Borg Queen (to Seven): "They've taken you apart and recreated you in their own image. But at the core, you are still mine."
...
Janeway: "She's one of us."

The infinite, impersonal communion of the mostly male-appearing Borg(14) is ordered by and focused in a single female figure: the Queen (as of an insect colony). Both maternal and sexual (just look at her! [the Borg Queen fights with Seven while her assimilated father looks on]), the Queen exists as a decapitated cyborg head suspended in the collective's command center like a computer's processor, the metaphoric unitary mind and identity of the civilization ("disembodiment is the epitome of perfection" she says in "Unimatrix Zero"). But she has a robotic body that she can couple with when it is convenient, and a distinct personality. Through the Borg, and in particular through the figure of the Queen (for example, her statements quoted above, which turn typical criticisms of the Borg on humans), Star Trek gives air time to tensions within and alternatives to its almost relentless liberal humanism. Characters like Captain Janeway dogmatically maintain that losing one's individuality to live as a Borg drone is a fate far worse than death, but the show (and the Queen explicitly) also suggests the pleasure of being Borg: the satisfaction of perfect efficiency, unmarred by personal quibbles (order supplanting chaos); omnipotence and immortality; utterly complete closeness to and sharing with one's family and the larger community (never being alone, continual "borgasm" [Dery]); a fortified, modular cyborg body that can both penetrate and be penetrated (Fuchs)...

When the character of Seven of Nine (a former Borg) was introduced at the beginning of Star Trek: Voyager's fourth season (1997), the move was widely spoken of as a transparent ploy to increase the show's popularity in the coveted 18-24 year-old male ratings bracket--this from a series that had originally made TV history by instating the first woman in Trek who was captain for longer than a cameo. But in spite of her Barbie-doll body and skin-tight outfit, Seven does not fit easily into satisfying stereotypes of the female sex object. A word about her fictional origins is in order: a former human (Annika Hansen) assimilated at age 6, she was assigned as the Borg liaison to Captain Janeway for certain negotiations. During a daring escape, Janeway severed Seven's link to the collective, effectively deassimilating her by force, and insisted that she be re-humanized against her will [Janeway comforts Seven in the brig during her deassimilation]. Most of her cybernetic implants were rejected by her body and removed (a fascinating medical discourse), and she has taken on a basically human (if somewhat topheavy) appearance. Permanent reminders of her Borg past and cyborg present remain, however, in metallic ornaments visible on her face and hand (and who knows where else!). Her transition to "individuality" in speech, behavior, affect, and thought have been much more gradual and incomplete than her physical transformation. In contrast to your typical bimbo (even of the action hero variety) she is extremely intelligent and physically powerful, talks almost as if she were a robot, is for the most part logical and emotionless (as well as arrogant), and is relentlessly desexualized (her naivete, social incompetence, and self-assuredness have been enough to cow most men who have shown an interest). Seven is, ultimately, a complex "grab bag of signifiers": she combines codes of the porn star, the independent woman, the cyborg/alien, the fetish slave, even the geek, into a site where almost all the conflicts of Voyager, and all conflict with the Captain, can be localized.(15)

In Seven's journey toward "humanity" Captain Janeway quickly took on the role of primary mentor. In the show's explicit narrative, this is generally justified as a result of Janeway's sense of responsibility to Seven, or as a manifestation of her maternal instincts. The two women have developed an intense and conspicuous bond, however, an emotionally potent and often highly contentious relationship that is not necessarily contained by the superimposed teacher-student reading. This is what many lesbian fans of Voyager identify as "subtext": narrative and visual structures that, while on the most literal level disavowing any erotic content, nevertheless invite a lesbian interpretation(16) [Janeway tries to assist Seven with social skills at a party]. Janeway (like Seven) has her own sexual hangups. She points out constantly that her professional duties as Captain require that she sublimate her personal needs for fulfilling emotional and sexual relationships: a timely rendition of the working woman's conflict between public and private spheres.(17) Janeway's closeness to Seven is both a counterpoint to her self-enforced celibacy and a political struggle: her mania for maintaining traditional Western values in the hostile elsewhere that is the Delta Quadrant (where her ship is stranded) seems to express itself in her obsession with de-Borgifying Seven. This intersection between intimate relationships and questions of the human and the public is often manifested in J/7 fan fiction, which hones in on the way Voyager quietly sets these relations up as lesbian (by endowing Janeway and Seven's relationship with such ambience). In this sense, there are other ways of reading Seven's porn-star coded body than as man-bait.

