Queer Geek Theory, and Related Wanderings

I just got back from Console-ing Passions in Santa Barbara, a wonderfully inspiring and exciting conference. This is the paper I presented. It connects a lot to the questions I was raising in my last post, I think, as well as being my summary of / intervention in a set of fan meta-conversations with which some people reading will doubtless be very familiar.

This is more or less word for word what I presented, although I’ve cut out the visual punctuation (stills from fanvids and icons) and references to it. As conference paper and blog entry, it’s not intended to be my final word on any of these things.

Televisual Transformation and its Discontents:
Slash Fan Fiction, “Queer Female Space” and Race

The Sci-Fi Channel spinoff show Stargate: Atlantis embodies some of sci-fi TV’s commonest and most problematic racial and sexual politics. It focuses on its white male protagonists and keeps the women, strong as they may be, in the background. It insists that there are no queers in space, holding back from more than the slightest subtextual suggestion of nonheterosexual identity or desire. It maps a colonizing discourse of US militarism onto an Othered galaxy populated by backwards humans properly grateful for rescue from life-sucking aliens. And in terms of race it falls victim to a combination of TV stereotyping and sci-fi cliche, killing off or writing out almost all Earthling characters of color and carefully marking the alienness of the Pegasus Galaxy natives who just happen to be the only major characters played by actors of color.

Stargate: Atlantis has a hugely active online fan community which engages in making art with and from the material the show provides. A significant proportion of fans regularly voice criticisms like mine. Such opinions lead to impassioned blog debates in fan communities, which have initiated many into queer critiques and antiracist ideologies. The metadiscourses and vernacular theorizing which surface in such conversations have much to say about the complex intersections of pleasure and politics which shape fans’ and others’ engagements with popular culture.

Academic and popular writings about fans tend to focus on the radical, conservative, capitalist and/or anarchic qualities of fannish love. Jonathon Gray recently insisted on the importance of viewers’ hate for media productions; but fans’ more ambivalent affects toward their objects are rarely foregrounded in academic analysis. When questions not only of taste but also of racism, sexism and homophobia get involved, the textual and discursive spheres active fans build around and from their objects become very complex.

This paper is an attempt to look at the ambivalences, ambiguities and discomforts engendered by the intersection of the affective and the political in subcultural fandom on LiveJournal. I don’t want to talk about whether fan practices are subversive or dominant, oppositional or capitalist — I’ll start from the assumption that they are both and neither. Instead I will discuss specific subversions, dominations, and oppositions as I home in on practices that show online fan networks’ intersections with feminist, queer and antiracist investments in identity, representation and activist transformation. Internet drama and internet pleasure are world-making practices of the sort that theorists of performance like Jill Dolan and José Muñoz have described. But what kinds of worlds do they make, what happens when worlds collide, and how, if at all, do they attempt to change wider political worlds?

Slash fans’ practices build queered worlds on and from shows in which same-sex desire is banished or permitted to very limited degrees. Love, sex, and lust are drawn over and mapped on to characters, and circulate between discursive and physical bodies in front of TV and and computer screens. Science fiction fans, mostly women, have been sharing homoerotic, sexually explicit stories about media characters since the 70s. In Stargate fandom, the two male leads (John Sheppard and Rodney McKay, played by Joe Flanagan and David Hewlett) elicit huge quantities of fiction and art. Although many, even most slash writers have no interest in politicizing their hobby, subsections of “meta” focused fandom are intensely involved in theorizing themselves. The language of queer politics and queer theory frequently traffics among these fans, whose investments in academic theorizing ranges from professional participation to open hostility.

Kristina Busse, Robin Anne Reid and I have articulated these self-theorizations in an academic context. Some slash fans articulate their erotic sociability as a “queer female space” where shared sexual fantasies create a communal imaginary sphere. We found that slash fandom’s queerness exists in fictive insertions into heteronormative textual spaces which open up queer subject positions; at locations where virtual erotic play in and with a heteronormative text destabilizes it; and in intersubjective zones where sexualized fantasy exchanges trouble norms of gender and desire.

Writing about queer counterpublics, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner describe the work of “elaborat[ing] new worlds of culture and social relations in which gender and sexuality can be lived, including forms of intimate association, vocabularies of affect, styles of embodiment, erotic practices, and relations of care and pedagogy”. In reframing what counts as sex and blurring these erotic practices with intimate sociabilities, slash fan culture (at its most utopian) is capable of doing all these things. Based on shared fantasy expressed through the exchange of words and images, these online worlds are framed by relations of cathexis to specific cultural objects and bounded by those objects’ accessibility and appeal. In these ways of thinking about practices of fan fantasy, the transformation of TV develops into a worldmaking force that seems to have little to do with the representational politics of the show whose subtext provides its jumping-off point. Those representational politics are never irrelevant, though.

Fans often purposefully transform what they perceive to be their show’s crucial lacks. In Stargate fandom, fictions explore the effect of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell regulations on the possibility of queerness on Atlantis, and speculate about the deeper alterities of the show’s sketched-out “alien” cultures. In some ways, we might read these rewritings as worldmaking practices in the model of the art José Muñoz analyses in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. He finds in minoritarian subjects’ politicized appropriations of majority culture a way to “disassemble that sphere of publicity and use its parts to build an alternative reality” (196). But is it meaningful to think of fandom as in any sense “minoritarian”? And what violence might such thinking do to the perspectives of those who are minoritized within fan cultures?

