationships, expressions of sexuality, as well as the intricate plotting and big ideas of SFF) and that our critiques of mainstream culture therefore aren't valid. And worse yet, some people would argue that our critiques aren't explicitly protected; not the way parody or other more distanced forms of criticism are protected. A fanfiction story or a fanvid may not be read as an obvious critique of its source the way an essay or a parodic film does, but it is. Many female fans critique the mainstream media for its lack of nuance and emotional depth, and we create stories and vids that rectify that; we add feelings to the text, we add personal attachments and sustained relationships; we add sex, tears and put in what I would say are appropriate emotional responses to the kinds of stories we like. You get to cry when your planet blows up. You might fall in love with the person you've been fighting aliens with.

Robert Kozinets: Well, it's an interesting argument. But speaking as a male academic who likes to write about my entire lived experience, and is very interested in representational issues in scholarly activities, I have to say that I think this bias cuts both ways. Male academics and female academics in my field have been taken to task for expressing an introspective, emotional perspective. In fact, in one of the most famous incidents in my field, a male academic, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote a classic and I think brilliant introduction to introspection as a methodology. His illustration was all about how he, as a consumer, uses his consumption in a way that moves energy around. Now, Stephen is a spiritual guy and he practices tantric methods that are a bit spicy and that probably don't represent the mainstream. But I thought his piece was right on target, and certainly it had lots in common with Larry Grossberg's ideas of mood modulation and mattering maps. Shortly after that publication had supposedly opened the gates to a flood of "non-scientific" introspective pieces in the economics-psychology dominated scientific field of marketing, two female scholars, Melanie Wallendorf and Merrie Brucks, stepped up with a very detailed and precise refutation of Stephen's methodology. They showed how idiosyncratic, unrepresentative, and unscientific that method could be, especially in the hands of literate folk. In effect, females in our field shut down the male voice (and I'd argue male and female both, as Morris Holbrook was also doing some similar stuff and so was Beth Hirschman) that was bringing in a far more emotional, evocative, resonant, sexualized voice into our little corner of academia. Now, maybe you and I are comparing apples and oranges with these discussions of academic versus fannish writing. But I think the point that women suffer more for presenting their feelings is stretching it. I think female and male representational characteristics (if I can call them that without valorizing one over the other) show up in the writing of both males and females, and that they are suppressed, quashed and acted upon by both males and females.

Francesca Coppa: Well, it depends; I mean, I'm not really surprised that it was men who were able to step out in public with this new and exciting emotive methodology, in the same way that I think that it's not a surprise that Henry Jenkins is currently the dominant voice in fan studies. It's not that they're not brilliant and talented men--they are!--but it's also safer for them to risk bringing an emotive voice into the public arena without being dismissed or marginalized. Similarly, I'm not surprised that two female economists took a policing role there; they may well have had something to prove in this arena.

But there is some truth to gender clichés. There's a great story about the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark; Lucas and Spielberg were watching the rough cut, which ended, as you remember, with Indiana Jones meeting with the government people and the ark being squirreled away into a warehouse. Well, Marcia Lucas--George Lucas's first wife, and also a film editor who won the Oscar for editing Star Wars, noticed that Marion was nowhere to be seen; the last we'd seen her, she was standing around with a bunch of melted Nazis. Marcia Lucas argued that there was no emotional closure for the film, and so at the last minute, Lucas and Spielberg shot an additional scene where Jones comes out of his meeting and Marion is there waiting for him, and they go off arm in arm. Put it this way: most genre television and film isn't lucky enough to have a Marcia Lucas. Something else worth noting: she and Lucas were divorced shortly thereafter, and he really hasn't made a decent film since.

Robert Kozinets: Again, I like the example, but I'm confused about the takeaway. Are there no talented, sensitive, male screenwriters who could have handled that scene as well? I've known lots of sensitive, expressive males, and lots of insensitive, emotionally stunted females. I'm not sure gender assignment is a sure bet for the way people are going to act--or write.

Francesca Coppa: Sure, absolutely; in fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Star Trek fandom is the broad female identification with the emotionally-constricted Spock (partly, I would argue, as an expression of how it feels to be a cerebral, often scientific and/or technically minded woman; which is to say, an "abnormal" woman, at least historically.) And of course there are talented, sensitive male screenwriters. But where are the blockbuster female directors?