That is, the point of this long digression into the television text is not only to provide a context for the fiction to follow, but to acknowledge that the show is already doing some of the work. Mass culture is hegemonic, and as such it is not an ideological monolith: its meanings are constantly contested in a dynamic dialogue with their resistant or marginal counterparts. I do not intend to claim that fan writers are creating something subversive out of nothing in simple opposition to the dominant TV text. While there are certainly pairings and styles that are far more independent of screen subtext than J/7, fan fiction is by definition a genre of poaching, as it were, which means that there must be something attractive in the lord's preserve that fans want to get their hands on. Fan texts are also not immune to mainstream ideology: a romance in which Seven becomes fully human and ends up marrying Janeway, for example, is hardly a bastion of radicalism. What is interesting about fan fiction is not that it is inherently revolutionary, but that it makes manifest the complex conversations that take place between consumers and the mass media outside the expected boundaries of television, and the technologies and communities that provide relatively independent environments for fan interpretations.

Many fan writers say that what they do is fix things that are wrong with the shows they love, or pick up and carry out possibilities that are unavailable to television. In the case of erotic fan fiction, one thing fans seem to indignantly assert is lacking in the mass media is public characters and discourses that are meaningfully embodied and erotic. Slash makes the additional demand that queer sexuality and relationships be publicly celebrated. Although fan stories about two men having a relationship have been around for three decades, it is only much more recently that large numbers of lesbian slash stories have been available. This may be because of the internet's role in making fan fiction accessible to a more diverse group of fan readers and writers, or it may have more to do with the historical dearth of strong female characters in the mass media. Within Trek fandom, J/7 is the first female pairing to develop a large following, perhaps because the characters have the archetypal qualities of a slash couple: a screen relationship fraught with deep emotional connection and conflict.

I must acknowledge, here, one of the major unresolved tensions of this paper, coalescing around its "lesbian" theme. Instinctively, I want to claim J/7 fan fiction as a lesbian phenomenon, as in made by and for real-world lesbians. I have no demographic data or representative sampling to offer (indeed I resist these approaches), but from my own extensive web surfing it does seem to me that the majority of J/7 fiction is of relatively high artistic quality, and is written by people who identify themselves as women. Or at least, most writers come across convincingly as lesbians discursively, and approach lesbianism in their work with an insider's respect and humor. Part of my fantasy is that J/7 fiction (and perhaps female slash more generally) can be read as a quirky example of how lesbians make their own collective spaces to meditate on and oppose a sexist and heteronormative culture. On the other hand, it is central to my argument that I move beyond models that depend on fixed identities (and certainly on demographic claims). The lesbian-ness of J/7 may be interpreted as a strategic position, a queer practice, or a metaphor, but attaching it literally to corporeal individuals living out a relatively stable sexual orientation seems antithetical to my project and to the theoretical framework I have delineated. Rather than try to mediate between these two interpretations, I will simply point out that both of them are at work in the arguments that follow (giving a touch of the cyborg to the my theoretical fantasy itself, perhaps). Interestingly, I find an analogue to my own dilemma in J/7 stories themselves. As I will show, they often combine reactionary narrative conventions (like plugging Janeway and Seven into the structure of a heterosexual romance) with elements that threaten this status quo (like manifestations of cyborg sex), with unpredictable results.(18)

In the thousands of J/7 stories published on the internet, it is typical for there to be some acknowledgement of the contemporary strangeness of lesbian relationships in mainstream culture: becoming involved with a woman may be new and unexpected, or require research beforehand (in Seven's case). However, I have never read a story where one of the characters had to agonize over coming out--in fact, in this imaginary future, lesbianism seems to be a fairly commonplace act more often than an identity. A debate about how a romantic relationship can fit into Janeway's role as captain is another common trope. And J/7 always deals in some way with Seven's Borg hybridity, as a character trait and as a bodily characteristic, and also, tacitly or explicitly, with Janeway's relationship to Seven's pre-human self. Janeway often ends up affirming that Seven is sexually desirable in spite or because of her visibly cybernetic body. As a genre, J/7 smut spins an erotic narrative out of the tensions and intersections in the unmapped, post-reproductive territories beyond the boundaries of humanity and heteronormativity. That said, J/7 stories exhibit an impressive diversity of styles: they range in length from vignettes of a few pages to novel-size series; they may conform to the codes of romance or be dark SM fantasies that capitalize on Janeway and Seven's on-screen power dynamics. I offer a closer reading of one story, "Freeing Kathryn," by Paulann Hughes, as a more detailed and specific taste of some of the possibilities of active consumption that fan fiction can exemplify. No one story is typical of J/7 fiction, but this one combines several recurring elements, and strikes a balance between romance and more original narrative structures.

