abstract
Since the 1970’s, people have been writing fan fiction and organizing communities in which it could be shared. Many of these stories about characters swiped from television, movies, or other mass media revolve around queer erotic narratives. Captain Janeway and the cyborg Seven of Nine from the show Star Trek: Voyager have become a common lesbian pairing, part of the fan fiction explosion that occurred with the popularization of the internet. Well-known academic work on fan fiction in the field of audience studies (e.g. Jenkins) cannot adequately account for the vast structural changes the internet and related technologies precipitated in fan culture. I will argue that it is time to cultivate a new approach to media reception from the perspective of critical theory. My method, which in this example draws on Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and Berlant and Warner’s “Sex in Public,” provides a framework for modeling realistically intricate and expansive connections between the site of mass culture production and the site of its consumption. I will apply this model to an exploration of Janeway/Seven fan fiction on the internet, discussing the relationship of new communication technologies to compromises of intellectual property law, to the creation of spaces that are both public and erotic, and to the (political) possibilities of non-economic models of mass media production and consumption.

"I do not believe the Collective intended for me to..."
			She searched a moment for the phrasing.
						"...make love to you."   

~ Seven of Nine in "The Dress" by Boadicea


Production is also immediately consumption... 
Consumption is also immediately production... 
Each is immediately its opposite.  But at the same time 
a mediating movement takes place between the two.

~ Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Tucker 228-9)