Muñoz’s framework of disidentification emphasizes readings of the sort Stuart Hall has called oppositional: explicit and political refusals of the dominant narrative. Slash fans are far more likely to de-emphasize politics and focus on pleasure. The transformation of TV worlds that have no access to queerness into online worlds that are soaking in it has no necessary relation to the privileges and oppressions that are the conditions of possibility for mainstream TV’s lacks. Online queer participation may or may not extend into the offline world, and even there it can mean many different things. This relationship and its politics are cyclically debated in the fannish blogosphere, with the worlds of radical queer politics, liberal gay politics and various iterations of academic queer theory in contention with one another.

Joanna Russ famously wrote that the “what if’ of slash fanfiction was “what if I were free”: if women were free to transform worlds according to their own desire. Conflicts over the meaning of slash fiction and the worlds it builds are vital reminders that “freedom” of desire, interpretation, and interaction doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Fannish participation relies on certain material and social requirements, and for some (though not for all) these include a willingnessm more easily accessed by those with greater privilege, to bracket problematic “real life” concerns. While some fans emphasize “queer female space” as a utopian zone of shared subversive pleasure, those who draw attention to dynamics of misogyny, racism or antisemitism in fiction, discussion or the source texts around which they revolve may be seen as raining on everyone’s parade. When pleasure is privileged to this extent, any critique which is perceived as endangering that pleasure can be squashed all too easily. The utopian network can end up exclusionary, revolutionizing the lives of only a chosen few.

Placed in this context, fandom’s queer female space might share many of the problematic aspects of queer and feminist politics which do not foreground intersectional critique. Jasbir Puar critiques “queer exceptionalism” in her work on terrorist bodies and what she calls homonationalism, writing about how “‘freedom from norms’ becomes a regulatory queer ideal” that serves to abjectify bodies of color who are queered in less pleasurable ways (22). Fandom’s queered pleasures may risk functioning similarly. Making the white protagonists fuck might subvert the show’s homophobic narratives and yet rewrite or exacerbate other dangerous norms.

In the case of Stargate, that may mean slashed characters’ bodies and by extension the politics of their writers can be more easily folded into the US nationalist, pro-military slant of the show. That’s not to say that this is what all slash does or what all Stargate fans do; many other readings are of course possible. But a theory of the love- and lust-saturated queer worldmaking of slash fandom shouldn’t erase the failures of that transformation, or the extent to which it can participate in building a self-theorized “queer female” world from which some bodies (those not white, not pretty, not normative enough) are erased. The uncomfortable relationalities that have circulated around race in Stargate fandom on LiveJournal offer some alternative, less easily celebrated worldmaking practices.

In March 2007, several Stargate fans angrily complained about another fan fiction writer’s problematic representation of Ronon Dex, the dreadlocked Pegasus Galaxy inhabitant played by biracial Hawaiian actor Jason Momoa, as subservient to the white main characters of a story. In response, posts and debates detailing concerns about the interrelationship of privilege, TV stereotyping, and fannish pleasure spiralled across Stargate’s interconnected fan networks. These were far from new concerns, having led fans of color to create several online communities dedicated to challenging the racial politics of TV and fandom. In this quote, which I won’t read aloud, Darkrose, a frequent voice in such conversations, summarized the frustration of ongoing and repetitive conflicts about race in fanfiction, which mirror arguments over so-called political correctness and oversensitivity in many other contexts:

I might have been more diplomatic about asking the author of this particular fic why she chose to put Ronon in that role in her fic. Then again, I might not have, depending on how tired I was of constantly having to explain myself and educate people who genuinely don’t understand why the fact that the small number of non-white characters in most fandoms don’t get nearly as much attention from fan writers as even the most minor white characters might possibly make some of us uncomfortable. (Darkrose)

On this occasion the discussions had a particularly broad reach, variously emerging as flamewars, intense discussions of race and class privilege, and challenges to fans’ desires to see their televisual transformations and queer female spaces as exempting them from potentially offending. The racially problematic dynamics underlying the show’s presentation of a happy multicultural team were discussed by several commenters along with the significance of fannish transformation, of the queerness and femaleness of the spaces fans create around their shows, and of the challenges of acknowledging and combating racism within them.

