This year I have the great privilege of being on the jury for the Tiptree Award. As a young geek, I spent many hours reading about the history of feminist science fiction, and my understanding of the workings of gender and sexuality were enormously influenced by novels like Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Delany’s Trouble on Triton. The Tiptree Award — named after James Tiptree, Jr, the science fiction author feted as a writer of great masculinity and occasionally admired for his understanding of women, who was also a woman named Alice Sheldon — honours science fiction that continues to expand and challenge the ways we experience gender. Nominations for texts published in 2009 are still open, and you can follow the link on the website or just leave a comment here. I confess I’d love to see some nominations that aren’t just in the format of the standard novel or short story, much as I enjoy both.

I can’t write too much about what I’ve been reading lest I give away the jury’s deliberations, but I am greatly enjoying this process. I will post my reviews once the winner is announced.

I’m a little ashamed of how much radio silence I have to break here; life has been very busy. I have a backlog of blog entries to make, and hope to start producing them soon.

In the meantime, I want to announce the publication of the third issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which you can find here. There are some great articles about everything from quilting to filk to lesbian fandom.

As well as editing on Symposium, my main contribution to this issue was transcribing and editing a multi-voiced piece Pattern Recognition: A Dialogue on Racism in Fan Communities. The piece emerged from some intense conversations at WisCon, and could easily have been many times its current length; I felt unspeakably honoured to be in a room with Deepa, Coffeeandink, Oyceter, Sparkymonster, Naamen, Jackie and Liz, listening to them talk about race, representation and fandom with such depth and complexity.

I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged.

I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sides with fascination and love. (“Queer and Now” 3)

I never met Sedgwick or even listened to her give a lecture. But I feel that she made it possible for me to exist, to turn my misfit overintellectualized object-mediated desires into scholarship and work and something that could, perhaps, matter. Her place in the critical genealogy of queer theory is assured, but I always also felt a great personal attachment for the way she put herself into her writing; reading continents and generations away, I felt that she was speaking to and for me. The dissertation prospectus I’m writing at the moment contains some critiques of the utopian discourse of queer possibility “Queer and Now” has always embodied for me, but I still can’t imagine theory having a greater value than that.

The world is surely a shade less queerly exciting for no longer having her in it.

I attended a couple of events this week that set me thinking about the complex swirl of issues around digital identity and community, art and academia and their institutions, and how the possibilities online tools and cultures make available translate (and fail to translate) between different forms, different agendas.

First was The Future of Mediated Scholarship, part of a workshop series the Institute for Multimedia Literacy is running for USC graduate students. The talks included USC Associate Vice Provost Susan Metros presenting the Horizon report predicting technological futures (a very science-fictional experience), Mark Marino giving tips for online research tools, and Elizabeth Losh on online pedagogical spaces. Losh wrote a blog entry about the event which makes a grad student at USC sound like a wonderfully exciting thing to be, while also detailing the important questions she raised in her talk.

However, I mainly wanted to write about Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s talk on the future of scholarly publishing, which kept me frantically typing notes (and the occasional twitter update) throughout.

Fitzpatrick, who’s one of the founders of the ever fabulous Media Commons, talked about the obsolescence of the current scholarly publishing model and the range of things that “obsolescence” means. She summarized her first book’s argument that frantic declarations about the death of the book tend to mean primarily that a literary elite is afraid its privileged form will no longer be the centre of cultural relevance, then moved on to the conditions of publication of that book to explore the ‘crisis in scholarly publishing’ that means scholars’ first tenure-securing books struggle to find publishers. The book as a form may continue to live, paper being rather more durable than outdated operating systems et cetera; but the academic monograph as a profitable entity is verifiably dead. However, as it is required by the institutional structures of academe, it lives on–it is undead.

Zombie metaphors make any academic talk better. Fitzpatrick moved on from hers to talk about how scholarly publishing has to change to become more alive than (un)dead. Quoting my notes:

Until scholars believe publishing on the web is as valuable as print and until they believe their institutions also believe it, few will risk their careers. Social, intellectual and institutional change are necessary. The ways we research, write, peer review, have to change. The system of peer review is part of what is broken in the current system of scholarly publishing. It is a disciplinary technology that creates the conditions of possibility for the academic institution: the disciplined are gradually given the technology to discipline others. In print, it serves primarily a gatekeeping role, excluding some realms of discourse from the realm of the thinkable. In the digital, scarcity is over: anyone can publish anything, we face an extraordinary plenitude. Digital humanities needs to develop not a means of applying peer review to create artificial scarcity but rather to find a means of coping with abundance, of working within a living system of scholarly publication.

