{ jlr } (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cyborganize) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} virgule,@ 2005-05-07 23:01:00 |
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TV fandom lecture
this is my text/notes for a (50 min.) lecture I prepared for an intro to TV studies course -- for my own future reference, but I also thought y'all might enjoy. I'd love to hear what you think of the ways I chose to summarize and abstract fandom and its theory -- but it is finals just now so it might take me a while to reply to any comments.
assigned essays:
• Jenkins, Henry. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." Television: The Critical View (5th ed.). Horace Newcomb. NY: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Jones, Sara Gwenllian. "Starring Lucy Lawless?" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2000).
TV episode:
Xena: Warrior Princess, "Déjà Vu All Over Again" (S.04)
(I also wanted to show The X-Files, "Hollywood A.D." (S.07) -- the one about a parodic XF movie that David Duchovny wrote and directed)
collected links: http://del.icio.us/jlr/tvfanlecture
segue
Through the majority of this course we've learned about the textual, subjective, sociohistorical, and economic structures of US commercial TV, and about various approaches to understanding and critiquing TV (both as a medium and as a sort of nexus of broader social forces). Last week, we began to explicitly question the terms of the economic organization of TV, rather than taking them as a given of our work. Let me go first to last week, which raised the issue of access to the technologies and infrastructure of TV production and distribution in the context of a global TV industry. The readings and screenings suggested that the appropriation of power over televisual representation by communities of viewers is a vital political project, while still refusing any simple binarization of global control vs. local resistance, capitalist homogenization vs. popular diversity. Professor J____ couched the contemporary conditions and possibilities of these relations in the economic dimension of postmodernism: the transition to an economic system alternately called late capitalism, third-stage capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, global capitalism, the information economy, etc. Under this regime, value inheres in non-material goods like intellectual property (for example: software, scientific research) and brand identity (the meaning of a product, rather than its instrumental function). Thus, whereas the industrial economy was driven by the production of material commodities, in the post-industrial economy it is now the site of consumption that is most productive, since information and meaning which are materialized in the consumer are what is in fact being sold. The television industry aligns well with this logic, since what it sells to advertisers is the interpretive labor of its audience in watching commercials. So, while it would be easy to divide this week's material into interventions on the side of production (independent TV and video) and interventions on the side of consumption (derivative works produced by mass media fans), this dichotomization of production and consumption is precisely what breaks down under postmodernism. Indeed, professor J____ has already pointed out that the independent video we screened appropriates much of its formal strategies and narrative and visual materials from commercial TV, even as it comments on and critiques it, rewriting TV in much the same way as fan communities do. I'd propose that the main difference between these two kinds of work is the mode of distribution: single channel video (often through cable-access stations) vs. the multi-channel network of the internet.
That said, let me give you a brief overview of the history of fan production, and how it came to be organized in the way it is.
history of fandom/Jenkins
• semiotics: texts not autonomous works, all texts are polysemic, intertextual
> derivative literary works have been produced throughout history: midrash; tales of Arthur; continuations of Canterbury Tales, Austen and Carroll novels, Sherlock Homes
• primary contemporary incarnation of fan production — fiction and visual art based on mass media texts (TV shows, movies, books, celebrities, etc.) — dates from the first run of Star Trek in the 1960's, and burgeoned throughout the 70's and 80's in the form of print zines circulated at fan conventions or directly through the mail
• first academic article on fan fiction (afaik) is Russ, Joanna: "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love" (1985)
• Jenkins' book Textual Poachers (1992) = one of the earliest and most influential full-length studies of fan fiction, and he remains the best-known scholar of the phenomenon (along with Constance Penley)
> he's writing about the pre-internet context, so his account has limited applicability to current practices
> conceptually, he did contribute key aspects of the theoretical framework for studying fandom, which draws heavily on cultural studies models of reception as the active production of meanings which we covered earlier in the semester.
[me:] arguing against popular and academic "stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers," he proposes that "fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions. In the process...they become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings" (23-24). This formulation goes one step beyond understanding popular reception only as resistant reading--Jenkins allows that fan writers are producers (in some sense) of culture. [As Professor J____ noted on Tuesday,] this framework draws on Michel de Certeau's "poaching" metaphor, which conceptualizes reading not as the passive absorption of authorial meaning passed down from positions of dominance, but as "an ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for control over its meanings" (24).