Fanfiction is the least fucked up, racist, sexist thing in this patriarchy. And the fanfic is certainly less racist than the show itself, which I’m sure you still are watching. (Jessant)

I’m so sorry my experiences in life being treated as the Other harsh your fandom buzz, but I don’t get the privilege to say it’s just a show and merrily flit on to the next hot white male. (Moxie Brown)

You simply do not get to be all proud of your bad liberal, pro-gay, political self, your porn-positive, feminist self when using big buzz words like “subtext” and “subverting the dominant paradigm” and then turn around and look puzzled and scratch your head when people ask why other dominant paradigms in the media are carried over into fandom. (Telesilla)

One commenter wrote that fandom is the “least fucked up, racist, sexist thing in this patriarchy,” especially in comparison to the show itself. For this commenter, perhaps by virtue of its queer female spaces, fandom as creativity is always already outside the patriarchal, racist paradigms of mainstream TV — and yet watching mainstream TV automatically embeds one in supporting said paradigms. Yet for others, the transformation of TV politics is not only possible but ethically imperative for fan writers. This interpretation rests on the worldmaking potential of fandom which is so powerfully expressed by proponents of fandom as queer female space, but brings it into an intersectional sphere where the utopian tendencies of fandom’s self-description require serious autocritique if they can be taken seriously. Being pro-gay, porn-positive and situated amid queer interactive worlds built by desire is meaningless if the “fandom buzz” is eliminated for white fans by the recognition of dominant paradigms that privilege them.

This debate over race in Stargate fandom became a reference point for LiveJournal fandom’s continuing dealings with racism. In the wake of these explosive discussions, critiques of the dominant paradigm began to appear much more frequently in fandom’s newsletters and RSS feeds. The fans who did not take kindly to complaints over Ronon and the introduction of critical race theory to their hobby have been neither eliminated nor silenced, of course, and their perspectives probably still outnumber those I have cited here. But fiction and image “festivals” and “carnivals” to celebrate characters of color have multiplied. More voices have been added to those critiquing fans’ problematic utopianisms and blind spots.

One implication of these conversations about race seems to be that more intense demands are made of fannish metadiscourse: that it live up to its self-image by making something more of its source material than the source makes of itself. In the wake of this discussion and others like it, Peggy McIntosh’s famous white privilege checklist and antiracist blogs have become required reading for significant sections of fan subculture. Some fans have publicly moved from defensive to critical positions; Amireal traced her own progression from “Of course racism is bad! Sesame street and my parents taught me that!” through being “made fun of” for racist assumptions and being unable to “parse” writings on privilege and white supremacy, to eventually understand[ing] “more than the basic principle” of critiques made in fandom’s race debates. Such conversations are not as sexy as sharing porn, but they do perform their own kind of world building, challenging the positivity and political irrelevance of the affects most would associate with being a fan and tempering the focus on pleasure. So should this be understood as progress? Is internet drama changing the world?

If so-called queer female spaces get too comfortable in the televisual disorientations they practice, then for them to be made uncomfortable, confused out of the unquestioned centrality of whiteness, could be a worldmaking project of its own: one that potentially breaks out of what Sarah Ahmed calls the “lines that accumulate privilege” (179). Critiques of racial privilege in queer worlds, fannish and otherwise, disorient expected relationships to objects and communities, marking the self-consciously subversive as embedded in dominant oppressie structures. In this case, they call attention to the politics of fannish love and encourage the coexistence of critical ambivalence. In fannish idiom, they engage in the harshing of squee as a necessary political intervention.

But it wouldn’t do to create a new quasi-utopian narrative from the dystopianizing of another. We should not forget who is called upon to do the work of this valuable disorientation, and the dangers of framing its progress as an educative and enlightening project. Ahmed remarks that “It is not up to queers to disorientate straights, just as it is not up to bodies of color to do the work of antiracism, although of course disorientation might still happen and we do ‘do’ this work” (177). Fans of color may become the voices whose self-evident oppression does the work of a discomfort made political that may, in the end, be expected only to teach white fans to be better liberal multicultural subjects.

Muñoz writes in Disidentifications of the “burden of liveness” that gets imposed on minority subjects who are expected to “‘perform’ for the amusement of a dominant power bloc” (187). For fans who find themselves in the racial, sexual, cultural, gender or ability minority, that burden of liveness may become a burden of critique, where majority fans on the road to enlightenment feel entitled to be led by the hand through their mistakes. Marginalization of viewers of color may then become a self-perpetuating force as their experience of race-on-TV is made an archetypically critical, serious one by virtue of embodiment rather than inclination.

Critical race cultural studies, like queer studies, have long been suspicious of the ‘positive images’ school of representation and interpretation because of the possibilities and pleasures its policing of stereotype erases. While fans’ perpetuation of racial stereotyping and marginalization must of course be challenged, that should not happen at the expense of other interpretive possibilities. Decentering pleasure and its associated utopianisms risks denying pleasures to some who desire them, and erasing something else: the fact that uncomfortable critiques of representation don’t preclude the comforts of fannish pleasure.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sarah. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
Amireal. “It’s like we speak a different language..” 2 Aug 2007. 17 Apr 2008 .
Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-66.
Darkrose. “”Are you angry?” “Hell yeah!”.” 30 Mar 2007. 20 Apr 2008 .
Gray, Jonathon. “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television Without Pity and Textual Dislike,” American Behavioral Scientist 48.7 (2005): 840-58.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. Ed. Dorothy Hobson Stuart Hall, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis. 1980. 128-38.
Jessant. Comment on “Atlantis meta: time to stop and think about things.” 30 Mar 2007. 20 Apr 2008 .
Lothian, Alexis, Kristina Busse and Robin Reid. “Yearning Void and Infinite Potential: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space,” English Language Notes 45.2 (2007): 103-12.
Moxie Brown. “Because I just can’t help myself….” 29 Mar 2007. 20 Apr 2008 .
Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Russ, Joanna. “Pornography By Women, for Women, With Love.” Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1985. 79-100.
Telesilla. “SGA Meta: As the bowl of petunias said, “Oh no, not again.”.” 30 Mar 2007. 20 Apr 2008 .

