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

Fan and Academic Identities

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

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

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

Gender Infiltration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender and Slash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queering the Discussion Sean Griffin Faculty Page

Robin Anne Reid Professional LJ, Faculty Page

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GENDER ESSENTIALISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERFACES, AUTHORSHIP, AND PLAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Media and Fan Artifacts.

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

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

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

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

implications of video games.

MORE TOMORROW -- SAME BAT TIME, SAME BAT CHANNEL

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

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

5. Bridging the gender divide?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, let the fun begin.

Authority

by Karen Hellekson & Jason Mittell

1. Academic authority

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

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

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

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

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

2. Fannish authority

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

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

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

3. Gendered academic authority

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

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

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

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

4. Gendered textual authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW...

Chris Williams Responds to Our Questions about FanLib

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

Dr. Jenkins,

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

BASIC BACKGROUND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FanLib offers four things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third, we have highly responsive customer support.

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

Features:

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

+ Easy submission creation and editing, including:

o WYSIWYG editing

o Import from another website

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

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

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

o Add chapters over time

o Easily assign up to three fandoms to each submission

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

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

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

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

+ Story Views:

o Paginated with bookmarking

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

+ QuickLists (save a fic for later viewing)

+ Favorites

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

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

+ Tagging of fanfics

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

+ Auto-Recommendations

+ Private messaging

+ Full Featured Message Boards

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

+ Star Readers and Writers

+ Rate submissions (1-5 stars)

+ Leave multiple comments

+ Strong search engine optimizations

And, coming soon:

+ Email notifications

+ Multiple Author submissions

+ Banning individual members from leaving you comments

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

+ Social networking tools

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

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

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

COPYRIGHT ISSUES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTENT ISSUES

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

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

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

In your marketing brochure --

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

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

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

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

I hope that addresses the confusion.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS ISSUES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks again for your willingness to be interviewed.

Thank you for the opportunity.

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

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

Let's call the whole thing off!

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

FanLib -- "Where the Stories Continue"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Went Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Fury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Not to Handle a Controversy

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

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

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

Alternative Models

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

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

I think the necessary features would include:

* run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers

* with no ads and solely donation-supported

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Public Invitation

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

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

Everybody Loves Harry?

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

Harry Potter in the Mainstream

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

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

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

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

Harry Potter as Niche Media

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

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

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

Wizard Rock?

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

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

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

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

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

Ships that Pass in the Night

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

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

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

Harry Potter and the Media Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Fan Boys and Fan Girls Meet...

There's an old joke that by the time a phenomenon gets the attention of one of the major national news magazines, it is probably already over. A few weeks ago, Time ran a story on the rising influence of "fan boy culture" and then this week, Entertainment Weekly used this same angle to talk about the success of the new Spider-Man movie. I've been so busy trying to wrap up the term that I haven't had a chance to comment before now. Time's article, in particular, was explicit about the gender-dimensions of its claims, titling the article, "Boys Who Like Toys," and opening with the following description:

He's one of the most powerful taste-makers in Hollywood, the guy behind the record-breaking success of 300, the hit status of NBC's Heroes and the reign of the Xbox 360 gaming console. He enjoys invitations to the Skywalker Ranch and hangs out with guys like Nicolas Cage and Quentin Tarantino at conventions. He's zealously loyal, notoriously finicky and often aggressive with those who dare to disagree with him.

Oh, and occasionally he likes to dress up as Spider-Man.

He is the fanboy, the typically geeky 16-to-34-year-old male (though there are some fangirls) whose slavish devotion to a pop-culture subject, like a comic-book character or a video game, drives him to blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos, go to comic-book conventions and, once in a while, see a movie on the subject of his obsession. And he's having his way with Hollywood.

Nope, there's no accident that all of the pronouns here are masculine. In part, this is because the article is focused on the San Diego Comic-Con, superhero comics, and their media spinoffs, not to mention a number of high profile fanboys -- Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, and the like -- who are exerting power and influence within the Hollywood establishment. The article can't avoid the usually cliches -- coming back in the end to the idea that "fanboys" are "outsiders" who may not adequately predict box office revenues except in the case of those films which are already targeted at niche or cult audiences. The other governing myth here is that fans are fickle and unpredictable; that one can go crazy trying to understand their tastes or listening to their criticism.

Entertainment Weekly hits that second point especially hard. (Sorry but that article is only accessible to subscribers to the magazine and I bought my copy on the newstand, so no links.) EW writes about Spider-Man III:

The opening also proves the studio can successfully premiere a movie that was scrutinized and dissected on the Internet throughout its entire production, probably more so than any other film in history. Such is the new reality for filmmakers behind high-profile comic-book adaptations and blockbuster sequels, who increasing depend on the Net as a vital marketing tool -- but must also contend with fans who rabidly pick apart, analyze, and leak early peeks at upcoming projects online. "I'm at a loss to know how to deal with that," says Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi, "But it's the world we live in. I just have to adapt."

The article describes how studios have made their peace with the spoiling community, actively courting influential fans as grassroots intermediaries the way they once courted powerful gossip columnists in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- because they can help you if they like you and destroy you if they don't. EW calls it "befriending the enemy," a phrase which preserves the separation between consumers and producers, even as it describes the process by which that distinction is starting to break down.

It's interesting, though, that EW describes fan culture entirely in terms of the consumption and circulation of information about commercially produced works and has nothing to say about the things that fans themselves create through their appropriation of the raw materials that commercial culture provides them. At least Time wrote about fans who "blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos."

This media attention on "fan boy" culture comes at a moment of increasing debate within the aca-fan community about the gender dimensions of fan research. I wrote briefly about this topic a while back in response to some comments which got made at the Flow conference about the segregation of fan boy and fan girl scholars who are writing on similar topics but through different language, around different topics, and more often than not, on different panels. And I followed up a few days later with a second post on this topic. The discussion of topics such as the complexity of cult media narratives, transmedia storytelling, engagement, and convergence are being discussed seperately from long-standing work around fan fiction and fan culture more generally. There is some risk of taking up the industry's own atomistic conception of the fan rather than embracing the more collective vision represented by the concept of fandom. More generally, as I have written here before, phrases like "the architecture of participation" that surround web 2.0 suggest the degree to which network culture is really fan culture without the stigma.

At the same time, some of these shifts may reflect growing pains in the ways fan culture gets studied as more men begin to write about their own experiences and interests as fans. We certainly do not want to lose the important insights which feminist scholarship contributed to our early understanding of fan culture -- and indeed, the consciousness-raising tradition of feminist scholarship made it possible for us to write about our own experiences as fans. Yet, if fan studies is going to remain a viable area of research, we necessarily need to broaden the range of theoretical and methodological perspectives which get brought to bear upon it. We need to expand the range of fan cultures we study and the kinds of fan productivity we talk about.

It is also worth noting that this work is being produced in a larger context, one where at least some aspects of fan culture are gaining real visibility and influence, while others remain largely hidden from view. This is in part why I opened this post with a nod to Time and Entertainment Weekly, both of whom seem to understand the rise of fan influence in Hollywood along gender specific lines. Fan scholars may simply be reproducing, unconsciously in many cases, the dividing lines which structure the general culture's response to fan culture.

A heated and yet highly productive discussion of these issues has been raging over at Kristina Busse's blog, where her somewhat angry response to the discussions of these issues at the Media in Transition conference has so far generated 83 responses from a range of leading fan girl and fan boy academics. I can't begin to do justice to this multi-layered discussion here. If you haven't been following it yourself, you should check it out.

But I am concerned about the prospect that male and female scholars may be talking past each other rather than engaging with each other's work. The past few years have seen a range of new books on fan culture, including several important anthologies, that reflect the work of a new generation of fan scholars.

So, earlier this week, I wrote to nearly 30 of the key researchers in this field and ask them if they would be willing to participate in what I am jokingly calling "Fan Boy/Fan Girl Detante." Throughout the summer, this blog will be hosting a series of conversations among male and female researchers doing work on fan productivity, participatory culture, cult media, transmedia narratives, and so forth, designed to try to better understand the common ground and gender differences in the ways they are approaching their topic. Kristina and I have been working together to select researchers from a range of disciplines and national contexts, whose research spans not simply science fiction and fantasy, but also soap operas, Bollywood, popular music, games, and a range of other forms of media.

The entertainment industry loves big summer events: well, consider this to be a big summer event for those of us who are studying popular culture. While I will be spotlighting two scholars each week, many of the scholars have agreed to jump in both through the comments section here and through their own blogs to expand the conversation. I certainly hope that other fan researchers who have not been contacted about this first phase of the project will get in touch and let us know about the work they may be doing on these topics.

Earlier this week, Sibauchi, a media studies graduate student from South Korea, wrote to ask us about the value of fan studies. I am hoping that this series of exchanges will provide many valuable answers for Sibauchi and anyone else who wants to enter into this thriving area of research.

I am still hearing back from the scholars I contacted (so some of your favorite scholars may not be included here), but so far, the following folks who agreed to participate.

For the Red Team:

Nancy Baym, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of

Kansas

Rhiannon Bury, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of Waterloo

Kristina Busse (PhD) Independent Scholar

Melissa Click, Assistant Professor, Communications, University of Missouri-Columbia

Francesca Coppa, Associate Professor, English, Muhlenberg College

Abigail Derecho, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literary Studies and Radio/Television/Film,

Northwestern University

Catherine Driscoll, Chair, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

Karen Hellekson, (Ph.D.) Independent Scholar

Lee Harrington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Miami University in Ohio.

Deborah Kaplan, (M.A.) Independent Scholar

Anne Kustritz Ph.D. Candidate, American Culture, University of Michigan

Lisa Morimoto, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University

Roberta Pearson Chair, Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham

Ksenia Prassolova Ph.D. Candidate, University of Kaliningrad

Julie Levin Russo Ph.D. Candidate, Brown

Robin Anne Reid, Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, Texas A&M

University-Commerce

Louisa Stein, Assistant Professor, San Diego

Rebecca Tushnet, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager disability and media technology blogger

Cynthia W. Walker Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, St. Peter's College

Editor's Note: I originally identified this as the Pink team but have changed it by popular demand.

