A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University!

This project confronts the term "convergence," which crystallizes a matrix of current cultural phenomena, from corporate consolidation to technical integration to user participation, that are transforming the relationship between media producers and consumers. The author analyzes the tensions emerging at the crossroads of television and the internet by taking queer female labor in the guise of online fan discussion, fiction, music videos, and community-building as an artifact that is exemplary of this formation. Her research is oriented to queer fan practices for both theoretical and historical reasons: convergence is concerned with queer dynamics like managing categories and transgressing boundaries; and more concretely her approach to such social, economic, legal, and ideological negotiations through the lens of fandom comes at a time when the media industry is itself reorienting to privilege fan engagement. Thus, along with broadening the scope of fan studies, this work intervenes in the disciplines of television and internet studies more generally through a unique critical theoretical perspective, constructing a framework drawn from media theory, queer theory, Marxist theory, and cultural studies. The core of the dissertation consists of three case studies of lesbian fan activity around the television programs Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Battlestar Galactica, and The L Word, with particular attention to three intertwined registers: the screen texts still defined as television episodes; the transmedia texts that include online tie-ins, promotions, and gossip; and the fan texts produced by interpretive communities. These evaluations allow the author to explore disputes over politics of representation (figured by the closet), technologies of reproduction (figured by the hybrid), and commodification of identity (figured by the worker), positioning fan economies as a contested axis of immaterial labor in late capitalism. Mapping the queer interventions generated by a predominantly female fan subculture, this project argues that the technologies, discourses, and subjectivities of convergence pose structural challenges to systems of ownership, circulation, and value that corporate media are struggling to reincorporate. Scrutinizing the increasingly intermediated configuration of television and the internet is essential to understanding these and other antagonisms shaping media evolution today.

Drafts of the three central chapters, which were posted as I wrote them, remain here. Only Chapter III (on Battlestar Galactica) subsequently underwent substantial revisions. The manuscript comprises the final versions, plus an introduction and conclusion. I would welcome feedback on the project as I work toward the book manuscript!

VividCon is an annual convention for fan vidders where many of each year's important works premiere. Unfortunately this summer I wasn't able to attend (here are last year's reviews), but I spent a month watching the 4-DVD set (over 100 vids) and reccing daily (with one big hiatus) on twitter.

These selections say a lot about me as a vid-watcher. For starters, none of them feature the wildly popular shows Supernatural or Merlin (and boys are kept to an absolute minimum overall). But more importantly, almost all of them deviate from the standard conventions of a vid in some significant way. There's certainly much to be said for an excellent execution of the established format, but to me, it's pushing the limits that really highlights what's unique about the form, as well as the possibilities of vidding as an art.

With no further ado my VVC09 top 20 (19 vids and 1 meta post):

• terrified by impending flood of #vvc vid premieres. first #rec - Hard Sun, on firefly fandom w/ live-action footage WOW http://tr.im/wvHf Aug 17th [Hard Sun by laurashapiro + bradcpu]




• today's #vvc #rec - Dollhouse vid by @kiki_miserychic to a mashup of the Bale rant: oh the layers of crack/meta/metacrack! http://tr.im/wA3a Aug 18th [Bale Out by kiki_miserychic]




• a #vvc #rec for John Hughes lovers: jarrow's dancevid of 80s high school movies (selected for in-depth vid review) http://tr.im/wE3Z Aug 19th [Give It Up by jarrow]




• #rec the other #vvc in-depth vid review selection: hollywoodgrrl's Doctor Who vid incorporates text + archival war footage http://tr.im/wIIL Aug 20th [Marble House by hollywoodgrrl]




• today's #vvc #rec is this important post-mortem by bop_radar: "on inclusion and exclusion in vidding fandom" http://tr.im/wN6n Aug 21st




• a more traditional #vvc #rec - obsessive24's "Bachelorette" is Buffy vs. patriarchy http://tr.im/wRcx Aug 22nd [Bachelorette by obsessive24]




• 2fer friday: sweetestdrain's "Land" is an epic 10 min. tribute to the Terminator franchise http://tr.im/wRdg #vvc #rec Aug 22nd [Land by sweetestdrain]