The plot of "Freeing Kathryn" revolves around a subtly enumerated interrogation of how and why Janeway and Seven's sexual relationship should be made public knowledge. For Seven, Janeway's struggle to reconcile her needs as a captain and as a woman is connected to Seven's own acceptance on Voyager as a former Borg. At the beginning of the story, the two women are already lovers, but only in stolen moments on the sly, and this "had left Seven feeling as though there was no difference between being the queen's drone and being Kathryn Janeway's partner." She worries that "the ambitious Starfleet Captain would feel humiliated to have others know she had copulated with a Borg." Seven can no longer deal with their stilted, secret liaison, but Janeway is certain that her duty to the ship compels her to rigidly compartmentalize her life into personal and public zones: "She gave Seven every private minute she could spare...Whatever was left of her when she was done being Captain belonged to Seven...It was the reminder of what the four pips on her collar had cost her." When another woman falls in love with Seven (an alien hybrid also, incidentally) it precipitates a crisis, and Janeway realizes she must "'make it clear that Seven is taken'" if she wants to maintain a monogamous romance with her. She orchestrates an elaborate scene in the mess hall that puts her erotic bond with Seven on display:

she said, loud enough to regain the attention of those who had politely stopped staring at her, 'The Commander has been kind enough to give me the day off to spend with you, Darling, so, I'm not on duty. So you can dispense with the rank and call me Kathryn.' Then she added for the benefit of those whose chins hadn't yet hit their tables, 'Like you do when we're alone'...and gave her a kiss that was intended to appear anything but chaste.

Because one more thing must happen before Janeway and Seven's love is truly consummated: Seven's Borg half must be productively consolidated with their newly integrated sex life. Seven's most threatening Borg apparatus turns into a sex toy, forcing Janeway to confront the boundary anxieties that are holding her back:

She sat, transfixed, as Seven used her left hand, her Borg hand, to caress and excite herself...she marveled that something so inhuman as that hand could move with such purposeful tenderness. But then, when she saw Seven extend and insert her assimilation tubules into her opening, it terrified her and she grabbed her lover's hand, forcing her to stop.(19)

She laced her fingers with Seven's Borg ones and drew that hand to her lips. She placed small but satisfying kisses on each finger, each implant. "Darling? Why haven't you ever used this hand on me before?"

Seven could not prevent herself from smiling. As brilliant as the more experienced woman was, she had made a habit of missing the obvious. "You never allowed it, Kathryn."

"Oh," she said. "Well, that was dumb."

"Indeed." She removed her hand from Kathryn's and edged it toward her partner's thighs. "Shall I demonstrate its other uses?"

"Do you know why I never pushed you about letting me call you 'Annika'?"

"Because I forbid you from doing so?"

She laughed, "Well, there was that, but, it's more because I realized some time ago that Annika is someone I never knew. That you, the woman I love and have always intended to spend my life loving, are Seven of Nine. Not Borg. Not human. But the best of both."

re-imagining reception

In my formulation, a politically engaged theory must facilitate specific questions not only about what surprising ideas pop culture articulates, but about whether these articulations are a significant force in the ongoing renegotiations of the material and ideological structures that dominate our culture. It is interesting that J/7 fan fiction expresses alternative formations of desire that call oppressive conceptions of privacy and humanity into question, but it is not clear whether the power to express a resistant viewpoint is a politically effective power in a hegemony. The more interesting potential of this potent elaboration of sexual, social, and bodily alternatives lies in its relations with dominant ideological and material contexts--in particular with systems of production and consumption. In order to theorize these relations in a novel way, I would like to begin to think about consumption from the perspective of the cyborg, who sees positions as contingent, contradictory, unstable, and intangible, and defines culture as connectivity, simultaneity, impurity, and information. And from a queer perspective which calls into question the appropriate distinctions between and substance of the private and the public.

The conventional understanding of the economic structure of mass media is fairly nuanced and complex, and it is actually not accurate to assume that the TV studio is the producer, the program the product, and the viewer the consumer. Media commodities circulate on several different levels, which entail corresponding role reversals. First, independent contractors produce a program and sell it (as a commodity) to distributors. In the hands of the distributors (media corporations), the program becomes a producer: it is responsible for delivering an audience (the commodity) that the station can sell to advertisers. The audience's role as a commodity is dependent on the more abstract realm of the cultural economy, in which viewers produce meanings and pleasures from television texts (reception)--that is, these meanings and pleasures are one of the main reasons people watch TV.(21) Although, for the sake of simplicity, I will continue to call audiences "consumers," I wanted to point out that it is not only in speculative, metaphorical terms that this demarcation is complex and unstable. I am going to go on to explore both the concrete traces of fan fiction's interactions with the culture industry's dominations and their more figurative components. And I would still like to keep open the option that, while I'm offering fan fiction as a tangible trace of meaning-making, less concrete effects of audience activity may be dispersed in similar ways.