For the Blue Team:

Will Brooker, Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Kingston University

Sam Ford M.A. CMS, MIT

Jonathan Gray, Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

Sean Griffin, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television Studies, Southern Methodist University

Matt Hills Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies Cardiff University

Mark Jancovich, Professor, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia

Derek Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Robert Jones, Ph.D. NYU

Dereck Kompare, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television, Southern Methodist University

Robert Kozinets, Associate Professor, Marketing, York University

Christian McCrea, Lecturer in Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University

Jason Mittell, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Film & Media Culture, Middlebury

College

Martyn Pedler, Independent Scholar

Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Bob Rehak, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College

All joking about Pink/Red and Blue teams, aside, my hope is that we will discover that there's more common ground and shared interest here than might first seem apparent to those reading this work in isolation. I hope we all learn things that will inform our work and pushes us in new directions. By pairing scholars on the basis of gender, we insure two things that are often missing from this discussion: we insure that gender remains central to the discussion throughout and we insure absolute equal numbers of male and female participants. I am personally hoping that one of the things which will come out of the discussion, however, is some challenge to the essentialism which can run through discussions of this kind. I don't think all of the work here is going to break down clearly into Red and Blue Teams at all.

I welcome further suggestions about people who should participate actively in this discussion. I note, for example, that while this list is very inclusive in terms of gender, it does not yet feel very inclusive in terms of race and ethnicity. I'd love to find some more scholars of color who would like to join this conversation and am very open to suggestions.

We will start the conversations here in a few weeks. I will post more details once they are known.

By the way, I am posting this tonight from my hotel room in New Orleans where I am attending Phoenix Rising, a major conference of fans and academics who love Harry Potter. I hope to write more about the conference in my post later in the day tomorrow. If you happen to be here at the conference, say hey! I'd love to meet you.

Bring Me the Head of Henry Jenkins.... (Part One)

Coming soon to an art gallery near you: My decapitated head. Don't worry if you don't live in a major cultural center -- my head will also be rolling around in a pool of blood in a straight to video horror movie that you can rent at your local Blockbuster. Well, this is another fine mess I've gotten myself into. In this entry, I will be sharing some images of the process by which the experimental artist Christian Jankowski transformed my head into an art object as part of a work known as "The Violence of Theory."

For me, this all began when I was asked by the folks at MIT's List Gallery to give a talk about the intersection between popular culture and high art. (I have for a number of years served as part of the advisory group for the gallery, though I have been relatively inactive lately.) I decided to present a talk based on my essay about Matthew Barney's relationship to the horror film, an essay which appears in my new anthology, The Wow Climax. In the course of the talk, I moved pretty fluidly from clips and images from Barney's Cremaster series to clips and quotes from such popular horror artists as David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, and Clive Barker. This paragraph cuts to the heart of my argument:

The modern horror genre was born in the context of romanticism (with authors seeking within the monster and his creator powerful metaphors for their own uneasy relationship with bourgeois culture) and the horror film originated in the context of German expressionism (with the studios demanding that madness or the supernatural be put forth as a justification for the powerful feelings generated by that new aesthetic sensibility.) The popular aesthetic's demand for affective intensity and novelty requires that popular artists constantly renew their formal vocabulary. Representing the monstrous gives popular artists a chance to move beyond conventional modes of representation, to imagine alternative forms of sensuality and perception, and to invert or transform dominant ideological assumptions. Historically, horror filmmakers have drawn on the "shock of the new" associated with cutting edge art movements to throw us off guard and open us up to new sensations.

From the start, horror films have required a complex balancing between the destabilization represented by those avant garde techniques and the restabilization represented by the reassertion of traditional moral categories and aesthetic norms in the films' final moments. There is always the danger that these new devices will prove so fascinating in their own right that they will swamp any moral framing or narrative positioning. For many horror fans, the genre becomes most compelling and interesting where narrative breaks down and erotic spectacle and visual excess takes over.

If the horror film has a moment of original sin, it came when the producers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari inserted, at the last moment, a frame story that recontextualized the film's expressionist mise-en-scene as the distorted vision of a mad man. Through this compromise, they created a permanent space for modern art sensibilities within popular culture but only at the price of them no longer being taken seriously as art.

Among those people in the audience for the talk was Christian Jankowski, then in residence at MIT, as he was setting up an exhibition, "Everything Fell Together," in the gallery. Some months later, Jankowski contacted me again, this time to talk about his newest project, a series of artistic explorations of the culture around the contemporary horror film. Jankowiski had found a low budget horror film production which was willing to work with him to create a parallel work: he wanted to interview some of the leading theorists of the horror genre and incorporate their insights into the dialogue of the film. And while he was at it, he wanted to take "impressions" of us and transform them into prosthetic body parts, which would be deployed in gorey ways in the film and then displayed under glass in the installation.

Little did he know that he was tapping one of my boyhood fantasies. I was a horror film fan from the crib. I received a subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine for my thirteen birthday and spent hours flipping through the pages. My favorite bits were when they showed us the process which transformed Lon Chaney into the Wolfman or Boris Karloff into Frankenstein. I had clipped articles from Life magazine about the aging of Dustan Hoffman for Little Big Man and about the process that transformed Hal Holbrook into Mark Twain for his famous television special. At one time, I could have told you what Lon Chaney had in his make-up kit and how long it took them to turn Roddy McDowell into a chimp for Planet of the Apes. My mother had given me a make up kit and book when I was in my tween years and I spent horrors dribbling fake blood from my mouth or making synthetic scars using mortuary wax. So, it didn't take much to convince me to sit in the chair and have professional horror film makeup artists take an impression of my head.

My mother always told me to leave a good impression. My father always said that I should have my head examined. As it turns out, they both got their wish.

They started by wraping my upper body with a plastic garbage bag and then making a skull cap. They proceeded by coating my beard and my hair with vasaline which is supposed to prevent the rubber from sticking to my folicules. Then, they coated the area around my nose with an hideous orange goop, clearing out an area around the nostrels into which they inserted straws so that I would be able to breathe throughout the rest of the process. From there, they proceeded to coat my entire face with this orange substance. As it starts to dry, it becomes more like rubber but at first, it felt a bit like dunking your face in a vat of cold oatmeal. To hold the rubbery stuff in place as it dries, they wraped my head with bandages and finally covered the whole with plaster. For me, the biggest surprise was how much weight all of this placed on my shoulder and chest.

I had been warned that many people experience claustrophobia while undergoing this process: I went into a kind of hybernation and found the whole thing very relaxing up until the final few moments. For some reason, as we were approaching the end of the process, I suddenly found myself starting to sweet and felt some mild forms of panic. It was an enormous relief when the whole thing was removed -- not the least because I was finally able to speak again. I had so many puns and one-liners built up that they just exploded out of me once I got a chance to talk again. The whole process took about two hours -- and we did it in the main lobby of the CMS headquarters -- so you can imagine the startled looks of people walking in to pick up forms or what not.

The dried rubbery mask came off surprisingly easily and the technicians carried away with them a mold which perfectly captured the contours of my face. They said it would take about two weeks worth of work to transform it into a full reproduction of my head. While they were there, they took an extensive series of photographs of my face with various expressions, including asking me to imitate the lax jaw expression which we associate with death.

When Piracy Becomes Promotion Revisted...

Last fall, Reason magazine reprinted the "When Piracy Becomes Promotion" section from Convergence Culture, foregrounding the ways that the arguably illegal practices of fan subbing have helped to build the American market for anime. More recently, I received a tip from reader David Mankins about the ways that the commercial marketing for the anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, sought to explicitly tap into the fansubbing circuit. Haruhi had been a huge success in Japan and had generated growing interest in the American Otaku community through its circulation in fansubbed versions. Wikipedia offers this history of the international reception of the series:

DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 and 90,000 units sold of the first two DVDs respectively as of August 2006. A 2006 online poll of Japan's top 100 favourite animated television series of all time, conducted by TV Asahi, placed the series in fourth place. The series has also become somewhat of an internet phenomenon in both Japan and English-speaking countries thanks to the distribution of English language fansubs, and over 2000 clips of the series and user-created parodies and homages were posted to video sharing websites such as YouTube. The popularity of these clips (and those of other popular Japanese series) lead the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to request that YouTube remove clips protected under copyright.

Rather than ignore this history, the company releasing the anime series officially in the United States openly courted anime fans, urging those who have loved the fan sub version to support the commercial releases.

Here's an account of the campaign published last December on The Anime Almanac:

Buzz was generating through out all off last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets with promises of the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that "The World as we know it will end" that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website's source code. The popular website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along with the highlight of the letters SOS written on their news posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery....

Bandai's idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet. They have also created a Myspace page and encourage fans.

The movie is done "for fans by fans" style, and they really know their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialog with a Korean-Americain, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren't expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catch-phrases like "O Rly?" and "No Wai!" are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee's choice to translate a word to "psychic" over the word "esper", a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-prefered word written under the original recording...

Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to "All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works," and specifically gives no thanks to "downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs." This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

This case suggest just how central the fan network is to the release strategies of anime publishers. Rather than trying to shut down the fans, the company is recognizing the ways that fans have appreciated the value of the series, helping to familiarize at least American otaku to the content, and encouraging them to put their money behind a cultural product that they have already enjoyed in an underground form. I will be curious to see how this turns out and would welcome any insights from readers of this blog who are more involved in anime than I am.

For anime and manga fans in the Boston area, I wanted to share details of the forthcoming Cool Japan conference being hosted by Ian Condry, a faculty member in the Foreign Languages and Literature section at MIT and an active contributor to the Comparative Media Studies Program. Here are some of the highlights of the event (taken from the press release). Events will be split between MIT and Harvard, reflecting the joint affiliation of the "Cool Japan" Project:

Wednesday, February 28

Anime Screening & Director's Talk: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

7pm, MIT Room 32-123 (enter at 32 Vassar St.)

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda will screen and discuss his feature film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shôjo, 2006, Kadokawa/ Madhouse), which was awarded Best Animation by the Media Arts Festival 2007.

Thursday, March 1

Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization Book Launch and Dialogue with Author Ian Condry. 4-5:30pm, MIT Room 4-237 (enter at 77 Massachusetts Ave.)

MIT Associate Professor Ian Condry will discuss his recently published book with comments from local hip-hop scholars Thomas DeFrantz (MIT Associate Professor) and Murray Forman (Northeastern) and dialogue with audience.