I haven’t been the best of bloggers, have I? It’s so long since I posted, WordPress has changed its interface.

The conference went very well, anyway. Tavia Nyong’o gave a wonderful talk about The Wire, lots of people talked very intelligently about obsession, and we finished off with an evening of creativity and the scholarly performance of critical karaoke. I didn’t do a critical karaoke piece, but I very much want to some day. I’d be torn between the Manic Street Preachers’ “Faster” and Belle and Sebastian’s “Mary Jo.”

***

I am buried in deadlines and I lack the energy for actual blogging, at least that’s what the still-unfinished post on Kara Thrace’s tragic heterosexuality is telling me. But when working on my conference paper for Console-ing Passions this week, I ran across this file on my hard drive. I wrote it a year ago in response to a friend’s question about my thoughts on affect and politics, and even though I’ve read a lot more books since then so that it all feels rather obvious, I still think it’s interesting enough to be worth throwing out there.

Notes on affect and fandom

I think it’s really important to pay attention to affect, to our emotional and visceral reactions to texts, culture, theory – to our love, and to our hate. We can’t hide behind the illusion of objective quality, whether in the texts that we might academically study or in the reasons we give for why we watch our favourite shows over and over again. Exploring the processes behind affective reactions and tracing the work that affect does are really important projects.

But I don’t think it’s enough to stop there, either. Exploring affect in and of itself strikes me as moving too close to pretending that our loves and hates are any more innocent of implication in social and political structures than our perceptions of ‘quality’ are. If you’re interested in doing theoretical work that has a political aspect, that reflects commitments to feminism or critical race studies or Marxism or Queer or whatever else, the political questions and contradictions that cluster around affect become really important. My joy in a novel with revolutionary politics, in a queer character appearing on my favourite TV show, in a woman of color kicking ass in a movie, are one thing; my pleasurable tears at romantic melodrama that lauds everything I try to strive against in daily life, my excitement at a rousing portrayal of war, are quite another. And thinking about affective reactions on their own elides that distinction; glosses over the fact that our emotions often contradict our opinions, that affect lies.

So what do you do about that, if you continue to value the affective and you don’t believe in dismissing everything non-ideologically-sound as false consciousness? Maybe communal articulations of affect, where reactions are shared and discussed, are locations where the political implications of affect can get hashed out. In queer communities where the attraction of The L-Word is understood in terms of the general lack of representation of dykes on TV as well as the lack of representativeness of the cast; and in fan communities where whole subcultures built around love for a source text engage in projects of rewriting and critiquing. Not all fans, all of the time; but the critical, feminist, queer parts of fandom I’ve engaged with taught me to revalue my own affective reactions, to own up to them even when they don’t line up with my politics.

If fandom is a subculture (or more properly a set of subcultures), it’s a subculture organised around affect. And as such, it takes the affective out of the realm of the entirely individual, which means that the contradictions of personal taste don’t necessarily function as pure idiosyncrasy any more. Communal readings and rewritings can repurpose the dynamics of TV shows (slash) and maybe even the gender performance of fans (since many of those who let their inner teenage girl out to play in fandom had stridently disavowed such emotional behaviour as a trapping of steretypical femininity they refuse); they can carry out blistering critiques while still finding something to love, as many fans of color and white antiracist ally fans do with regard to the unfortunate racial politics of much science fiction. So I wonder whether communal articulations of affect, discussions of the political contradictions and implications of what we are and are not drawn to as individuals and as groups, could be a starting point for one affective theory that pays attention to politics?

***

Of course, this blog is the least communal of my soapboxes, and the one where readers are least likely to mean the same thing I mean when they say “fandom.”

Less theory, more geek for this entry.

I just have to give a little shout out to Brian K. Vaughn and Lost for the scene which made me utter this post’s subject line in a tone of disbelief. And, most especially, for the fact that they did not leave the queerness of two men getting very familiar with one another in a hotel room in the realm of the subtextual:

Minor character, gratuitously queer with no particular relevance to plot and no angst whatsoever. Imagine that! It’s almost like watching Doctor Who (Russell T Davies edition, the last season of which featured bisexual Shakespeare and two little old ladies married to one another, in addition to Captain Jack’s equal opportunity lechery). Given that Vaughn, who wrote this episode, slipped a wee Doctor cameo into the Buffy Season 8 comic he wrote, I suspect I’m not the only one seeing the resemblance in strategies for queer representation.

There is, of course, a lengthy critique to be made about the kinds of meaning attached to queerness on TV (US TV in particular, though certainly not exclusively) that caused this blink-and-miss-it moment to make me jump up and down in my chair with glee quite so hard. But I just finished Battlestar Galactica S3 and I have a lengthy post about Starbuck brewing that will definitely be going there; I think I’ll save it for that.