Simply by existing, fan fiction is implicitly making certain claims about the boundaries between producers and consumers of mass media: it suggests that media products don't always meet the needs or satisfy the desires of consumers, and are therefore subject to continuing work by consumers which destabilizes their textual perimeters and contests producers' "ownership" of them. This idea is standard fare in analyses of fan fiction, and in work on active audience reception in general. To take this conflict literally is to describe the legal disputes and tacit negotiations that are a sort of conversation between corporations and fans (and not always a polite one). What critics don't often point out, in their descriptions of the legal discourses that are always implicated in the shape of fan culture, is the commonsense weirdness of intellectual property law. As subjects in a culture in which these concepts have been very effectively naturalized, we never step back to ask: how can an idea or a sign or a character, something which is essentially pure meaning, and certainly completely immaterial, be fixed as property, to be used (whatever that means) by only one individual or company or associated with only one official reading? How can the boundaries of this kind of property even be defined in concrete legal terms, in whose interest does such a definition operate, and does it have internal fissures which are ready-made points of opposition? In other words, the law is not a monolith which fans' activities are situated in simple resistance to, it is as much a piecemeal, contingent, paradoxical, constantly renegotiated tangle as the fan texts.

Rosemary J. Coombe gives an excellent elaboration of this in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, arguing that trademark law is constructed by overlooking the fact of reception: it assumes any meaning that accrues to a sign like a logo or character to be the product of a company's creative and promotional efforts, and not of the activities of the consumers who interpret it. Therefore, the corporation is entitled to be the sole beneficiary of all those meanings; consumers have no rights over them. However impossible it sounds in terms of the way messages actually circulate, "The law freezes the play of signification by legitimating authorship, deeming meaning to be value properly redounding to those who 'own' the signature or proper name, without regard to the contributions or interests of those others in whose lives it figures" (8). This may be viewed either (pessimistically) as disempowering consumers in favor of those with more economic clout, or (optimistically) as putting corporate authority in a rather sticky situation: Coombe points out that

the law creates the cultural spaces of postmodernism in which mass-media images are authorized and become available for the authorial practices of others. It produces fixed, stable identities authored by the celebrity subject, but simultaneously creates the possibility of places of transgression in which the signifier's fixity and the celebrity's authority may be contested and resisted. (125)

In a brief discussion of fan fiction, Coombe makes an engaging case for the political productiveness of the form by focusing on the "complex moral economy in which [fans] legitimize their unorthodox appropriation of the texts" (125). She describes fans as engaging in a conscious ethical dialogue and struggle with the norms embodied by the law--a political practice. With Coombe's framework in mind, it is not surprising that the stakes of this engagement are heightened by the fact that the legal precedents surrounding fan fiction are vague and uneasy. Part of the explanation for this may be that fans have few legal resources in comparison with media conglomerates, so when the corporations take issue with their activities, they often choose to go further underground rather than to stand and fight. But, between the First Amendment and the aforementioned ambiguousness of the distinction between "derivative materials and branded properties" and "independent 'creative work,'"(22) the corporations may not be sure the law will come down on their side. They are also forced into compromise by the paradox of their position as producers: they need to guard their sole possession of their lucrative commodities as a source of revenue, but for the same reason they need the goodwill of fans. They can't afford to indiscriminately alienate the people who spend the most time and money on their products (the most obvious form of authority that consumers have), and so they must choose their battles carefully.

Whatever the reason, the periodic border wars that have been staged by the studios as attempts to place constraints on the propagation of fan fiction have most often taken the form of corporate muscle-flexing through legal threats and "cease and desist" letters. In a typical case cited in the New York Times last year (2000), Fox sent a warning to a Simpsons fan who had sounds, images, and video from the show on his web site--he removed the material and was forced to move (not disappear) by his web server, but not without a flurry of on-line protest. Different studios have also taken harder or softer lines toward fan production, and exercised different strategies. Jenkins cites an incident in the early 80's in which Lucasfilm Ltd. tried crying defamation instead of trademark violation: a representative wrote "we are going to insist on no pornography. This may mean no fanzines if that measure is what's necessary to stop the few from darkening the reputation our company is so proud of" (31). In other words, a corporation might decide that it is only particular kinds of meaning-making, such as (homo)sexual readings, that it won't countenance (although in practice this has not been a popular tactic). The implied compromise that has been reached through all this legalistic wrangling is that fan writing is tolerated provided it is strictly not-for-profit, and this stipulation is likely to stand (in the New York Times, Amy Harmon quotes a 20th Century Fox spokesman as saying "as long as somebody's not out there trying to make money with it, I don't think anybody wants to shut them down"). The point: in spite of (presumably) having dominant social forces on their side, the studios have been relatively unsuccessful at setting precedents that contain the proliferation of resistant fan interpretations. Their impotence might be due to a calculation that these subcultural readings are ultimately unthreatening to corporate hegemony, or it might demonstrate the incipient political power fans have in the multiaccentual terrain of representation (or both).

