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’ve written about vidding quite a lot on this blog. It’s an artform that is getting steadily more attention: as one facet of the web’s enabling of grassroots, amateur filmmaking, as part of the long history of women’s work with media, as a valuable kind of media literacy. Last weekend, I made a pilgrimage to Riverside to attend the opening of an exhibition that features what is, as far as I know, the first vid to be exhibited in an art gallery.

The vid is Us by Lim (link goes to Kristina Busse’s In Media Res curation), a profound and multifaceted and deep and beautiful piece with which I have a very intimate affective relationship.

I have a short essay coming out in Cinema Journal’s In Focus section that talks about the way the vid comments on piracy and intellectual property in ways that address their significance beyond the (important) legal arguments for fair use by highlighting the artistic and cultural work of media ‘theft’. I love the vid not only for that but for the critique it embeds of academic work on fan cultures, like the work I have done, crystallized in the image of Henry Jenkins as Regina Spektor sings “the tourists come and stare at us”. That critique is not, in my interpretation (which has been strengthened through email conversations with Lim) an expression of hostility, merely an acknowledgment of the power dynamics brought into being by relative institutional status, and economic/cultural privilege.

So what about the power dynamics that come into play when this vid, which speaks to and from a particular subcultural context but has been distributed and discussed well beyond it, is shown to a new kind of public in an art gallery?

I bought the catalogue for the exhibition, which is a beautifully designed little book. The images from Us and the other artworks are shiny and stunning. As you would expect, each artist has a bio, detailing their training and achievements. Lim’s places her outside the professional art world, making it clear that she doesn’t produce work with this audience in mind; it is followed by an essay on the “Anthropology of YouTube” by Michael Wesch. It’s an excellent essay, which explains the work online video does very well. Although it doesn’t go into any depth on the particular activity of vidding, I think it provides a good introductory context.

However, anthropology is a word that makes me nervous; it hints at colonial dynamics, power held by the looker-on and explainer of a strange culture as it is denied to the members of that culture themselves. I know that those aspects of anthropology have been intensely critiqued; but I think it’s worth thinking about the discomfort anyway. As Julie Levin Russo reminded me when I talked about this with her, the problem with anthropological discourse here is precisely the critique that Lim makes of academic fan studies in her vid. Some artists are in the gallery and in the catalogue because it is part of their professional lives, because it will bring them material benefits; some are invited there from other contexts and have to be anthropologically explained. The relationship to explanation, to academic criticism, to exposure won’t and can’t be the same.

I would hazard a guess that, although vidding as a subcultural practice is pretty marginal, there are a lot more people out there who are familiar with YouTube culture than with the art world. But it’s hard to imagine an anthropology that would go the other way. That was what I wanted as I wandered through the exhibit, though: I wanted to record the conversations people might have been having in front of the vid, wanted to hear what interpretations it elicited in a setting so divorced from the ones where I had encountered it. It’s those conversations that are at the heart of what it means to show this work there, as far as I am concerned, and I miss the inbuilt archive for commentary–and impromptu anthropology–that YouTube, imeem and other online video-sharing platforms contain.

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.

My last post was about science fiction fandom’s Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom. Although there had been rather a lot of unfortunate remarks made, I felt justified in linking to the most interesting posts and describing the overall affair in more or less positive terms, as an occasion when important things about complex, difficult and painful topics were said, as well as predictable and unpleasant things.

Things have changed, and my previous post needs an addendum.

As seems to be the general process in these debates, the “unpleasant” has shifted to the unconscionable. Many links can be found on Micole’s posts to the Aqueduct Press blog, linked above; Rydra Wong also maintains an enormous archive of fannish race discussion if you want background. What it boils down to is that more respected sf writers and editors from the small subcultural pond have become involved; nasty accusations have flown (I would say “in both directions”; but the accusations flowing one way have been “orc,” “troll,” and “blogwhore,” and the accusation flowing the other has been “racist” more often as an adjective than a noun. I think that’s telling.) and it has become very, very ugly.