*ETA: Sorry, I forgot to resize the image and now it will mess up your RSS reader, if mine is anything to judge by.*

… Aside from all the regular graduate school time-consuming things such as term papers, reading, grading and teaching, I have been devoting an extraordinary amount of mental energy to co-chairing my department’s conference on obsession and excess. Follow the poster thumbnail link to see further information, including a schedule.

It’s on March 28 and 29 2008 and we have keynote speeches from Tavia Nyong’o and Stephen Elliott, as well as an evening of readings, a DJ set from Tavia Nyong’o, and critical karaoke — where a scholar of pop performs reflections on a song while the song plays in the background. It should be a pretty fun event.

Although I must admit I am looking forward to it being over so I can have my life back.

Science fiction in book form was and is my first and most enduring fannish love. It gave me ways to imagine worlds and people differently, models for gender and sexuality from the painfully normative to the radically queer, started me on tracks of thinking about futurity, humanity and alterity that have led me all the way to my current pursuit of a PhD.

Televisual science fiction and I have had a rather more casual relationship, most often mediated by the interpretive and transformative practices of fan artistic production. It isn’t often that a TV show can provide the intellectual excitement and stimulation I expect from the best written science fiction. But I’ve spent the past two months mainlining the first two seasons of (new) Battlestar Galactica (hereafter acronymed BSG), and it has (almost) everything this theory-loving sf-geek could desire.

I still have a season and a special to go before I’m caught up on BSG, but I couldn’t hold back from posting some of the thoughts that have been making me overexcited as I viewed. I’ve been having ongoing discussions with Julie Levin Russo who writes fabulous queer media theory about BSG (here, for example, although that one I’m studiously avoiding until I catch up, as the first paragraph spoiled me for a major Season Two event I would have preferred not to know in advance). This post is enormously influenced by her thoughts about BSG’s queer technological reproductive economies, so I dedicate it to her.

***

I knew I was going to love BSG from the miniseries’ opening salvo: humanity’s home planet destroyed by their robot creations the Cylons, survivors adrift in space, Cylons among them indistinguishable from themselves, paranoia, politics, conflict. I have a blog entry in me for many of the running themes in BSG, I think, but for now I want to talk about aspects most central to my dissertationish ideas: what BSG has to say about humanity’s future. Or, rather, the lack thereof: because what I really want to talk about is Cylons, and the complexities of their drive for humanity’s death.

Cylons (which I would prefer not to capitalize, but apparently BSG’s writers and fans think otherwise) are something of a theorygeek’s dream. They lend themselves to multitudinous metaphors, which is one of the major reasons I love these genocidal robots so very very much.

***

For example:

Cylons are humanity’s ungrateful children, and they’re not going to continue in the family way. They may look like their parents, but they refuse to follow their path or their rules: they spat on the hand that fed and abused them and then claimed the universe for their own. There’s a scene early in season one when a Cylon woman murders a human baby, prefiguring the genocide of the human: even as I was experiencing the appropriate horror and disgust, I thought of Lee Edelman’s exhortations to say “fuck you” to the innocent face of hetero-reproductive futurity. Cylons choose not to choose life, if life is defined as human. They just take their negation of reproductive futurity a little more literally than your average Edelmanian queer; they’re not afraid to kill a baby or two.

***

Another one:

Like terroristic figures from Lucifer to Frankenstein and beyond, the Cylons were made by those who they now terrorize, creators reaping what they sowed. They only treat humans the way humans treated them and themselves: they’re Caliban too to these Colonials, who taught them language and their profit on it is they know how to curse. And their language, which as the series progresses they use for many things other than killing and cursing, is wireless networks. Imagine what your iphone could do if it rose to rebellious consciousness.

***

Thirdly and more completely:

Watch this short clip, from the episode “Resurrection Ship part 2″.

This conversation between Sharon Valerii, a Cylon who lived as a human for years without knowing she wasn’t, and Commander Adama, leader of the human forces, epitomizes the antihumanist pleasures available in watching BSG as (if you will) a Cylon.

Adama wants to know why ‘they (you, we)’ hate ‘us’; why the Cylons can’t let humanity have its future, why mankind’s children are ungrateful, why they turned genocidal. Sharon, in return, insists that his humanistic terms are not as universal as he thinks: that he knows “why do they hate us?” is a question, in this case, to which the asker already contains the answer. This is a show about saving the human race that isn’t afraid to wonder if the human race is worth saving, as ‘saving,’ ‘worth,’ and ‘human’ are currently defined. By the old white guy.* Sharon, neither white nor a guy and thus often excluded from the defaults of the human on grounds other than her Cylonhood, asks whether the flaws in the creation he romantically defined might not outweigh the benefits after all: whether the future he and his are fighting for would be better off not existing.

It’s not that BSG’s sympathy, or for that matter my own, is not with Adama, with survival, with lives and their dramas lived under attack. Even Sharon, brimful of interpersonal connections and memories that never happened, has defected to the human cause. But in her particular ambivalence to the continuation of a human race with which she has thrown in her lot, Sharon asks what we might find outside it in futures not accounted for in Adamaesque speechifying, in people who don’t ask why ‘they’ hate ‘us,’ who don’t get to be his kind of human?

