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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: Yadda yadda yadda high quality fan fiction --

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

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

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

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

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

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

K: How do you know? Brainwash victim.

M: ...

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

M: Look, a yak!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baseball, Doctor Who, and gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lowbrow culture

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

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

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

Fan expertise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm So Hot My Husband Can't Get Fire Insurance": Interview with Grant Hayter-Menzies (Part One)

While I was doing my dissertation on early sound comedy, I would book time as often as possible at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which has one of the best film archives in the country. Over the four years I lived in Madison, I was able to work my way through most of the comedies produced by Warner Brothers and RKO in the late 1920s and early 1930s. My goal had been to extend the discussion of early sound comedy beyond the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields to include a range of now largely forgotten performers who had made their way to Hollywood via Vaudeville and the Broadway Revues. One day, I happened to book a film called So Long Letty, knowing nothing about its lead performer, Charlotte Greenwood, other than that she had been a stage performer before appearing briefly on the screen. By the end of the first sequence, I knew I had made a real discovery. I can share some of what I saw through the magic of YouTube! Someone has kindly posted some segments from this film. So Long Letty and Charlotte Greenwood ended up being a key case study for my book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

Earlier this year, I got e-mail from Grant Hayter-Menzies, an art and music critic living in British Columbia, letting me know he was publishing a biography of Greenwood for MacFarland Press. Now that Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of the Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio, and Film has been published, I wanted to share with you some of his perspectives on this remarkable and now largely forgotten female performer. As the title suggests, she was a transmedia personality, probably best known in her own time for her stage performances, but someone who did memorable work on screen and on radio.

Here's a brief segment from my account of her career and personality:

Claude Gillingwater's balding head and sunken eyes make his Uncle Claude the very image of a fossilized patriarchal order. His slow, stiff movements and nasal speech contrast sharply with Greenwood's rapid-fire delivery and rambunctious gestures. With her ear-piercing voice and thrashing movements, her lack of respect for proper authority and her steady stream of slang and wisecracks, Letty is a dreadful negation of everything he regards to be proper and ladylike: 'Take my advice and don't become too intimate with that terrible woman,' he warns his nephew. What is different about So Long Letty is the surprising way in which the film reverses the normal assignment of gender roles in this scenario. We are offered here a sequence in which a spontainous woman liberates two young women from the control of male authority and invites them to pursue their own pleasure. Letty's engaging performance encourages spectators to judge and ridicule the stiff old man through the eyes of three lively young women in a reversal of the tripartite structure -- male jester, female object, male audience -- that Freud saw as characteristic of the smut joke. The woman, by becoming the clown and casting the patriarch in the traditional killjoy role, forces the anarchistic scenario to speak for female resistance, offering women utopian possibilities most other comedian comedies reserve for men only....

Letty spends her time at the Ardmore Hotel, earning free beauty treatments by drumming up new customers for the salon. What makes Letty "so hot that my husband can't get fire insurance," as she brags at one point, is her willingness to put her own bodily pleasure (and her economic self-sufficiency) over her wifely duties; she abandons her home to "rack and ruin" while she indulges her desires for physical pampering...Ironically those traits that make Letty such a frustration for her husband and a threat to his uncle are precisely those qualities that make her such a delight to the audience -- Greenwood's directness and vitality, her high energy style, her flamboyant gestures and loud voice, her colorful use of language, and especially her unorthodox physicality. Greenwood was a woman who relished her mastery over her own body, frequently challenging local women (and sometimes, men) to footraces as part of the publicity for her vaudeville tours and generally offering women a model for a more fit and limber style of femininity....Alexander Woollcott described Greenwood's performance style in a 1919 review of Linger Longer Letty, one of a series of Letty plays she performed on Broadway and n tour throughout the 1920s: "The lanky Charlotte sings and romps and bays at the moon. She steps over high walls and walks on all fours and strokes the ceiling." A publicity flier for one of her stage appearances features a cartoon of Greenwood, her face dominated by enormous eyes and mouth, and her long arms, crossed, dangling limply in front of her thin body. Greenwood herself often bragged that she was 'the only woman in the world could kick a giraffe in the eye.' Such representations capture both the illusion of gracelessness and the display of virtuosity that made her such a fascinating performer.

As Letty, Greenwood exploits many of these same qualities. In one scene, Letty, juggling a huge pile of packages that block her vision, steps effortlessly over a white picket fence, a movement underscored by exaggerated creaking sounds and by her bungling husband's inability to cross this same fence without tripping. Letty slides down the hallway of the Ardmore hotel, using her outstretched leg to spin her around when she comes to the corner. She paces about her house, crossing the room in only a few strides, and when she dances at the party, her arms and legs seem to fly off in all directions. She stands, bowlegged, her knees bent slightly and her arms dangling limp or flung broadly to focus attention on their length. Her gestures and movements are too large-scale to be comfortably contained within the domestic spaces where the men wish her to remain, suggesting a high-spiritedness and spontanaety that will resist all restraint (self-imposed or otherwise). Greenwood's enthusiastic acceptance of her own odd appearance transforms what could be a pathetic or threatening figure into a celebration of spontaneity and self-confidence. Greenwood is most attractive and engaging in those sequences where she strays the furthest from the norms of traditional feminine behavior and causes the broadest disruption of the patriarchal order (her humiliation of Uncle Claude in the opening scene, her 'clowning' in the party sequence."

As I have learned more about her memorable performances in The Gangs All Here and Oklahoma, I've discovered that she maintains some of this same vigor and physicality well into her mature years, offering not just a limber image of femininity but also an alternative image of maturity. Check out this remarkable sequence from The Gangs All Here where an older Greenwood teaches a young man a thing or two about how to do the jitterbug.

In this interview, Grant Hayter-Menzies tells us more about his efforts to focus more attention on a performer who is increasingly being written out of the history of American show business. Enjoy!

Your introduction begins with Charlotte Greenwood's performance as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma for good reason since I've found that if she is recalled at all today, it is for her work in that film. Why do you think this has become her most memorable screen appearance? What place did this film have in the context of her career as a whole?

As I point out in my book, the role of Aunt Eller not only came to Charlotte Greenwood with perfect timing--after a career of fifty years, when she had had as much experience of living, and then some, as the character she played--but also for two other reasons. The role called on everything Charlotte did well: comedy, drama, singing, dancing, which by that point in her career had achieved the ultimate in comic timing, emotional depth, and sheer characterful panache. Charlotte also had by that time many role models in her memories to call on as inspiration: the most powerful of them was her mother, Annabelle Higgins Greenwood, a hard-working woman who heroically brought up this girl abandoned by her father in infancy, a child racked by sicknesses and challenged by constantly interrupted schooling, who bequeathed to Charlotte not just her imposing physical looks but her ramrod strength of character. Charlotte also emulated friends like actress Jobyna Howland, who was tall, not conventionally pretty, often of battering ram aspect, but always warm, wise and witty.

These are all reasons why Charlotte Greenwood is so fondly remembered as Aunt Eller because these are all details of the portrait Charlotte paints of her. Perhaps, though, the most important reason Charlotte is remembered for this role is her compelling skills as an actor. If you can watch this film and not sense Charlotte Greenwood's presence even in scenes that don't include her, you aren't paying attention.

Most people don't realize that Greenwood enjoyed an extended and high profile career on stage, film, and radio, before appearing in Oklahoma. What can we learn about the interconnectedness of the American entertainment world in the early 20th century by studying the trajectory of her career?

I think the greatest lesson of Charlotte's career is that a girl who had had only a few music or dance lessons, and no contact with the theatre outside the magazine articles she read, could by dint of sheer willpower and consuming love for the stage become a recognized star only a few years after her first appearance as a fifteen year old chorus girl in 1905.

I point out in my book that Charlotte was very much an accidental comedian. She had had no intention of becoming a funny girl--she wanted to be an opera singer, a great tragedienne, a balladeer. When comedy kept knocking (often knocking her over in the process), she finally gave in to it--much as did Eddie Cantor or Sophie Tucker, both of whom had originally wanted to have serious careers. As Charlotte wrote, "The greatest lesson to be learned as an actor is that of subjugation of self," and she did that, to great acclaim as a comedy specialist. But all the while she was studying opera, taking acting lessons, reading great literature, developing discerning taste in art, and never giving up on her dream of becoming a serious dramatic artist (and lauded as such by critics who, as I write, normally did not waste ink on the less than worthy--Alexander Woollcott, James Agate, Hannen Swaffer, Amy Leslie, Claudia Cassidy).

