The implementation of the "chart" on OurChart.com materializes the many contradictions and insufficiencies that delineate The L Word's ideology of commodity lesbianism. Much like the program itself, the website must find an equilibrium between appealing to its niche fan base and to mainstream users and companies. But where the TV series titillates to attract straight male viewers, OurChart.com takes an opposing tack: desexualizing its lesbian orientation in order to render it as a palatable assortment of consumer positions encompassing popular culture, chic style, and liberal politics. With unusual coyness for an L Word tie-in, the venture is billed as a "site where women can connect" ("About Us"), thus sidestepping queer sex by emphasizing an assumed gender stability that erases male and transgender fans. In keeping with the franchise's signature circularity, season 5 episodes recapitulated criticisms similar to these, commenting self-referentially on the development of the existing OurChart.com. In the season premiere, Alice (now an executive of the fictional OurChart just as actress Leisha Hailey is a partner in the actual site) films an installment of her video podcast "Alice in Lesbo Land." Her interview with Phyllis Kroll (Cybill Shepherd), a middle-aged woman who has recently come out, is an occasion for a didactic review of some of the lesbian buzzwords ("stone butch," "vanilla," "trannies") that comprise the social network's lingua franca. However Max, who is behind the camera, questions the status of this common idiom, arguing with Alice about the eponymous "our" in relation to his transgender identity:
Nowhere is the gap between OurChart.com's claims and its capabilities more stark than in the failure of its hyperbolic promise to tell you who has hooked up with who (which, according to the program's diegetic logic, has been the Chart's primary impetus all along). Ficera's intuitive skepticism about the database project seems to prefigure its technocultural limitations, and these deficits are compounded by a conflict between the sexual archive concept and the site's move to advance a desexed, advertising-friendly brand of lesbianism. In contrast to The L Word's onscreen graphics portraying an imaginary interface with an intimate network, "friend" connections on OurChart.com conveyed no more information than they would on a typical online social network (send anyone a request, whatever your relationship is, and they choose whether to approve it). In a small concession to the original idea, a second type of connection was added later, dubbed "friends plus." The site defined this modality in the vaguest possible terms, with no mandate that it involve a sexual liaison:
Because, despite OurChart.com's heavy reliance on professional content to impose a consistent tone, its users did work. The site's social network was in fact a lively one, with plenty of conversations, opinions, relationships, and no doubt hookups being forged beyond its "celesbian" encounters. The fan fiction thread numbered among many active forum topics [Figure 9] -- while the offerings in The L Word fic are strikingly sparse in the usual venues for Law & Order: SVU or Battlestar Galactica femslash (LiveJournal and standalone archives, for example; note that there are around 200 stories for The L Word vs. thousands for the other programs at {http://fanfiction.net/tv}), in this case creativity seemed to thrive under the auspices of the official brand. We could speculate that this idiosyncratic pattern was elicited by the ostensible correspondence between the aspirations, culture, and sexuality of the viewers, characters, and producers of the series as "authentic" lesbians, and enhanced by the latters' inviting attitude toward fans. While it is becoming more common for entertainment companies to celebrate fan fiction in principle, it still rarely garners direct acknowledgement or sponsorship due to its potential interference with brand integrity and control. Because Showtime outsourced much of the labor of OurChart.com to an autonomous, emergent community, the network could not guarantee that the subjectivities and discourses circulating within its social network factory would conform to its intentions and interests. Certainly, Max's fictional invasion of this "lesbian space" raises the possibility that OurChart's construction of a static, homonormative lesbian identity along gender lines might be challenged. But if any such challenges occurred under the banner (and literally, the logo) of The L Word, could these unruly connections offer any significant disruption to the expropriation of users' labor? Much like the reflexive incorporation of fans' objections into the program itself, any unexpected, creative, critical, or even outright rebellious moments that erupted on OurChart.com play into the impression that the site was an authentic reflection of and platform for lesbian community. In an era of real subsumption, simply by following the edict to "be subjects" -- to desire, communicate, and invest immaterial commodities with meaning -- fans are performing lesbianism as labor in accordance with The L Word's teachings. The crucial fault line in this capitalist monolith, however, is that OurChart.com does not capture the whole of this labor and its value: subjectivity is productive in excess of what a corporate framework can rationalize. In the next section, I will locate the tensions and antagonisms that this excess can generate within fandom's queer economy
Alice: I feel like we're getting a little off-topic here for OurChart.When Max then posts about his gender transition on OurChart "to educate people" [Figure 7], he angers Alice as well as his fellow bloggers, who continue to insist that it's a "lesbian space." By presenting this fabricated outrage over the boundaries of "lesbian" as originating from users themselves, The L Word disavows it's own role in perpetuating and even constructing transgender exclusion while backhandedly reinforcing the impression that the site is for women only. And when Alice grudgingly concedes that Max can continue writing a featured blog, it appears as if OurChart simply offers a neutral forum where the lesbian community can negotiate existing tensions while mobilizing this fictional narrative to inoculate the real life OurChart.com against charges of discrimination.