• EMOBOT <# - sisabet's Cameron character study (Cameron/John) to Dar Williams w/ splitscreens is today's #vvc #rec http://tr.im/wU3c Aug 23rd [Comfortably Numb by sisabet]




• deejay's Tropic Thunder vid was controversial at #vvc on the race front, but I think it's interesting. an anti-vid? #rec http://tr.im/wUrn Aug 23rd [Fight the Power by deejay]




• the Wicked Witch (Elphaba) is the Radio Star in this genius Wizard of Oz vid by dualbunny http://tr.im/wX2A - #vvc #rec SQUEE Aug 24th [Video Killed the Radio Star by dualbunny]




• ROBOTS R <# #vvc #rec - awesome multifandom action vid by charmax http://tr.im/x2aR Aug 25th [Seven Nation Army by charmax




• OK I hate all things pop, boys, + reality. but I still #rec this #vvc vid about @adamlambert by @intimations + merryish http://tr.im/x5CB Aug 25th [beautiful dirty rich by astolat + merryish]




• no, not done with the #vvc #rec project! today I have the epic Star Trek vid that you've been awaiting (K/S thru the ages) http://tr.im/yZxm Sep 18th [The Long Spear by jmtorres + niqaeli et al]




• almost forgot today's #vvc #rec - an innovative and hilarious Buffy vid by Milly http://tr.im/z6JZ Sep 19th [Lucky Me by millylicious]




• BSG nite in #vvc #rec land! this haunting FAILNALE vid relies on dissonance for its message: http://tr.im/zfWq Sep 21st [When You Wish by keewick]




• & a feel-good #vvc #rec - this virtuosic Kara/Kat by jarrow is classic shipper vidding at its best: http://tr.im/zfXA Sep 21st [Learn to Crawl by jarrow]




• "Can Delight" is an AMV-style multifandom vid by jescaflowne about cheerleaders kicking ass! #vvc #rec http://tr.im/zmeh Sep 22nd [Can Delight by jescaflowne]




• finally finished the DVDs, so this is my last #vvc #rec - yes, it's a Barack/Michelle Obama fanvid! spoiler alert: HE WON http://tr.im/zsse Sep 22nd [Say Hey (I Love You) by sdwolfpup]




• to make it an even 20 #vvc #rec let me add Star Trek by Llamas (animated) http://tr.im/zyUy + Metaphor by ces + flummery http://tr.im/zyTS Sep 23rd [Star Trek In 60 Seconds (Re-enacted by Llamas) by halcyon_shift] & [Metaphor by cesperanza + flummery]

I've had three pieces of varying scope come out in the past few weeks. The eagle-eyed will have spotted some portion of each of my three main dissertation chapters!

• Sex detectives: Law & Order: SVU's fans, critics, and characters investigate lesbian desire is the five-year-old "My Girlfriend Olivia" paper, finally ready for prime time in Transformative Works and Cultures.

• My essay "User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence" is part of the fabulous In Focus: Fandom and Feminism [right-click to download PDF] feature in the most recent Cinema Journal (it comes from my Battlestar Galactica chapter).

• You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor is an In Media Res post about fan-written scripts that teases the chapter to come. Check out more lively contributions to L Word week through Friday!

For an article that's completely unrelated to my dissertation, watch for "Show Me Yours: Cyber-Exhibitionism from Perversion to Politics" in Camera Obscura #73 (spring 2010).

I'm delighted to present slidecasts of the four talks that comprised the "Media Temporalities" panel at Media in Transition 6, held Saturday 25 April 5-6:30 at MIT. I hope that, now that we're a few months past the sometimes overwhelming MiT6 excitement, this virtual reconstruction will hold some interest for those who weren't able to attend the session. Click the play buttons to hear an audio recording of each talk synchronized with the slides.