Where radio is concerned Charlotte was a perfect fit, because if any radio star could act with her voice alone, it was she. She had studied serious vocal literature, but her singing voice was always as big, muscular and comic as her body, lacking all subtlety. Charlotte's spoken voice, however, was full of shades of many colors. Once you heard her on The Charlotte Greenwood Show, you never forgot it, not least because it was, in time of war, a voice full of comfort and warmth and wisdom that rolled like a combination of mink and steel from the radio speaker. I think what made Charlotte so open to all the various entertainment media developed in the twentieth century was her stage training, which prepared you for whatever might be asked of you, under any circumstances. Those people of the theatre never knew what was waiting for them when the curtain parted, and like adepts of judo they knew how to go with the flow of energy, tacking their sails to whatever strength or direction public feeling happened to be blowing in, and harnessing it to their own benefit.

Charlotte's first and last great love, however, was the theatre. She had worshipped in the holiest of the holies--the Victoria, the New Amsterdam, the Nixon, the Empire, the El Capitan, Drury Lane--and it just didn't get better than that on earth, as far as she was concerned. It is the obsession of her memoirs, far above anything else she did in any other medium.

Central to the writing of this book was your discovery of an largely completed draft of an autobiography as well as other assorted correspondence that Greenwood had written through the years. Can you tell us how you came into contact with these materials and how they influenced your decision to write this book?

Just a few months before she died, in late 1977, Charlotte gave playwright William Luce a box containing most of her memoir materials: several manuscript drafts, typed and handwritten, hundreds of handwritten notes and letters, memorabilia and photos, which she hoped he could fashion into a stage work. Despite all her best efforts, up till the early 1950's this veteran of half a century's worth of entertainment experience and star of both stage and screen could not get any publisher interested in her life story. Bill Luce had known Charlotte and her husband, the songwriter Martin Broones, for almost twenty five years at that point--he had started out writing lyrics for Martin's songs written for use by the Christian Science Church, and ended up the son they'd never had. Bill also inherited many things from Charlotte's Beverly Hlls house--furniture, books, music, silver, crystal, you name it.

I knew Bill and his partner, the artist Ray Lewis, since I was in my teens; they had, in fact, adopted me in all but name, much as Charlotte and Martin had adopted Bill. I therefore grew up among Charlotte's furniture and personal items, and had had ample opportunity to look through the box of memoir materials. These papers were in such a mess that, several years ago, I decided they needed organizing. As I did so, I realized that while the materials were not in such form as would make them publishable without heavy editing, they would make first class source materials for a long-overdue biography of Charlotte. Voila, I had found a dream project for my first biography.

I have pointed out that I grew up among Charlotte's things, which is true, but I also learned that I was a writer living and traveling with Bill Luce, stage biographer par excellence. It was his gift (aided and abetted by Julie Harris, Zoe Caldwell, Christopher Plummer and others) to breathe life into Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Lillian Hellman and John Barrymore that gave me the inspiration and model for how to do so as an author. As a friend of long years standing of Charlotte's and her husband's, Bill was also an invaluable source of information about the real Charlotte and Martin--outside the articles or books or even Charlotte's own memoirs--how they really lived at home. Bill can attest that the couple's fame as one of the happiest married pairs in Hollywood was well earned.

Our correspondence suggests that you have become a collector of Greenwood related materials. What can you tell us about your collection? How were you able to get your hands on some of these materials?

The Greenwoodiana, as I call it, that I brought with me to my new home in Canada came to me through Bill Luce. He'd moved to a smaller house from the large oceanfront place he had on the Oregon coast, and did not want to sell these things outside the family. So he told me to bring a moving van down to his place, and I returned with it to Portland, where I was then living, with a whole Charlotte Greenwood Museum of things--everything from one of her velvet and gilt boudoir chairs to several of her Peking carpets, her sealskin opera cape, pieces of costumes from her film and stage work, jewelry, silver, glass, mirrors.... the list goes on and on. I really should write it all down.

So Long Letty, on both stage and screen, became closely associated with Greenwood, and she would appear in a number of stage plays with Letty in the title. What was the connection between these shows? Does she play the same or a similar character across them? What aspects of her personality did she bring to the part of Letty?

Charlotte's Letty character got its start with a supporting role in the 1914 musical show, Pretty Mrs. Smith. Fritzi Scheff was the star, but Charlotte, who played a gangly, man-chasing young woman named Letitia Proudfoot, stole the show. Audiences couldn't wait till she was on stage, and she got the most applause. This inspired Charlotte's producer, Oliver Morosco, to adapt plays already written to fit the character, which was always named Letty. People began to confuse Charlotte with this character, to the point of calling out to her as "Letty!" on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Paris.

The interesting thing about Letty is that Charlotte was not like the character at all. As she told a reporter in 1922, wouldn't it be awful if she really was like Letty, barging into the parlor and slapping a perfect stranger on the shoulder in hearty greeting? Letty was a barnstorming spinster, climbing over furniture to pursue some reluctant man, always ready with a one-liner (funny or not) and yacking a mile a minute. Charlotte was a quiet, refined, basically shy person off stage. As actor George Gaynes told me, when I interviewed him about working with Charlotte in Cole Porter's musical Out of This World in 1951, it was hard to believe that such an elegant lady could bring the house down with those mile-high kicks of hers--those kicks that everyone associates with Charlotte, which with her splits, Camel Walk and other vaudeville moves she discovered through accidents early in her career and kept because they made her audiences so happy.

The Mud-Wrestling Media Maven from MIT and Other Stories

This has been a big few weeks for me and the Comparative Media Studies Program -- with lots of media attention. The title of this post comes from the headline of an article, written by Jeffrey R. Young, for Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's how the story starts:

My Life: The Transmedia Version

If this profile of Henry Jenkins III were a YouTube video, it would begin with footage of the influential scholar mud-wrestling his wife at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If it were a podcast, the introduction would note that Jenkins has been called the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. And if this were an interactive graphic, it would trace the millions of dollars in research grants he has won from foundations, companies, and the government of Singapore.

Any of those media would be a fitting way to tell the story of a scholar who is at the forefront of exploring how digital technologies are reshaping popular culture. But just as Jenkins still reveres words on paper (and online), so too does much of his story lend itself to good old ink on paper.

In fact, the Chronicle's online edition uses a variety of digital media to tell my story -- including digging up some YouTube footage of my wife and I wrestling as part of a big party our dorm throws every year, not to mention a podcast interview and an interactive chart showing the range of research the Comparative Media Studies program is doing and where our funds come from.

Young spent an extraordinary amount of time preparing this story. We started doing interviews together back in January. He came to campus and spent several days following me around; he interviewed students, colleagues, and a range of others who have touched my life; he flew out to San Francisco to see me participate in a panel discussion at the YPulse conference with danah boyd. (You can listen to the podcast version of a similar conversation I did with danah at South by Southwest last year.)

Actually, it now looks like YPulse has just put up a podcast of the talk the article describes if anyone is interested.

In the end, I personally think the hard work paid off. I was very flattered -- if a bit unnerved at times -- to have a reporter dig this deeply into my life and work. I winced a few times at some of the descriptive details -- my wife is still giving me a hard time about a stain on my shirt which he spotted at a particular speaking gig and I am not sure I accept the idea that my body is "pear-shaped." I am sure that I wouldn't hold up to the withering critique of how academics dress offered by Project Runway's Tim Gun elsewhere in this issue. :-) But he really does capture both the serious and playful sides of my personality. I'm not sure what to make of the split personality of a cover which wants to proclaim me the new Marshall McLuhan and an inside headline which makes me sound more like the new John Nash (A Brilliant Mind).

To Serve Them All My Days...

Several readers have asked for more details on my experiences as a housemaster at a MIT dorm. The article has a fair amount to say about this aspect of my life:

For all his scholarship, Jenkins has always had a playful side. Just ask his brood at MIT's Senior House, known as a home for those who might be considered misfits elsewhere. "At Senior House, it isn't an insult to be called 'weird' -- it's a compliment!" says a welcome message on the dorm's Web site. "Residents are comfortable in their skins. We are straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or poly. ... Tolerance is the one virtue we value even more than individuality."

This is where Henry Jenkins lives -- and he's the one who wrote that message. He and his wife, Cynthia, have served as housemasters here for more than 12 years, and they seem well suited to lead this unusual community.

"Henry is very good at keeping an eye on the pulse of Senior House and stopping things that are particularly dangerous before they get out of hand without crushing all creativity and spirit in the house," says Laura Boylan, a senior in his program. Jenkins has intervened to stop residents from hijacking a construction crane and from rewiring the dorm's electronic locks, she says (MIT students are known for their elaborate pranks), but he is "hands-off about things that are going to end up fine."

The dorm is best known for its springtime Steer Roast party. It starts with a flaming roll of toilet paper zipping down a wire from the roof, igniting fuel-soaked kindling in a pit below. Enormous slabs of meat cook over that flame all night, while rock bands play and students and alumni frolic. Some wear elaborate costumes, or dress only in body paint.