Elizabeth Bear has stepped back from what she now calls a circular firing squad, a phrase that seems to me to skirt close to “political correctness gone mad.” I had initially planned for this post to segue off into a discussion of friendship and what is implied in Bear’s closing declaration:

Do not confuse my politeness, my willingness to listen to criticism, or my acceptance of the need to sometimes take one for the team with moral cowardice, a susceptibility to bullying, or any plans to throw any of my friends under the bus whether I disagree with them or not.

It made me wonder about the politics of friendship; does disagreement work differently among the internet friends with whom we (and by “we” I suppose I mean anyone who engages in an active digital life that is more than an extension of their pre-existing physical one) often share far more of our internality than we do with the people we see every day? At what point does someone become the kind of friend who is effectively family, with whom no disagreement can be a deal-breaker? Is that a point that can be said to meaningfully exist? Is it throwing someone under a bus to call them on their actions when you believe them to be wrong and you think they are hurting others?

I suppose that last question makes my standpoint clear; her post assumes that there are two sides with equal status and at equal wrong here, and I don’t think that’s the case. Ciderpress made a concise, eloquent and stunning post that deserves to be read in its entirety, and that is responsible for this post being significantly more opinion than the analysis I had originally intended. It reminded me of what’s at stake in my ability to maintain a racialized, classed tone of intellectualizing detachment.

The discussion that Seeking Avalon’s Willow and [info]deepad started and many other PoC participated in and the points they made regarding cultural appropriation, different PoC experiences with life in general, the media and the effect that cultural appropriation has on our emotions, our narratives and our ideologies was derailed. Instead, the discussion became focused on accusations of reverse-racism, racism against white people!, classism, anti-intellectualism, jealousy and grandstanding etc and the arguments that followed.

In fact, the whole focus and point of the discussion devolved into several PoC having to defend themselves, their integrity and their character for having a non-dominant-white-mainstream opinion and for expressing it. It became, as these discussions do without fail, almost completely about white people’s feelings, white people’s actions, white people’s reactions and white people’s needs. Even a discussion about cultural appropriation, about us and our representation? The whole conversation is appropriated, our concerns are very much silenced and lost in the furore.
…
[I]n the intense and almost singular focus on clueless white people in this discussion and the often repeated statement that this was an opportunity to dialogue, that there is solace in the fact that it has been worth all the pain and difficulty, that they are somehow *glad*, the underlying assumption is that:

• PoCs have emotional/intellectual catharsis after such discussions.

• PoC’s pain being part of an educational moment for clueless white people is worth it to PoCs because it’s worth it to white people.

• Anti-racism matters the same amount, in the same way to clueless white people, allies and PoC.

My own personal answer is, frankly no, I haven’t felt any kind of catharsis. I’m pretty sure that the sacrifice of my dignity and watching other PoC being denigrated without any remorse isn’t worth it so please stop talking for me and be more precise in your speech and own that you didn’t really think about whether my pain and humiliation is worth your enlightening moment. And I can’t walk away after a discussion and it’s not about having a choice (even a forced one) about writing or not writing characters that are in my head. When we talk about race, we are often talking about our lives, it’s deeply personal, it’s how we related to the world, to people, to media, to everything.

I try to avoid it, but I know I can do the flip utopian moment as well as any other white participant in conversations about race. But ‘at least we’re talking about it, people are learning’ is only valuable for the people who are doing the learning, not those off whose backs it occurs.

My last post about this debate-turned-debacle was linked from a metafilter post, in the comments to which LiveJournal is described as a zone of cat-picture-loving teenage drama queens. I moderated a panel at least year’s WisCon that asked whether internet drama could change the world, and for it to have a chance at that lofty goal, it has to be more than groups of friends at loggerheads over subjects whose content is irrelevant. And, in fact, it is; for better and for worse. I think Ciderpress’s post gives some sense of why the threaded, community-oriented discussion sphere that LJ is matters, why internet drama matters, even though the answer is not ‘great, a few more white people learned what racism is!’ Because the scope and the meaning and the reach of these discussions is not by any means limited to LJ or to the internet. Because it’s not a case of there being so many other ‘real’ problems in the world, but of this being one location where the structural inequalities of the real world (which does, after all, include the internet) play out.