I mean, I agree with your larger point: that people are complex and don't act narrowly according to gender stereotypes. Nowhere is that truer than in science fiction media fandom, which is full of proud female geeks. But there are ways in which what can be expressed (and be successful and respected) in the marketplace (either of culture or of ideas) is structured by the context of gender.

I gave a paper at MIT5 that seemed to be a bit of a flashpoint for this debate: it was on the history of fannish vidding as it derived from 1975, and I wrote it at least partly in response to seeing Paul Marino give a presentation at the Berkman Center's "Signal To Noise" conference in 2006. Marino showed a Sims music video ("Let's Get It Started" by the Black Eyed Peas) and discussed it as a music video with no reference to the longer, female filmmaking tradition of fannish music vidding (in which female video editors recut extant footage to music to make arguments and tell stories.) Instead, Marino said, "people have been doing this since 1996," and yes, I understand he meant "machinima,"--or, at least, I think he did--but it really bothered me that that this kind of visual creativity was being spoken about as if it were the recent invention of men, rather then the long standing practice of women. Women have always had a harder time getting into the film industry as creators, and so it makes sense that this kind of filmic editing, mashing-up and sampling--which is arduous and was historically done using home equipment like VCRs--would be a female practice, just like blacks engage in sampling partly as an compensation for other kinds of creative resource scarcities. (Abigail Derecho made a more detailed version of this argument in her conversation on this blog three weeks ago, here.) I'm not claiming that women are predisposed to vid because of biological gender; I'm claiming that historically, structurally, women were more likely to act as bricoleurs, to cobble together what they want to see.

Poetics and Power

Robert Kozinets: I have to admit that I was a bit surprised about the gender balance upon entering fandom and starting to read about fandom. Like a lot of people, I had assumed that Star Trek fans were mainly a bunch of keener, somewhat brainy and socially disconsolate young guys. But when I entered the fandom scene by joining a fan club, it had a female Captain and much of the command crew was female. It's kind of a funny story, but my key informant was an American civil servant who was very active in the fandom scene, writing and filking. This person had an androgynous name, and all through our correspondence I assumed that "he" was a male. It turned out that she was female, and she was good enough to laugh about my mistake and to comment on it as a function of the nature of email communication. But I went back and missed a number of subtle hints that, in retrospect I think I should have picked up. It attuned me to my own biases, but I can see how they would be all around with male academics. Yet, again, I think what we are talking about is minority status more than gender. Your drawing on African-American sampling as an example proves that point. Jewish creativity would be another case in point.

Francesca Coppa: Well, but the gender thing makes sense: if, as Henry rightly pointed out, being a fan is at least partly about being a critic, who'd want to be criticizing SFF? Women, certainly. The fact that male critics haven't properly seen this (Henry notwithstanding) really has to do with the failure of men to be bilingual; as so many of the commentators here have noted, it's the "girls read books written for boys, but boys don't read 'girl' books" thing. And you know what, I get that, that's what power is: less powerful people learn the dominant language. But it means that male academics miss things if they aren't paying attention, and worse yet: the danger is that it won't even matter if they miss it, because their version will become the norm: that's what power is, too. Or else, there's the danger that they'll see you but mistake you, not understand the significance of what you're doing, or the art you're making: dismiss it, belittle it. A lot of female fans avoid attention because they're sure it will be the wrong kind of attention: the kind that describes fanvids as (true story) "your little movies," or thinks your slash story is perverse or hilarious while completely failing to understand the context in which it's working, the intellectual moves it's making. However, there are some pluses: for instance, the fact that men have not historically been interested in fan fiction and fan vidding has meant that an exclusively female tradition has been allowed to develop and take root: fan fiction and fan vidding are like the Seven Sisters of the fan world. I personally find women's media fandom profoundly moving; it's one of the few places where I let down my cultural defenses, because the art is made for me, as if I ruled the world. It's like what television and film might look like if Mary Pickford and other women filmmakers had continued to dominate the industry.

Robert Kozinets: Back to my field for a second. There are big debates that have gone on for twenty years, originally raging in open, and now continued more behind closed doors, about the legitimacy of cultural methods and modes of interpretation to study and understand consumers and markets. Most of those battles have already been won intellectually, and yet institutionally we who practice "Consumer Culture Theory" find that our students have far fewer jobs to choose from than our colleagues who use Greek letters in their equations do, and our tenure standards are completely different from our economics-driven colleagues, and that entire schools have locked us out. We are the minorities in our field, and behind our backs (and even to our faces at time) we are dismissed as atheoretical or irrelevant, and belittled as "merely journalism." That's power at work. We're supposed to know their theories, they don't have to know our theories. They critique us using terms and concepts from their paradigm, but don't see how our critiques make sense when applied to them. This is exactly the same tale being told, except that instead of male and female fans, it's quantitative and qualitative research scholars.