I’ll resist reproducing the rest of the talk in order to think about what a “living system of scholarly publication” might mean, what it already means. In this talk, and in other conversations about new mediations for scholarly dissemination, there’s talk of how blind peer review could be replaced: metrics? Open public comments? Something else? Open source scholarship published publically online is, by definition, open to enter into different living economies of publication, to be read in unexpected ways, just as books are; but books (and peer reviewed journal publications) aren’t validated based on the status they hold in multiple intersecting subcultural publics. For practical institutional reasons, I’m sure no open peer review system would be either; yet in the living systems of publication I’ve been talking about for my last couple of posts, that’s exactly what happens.

In online fandom, as you can see if you follow the links I gave in my last two posts and their ever-multiplying counterparts, abundance is the rule. Every participant has a soapbox and if their contributions to public conversations are considered valuable they get cited and passed around, fans develop reputations for particular critical and political positions, paradigm shifts happen and are contested, personalities clash. I think of fast-changing landscapes like this and other blog-based communities when I think of a living system of publication, in large part because my own scholarly work (whether or not it is about those spaces) is shaped by them and by the networks I’ve built through them at least as much as, if not more than, it is by traditional academic contexts.

As one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures’s Symposium section, I’m committed to bringing the online meta-sphere’s and academia’s institutional discourses into conversation, to the idea that academia and other subcultural presences can meet on something approaching even terms. Media Commons shares the same commitment, as far as I can tell. It still seems clear to me that institutional professionalism and the nonprofessional, community-oriented (even when conflict-driven) spaces of living, open publication must always sit uncomfortably together. Yet I can’t think of them as wholly separate. I’m not sure if that’s just because I personally occupy the borders between them or if there’s something more significant to be said there.

Maybe I’ll get to figuring that out in the second part of this post, about this exhibition, which I will put up in the next day or two. I wish I were a speedier blogger.

I am on a top 100 Gender Studies blogs list, inexplicably. And rather excitingly, although I was slightly sad that the geek aspect didn’t seem to be relevant to the maker of the list. Then again, at least she didn’t think it was a tech blog. But if that doesn’t drive me to update, I don’t know what could.

Handily, I even have something to update about. There is currently a fierce debate afoot in the feminist science fiction blogosphere about cultural appropriation, colonialism and the representation of people of color in science fiction. It began with some rather boring complaints from white male writers about how all those nasty politically correct people are taking away their goshdarned right to say whatever they please about anyone without worrying about race or gender (I gather; there is a more nuanced reading of that, I’m sure, but I confess I didn’t read them in much detail, preferring the rest of the posts linked here).

Then Elizabeth Bear* made a post giving tips on how to write the “Other”; “Other” defined as a person very different from oneself, and the summation being to remember that people are people even when there experiences are different. Several people pointed out in comments that there is more at stake than innocent difference when it comes to othered narratives; Deepa D. wrote a stunning, moving response, I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, which talks about (among other things including capitalism, taverns and Enid Blyton) how the ‘treat everyone like people’ argument is flawed when full, novelistic personhood has already been predefined in colonizing terms. She Who Has Hope has also posted some eloquent responses.

Avalon’s Willow wrote an open letter discussing the racial tropes Bear used in her novel Blood and Iron and how they made it impossible for her to read the book. Bear wrote a very gracious response, as did Sarah Monette; Monette’s post provoked a great deal of discussion about the legitimate way to read a text, and whether discarding it for the painful issues it touched upon is a ‘valid’ reading. Those were some moments when I felt a little embarrassed to be a literary scholar, especially because I think my reading of the novel in question would probably have leant heavily toward the critique of imperialism the author discusses as her intention rather than the reproduction of stereotypes Willow found in it.

Critique and reproduction often sit uncomfortably close; I can think of several episodes of Doctor Who that offer similar, probably less complex, examples. I’ve often been driven to question my own comfortable critical interpretations that privilege clever commentary over unpleasant imagery by reading antiracist fan discussions of how popular culture and sf texts reproduce racist tropes and stereotypes while claiming to challenge or critique them, and I’m grateful for the education. I’ve also often been driven to question my uncomfortable emotional and political interpretations that privilege unpleasant imagery over critical commentary by reading critical texts and having intellectual discussions in both academia and fandom; sometimes I’m grateful for that education, and sometimes I’m (to put it politely) not. It will be interesting to see which interpretation I pick up when I get around to obtaining a copy of Bear’s book

I am currently writing my PhD field exams, so I am going to cut short these ruminations and play World of Warcraft for the restorative hour or so I have been engaging in during this process, before I go to bed early in order to get up at the sparrow’s fart and write. (I am not a WoW geek by any stretch of the imagination. I like to be low level, not get involved, kill things and look at the pretty graphics. I find it very relaxing, mainly because there is very little chance of my ever studying it.)