Maybe the more people who can confront the fact that there aren’t easy answers–who can realise that the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation white writers complained about so vociferously is in fact a fundamental fact about the hierarchical and unequal structures and ideologies through which we experience the world, the better. Although that value certainly doesn’t outweigh what ought to be the exceedingly basic importance of, you know, not hurting people, and perhaps I am engaging in naive and privileged utopianism by even bringing it up, it might force some to recognize the wider problems to which their individual discomforts and lashings-out contribute.

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.

This is my paper from LA Queer Studies. Right now, it seems likely that it’s the last piece I’ll do on fan fiction for a while, although I would like to turn my three conference papers on queer politics in SGA fandom into a full-length article some day. There is a whole lot more to say about fan genderfuck fiction, in particular, than I get to even remotely here.

Stories are linked in the text and my powerpoint from the conference is interspersed throughout. If any of the writers or artists linked would like me to take things out or put them in, I will happily do so.

***

This paper explores the intersection of two subcultural worlds: the social and political realm of queer and trans academia and activism; and online fan fiction culture, particularly slash fan fiction written around the sci-fi channel show Stargate: Atlantis and distributed through the blog/social networking site LiveJournal.com.

Online fan fiction cultures are structured around reinterpreting TV shows and other popular media texts. Many fan-written texts are concerned with providing audiences with more of what their show provides, but some create narratives that would never show up on TV. Slash fan fiction transforms TV texts by adding gay sex; the subgenre of slash fan fiction I’m focusing on transforms not only the text and the characters’ relationships to one another but the characters themselves.

So-called ‘genderfuck’ fan fiction uses science fiction and fantasy tropes to alter and reimagine characters’ sexed and gendered bodies. Connected to feminist concerns with the cultural meanings and effects of gendered bodies and to the tensions around embodiment explored by queer theorists and other people who fuck with gender, these fictional tropes manipulate the bodies of their protagonists for a variety of purposes, ranging from the spurious, silly and voyeuristic to the political and subversive.

Critics writing about slash have been careful to explain that the male homoerotic explicit representations produced in communities which tend to be largely female is not ‘about’ gay men or gay male culture, though there are of course exceptions. Similarly, the genderfuck of fan fiction does not share the genealogies of queer cultures’ genderfuck performances and identities, and the way characters are made to cross conventional gender boundaries does not usually fit into the narratives of transgendered communities or identities. Fans queer and nonqueer, trans and nontrans mobilize fiction as interpretation and commentary on both the source text and the production and normalization of gender in society. And that mobilization is structured by the textual and generic orientations of the fan communities in which it takes place.

Stargate: Atlantis, a spinoff of a spinoff of the 1994 film Stargate, is the locus for a huge and diverse set of fan communities–the show is not very well written or thought through and fans tend to love it more for its potential than its execution.

Watch vid at www.imeem.com/mamoru

Image at community.livejournal.com/sga_genderfuck/11955.html

I’ll trace three broad sets of meanings that attach to re-gendering of characters, which I might reductively describe as ‘feminist, ‘queer’ and ‘trans.’ It’s important to note that while there may be an element of progression here, these are still all occuring at the same time, and often in the same stories and writers. I’m interested in showing how the stories work in context rather than providing a comprehensive diagnosis or interpretation: there are a lot more questions, critiques and discussions to be had than I will have time to bring up here.

Fan fiction-writing communities have historically been made up overwhelmingly of women (who tend to be mainly white, middle-class and straight or bisexual, though significant and vocal minorities exist); it is scarcely surprising, then, that questions of gender presentation, representation, and equality are central to fan fiction and discussions. Slash fandom’s practices of queering texts, which tend to be predicated on a normative romance trajectory, are sometimes at odds with queer and feminist understandings of the politics of bodies.