- Julie Levin Russo (moderator)

Media Temporalities: Genre, Queer Space, and Digital Archives in Transition

While the term "cyberspace" has swiftly entered daily conversation, the notion of "cybertime" receives considerably less scrutiny. Perhaps this is because the Internet seems to both infinitely expand, growing richer by the minute with the addition of new content, and remain stable, preserved in a nebulous cloud between networked computers. Yet as media, online or otherwise, develop and grow so too do cultural understandings of temporal concepts like permanence, stability, the span of a generation, and (post)modernity. This panel thus seeks to analyze a few case studies in media temporality and the way that changes in media are marked by paradigms of time. By analyzing American time capsules, Sarah Toton discusses the changing roles of technology in cultural preservation, curation and audience participation. Examining practices of self-inscription within digital archives, Anne Kustitz considers Foucault's arts of existence as a model for users' negotiation of online information’s ephemerality and permanency. Melanie Kohnen scrutinizes the consequence of distancing viewers from queer filmic time. In investigating the transmediation of noir themes, Louisa Stein reflects on the nature of genre continuities throughout media eras, speculating on the influence of digitally-savvy "millenials" on a changing media genre. Through these examinations of archives, films, and other online materials, this panel considers the importance of addressing shifting temporalities and situating users and audiences within them.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen

As a medium of representation, the apparatus of cinema necessarily distances the depiction of space and time from the perceived reality of the spectator. Nevertheless, films have been credited with bringing audiences closer to social realities with which they might be unfamiliar. Recently, mainstream press and audiences have bestowed this credit on the films Boys Don't Cry (1999) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), designating them as breakthroughs in Hollywood's approach to representing queer desires and identities. I challenge this assessment and argue that increasing efforts of putting queerness on film and television screens always include a screening of queerness that limits or filters out unruly and undermining aspects. In particular, my paper analyzes how genre and mise-en-scene facilitate a screening of queerness in Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain that encapsulates the films' diegeses in a distant place and time. Instead of bringing queerness closer to the spectator, these screening processes render the representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of Hollywood cinema and of American society. In fact, I want to underline that the praise for the breakthrough qualities of these films precisely depends on their encapsulation of queerness in a time and place that is alien and remote, and, as such, ultimately unable to significantly impact neither Hollywood film-making nor everyday life.

Anne Kustritz

The enormous expansion of digital archiving and unprecedented levels of access to information produce both incredible excitement and anxiety. For individuals, massive digital archives of personal information inspire concerns about privacy, identity theft, and the potential for government interference in citizens' private lives. Each of these anxieties construct the internet's digital archives as sites of multi-faceted, panoptic surveillance, very much in the tradition established by Michel Foucault's early work. Yet, despite constant reminders of the always present potential for surveillance and discipline, people continue to blog, chat, interact, podcast, and otherwise inscribe themselves into the digital archive. These practices of deliberate digital self-fashioning can be understood as arts of existence or arts of the self, an aesthetic theory of identity and ethics developed in Foucault's later works. Attempts to manage and cultivate the representation of the self housed within digital archives as an aesthetic project offer a glimpse of individuals functioning within surveillance with a critical self-reflexivity about the constructedness of identity and the pervasive reach of power.

Louisa Stein

This talk investigates the continuities and transformations of generic discourse across media formats and over time. Contemporary genre theorists such as Rick Altman and Jason Mittell consider genres as complex circuits of meaning that bridge media formats and history/time. I focus here on film noir, a generic concept that seems especially bound up with questions of technology and with notions of temporality and nostalgia. Specifically, I look at new manifestations of film noir in television, new media extensions, and independent digital arenas. I consider the way in which these texts combine contemporary investments in nostalgia and pastness with questions of the moral (or immoral) import of technology. Currently, noir elements are especially central in television programs designed to reach the desirable young adult audience, a generation known in industrial terms as Millennials. A noir ethos characterizes much contemporary TV programming, including shows such as Gossip Girl, Heroes, Kyle XY, Lost, Supernatural, and The Wire. Such television programs frequently combine questions of contemporary moral ambiguity with nostalgic visuals, and invoke the threat of corporate technology draped in the mystique of noir. I trace these noir-inflected representations of technology from TV texts to their digital media extensions and to the noir-infused responses of viewers turned transmedia participants.

Sarah Toton

While historic examples of time capsules date back to Mesopotamia, the modern act of burying a sealed object containing products of material culture began in Atlanta, GA in 1936 when the Crypt of Civilization was sealed at Oglethorpe University. The Crypt became the first of a handful of "millennial time capsules": that is, capsules sealed for over 1000 years. Since the 1930s, time capsules have become a popular attempt to preserve a society through its technologies and products. This paper uncovers two time capsules--the Crypt of Civilization and Westinghouse's Capsule of Cupaloy--and suggests the ideological and commercial impulses behind these popular endeavors in collection and archiving.