Does the Long Tail Include Women?

Francesca Coppa: Agreed; it's about any two groups with power; gender is not the only category, it's just a large one. It's also what makes me suspicious of your field, Marketing. I can't help but feel that any sensible marketer has to market to the thickest part of the hypothetical Venn diagram: if girls will watch boy TV, and boys will watch boy TV, then clearly: boy TV is what you should make. I've heard the various arguments about niche marketing, the long tail, etc, but I'm not convinced, because who will make those niche works? Us; they'll have to come out of the community, I assume, and so what this really comes down to is us selling our works to each other while big media takes a cut, yes? So for instance, the FanLib debacle. Thousands of women write stories and give them to each other for free, and I can practically hear the marketers salivating: all those eyeballs focused on something other than ads! I worry that the new marketing to fandom is essentially designed to put a toll on the artistic roads we've spent years making: and, to continue the metaphor, those roads were carved on the desire lines of all our footsteps, collectively wearing through the grass. No one made those roads for us; the big shiny highways didn't go where we wanted, didn't take our route. But now the roads all seem to be converging.

Robert Kozinets: I don't see anything except perhaps technologies converging in any big way. I see fragmentation. There are no big audiences anymore, Harry Potter excepted. I see marketers at work segmenting into smaller and smaller chunks. I see Divergence Culture. I see marketers thinking for a change about "Aggregation" instead of segmentation. The media audience is becoming smaller and smaller. And I also see fans taking control like never before. Not only are they creating bigger and better stories and sharing them, but some of them want to charge, want to work with the big media corporations, and want to take a cut. Many don't. And a lot of the debate and ferment is about rights. Who owns what, how can it get properly used. Tolls on roads make sense if the roads are kept up well and public services that benefit the community come out of them (regardless of whose footsteps they are built upon). Tolls for the sake of tolls don't make sense, and people will find alternative routes.

Francesca Coppa: Sure, but there may be (male) majorities even within that segmentation. My large (and gendered) concern is that this rising new media culture is going to function in the 21st century like the "rise of the novel" did in the 18th--in other words, that the scribbling/vidding women will be erased now that Richardson and Fielding (the fanboy as mogul) are on the horizon and fandom is becoming a serious cultural practice, national economic engine, and academic discipline. Women became so alienated from the novel--which had been a lowbrow female artform--that Virginia Woolf had trouble finding a "female sentence" 150 years later; it seems to me that we, as scholars, have a responsibility not to go through that cycle again: let's not carelessly erase and/or overwrite the women and rediscover them in twenty years. Let's just write scholarship that takes time to remember the foremothers and originators, and that recognizes the accomplishments of current female fan writers and artists.

Robert Kozinets: And maybe some of the males, too. Males who are straight and gay, black and Asian, rich and poor, Islamic and Jewish, and all other varieties of maleness and femaleness that deserve voices. But overall I agree and this is a very interesting observation. I wonder if the social and particularly economic conditions have changed enough so that history won't repeat itself. Business is depending increasingly upon marketing, and marketing is basing itself on, as I mentioned above, segmentation. Segmentation is supposed to be about finding distinct groups of consumers, understanding their needs, and then fashioning products and services that will appeal directly to them. So businesses presumably would be interested in keeping the female "market" happy. In addition, and I think even more importantly, women fans (and all fans) have more of a voice now than they did in the 18th century, because they have access not only to the means of production, but to the means of distribution. Yet as your earlier example points out, we do seem to have an amazingly short historical memory, and also we tend to give credit to the person who last stated an idea at the expense of the person who first developed that idea. I wonder if this is some sort of cultural blindspot that North Americans have, and I wonder if our European and Asian colleagues would find the same sort of ahistorical perspectives in fan cultures on their home turf. But, yes, keeping an eye on past developments and reminding people about our tendency to repeat the past does stand as a very worthwhile academic pursuit. That should apply to males as well as females.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Academics and the Future of Fan Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lightning Round!

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

What has been your most formative fan experience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Fandom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fans and Public Sphere Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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