• let me now suggest, though, some of the limitations of this conception, particularly in the contemporary digital context:
> poaching implies a hierarchy of lords and serfs:
In Jenkins's mode of reading, fan fiction is always subordinate to its parent text; he writes that "Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests" (23). In other words, it is fans' torturous enthrallment to an inadequate mass media that constrains them to add their own ancillary narratives to it.
This is one of what I'll suggest are three major schools of understanding the impetus of fanfic (among both academics and fans): the compensatory account (I'll talk more about the others when I come to Jones).
> Jenkins is willing to countenance certain aspects of the breakdown of the consumption/production binary:
- "For fans, consumption sparks production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable" (451)
- "fan writers suggest the need to redefine the politics of reading, to view textual property not as the exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by textual consumers" (469)
BUT, his exclusive (methodologically: ethnographic) focus on fan activity as an intervention at the site of reception — that is, mass media texts as raw materials for producing communities and popular mythologies that nonetheless remain derivative — leaves the ostensibly unilateral power of the TV industry to produce mass media texts essentially intact ("no substitution for meaningful change" [469]). Thus, it excludes the question of how fan production is actually central to media commodities — because, as I said earlier, TV depends economically on the interpretive work of its audience. And the question of how fan production participates the widespread challenge to control over the boundaries of information, which must be somehow fixed in order to package it as a product (e.g. peer to peer file sharing) — evidence (again, as we learn from semiotics and post-structuralism) that texts and their meanings are not contained within any obvious borders (vs. Jenkins: "The text that [fans] so lovingly preserve is the Star Trek that they created through their own speculations, not the one that Roddenberry produced for network air play" [465] - ?!)
(note: I'm not trying to claim that fandom is a "subversive" activity in the sense that Jenkins, along with the rest of his school of reception theory, does. Rather, I'm questioning the binary terms of this formulation, which unproblematically opposes hegemonic mass media texts [on the teevee] to reception practices that ostensibly resist them [somewhere else].)
jumping ahead to Jones: "intricately bound up with fan culture's move into cyberspace and with the possibilities opened up by digital technologies... from the outset, the virtual star is in a sense ‘outside' itself... [It] marks a profound shift in the balance of creative power between television industry and television audiences. Xena's status as a virtual star complicates her origins as a piece of copyrighted intellectual property... [She's] a text with innumerable ‘authors' that is written and realized through processes of imaginative translation that cannot be effectively policed or prohibited" (20)
• I need to give you a brief gloss, here, of fan fiction's legal status...
• much of the stuff about fandom's moral economy and discourses of legitimation through textual fidelity to the source text I'm just going to ignore, because I don't think these issues, in the way Jenkins formulates them, are relevant to contemporary fan culture. However, I will go into the question of fandom and gender, because this remains a central one. While contemporary online fandom is far, far larger and more diverse than the fan subculture Jenkins studied, and while there's no reliable demographic information about the makeup of this population (and collecting such data seems like a virtually impossible project), I think it's safe to say that the majority of active participants in fan production are straight and bi women (though this is a smaller majority than in Jenkins' day).
> academic work on fan fiction focuses to a disproportionate degree on documenting and explaining the phenomenon that slash fan fiction (defined by Professor J____ on Tuesday — same-gender pairings — in this case we're talking about men) is wildly popular among, and almost exclusively produced by, women. my problems with this:
- the idea that this situation is astonishing seems to rely on fairly simplistic assumptions about the gender dynamics of desire and identification. within a psychoanalytically-informed framework, that is, I don't see that there's anything particularly remarkable about women finding gay sex hot.
- along the same lines, it often seems to want to elevate slash by offering smut some alibi:
"While character sexuality constitutes one of the most striking characteristics of slash, and most slash fans concede that erotic pleasure is central to their interest in the genre, it seems false to define this genre exclusively in terms of its representation of sexuality. Slash is not so much a genre about sex as it is a genre about the limitations of traditional masculinity and about reconfiguring male identity." (TP 191)
- finally, it has almost totally excluded any attention to fandom's dynamics and diversity (or lack thereof) in relation to any other social formation: race, class, age, etc.