Fans do engage very consciously with the legal inflections of conceptions of production and products that hover over their activities. As a nod to the provisions of intellectual property law, all fan stories carry a disclaimer that states that "Star Trek, Star Trek Voyager, and the characters in this story are the property of Paramount" (to give a serviceable, if spartan, example from a J/7 story). The degree to which fan writers are aware of the dominations that circumscribe their work is evident in the more creative disclaimers that are quite common; here is the most elaborate example I've seen, by T. Dancinghands:(23)

The Lord's Disclaimer

Our Paramount/Viacom, who art in Hollywood,
Copyrighted be thy name.
Thy profits come,
Thy royalties be honored,
In Asia as they are in the "Free World".
Give us this week our piece of cannon, [sic]
And forgive us our fanfics,
As we forgive the real klunkers you occasionally produce.
And lead us not into litigation,
But deliver us from cancellations.
For thine is the franchise, and the trade marks, and the merchandising,
For ever and ever
Amen

This story contains graphic depictions of sexual intercourse between two women. If you are under eighteen, easily offended, homophobic, pea brained, or otherwise hung up, seek out thy entertainment elsewhere cause this just ain't your bag. (Reverend Jim)(24)

Disclaimers demonstrate the disjuncture between what is considered significant in the dominant discourse and in fan discourse: for the studios, production is apparently only meaningful (that is, threatening to their containment of their property) if it generates money; "amateur" writing is allowed to proliferate freely. For fan writers, it is precisely the freedom to create texts outside of and in response to capitalist management of narrative that is valued. It is not clear whether the corporate tunnel-vision that conflates products and profit is a sign that fan production simply can't hope to operate anywhere near the same level of influence as economics, or whether it is actually an oversight, and therefore a potential ground for the political activities of fans to germinate. The studios' tolerance of fan fiction is always provisional, and they do show an interest in controlling the expansion of (versus simply policing) the perimeters of their texts. For years, there have been professionally written novels published by the studios that elaborate on and spin off of television storylines. And Paramount/Viacom is now holding an annual Star Trek fan fiction contest, and publishing anthologies of the winning stories--royalties are even paid to the authors.

Jenkins implies that even though the copyright compromise protects the studios' status as producers (in economic terms), it leaves space for fans to challenge their power to dictate the meanings received from TV texts. I would argue that the challenge fan fiction poses to dominant models of textual production is actually far more sweeping. By narrating around, over, in between, and parallel to television, it attacks any attempt to see texts as discrete and bounded events that can be packaged as products. As manifested in fanfic, textual meaning is a fluid practice that invites communal participation in public forums. The relative lack of legal restrictions on fan fiction is evidence for fans' contention that characters and stories are public property, and demonstrates the difficulty of officially legitimizing one meaning over another. Even more importantly, fans activities' challenge the definition, as well as the borders, of products. Fan writers turn the production of new texts into an integral part of the process of mass culture consumption, compromising the rigid dichotomy a capitalist model maintains between the two activities, and representing production and consumption as interrelated, even similar operations. And by harnessing the valuation of their creative enterprises to things other than money, fans propose alternate understandings of what it is to be a consumer or a producer. Parallel to my earlier example of how erotic fan fiction can stage a redefinition of relationships and categories within dominant texts by imagining new sexual modes, fanfic refigures on a meta-level the mass media system it participates in.

All of this was, for the most part, moot when fan fiction was distributed in paper zines. With modes of reproduction and distribution that were shackled to the physical, the radical possibilities of fan production could circulate in only very limited ways. The internet is changing everything.