Miss Monday in Concert. Tokyo hip-hop artist and local hip-hop sensations Akrobatik and Danielle Scott. Tickets: $8 Adv./$10 Door (18+). 9pm (doors open at 8:30pm), The Middle East, Upstairs (472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge).

Friday, March 2

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." Harvard CGIS (South, Room 020 Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge).

"Visual" with Susan Napier (Tufts/ U Texas), author of Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle; Roland Kelts (U Tokyo), author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Invaded the US; and Adam Kern (Harvard), author of Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and Kibyoshi in Edo Japan. 1pm.

"Design" with Marcos Novac (University of California, Santa Barbara), artist, transarchitect, and designer; Kostas Terzidis (Harvard), author of Algorhithmic Architecture; and Larry Kubota (GLOCOM), filmmaker, Black Current Productions. 3pm.

Afro Samurai Screening and Discussion with Manga Artist Takashi Okazaki. Screening of one 25-minute episode from the new five-part animated series produced in Japan and starring Samuel L. Jackson. Discussion follows with Afro Samurai manga artist Takashi Okazaki, who drew the original cult comic that launched the project. 7pm, Gund

Hall Piper Auditorium (Harvard, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge). WARNING:

Mature content, not suitable for children.

Saturday, March 3

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." MIT Stata Center Room 32-124 (32 Vassar St.).

"Culture" with Laura Miller (Loyola), author of Beauty Up: Exploring Japanese Beauty Aesthetics; Christine Yano (U Hawaii), author of Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and Nation in Japanese Popular Song; Ian Condry (MIT/Harvard), author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and Paths of Cultural Globalization. 1pm.

"Politics" with David Leheny (U Wisconsin), author of Think Global Fear Local: Sex, Violence, Anxiety in Contemporary Japan; Theodore J. Gilman (Harvard), author of No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and US; and Ueno Toshiya (Wako U), author of Urban Tribal Studies: A Sociology of Club and Party Cultures. 3pm.

For those of you who are not in the neighborhood, you may have to make due with Anime Pulse's extensive coverage of the previous Cool Japan conference. Here's hoping they provide a similar record of this event.

In Defense of Crud

"Ninety percent of everything is crud" -- Theodore Sturgeon

I have found myself thinking a lot lately about the issue of quality as it relates to the emergence of participatory culture. Several things have raised the issue in my mind:

The first was reading a very interesting essay written by Cathy Young, a regular columnist for Reason magazine, debating the merits of fan fiction. In fact, Young outs herself as someone who has written and published fan fiction set in the universe of Xena: Warrior Princess. She is in turn responding to a diatribe against fan fiction by fantasy writer Robin Hobbs. She writes:

Hobb's indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness. Deriding the idea of fanfic as good training for writers, Hobb wrote, "Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else's world, characters, and plot....The first step to becoming a writer is to have your own idea. Not to take someone else's idea, put a dent in it, and claim it as your own."

Young works through some of the standard defenses of fan fiction (I won't go into all of them here, since I've delivered most of them in the past myself and am a little tired of the arguments.) But she ends with the following:

So is the growth of Internet-based fan fiction a cultural development to be wholeheartedly applauded? Not quite. The good news about the Internet is that, in a world without gatekeepers, anyone can get published. The bad news, of course, is the same. Much fanfic is hosted on sites such as fanfiction.net, where authors can get their work online in minutes--which means that professional-quality stories coexist with barely literate fluff, and reader reviews will sometimes congratulate an author on good grammar and spelling. Even sites that prescreen fanfic and encourage authors to use beta readers and a spell checker tend to be quite lax with quality control, and only a few fan fiction archives are genuinely selective.

For the more sophisticated fanfic lovers, the high crap-to-quality ratio can mean a frustrating search for readable stories. The real problem, though, is that less experienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story. It is frankly disturbing to encounter teenagers and young adults whose recreational reading is limited to fanfic based on their favorite shows, and there have been moments when I have felt like telling some of my own readers to put down the fanfic and pick up a book. It is even more troubling, as far as educational experiences go, that a teenager can wantonly butcher the English language at fanfiction.net and get complimented on a "well-written story."

Golubchik thinks that such concerns are exaggerated. "If anything," she says, "I think that fanfic teaches kids to be more discerning. The quality stuff does tend to percolate to the top; it gets recommended and popularized." Indeed, while the worst of fan fiction can make a Harlequin romance look like Charlotte Bronte, the popular stories are at least no worse in quality--and sometimes far better--than, say, The Da Vinci Code.

The mainstreaming of fan fiction is likely to raise standards further, bringing more educated people into the arena and perhaps encouraging some voluntary gatekeeping, such as contests with input from professional writers or editors...

Perhaps, as with other cultural products often dismissed as intellectual junk food, the answer to bad fanfic is simply better fanfic.

The second was reading a debate between Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur (which I am sure to be saying more about down the line) and Chris Anderson, the promoter of the concept of the "Long Tail."

Here's some of what Keen had to say:

Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing....I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life. Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Keen's overtly and unapologetically elitist comments, frankly, get under my skin -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing if it forces those of us who believe in participatory culture to question and defend our own assumptions at a moment when the world seems to be moving more decisively in our directions. So, I find myself thinking a bit more about the vexing issue of quality. So let me offer a range of different responses to the issue:

1.We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process. Consider, for a moment, all of the arts and creative writing classes being offered at schools around the world. Consider, for example, all of the school children being taught to produce pots. We don't do this because we anticipate that very many of them are going to grow up to be professional potters. In fact, most of them are going to produce pots that look like lopsided lumps of clay only a mother could love (though it does say something about how we value culture that many of them do get cherished for decades). We do so because we see a value in the process of creating something, of learning to work with clay as a material, or what have you. There is a value in creating, in other words, quite apart from the value attached to what we create. And from that perspective, the expansion of who gets to create and share what they create with others is important even if none of us produces anything beyond the literary equivalent of a lopsided lump of clay that will be cherished by the intended recipient (whether Mom or the fan community) and nobody else.

2. All forms of art require a place where beginning artists can be bad, learn from their mistakes, and get better. A world of totally professionalized expression masks the apprenticeship process all artists need to undergo if they are going to achieve their full potential. A world where amateur artists can share their work is a world where learning can take place. If the only films you see are multimillion dollar productions by Steven Spielberg, then most of us will assume that we have nothing meaningful to contribute to the culture and give up. If we see films with a range of quality, including some that are, in Sturgeon's terms, "crud," then it becomes possible to imagine ourselves as potentially becoming artists. Bad art inspires more new artists than good art does for this reason: I can do better than that!

3. A world where there is a lot of bad art in circulation lowers the risks of experimentation and innovation. In such a world, one doesn't have to worry about hitting the marks or even making a fool out of oneself. One can take risks, try challenging things, push in new directions because the cost of failure is relatively low. That is why a participatory culture is potentially so generative. Right now, innovation occurs most often at the grassroots level and only subsequently gets amplified by mass media. Professional media is afraid to take risks.

4. Bad art inspires responses which push the culture to improve upon it over time. I have argued elsewhere that fandom is inspired by a mixture of fascination and frustration. If the show didn't fascinate us, we would not keep returning to it. If it fully satisfied us, we would not feel compelled to remake it. Many of the shows that have inspired the most fan fiction are not the best shows but rather they are shows with real potential -- the literary equivalent of the "fixer-upper" that real estate agents always talk about. Over time, bad art may become an irritant, like sand in the oyster, which becomes a pearl when it gets worked over by many different imaginations. Good art may simply close off conversations.

5. Good and Bad, as artistic standards, are context specific. Good for what purposes? Good by what standards? Good for what audiences? In some ways, one can argue that professionally published fiction about popular television shows is superior to at least most fan fiction -- in terms of a certain professional polish in the writing style, in terms of its copy editing, in terms of perhaps its construction of plots. But it is not going to be as good as fan fiction on other levels -- in terms of its insight into the characters and their relationship, in terms of its match with the shared fantasies of the fan community, in terms of its freedom to push beyond certain constraints of the genre.

6. Standards of good and bad are hard to define when the forms of expression being discussed are new and still evolving. This would apply to many of the forms of participatory culture which are growing up around digital media. The forms are too new to have well established standards or fixed cannons.

7. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not clear that the growth of participatory culture does, in fact, damage to professional media making. One could argue that so far most popular work by amateur media makers has been reactive to stories, characters, and ideas generated by mass culture. The two may exist in dialogue with each other. This is certainly true of the kinds of fan culture that Cathy Young is discussing.

We should be less concerned with the presence of "bad art" in participatory culture than with the need to develop mechanisms for feedback which allow artists to learn and grow, the need to develop aesthetic criteria which allow us to meaningful evaluate new and emerging forms of expression or which reflect the particular needs of specific contexts of cultural production, and the need to develop mechanisms which help each consumer to locate forms of cultural expression which they regard to be good.

All of this brings us back to Sturgeon's Revelation: If 90 percent of everything is crud, then we are playing the law of averages. If you increase the number of people producing culture, you increase the amount of good art even if you don't increase the percentage of good art to bad. This is debatable, I suppose, but what is not debatable is that you also increase the diversity of the culture. Many many groups of people have felt excluded by a system of professionalized art and storytelling that might have vital contributions to make to our culture. To embrace what they produce doesn't require us to "lower" our standards but it may require us to broaden them to appreciate new forms of expression that do not fit comfortably within existing aesthetic categories.

Are You Hep to That Jive?: The Fan Culture Surrounding Swing Music

When Sue Turnbull (a scholar who has written very interesting work on murder mysteries, their female readers and writers) asked me to be the outside reader on a PhD dissertation being written by one of her students at LaTrobe University (in Melbourne, Australia), on contemporary swing dance, I was resistant at first, insisting that I knew little or nothing about the scholarly literature around dance. Sue pushed me harder, suggesting that this project had much more to do with my own work than I might imagine, and being a trusting sort, I agreed to read the work, satisfied in having made my own lack of credentials clear, intrigued by why she was pushing so hard, and a bit pleased to be reading something on swing since I am a closset enthusiast of the new Swing revival (though I certainly can't do the Lindy Hop to save my life.) Thus, Sam(antha) Carroll entered my life. Carroll's dissertation did indeed fascinate me -- it is frankly some of the best work by a graduate student in cultural studies I have read in some time. She draws not just on the literature in performance studies on popular dance traditions in America but it also shows a deep familiarity with cultural studies work on fan appropriations and transformations on media content as well as work in digital studies on virtual and online communities. She captures the world of swing dance culture -- from the inside out -- and traces it across multiple media channels, showing how their lives online are connecting to their physical encounters in geographic space, and especially exploring how they trade video clips of obscure dance performances which become core resources in the development of their own performance repertoires. And, hey, the dissertation came with its own dvd of amazing clips -- and you could dance to it!