Image at pentapus.livejournal.com/105413.html

Forcing male characters to experience the social and cultural, physical and emotional realities of life in a female body, genderswap stories ask whether and how much its socio-biological facts–objectification, sexual vulnerability, the possibility of becoming pregnant–constitute womanhood. They also ask whether, when the cultural predicates by which one gains one’s sense of identity change, one remains the same person. In many cases, these questions are answered with highly stereotyped understandings of the intersections of biology and gender. Frequent discoveries for the newly female-bodied include exaggerated invocations which would horrify feminists against biological determinism: characters lose physical strength, develop natural nurturing power and emotional intelligence and experience a different and multi-orgasmic sexuality along with intense menstrual cramps, chocolate cravings and the sudden uncontrollable desire to buy expensive shoes.

Busse and I have written that this the exaggerated lens is often a tool through which to explore gender relations rather than a failure of verisimilitude: the stereotypical presentation is a reflection of cultural stereotypes of femininity, rather than false consciousness or an accurate depiction of readers’ and writers’ interpretations of their own embodiments. The stories become a place to explore expectations around feminine roles, often with a strong dose of irony, projecting onto fictional men the fictional constructs of what womanhood can look like. Theoretically, these crossgendered writings might connect to an understanding of gender as performance: the woman writing show the disjuncture between womanliness and actual women by writing femininity and its discontents onto the bodies of favored male characters. And they do so above all playfully.

Images at pentapus.livejournal.com/224961.html; pentapus.livejournal.com/14044.html

Images at community.livejournal.com/street_of_mercy/64331.html; aretria.livejournal.com/15157.html

If traditional slash (and traditional genderswap) foregrounds a love that transcends physical boundaries and, by extension, sexual orientation, fan genderfuck under queer influence contains very different ideologies. I focus on one particular story, although there are many to choose from.

Images at mutecornett.livejournal.com/26316.html

The source of this particular sex change is crucial to the story’s intervention. The two characters are caught in the crossfire of an alien civilization’s armed conflict over the acceptability of same-sex desire: as one commenter to the story remarks, they are turned into women by “alien queer radical gender terrorists.” John and Rodney’s change here is not spurious fantasy ‘science’ but inescapably linked to queer politics. In a public discussion the author connects the political act within the story of forcefully imposing gender on the characters to her own act of writing. This story, in other words, performs what happens when radical queer gender terrorism hits fan genderswap tropes: the characters described by its author as “fairly uncritical middle-aged heterosexual men” become queer, both in the sense in which Lee Edelman says “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17) and in the ways that shared nonnormative relationships to sex and gender define queer communities.

The queering of John and Rodney is an involved and complex process in this story, and follows the two characters through several sex reassignments. First the characters are attracted to one anther as straight men who happen to have female bodies; then they decide that they identify with their new embodiments sufficiently to call their sexual encounters gay. Then they change back and realise that they have moved into a zone where their gender identities are based on experiences that only make sense to each other; they’re straight gay male lesbians, changed by their change of sex in ways far broader than the sudden recognition of true love that provides closure for classic genderswap slash plots.

John and Rodney are not gay, they just love one another; their experiences of sexual transformation lead them to recognize that they should be together. But in this story, that love is not born from a recognition of the other’s individual perfection that transcends gender–it emerges from a community of unique shared experience. The story takes slash’s tropes of individual love overriding false barriers of gender and sexual identity and uses them to show how and why a queered identity politics is preferable to a naïvely imagined genderfree utopia of individualistic desire. The political subtext of the story becomes particularly clear when we look at the figure of the alien gender terrorist Tarin. He has become a social outcast after a failed revolution which tried to use sex-changing technology in the service of homosexual acceptance, the only one who chose not to return to the sex he was assigned at birth; he is also, according to the author a “nod to all the lonely passing FTM/butches of lesbian literature”–and, of course, a stand-in for the author herself, who also aggressively alters gender to increase awareness.

Tarin’s marginal place in always hints at some of the issues that arise when fan genderfuck narratives are approached from the perspective of transgender realities rather than queer fluidities or feminist interpretation. In his 1998 book Second Skins, Jay Prosser wrote about the tendency of queer studies to make “the transgendered subject, the subject who crosses gender boundaries” into a trope to “challenge sex, gender and sexuality binaries” and deliteralize gender and sex without recognizing “the personal costs of not simply being a man or a woman.” We can see this tendency in many fan genderfuck stories, often unacknowledged but sometimes thematized as by things with wings.