Along with other recently developed technologies, the internet is transfiguring culture rapidly and acutely. Right now, the net feels like a maelstrom of competing discourses and interests, and it's anybody's guess who is going to come out on top. Theorists, for their part, have advanced many ideas but few conclusions. Sadie Plant writes that, unlike any other dominant social form in cultural memory, "[the Net can] be described as a parallel, distributed system which not only functions without centralized control but has also developed as a consequence of localized, piecemeal activities which build the system from the bottom up" (206). Mark Poster quotes cyber-guru John Katz as saying "technology is breaking down the notion of few-to-many communications. Some communicators will always be more powerful than others, but the big idea behind cyber-tales is that for the first time the many are talking to the many" (194-5). Poster adds "the information superhighway opens qualitatively new political opportunities because it creates new loci of speech" (187). One example of this unpredictable movement is the imminent failures of intellectual property law (the main instrument of fan fiction containment).

John Perry Barlow conveniently explores the consequences the world wide web may have for intellectual property law in "Selling Wine Without Bottles." He points out that we are well on our way to converting to an economy where information itself is the primary, privileged commodity. At the same time, the nature of information is being radically transformed: it is becoming fully digitized, made up only of electrons, able to travel at the speed of light and change hands without ever becoming physical. And it is incredibly easy to produce and reproduce in a way that books, or even radio or TV programs, never were. This is, Barlow argues, a crisis for the organization of property, and corporations are the ones falling behind. Their strategy seems to be to ignore the fact that virtual property is fundamentally different from information that has physical traces, while aggressively expanding existing law to manhandle it into submission. Barlow thinks this simply won't work: "we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship...Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain the gasses of digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum" (149). Even more provocatively, "Most of the people who actually create soft property--the programmers, hackers, and Net surfers--already know this" (149)--it's regular folks who have the upper hand. Popular practice has already overrun the boundaries of unenforceable laws: take, for example, the almost universal habit of software piracy, or the court's impotent attempt to stop the sharing of music files by shutting down Napster.(25) As Barlow presciently quips, "Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain" (153). The activities that define producers of information and consumers of it are shifting irrevocably.

On the other hand, the Powers That Be aren't idly standing by while the People run amok. As cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig puts it,

The Internet has an embedded ideology. That ideology has changed. At its birth, the net protected privacy, freedom of speech and innovation. As the architecture of the net has evolved, it protects those values less effectively. Today it is easier to monitor and track behavior on the net, and easier for network owners to control how the net gets used. That increase in the power to control is a shift in the ideology of the original net. (McGrath)

On the more optimistic side of this debate is the popular triumph in the struggle for the control of cryptography technology, the intrepid and indispensable defender of data privacy. For decades, the government (in particular agencies responsible for national security like the NSA and FBI) have opposed any public access to cryptography, arguing that it would make it impossible to track criminals. They were forced to cave by a massive public resistance, and now we send encrypted transmissions on a daily basis. As one writer crows, "On one side of the battle were relative nobodies: computer hackers, academics and wonky civil libertarians. On the other were some of the most powerful people in the world: spies, generals and even presidents. Guess who won" (Levy).

This is only one concrete example of the ways cyberspace mucks up traditional inflections of the public and the private, making the apparently stable boundary between their domains blurry and permeable. The rhetorical question raised here is: if all information can now be universally shared (or at least distributed), where (in the e-world) do we locate the border between an insulated private space of subjectivity and intimacy and a public space for commerce and civics, a distinction that Berlant and Warner identify as ideologically central to modern capitalism? In discourse about the internet, the connection of this question to sex is clear. One of the anxieties of "internet privacy" is that formerly private preferences and acts (consuming porn/surfing porn sites, sharing fantasies with a sexual partner/talking dirty in chat rooms) will be converted into data in the public domain. And pornographic content and activity on-line has been the obsessive hub of much of the government's e-regulatory energy (powered by consumer advocacy), particularly when this focus is symptomatized as "protecting children" from inappropriate material. Indeed, porn is perhaps the net's biggest industry, both commercial and cottage. Was consuming pornography (erotic fan fiction included) formerly a private affair that is now being turned into a public act or even a community structure? If you are sitting at your computer at home talking to 20 people in a gay.com chatroom, are you in private or in public? If I were to locate a lesbian public sex in the realm of e-possibility, would it be at the intersection of a new and deviant publicity of sexuality with traditionally nurturing female private spaces (as they translate on-line), or at the intersection of conscientiously constructed feminist public discourses with the shielded private zone of sex talk and images and acts? What is clear is that the qualitative transformations in the social field that new technologies of communication are realizing are confusing and opening up the terms of the public/private binary (and its sexual investments) along with the terms of the production/consumption binary.