I felt that some of her work would be of great interest to readers of this blog given our ongoing discussions of various fan cultures, of the ways digital media is transforming traditional cultural practices, and of the poetics and politics of remixing media content. (And to add to my pleasure, she writes about Hellzapoppin', a much beloved film in my household, and one which I regularly assign to graduate students in our program.) Even if, like me, you think this may be outside your field of interest, think again and give it a closer look.

The following entry was written specifically for this blog by Sam Carroll. I asked her to give us some more biographical data and here's what she wrote:

Sam Carroll has just completed her Phd at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In that doctoral thesis she discussed contemporary swing dancers and their use of digital media in embodied practice - or, in other words, what dancers do with computers. In addition to writing about dancing (and computers), Sam also likes dancing very much. And watching footage of dancing on her computer. She began learning lindy hop in 1999 in Brisbane, but found the swing dancing community an excellent complement to academic life when she moved to Melbourne in 2001 to pursue a postgraduate degree - less writing, more dancing. Sam is now trying to learn as many authentic jazz routines from the 1930s and 40s as possible. Her progress is more a performance of fandom than an embodiment of elite fan knowledge.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY SAM CARROLL

This is a clip of the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dancing a Big Apple routine (choreographed by Frankie Manning) in the 1939 film Keep Punchin'. In the last section of this clip they dance lindy hop on a 'social dance floor'.

And here's footage of dancers in the US dancing the same routine in 2006.

If you follow this link you can listen to the Solomon Douglas Swinged playing the same song on their recent album.

Both dancers and musicians have painstakingly transcribed what they see and hear in that original 1939 clip.

Lindy hop - the partner dance most popular today in swing dance communities - developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 30s by African American dancers. Over the following years it moved to mainstream American youth culture, carried by dance teachers and performers in films like Keep Punchin' and in stage shows, and then moved out into the international community, again in film and stage plays, but also with American soldiers stationed overseas. Though it was massively popular in its day, by the 1950s changes in popular music, where jazz was replaced by rock n roll or became increasingly difficult to dance to with the rise of bebop, saw lindy slipping from the public eye.

In the 1980s, dancers in Europe and the US began researching lindy, using archival footage like Keep Punchin' but also including films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races - popular musical films of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of these dancers was to revive lindy hop, to recreate the steps they saw on screen. Learning to dance by watching films, particularly films that were only available at cinemas or in archival collections, was unsurprisingly, quite difficult, and these revivalists began seeking out surviving dancers from the period. Among these original lindy hoppers were Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns, Sugar Sullivan and Dean Collins.

Twenty years after these revivalists began learning lindy, there are thriving swing dance communities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Korea. They come together in their local communities for classes and social dancing, and also travel extensively for camps and lindy exchanges. My research has focussed on the ways these contemporary swing dancers utilise a range of digital media in their embodied practices. This has involved discussing the way DJs in the swing community use digital music technology; the way swing dancers use discussion boards (Swing Talk, SwingDJs), websites (Dance History), instant messaging and email to keep in contact with dancers in their own community and overseas and to plan their own trips to other local scenes; and the ways in which swing dancers have use a range of audio visual technology. These uses of audio visual technology include the sorts of revivalist activities first practiced in the 1980s, but continuing now in lounge rooms and church halls in every local scene, but also to record their own dancing and local communities and also performances (on the social or competitive floor) by 'celebrity' lindy hoppers.

The Big Apple contest from Keep Punchin' is a useful example of the ways swing dancers make use of digital media in their embodied practices. But it's also the focus of my own dancing obsessions at the moment. I've been dancing lindy for at least eight years, and dance a few times a week in my local, Melbourne scene. I've travelled extensively within Australia to attend dance events, I've run events in my own city and I've travelled overseas for large dance events (such as the Herräng dance camp). This year, having just finished my Phd, I've decided I finally have time to work on my own dancing, in the sweaty, embodied sense, rather than the academic or abstract.

Writers in fan studies like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills and Camille Bacon-Smith have discussed being a scholar-fan (to use Matt Hill's term), where you're a member of the community of fans you're researching. This approach is fairly standard in much of the dance studies literature - it is notoriously difficult to write about dance and dancing with any degree of convincingness if you don't dance - it's a little like dancing about architecture. I've also found that combining my academic work with my everyday, making my everyday experiences my work, has been a satisfying way to extend my fanatical obsession with dance into every corner of my life (a little like Henry's writing about Supernatural, a program I also love, here on this blog).

So when I decided I needed to get back to some level of dance fitness, to end the thesis-imposed hiatus from hardcore dance training, I chose this Big Apple and a number of other 'vintage' or 'authentic' jazz dance routines as my focus. I've learnt the Big Apple and Tranky Doo (another venerable jazz dance routine choreographed by Frankie Manning) before, but this was to be my first solo mission, using clips garnered almost entirely from the internet, though also making use of sections of an instructional DVD produced by a famous teaching couple.

Dancing alone is an essential part of lindy hop. The dance itself revolutionised the European partner dancing structure with its use of the 'break away', (which you can see danced by the last couple in the film After Seben), where partners literally broke away from each other to dance in 'open' position. In open, partners are free to improvise, and the most common improvisation in that historical moment and today, is to include jazz steps from the vast repertoire of steps developed by African American vernacular dance culture over centuries in America. Learning to dance alone not only offers dancers the opportunity to work on body awareness, fitness, coordination, individual styling and expanding their own repertoire (a point upon which I was relying), but also encourages a creative, improvised approach to music which they can then bring to their lindy hop for those 5 or 6 beats of the 8 count swing out - the foundational step of lindy hop.

I've written a great deal about the gender dynamics at work in lindy hop, a dance which prioritise the heterocentric pairing of a man and a woman, beginning with my own discomfort with a dance where the man leads, the woman follows, and traditional gender roles prevail. But I've also written a great deal about the liberatory potential of lindy. The open position and the emphasis on improvisation are an important part of this - in those moments both partners are expected to 'bring it' - to contribute to the creative exchange within the partnership. Lindy, as it was danced by African American dancers in that original creative moment, also embodies a history of resistance and transgression, as a dance with its roots in slavery and created during a period of institutionalised racism and oppression. One of my own research interests has been the extent to which the resistant themes of lindy hop, of African American vernacular dance, have been realised by contemporary swing dancers. The fact that most of these contemporary dancers are white, middle class urban heterosexual youth goes some way to discouraging my reading of contemporary swing dance culture as a hot bed of radical politics and revisions of dominant ideology and culture. Yet I have also found that lindy hop and African American vernacular jazz dances like the Big Apple structure and the Tranky Doo offer opportunities for the expression of self and resistance of dominant gender roles.

As a woman, and as a feminist, I've found that archival footage such as that Keep Punchin' clip offer opportunities for reworking the way I dance and participate in the public dance discourse. When we watch that Big Apple clip, while we can clearly see that each dancer is performing synchronised, choreographed steps, they are also clearly styling each step to suit their own aesthetic, athletic and social needs and interests. We see the personality of each dancer as they execute a set piece of choreography. The very concept of a Big Apple contest involves dancers performing specific steps as they are called, and being judged not only for their ability to dance the correct step in time and with alacrity, but more importantly (in a setting where dance competency, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has written, is demanded by the social setting - everyone can dance), for their individual interpretation of the step. This is a performance of improvisation within a socially, collaboratively created structure. The representation of individual identity within a consensual public discourse. This is the sort of thing that jazz musicians do - improvise within a given structure.

And man, is that some serious fun.

For contemporary swing dancers, the idea of taking particular formal structures and then reworking them to suit their own discursive needs extends from the dance floor to the mediated world. Online, swing dancers upload digital footage of themselves dancing, edited to best display their abilities. Or they edit whole narrative films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races and edit out the sequences they're most interested in - the dancing. And dancers like myself are still watching these edited clips, recreating entire routines, and then, even more interestingly, editing out particular steps and integrating them into their lindy on the social dance floor, or into their own choreographed routines.

The notion of step stealing is not new in African American vernacular dance - it reaches back to Africa. And Frankie Manning himself is often quoted as saying 'dance it once and it's yours, dance it twice and it's mine'. For me, as a dancer, this is exciting stuff. If I put in the time and effort, I can learn these steps (well, some of them - watch that Hellzapoppin' clip and you'll see what I mean). And if I practice, time it properly and really bring it, I can pull that out on the social dance floor. Perhaps. Contemporary dancers enact that philosophy on the dance floor every day -stealing steps that catch their attention on the social dance floor, or 'ripping off' moves they see performed in footage of dancers in competitions or performances or in social dance settings all over the world. Or from seventy years ago.

For me, swing dancers' tactical use of digital media in their embodied use of archival footage is not only a source of academic fascination, but also a very practical skill to develop. I have had to learn how to watch footage of dancing in a way that lets me apply my knowledge of dance to separate out distinct steps, then figure out how they work, practically. Learning to poach dance steps from archival footage is a useful skill for lindy hoppers. But the testing of my skills is not online or in my ability to write and talk about these things. The real challenge to my creative and critical faculties comes on the dance floor, when I have to bring it - to bring the right step at the right time, but with my own unique, creative twist.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

---. (2000). Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Clein, John, dir. (1939). Keep Punchin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Frank Manning and Hot Chocolates. USA.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. (1990). Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Kaufman, S. J. (1929). After Seben. Short film. Perf. "Shorty" George Snowden. USA.

Potter, H. C., dir. (1941). Hellzapoppin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Frank Manning. USA.

Solomon Douglas Swingtet. (2006). Swingmatism. USA.

Wood, Sam. (1939). A Day at the Races. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. USA.