Jenkins is protective of Steer Roast, a 40-plus-year-old tradition. He has fended off administrators who want it toned down, and refused to let an Academic Life reporter or photographer attend, citing a "policy" of not allowing news coverage. But it's easy to piece together details of the gathering from student blogs, photos posted on Flickr and other photo-sharing Web sites, and videos on YouTube.

One of the main attractions of the two-day festival is mud-wrestling. A homemade ring is set up in the dorm's courtyard, under the shadow of a giant black banner that reads: "Sport Death: Only Life Can Kill You." Announcers provide amplified color commentary, as pair after pair of wrestlers face off. Every year one of the first matches is Henry Jenkins vs. Cynthia Jenkins.

Jenkins once published a scholarly paper arguing that professional wrestling was a form of melodrama aimed at men, allowing "a powerful release of repressed male emotion." He demonstrated a fan's knowledge of the subculture's colorful characters, analyzing the moves and costumes of the Mountie, the Million Dollar Man, and the late "Ravishing" Rick Rude, among others.

Jenkins doesn't wear a cape or costume when he appears at Steer Roast, but last year he scripted his match with the help of one of his students, Sam Ford.

"The game plan we came up with," Ford says in an interview, was to have Jenkins fake a knee injury early in the match. "Then, when Cynthia turned her back, Henry got up on his knees and held his finger up and said 'Shh,'" signaling to the crowd that he was unharmed, while a concerned Cynthia turned to look for help. "One of the other grad students comes out of the crowd and jumps up and pushes Cynthia's shoulder," and she trips over Henry, who pins her to the mat.

"It was the first win of his mud-wrestling career," Ford says proudly....

Not long ago, I visited the Jenkinses at home -- their spacious apartment is at one end of Senior House.

The living room is decorated in grad-student chic, with beat-up couches and pop-culture artifacts. Jenkins points out a replica of a crescent-shaped Klingon blade weapon, a bat'leth, that was featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And there are vast shelves of books, videos, 'zines, CD's, and comic books. "This space definitely gives you the sense of the full range of media that we regularly consume here," he says.

The room is also the emotional heart of Comparative Media Studies. Nearly every Thursday, students in the program are invited over after a colloquium by a visiting speaker in the early evening. Over catered dinners, they often continue conversations well into the night.

Jenkins says he believes in integrating his personal and professional lives: "I think it allows you on some level to give more to both, instead of less to both." And he likes to stay in motion, according to a post on his blog headlined: "How to Become a Compulsive Workaholic With No Life ... Or the Secrets Behind My Success."

Cynthia Jenkins occasionally works part time grading papers at MIT. These days she is learning glass blowing. But she is in many ways a partner in her husband's work. She edits most of his writing, and they have co-written articles about fan cultures. It's hard to say which one of them is the bigger fan. When the latest Harry Potter book came out this summer, the Jenkinses hit the campus bookstore at midnight to pick up their preordered copies. They stayed up all night reading, by flashlight, on a hammock in the dorm courtyard.

We've been pushing the university for sometime to get us some new furniture. You can bet that I sent the dean's office a note saying that even the Chronicle of Higher Education was reporting on the ratty condition of my couches. :-)

In case you are wondering, our decision to become housemasters was partially inspired by seeing a PBS series years ago, To Serve Them All My Days, about the life of a British boarding school don. We were both taken by the ways the series depicted the integration of his life as a teacher inside the classroom and in the dorm. I have to say that living in Senior House has been everything I have hoped for and more. We've been living here for a dozen plus years and I can imagine myself continuing for much much longer. Living with students has not only made me a better teacher but also a better scholar, since the dorm is a lab where I can observe youth interacting with media of all kinds just by walking down the hallway.

I faced an interesting ethical challenge while doing the photo shoot for this article. I was asked if they could take my picture holding the Klingon battle sword which I keep leaning against my fireplace. (This picture appears only in the print edition.) I wondered whether I could pose for such an image and avoid the stereotypes and cliches about fans which I have critiqued in my work. I wasn't worried about making myself look foolish but I didn't want to do any damage to the fan community. In the end, I decided that the best way to handle this situation was to be as dignified as possible and act as if there was nothing unusual about being photographed holding a replica of a television show prop. My big fear, now, though, is that hardcore Klingon fans will tell me that I am holding the weapon all wrong. While I was once a card carrying Klingon in a role play game, I have never really been a student of Klingon culture. :-)

The article focuses heavily on the work I have been doing with media companies, both as an individual and through the Convergence Culture Consortium. If you'd like to know more about the later, you might want to read some recent posts which review key things and topics over the past year. You can start reading with this entry.

Meanwhile... Games and More Games

On other fronts, I was one of several games researchers asked by Gamasutra to share our thoughts about whether there is life after World of Warcraft. More specifically, they wanted us to speculate on when and why players abandon one virtual world and move to another. To be honest, I am one of the few games scholars I know who is not hooked on WOW. So I ended up relying much more on my experience of fan culture than on my games research. Here's part of what I had to say:

I know less about what happens when multiplayer games start to implode than I know about the migrations of television fans, which is a phenomenon that I've had a chance to observe over more than 20 years. In both cases, the holding power has to do with at least two variables: the degree to which individual members value what the franchise is giving them (including both content and corporate/community relations) and the degree to which the members feel attached to the social network which grows up around the franchise.

Typically, a bad decision or decisions by the company compromises, at some point, in the cycle the interests of the community, creating growing dis-satisfaction within the community. Certain key thought leaders in the community move elsewhere, often issuing some final message to the group, which feeds the discontent. Initially, the group may move outward in several different directions, testing new franchises to see if they offer either new pleasures or more of what attracted them to the earlier franchise.

In a networked culture, the word gets out where they went and what they thought and then there's a larger migration which can, under the right conditions, turn into a stampede. I suspect when this happens to WoW that people will be searching in several directions: some following the genre, looking for other worlds with similar elements; others will follow the game play mechanics, looking for games which either offer features they like about WOW or which fix the things that bugged them about the game; and others will follow the community, wanting to move to where-ever their friends relocate.

This whole process unfolds over several months or longer as the pieces sort themselves out. The key point here is that it is never social to the degree that other elements of the experience don't matter at all but the choice between equally satisfying experiences will frequently rest on the decisions made by the social network as a whole.

The article also features responses from some better informed sources -- Edward Castranova, Aaron Delwiche, Jeff McNeil, and Florence Chee. Check it out.

While we are on the subject of games, there was a nice piece on CNN's website focused on one of the games we produced through the GAMBIT lab this summer. The game in question, AudiOdyssey, was designed to facilitate play between sighted and visually impaired players. Here's some of what CNN had to say about the game:

Forget shoot-em-up addicts -- video games are reaching out to the rest of us.

The greatest symbol of this is the Wii console from Nintendo. Its innovative wireless control -- the Wiimote -- has even non-gamers excited as they swing it through the air to control, say, a tennis racket on the screen.

art.wii.afp.jpg

Wii's Wiimote may play a pivotal role in bringing the visually impaired into the electronic gaming fold.

But not quite everyone has been reached. One group is still largely ignored by video game makers: the blind.

With that in mind, a team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Massachusetts set out this summer to make a music-based video game that's designed for mainstream players and also accessible to the blind.

Appropriately, perhaps, they incorporated the Wiimote into the game-play, though it's optional.

The resulting DJ game, designed for the PC, is called AudiOdyssey. In it, players try to lay down different tracks in a song by swinging and waving the Wiimote in time with the beats. Or they can just use keyboard controls.

The game reminded this writer of my lack of any rhythm whatsoever. I used the keyboard version, where you're instructed to follow the beat by hitting an arrow key. Miss a beat and you get an ugly sound. Things sounded pretty ugly. But I did start to get a little better after 15 minutes and was awarded occasionally by crowd cheers. It's a fun game. And I got a kick out of it.

So did 41-year-old Alicia Verlager. For her, though, the fun is a bit more significant. She's visually impaired.

"Play is one of the ways in which people build relationships," she notes. "It's fun to take on the challenge of a game and take turns encouraging and laughing at each other's sillier mistakes. That's the experience I am really craving in a game -- the social aspects."

AudiOdyssey is presently single-player only, and there's no scoring system. But a multiplayer online version will be released in a few months. Intriguingly, players in this version won't necessarily know whether their opponent is blind -- and it won't make a difference in the game.

