I'm going to try to video as many of my lectures as possible (next semester), and post them @ http://julie.blip.tv (feed: ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif)
julie_bliptv)
here's the first! a slightly different version of one I prepared last year. eta: a later version.
no illustrations, because it was shorter. links still here.
materials also still the same:
assigned essays:
• Jenkins, Henry. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." Television: The Critical View (5th ed.). Horace Newcomb. NY: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Jones, Sara Gwenllian. "Starring Lucy Lawless?" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2000).
TV episode:
Xena: Warrior Princess, "Déjà Vu All Over Again" (S.04)
(I did not choose these)
*
I last gave this lecture a year and a half ago, and since that time, the status of fandom in relation to the larger TV industry and audience has been changing dramatically. Some of the blurred boundaries that professor J. was just talking about -- between consumption and production of television, between the power of TV studios and the power of TV fans -- have broken down even more dramatically. Transmedia [explain], viral/interactive marketing, user-generated content have become the buzzwords, and corporations have openly embraced the interpretive and libidinal labor of fans as a crucial part of their moneymaking endeavor.
While this "mainstreaming" of fandom legitimizes a mode of engagement formerly ridiculed as obsessive and childish, it also risks redrawing hierarchies between commercially acceptable and unacceptable forms of fan activity. Rather than simply celebrating the participatory character of such media metamorphoses, we should ask (as do many of the independent videos, and indeed, many fans) what kind of power is being offered to viewers, and with what implications and effects.
• semiotics: texts not autonomous works, all texts are polysemic, intertextual
> derivative literary works have been produced throughout history: midrash; tales of Arthur; continuations of Canterbury Tales, Austen and Carroll novels, Sherlock Homes
> however, one could argue that there are specific qualities of postmodern textual forms like television that particularly invite active reading and reappropriation (Jones makes this claim for seriality -- if you recall, we’ve discussed TV’s defining temporality of liveness, presence, and immediacy: it’s constant availability as a world we can turn on and off at will makes it seem as if its characters exist in a time that runs parallel to our own)
• primary contemporary incarnation of fan production — fiction and visual art based on mass media texts (TV shows, movies, books, celebrities, etc.) — dates from the first run of Star Trek in the 1960’s, and burgeoned throughout the 70’s and 80’s in the form of print zines circulated at fan conventions or directly through the mail
> Jenkins is writing about the pre-internet context, so his account has limited applicability to current practices
> conceptually, he did contribute key aspects of the theoretical framework for studying fandom, which draws heavily on cultural studies models of reception as the active production of meanings which we covered earlier in the semester.
[Textual Poachers]
• let me now suggest, though, some of the limitations of this conception, particularly in the contemporary digital context:
> poaching implies a hierarchy of lords and serfs:
In Jenkins's mode of reading, fan fiction is always subordinate to its parent text; he writes that "Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests" (23). In other words, it is fans' torturous enthrallment to an inadequate mass media that constrains them to add their own ancillary narratives to it.
That is, Jenkins adopts what I call the compensatory account of the motivation for fan production.
[TALK ABOUT GENDER, FEMINISM, FANBOYS vs. FANGIRLS, SPACE OPERA]
SLASH
going through Jenkins’ article, I picked out six different explanations of slash’s appeal to women:
4. “Research suggests that men and women have been socialized to read for different purposes and in different ways†(454) (relationships and emotions rather than plot and causality)
5. “fan writing adopts forms and functions traditional to women’s literary culture†(455)
1. a subset of the compensatory account I already mentioned: the “need to reclaim feminine interests from the margins of masculine texts†(455) (also, explanation for why there’s less girlslash: not as many ‘good’ female characters)
2. “effort to construct a feminist utopia†(462) — relates to Russ’s original account of how fans envision utopian egalitarian possibilities through same-gender pairings, because it was impossible to do so through a heterosexual couple (other differences, like human/alien, might stand in for gender). today, however, slash is just as likely to be condemned as anti-feminist by fans, the product of an internalized misogyny which rejects women and their sexuality.
3. “Men may feel comfortable joining discussions of future technologies or military lifestyle but not in pondering Vulcan sexuality, McCoy’s childhood, or Kirk’s love life†(454)
6. “a semiotics of masculinity, with the need to read men’s often repressed emotional states from the subtle signs of outward gesture and expression†(462) (another explanation for lack of girlslash: it’s more accepted for women to show affection, so bonds between female characters are less likely to be read as sexual subtext)
Any of these interpretations is potentially still relevant to fandom today.