• that said, discussions of the relation of gender and slash remain lively throughout fandom. going through Jenkins' article, I picked out six different explanations of slash's appeal to women:
1. a subset of the compensatory account I already mentioned: the "need to reclaim feminine interests from the margins of masculine texts" (455) (also, explanation for why there's less girlslash: not as many ‘good' female characters)
2. "effort to construct a feminist utopia" (462) — relates to Russ's original account of how fans envision utopian egalitarian possibilities through same-gender pairings, because it was impossible to do so through a heterosexual couple (other differences, like human/alien, might stand in for gender). today, however, slash is just as likely to be condemned as anti-feminist by fans, the product of an internalized misogyny which rejects women and their sexuality.
3. "Men may feel comfortable joining discussions of future technologies or military lifestyle but not in pondering Vulcan sexuality, McCoy's childhood, or Kirk's love life" (454)
4. "Research suggests that men and women have been socialized to read for different purposes and in different ways" (454)
5. "fan writing adopts forms and functions traditional to women's literary culture" (455)
6. "a semiotics of masculinity, with the need to read men's often repressed emotional states from the subtle signs of outward gesture and expression" (462) (another explanation for lack of girlslash: it's more accepted for women to show affection, so bonds between female characters are less likely to be read as sexual subtext)
Any of these interpretations is potentially still relevant to fandom today.
online fandom/Jones
• In an article we didn't read called "The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters" [Screen. 43:1 (Spring 2002): 79-90.], Sara Gwenllian Jones raises another crucial critique of the typical academic focus on the wonders of slash as a resistant practice, writing that
[me:] "In such formulations, slash is interpreted as ‘resistant' or ‘subversive' because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters' heterosexuality" (81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates [in his essay], in the homophobia of "a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved" (81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is "an actualization of latent textual elements" (82).
• This points toward the second of what, again, I'm identifying as three major conceptualizations of the impetus behind fanfic: the subtextual account.
> now, the word "subtext" has been condemned for suggesting a hierarchy of meaning, wherein queer content is sub-: less present or legitimate than the presumably heterosexual maintext — which is not the point at all. I retain the term nonetheless because it is in widespread use among fans...
> if the compensatory account pits fan production against the text, in the subtextual account fans work with the text, filling out aspects (usually romance and sex) that are suggested on the show but not fully represented or representable
> far more prevalent, today, in my experience, than the compensatory account
• Jones thus suggests that fan production is tied to the televisual given that "There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers" (13) — and my major quibble with Jones is that she modestly claims for cult TV alone characteristics that hold for ALL TV. Remember back to our discussions of television's irreducible polysemy, perpetual play of flow and segmentation, and imperative to continually reproduce itself from the early weeks of the course.
• Xena: Warrior Princess, our fandom example for today, is unmatched before or since in the degree to which the producers and actors admitted to deliberately playing up gay subtext (though we should note that sanctioned heterosexual subtext is extremely common) — as should have been apparent from the episode we screened and Jones' description.
http://xenite.org/faqs/subtext.html
As Jones points out, this really highlights what I see as a problematic tendency on the part of fans to rely on an argument from authorial intent to legitimate their queer interpretations (and to feel their readings are illegitimate when they don't get this validation, as they almost never do outside of Xena) — and we've already discussed the critique from semiotics of understanding texts as bounded, autonomous works produced by a singular author, and its particular force when it comes to TV texts, which are of course produced through the collaboration of hundreds of different people.
• Now, the compensatory and subtextual accounts of fanfic may seem opposite, but in practice there is a continuum between them based on how subtext (whether intentional or not) is viewed politically: is it an opportunity for fans to actively participate in producing mass media texts, as Jones suggests when she writes "This ambiguity is a source of pleasure for many fans, who enjoy spotting ‘subtextual' moments and filling in the gaps for themselves" (19). Or, is it a cynical mass marketing ploy in the form of "heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon" (19), thus appealing backhandedly to viewers starved for queer representation, while maintaining plausible deniability for the sake of squeamish straight viewers. This latter shades toward the compensatory, as writers may see themselves as queerly remediating characters who should be openly gay onscreen.