If you would like to know more about this project, check out the GAMBIT home page where they are starting to post some of the games developed by a team of some 50 Singaporean and MIT students working together this summer. I am going to be sharing the back story behind these titles as the semester runs along but you can download and play some of the titles whenever you want.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fanification, Complexification, and Categorization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO WILL RUN ON MONDAY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Essex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Back: The Re:Constructions Project

In the fall of 2001, my graduate media theory seminar at MIT met every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. Classes had started a week before 9/11. The opening discussion focused on Thomas McLaughlin's concept of vernacular theory. I had emphasized that all kinds of groups for all kinds of reasons both produce and consume media theory, although they do so with different languages and with different institutional norms. From here, we had discussed the ways academic theorists might more fully engage with other producers and consumers of theory and how this would require a shift in rhetoric. We talked a lot about the concept of applied humanism, which is one of the cornerstones of the comparative media studies approach--the idea that insights from the humanities and social sciences need to be applied and tested at actual sites of media change. MIT has applied physics, applied math. It was time it had applied humanism. We challenged our students to do projects that had real-world impact and that confronted pragmatic challenges. I had to go almost immediately from hearing the news of the tragedy on 9/11 to conducting a seminar. As I walked toward the classroom, I passed graduate students huddled around radios or reading information off the Internet, many of them openly weeping. Afterward, everyone focused on New York City, but at that moment Boston was profoundly affected because the airplanes that had crashed into the towers had departed from Boston's Logan Airport. No one felt like class, yet nobody wanted to be alone. Since I live on campus, I phoned my wife to tell her I was bringing the class home to watch news reports.

Most of the students came with me. Some made calls on their cell phones to friends and family members; others channel zapped before focusing on BBC America, which MIT Cable had just added a few days before; and some used wireless laptops to glean information from the Web.

The students gathered in my living room hardly knew each other. Most had arrived on campus a week or so before. This was the most heavily international cohort we had attracted since MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program had been launched three years earlier. The students were acutely aware of the tragedy's international dimensions and frustrated by how intensely nationalistic much of the coverage was.

Over the next several days, e-mails flew fast and furious on the departmental discussion list. When the class gathered again on Thursday, the students demanded to know what role theory might play now and wondered whether there was any way they as students at the beginning of their professional training could make a difference. We talked a lot about ways the program might respond and about some of the statements issued by public intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. Many students found these statements unsatisfactory in their abstract tone and their "told you so" attitude. A meaningful theoretical response needed to be humane, to acknowledge the author's own emotional experiences, and to respect the reality of several thousand deaths. Political analysis might come later, although the Bush administration was already cutting short the mourning process and preparing us for military action.

We called a "town meeting" of all our faculty and students. Several ideas surfaced, the most compelling being to produce a Web site that would provide resources for people who wanted to lead discussions about the media coverage. Although the Web project, operating under the title re:constructions, would involve faculty, students, and staff, it was voluntary, outside formal class requirements.

Many of us--faculty and students--gathered the following day in an MIT classroom, where we outlined topics we wanted to cover and divided up the tasks. All the blackboards were covered with chalk and post-its by the end of the discussion. William Uricchio, then CMS's associate director (now my Co-Director), recalls:

What impressed me about the experience was that fellow faculty and students were bound together in a shared project far different than the classroom. In the classroom, we approach one another from different sides, with different agendas. In the case of re:constructions, we worked side by side, exchanging insight and expertise without ever sliding into the collaborative opposition that typifies the classroom. That this happened so early in the semester made for an excellent set of working relations for the rest of the year.

Some of the students formed teams to videotape events on campus and elsewhere, the more experienced students teaching novices how to use the equipment. Other students began scanning media coverage in their home countries or reaching out to friends and family members around the world. Our goal was to provide summaries and links to media coverage in as many countries as possible. We contacted additional faculty members and urged them to write short essays modeled after Raymond Williams's Keywords to explain the historical contexts behind some of the language being used to describe what had happened. Others read essays about news and propaganda, developing questions teachers could use to generate discussions. Students circulated drafts of their essays electronically, giving each other advice and feedback.

The work went on all weekend, with students coming in and out of our offices at all hours, day and night. One student, Philip Tan, did all the coding for the site himself, working eighteen-hour shifts, pasting in text as quickly as the other team members generated it. Alex Chisholm, a member of our staff, proofed everything as it passed across the mailing list. Sometimes, students and faculty would huddle for quick discussions about core theoretical concepts. Sometimes, faculty sent e-mails with advice. A few faculty expressed reservations, concerned that a programmatic response might be inappropriate or ill timed. Each of these exchanges produced animated conversation about what we were doing and why.

Often, we had to make quick decisions about how to deal with evolving controversies. For example, many different people sent us reports that CNN had recycled footage from the earlier Gulf War to give the impression that Palestinians were celebrating the attacks. We also received a detailed rebuttal of these charges allegedly issued by CNN insisting that the Palestinians were chanting Bin Laden's name and that he had not been a figure in the previous conflict. We were left uncertain which was more likely--that conspiracy theories with little foundation might quickly circulate on the Internet or that a major news organization might lie about its own production processes in order to manufacture consent. All of this gave us a greater appreciation of the decisions practicing journalists made as they generated the news coverage our site was critiquing.

As we read earlier attempts to theorize catastrophe, some rang remarkably hollow, preoccupied as they were with describing and critiquing discursive practices that they lost sight of the human costs. In other cases, theory proved enormously comforting, much as my colleagues in the arts and humanities took comfort in poetry or music.

Some of the most interesting discussions centered on the design of the site itself. Candis Callison, a second-year student, was the primary designer. She has written this description of her process:

Quite honestly, my original instinct . . . was to stay away from images entirely, fearing their power to repel, and mesmerize. But after receiving an e-mail from one of my classmates requesting the use of photos, I realized I was probably alone and quite likely misguided. Against my own desires, I plunged into the photo archives of Time, CNN, and others. This was a task I dreaded. The devastating impact of watching these acts of terror live on television or on video is one thing. Seeing these acts suspended through the lens of a still camera is another. Still photography often provides more detail, and more time for the enormity of the recorded events to sink in and stay awhile. I chose photos representative of what I had seen most often on television, thinking rightly or wrongly that if people had to see these photos, they might as well see those they most associated with September 11. From these photos, I created the first iteration of a collage for the front page of our Web site. I purposely blurred them and removed the color, trying somehow to dim the impact of the horror they represent. The response from our CMS team was overwhelmingly against this collage. Why? In a nutshell: too stark, too shocking, and not the right tone. What we were going for was reflection, compassion, and something different than what was available anywhere else. . . . I skimmed through images shot by my fellow classmates of MIT's Killian Court memorial gathering, the dedication of MIT's Reflecting Wall, and other gathering areas within MIT. What I found were compelling images of grief, compassion, and gestures that grasp at that understanding and hope in humanity we all so desperately desire.

We preserved both collages on the site to provoke discussions about the ethical implications of digital design.

By Monday morning, the site, http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions, had launched with more than one hundred essays, including summaries of media coverage in some twenty countries or regions. Many of the students and some of the faculty found they were unable to complete projects they had started, but the efforts had drawn the community together, and the process of producing the site had enormous educational payoffs for everyone involved. Our introduction offered this rationale:

As millions of people around the world sit glued to their television sets, even as we write, we feel it is important to encourage critical analysis of the words, images, and stories which fill the media--as well as the ones we are not hearing or seeing. We hope this site will be used to help inform discussions in schools, places of worship, union halls, civic gatherings, and homes as people struggle to make sense of what is happening and to sort through their competing emotions about these events. We are not offering answers here so much as encouraging people to ask hard questions before they rush to judgment and action. We do not present these essays as the work of experts--although in some cases we have included pieces from important commentators, past and present. Most of us are still learning how to think critically and theoretically about the media ourselves. All of us are too torn apart by these events to have any certainty about the adequacy of our words and our knowledge to respond to such a situation. But we want to share what we know and what we think and what we feel. We want to see if these ideas might be useful in helping someone else begin a similar process of exploration and examination.

The MIT home page saluted our efforts, remodeling its logo to reflect elements from Callison's design. Within two days, word of the site had spread outward to major mailing lists for educators in the United States and elsewhere and Yahoo had chosen re:constructions as its site of the day. We continue to receive regular mail from teachers using the site.

Scholars and students elsewhere responded to the site's provocation to "let's think this through together" and contributed their own essays. One of the most compelling responses was a thesis project produced by a Massachusetts College of Art master's student, Kate Brigham, who developed a digital tool that allowed users to redesign the screens from a television newscast, the front page of a newspaper, and the layout of a news-magazine story on the events, enabling students to explore the ideological consequences of the different graphic choices that the news media had made.

Re:constructions has been referenced again and again across a range of classes and research activities. We put our ideals to a test and proved to ourselves that it was possible, at least for short bursts of time, to move theory out of the academy and into a larger public dialogue.

