Transformative Works and Cultures, the online academic journal associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, is looking for your meta.

The Symposium section of the journal is a section of concise, thematically contained essays. These short pieces provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures. These essays will not go through academic peer review but will be reviewed by the editorial team. We’re looking for 1500 to 2500-word essays on any aspect of fandom, transformative works, online culture.Images, music and video can be included.

Symposium pieces will be more polished than a meta post, less detailed than an academic paper: we’re imagining them as an archive of fannish and academic meta debates of issues relating to fan cultures, saved for posterity. We hope to continue and expand the work of Lucy Cereta’s Fanfic Symposium, which has been doing that for many years.

Here’s the full Journal call for papers for your information. Please note that although TWC is a part of OTW’s umbrella organization, we are not an organ of OTW. We have editorial independence and are happy to consider pieces that criticize the OTW organization. And we are very much looking for submissions from non-academics.

We are still accepting submissions for the September issue, and we need those by the end of the month. Our loose theme for this issue is online scholarship, the Organization for Transformative Works, and the relationship between criticism and theory from inside and outside the academy, but we’re open to more or less anything.

Email us on symposium@transformativeworks.org if you’d like to talk about your ideas.

Last weekend I attended WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention with an academic track. Immediately after the convention I flew to London (after first flying back to LA, and yes, I know that makes no sense), where I am currently reuniting with family and friends and feeling jetlagged, and most of my online time since I got back has been taken up with futile attempts to catch up on the deluge of post-con discussion. I’ve been longing to attend WisCon since I first read about its beginnings and the Tiptree award, and a couple of years ago I began to follow its proceedings in the feminist science fiction blogosphere. Getting to be there in person was as much like coming home as going someplace you’ve never been can be.

I participated in two panels at WisCon. In the academic track, I gave a paper titled “Utopia, Fiction and Fandom: Community, Conflict and ‘Queer Female Space,’” which reframed the analysis of slash fandom, queerness and race I wrote for Console-ing Passions in terms of the utopian discourses and critiques of feminist science fiction. In the main track of the con, I moderated a panel called “Can Internet Drama Change the World?” which featured K. Tempest Bradford Woodrow Hill, Julia Starkey and K. Joyce Tsai. Coffeeandink posted a great transcript of the panel. Both went very well and sparked interesting discussions which seem relevant to post-WisCon online events. I’m not sure my brain is up to writing that would approach a complete essay on the connections, but I’d like to throw a few thoughts out there at least.

Several of the questions asked about my paper focused on the intersections between academia and different kinds of fandom. Do media fans read feminist science fiction? (Yes.) Do fans agree that their practices can be described using the jargon of activism and cultural theory? (Sometimes.) Various conversations at and around WisCon made me think about the differences between doing theory in and out of the institution — how fandom, like any subculture, has its own modes of knowledge production that conflict as well as overlap with academic ones. I felt exceptionally welcome as an academic at WisCon, though. I missed the panel on how WisCon’s acatrack could be better integrated with the rest of the con because I was at another, fannish panel; I would have liked to spend more time at the academic part of the convention but I was too excited about the rest of it, and there seemed to be plenty of other graduate students and academics outside of the designated academic programming room.

To my knowledge I was the only institutionally located scholar on the internet drama panel (and I was the moderator, aiming to facilitate discussion more than put my own views across) but everyone there was and is a theorist. The panelists connected different aspects of their experiences on and offline; their and the audience’s observations came together to show how ‘internet drama’ has profound political effects on personal and interpersonal levels. I was so pleased that I had the courage to participate here and not only in the academic track at WisCon, because if I had ever been in danger of reinforcing the binary that ‘theory’ happens in academe and ‘action’ happens outside it, this would have cured me. What I love about activist internet drama is the way that events and the analysis of events become the same thing.

To argue that this is ‘theory’ is not to say that everyone needs to be able to compare their own thoughts on intersectionality to the homonationalist assemblages of Jasbir Puar — that’s a theoretical connection I cut from my WisCon paper because I wasn’t sure I had room to fully explain it. The very phrases ‘homonationalism’ and ‘terrorist assemblage’ might appear as evidence of academia’s unintelligible jargon, to people inclined to read it that way, no matter how hard the likes of me might explain that the phrases embody important interventions that show how terrorism is constituted in media and culture and how certain kinds of privileged queerness (like marriage) are enfolded into the mainstream by casting others into abjection. Sometimes the exclusionary and privileged locations associated with certain kinds of language makes the language unintelligible — and much as I’d love to have everyone read the books I read and talk about them, I wouldn’t want to make it a prerequisite for having a meaningful conversation.

L. Timmel Duchamp gave a keynote speech at WisCon on the theme of intelligibility, talking about how her experiences of being sexually harrassed in the 1970s were unintelligible even to her until history and politics gave her hindsight and stories to tell about it. She argued for the need for new stories to make new social landscapes and radical politics intelligible, and I agree enormously with her that this is an important role for science fiction. But it also made me think about intelligibility in terms of how to make ideas intelligible across communities. Academic theory remains important because its specialized language and the intense analyses it performs allow things to be said and thought succinctly in ways that can synthesize years of less formal discussions while adding to those discussions and moving them on. That’s my hope for what I can do, and also the reason I think it’s important that I make the academic theory I perform around fanstuff and online stuff available and public if I can.

Since WisCon I have spent a lot of time travelling and every spare minute online catching up on the convention’s drama. For those who don’t share my online communities, someone took photos of WisCon participants without their permission and posted them to an online mockery forum with transphobic, homophobic, racist and fatphobic commentary: some of the extensive documentation. Her actions are clearly inexcusable, but they’ve also been making me think about intelligibility. One of the most interesting things to me has been the recursive quotation involved as words and images have passed across different parts of the internet. Participants at the forum where Moss’s tirade was reposted without her permission are copying and pasting every comment (including my one brief remark in comments to someone on my LJ friendslist) made by WisCon folk without even discussing them, while the actions of the forum-ites are dissected in minute and complex detail by feminist science fiction fans. In the context of the forum culture of mocking and flaming, every expression of solidarity with the subjects in the images becomes ‘fat dyke’ stupidity. The internet drama which my paper and my panel were about, the serious and activist drama that is closely tied to politics and to ‘real’ life, is intelligible to this community only as a failure to understand what the internet is for (too much SRS BIZNESS); the world of the forum is intelligible to my blogosphere only as something pathological and distressing.

At the internet drama panel I raised the question of the way other blogospheres might have very different modes of online practice-theory, of whether and how ‘we’ should think of and deal with that. But I know even less where to place forum goons who think racism, homophobia and visceral disgust at women’s and transfolks’ bodies is hilarious in my critically-utopian daydreams of world-changing . internet drama. I generally prefer to ignore them — but it’s the same internet, after all, and the words and images of my friends that carry these meanings we might wish were wholly unintelligible to us.

As the dust settles and the blog posts move into reflective analysis mode, I’m pleased and impressed by the extent to which the blog and LJ-sphere I know best is using this attack to do what it does best, which is to build a sense of queer, feminist community across time and space. Like Tempest, when I scrolled through the forum pages, I was excited to see pictures of the many gorgeous people I met at WisCon. To reappropriate the images approprited by hate was the easiest thing in the world. If I hadn’t been there, it would still have functioned more as enticement than as warning.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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*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.