Ultimately, Jenkins is willing to countenance certain aspects of the breakdown of the consumption/production binary:
- “For fans, consumption sparks production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable†(451)
- “fan writers suggest the need to redefine the politics of reading, to view textual property not as the exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by textual consumers†(469)
BUT, his exclusive (methodologically: ethnographic) focus on fan activity as an intervention at the site of reception — that is, mass media texts as raw materials for producing communities and popular mythologies that nonetheless remain derivative — leaves the ostensibly unilateral power of the TV industry to produce mass media texts essentially intact (“no substitution for meaningful change†[469]). Thus, it excludes the question of how fan production is actually central to media commodities — because, as I suggested earlier, TV depends economically on the interpretive work of its audience. And the question of how fan production participates in the widespread struggle for control over the boundaries of information, which must be somehow fixed in order to package it as a product — evidence (again, as we learn from semiotics and post-structuralism) that texts and their meanings are not contained within any obvious borders.
I’m not convinced that fandom is a “subversive†activity in the sense that Jenkins claims: "fans are empowered over mass culture... Resistance comes from the uses they make of these popular texts" (469). I'd question the binary terms of this formulation, which unproblematically opposes hegemonic mass media texts [on the TV] to reception practices that ostensibly resist them [in RL].)
• In an article we didn’t read called “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters†[Screen. 43:1 (Spring 2002): 79-90.], Sara Gwenllian Jones raises another crucial critique of the typical academic focus on the wonders of slash as a resistant practice, writing that
“In such formulations, slash is interpreted as ‘resistant’ or ‘subversive’ because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters’ heterosexuality†(81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates [in his essay], in the homophobia of “a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved†(81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is “an actualization of latent textual elements†(82). [source: me]
• This points toward the second of what I’m identifying as three major conceptualizations of the impetus behind fanfic: the subtextual account.
> now, the word “subtext†has been condemned for suggesting a hierarchy of meaning, wherein queer content is sub-: less present or legitimate than the presumably heterosexual maintext — which is not the point at all. I retain the term nonetheless because it is in widespread use among fans...
> if the compensatory account pits fan production against the text, in the subtextual account fans work with the text, filling out aspects (usually romance and sex) that are suggested on the show but not fully represented or representable
> far more prevalent, today, in my experience, than the compensatory account
• Jones thus suggests that fan production is tied to the televisual given that “There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers†(13) — and my major quibble with Jones is that she modestly claims for cult TV alone characteristics that hold for ALL TV. Remember back to our discussions of television’s irreducible polysemy, perpetual play of flow and segmentation, and imperative to continually reproduce itself from the early weeks of the course.
• Now, the compensatory and subtextual accounts of fanfic may seem opposite, but in practice there is a continuum between them based on how subtext (whether intentional or not) is viewed politically: is it an opportunity for fans to actively participate in producing mass media texts, as Jones suggests when she writes “This ambiguity is a source of pleasure for many fans, who enjoy spotting ‘subtextual’ moments and filling in the gaps for themselves†(19). Or, is it a cynical mass marketing ploy in the form of “heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon†(19), thus appealing backhandedly to viewers starved for queer representation, while maintaining plausible deniability for the sake of squeamish straight viewers. This latter shades toward the compensatory, as writers may see themselves as queerly remediating characters who should be openly gay onscreen.
This is another reason why we need to be cautious of glorifying fanfic and slash as resistant, even in the alternative sense that I’m provisionally proposing. This takes us back to our debates, in the week on consumerism, about whether and how effective resistance to a capitalism with no outside could take shape.
We have to also remember that discursive relations are always power relations, and those with more cultural capital have more power to produce legitmate meanings. As Jones points out, “Xena’s star text is by no means entirely open to interpretation†(17): fans are incredibly invested in the onscreen portion of the texts they’re engaged in, and this, indeed, is outside of their control.
• The third approach to fan practice I’m calling the lateral account.