***

It’s clear, I think, that I’m interested in reading the Cylons as queer (among other things). There’s plenty of sexy evidence in addition to my tenuous Edelman analogies: beautiful women whose love for one another changes worlds, and the familial and reproductive weirdnesses of multiple differentiated iterations of downloaded consciousnesses. BSG is rich in coded queernesses and all but empty of actual represented nonstraight sexuality, which is fairly annoying, but I do think that the Cylons’ many queernesses mean that much of what could be most normative in BSG ends up appearing slanted, askew. Disorienting, to turn a phrase from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, since I read it last week and this is supposed to be an academic blog after all.

There are Cylon women who fall in love with human men, several of them, for whom love brings a respect for human life and a sense of the value of the individual over Cylon collectivity. There’s a baby, born of such a coupling, who seems to signify the future, though what kind no one seems sure. But these machine women are not (yet, anyway) selling out their collective for the Colonial men. The Cylon revolutionaries who change the Cylon future for love aren’t privileging humanity, returning to the family, or honouring their creators, I don’t think. They’re reaching for a different relation between individual and collective, Cylon and human, one that can allow for experiential difference and relative autonomy on behalf of both species.

Love, as Julie theorizes, does complex things in Cylon and Cylon/human mythologies and technologies. It complicates the drive for species extinction on both sides, turns murderous urges internal and reparative ones across unexpected lines, gives birth to mutants and hybrids.

From what I gather by osmosis and Julie, there’s lots more antihumanist reproduction, death, and queer futurity in my future of Cylon spectatorship.

—

*ETA: Edward James Olmos, I have just been informed, is Latino, not white; which is an excellent example of why even bloggers should do their homework. I still think Adama occupies a structural position of unquestioned authority and setting of terms that is to some extent coextensive with what an in-BSG-universe equivalent to whiteness would be; but (especially given the Pegasus arc) one could argue against that.

I’m a words person. I can’t remember that ever not being true. Not just a sentences person, a meanings person, a linguistic semiotics person, though all of those too, but a letters-on-pages person.

There was, clearly, a time before I could read, but I can’t remember it. Nor can I remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by the shapes of letters, their lines and curves and circles and the small differences in the ways they’re formed; and by the ways they combine into syllables, phonemes, words, the strange admixtures of English pronunciation and spelling. I used to invent phonetic alphabets in my head before I learned the international one. If I know a word, I know how to spell it, and if I don’t know how to spell a word, I don’t know it: the words I think in are visual things. (This has been very helpful in learning European languages, but I can’t imagine how I would go about approaching a non-Roman alphabet.)

All of this is very useful for a student of English Literature, but as my academic interests have come to slide away from the strictly literary (though never leaving that behind) and towards media, film, TV, online spheres of words and so much more, I’ve come to realise how many other kinds of thinking there are and how much words and sentences can only partially encompass. I can write about a song, a video, a picture; I can write myself in circles about the paradoxes of representation, the impossibility of approaching things as if they were outside language, but there are still myriad things a visual or auditory art maker can do that I’ll never approach.

Lately, I’ve entered into a fascination with one particular genre of audiovisual artistic communication: vidding, which is what members of media fan subcultures (and some other people) call it when they edit clips of TV shows together with songs to make interpretive music videos. Fans have been doing this since before VCRs were widely available, but new media technologies have given them a lot more options, and there’s some seriously great art coming out of vidding culture now. One of the reasons fanvids fascinate me so much is that they juxtapose sounds and images to create arguments, doing intellectual work for which it would be easy to assume words are perfectly adequate, and showing — by emotional resonances, by multifaceted interpretive possibilities — that even without creating from whole cloth in a traditional sense (not that there aren’t fanvids that do that), just in the art of context audiovisuality is worth more than the sum of its parts or the list of its interpretations.

Fanvid comprehension is a skill it takes a fairly significant learning curve to acquire, at least for the less visually-minded of us (some vids take more comprehension than others, clearly). I’m a relative latecomer to the genre, and I noticed the curve first when, on the fourth or fifth viewing, I finally understood how every shot and clip in T. Jonesy and Killa’s slash Star Trek vid to Nine Inch Nails, Closer, was absolutely necessary to the dramatic, tragic story the vid was telling. It took that long to make it absolutely impossible for me to watch the vid and not take old-school Trek, which I have often enjoyed for its camp value, deeply seriously. Now I can’t imagine watching from another subject position; but remembering the first time I watched and only noticed that Spock wanted to fuck Kirk like an animal without understanding the why and how of it, I am a lot more sympathetic to the laughter the vid elicits from the uninitiated than the many more involved vid fans who find it just as unthinkable as laughing at rape ought to be.

Closer is also a vid whose distribution story highlights some of the major differences between vidders and other producers of the DIY video 24-7 celebrated, and the problems intersections can bring: when it went viral on YouTube its creator was driven into hiding by unwanted publicity and excessive demands on bandwidth. (Henry Jenkins discusses the reasons for this in his blog entry How to Watch a Fanvid.)