> Jones briefly opens the question of the economics of relation as well (20), but I want to quote you a more extensive passage from another article by Jeanne E. Hamming:
The circuit created between Xena: Warrior Princess and Xena slash fiction, between the production of the series (as commodity) and the production of slash confession (also as commodity), is, in short, a capitalist relation; "sex(uality) sells!" This relation inevitably leads, according to Brian Massumi, to the "real subsumption" of society: the penetration, expansion, and intensification of the capitalist machine into the social fields of identity, increasing capitalist production and consumption through the appropriation of sexual identities offered for sale on the market (Massumi 154)...
Furthermore, the implication of a lesbian sexuality which, nevertheless, always remains hidden just beneath the surface, perpetuates the series' marketability by maintaining the tension between secrecy and openness... the crisis of "not knowing for sure"--has the effect of continually regenerating the (very profitable) desire-producing circuit created between Xena and its fans. [19/21]
This is another reason why we need to be cautious of glorifying fanfic and slash as resistant, even in the alternative sense that I'm provisionally proposing. This takes us back to our debates, in the week on consumerism, about whether and how effective resistance to a capitalism with no outside could take shape.
We have to also remember that discursive relations are always power relations, and those with more cultural capital have more power to produce legitmate meanings. As Jones points out, "Xena's star text is by no means entirely open to interpretation" (17): fans are incredibly invested in the onscreen portion of the texts they're engaged in, and this, indeed, is outside of their control.
• The third approach to fan practice I'm calling the lateral account.
Jenkins: "As Star Trek fan writing has come to assume an institutional status in its own right and therefore to require less legitimation through appeals to textual fidelity, a new conception of fan fiction has emerged, one that perceives the stories not as a necessary expansion of the original series text but rather as chronicles of alternate universes, similar to the program world in some ways and different in others" (466)
Jones: "uber" stories
other instances and sources of varying indifference to canon: AUs, crossovers, personal interests, prurient interest, writing workshop
(also a continuum, not an absolute break with the other modes)
This suggests some of the diversity of contemporary fan production, so, continuing the historical development of fandom post-Jenkins:
• usenet groups for fan fiction were up and running by the early 1990's. > the ones that still exist (like alt.startrek.creative [1991], still the central clearinghouse for Trek fanfic) have largely transitioned to email lists [example]
> bulletin boards in their web incarnation [example]
> personal web sites and archives [ff.net] (+ webrings) [example]
> livejournal [example]
• Jones suggests that one of the aspect of TV that particularly invites fan practice is its seriality — if you recall, we've discussed TV's defining temporality of liveness, presence, and immediacy: it's constant availability as a world we can turn on and off at will makes it seem as if its characters exist in a time that runs parallel to our own. The internet is even more uninterrupted, more fragmentary and diffuse than television, which may contribute to its aptness as a medium for fandom. Moreover, Jones notes, via Ellis, that "television's contemporaneous cycles of promotion and broadcast effect a slippage between actor and character in the audience's imagination" (11). If TV time and realtime tend to merge, that is, so do the televisual and real worlds more broadly — as the Lewis article we read earlier in the semester, for example, explores.
The episode of Xena that we watched plays self-reflexively with this quality.
[summarize]
http://whoosh.org/epguide/dejavu.html:
but to me, this is what's so brilliant about the ep!
laments: the universe and the characters can be arbitrarily recast to suit the needs of a particular episode, it appears... which means that trying to make any kind of coherent sense of the show as a whole is perhaps a futile exercise. Perhaps one can expect no more from a commercial TV show
Jones, on the other hand, sees TV's "invariably incompletely furnished" (13) worlds as positive, the source of its irreducible interactivity.
• The fan fiction story I handed out deals with similar issues:
> Mary Sue/self-insertion —> the boundary between televisual and real
> narrates spectatorship, and fan subjectivity
> narrates fan interpretations and fanfic (the J/7 "story")
> ultimate convergence of fan and idol
• Thus, my differences from Jones: she concludes that actor is subordinate to character on TV, and fans see Lawless as distinct from and secondary to Xena. While TV actors may certainly be more minor celebrities than movie stars, for all the reasons I've just been discussing, and in my experiences of fandom, I think the slippage between actor and character is much greater. At least, when it comes to TV and its fan cultures, the boundaries between consumer/producer, text/audience, straight/queer, capitalist/resistant, fictional/real are never fixed and impermeable.
this is my text/notes for a (50 min.) lecture I prepared for an intro to TV studies course -- for my own future reference, but I also thought y'all might enjoy. I'd love to hear what you think of the ways I chose to summarize and abstract fandom and its theory -- but it is finals just now so it might take me a while to reply to any comments.
assigned essays:
• Jenkins, Henry. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." Television: The Critical View (5th ed.). Horace Newcomb. NY: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Jones, Sara Gwenllian. "Starring Lucy Lawless?" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2000).