Once upon a time, when I was but a wee proto-professional in the wide and wondrous field of media studies, I went on the academic job market. Between October and April, I sent out more than 60 applications, and no doubt expended far too much energy in the improbable pursuit of a gainful livelihood. Many times I rejoiced and many times I despaired, and although I learned lessons of patience and humility the uncertain outcome never became easier to bear. I am thus ecstatic to announce a happy ending to this saga:

For the next 2 years I will be serving as Acting Assistant Professor of new media in the Film & Media Studies program of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University!

I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting my colleagues in person because their search did not allow for campus visits. But all signs suggest a fantastic fit between my academic background and future and the program's composition and goals. I'm thrilled at the prospect of contributing to the evolution of the department's offerings in digital media, television, and contemporary visual culture.

Moreover, the position is absurdly accommodating of my continuing professional development. The appointment begins in January 2010 and comprises a 1-2 teaching load over winter and spring terms in 2010 and 4 courses over 3 quarters in the 2010-2011 academic year. I plan to move to the bay area in December, and until then I will be working to complete my PhD (don't expect to hear much from me over the next 6 months). I leave my permanent residence in Providence in mid-June and will return periodically while living at home in Michigan during the summer and fall.

Though I may be one princess who lives happily ever after, I have never been more aware than I was during this process of the centrality of class privilege to my achievements. In the context of a general economic crisis, the depressed academic job market has gotten more coverage than usual this year, much of it (in the New York Times, for example) portraying the plight of grad students as a temporary exception to the status quo. Speaking from my own experience, the problems with academic training and employment are not exceptional, they are structural (hat tip Dave Parry or someone contiguous). The notion that institutions of higher learning support the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake and that the most talented scholars will succeed in a meritocracy provides an ideological alibi for the precarious conditions of academic labor.

Based simply on the numbers, the majority of new professors will not land secure tenure-track jobs in the early stages of their careers, no matter how promising their skills. Because the limited array of post-doctoral and temporary full-time positions isn't adequate to absorb this workforce, most young scholars expect to toil as adjuncts for low pay until their research and teaching profile is more established. In many cases, work that could support emerging PhDs is is piled onto grad students (hat tip Amanda French), and tenured jobs that could support professionals are parceled out into part-time positions without benefits. The university is an industry and we are workers; the more that advanced grad students and new PhDs have to concentrate on paid employment, the harder it is for us to progress in our research and move onto firmer vocational ground. The result is that academics typically spend a decade or more of their lives, through grad school and several years afterwards, not earning a living wage. I am lucky to have financial resources that mitigate this burden, and certainly many with less advantages than I navigate these circumstances with aplomb and go on to distinguished careers. But I can't help remarking that these conditions perpetuate an institutional culture that makes access difficult for those without a commensurate level of economic privilege (and the other dimensions of privilege with which class intersects).

If you'd like to celebrate my accomplishments, I urge you to support organizations and initiatives that advocate for academia as a profession that is equitable and open to all. Marc Bousquet and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor offer some illuminating resources, including (USA):
• The Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions
• The Coalition on the Academic Workforce
• The American Federation of Teachers
• The American Association of University Professors (currently seeking donations for their capital campaign)

I write all this because I feel a certain responsibility to head off the impression that, since I got a desirable job in the end, the system works. It doesn't, to which my brilliant friends who will be left un(der)employed this year attest. However, I think it's fair to say that a tremendous dose of my own tenacious work and careful strategy went into my success. I hope that we can continue to nurture ABDs and new PhDs by sharing knowledge and experience as a collective resource. For starters, I'll point you to the Media Studies Job Search group on Facebook, where I'd be happy to field discussion, and the advice section of the infamous wiki.

Finally, I'd like to convey my deepest thanks to the friends, family, mentors, and peers who have supported me in so many ways through this process.

This entry is crossposted at cyborganize, but I am relocating my future blogging back to this web site. Please update any blogrolls to the Indiscrete Media category feed, which is my workaround for organizing new posts. I believe I've managed to rejigger the site to allow you to comment using OpenID or without logging in.