The Merits of Nitpicking: A Doctor Diagnoses House

My son and I are both big fans of the television series, >em>House. I watch the show for the characters and their interactions -- especially for Hugh Laurie's performance but also for his interplay with the other doctors. My son has shown a bit more curiosity about the medical dimensions of the series and in search of information, he stumbled onto a fascinating blog, Polite Dissent, which offers medical insight into House, superhero comics, and a range of other popular culture texts. The blog promises us "Comics, Medicine, Politics, and Fun." Its author, Scott, describes himself as being part of a large family practice in Southwestern Illinois. Scott's blog is a good illustration of a mode of fan criticism which sometimes goes by the name of nitpicking. Nitpickers examine their favorite programs through a particular lens -- in this case, medicine -- in which they have developed expertise. I became very interested in nitpicking when I did research for Science Fiction Audiences about the reception of Star Trek at MIT. What I found at that time -- the late 1980s -- was that MIT students were often drawn to our school because of an early interest in science fiction and used science fiction -- especially debates about the lines between known science, reasonable speculation, and implaussible technobabel -- to work through their own mastery of core scientific concepts. The pleasure was in being able to prove to each other what was "wrong" with the science in a particular Star Trek episode and to explain a more plausible or realistic way of dealing with the same themes. Indeed, they classified the ST:NG episodes by discipline, often using the numerical codes ("Course 6") which are most often used to refer to majors within the MIT Context, suggesting just how much the shows functioned in parallel with what they were learning in their classes.

These scientists and engineers in training were not being obnoxious in trying to show their superiority to the program: part of the pleasure for them came in sorting out the differences between real and bogus science. In some senses, this was to look at the series through a realist lens but that's too simple a way to understand what is going on since all science fiction fans recognize that science fiction involves speculation and about social commentary, not simply about reproducing the world of known science but pushing beyond it to explore alternative possibilities. There were just "rules" that governed how far outside known science science fiction "should" stray and in what directions.

The classic nitpicker has a love/hate relationship with their favorite program: the show has to be good enough to stretch the outer limits of their knowledge at a regular basis and yet at the same time, it has to be flawed enough that they can catch it when the authors "fake it" in a particular domain of knowledge.

So, Scott takes House apart in terms of hospital procedure, medical tests and equiptment, and the specifics of the various ailments they appear in the speculations surrounding a particular case. Taken as a whole, Scott seems to enjoy the speculative aspects of the series but to be displeased by the various shortcuts the writers take to get us through a complex medical process in under an hour of screentime. Scott recognizes the tension between story telling and communicating actual medical knowledge but remains frustrated, as he puts it, "when House does a "character show," the medicine suffers."

Here, for example, are some of the key concerns he raised about "TB or Not TB", a second season episode about a grandstanding doctor who works on the medical problems in the third world and who provokes special ire from the series protagonist:

I

f the patient is suspected of having TB, why is no one treating him wearing a mask? Why he wandering around the hospital and not in isolation? Why is he not in a negative-pressure room?

PPDs are not read by sight, but by feel. It doesn't matter how red it looks, but instead how indurated it is.

TB is slow growing. How did the team know almost immediately that it was resistant TB? How did the antibiotics kick in so fast?

A nesidioblastoma would explain most of Dr. Charles's symptoms, but *wow* that's a convenient tumor. Small enough that it can't be seen on x-rays or MRIs. Intermittent, so it only releases insulin periodically. And yet strong enough to lower the sugar level in his CSF. It's more of a deus ex machina than a diagnosis.

When Dr. Charles coded, why did no one in a room full of doctors start CPR while waiting for the paddles to charge?

I'm certainly no surgeon, interventional radiologist or endocrinologist, but the scene where the team is trying to induce the tumor to release insulin seemed wrong. Injecting calcium directly into the pancreatic blood supply may be a legitimate procedure, but I doubt those four are qualified to perform it. Also, since they expected the blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels, they should have had the D50 ready to inject and not scramble for an IV setup

Frankly, most of these questions never crossed my mind: for me, the medical language on >em>House is as much technobabel as anything heard on Star Trek, but I found I had to stop watching Jack and Bobby a few years ago because I got so frustrated in how they dealt with academic life and I am starting to get more frustrated with Veronica Mars along similar lines. It all depends on where your expertise and interest lies but that's part of the value of creating a space where shared texts get examined through multiple lens.

It has been widely observed that procedural shows like House or CSI can play an important role in exciting the American public about the professions being represented. They are often accompanied both by an increase in sales of nonfiction works on the same topics and by increased applications to colleges which offer programs in those areas of specialization. The obvious parallel here is to the MIT students who got turned onto science through Star Trek. In such a context, sites like this one play an important role in providing a corrective to some of the more hairbrained ideas that find their ways into dramatic television or simply to provide further background on the medical conditions and practices discussed on the program.

I wonder how we can incorporate something like the nitpicking process into the educational system. What is the value of getting students to apply their knowledge to deconstruct a popular representation? What is gained by the process of walking through such critiques and then trying to verify competing truth claims through reference to concrete evidence and information? What gets added when we move from a single knowledgible critic like Scott to the incorporation of a larger community of interested people who might bring slightly different expertises to the table or who might have competing interpretations and evaluations of what is represented in the program (as occurs in the comments section of this site)? The key point is that the procedural shows themselves do not have to be 100 percent accurate as long as they offer problems for students to work through and solve and as long as a spirit of playful debunking is built into how they get discussed in the classroom. Indeed, the shows may be a better basis for such an experiment if they are good enough to capture the imagination but ultimately flawed or compromised in their representation of real world practices. Such an excercise would seem to be a great way to introduce media literacy concepts into the biology classroom.

Supernatural: First Impressions

Late last fall, I asked for readers of this blog to pimp their favorite shows. Overwhelmingly, the most popular choice was a CW series called Supernatural -- of course, there was a concerted campaign within the show's fan community to write in and share the love for the series in hopes that it might generate greater awareness of the program. Here's just a few of the things readers had to say about Supernatural:

Every week is like a new little horror movie that, most times, is really quite frightening. But that's not what really drives it. The true strength of Supernatural lies in the absolutely touching family ties and brotherly love exhibited every episode by Sam and Dean.

***********************

The tight brotherly bond, driven by the love of their father is what keeps the fans coming back. The lore [hellhounds, demons, vamps, wendigos] keeps the fans sticking around for more and a crossover from the [Joss]Whedonverse thrills us! Each week a new puzzle piece is put down in the mystery of their family's trials and tribulations and we LOVE Eric Kripke for such a great show.

*****

John, Sam and Dean are a dysfunctional family, and so intriguing with it that all the exchanges they have about their family issues have us fan(girls, mostly, I think) squee in delight. They all have a definite character, differences and similarities quite cleverly written and filmed (the way Dean and John move, the way in which John and Sam say the same words, etc). The feelings implied in looking out for each other not only as fellow hunters but as a family make the tension in the fighting/dangerous scenes raise up a notch. We want to see Sam telling it all to his father, we want to see what Dean would do, who would he side with, we want to see John worried about his boys. In short, we want to see MEN EMOTE for each other, and the family ties allow for a narrative that can play with this instead of justifying it.

******

Usually when there's a friendship that fan glom onto, there will be hints of it onscreen--banter, and maybe once or twice per season they save each other's lives. It's the fans who had the really deep, strong emotional undercurrent in fanfic. But in Supernatural, the intense bond between the brothers is part of the text.

*********

It's got a lovely mix of an overall mytharc as well as standalone bits and episodes.

********

The arch narrative is threaded all throughout the first season, picked up in some episodes and just mentioned in others, but it's what gives the series a fundamental unity and reason d'eitre.

*******

The continuity is fabulous, and works in all sorts of extra information, both on the characters and whatever myth they're investigating. I find myself re-watching episodes, figuring out what's going on, and the researching the history of the legends.

Each of the paragraphs above comes from a different reader but they represent steps in an argument that certainly got my attention. All I can say is that your campaign worked -- at least in my case. I had only a vague awareness of Supernatural before I started getting flooded by these earnest pleas and recommendations. Frankly, I had lumped it together with Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, seeing the whole lot as basically TV knockoffs of The Sixth Sense. But, once I read those recommendations, I know I had to see it for myself and so I put the Season One DVD boxed set on my Christmas list. I've been watching Supernatural while coping with jet lag during my trip to Singapore -- maybe not the best choice under the circumstances because instead of putting me to sleep, I keep wanting to watch just one more and end up staying up later than I should be. I more or less ended up inhaling Season One -- watching the last eight episodes more or less back to back on the flight back from Singapore, and I am now craving season two.

I kept planning to write a midterm report on my viewing but given the choice between watching another episode and writing about the series, I kept choosing to watch another episode. Every statement I quoted above is absolutely true -- this is a show which delivers real haunted house style horror every week and does so while giving us an extensive look into the emotional life and personal growth of its core protagonist. Each episode is self contained enough that you can watch it out of sequence and get something rewarding out of the experience, yet there's a powerful cumulative effect of watching the episodes in sequence and thus seeing the character's inner lives come bubbling up again and again. The writing is crisp; the characters have a distinctive voice.

You can try to compare it to X-Files or Buffy or Night Stalker, all of which it superficially resembles, but this series does things its own way (as I hope to illustrate in a moment).

It's hard to imagine how or why a series this good is suffering from such total neglect from the network, from the critics, though clearly not from its most hardcore fans.

Let me tell you I was nervous going in. Having decided I wanted to write something in response to the community's push, I was terrified I wasn't going to like the show and would then have to write something negative. I never want to pee on someone else's fandom but I was starting to see some folks out in LJland grumbling because I hadn't said anything about Supernatural while I had posted about Heroes, the runner up show in my contest (You know who you are). I was already writing Heroes; Supernatural took homework and the end of a term is not the best time to be adding on extra assignments.

As it happens, the first few episodes didn't quite grab me -- they were good enough, they worked well within the terms of the genre, the characters and plot had potential, but I wasn't hooked. For me, the episode that pushed me over the edge was "Skin." And from there, it just got more and more intense. Retrospectively, it was all there from the beginning.

For those who, like me, got it confused with some of the other supernatural shows that hit television around the same time, this one deals with two brothers who are traveling across America doing battle with demonic forces and searching for their missing father. The creatures they encounter in any given episode are the stuff of campfire stories -- they are inspired by roadside Americana and by urban legends. It is supernatural horror of a kind which movies rarely give us any more -- spin tingling without being overly gory (other than an odd preoccupation with dripping blood). Indeed, its dependence on shadowy figures owes something to the vintage horror films of producer Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) than anything in contemporary horror cinema. On the making of tape, Eric Kripke cites a range of filmic exemplars, including Poltergeist, An American Werewolf in London, and The Evil Dead movies.