TV episode:
Xena: Warrior Princess, "Déjà Vu All Over Again" (S.04)
(I also wanted to show The X-Files, "Hollywood A.D." (S.07) -- the one about a parodic XF movie that David Duchovny wrote and directed)
collected links: http://del.icio.us/jlr/tvfanlecture
segue
Through the majority of this course we've learned about the textual, subjective, sociohistorical, and economic structures of US commercial TV, and about various approaches to understanding and critiquing TV (both as a medium and as a sort of nexus of broader social forces). Last week, we began to explicitly question the terms of the economic organization of TV, rather than taking them as a given of our work. Let me go first to last week, which raised the issue of access to the technologies and infrastructure of TV production and distribution in the context of a global TV industry. The readings and screenings suggested that the appropriation of power over televisual representation by communities of viewers is a vital political project, while still refusing any simple binarization of global control vs. local resistance, capitalist homogenization vs. popular diversity. Professor J____ couched the contemporary conditions and possibilities of these relations in the economic dimension of postmodernism: the transition to an economic system alternately called late capitalism, third-stage capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, global capitalism, the information economy, etc. Under this regime, value inheres in non-material goods like intellectual property (for example: software, scientific research) and brand identity (the meaning of a product, rather than its instrumental function). Thus, whereas the industrial economy was driven by the production of material commodities, in the post-industrial economy it is now the site of consumption that is most productive, since information and meaning which are materialized in the consumer are what is in fact being sold. The television industry aligns well with this logic, since what it sells to advertisers is the interpretive labor of its audience in watching commercials. So, while it would be easy to divide this week's material into interventions on the side of production (independent TV and video) and interventions on the side of consumption (derivative works produced by mass media fans), this dichotomization of production and consumption is precisely what breaks down under postmodernism. Indeed, professor J____ has already pointed out that the independent video we screened appropriates much of its formal strategies and narrative and visual materials from commercial TV, even as it comments on and critiques it, rewriting TV in much the same way as fan communities do. I'd propose that the main difference between these two kinds of work is the mode of distribution: single channel video (often through cable-access stations) vs. the multi-channel network of the internet.
That said, let me give you a brief overview of the history of fan production, and how it came to be organized in the way it is.
history of fandom/Jenkins
• semiotics: texts not autonomous works, all texts are polysemic, intertextual
> derivative literary works have been produced throughout history: midrash; tales of Arthur; continuations of Canterbury Tales, Austen and Carroll novels, Sherlock Homes
• primary contemporary incarnation of fan production — fiction and visual art based on mass media texts (TV shows, movies, books, celebrities, etc.) — dates from the first run of Star Trek in the 1960's, and burgeoned throughout the 70's and 80's in the form of print zines circulated at fan conventions or directly through the mail
• first academic article on fan fiction (afaik) is Russ, Joanna: "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love" (1985)
• Jenkins' book Textual Poachers (1992) = one of the earliest and most influential full-length studies of fan fiction, and he remains the best-known scholar of the phenomenon (along with Constance Penley)
> he's writing about the pre-internet context, so his account has limited applicability to current practices
> conceptually, he did contribute key aspects of the theoretical framework for studying fandom, which draws heavily on cultural studies models of reception as the active production of meanings which we covered earlier in the semester.
[me:] arguing against popular and academic "stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers," he proposes that "fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions. In the process...they become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings" (23-24). This formulation goes one step beyond understanding popular reception only as resistant reading--Jenkins allows that fan writers are producers (in some sense) of culture. [As Professor J____ noted on Tuesday,] this framework draws on Michel de Certeau's "poaching" metaphor, which conceptualizes reading not as the passive absorption of authorial meaning passed down from positions of dominance, but as "an ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for control over its meanings" (24).