This article was written in 2003 and appeared in a 2004 issue of Cinema Journalfocused on academic responses to 9/11. We still receive a limited number of requests to reproduce some of the essays written during this intense period of activity. I am posting it here today so that we will never forget -- not only what happened on 9/11 but the many different ways we, as a society, could have processed and reacted to these events.

How We Make Media Theory at MIT...

In getting ready to teach our graduate prosem on Media Theory and Methods, I have been rereading some passages from Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. This term, I am trying something different with the class, beginning with an extended examination of the role of theory and media production in the history of MIT as a way of helping our entering CMS students think about the place of our program within this institutional history. Turner's book is an ideal introduction to this topic in part because he has so much to say specifically about MIT but also because he speaks to the roles of both formal institutions and informal networks in shaping the production and dispersion of media theory. Turner's book is a study of the ways what he calls "network forums" have shaped our current interpretation of digital technologies. In particular, he is interested in how Stewart Brand, his primary subject, "began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks." Turner continues, "

Drawing on the systems rhetoric of cybernetics and on models of entrepreneurship borrowed from both the research and the counter-cultural worlds, Brand established a series of meetings, publications, and digital networks within which members of multiple communities could meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community. These forums in turn generated new social networks, new cultural categories, and new turns of phrase."

Turner is interested in documenting the various "contact zones" where different subcultures of researchers were brought together and the kinds of "border languages" that were created to enable their ideas to flow from one discipline to another. Turner focuses less on Brand as a person than on the various social networks within which he participated -- The Whole Earth Catalog, the Well, and Wired, chief among them.

The book opens with some insightful analysis of what happened when MIT Professor and administrator Vannevar Bush convinced FDR to fund the National Defense Research Committee during World War II: this brought about a different set of relationships between corporate, government, and academic research. According to Turner, Bush, Norbert Wiener, and others of his generation created a context for multidisciplinary research at MIT. Writing about the "RadLab", Turner explains, "

It brought together scientists and mathematicians from MIT and elsewhere, engineers and designers from industry, and many different military and government planners. Among these various professionals, and particularly among the engineers and designers, entrepreneurship and collaboration were the norm, and independence of mind was strongly encouraged. Formerly specialized scientists were urged to become generalists in their research, able not only to theorize but also to design and build new technologies. At the same time, scientists and engineers had to become entrepreneurs, assembling networks of technologists, funders, and administrators to see their projects through. Neither scientists nor administrators could stay walled off from one another in their offices and laboratories; throughout the Rad Lab, and even after hours, in the restaurants and living rooms of Cambridge, the pressures to produce new technologies to fight the war drove formerly specialized scientists and engineers to cross professional boundaries, to routinely mix work with pleasure, and to form new, interdisciplinary networks within which to work and live."

Studying Turner's book has given me some core insights into the institution where I have worked and thrived for the past sixteen plus years. One of the first things I observed when I came here was the difference between the ways that MIT students engaged with theory from the ways it is often discussed in the Big Ten institutes where I did my graduate work. In a liberal arts classroom, students tend to circle a theory like a pack of raptors and rip it to shreds in the course of a discussion, leaving only the tattered bits on the table, or they choose sides, some embracing, others critiquing the theory, and butt heads together like charging rams, to see which one can withstand the pressure. At MIT, the tendency is to tinker, to take the theory apart, reduce it to component elements, and then reassemble it again in a better form. It is a brainstorming and problem solving culture: a theory is only valuable if it allows us to do something we want to do and the test of a theory is its applications in the real world.

The Comparative Media Studies program's emphasis on "applied humanities" reflects these habits of mind: we are interested in figuring out what the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences might have to contribute to helping our society adjust to a profound and prolonged period of media change and our goals are to embrace and promote the emergence of a more participatory culture. To achieve these goals, we have tried to create a "lab culture" for the humanities at MIT. In the MIT tradition, we have created centers and labs which emphasize experimentation and research, organized conferences which bring together researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds, and participate in larger national networks and projects which bridge between different spheres of activity. Perhaps most of all, we place an emphasis on the public communication of our ideas so that they can make a difference in the world and in the process, we try to strip our language of specialized terms or concepts that might impede its ability to circulate within these larger social networks. I have struggled a lot through the years with the question of what it means to be a humanist at MIT. Every so often, I get a glimpse of how well, in fact, our program fits within the MIT culture and how much I have absorbed of the institutional values and practices of this place.

Turner's book has also helped me to better understand MacArthur's current initiative on Youth and Digital Learning. The Foundation speaks openly about trying to construct a new field focused on understanding how young people incorporate new media technologies into their everyday lives, giving rise to new forms of civic engagement, cultural participation, and informal learning. Our Project nml is simply one node in this much larger network of researchers, drawn from universities and centers around the country, built up from people working in very different disciplines. Collectively, this network is doing field work and ethnography on young people's existing practices, developing curricular materials to support new media literacies, rethinking the place of the library within an information culture, forming after school programs and experimental schools, designing and distributing computer and video games designed to foster computational and design skills, editing and publishing books to guide parents and policy makers, creating and maintaining a blog to insure the circulation of these ideas to the larger public, and much more. The Foundation has done an extraordinary job in enabling intellectually meaningful connections between these various projects, bringing various mixes of researchers together for in person meetings and telephone conferences, creating shared projects that build upon our individual endeavors, insuring that we each have stakes in the success of the initiative as a whole. And they have done a good job of publicizing their efforts so that they have started to capture the public imagination. Increasingly, as I travel around the country, I am asked about what MacArthur is trying to do and my role in the larger process. Above all, MacArthur has instilled in us a sense that what we are doing can make a difference in the world.

Over the next few weeks, my students and I will be taking a look at: the development of cybernetic theory, the experimentation with strobe photography and its impact on our understanding of photography as a medium, the role of MIT as a center for video art and cinema verite documentary, several generations of thinking about the political impact of news and information, and several major traditions for thinking about the value of new media for education and self discovery. My hope is that these case studies will not only introduce our students to some core debates in media theory but also give them insights into how these theories originated, the institutional contexts within which they circulated, the discursive practices that shaped how they got picked up by the outside world, and the particular relationship which MIT has developed between theory and practice.

Part of the process of putting this class together has been to reconnect with researchers from these various traditions who are still actively part of the MIT community. For the most part, my students will be getting first hand reports on how these theories emerged at MIT and the contexts which shaped them. I hope to share some of what we learn through the blog in the weeks to come.

MIT is a particularly rich site for exploring the evolution of media theory because of the ways that social and cultural theories take shape here through interplay with technologists and designers, scientists and engineers, industry leaders and public policy makers, rather than in a self-contained academic discipline. I am going to be interested in exploring the kinds of "network forums," "contact zones," and "border languages" which support and sustain the production of theory here at MIT. From there, I hope to maintain at least some focus on the institutional contexts within which theory originated -- from Eisenstein's blurring of film theory and practice through to the Frankfort and Birmingham Schools and to contemporary digital theory (including the work of modern media makers/theorists, such as Scott McCloud or a growing number of folks in games studies.) I'd be curious to hear how other academics are getting students to focus on their own institutions and their historical evolution.

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

Techspressive Tools

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

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

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

The Fan Boy Reconsidered

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

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

Robert Kozinets: Oh yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikimedia and Archontic Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affect and Gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetics and Power

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

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

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

Does the Long Tail Include Women?

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

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

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

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

How I Spent My Summer Vacation...

Several weeks ago, I played hooky from writing this blog to attend an Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society. At the time, I promised to share some of my experiences with you but have been so focused on starting the term that I am just now getting back to you. Here's how the Aspen Institute described their goals for the event:

The purpose of the Forum is to develop recommendations for leaders in media, government, and other societal institutions to promote positive social and democratic values through the various communications media without undue governmental regulation. The Forum will explore how the new technological and behavioral environments are changing the way that media -- old and new -- will serve customers (advertisers/subscribers), users (readers/listeners/viewers/contributors), communities, and the broader social good. After an introductory plenary session describing the drivers and impact of the new media, the Forum will consist of three distinct roundtable tracks, exploring the ways that media may be used to promote an informed citizenry, civic participation, enhancement of community life, and consideration of intellectual property rights and interests.

The Forum brought together government leaders (including U.S. Representatives, current and former members of the Federal Communications Commission), the chief executives of major media companies (old and new), leading academics from a number of different disciplines, lawyers and policy makers, and heads of foundations and non-profit organizations with strong stakes in shaping the future of our media environment. The Aspen Institute events are legendary for creating a social and intellectual climate where people from very different perspectives can exchange views and arrive at meaningful compromises that move forward public policy on a wide array of topics. It was fascinating to watch this process work -- not only through formal events (including plenary conversations with heavy hitters like Michael Eisner, Arriane Huffington, Madeleine Albright, and Arthur Sulzberger, round table exchanges among clusters of participants, and more focused working groups designed to brainstorm and make policy recommendations) and informal exchanges (over breakfast, in the line for lunch, or at the cocktail parties and receptions in the evening.) Charles M. Firestone, the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society programs, was an adept moderator, making sure that every position got aired, cutting off conflict, and pushing us towards practical and pragmatic solutions.

