[another version of the abstract for the ongoing BSG project, submitted to SCMS]
Love is television's reproductive technology: yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry, TV depends for its self-perpetuation on our desire for its endlessly multiplying texts. On the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica, love is likewise the cybernetic Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and "the shape of things to come." Hybridity is "the shape of things to come" for broadcast media as well: it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with exclusive online content, offering television intensified opportunities to proliferate its texts and its intercourse with fans. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor within an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.
This paper analyzes and contrasts an official fan filmmaking contest on the Battlestar Galactica website and fan music videos created in the context of online communities. Videomaker Toolkit exemplifies the industry's dance of permissiveness and containment, while fan works demonstrate that the text's open networks, like the Fleet's networked computers, are vulnerable to unorthodox technologies of love. I focus particularly on the queerness of Battlestar Galactica's alternative families (both on- and offscreen), which becomes increasingly notable as television learns that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.
BSG, Videomaker, and fanvids foreground the ways that both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately contain and channel these desires. I will argue that, even though fan activities (whether literally or metaphorically queer) are thoroughly implicated in television's consumer economy, there are aspects of their queer families that are unavailable to capitalist poaching.
Love is television's reproductive technology: yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry, TV depends for its self-perpetuation on our desire for its endlessly multiplying texts. On the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica, love is likewise the cybernetic Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and "the shape of things to come." Hybridity is "the shape of things to come" for broadcast media as well: it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with exclusive online content, offering television intensified opportunities to proliferate its texts and its intercourse with fans. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor within an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.
This paper analyzes and contrasts an official fan filmmaking contest on the Battlestar Galactica website and fan music videos created in the context of online communities. Videomaker Toolkit exemplifies the industry's dance of permissiveness and containment, while fan works demonstrate that the text's open networks, like the Fleet's networked computers, are vulnerable to unorthodox technologies of love. I focus particularly on the queerness of Battlestar Galactica's alternative families (both on- and offscreen), which becomes increasingly notable as television learns that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.
BSG, Videomaker, and fanvids foreground the ways that both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately contain and channel these desires. I will argue that, even though fan activities (whether literally or metaphorically queer) are thoroughly implicated in television's consumer economy, there are aspects of their queer families that are unavailable to capitalist poaching.