• let me now suggest, though, some of the limitations of this conception, particularly in the contemporary digital context:
> poaching implies a hierarchy of lords and serfs:
In Jenkins's mode of reading, fan fiction is always subordinate to its parent text; he writes that "Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests" (23). In other words, it is fans' torturous enthrallment to an inadequate mass media that constrains them to add their own ancillary narratives to it.
This is one of what I'll suggest are three major schools of understanding the impetus of fanfic (among both academics and fans): the compensatory account (I'll talk more about the others when I come to Jones).
> Jenkins is willing to countenance certain aspects of the breakdown of the consumption/production binary:
- "For fans, consumption sparks production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable" (451)
- "fan writers suggest the need to redefine the politics of reading, to view textual property not as the exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by textual consumers" (469)
BUT, his exclusive (methodologically: ethnographic) focus on fan activity as an intervention at the site of reception — that is, mass media texts as raw materials for producing communities and popular mythologies that nonetheless remain derivative — leaves the ostensibly unilateral power of the TV industry to produce mass media texts essentially intact ("no substitution for meaningful change" [469]). Thus, it excludes the question of how fan production is actually central to media commodities — because, as I said earlier, TV depends economically on the interpretive work of its audience. And the question of how fan production participates the widespread challenge to control over the boundaries of information, which must be somehow fixed in order to package it as a product (e.g. peer to peer file sharing) — evidence (again, as we learn from semiotics and post-structuralism) that texts and their meanings are not contained within any obvious borders (vs. Jenkins: "The text that [fans] so lovingly preserve is the Star Trek that they created through their own speculations, not the one that Roddenberry produced for network air play" [465] - ?!)
(note: I'm not trying to claim that fandom is a "subversive" activity in the sense that Jenkins, along with the rest of his school of reception theory, does. Rather, I'm questioning the binary terms of this formulation, which unproblematically opposes hegemonic mass media texts [on the teevee] to reception practices that ostensibly resist them [somewhere else].)
jumping ahead to Jones: "intricately bound up with fan culture's move into cyberspace and with the possibilities opened up by digital technologies... from the outset, the virtual star is in a sense ‘outside' itself... [It] marks a profound shift in the balance of creative power between television industry and television audiences. Xena's status as a virtual star complicates her origins as a piece of copyrighted intellectual property... [She's] a text with innumerable ‘authors' that is written and realized through processes of imaginative translation that cannot be effectively policed or prohibited" (20)
• I need to give you a brief gloss, here, of fan fiction's legal status...
• much of the stuff about fandom's moral economy and discourses of legitimation through textual fidelity to the source text I'm just going to ignore, because I don't think these issues, in the way Jenkins formulates them, are relevant to contemporary fan culture. However, I will go into the question of fandom and gender, because this remains a central one. While contemporary online fandom is far, far larger and more diverse than the fan subculture Jenkins studied, and while there's no reliable demographic information about the makeup of this population (and collecting such data seems like a virtually impossible project), I think it's safe to say that the majority of active participants in fan production are straight and bi women (though this is a smaller majority than in Jenkins' day).
> academic work on fan fiction focuses to a disproportionate degree on documenting and explaining the phenomenon that slash fan fiction (defined by Professor J____ on Tuesday — same-gender pairings — in this case we're talking about men) is wildly popular among, and almost exclusively produced by, women. my problems with this:
- the idea that this situation is astonishing seems to rely on fairly simplistic assumptions about the gender dynamics of desire and identification. within a psychoanalytically-informed framework, that is, I don't see that there's anything particularly remarkable about women finding gay sex hot.
- along the same lines, it often seems to want to elevate slash by offering smut some alibi:
"While character sexuality constitutes one of the most striking characteristics of slash, and most slash fans concede that erotic pleasure is central to their interest in the genre, it seems false to define this genre exclusively in terms of its representation of sexuality. Slash is not so much a genre about sex as it is a genre about the limitations of traditional masculinity and about reconfiguring male identity." (TP 191)
- finally, it has almost totally excluded any attention to fandom's dynamics and diversity (or lack thereof) in relation to any other social formation: race, class, age, etc.