One can get a sense of the caliber of the conversations by checking out the streaming webcast versions of some of the key events. While the videos don't preserve the work process, they do include some of the plenary exchanges which were a highlight of the event. (I am told that videos of the roundtables are forthcoming.)

Sparks flew during the opening session which featured Eisner, Huffington, music industry defender Jon Diamond, and advertising industry leader Lynda Resnick, for a passionate exchange about the current state of the media landscape. Taken as a whole, the group offered us some glimpses into the conflicted and sometimes self-contradictory thinking which is shaping old media's response to the emergence of a more participatory culture. Here, as throughout the sessions, disagreements about how to handle intellectual property in the digital age shaped more or less every other potential point of contact between old and new media companies.

Another memorable exchange, also available via webcast, paired current FCC chairman Kevin Martin with Vivianne Reding, his counterpart on the European Union's Commission on the Information Society and Media. Here, we were given textbook illustrations of the difference between how media policy operates under commercial and public service broadcasting models, as well as hints at the very different cultural and political traditions shaping media policy in Europe and the United States.

A third session on the Future of the Newspaper featured Sulzberger (New York Times), Caroline Litttle (Washington Post), Jake Oliver (Afro), Dean Singleton (MediaNews Group), Craig Newmark (craigslist), and Scott Moore (Yahoo!).

I was delighted to see new media literacies emerge as a central theme at the conference from the very opening session. An excerpt from our white paper was circulated to attendees as part of the packet they received in advance of the meeting and seemed to have heightened participant's awareness of the topic. The idea of young people's relationship to emerging media was posed by opening remarks from Jeff Cole (USC Annenberg School for Communication), who outlined a series of shifts in the ways younger Americans got their entertainment and information. By the end of the first roundtable, the need for robust and widespread media literacy education (for adults as well as for youth) had become part of the group's consensus.

This shared investment in media literacy provided me a context for raising what I saw as important issues about the ways that current ambiguities in copyright law are having a chilling effect upon our efforts to develop and circulate materials for media literacy education. It was clear that almost no one at the event had considered the connection between these two issues before.

Here's how I explained it: I am both a Professor of Literature and a Professor of Media Studies. As a Professor of Literature, I have a pretty good sense of what claims I can make on Fair Use in my work. In writing a printed work about a literary text, I understand roughly how much of a given work I can quote for the purposes of critical commentary and in what contexts; I also know when I need to seek additional permissions and where I can go to get those permissions; for the most part, a system is in place that allows me to pay an appropriate and reasonable rate for my use of those materials.

None of this applies to my work as a media scholar if what I want to do is directly quote from a media text in my own media work for the purposes of critical commentary. There is a pretty well established set of principles and agreements which allow me to show clips in class to my own students and even to break encryption if necessary in order to duplicate and archive those clips. But there is no such protection in place if I wish to circulate materials I have produced amongst other media educators.

Renee Hobbes, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are doing research for the MacArthur Foundation, trying to understand teacher's attitudes towards copyright and how this impacts media literacy education. So far, they are finding enormous fear and much uncertainty regarding many standard pedagogical practices which involve reproducing and sharing media content. Their long term goal is to develop principles of fair use which would provide greater protection to educators, but the effectiveness of these principles rests in part on getting them accepted within the media industry itself. If you want to learn more about this work, you can listen to a podcast of a plenary session we hosted at last spring's Media in Transition conference.

For the most part, Hollywood has been so aggressive at defending its trademark and copyright control over their content (especially in the context of current battles over Napster and YouTube) that university attorneys typically tell us that we run a risk of legal action if we directly excerpt any segments of commercial media content for distribution in any form or in any context. Surely, these attorneys are being conservative and the courts would no doubt recognize at least some limited notion of fair use defending our use of these materials. But this fear of legal action is creating a chilling effect on the development of instructional resources for media literacy.

If educators wanted, however, to get studio permission for our use of these materials, the history has been equally problematic. There is no established clearing house for identifying and contacting rights holders. The studios often do not respond to our queries and when they do, they set arbitrarily high prices. In one recent case, a faculty member was quoted a price of a thousand dollars a minute for the use of Hollywood content for an educational project -- a price which would have quickly bankrupted the initiative. Some organizations are producing media literacy documentaries which include clips from mainstream media, but they have historically felt they were taking major risks in doing so and this has in turn impacted how widely they publicize their efforts.

Thanks to the Aspen Institute, my story was heard by some of the key policy makers and leaders of the entertainment industry. My hope is that this issue will be part of the policy recommendations released by the Institute in the aftermath of our session and that we can use this as a rallying point in brokering a meeting between the Hollywood establishment and key media literacy educators (a possibility raised by several of the industry participants at the event). None of us are ready to declare victory yet but the particular climate of Aspen, which brings key decision makers together in the same space to talk about vexing issues of cultural policy, has made it possible for us to make some real progress on this issue.

One final aside about Aspen: As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.

If You Found This Blog Through Game Informer...

The September issue of Game Informer features a profile of someone they describe variously as "one of the leading thinkers about video games in the world" and "The Game Academic." I am not certain I know who they are talking about but the guy in the picture looks remarkably like me. As a result of this story, this blog is probably seeing at least a modest influx of visitors from readers of Game Informer magazine, which is given away free with purchases at one of the leading games retail chains. I thought I would flag for these visitors some past posts on games which extend on points raised in the interview and provide a bit more background about my work in game studies.

Game Aesthetics

Are Games Art? Wii, I Mean, Oui!

More on Games Criticism

More on Games as Art

Applied Game Theory, RIP: Melodrama and Realism, Role Play and Race, Addiction and Copy Right

Games as Meaningful Expression

National Politics within Virtual Game Worlds: The Case of China

Getting Serious About Games

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming

A Few Thoughts About Media Violence

Interviews

With Greg Costikyan

With Stephanie Barish

With Eric Zimmerman

With Chris Kohler

With Peter Ludlow

With Wagner James Au

With David William Schaffer

If you would like to read some more of my writing on games, check out the following articles which are available online:

Eight Myths about Video Games Debunked

Games, the New Lively Art

Game Design as Narrative Architecture

The Penny Arcade Interview

As I suggested in the interview, my interest in games dates back to playing Pong when it first was released in the market. But my transformative experience came when I bought my son a NES for Christmas and I saw Super Mario Bros. for the first time. I was so astonished by what video games had become already and became convinced that this was going to become an even more important medium in the future. I've been studying and writing about video games for sixteen plus years.

Along the way, my involvement with games has led me to:

host several conferences on computer games, including From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games; Computer and Video Games Come of Age; and two Education Arcade conferences held in conjunction with E3, the major trade show in the video games industry;

Doing consulting work for Brenda Laurel at Purple Moon and conducting a Creative Leaders program for EA;

Co-Editing From Barbie to Mortal Kombat with Justine Castell;

Testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee about games and violence in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting;

Defending Grand Theft Auto on the Donahue Program and taking some hits for my efforts;

helping to establish the Games to Teach Project and more recently, the Education Arcade, exploring the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games;

authoring a white paper for the MacArthur Foundation which, among other things, stresses the value of games-based skills;

overseeing a team which is producing digital documentaries on topics, such as the Big Games Movement;

appearing in a range of documentary films about games and games culture, including PBS's Video Games Revolution;

helping to start GAMBIT, a collaboration between MIT and the Singapore Media Development Authority to conduct games design and research projects;

overseeing a range of thesis projects dealing with games secrets, morality and ethics in game design, mastery and multiplayer games, representations of adolescence in games, and a range of other topics;

Writing the monthly Applied Game Theory column with Kurt Squire for Computer Games Magazine;

and much much more.

In the interview, I talked about the growth of games studies as a field. I thought I would also throw out some pointers to those wanting to learn more about academic games studies.

Here are some pointers:

Some Key Blogs:

Ludology.org

Gamasutra

Joystick 101

Water Cooler Games

Grand Text Auto

Some Journals

Game Studies

Games and Culture

Some Conferences and Organizations

Digital Games Research Association

Games, Learning and Society Conference

Some recent books I'd recommend:

Jesper Juuls, Half Real

T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds

Mia Consalvo, Cheating

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games

James Paul Gee, Video Games Are Good For Your Soul

Pat Harrigan and Noah Waldrup-Fruin, Second Person

Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens, The Game Design Reader

This list only scratches the surface, but hopefully it will allow those of you who are discovering academic game studies for the first time a point of entry into this much much larger conversation.