The film scholar Robin Wood has identified the core formula for the horror film -- "normality is threatened by the monstrous" -- and suggested that the formula breaks down into three elements - normality, the monstrous, and the relationship between the two. And it is on that level that we can understand what separates Supernatural from many of the other horror series on television.

Joss Whedon has described the vampires and demons represented on Buffy as "metaphors" for teenage experience in America: they embody the horrors to be found in the hellmouth that is American public education.

The monsters in The X-Files ultimately became clues within the vast governmental conspiracy that Scully and Muldar wanted to uncover: the truth was out there and each monster we unmask brought us closer to the truth. Earlier in the series, everything hinged on the debate between faith and science, with the two partners contesting the validity of each other's world views.

Something similar can be said of Lost where the supernatural elements are few and far between but seem to be just one more tantalizing clue to the puzzle that constitutes the series.

In Supernatural, the monsters are, in effect, emotional scars and psychic wounds. They represent unresolved emotional issues, often within the context of family life, and they are also external correlatives for the emotional drama taking place in the lives of the series' protagonists. Sam and Dean go out there looking for things that are strange and unfamiliar and they end up seeing themselves and their relationship more clearly.

This is the stuff of classic melodrama: Peter Brooks tells us that melodrama externalizes emotions. It takes what the characters are feeling and projects it onto the universe. So that the character's emotional lives gets mapped onto physical objects and artifacts, gets mirror backed to them through other characters, gets articulated through gestures and physical movements, and on a metalevel, speaks to us through the music which is what gives melodrama its name. Supernatural is melodrama in the best sense of the term.

On one level, it is made up of classic masculine elements -- horror, the hero's quest, sibling rivalry, unresolved oedipal dramas -- but on another level, it seems ideally suited to the themes and concerns which have long interested the female fan community. Heck, this series is one long hurt/comfort story. Every episode seems structured as much around the character moments as around the monster of the week plotlines. Everything here seems designed to draw out the emotions of the characters and force them to communicate with each other across all of the various walls which traditional masculinity erects to prevent men from sharing their feelings with each other. Dean in particular seems to hate "chick flick moments" and has a running commentary on how much he would like to avoid getting in touch with his feelings but this doesn't prevent us from having some real emotional revelations in almost every episode and the last few episodes of the season force each character to decide what matters most to them and to weigh their goals against their ties to their family in the most immediate ways possible.

I am someone who is definitely closer to Sam than to Dean in my outlook on life and indeed, there are moments in the series that I absolutely hate Dean, yet the series is well enough constructed that each time you reach that point, they peal back another layer and show some other aspect of his character. There are several episodes near the end of Season one which show us why he acts the way he does and suggests that his emotions run a lot deeper than his machismo will allow him to admit.

What gives the series its epic structure is the quest for the demon that took the life of the boy's mother. The goal is what holds the dysfunctional and centrifugal family together; it is also what pulls them apart (since each of them holds within them some secrets about what happened that night that they have never shared with each other and the trauma has hit each of them on a different level.) Not every episode contributes directly to this core quest narrative -- though many of them are connected to it in ways that are not immediately clear and the quest gains momentum as you move into the last third of the first season (and perhaps beyond). This is not an ensemble drama of the kind which most often wins recognition from critics these days: the focus is strongly on the two protagonists but around them, we accumulate, episode by episode, a richly drawn set of supporting characters, some of whom are recurring, some of whom appear in only a single storyline. It is not always clear which is which when we watch an episode and a real strength of the series is that what may at first seem to be throw away or one shot characters may resurface later. The series spends enough time setting up many of these characters that it produces considerable negative capability: we want to know what happens to these characters after the episode ends and in the case of the various family friends we encounter, we'd like to find out more about their history with the father before the series itself starts. There's more than enough suggestions of back story here to sustain an army of fan writers for a long time to come.

A real strength of the series is the construction of female secondary characters, all the more unusual in a series which is so centrally about its core male leads. But each week, we seem to introduce one or two women who are struggling not only against supernatural forces but against the circumstances life has thrown their way. As Carol Clover suggests in Men, Women, and Chain Saw, horror films have traditionally offered a range of strong roles for women in part because men can accept the experience of risk and vulnerability at the heart of horror by mapping it onto the female victim. Clover describes the role of the Final Girl in the slasher film genre, for example, showing how the women overcome and ultimately face down their fear in the course of the action. These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion. The result are some of the most compelling male/female relationships I've seen on prime time network television.

I am trying to write this without giving away too many spoilers. Part of my pleasure here was going into this series without knowing what to expect. Yet, I am hoping that I can lend my voice to the other fans of the series who wrote in this fall to pimp this show. You can certainly discover some of the virtues I've identified here in a single episode seen out of context but there really is a value in going back and watching this series from the beginning. There is a growth in the emotional life of the characters which is best experienced watching several episodes in a gulp. This is the kind of series that dvd box sets are made for.

I hope to write some more about Supernatural down the line. One of the things I am still working on are the parallels between Supernatural and Heroes, the other show which did very well with readers of this blog. There are several plot elements here -- the theme of dopplegangers in "Skin" for example parallels the Niki/Jessica storyline in Heroes and the slow discovery of the extend of Sam's powers has a lot in common with what happens to the various protagonists on the NBC superhero drama. I also think there's a fair amount to be said here about what I see as the surprisingly negative portrayal of fans in "Hell House," especially given the discussions we've had here about the "Love & Monsters" episode of Doctor Who.

I still have read none of the fan commentary beyond what's been posted here or the fan fiction so I don't know for sure what elements fans are picking up on in this series. That will be the next step once I get caught up with season two. But for the moment, I think you can add me to the list of Supernatural fans.

Asian Cinema and the Slash Subtext

When I opened up the arts section of the Straits Times last Saturday I was surprised to read a story there about Hong Kong Actor Ti Lung and his latest film --which has a strong slashy subtext. Here's what the paper reported:

In all of his showbiz career of over 30 years, Hong Kong actor Ti Lung is known for his alpha-male, authoritative roles. Fans will remember fondly his swordsman characters in 1970s martial arts movies like Duel of Fists and The New One-Armed Swordsman or his Golden Horse-winning role as a gangster leader in A Better Tomorrow.

But Ti, 60, as a gay cop?

In his first Singapore movie One Last Dance, directed by Brazilian director Max Makowski, the actor plays a roguish police captain who has a special relationship with an assassin named T., played by Francis Ng.

While there are no intimate scenes in the unconventional mafia tale to indicate homosexuality, Ti felt his character had to be irrationally in love with NG's philosophical killer or he would have arrested T for his crimes....

"Mind you, when we filmed this, Brokeback Mountain was not even out yet. I asked the director, but he didnt give a definite yes. If he had, I would have added more hints in my acting."

What slash does is make explicit the feelings that such films leave implicit? It is, as I suggest in Textual Poachers, about crossing the divide between the homosocial and the homoerotic.

As I read this story about Ti Lung, I was reminded of another story about the rise of Bhaisexuals in Hindi cinema from the Indian Express, which my former student, Parmesh Shahani, sent to me a while back. Here's part of what the story said:

Hindi cinema celebrated the metrosexuals (the smoothies of Dil Chahta Hai). It has paid homage to the retrosexuals (Abhishek Bachchan, with his rugged, awkward macho-ness in everything from Bunty aur Babli to Sarkar). Now, it is seeing the rise and rise of a new breed. Call them the Bhai- sexuals. Unlike the Gucci-sporting, new-age DCH boys, the Bhai-sexuals are macho, retro and raw. And though, like the retrosexuals, they'd rather be sporting the newest gun rather than the latest designerwear, there's one crucial difference that sets them apart.

The Bhai-sexual shares a chemistry with his best pal that often even overshadows his chemistry with his lady love.

Again, these sounds like the kinds of tough but sensitive males who have often been the center piece of slash fan fiction in the west. And indeed, as the story continues, it starts to spell out the kinds of hurt/comfort contexts that lead to some of the most angsty of fan fiction.

If you recall, arguably the highpoint of Lage Raho Munnabhai was not the gently budding Vidya Balan-Sanjay Dutt romance, but the emotional scene where a contrite Munna approaches Circuit to apologise to him for losing his temper. Heart-wrenching drama follows when Munna reveals that the loyal Circuit, who has resorted to kidnapping chefs in the middle of the night to source hakka noodles, had also nursed Munna back to health, cradling him on his lap so that he does not miss his mother.

Then there's Rang De Basanti, which can claim to a more than a few of its own bhai-sexual moments -- not only do Aamir Khan and his friends hang out shirtless in rough fields that set off their own rough and tough physiques, they also pick up the gun for each other and sacrifice their lives. Not since Jai and Veeru, who -- riding their scooter, singing Yeh dosti... -- immortalised male friendship in Hindi cinema forever has Bollywood taken up male bonding with as much fervour.

These celluloid pals do not shy away from being emotionally intimate. It's a trend that's described as "bromance", that is, friendship between brothers, or two heterosexual males or as a "male-ationship". The metrosexuals typically bonded over hair gels and conduct their relationships with both their men pals and their women pals with equal new-age ease. On the

other hand, there's nothing easy about the retrosexual... angst, fury and raging testosterone defines not just all his actions, but also his relationships.

Like the

Straits Times

writer, this report raises but then denies the possibility that this structure of male friendship may have emerged from a western source -- i.e. Brokeback Mountain . These writers use Brokeback to stand in for a more explicitly homoerotic relationship in films and instead pull towards the homosocial. Of course, it may be no accident that Brokeback Mountain had an Asian director, Ang Lee.

Our heroes are straight heterosexual males and Brokeback Mountain is not an inspiration for anybody yet. "Male bonding in our movies has to be taken at face value. There cannot be any homoerotic tinge to it. No Bollywood hero will ever risk his reputation by acting as a homosexual. Actors are very concerned about their reputation. The life span of an actor is too short for such risks," points out Gadhvi.

Instead, the reporter shows the continuities between the Bhai-sexual friendship and more classic representations of male-bonding in Indian cinema.