• that said, discussions of the relation of gender and slash remain lively throughout fandom. going through Jenkins' article, I picked out six different explanations of slash's appeal to women:
1. a subset of the compensatory account I already mentioned: the "need to reclaim feminine interests from the margins of masculine texts" (455) (also, explanation for why there's less girlslash: not as many ‘good' female characters)
2. "effort to construct a feminist utopia" (462) — relates to Russ's original account of how fans envision utopian egalitarian possibilities through same-gender pairings, because it was impossible to do so through a heterosexual couple (other differences, like human/alien, might stand in for gender). today, however, slash is just as likely to be condemned as anti-feminist by fans, the product of an internalized misogyny which rejects women and their sexuality.
3. "Men may feel comfortable joining discussions of future technologies or military lifestyle but not in pondering Vulcan sexuality, McCoy's childhood, or Kirk's love life" (454)
4. "Research suggests that men and women have been socialized to read for different purposes and in different ways" (454)
5. "fan writing adopts forms and functions traditional to women's literary culture" (455)
6. "a semiotics of masculinity, with the need to read men's often repressed emotional states from the subtle signs of outward gesture and expression" (462) (another explanation for lack of girlslash: it's more accepted for women to show affection, so bonds between female characters are less likely to be read as sexual subtext)
Any of these interpretations is potentially still relevant to fandom today.
online fandom/Jones
• In an article we didn't read called "The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters" [Screen. 43:1 (Spring 2002): 79-90.], Sara Gwenllian Jones raises another crucial critique of the typical academic focus on the wonders of slash as a resistant practice, writing that
[me:] "In such formulations, slash is interpreted as ‘resistant' or ‘subversive' because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters' heterosexuality" (81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates [in his essay], in the homophobia of "a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved" (81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is "an actualization of latent textual elements" (82).
• This points toward the second of what, again, I'm identifying as three major conceptualizations of the impetus behind fanfic: the subtextual account.
> now, the word "subtext" has been condemned for suggesting a hierarchy of meaning, wherein queer content is sub-: less present or legitimate than the presumably heterosexual maintext — which is not the point at all. I retain the term nonetheless because it is in widespread use among fans...
> if the compensatory account pits fan production against the text, in the subtextual account fans work with the text, filling out aspects (usually romance and sex) that are suggested on the show but not fully represented or representable
> far more prevalent, today, in my experience, than the compensatory account
• Jones thus suggests that fan production is tied to the televisual given that "There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers" (13) — and my major quibble with Jones is that she modestly claims for cult TV alone characteristics that hold for ALL TV. Remember back to our discussions of television's irreducible polysemy, perpetual play of flow and segmentation, and imperative to continually reproduce itself from the early weeks of the course.
• Xena: Warrior Princess, our fandom example for today, is unmatched before or since in the degree to which the producers and actors admitted to deliberately playing up gay subtext (though we should note that sanctioned heterosexual subtext is extremely common) — as should have been apparent from the episode we screened and Jones' description.
http://xenite.org/faqs/subtext.html
As Jones points out, this really highlights what I see as a problematic tendency on the part of fans to rely on an argument from authorial intent to legitimate their queer interpretations (and to feel their readings are illegitimate when they don't get this validation, as they almost never do outside of Xena) — and we've already discussed the critique from semiotics of understanding texts as bounded, autonomous works produced by a singular author, and its particular force when it comes to TV texts, which are of course produced through the collaboration of hundreds of different people.
• Now, the compensatory and subtextual accounts of fanfic may seem opposite, but in practice there is a continuum between them based on how subtext (whether intentional or not) is viewed politically: is it an opportunity for fans to actively participate in producing mass media texts, as Jones suggests when she writes "This ambiguity is a source of pleasure for many fans, who enjoy spotting ‘subtextual' moments and filling in the gaps for themselves" (19). Or, is it a cynical mass marketing ploy in the form of "heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon" (19), thus appealing backhandedly to viewers starved for queer representation, while maintaining plausible deniability for the sake of squeamish straight viewers. This latter shades toward the compensatory, as writers may see themselves as queerly remediating characters who should be openly gay onscreen.