Just one word of warning: All of the above-linked posts are thoughtful, well written, and expressed with grace and clarity even when they are filled with anger. The comments are not so (well, some commenters are all of these things, but many are not). Be prepared for foolishness, and don’t go reading them all unless you enjoy car crashes. However, many of the impassioned posts are responses primarily to the comments, so you probably do want to read enough to get a fair impression. Also, there are lots more posts linked from these and others I haven’t yet seen myself; lots of people are weighing in.

(This post contains many of the mutant parentheses I excise from the essays I am writing for exams. Sorry about that. I am sure my committee will thank you for taking some of the convolution off their hands.)

*I have read one book by Elizabeth Bear, Carnival. I thought it was a well-written, nicely queer and engaging update on feminist science fiction concerns, and much appreciated the nod to Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s under-read opus. Which I was privileged enough to read an original edition of at the British Library this summer; I thought of its degraded cheap paper as I cited it in my field exam essay on early twentieth century utopianisms.

Today I attended the Fair Use and the Future of the Commons event sponsored by the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Veronica Paredes is hosting a related discussion at HASTAC.

Much of what was discussed I had some familiarity with through my work on vidding; I am in the process or revising a short essay that talks about fair and unfair use (emphasis on the possibilities that accompany the latter) through Lim’s stunning fanvid “Us”. I have, until now, kept my discussions of vidding in this space strictly theoretical. But listening to lawyers talk optimistically about fair use, learning about digitally enabled new forms of scholarship from people like Phillip Ethington, Eric Faden, Virginia Kuhn and Steve Anderson, and reading the Center for Social Media’s code of practice for online video, I realised that there’s no reason for me not to share my own attempts at transformative scholarly work.

Last year, with the encouragement of a workshop-style graduate class on alternative models of scholarship, I learned some rudimentary skills in video editing and Flash, and I used them to make a visual and textual analysis and repurposing of some recent dystopian films which fascinate me. The central film here is a fan video that makes visual an argument that, together with the rest of the framework that complicates and questions it, will likely form a significant part of my dissertation. If I can figure out how to get it into words.

Making this and sharing it in various contexts has really helped me think in new ways about scholarship, visuality, media and knowledge production. And it has given me (perhaps even not only me) some new approaches to the films and to some of the questions around gendered and racialized violence, survival, futurity and representation that it tries to articulate.

For those of you I’ve shown this to before, I’ve adjusted it so that you see a works cited, disclaimer and acknowledgment page before you click to the video. Just exercising a little fair use-related paranoia; but I rather like the result that you have to figure out how to make anything happen.

The first time I visited the USA, I was 19. Alice and I headed with great excitement to San Francisco, where we marvelled at the Pacific, the hills and the residents, made a lot of Sex and the City References, and were generally amazed at how the America of pop-cultural exports both did and did not appear to actually exist.

In a bookstore––I think it may have been on Haight Street–I picked up a copy of Bitch magazine. I had never seen anything like this before; a magazine that was all critical cultural analysis, that was outspokenly feminist, that took apart the gender and race and class politics of TV and film and all the rest. I was a latecomer to the world of the internet, and wouldn’t have regular access from home for another couple of years; I didn’t have any way of getting more. I took that issue home, and I read it to death. I was learning feminist theory at university, but I was only stumblingly beginning to understand the cultural politics of my own life; although the examples were foreign (that exoticism was, of course, part of the appeal), Bitch showed my how to do that. When I moved to the US to spend the following year as an exchange student at Berkeley, one of the first things I did was become a subscriber.

Now Bitch is in trouble, and needs a lot of money to get their next issue out. It’s true that there are plenty of online sources for the kind of critique that it offers, but I am horrified by the idea that this vital set of takes on popular culture might disappear from the newsstands where people like my former self could stumble across it. As a more advanced student of feminisms I am as likely to disagree with the articles there as I am to be inspired by them, but Bitch itself had a huge hand in educating me to a point where I can have that kind of nuanced analysis. I still find out new things from the magazine every quarter, and read articles on subjects about which I would probably never have clicked through to a blog entry.

(And consider checking out Make/shift too, while your mind is on feminist independent publications.)

I’d like to share Dean Spade and Tyrone Boucher’s new website, Enough. Growing out of an intense series of coversations on Dean’s blog last year, it is a space to encourage reflection on class, privilege, intersectionality, social justice and most of all money.

They’re issues that are hard to think about without defensiveness, no matter what your background. Seeing the kind of open, honest, self-aware analysis in the essays on the website makes me hopeful that that’s possible.

Maybe I’ll even contribute one.

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.*