In many ways, the Bhai-sexual has always existed in Hindi films. While Sholay is a show-piece for the early Bhai-sexual, Yarana, Dostana and Amar Akbar Anthony are examples of films where full-bloodied heterosexuals who wouldn't know a metrosexual from a train station, matching steps with one another, and thinking nothing of falling into hard embraces in moments of high drama.

However, social observers do point to one difference. Whether is it Sangam, Yaarana, Dostana, Qurbani and, of course, Sholay, sacrifice has been the ultimate test and enduring hallmark of the male friendship in Bollywood. According to anthropologist Shiv Vishwanathan: "In the films of the '70s and '80s, the friends were condemned to sacrifice. It was almost a duty relationship. You either had to die for each other or give up your love for your best friend."

Not so, the new age friendship. The 21st century celluloid buddies know how to have a good time. They simply hang out and talk to each other, like the Dil Chahta Hai gang. "You can live for the new age friendship, you don't have to die for it. The punitive aspect of friendship is gone from Hindi cinema. It is now celebratory and light-hearted without being over intense or sacrificial in nature," adds Vishwanathan.

"A lot of the films that we've loved and watched have had male friendship as the eternal theme. There's something universally appealing about male bonding, one can connect with it very strongly," says director Rohan Sippy, son of Ramesh Sippy who created Bollywood's most famous friends, Jai and Veeru. "Everybody wants buddies like Jai and Veeru. Their relationship is playful, emotional, loyal and they're ready to give up everything for each other," adds Rohan. Both his movies Bluffmaster and Taxi 9-2-11 explore the friendships between Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh and Nana Patekar and John Abraham, respectively. For Rohan, the archetype of the friendship is classic, but the setting is modern. "The friendship is as unconditional as it was in the movies of the '70s, but it is packaged for a modern audience," he says.

So, slash may represent an important half-way point as countries around the world edge up to the sexual explicitness they associate with Brokeback Mountain. Implicitly or explicitly, they may be drawn towards the rough and tumble style of male friendship which inspires slash but leave it up to their viewers to connect the dots for themselves.

There's a whole world out there waiting for you to slash, my friends, and thanks to the (legal and illegal) global circulation of content, sooner or later these movies will be accessible to you. We've already seen the influence of anime and manga on American slash fan. What will happen when Bollywood and Singaporean films enter the mix?

Given the international readership this blog attracts, I'd be curious if readers have spotted other slashy films in your countries.

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

When Fandom Goes Mainstream...

The most recent issue of Flow includes a range of different responses to the Flow conference, which I referenced here a few weeks ago. One of the articles would seem to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, because it refers to the panel on "Watching Television Off-Television" which I helped to organize, because it addresses the shifting nature of fan engagement with contemporary media, and because it was written by Kristina Busse (co-editor of the book, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which was previously discussed here). Previously I have contrasted the context in which I wrote Textual Poachers (a world where fan culture was largely marginalized and hidden from view) and the context described in Convergence Culture (a world where fan participations are increasingly central to the production decisions shaping the current media landscape).

Busse's question, though, is whether we are really talking about the same fan culture in the two instances. Here's part of what she has to say:

Throughout the panel "Watching Television Off-Television," the emphasis was on how such behavior has become mainstream: casual media users now can engage with a universe that exceeds the television show via cross-media, cross-platform texts, thus creating a synergistic "overflow" experience. Thus, Jason Mittell offered the examples of Alternate Reality Games and additional online-only available footage, Will Brooker presented various fully immersive web sites that invite viewers into the shows' diegetic spaces, and Henry Jenkins commented on the current ease of streaming or downloading television shows. The mainstreaming of fannish behaviors is thus seen as advantageous even if (or maybe even because?) the industry clearly attempts to create such behavioral patterns in order to sell their products and/or supplementary materials....My central question is: How alike or different is such a commercially constructed position when compared to the space media fans have traditionally eked out for themselves?

At least some fans have gained power and influence in the context of convergence culture. As I suggested here the other week, there are more fan friendly shows on the schedule. Shows which attract strong fan interests have a somewhat stronger chance of surviving. Producers interested in engaging with fans are generating more additional material which expands the fictional universe. We are seeing a thawing of the relations between media producers and fans as the studios are reassessing their attitudes towards even some of the more controversial aspects of fan culture. (We saw some signs of this détente during the Fan Culture panel at the Future of Entertainment conference.) And fannish modes of engagement with popular texts are spreading at a dramatic rate across more and more segments of the population.

And that's part of what concerns Busse:

What ultimately separates "fans" from casual TV viewers who engage fannishly? Or, more specifically, how can we define fans without invoking a category so expansive that it includes all media audiences or one so narrow that it excludes large numbers of individualist fans? How can we create a continuum that acknowledges the more intense emotional and actual engagements of many TV viewers today without erasing the strong community structures which have developed through media fandom?

What gets lost as some of these fannish values and reading practices spread across the entire viewing public? Is there still a value in understanding fandom as a distinct subculture with its own cultural hierarchies and aesthetic norms, its own forms of social engagement, its own traditions of interpretation, its own system of genres for cultural production, and perhaps its own gender politics? Is this just another case of a subculture fearing a loss of "authenticity" as it moves into the mainstream? Or read from another angle, what happens to fan studies when it moves from the study of subcultural practices to the study of dominant or at least widespread forms of media consumption?

To some degree, fandom has already started to lose some of its distinctiveness as a subcultural community. Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic expansion in the amount of fan fiction being produced, for example, with many of the newcomers entering the space not through social interactions with other fans but rather from reading fan fiction online. In some cases, old time fans would argue, some core norms of the fan community have been shredded and old taboos have been violated as these "unsocialized" fans have pulled fan fiction in their own directions. Communities which might have been separated geographically and culturally have been brought together online, resulting in a series of flame wars and feuds over disagreements about how texts should be interpreted or rewritten in a "fannish" way. As many of these reading practices spread further, reaching fans through commercial channels who have had no real direct contact with fandom as a subculture, further changes are likely to occur.

Busse links this shift in what it means to be a fan to what seems destined to become an important conceptual debate in the field of fan studies -- between a focus on fan cultures (which runs through my own work) and the emphasis on the emotional experience of the individual fan (best embodied by Cornel Sandvoss's Fans. Sandvoss seems to want us to return to the idea of the isolated, individual fan at the moment where most of the rest of the world is discovering the power of social networks, embracing an "architecture of participation," and recognizing the importance of the kinds of knowledge communities that have always been central to the concept of a fan culture. Yet, Sandvoss is correct to argue that a great many people who call themselves "fans" have no direct engagement with the larger social community which fandom represents and our research paradigm privileges the most visible and distinctive fans over the more "causal" fans who can be difficult to locate or document. For these people, being a fan becomes a form of media consumption but not necessarily a kind of social affiliation.

This leads Busse to suggest we make some basic distinctions in our discussions of fans and fan culture:

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

This last bit seems particularly important to me. From the start, media studies has been most interested, it seems to me, in the study of fans of particular texts. My early work on fans keeps getting described as a study of Trekkers (if I am lucky) and Trekkies (if I am not), even though the idea of nomadic reading was absolutely central to Textual Poachers account of fandom. Whatever Poachers was about, it wasn't about the fans of a single series (Star Trek or otherwise), though I do spend a chapter talking about the fans of Beauty and the Beast and tracing their shifting relationship to the series. Rather, I would have said that the book was much more about a kind of cultural logic which shapes how fans read across a range of different texts and even more importantly, about a specific social and cultural community -- mostly composed of women -- which actively translates the experience of watching television into various forms of cultural production.

My second book on fans, Science Fiction Audiences (written with John Tulloch), suggested that there may be multiple fan communities with their own interpretive and creative practices which grow up around the same series. There, I am focused on Star Trek but try to show a larger context for the differences in the way the series gets read in the technologically-focused community at MIT, in the female fanzine culture, and among the members of the Gaylaxians, a queer fan organization.

Yet, still, my emphasis was on fan communities -- the shared social contexts within which fan reading and creative practices occur -- and not on fans per se. Indeed, most of fan studies has ended up being a study of fandom -- as in the practices and creations of a specific subculture of fans -- rather than the study of fans -- what we assume to be a somewhat larger, socially fragmented, group of people who feel a strong emotional investment in television content but who may never translate that attachment into the kinds of creative and social activities which we study. Sometimes, we get around this distinction by describing the most socially active group as fans and the more causal and isolated individuals as followers but this simply creates a misalignment between academic terms and popular usage.

Busse's essay, then, is dealing in part with how academics conceptualize fandom but I also think she is expressing concern over the mainstreaming of fan culture and I understand her concern. There has been a pretty long history of media producers nuzzling up to fans in the early days of a franchise when they need help attracting an audience or staying on the air and then creating more distance when the show reaches a certain level of commercial success. Fandom as a subculture seems closely associated with the idea of niche success, where-as a mainstream success may depend on a more diffused notion of what it means to be a fan.

Busse writes:

Commercially encouraged modes of engagement that employ modes of fannish identity do not create instafans; moreover, the types of engagement often vary, not only with intensity but also with creativity. In the end, I feel it is important to realize that playing a computer game or looking around a website may not be wholly the same as participating in a fannish gift exchange or contributing to a shared fictional universe.

Yes and No. In some cases, these commercial materials represent a point of entry into other, more elaborate forms of fan activity -- they represent one gateway among many into fandom and it is up to the individual participant whether they are satisfied with playing in the shallow end of the pool or whether they want a deeper immersion into fan culture. In some cases, such as the creation of immersive shared worlds around fictional programs or the deployment of alternative reality games, there may be more creativity and social engagement going on here that Busse is estimating from the vantage point of someone who comes at fan culture from a different point of entry.

There are also important gender distinctions here in terms of what activities count once fandom goes mainstream -- with the commercial industry finding it easier to absorb some of the collector or geeky aspects of male fan culture more easily than it can deal with the issues of emotion and sexuality that run through female produced fan fiction. I am struck in my own work that gender was much more central to Textual Poachers, written at a moment when fans were marginal, than in Convergence Culture, written at a moment when fan culture is more central to the ways the media ecology operates. Does this reflect a lack of segregation of interests in these newer fan cultures or the continued marginalization of interests and tastes that have historically shaped women's participation in fan culture?

We need to continually refine our categories of analysis and this essay makes a great contribution by bringing some of these questions out into the open.