Jenkins: “As Star Trek fan writing has come to assume an institutional status in its own right and therefore to require less legitimation through appeals to textual fidelity, a new conception of fan fiction has emerged, one that perceives the stories not as a necessary expansion of the original series text but rather as chronicles of alternate universes, similar to the program world in some ways and different in others†(466)
Jones: “uber†stories
other instances and sources of varying indifference to canon: AUs, crossovers, personal interests, prurient interest, writing workshop
(also a continuum, not an absolute break with the other modes)
• Jones suggests that one of the aspect of TV that particularly invites fan practice is its seriality. The internet is even more uninterrupted, more fragmentary and diffuse than television, which may contribute to its aptness as a medium for fandom. Moreover, Jones notes, via Ellis, that “television’s contemporaneous cycles of promotion and broadcast effect a slippage between actor and character in the audience’s imagination†(11). If TV time and realtime tend to merge, that is, so do the televisual and real worlds more broadly — as the Lewis article we read earlier in the semester, for example, explores.
[Xena, “Déjà Vu All Over Again†(S.04)]
The episode of Xena that we watched plays self-reflexively with this quality.
[summarize]
[also, the ep's commentary on FANS, and the way fans also work through similar questions of identity through stars]
most of the ep's own internal inconsistency came from the fact that it didn't seem able to settle firmly upon an attitude to the "world of the show" - is it "just a show", subject to the demands of the market and the whims of the writers and producers, or is it a contiguous part of the reality in which this ep takes place, which would presumably be necessary for the characters in this ep to actually be reincarnations of characters from the show... Personally I regard this lack of internal consistency as a flaw [Whoosh!]
but to me, this is what’s so brilliant about the ep!
laments: the universe and the characters can be arbitrarily recast to suit the needs of a particular episode, it appears... which means that trying to make any kind of coherent sense of the show as a whole is perhaps a futile exercise. Perhaps one can expect no more from a commercial TV show
Jones, on the other hand, sees TV’s “invariably incompletely furnished†(13) worlds as positive, the source of its irreducible interactivity.
Thus, my differences from Jones: she concludes that actor is subordinate to character on TV, and fans see Lawless as distinct from and secondary to Xena. While TV actors may certainly be more minor celebrities than movie stars, for all the reasons I’ve just been discussing, and in my experiences of fandom, I think the slippage between actor and character is much greater. At least, when it comes to TV and its fan cultures, the boundaries between consumer/producer, text/audience, straight/queer, capitalist/resistant, fictional/real are never fixed and impermeable.
[if there's time, could conclude with a riff on Barbie Liberation Organization and the blurred boundaries between art/activism and popular culture]
julie_bliptv)here's the first! a slightly different version of one I prepared last year. eta: a later version.
no illustrations, because it was shorter. links still here.
materials also still the same:
assigned essays:
• Jenkins, Henry. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." Television: The Critical View (5th ed.). Horace Newcomb. NY: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Jones, Sara Gwenllian. "Starring Lucy Lawless?" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2000).
TV episode:
Xena: Warrior Princess, "Déjà Vu All Over Again" (S.04)
(I did not choose these)
*
I last gave this lecture a year and a half ago, and since that time, the status of fandom in relation to the larger TV industry and audience has been changing dramatically. Some of the blurred boundaries that professor J. was just talking about -- between consumption and production of television, between the power of TV studios and the power of TV fans -- have broken down even more dramatically. Transmedia [explain], viral/interactive marketing, user-generated content have become the buzzwords, and corporations have openly embraced the interpretive and libidinal labor of fans as a crucial part of their moneymaking endeavor.
While this "mainstreaming" of fandom legitimizes a mode of engagement formerly ridiculed as obsessive and childish, it also risks redrawing hierarchies between commercially acceptable and unacceptable forms of fan activity. Rather than simply celebrating the participatory character of such media metamorphoses, we should ask (as do many of the independent videos, and indeed, many fans) what kind of power is being offered to viewers, and with what implications and effects.
• semiotics: texts not autonomous works, all texts are polysemic, intertextual
> derivative literary works have been produced throughout history: midrash; tales of Arthur; continuations of Canterbury Tales, Austen and Carroll novels, Sherlock Homes
> however, one could argue that there are specific qualities of postmodern textual forms like television that particularly invite active reading and reappropriation (Jones makes this claim for seriality -- if you recall, we’ve discussed TV’s defining temporality of liveness, presence, and immediacy: it’s constant availability as a world we can turn on and off at will makes it seem as if its characters exist in a time that runs parallel to our own)
• primary contemporary incarnation of fan production — fiction and visual art based on mass media texts (TV shows, movies, books, celebrities, etc.) — dates from the first run of Star Trek in the 1960’s, and burgeoned throughout the 70’s and 80’s in the form of print zines circulated at fan conventions or directly through the mail
> Jenkins is writing about the pre-internet context, so his account has limited applicability to current practices
> conceptually, he did contribute key aspects of the theoretical framework for studying fandom, which draws heavily on cultural studies models of reception as the active production of meanings which we covered earlier in the semester.