One comic story about chaos caused by a gender-swapping machine run riot, Fiercely dreamed’s Tab A Slot B, was inspired by frustrations with the way gender had been portrayed in genderswap fiction; the writer included an afterword to inform readers that the story “wasn’t written to address the real experiences of intersex and transgendered people” and included links to the Intersex Society of North America and the National Center for Transgender Equality along with an impassioned insistence that transmen and women’s rights should be a priority for the feminist movements for which fans often express their support.

At the begining of this paper I insisted that genderfuck fan fiction is less concerned with accurately representing transgendered or transsexual identities and politics than it is with exploring the show’s characters and their dynamics, that its gendered explorations rarely fit with trans activist politics; but that’s not always true. Some fans, some of whom identify themselves as trans, have made it their business to see that “genderfuck” as a genre does not exclude transgender and transsexual experiences and concerns. There is a growing subset of genderfuck stories that use the narrative tropes of bodily transformation neither to explore issues of conventional femininity nor to queer sexual and gender categories, but to speak to and from trans perspectives within the idiom of fan fiction subculture.

Posted in the wake of the TV episode that revealed Rodney’s first name to be Meredith, this postcard image imagines Rodney as an FTM transsexual. It taps into certain melodramatic and stereotypical discourses around transsexuality, showing “the” surgery as a once for all event and as something that would change Rodney into a different person. The postcard spawned many stories about an FTM Rodney, some of which portrayed real-world gender reassignment as almost identical to fan genderswap fiction. These initiated wide-ranging discussions with fandom intended to educate fans about trans realities, including the extent to which experiencing life in a ‘wrongly gendered’ body could be neither silly nor sexy.

Several writers have done this by moving fan genderfuck’s favourite tropes from sexual fantasy to emotional realism, pointing out that sex-swapping science fiction machines would not necessarily be productive of horror or of porn. Cupidsbow’s story “Sheppard’s Choice” and Eponine_667’s “Progenitor” both show a John who has hidden a female identification in order to maintain his military position wrestling with the emotions and interpersonal conflicts that discovering a machine that could perform sex reassignments flawlessly and immediately would bring up. The characters contend with traditional genderswap tropes and are oppressed by them.

In the first story, the universal and normative assumption that John would want to follow the classic genderswap trajectory by getting his own body back would leave him unhappy and closeted; in the second, John and Rodney’s mutual romantic understanding is consummated when Rodney promises to help a transsexual John change his sex and pretend it was an irreversible accident so that he will not be read as queer by his military employers. Implicit in these stories are the social and political implications that a science fictional body-altering machinery could contain for the medical realities of transgender healthcare: how would we understand the relationship between gender identity and physical embodiment if genitals and other sex-linked characteristics could be altered at the flick of a switch?

If writers of trans fan fiction are not considering the social implications of science fiction gender changing, they are transferring the characters out of their original milieu and freeing from the constraints of secret US military projects into ‘alternative universes’ that connect them to queer and trans social worlds. Busaikko’s romance novel, A Hundred Happy Things, features a John who left the military in order to transition and who gets together with Rodney outside a science fiction setting. (The images are from a video version of the story Busaikko created by Photoshopping images of Joe Flanagan, who plays John, and setting clips from Stargate and other shows to the song “Bird Girl” by Antony and the Johnsons.) John’s transsexuality is not the story’s main plot point, a choice which shows how much transgender has been normalized in fan communities in and of itself. The story, told from Rodney’s point of view, contains a strong didactic strain, as it shows us the appropriate way even a socially awkward physicist should react to finding out someone in their life is trans. Science fiction wand-waving may lead to misleading representations of the legal, medical and physiological realities of gender reassignment, and Busaikko reminds her readers that it’s important to do your homework.

