As I have explored in the preceding chapters on Law & Order: SVU and Battlestar Galactica, new textual and technocultural formations are intensifying the stresses in today's media ecology. Among these stresses, managing the production of queer readings, desires and appropriations is a nexus of particular concern in the shift from broadcast's centralized and vertical model to the more distributed and horizontal configuration of digital distribution. The 2007 Writers Guild of America strike foregrounded the bottom line of such transactions for the entertainment industry: labor. This dispute between screenwriters and executives illuminated the present-day predicament of mass media, which is hard pressed to keep up with a proliferation of content and platforms while squeezing ever greater efficiency out of its creative workers. It is these conditions that have spurred not only the official exploitation of paid labor as expressed in the AMPTP's demands at the bargaining table, but also the industry's turn to a far more vast, dynamic, and affordable resource: the free labor of fans. Fan production has no doubt always held indirect economic value for corporations as a form of promotion and a stimulus to consumption but, until very recently, this phenomenon was rarely considered openly outside the science fiction niche. Now, as convergence puts pressure on television's obsolescing profit models, hit network shows like Lost (ABC, 2004-present) and its derivatives are adopting cult media's tactics for attracting a loyal and engaged audience -- in short, a fandom -- as marketing's next frontier. In addition to the presumptive value of active and insatiable consumers, the internet's characteristics as a decentralized, immediate, and continuous network make it practicable for the industry to exploit fan labor directly as "user-generated content." By contrast, it is now equally practicable for fans to exploit media commodities directly, as TV and movies, along with their multiplying complement of bonus features, can be downloaded at will to serve as the raw material for unauthorized creative work. Whereas earlier chapters evaluated this juncture in terms of its representations and technologies, I here examine its economic dimension: the emerging labor relations that will shape the future of television and of its queer subcultures.
My coupling of queer subjectivities and post-industrial capitalism is not arbitrary: as commodities themselves become increasingly immaterial, the affective labor of desire, identification, and meaning-making accrues greater economic value. Paraphrasing a 1999 Wired article that boldly proclaimed the death of the "Old Web," Tiziana Terranova suggests that, with "new ways to make the audience work... television and the web converge in the one thing they have in common: their reliance on audience/users as providers of... cultural labour" (95). This labor, which is the productive force behind media convergence, exemplifies the architecture of the larger "digital economy":
These channels are fabricated from reactive discipline in the guise of copyright enforcement and ideologies that devalue fan labor, but also increasingly from proactive enticements toward modes of participation that enrich the brand. Outside of cult genres, one of the earliest forays into this terrain among television programs came from The L Word (Showtime, 2004-2009), the first American TV series to make lesbian romance its primary focus. In addition to thematizing issues of lesbian identity and representation onscreen, The L Word has innovated through online promotions that leverage its projected lesbian audience into an interactive fan community. At the intersection of lived subculture, virtual world, and marketing spectacle, the web-based tie-ins OurChart.com (a content portal and social networking site) and "You Write It!" (a platform for fan-written script contests) attempt to mobilize subjectivity as labor, exposing both the possibilities and the limits of such transmedia ventures. Showrunner Ilene Chaiken has spoken of the push to dismantle television's fourth wall in the era of convergence:
My coupling of queer subjectivities and post-industrial capitalism is not arbitrary: as commodities themselves become increasingly immaterial, the affective labor of desire, identification, and meaning-making accrues greater economic value. Paraphrasing a 1999 Wired article that boldly proclaimed the death of the "Old Web," Tiziana Terranova suggests that, with "new ways to make the audience work... television and the web converge in the one thing they have in common: their reliance on audience/users as providers of... cultural labour" (95). This labor, which is the productive force behind media convergence, exemplifies the architecture of the larger "digital economy":
It is about specific forms of production (web design, multimedia production, digital services and so on), but it is also about forms of labour we do not immediately recognize as such... These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion... However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect. (79)Such relatively autonomous and freely conducted labor schemes, fan production included, break down the distinction between waged work and leisure, but this does not place them outside of capitalist demands. In comparison to the sunny forecast for our much vaunted "participatory culture," this view of convergence as expropriation may seem pessimistic: fandom is more commonly celebrated as a "gift economy" or alternative system of exchange that circumvents or even resists capitalism. Terronova argues that this outlook on free labor effaces the reality of its functional integration into the post-industrial economy. Her position does not, however, reduce fans and other digital enthusiasts to unwitting dupes of capitalism, colluding with the incorporation of their authentic practices into a monolithic machine. Terranova emphasizes, by contrast, that "such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive" (94). Given this interdependence, the entertainment industry and its audiences each have collective bargaining power in their immaterial labor negotiations. Resistance exists within the flows of capitalism, and the political project is to boost the turbulence that exceeds its corporate channels.
These channels are fabricated from reactive discipline in the guise of copyright enforcement and ideologies that devalue fan labor, but also increasingly from proactive enticements toward modes of participation that enrich the brand. Outside of cult genres, one of the earliest forays into this terrain among television programs came from The L Word (Showtime, 2004-2009), the first American TV series to make lesbian romance its primary focus. In addition to thematizing issues of lesbian identity and representation onscreen, The L Word has innovated through online promotions that leverage its projected lesbian audience into an interactive fan community. At the intersection of lived subculture, virtual world, and marketing spectacle, the web-based tie-ins OurChart.com (a content portal and social networking site) and "You Write It!" (a platform for fan-written script contests) attempt to mobilize subjectivity as labor, exposing both the possibilities and the limits of such transmedia ventures. Showrunner Ilene Chaiken has spoken of the push to dismantle television's fourth wall in the era of convergence:
In the beginning I said -- and was given a very hard time for saying -- "I don't listen, I write what I want to write." But another way the world has changed since I started doing the show is that the internet has become a big part of our lives. Anybody who writes a TV show would be a fool not to interact with her audience. Our audience is particularly passionate and engaging, so I talk to them and I listen to them. I can't always do what they want to do, but there's an effect of hearing their voices and then deciding what stories to tell. (Wilkes)Chaiken's growing willingness to listen and interact through the internet is more than a minor update to her job description. Implicit in her comments is the "L word" of her title: Lesbian as a commodity that is produced as much by the "voices" of a "passionate" audience as by the program's own portrayals. There is thus another "L word" here, the one from my title: Labor as an asset of audiences that the industry must now integrate. Both words are taboo in the orbit of television but, as rendered in the case of The L Word, both are central to key transformations in the mass media landscape. In this chapter, I analyze the role of lesbianism as labor in The L Word's commercial empire and, by extension, the role of subjectivity as labor in the emerging economy of convergence. My argument is that, while more and more of fan production is subsumed into a capitalist topology, these conditions correspondingly intensify the underlying antagonism between audiences and corporations. As Terranova puts it, the "desires [of capital and living labour] cease to coincide" when "capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these... processes of valorization" (84), and it is our task to counter that control by sustaining divergent values and desires within it.