[Textual Poachers]
• let me now suggest, though, some of the limitations of this conception, particularly in the contemporary digital context:
> poaching implies a hierarchy of lords and serfs:
In Jenkins's mode of reading, fan fiction is always subordinate to its parent text; he writes that "Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests" (23). In other words, it is fans' torturous enthrallment to an inadequate mass media that constrains them to add their own ancillary narratives to it.
That is, Jenkins adopts what I call the compensatory account of the motivation for fan production.
[TALK ABOUT GENDER, FEMINISM, FANBOYS vs. FANGIRLS, SPACE OPERA]
SLASH
going through Jenkins’ article, I picked out six different explanations of slash’s appeal to women:
4. “Research suggests that men and women have been socialized to read for different purposes and in different ways†(454) (relationships and emotions rather than plot and causality)
5. “fan writing adopts forms and functions traditional to women’s literary culture†(455)
1. a subset of the compensatory account I already mentioned: the “need to reclaim feminine interests from the margins of masculine texts†(455) (also, explanation for why there’s less girlslash: not as many ‘good’ female characters)
2. “effort to construct a feminist utopia†(462) — relates to Russ’s original account of how fans envision utopian egalitarian possibilities through same-gender pairings, because it was impossible to do so through a heterosexual couple (other differences, like human/alien, might stand in for gender). today, however, slash is just as likely to be condemned as anti-feminist by fans, the product of an internalized misogyny which rejects women and their sexuality.
3. “Men may feel comfortable joining discussions of future technologies or military lifestyle but not in pondering Vulcan sexuality, McCoy’s childhood, or Kirk’s love life†(454)
6. “a semiotics of masculinity, with the need to read men’s often repressed emotional states from the subtle signs of outward gesture and expression†(462) (another explanation for lack of girlslash: it’s more accepted for women to show affection, so bonds between female characters are less likely to be read as sexual subtext)
Any of these interpretations is potentially still relevant to fandom today.
Ultimately, Jenkins is willing to countenance certain aspects of the breakdown of the consumption/production binary:
- “For fans, consumption sparks production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable†(451)
- “fan writers suggest the need to redefine the politics of reading, to view textual property not as the exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by textual consumers†(469)
BUT, his exclusive (methodologically: ethnographic) focus on fan activity as an intervention at the site of reception — that is, mass media texts as raw materials for producing communities and popular mythologies that nonetheless remain derivative — leaves the ostensibly unilateral power of the TV industry to produce mass media texts essentially intact (“no substitution for meaningful change†[469]). Thus, it excludes the question of how fan production is actually central to media commodities — because, as I suggested earlier, TV depends economically on the interpretive work of its audience. And the question of how fan production participates in the widespread struggle for control over the boundaries of information, which must be somehow fixed in order to package it as a product — evidence (again, as we learn from semiotics and post-structuralism) that texts and their meanings are not contained within any obvious borders.
I’m not convinced that fandom is a “subversive†activity in the sense that Jenkins claims: "fans are empowered over mass culture... Resistance comes from the uses they make of these popular texts" (469). I'd question the binary terms of this formulation, which unproblematically opposes hegemonic mass media texts [on the TV] to reception practices that ostensibly resist them [in RL].)
• In an article we didn’t read called “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters†[Screen. 43:1 (Spring 2002): 79-90.], Sara Gwenllian Jones raises another crucial critique of the typical academic focus on the wonders of slash as a resistant practice, writing that
“In such formulations, slash is interpreted as ‘resistant’ or ‘subversive’ because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters’ heterosexuality†(81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates [in his essay], in the homophobia of “a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved†(81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is “an actualization of latent textual elements†(82). [source: me]
• This points toward the second of what I’m identifying as three major conceptualizations of the impetus behind fanfic: the subtextual account.
> now, the word “subtext†has been condemned for suggesting a hierarchy of meaning, wherein queer content is sub-: less present or legitimate than the presumably heterosexual maintext — which is not the point at all. I retain the term nonetheless because it is in widespread use among fans...