I’m watching my DVD of the 24-7 “Genealogy of Vidding” show (curated by Laura Shapiro and presented by Francesca Coppa) as I type, breaking for occasional full-screen appreciation of vids like Heresluck’s Superstar. (Laura posted links to the full line-up here.) Rather a different experience to sitting in a large auditorium watching it on a huge screen, but it gives me pleasant tingles of that affect, with all the problematic pleasure of seeing something geeky women have done in near-secret for years get institutional validation. I say problematic in the cold light of all my consciousness about the unpleasantnesses and violences involved in institutionalizing anything, normalizing, creating canons, leaving some parts out; sitting in the audience it was all melodramatic joy, alternately giggling and tearing up.

24-7 seems to have been something of a breakthrough in terms of my own ability to think imagistically. I spent much of the weekend in the company of vidders, and between listening to their discussions and watching many videos, apparently something clicked: ever since, I’ve been continually surprising myself by mentally juxtaposing snatches of the music on my ipod and the TV and movies I’ve been watching, imagining how they would look in a vid, thinking through how a videomusical argument could be made and how it would differ from a written one. I’m taking a class this semester that requires me to produce some kind of scholarly visual project, and for the first time I feel that’s something I might actually be capable of.

Thinking in words and making them visual seems always to be what people think it’s necessary to go to school to learn. Literacy, literature. It’s not a cognitive style I’m going to be giving up any time soon. But it’s exciting to recognise not only that there are other ways of thinking but that I may even be capable of thinking them. I don’t think it’s coincidental that this visual literacy comes most appreciably to me, despite enrolment in several film classes, from outside the sphere of academic book-learning.

SHUT UP AND MAKE SOMETHING, says the back of my tight-fitting volunteer T-shirt. I’m not too good at either, so I’ll compromise by making a blog entry. Whether that counts as shutting up and making something or doing the opposite, I leave up to your interpretation.

I was very interested in the discussions of intellectual property, which felt especially relevant given that so much of the video art to which the weekend was devoted can be characterised as infringing in some way or another — three of the genres represented (anime music videos, vidding and political remix) are forms that remix and remake visual and audio footage produced by media companies. There was a lot of utopian rhetoric floating around at the conference, with which I have varying degrees of sympathy (I am fairly sure that my dissertation is going to center on the concept of utopia; but that’s because I find I have a constant need to redefine it). My own (critical, negative, or some other as yet unnamed adjective) utopian feelings popped up most often around the questions of IP and fair use.

One of my favourite presentations was by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann, who talked about the difference between intellectual property law based on licensing (getting permission to use work someone else made in advance, like TV shows have to do) and the law to which online services are subject, in which users can do what they like until someone complains and sends a cease and desist letter, after which they have to take the offending content down. For creators, he said, if you’re willing to be sued, you can reach an audience, and that’s a better system than ever before in US copyright media law.

Lohmann spoke about his concerns regarding the tightening of copyright laws, that automated systems may soon refuse to accept copyrighted materials on media sharing sites, and worried about the effects this could have on remix and appropriation artists. He used the metaphor of a net, and wondered how the legitimately transformative dolphins could be separated from the illegitimate and illegal tuna of unedited uploaded corporate-owned media. My notes, at that point, say “free the fishes?!”.

I’m a vegetarian who regularly lapses into pescetarianism myself. Somehow this seems relevant.

Although I have all the support in the world for fair use defenses of appropriative/derivative art, I always want to think about the ‘unfair’ uses — sadly mourned tvlinks, BitTorrent, whole episodes available on YouTube, etc. Or, as Lohmann pointed out, using HandBrake to rip copyrighted DVDs.

Speaking after Lohmann, Johei Benkler made the point that “disregard” for copyright law is a significant force in the world of the internets; in another panel, Eric Garland talked about the ever-growing world of less than legal filesharing, making the familiar point about distributed networks’ unsuability. These uses of digital media’s possibilities seem to me to be inseparable from the “fair” ones; I wonder what it means to disavow them in our defenses. Is it (just?) a strategic deflection to focus on what can easily be defended? Are there ways to think about wide-ranging appropriative practices that pose a challenge to legalistic copyright frameworks?

My utopian impulses in favour of unfair use are mostly about my desire to imagine and/or recognize a world in which filesharing and stealing would not be theft, not exploitation, and not a zero sum game, as well as to think about what such uses do with and for the world’s current dystopian dynamics. And I would relate them to questions about capital that were also in the air at DIY, at some times more obliquely than at others.

For some speakers, the extent to which DIY media production relies on not only the profits of social networking websites but also on the global exploitative dynamics that allow shiny computers to get made and sold in the first place was not a primary concern. For others, it was (although I think I missed the panel where that was raised most forcefully). For me, the exploitation and domination embedded in the happy online worldmaking practices I like to write about is something I try not to let too far from my mind. The idea of a filesharing, transformative media pirate commons may not challenge any of that, but it brings up the conflicts and contradictions involved in thinking DIY and the globalized, capitalist culture industry together; and while I may not often know quite what to do with them, I think those are important.

Relevantly, this AMV got a great audience reaction at one of the screenings:

I have more to say, about videos and vidding and such things. We’ll see how much of that makes it out here.