A Few Links of Interest to Aca/Fan Readers

For those of you interested in science fiction...check out the webcast version of my conversation with Joe Haldeman on the Craft of Science Fiction which I publicized here a few weeks ago. I felt like it turned out very well with lots of insights from Haldeman about science fiction's place in contemporary culture and some interesting discussion of the representation of war in his own writing. One of my favorite moments came when he discussed the influence of Ernest Hemmingway on his work -- not exactly a common topic of the SF convention circuit. And he also reads from his forthcoming novel -- a time travel story set at MIT.

For those of you interested in Harry Potter... check out Episode 10 of Spellcast, a podcast created by the fine folks at Fictionalley.org. Gwen does an interview with yours truly about Convergence Culture with a particular focus on fandom and Harry Potter.

A Bit of Metablogging...

I have noted that there has been a decrease of late in the number of comments being posted to this blog despite a continuing increase in the number of people reading it. I have struggled for some time to think about the best way to address this when I spoke to a friend in Live Journal community who said there was some perception that there was no point posting comments here because they were being filtered.

Let me explain what's going on: This blog receives more than a hundred spam messages a day, most of them things that I really don't want going up on my site -- promises to expand the size of the various private bits of our variously gendered anatomies, footage of young women taking full advantage of their local menagerie, or promises of imagines of certain prominent media personalities engaged with what they would call in the world of wrestling, foreign objects. So far, even spam filter I have tried either lets significant numbers of these messages slide through or cuts out many of the most substantive posts and in most cases, both occur. I have moved away from a policy where things go up instantly on the site and then I have to take down all of the porn spam to one where everything goes into hold until I can filter through it manually.

I actually try to do this several times a day though when I travel or am running a conference or... there are days when I may only get to this task once every 24 hours. The only messages in the end, other than the unspeakable spam, that actually get filtered are those which are asking me to fix some bug on the site -- like a bad link (and there I just fix the problem) or those which clearly want to speak with me personally (and I just respond to the person directly).

Otherwise, it is my belief that every message I get is going up on the site within 24 hours of when it is posted. I know that is slower than most Live Journal entries which offer instant gratification but don't seem to face the same volume of spam. (I am told that the amount of spam is connected to the number of links to your site so the spam problem is a product of how successful we've been at generating more productive kinds of conversations. Ironic, isn't it?)

If for some reason your message doesn't go up within 24 hours, please ping me at henry3@mit.edu since I very much want to get your messages out there. We have created a really astonishing community of readers around this blog and I'd like to have you guys talking with each other more often.

I plan to continue to run periodic posts like the Pimp My Show one last week which are intended to generate a lot of traffic from readers but honestly, I'd love to get your reactions -- positive or negative -- to all of the posts here. Almost every given post seems to be generating discussion on other blogs targeted at some subset of the readership and I am grateful for all the shout outs. But it would be great, given the mix of industry folks and fans, for example, who read this blog to have more exchanges among you here. I see these posts as conversation starters, not the last word on the subject. I am not always able to respond personally to every comment but I am trying to use them to guide the content I put up here on the blog and they are extremely helpful to me.

Pimp My Show!

The title says it all. We are already a few months into the Fall 2006 television season -- some of the new series have already come and gone, others have started to develop solid fan followings. I wanted to invite my loyal readers to share with us which new shows have really caught your fancy and why. (Of course, it's always fun to hear which new shows have bored or disgusted you, too.) It's been a while since we've had a really good conversation going with the readers of this blog so I am hoping you will rise to the occasion and share with us what you think have been the most interesting new shows this season. And of course, since I've got lots of international readers, don't presume we are just talking about American shows. I'd love to hear about amazing shows out there in other countries which are generating fan interest.

To get the ball rolling, I dug out some notes I sent to the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium this summer, before any of the shows had actually reached the air. I tried to predict which new shows would be "most fan friendly." It's interesting to see how well I did.

First, let's define "fan friendly." By fan friendly, I mean programs that attract strong, committed and highly visible followings as manifested in such activities as fan fiction writing, convention discussions, and online forums. Such programs may or may not enjoy ratings success by traditional standards. So, the CSI franchise consistently ranks in the top tier of the Nielsen ratings but doesn't generate anywhere near as much interest within the fan communities as a lower rated show such as Veronica Mars. Indeed, historically, fan favorite shows enjoyed a marginal position on the schedule, having strong niche appeal but struggling to stay on the air. That's why there have been so many letter writing campaigns through the years to keep their favorite shows on the air. It is only in recent years where cult shows like Lost also happen to be ratings leaders that the line between the two has started to blur.

Yet, even if fan favorites are not top ratings earners, they serve other vital interests for networks -- as I suggest in Convergence Culture. They are "must see" TV at a time when appointment viewing is in decline. They tend to rank higher in terms of paid downloads or digital video recording than many shows that do better in the ratings. And early research suggests that people watching their favorite shows are more engaged with the advertising as well as the content. They are also more willing to seek out further information about the series, resulting in more touch points and a greater receptiveness to convergence-based strategies. And for lower ranked and cable networks, a strong niche audience may make or break a program.

For my current purposes, I am really talking about two different but sometimes interrelated fan communities: one mostly female and focused around the production and consumption of fan fiction and the second, mixed gender and focused on online speculation and discussion. Keep in mind that there are other possible fan communities - sports fans, soap fans, music fans, etc. who will have their own criteria and interests.

So, what kinds of shows are most apt to attract strong fan followings?

Fan Friendly Programs:

1. Focus heavily on characters and character relationships. In some cases, fans will pull secondary characters from the margins of a series if they are not interested in the central protagonists. In particular, they are looking for the following:

--Strong emotional bonds - especially partnership, mentorship, and romance (probably in that order if you are talking about the female fan writing community)

-- Strong focus on the formation of alternative or utopian communities (again, this is especially true with the fanzine community).

-- Intelligent characters who use their brains to solve problems

-- Outside characters or characters with strong internal conflicts.

--Strong, competent, and active female characters

We can understand each of these traits as in some ways reflecting how fans see themselves and their social network. Fans see themselves as intelligent, strong, independent, socially committed, and nonconventional and they are drawn to characters who share those characteristics. They contrast themselves to what they call "mundane" viewers. These traits also reflect the genres that have emerged in fan fiction. Given the presence of a strong fan tradition about male partners becoming lovers, for example, there is a tendency for fans to be attracted towards shows that have strong partnership themes. So, a show like House meets all or most of these criteria including intelligent protagonists, a focus on friendship, romance, and mentorship, a strong sense of community, etc.

2. Focus on genre entertainment. While many fans watch realist or quality dramas (such as The West Wing) or sitcoms, these programs rarely cross over into their activities as fans. They do not generate the same level of discussion online or at cons nor do they inspire the same amount of fan fiction. Historically, organized fandom started in response to science fiction but with each new series that fits the other criteria but does not fall into the science fiction genre, the tastes of this community has broadened. So, at the moment, fan favorites can include crime dramas (Prison Break), mystery (Veronica Mars), adventure (Lost), science fiction (Battlestar: Galactica), historical drama (Rome), westerns (Deadwood), Buddy shows (Entourage), medical shows (House), etc.

3. Provides a strong sense of continuity. Even before there were fully elaborated story arcs on television, fans were inclined to read the episodes as if they formed some larger continuity. Series which rely heavily on continuity tap the collective memory of the fan community and allow them to show the kinds of mastery that comes from systematically watching a particular series. The management of continuity in turn becomes a favorite activity in online fan discussions.

4. Contain secrets or problems to be solved. Take this back to a distinction I make in my book, Convergence Culture between attractors (that is, shows that draw together like minded individuals) and activators (shows that give the fan community something to do - some roles and goals they can pursue together in relation to the content). The power of a show like Lost is that it is continually opening up new secrets, posing new mysteries, and creating new opportunities for fans to pool knowledge (see the much-discussed example of the map this season). This also accounts for how reality television programs such as Survivor, Big Brother, or American Idol find their way into the emerging fan cannon - because they offer either plenty of room for speculation between episodes or explicit opportunities for evaluation and participation.

5. Often have strong pedigrees. Shows by creators of previous fan shows (such as Abrams or Whedon) can more or less insure that their fan bases will turn out and give a first look at any new series they produced. Since part of the challenge is to produce a series that will be an attractor, this is a huge advantage going in. Despite the focus on characters within fan aesthetics, the same has not always proven to be true for actors. While there are fans for specific actors who will follow them from series to series, fans of a character may or may not be interested in something else from the same performer.

These are traits we can judge from advanced information about a series. There are other elements that are harder to read. It is not enough that a show operate within a well defined genre; it has to respect those genre conventions and satisfy the audience demands that draw them to the genre. It is not enough that characters be compelling on paper but there's an element of chemistry that emerges as these characters are embodied by specific performers that can make or break a series.

What happens when we apply these criteria to the series announced for this fall.

First, most shows do not stand a chance of reaching this kind of committed fan viewer because they do not meet most if not all of these criteria. By my count, there are 14 shows that have the potential to be fan friendly. A surprisingly high number are explicitly comparing themselves to Lost, hoping to become mass-cult successes.

What's striking in looking at the fall lineup is that networks have gotten the idea of continuity and serialization almost too well. Many of the series are designed to last a season or even half a season. They have plots or gimmicks that are going to be compelling in short bursts but will be hard to sustain over time. Some may go the route of 24, generating a new plot for each new season. Some will be canceled before each the first story arc runs its course. And some will make the mistake of avoiding resolution and thus drawing out a plotline well past its likely audience interest. If American television operated like British television, say, where you have a firm commitment for x number of episodes going in and then a series ends, whether or not it develops strong ratings, then we would know how to calibrate expectations about these series. But, many of them are artistic time bombs which may take off strong and then blow up in the networks' faces as they move into season 2. Of course in a world where the vast majority of shows never make a second season, this may not be a total disaster....

If I had to pick the most likely fan favorite of the lot, I would go with Heroes, followed by Vanished, Six Degrees, Jericho and Runaways. Studio 60 is the wild card in all of this - It will certainly be watched by a large number of fans but will it motivate fanish activities. (Either way, Studio 60 is probably the new show that is going to be most eagerly awaited in my household.)

Of these shows, at this point, Heroes and Studio 60 are the only ones that are still on my Tivo. How about you?