Max: Why is it off-topic?
Alice: Well, I mean, OurChart is for lesbians.
Max: I thought OurChart is for everybody. It's OUR chart, doesn't that suggest it's inclusive?
Nowhere is the gap between OurChart.com's claims and its capabilities more stark than in the failure of its hyperbolic promise to tell you who has hooked up with who (which, according to the program's diegetic logic, has been the Chart's primary impetus all along). Ficera's intuitive skepticism about the database project seems to prefigure its technocultural limitations, and these deficits are compounded by a conflict between the sexual archive concept and the site's move to advance a desexed, advertising-friendly brand of lesbianism. In contrast to The L Word's onscreen graphics portraying an imaginary interface with an intimate network, "friend" connections on OurChart.com conveyed no more information than they would on a typical online social network (send anyone a request, whatever your relationship is, and they choose whether to approve it). In a small concession to the original idea, a second type of connection was added later, dubbed "friends plus." The site defined this modality in the vaguest possible terms, with no mandate that it involve a sexual liaison:
We've created friends plus for everyone who's more-than-just-a-friend: exes, one-night stands, long-term partners, and any other players in your own personal dyke drama. Ever been secretly in love with your best friend? Kept up an intense relationship with an ex? Found yourself in a group of girls who've all slept with each other? Been out with a girl but weren't sure you were on a date? So have we. All of these are your friends plus.Now, there is a certain radical quality to this open-ended articulation of community, in that it doesn't privilege the expected forms of coupling over more ephemeral interpersonal bonds. But in the context of OurChart.com, this cloud of intimacy functions as a smokescreen for the site's singular interest in labeling identities: the production of commodity lesbianism at any of these nodes. Whatever axes of their relationships users might wish to chart, OurChart.com engineered its equivalence between lesbian network and internet network to operates far better ideologically than technologically. Unlike the navigable data visualizations that represent Alice's online Chart in the episodes, OurChart.com's Flash animation of its user-generated Chart could only display about fifty of one person's friends in isolation [Figure 8]. The notion of the Chart is a pivotal device in The L Word's framing discourses, but its instantiation in OurChart.com demonstrates that it acts as an alibi, an ideal of connection for the purpose of community building that masks the franchise's investment in assembling immaterial workers into a virtual factory.
Because, despite OurChart.com's heavy reliance on professional content to impose a consistent tone, its users did work. The site's social network was in fact a lively one, with plenty of conversations, opinions, relationships, and no doubt hookups being forged beyond its "celesbian" encounters. The fan fiction thread numbered among many active forum topics [Figure 9] -- while the offerings in The L Word fic are strikingly sparse in the usual venues for Law & Order: SVU or Battlestar Galactica femslash (LiveJournal and standalone archives, for example; note that there are around 200 stories for The L Word vs. thousands for the other programs at {http://fanfiction.net/tv}), in this case creativity seemed to thrive under the auspices of the official brand. We could speculate that this idiosyncratic pattern was elicited by the ostensible correspondence between the aspirations, culture, and sexuality of the viewers, characters, and producers of the series as "authentic" lesbians, and enhanced by the latters' inviting attitude toward fans. While it is becoming more common for entertainment companies to celebrate fan fiction in principle, it still rarely garners direct acknowledgement or sponsorship due to its potential interference with brand integrity and control. Because Showtime outsourced much of the labor of OurChart.com to an autonomous, emergent community, the network could not guarantee that the subjectivities and discourses circulating within its social network factory would conform to its intentions and interests. Certainly, Max's fictional invasion of this "lesbian space" raises the possibility that OurChart's construction of a static, homonormative lesbian identity along gender lines might be challenged. But if any such challenges occurred under the banner (and literally, the logo) of The L Word, could these unruly connections offer any significant disruption to the expropriation of users' labor? Much like the reflexive incorporation of fans' objections into the program itself, any unexpected, creative, critical, or even outright rebellious moments that erupted on OurChart.com play into the impression that the site was an authentic reflection of and platform for lesbian community. In an era of real subsumption, simply by following the edict to "be subjects" -- to desire, communicate, and invest immaterial commodities with meaning -- fans are performing lesbianism as labor in accordance with The L Word's teachings. The crucial fault line in this capitalist monolith, however, is that OurChart.com does not capture the whole of this labor and its value: subjectivity is productive in excess of what a corporate framework can rationalize. In the next section, I will locate the tensions and antagonisms that this excess can generate within fandom's queer economy