> if the compensatory account pits fan production against the text, in the subtextual account fans work with the text, filling out aspects (usually romance and sex) that are suggested on the show but not fully represented or representable
> far more prevalent, today, in my experience, than the compensatory account
• Jones thus suggests that fan production is tied to the televisual given that “There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers†(13) — and my major quibble with Jones is that she modestly claims for cult TV alone characteristics that hold for ALL TV. Remember back to our discussions of television’s irreducible polysemy, perpetual play of flow and segmentation, and imperative to continually reproduce itself from the early weeks of the course.
• Now, the compensatory and subtextual accounts of fanfic may seem opposite, but in practice there is a continuum between them based on how subtext (whether intentional or not) is viewed politically: is it an opportunity for fans to actively participate in producing mass media texts, as Jones suggests when she writes “This ambiguity is a source of pleasure for many fans, who enjoy spotting ‘subtextual’ moments and filling in the gaps for themselves†(19). Or, is it a cynical mass marketing ploy in the form of “heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon†(19), thus appealing backhandedly to viewers starved for queer representation, while maintaining plausible deniability for the sake of squeamish straight viewers. This latter shades toward the compensatory, as writers may see themselves as queerly remediating characters who should be openly gay onscreen.
This is another reason why we need to be cautious of glorifying fanfic and slash as resistant, even in the alternative sense that I’m provisionally proposing. This takes us back to our debates, in the week on consumerism, about whether and how effective resistance to a capitalism with no outside could take shape.
We have to also remember that discursive relations are always power relations, and those with more cultural capital have more power to produce legitmate meanings. As Jones points out, “Xena’s star text is by no means entirely open to interpretation†(17): fans are incredibly invested in the onscreen portion of the texts they’re engaged in, and this, indeed, is outside of their control.
• The third approach to fan practice I’m calling the lateral account.
Jenkins: “As Star Trek fan writing has come to assume an institutional status in its own right and therefore to require less legitimation through appeals to textual fidelity, a new conception of fan fiction has emerged, one that perceives the stories not as a necessary expansion of the original series text but rather as chronicles of alternate universes, similar to the program world in some ways and different in others†(466)
Jones: “uber†stories
other instances and sources of varying indifference to canon: AUs, crossovers, personal interests, prurient interest, writing workshop
(also a continuum, not an absolute break with the other modes)
• Jones suggests that one of the aspect of TV that particularly invites fan practice is its seriality. The internet is even more uninterrupted, more fragmentary and diffuse than television, which may contribute to its aptness as a medium for fandom. Moreover, Jones notes, via Ellis, that “television’s contemporaneous cycles of promotion and broadcast effect a slippage between actor and character in the audience’s imagination†(11). If TV time and realtime tend to merge, that is, so do the televisual and real worlds more broadly — as the Lewis article we read earlier in the semester, for example, explores.
[Xena, “Déjà Vu All Over Again†(S.04)]
The episode of Xena that we watched plays self-reflexively with this quality.
[summarize]
[also, the ep's commentary on FANS, and the way fans also work through similar questions of identity through stars]
most of the ep's own internal inconsistency came from the fact that it didn't seem able to settle firmly upon an attitude to the "world of the show" - is it "just a show", subject to the demands of the market and the whims of the writers and producers, or is it a contiguous part of the reality in which this ep takes place, which would presumably be necessary for the characters in this ep to actually be reincarnations of characters from the show... Personally I regard this lack of internal consistency as a flaw [Whoosh!]
but to me, this is what’s so brilliant about the ep!
laments: the universe and the characters can be arbitrarily recast to suit the needs of a particular episode, it appears... which means that trying to make any kind of coherent sense of the show as a whole is perhaps a futile exercise. Perhaps one can expect no more from a commercial TV show
Jones, on the other hand, sees TV’s “invariably incompletely furnished†(13) worlds as positive, the source of its irreducible interactivity.
Thus, my differences from Jones: she concludes that actor is subordinate to character on TV, and fans see Lawless as distinct from and secondary to Xena. While TV actors may certainly be more minor celebrities than movie stars, for all the reasons I’ve just been discussing, and in my experiences of fandom, I think the slippage between actor and character is much greater. At least, when it comes to TV and its fan cultures, the boundaries between consumer/producer, text/audience, straight/queer, capitalist/resistant, fictional/real are never fixed and impermeable.
[if there's time, could conclude with a riff on Barbie Liberation Organization and the blurred boundaries between art/activism and popular culture]