Many fans prefer not to see political concerns foregrounded in fanwork: “issue fic” can be a derogatory description. But issues are ever-present even when they remain subtextual, as in many of the stories and tropes I have discussed, and they are frequently brought into the open by fans’ own politicized metadiscussions. The investments in genderfuck stories, even as they continue to foreground a romantic sexual payoff, show how queer and trans subcultural and activist discourses constructively and creatively contaminate the ways fan cultures do gender, even as play and pleasure rather than politics are the main reasons for writing.

The articulation between slash romance, gender and transgender realisms, and queer theoretical and activist discourses produces a subcultural archive for a queer and transgender activist fandom. In “Mutilating Gender,” Dean Spade wrote about the need to realise that gender regulatory practices obscure a world where gender categories are not only crossed by those who could be diagnosed wth gender identity disorder; likewise, same sex desire is not exclusive to those whose life narratives fit a gay identity. These stories insist on such a world by writing it on to TV genres which haven’t managed to embrace even a homonormative acceptance of nonstraight sexualities and genders. So even as many of the stories I’ve described here participate in narratives that we might find it easy to critique, their worldmaking projects may not always be so far from those of queer radicals.

Works cited

Bacon-Smith, Camille. 1992. Enterprising women: Television fandom and the creation of popular myth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Busaikko. A Hundred Happy Things. 2008. . 9 October 2008.
Busse, Kristina. 2006. “I’m jealous of the fake me”: Postmodern subjectivity and identity construction in boy band fan fiction. In Framing celebrity: New directions in celebrity culture, ed. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 253-68. London: Routledge.
Busse, Kristina and Alexis Lothian. “Bending Gender: Feminist and (Trans)Gender Discourses in the Changing Bodies of Slash Fanfiction.” In Internet Fiction(S), edited by Anton Kirchhofer Ingrid Hotz-Davies, and Sirpa Leppanen, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar’s Press, 2008.
Cupidsbow. “Sheppard’s Choice.” 2007. . 9 October 2008.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
Eponine_667. “Progenitor” 2008. . 9 October 2008.
Fiercelydreamed. “Tab A, Slot B.” 9 October 2008.
Penley, Constance. 1992. Feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture. In Cultural studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 479–500. New York: Routledge.
Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York,NY: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Spade, Dean. “Mutilating Gender.” Spring 2000. 9 October 2008.
Telesilla. “Sheppard’s Choice (Theory of the Male Gaze Redux)” . 9 October 2008.
Things with wings. always should be someone you really love. 2007. 9 October 2008.

I spent most of this weekend at the LA Queer Studies Conference at UCLA. It was the third time I’ve been to the conference, the second time I’ve presented there, and as always it left me with lots to think about. The key theoretical presences seemed to be Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages and/or Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (you can read parts of that here). The conjuncture of those texts’ concerns led on the one hand to analyses of art and practice attentive to the ties between gay/queer imaginaries, whiteness, the state and global hegemonies, and on the other to a focus on taxonomies and critiques of them and the continuing importance of rethinking and redrawing boundaries.

I’ve been reading Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, and thinking a lot about how she criticizes queer theory and other forms of radical scholarship for narrowing their vision of agency to an either/or system of hegemony and resistance (to be wildly reductive about her complex argument). One of the points that seemed to be made over and over by papers at LAQS was that any automatic connection between nonstraight sexuality and ‘resistance’ doesn’t make much sense , but that it’s absolutely crucial to pay attention to the fissures where there exist alternatives to neoliberal regimes that want to incorporate everything: from the queer diasporic art Gayatri Gopinath showed to Juana Maria Rodriguez’s profoundly hot sexual utopianism and through a whole lot of other things besides.

All of this, particularly the threading of ideas about critical utopianism and the importance of not giving up analysis at failure, is absolutely central to the dissertation project I have percolating in my head, which I hope to translate from scattered notes into an actual proposal in order to take exams by the end of the academic year (and yes, that is why this blog has been so quiet). The paper I actually gave at LAQS is probably quite tangential to said project, but I’d like to share it so that more than the brave souls who came to the 9am panel (including the writers and artists I actually quote) can read it.

Since I’ve surprised myself by rambling on in great abstraction about the conference, I’ll post it in the next entry.