I am arguing here that both the theoretical metaphors I explored earlier interface fruitfully with cyberspace: the net is pregnant with cyborgean forces, in both their progressive and totalitarian forms. It puts humans into new relationships with technology that call into question the boundaries of identity and the body and fundamentally restructure the fabric of relations both locally and globally. And the new and different opportunities the internet provides for social organization have made sex publicly available and fantasy publicly expressible in unprecedented ways, potentially lining up with Berlant and Warner's call for erotically engaged counterpublics. I am concerned here only with what these new formations mean for fan fiction: I am suggesting that they are a powerful and comprehensive realization of the possibilities for radically restructuring systems of domination that were already nascent in fans' creative activities. And I am suggesting that, at this stage in the emergence of internet culture, hegemonic forces don't necessarily have these possibilities under control.

In the New York Times last fall (2000), Ann Powers wrote:

the Internet has changed the relationship between the entertainment industry and its audience. Fandom has always pumped the heart of popular culture, but never before has it come so close to its motor functions...these new possibilities have...threatened to obliterate the space between fans as consumers and the industry that profits from their interest.

The web's facility for organizing vast amounts of information into smaller thematic pockets permits both flexibility and communalism: if you can find one J/7 web site, you can probably find them all by exploring authors' lists of links (because authors keep track of and communicate with each other). And if you don't have your own web site, you can join a newsgroup or discussion list and post your stories there, or have them collected at an archive page--another effect of the persistence of new public forms of community organization. The internet's cultural cachet, as well as its properties of wide circulation, has contributed to the expansion of fan fiction's readership beyond a show's die-hard fanatics (one of Harmon's interviewees commented "You're getting a lot of the people who wouldn't be caught dead near a convention...It's different if you do it on the web"). The increase in numbers has allowed fanfic to diversify and specialize (to admit much more lesbian fic, for example), while the web allows a network of connections to be maintained through general interest newsgroups, pages, archives, and link pages. Last but not least, all this abundance can flourish independent of monetary constraints: whatever their hidden costs, relatively unobtrusive pop-ups and banner ads are supporting a free internet where fan production can be structured as a new realm of public pleasures that are individual and communal, generous and limitless, fully bypassing a system based on the exchange of money between producers and consumers. While internet distribution is not quite comparable in scope to reaching a mass audience, it does achieve a flexibility and freedom that compromises dominant conceptions of the nature of consumption and production.

Because the internet is so diffuse, it is impossible to pin down all the positions where J/7 fic might be popping up. But if you're looking for an example of the context in which it is typically created and distributed (in my rather extensive experience), check out a J/7 page found at members.aol.com/Tenderware. Tenderware's page straddles the private/public dichotomy: it has a very personal tone, and refers itself to an intimate network of "friends and family." But it is interfaced with the high-traffic thoroughfares of slash fiction as part of a web ring and through its own web of links. The personal and the civic have an effortless connectivity. In addition to fiction, it offers artwork and articles: an ingeniously intertextual response to some J/7-related comments made by Jeri Ryan (the actor who plays Seven of Nine), and an intelligent FAQ that makes references to Jenkins and other studies of fan fiction. The fic, here, is part of a network of complex practices that constitute the fan's relationship to the media industry--critical understanding and ready defense of fan activities, non-fictional commentary on the show and its meta-texts, deliberate community building, and consciousness of academic perspectives--and these practices are being developed and extended in cyberspace together. Although we could make educated guesses about the real gender, sexual orientation, race, or class attached to the alias "Tenderware" in the physical world, internet environments elude demographics in favor of a freer play with positions and meanings. And in spite of its friendly and wholesome appearance, this web page has plenty of smut, and it is the pleasures of fan smut that its community is organized around.

In The Domain-Matrix, Sue-Ellen Case describes her project as (among other things) "a politics of space with lesbian as the final frontier that cyber-trekkies may imagine" (56). Her Star Trek metaphor marks the progressive pole of what she argues is a fiercely contested struggle over the shape of the future. Theorizing the internet as a new kind of space (i.e. cyberspace) that is radically reconfiguring the architecture of bodies, identity, work, and society, she (like Haraway) maintains that it is far from decided who will be in control of sculpting this nascent realm into its final form. Will dominations based on difference translate successfully, or will cyberspace take on the properties of fluidity, connectedness, and embodiedness that Case metaphorically ascribes to the performing lesbian? In the case of the battle that is tacitly being waged in cyberspace between corporations' and fans' divergent ways of structuring the production and dissemination of meaning, it's too soon to tell who's going to come out victorious. Both sides have staked their ground: the media conglomerates are always expanding their already vast jurisdiction over entertainment, communications, and technology, but the fans are stalwart in their financial clout as consumers and have claimed an extensive internet domain. Harmon quotes a Lucasfilm spokesperson expressing the company's helplessness in the face of fanfic: "What can you do? How can you control it? As we look at it, we appreciate the fans, and what would we do without them?" And the columnist Steve Silberman points out that the media may be in over its head in its efforts to dominate fan discourse on the net: "To attempt to force a community to sprout only in an officially sanctioned garden is to wage war on the very strengths of the medium you're using to get your message across."