Digital Media and Learning Competition Announced

I've written here often about the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative, which has funded our Project nml. The Foundation has made a 50 million dollar commitment over the next five years to help foster a field devoted to understanding "the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life" through their use of new and emerging media technologies. So far, the Foundation has tended to hand select researchers and community leaders to participate in the initiative, but earlier this month, they announced an open competition designed to identify innovative projects which might make a difference in this space. What follows are some excerpts from the press release announcing this competition:

"An open competition is an excellent way to identify and hopefully inspire new ideas about learning in an increasingly digital world," MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton said. "We do not yet know how much people are changing because of digital media, but we hope that this competition will help support the most innovative thinking about learning, the formation of ethical judgments, peer mentoring, creativity, and civic participation, all of which are increasingly conducted online."

Awards will be given in two categories:

* Innovation Awards will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. These innovations might range from a teacher add-on for MySpace that allows for safe assigning of a class group discussion, to a platform co-developed by teachers and students to facilitate digital literacy and peer-mentoring between college students and high-school drop-outs earning their GED degrees, to a digital learning festival for the leaders of a worldwide youth environmental campaign.

* Knowledge Networking Awards will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. For example, a team of teacher bloggers who already reach hundreds of thousands of readers may now seek to provide multimedia coverage and translation of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins' recent white paper on media literacy.

The open competition will be administered by a network of educators and digital innovators called "HASTAC" (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). HASTAC was founded and is primarily operated at two university centers, the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. HASTAC has a network reaching more than 80 institutions globally. The choice of HASTAC, one of a new breed of "virtual institutions," reflects MacArthur's goals in promoting next-generation learning.

"We are already teaching a generation of students who do not remember a time before they were online," said Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC. "Their social life and informal learning are interconnected. They don't just consume media, they customize it. These students bring fascinating new skills to our classrooms, but they also bring an urgent need for critical thinking about the digital world they have inherited and are shaping."

As part of their prize, awardees will receive special consultation support on everything from technology development to management training. Winners will be invited to showcase their work at a conference that will include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, educators and policy makers seeking the best ideas about digital learning. Applications are due Oct. 15, 2007, and prizewinners will be announced in January. Detailed information on the competition is available online at www.dmlcompetition.net.

"With the digital media and learning initiative, the MacArthur Foundation is playing a leading role in reshaping both institutional and informal learning practices," said David Theo Goldberg, HASTAC co-founder and director of the University of California's Humanities Research Institute. "Traditional learning practices are being supplemented and supplanted by new digital media, which both enable and extend their reach through virtual institutions like HASTAC. This is a natural partnership."

I know many of my readers are doing interested work in this space. I'd like to personally encourage you to pull together a proposal for this competition. Many of us have been frustrated by the climate of fear which so often clouds public policy as it relates to young people and new technologies. MacArthur is offering us another model -- one which is governed by reason and research rather than sparked by fear and ignorance, one which puts theory into practice to redesign public institutions and practices which touch the lives of children and youth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Academics and the Future of Fan Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lightning Round!

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

What has been your most formative fan experience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Fandom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fans and Public Sphere Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Getting of Wisdom or Orientation MIT Style

Sorry that the blog is getting very little of my attention this week. Yesterday is one of a small handful of days I have missed posting since I launched this blog sixteen months ago. But I have been very much in the business of orienting new students this week. This process takes over my life both at home (I am a housemaster in Senior House, an MIT dorm where we have no frosh and their parents arriving this week) and at the office (I am co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program). On the home front, Senior House welcomes new students by dropping thousands of bouncy balls from the roof of our building while "Go Ask Alice" blares from the sound system and strobe lights flash in their faces. It can be a vaguely out of body experience but it captures the unexpected quality of life in this dorm. I put a fair amount of time this weekend getting to know some of the new students and more importantly trying to calm down their anxious parents. One of the neighboring dorm has a pair of cutting shears at their front desk where students check in with the note, "use these to cut the cord." I know how painful it was for us to drive away and leave our son in a strange city for the first time, so I have great sympathy for such parents, but we also stress in our dorm that we as housemasters are not a second set of parents, that students are responsible for making their own decisions, and that most of the policies in the house originate from the community of student residents and are not imposed top down by administrators. One of our primary jobs is to try to insure that students have the space to make their own decisions, including make their own mistakes, within what has historically been a highly libertarian dorm culture.

Today, the new CMS graduate students arrive for a two day orientation process, designed to introduce them to both the academic and research side of the program. Today's focus is on the academic side. Each of our students is asked to use a medium or media of their choice to prepare a brief introduction of themselves to their fellow classmates. We very much want their first experience in the program to be one which bridges between theory and practices and encourages them to reflect on both the nature of identity (how to express who they are to someone who doesn't know them) and the nature of medium (how to creatively deploy the affordances of media to express some aspect of themselves). Students come with a wide array of different skills and experiences with media. Past presentations have included comic books, story boards, animated films, remix videos, chalk talks, costumed performances, power point presentations, sound mashups, and everything in between.

Another highlight of today's events will be our book discussion. Each year, we choose a recent book in the field of media studies (or a sampler of recent articles) which we ask all of the students to read over the summer. The books are selected because they embody key themes or topics which shape our instructional and research efforts for the coming year. The books become a shared reference point for our community -- in the weeks leading up to the student's arrival and in the weeks that follow.

This year, we selected Charles R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media. If you read my work earlier this summer on retrofuturism and Dean Motter, you will know that I have already found this book to be a useful intellectual resource myself. As a program which deals so often in the space of New Media, we felt this book set the right tone for our students. The new focus on Residual Media gives us a more layered and dynamic picture of the process of media change, helping us to focus on the ways that the emergence of new media impacts the entire ecology of existing media technologies and practices. When one medium becomes new, it typically means that another medium becomes... well, old. The writers in this collection draw on a range of different theoretical models for thinking about the concept of residual media and for offering models for understanding the process of media in transition (including McLuhan, Williams, Innis, Benjamin, and others). We like the broadly comparative approach the contributors take -- many of them discussing the range of media in place at a particular historical juncture -- as well as the mix of very different media discussed across the different contributions. The Comparative Media Studies emphasizes an approach which thinks across media, across historical periods, across disciplines, and across national borders, and we see Acland and his contributors to be very much exploring this same space.

In case you are interested, previous year's books have included Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation: Understanding New Media, Hamid Nafficy's Home, Exile, Homeland, Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins's Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, Marie-Laurie Ryan's Narrative Across Media:The Languages of Storytelling, and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Each of these books makes a valuable contribution to the development of comparative perspectives in media studies. Taken as a whole, this list would represent a pretty good starter set of readings in our field.

Tomorrow, we will take our students on a tour of the various CMS research initiatives, before settling down for extended meetings within the research teams.

Orientation isn't all hard work, though: our students will also enjoy a retro evening at a local 50s themed bowling ally tonight and tomorrow we are getting a tour of Boston's newly finished Institute for Contemporary Art. I have to race off now to actually attend these sessions but I hope you've enjoyed this window into our orientation process. (It's the only thing I have on my mind this week in any case so I couldn't think of anything else to write about).

Two New Aca-Fen Blogs

The Blogging Bug seems to be taking root across the Aca-Fan universe. Today, I want to give a shout out to two recently launched blogs, both created by participants in this summer's Gender and Fan Culture conversations, both dealing with topics which will be of interest to a fair cross section of my readers. The first is Graphic Engine, which describes itself as a blog about "special effects, videogames, film and television." Graphic Engine reflects the ruminations and speculations of Bob Rehak, an assistant professor of film and media studies at Swarthmore College. I have known Rehak since he was a masters student at the University of North Carolina doing work on avatars, first person shooters, and psychoanalysis. He recently finished up a Ph.D in Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where his research centered around special effects. I had the pleasure of featuring some of his work on special effects, the Star Trek blueprints, and early fan culture as part of a panel I put together on Convergence and Science Fiction for last year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. (This panel also featured Beth Coleman on Machinima and A Scatter Darkly; Geoffrey Long on transmedia storytelling, negative capability, and the Hensons; and Robert Kozinets on Star Trek fan cinema and branding cultures). We've long known that there was a male technically oriented fandom around Star Trek whose history parallels that of the female fanzine community; I touched on some aspects of this fan culture in my chapter on Star Trek at MIT in Science Fiction Audiences, but Rehak's work really takes us deep inside that world.