This weekend, I am excited to be attending the 24/7 DIY Media Summit at USC. All day Friday and Saturday, there are screenings of assorted sorts of amateur video — activist independent media, political and personal YouTube-type things, machinima, anime music video and fanvidding. I’m most excited about the activist and vidding segments. The vidding strand is curated by Laura Shapiro, who I’ve known online for a little while and am very excited to meet. I also can’t wait to see all those vids and videos on a really big screen.

Activist media is probably a fairly self-explanatory category; if you don’t know what vidding is, it’s when fans edit together clips from TV shows to music to make a narrative, artistic, interpretive or political point. Here are some
older and more recent examples (this one completely obsesses me), with critical commentary from Francesca Coppa, Tisha Turk, Louisa Stein, Jacqueline Kjono, and Kristina Busse respectively, from the media studies blog In Media Res.

I’ll try to post more substantively about vids and such after the conference.

At those painful and frequent academic moments when one has to sum up one’s entire intellectual existence (not to mention worth) in a couple of perfectly poised sentences, I often say that I work on “geek cultures.” Sometimes it’s more coy, like “geeky things”; sometimes it gets left out altogether as I ramble off about queer theory, cultural studies, utopia and futurity and temporality and the internet. Or the internets, as I once all too geekily said in a round of seminar introductions, leaving much of the class confused and the rest embarrassed on my behalf.

There’s that word “geek” again. I seem to say it a lot, don’t I? But what does it actually mean? And I don’t care about the alleged carnival-freak etymology. I’m wondering how the word traffics across different contexts, and how the communities of practice to which I belong result in my investing it with such significance.

After I introduce my yet embryonic project with some iteration of “geek,” I invariably find myself in a conversation I hadn’t anticipated. About Bill Gates, Chuck, Superbad, or one of the many other cultural proliferations of white straight men who like computers and don’t get enough exercise. My friend Mike would call these images the mainstreaming of geek subculture, and I wouldn’t disagree. The other night, after an exhiliarating session of communal anarchistic analysis of the new Lost chez Media Sheep, I found myself watching Mythbusters; those guys are definitely geeks. But these are rarely the items I am getting at when I go on about geekiness, all the same.

I think what I mean by it in the title of this blog is primarily the word’s adjectival capacity. Being geeky. Perhaps even a verb: geeking out. Getting overexcited about ideas, about texts, about insignificant and uncool things. The uncoolness, and the embracing of the uncoolness, is crucial: to be geeky is categorically not to be at the cutting edge, and not to be too worried about that, although there probably are geeks who are at the cutting edge in one way or another and I certainly will cop to that teenage longing. It’s rather exacerbated by academia.

But I’m not just geeky. Even as I disclaim those awkward white men with their technology and their awkward lust for cool, vapid women (okay, maybe not all of them), they and I often get on rather well. And I will happily give in to the identity narrative and proclaim myself ‘a geek.’ For me that’s less about loving video games and explosions and more about cathecting Willow and revelling in the science fiction and fanfic that leaves behind mainstreaming geekdoms or transforms them into queerer, less white, less male and less-binary-gendered places. Those are the transformative works and cultures that I daydream about connecting to different kinds of transformation, that have shaped my thinking about utopianisms and radicalisms and the vexed complicities of relationships to capitalist mainstreams. Of which more later, in the various ideas I have for posts in this blog.

At some point I am going to have to write seriously about geek identity politics, about what it means to happily claim an identifier that signifies simultaneously outcastness and acceptability to the mainstream. Perhaps my own incipiently queer and excessively geeky high school narrative intervenes: being ridiculed by one’s peers and beloved by one’s teachers isn’t what anyone would call revolutionary, but it maps fascinatingly on to the narratives of queer childhood’s “ardent reading” that Eve Sedgwick (”Queer and Now”) and others articulate.

Of course, it’s a powerfully classed narrative, that relation to bookishness. In my case, a story of being marked for mobility in a not-so-mobile place, of being the one everyone knew was going to get out and go on to greater things, as I’ve dutifully done: in hindsight, I can see how that was something to resent. The only person I ever heard of coming out as queer at my high school was a geek too, and he also got the hell away. Sedgwick asks “how to tell kids who are supposed never to learn this, that, farther along, the road widens and the air brightens; that in the big world there are worlds where it’s plausible, our demand to get used to it.” Some crossovers of queer with geek give their kids a leg up into other plausible worlds, may function as privilege rather than — or as well as — disadvantage.

Some don’t. I’m haunted by my comrade outcast classmate whose geekishness got him nowhere since it didn’t translate into academic achievement, who for reasons I can’t begin to think I know killed himself as a teenager. Perhaps for reasons that include his ghost I do find myself wanting to take the geek life narratives seriously, the ways people experience personality- or interest-based marginalness and write about and from it and make subcultures with it that don’t reduce to whining about success; the different politics of geekdom and the ways they cross over with different forms of privilege and oppression.

(Interesting project: trace the slippages between meanings of geekishness in this post which started as my attempt to trace them.)

I’m on the editorial team for this new online journal, and I’m very excited about its queer geek theory-making, transformative potential. Please link to and distribute the CFP widely, if you in any way agree!

Journal Announcement and Call for Papers

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000–8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000–7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500–2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500–2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for U.S. Letter or European A4. Please feel free to link, download, print, distribute, or post.