My point is that it is too soon to dismiss reception as a practice whose effects are contained in its immediate environment. I have argued that J/7 stories, as an example, are well suited to articulating the anti-authoritarian affinities between the queer and the cyborg (which Case calls two related "unnatural" figures [97]) in new and exciting ways. Through their practices on the internet, fan writers have developed a culture that makes good on the demands that are inherent in their texts: demands not only for public narratives that are embodied and erotic, but for new ways of making and disseminating such narratives. Fans themselves are the sexy cyborgs they write about: interfaced with computers and the virtual environments that technology gives them access to, their on-line personas resist construction as unitary, embodied, gendered citizens. From this position in the passageways that the cyborg opens up between categories, they create a public community (and not just a textual vision) structured around new sexual and relational possibilities that are produced and consumed in new ways. It is in these connections between the raw material of reception itself and the political context of that reception that the most interesting and valuable questions about mass media consumption lie.

If, as Haraway theorizes, the most powerful mode of opposition operates from within dominations themselves, fan fiction's position in dialogue with mass culture might be an influential strategy rather than simply a sign of fans' enthrallment. Rather than interpreting the interrelatedness of TV shows and fanfic as a sign that fans' meaning-making is circumscribed by their dependence on the material provided by the mass media, I would argue that this deliberate intertextuality is what makes fan fiction (and reception more generally) textually original and politically interesting. The power to appropriate television's signifiers can be seen as expanding rather than impoverishing the language fans have to comment on their culture. To reformulate Jenkins: poaching, the particular move which situates a resistant reading at the very heart of the hegemonic text, is a key tactic because it engages with hegemonies on their own inexhaustible turf. Case aligns this sort of guerrilla warfare with the hacker term voudou, which is cyberpunk-speak for finding resistant architectures in cyberspace. One of the defining characteristics of voudou is that it is "a system which takes found objects, the trash or litter that the transcendent system leaves behind, and redeploys them in a useful, hopeful manner" (51-2)--Janeway and Seven are the coffee grounds and locks of hair that treksmutters use to cast their spells over television, and, by extension, to hex the patriarchal capitalist status quo.

I am not making the claim that fan fiction alone has the power to destabilize this hegemony, or even that fans are always satisfied with their power to rework mass narratives. In spite of its growing popularity, fanfic is still a phenomenon most people haven't heard of, and only the privileged in our increasingly stratified economy have access to computers and the incipient transformations of the internet. At this point in our theories of culture, it is often just frustrating to try to answer the question of whether any particular discourse or relation harbors the seeds of fundamental changes, within a dominant ideological system which is capable of very sensitive evolution and expert at incorporating into itself expressions of resistance. I am simply presenting fan fiction as a test case to argue for a new understanding of where radical possibilities might germinate. Without bringing a theoretical framework that admits metaphor and imagination to a study of popular reception, that reads it as part of a complex and interconnected environment where not only consumption and production, but discourses as diverse as economics and sex, have the potential to affect each other, it is impossible to begin to wonder how mass media consumption might relate to political change. And if we can't imagine that acts of reception might harbor such powers, we certainly can't try to measure them in concrete or empirical or ethnographic ways. Here, I am only activating these questions by envisioning what the structures and strategies that would link consumption to politics might be, and I leave it to others to rework my narrative in their own productive ways. One of the lessons fan fiction teaches is that mass culture can be much more fertile if you fantasize about it, and I will suggest that if we are not willing, as theorists, to fantasize about the potentialities and not just the realities of culture as we observe it, we can't hope to be engaged with the struggles that are in play in that culture.

notes

1. Academic consensus locates the origins of fan fiction within Star Trek fan culture in the 1970's, although it may have existed in some form in earlier decades. It arose at about the same time in several other fandoms, and steadily spread and gained popularity.
In this case, and in many others throughout this paper, I give only the briefest gloss of a topic that has been extensively treated in earlier studies (work that has served as an important source for my own). The most influential and detailed explorations of fan fiction include "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love" by Joanna Russ (1985), Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith (1991), "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology" by Constance Penley (1991), and Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins (1992). Note #6 glosses all but the latter.