The Star Trek research is part of a much larger reconsideration of the social and cultural history of special effects. His new blog seems first and foremost about the cultural dimensions of special effects -- including attention to the effects industry and its fans, as well as to the economic, technical, and aesthetic factors that shape the place of special effects in the contemporary media landscape. Consider, for example, this passage from an early post about watching the recent Harry Potter film in 3D IMAX:

I already knew that, as with Superman Returns, only a portion of Phoenix would be 3D. What surprised me was how explicitly this was made clear to spectators, both as a matter of publicity and in ad-hoc fashion. Warnings were taped on the ticket window: ONLY THE LAST 20 MINUTES OF HARRY POTTER ARE IN 3D. The man who tore my ticket told me the same thing, in a rote voice, as he handed me the yellow plastic glasses. As the lights went down, a recorded announcement reiterated the point a third time, except in a tone of awe and promise: "When you see the flashing icon at the bottom of the screen, put on your glasses, and prepare to enter the spectacular world of Harry Potter in an amazing action climax" was the gist of it.

All this tutoring, not just in the timing of the glasses, but the proper level of anticipation! Calibrating the audience's reactions, indeed their perceptions, stoking the excitement while warning us not to get too excited. It went hand-in-hand with the promos for the Imax format itself, playing before the film and describing the awesome fidelity and sensory intensification we were about to experience. It seemed odd that we needed such schooling; aren't 3D and giant-screen technologies about removing layers of mediation?

But of course that's naïve; the most basic theory of cinematic spectacle reminds us that special effects (and Imax 3D, like sound, color, widescreen, and other threshold bumps, is a kind of meta-special-effect, an envelope or delivery system for smaller, more textually specific clusters of effects) function both as enhancements of illusion's power and as a reminder of the technology involved in bringing the illusion to us. At the movies, we're perfectly capable of believing in what we see while also believing in (and celebrating) its constructed nature; this is as true of special effects as it is of the editing that strings together a story, or our perception of Albus Dumbledore as being simultaneously the headmaster of Hogwarts and a performance (of subtle strength, in this case) by Michael Gambon.

This early piece turns out to be simply the prelude to a series of posts which explores how Harry Potter (the book series) is being "transcoded" into a film franchise. Here, for example, he builds on some comments that Jason Mittell has made about the ways Deathly Hollows throws down a challenge to filmmakers:

One now reads Harry Potter with the movies in mind, accompanying the print with at least sporadic visual associations distilled from the films' contents. Many sequences in Deathly Hallows struck me as excessively cinematic, tilted toward some future storyboard: one minor instance comes early in the book, when characters encounter a roomful of colorful paper airplanes that are really interoffice memos in the Ministry of Magic. Maybe because I had just seen Order of the Phoenix, which memorably gives form to the Ministry and its darting airborne memos, the book's scene immediately "read" in cinematic terms. But would I have had this sensation even without seeing any of the movies? Is it possible that Rowling is just that good, that descriptive, a writer?

I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing; indeed, I'm excited to witness the gigantic syncopated rhythms of a vastly profitable and popular media system that coordinates its printed and filmic incarnations with the grace of those balletic paper airplanes. But I do think we need to carefully dissect the processes involved in the transcoding - in the visualization - and suggest that special visual effects are a central place to begin the investigation.

He has promised a forthcoming entry focused on how the cover art and chapter illustrations of Mary GrandPre "both set a visual agenda for the stories and mutate in step with the movies' casting decisions and production design." As a Potter fan, I look forward to reading more of Rehak's thoughts on the franchise, alongside other interesting posts which describe his encounter with the Enterprise model at the Smithsonian Institute, his thoughts about the career of makeup artist William Tuttle (who recently passed away), or reactions to Laura Mulvey's essay, "The Culmsy Sublime." Along the way, he includes some thoughts on the aesthetics and psychology of computer game design and on his preparations for teaching a film history class.

Stranger 109 explores the intersections of "gaming, culture, and technology," with a strong focus on the Machinima movement. Robert Jones, a Ph.D candidate at New York University, has launched the blog as an extension of his dissertation research. Jones describes his research project this way:

My research spans over numerous topics in the videogame world. As a cultural critic, I approach the ways in which games function in our daily lives: socially, politically and economically. My dissertation focuses specifically on how all these aspects converge on the videogame subculture known as Machinima. As an extension of both hacking and modding culture, machinima presents a unique form of transformative play and a new way of understanding gamers as cultural producers. With the expansion of what has become known as Web 2.0 Culture, we increasingly live in a world defined by tool sets that enable consumer production. As a decade old phenomenon, machinima's appropriation of videogame engines as filmmaking tool sets represents a precursor to this trend that offers a rich historical insight ripe for investigation. In addition, I am also very interested in how the videogame medium functions as a potential tool of political communication in either its traditional interactive game or machinima forms.

There is so much machinima being produced today that it is helpful to have someone like Jones spotlight interesting and innovative work and provide interviews with important creators working in this space. Jones takes seriously the potentials of games as a medium, as is suggested by his recent discussion of Danny Ladonne's controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG:

Despite gaming's new found acceptance within mainstream culture, it has yet to find a place of legitimacy as a means of serious expression. Whereas Bowling for Columbine was championed by many as an important reflection on the Littleton tragedy, SCMRPG was seen as trivializing the event. So the content of the game becomes completely irrelevant simply because it occurs within the context of a game. And this poses the biggest hurdle for games as political expression. If you have not had a chance to play through the game, I would recommend doing so. Play it not because it is enjoyable (because it most certainly is not), but because Ladonne consructs a text that forces the player to consider other possible explanations than Klebold and Harris were simply monsters. Whereas most of the negative responses suggest that the game celebrates the tragedy, playing through reveals a thoughtful engagement of what should only be considered as a complex issue.

Jones has adopted a stance which allows him to document and defend the ambitions of machinima and serious games producers alike, while also raising questions about the sometimes dubious creative decisions shaping the mainstream games industry. We see this later perspective in a very interesting recent post supporting the charges of racism which have been leveled against a recently released trailer for Resident Evil 5, depicting a white man's encounter with a primitive African tribe. So often, such debates pit cultural critics who know about the history of racial representations with fan defenders who know and respect genre conventions. But, because Jones writes as a fan, he knows how to use genre history to sharpen and nuance the criticisms leveled against the preview:

As one of the most well-respected franchises within the genre of Survival Horror, Resident Evil takes its roots in the cinematic tradition of the zombie films pioneered by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Released in 1968, the film provided a rather poignant critique of the racial tensions in the United States. Often overlooked as "monster movies," the racial allegories that played out in Romero's films called attention to the issues of black representation in film at the time. The films were unique in their use of African-American protagonists who become the heroes of the films, saving white people from the "white" zombies. Metaphorically, becoming a zombie embodies the internalization of racist ideologies. Part of the commentary made by Romero here is that as a single individual, racism is not too hard to fight. As with the zombies, the strength lies in numbers. So for Romero, the infection that one zombie passes onto its victims and transforms them into zombies demonstrates the danger of racism and how it works.

Fastforward 40 years and the racial landscape in the United States has improved tremendously; however, as Resident Evil 5's trailer and mixed response would indicate, we are far from any sort of Colors of Benetton racial utopia. Platt's main issue with the trailer is a valid one. It clearly recreates racial stereotypes of Africans as savage peoples who need to be saved from themselves by White men. So the tragic twist in this latest iteration of Resident Evil is that while the franchise borrows from a film genre rooted in social critiques of racism, it devolves into an even older genre of film notorious for its horrific depiction of Blackness as savage and Whiteness as rational: the colonial adventure films. Simba (1955), which depicts the Mau-Mau rebellion that took place in Kenya, embodies this genre and the way it portrays blacks as the dangerous 'other,' while valorizing the colonial attempt to provide salvation to these savage people. The images from the game seem to at least echo this from what I have seen.

While it may be unfair to pass judgement on RE5 based solely on the trailer, the issue of representation of African-Americans in gaming has been one that has gone long unexamined. So when fanboys attack Platt's concerns by saying that no one had any problem with the previous RE's because the zombies were largely white, they are missing the larger media history in which this game sits. Because African-Americans have largely been relegated to secondary roles in film, with considerably fewer roles in total, the few representations they do get often portray them in limited capacities, often depicted as the cause of the problem as in the case of Simba. Whites, on the other hand, benefit from a myriad of representations and are not necessarily hurt by any single negative depiction.

But what concerns me more about the RE5 trailer is that it fits within most of the games that we see come out each week in that we are once again provided a white hero to play, which to me is the biggest way that gaming further perpetuates the racial intolerance we continue to suffer from. As an African-American man, you get to be either an athlete or gangster in the vast majority of games. So like film once had to overcome the racial barrier, so too does gaming. Much of this comes out of the lack of material representation of people of color on the level of development. Since the average game designer is a white male of 32 years of age, the lack of racial diversity in playable characters is no surprise. Only once we had more Black directors did we see a change in the film landscape. As gaming continues to grow and become even more a part of Black culture can we even hope this trend will change.

I am constantly on the look out for other aca-fen blogs. Let us know what you are reading or writing these days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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