> Jones briefly opens the question of the economics of relation as well (20), but I want to quote you a more extensive passage from another article by Jeanne E. Hamming:
The circuit created between Xena: Warrior Princess and Xena slash fiction, between the production of the series (as commodity) and the production of slash confession (also as commodity), is, in short, a capitalist relation; "sex(uality) sells!" This relation inevitably leads, according to Brian Massumi, to the "real subsumption" of society: the penetration, expansion, and intensification of the capitalist machine into the social fields of identity, increasing capitalist production and consumption through the appropriation of sexual identities offered for sale on the market (Massumi 154)...
Furthermore, the implication of a lesbian sexuality which, nevertheless, always remains hidden just beneath the surface, perpetuates the series' marketability by maintaining the tension between secrecy and openness... the crisis of "not knowing for sure"--has the effect of continually regenerating the (very profitable) desire-producing circuit created between Xena and its fans. [19/21]
This is another reason why we need to be cautious of glorifying fanfic and slash as resistant, even in the alternative sense that I'm provisionally proposing. This takes us back to our debates, in the week on consumerism, about whether and how effective resistance to a capitalism with no outside could take shape.
We have to also remember that discursive relations are always power relations, and those with more cultural capital have more power to produce legitmate meanings. As Jones points out, "Xena's star text is by no means entirely open to interpretation" (17): fans are incredibly invested in the onscreen portion of the texts they're engaged in, and this, indeed, is outside of their control.
• The third approach to fan practice I'm calling the lateral account.
Jenkins: "As Star Trek fan writing has come to assume an institutional status in its own right and therefore to require less legitimation through appeals to textual fidelity, a new conception of fan fiction has emerged, one that perceives the stories not as a necessary expansion of the original series text but rather as chronicles of alternate universes, similar to the program world in some ways and different in others" (466)
Jones: "uber" stories
other instances and sources of varying indifference to canon: AUs, crossovers, personal interests, prurient interest, writing workshop
(also a continuum, not an absolute break with the other modes)
This suggests some of the diversity of contemporary fan production, so, continuing the historical development of fandom post-Jenkins:
• usenet groups for fan fiction were up and running by the early 1990's. > the ones that still exist (like alt.startrek.creative [1991], still the central clearinghouse for Trek fanfic) have largely transitioned to email lists [example]
> bulletin boards in their web incarnation [example]
> personal web sites and archives [ff.net] (+ webrings) [example]
> livejournal [example]
• Jones suggests that one of the aspect of TV that particularly invites fan practice is its seriality — if you recall, we've discussed TV's defining temporality of liveness, presence, and immediacy: it's constant availability as a world we can turn on and off at will makes it seem as if its characters exist in a time that runs parallel to our own. The internet is even more uninterrupted, more fragmentary and diffuse than television, which may contribute to its aptness as a medium for fandom. Moreover, Jones notes, via Ellis, that "television's contemporaneous cycles of promotion and broadcast effect a slippage between actor and character in the audience's imagination" (11). If TV time and realtime tend to merge, that is, so do the televisual and real worlds more broadly — as the Lewis article we read earlier in the semester, for example, explores.
The episode of Xena that we watched plays self-reflexively with this quality.
[summarize]
http://whoosh.org/epguide/dejavu.html:
but to me, this is what's so brilliant about the ep!
laments: the universe and the characters can be arbitrarily recast to suit the needs of a particular episode, it appears... which means that trying to make any kind of coherent sense of the show as a whole is perhaps a futile exercise. Perhaps one can expect no more from a commercial TV show
Jones, on the other hand, sees TV's "invariably incompletely furnished" (13) worlds as positive, the source of its irreducible interactivity.
• The fan fiction story I handed out deals with similar issues:
> Mary Sue/self-insertion —> the boundary between televisual and real
> narrates spectatorship, and fan subjectivity
> narrates fan interpretations and fanfic (the J/7 "story")
> ultimate convergence of fan and idol
• Thus, my differences from Jones: she concludes that actor is subordinate to character on TV, and fans see Lawless as distinct from and secondary to Xena. While TV actors may certainly be more minor celebrities than movie stars, for all the reasons I've just been discussing, and in my experiences of fandom, I think the slippage between actor and character is much greater. At least, when it comes to TV and its fan cultures, the boundaries between consumer/producer, text/audience, straight/queer, capitalist/resistant, fictional/real are never fixed and impermeable.
