The conclusion to the saga of OurChart.com illustrates once again the vulnerability of fan communities when they rely on corporately controlled infrastructure, confirming the importance of efforts like the OTW's to advocate for the autonomy of fan labor. The site shut down abruptly in January 2009, vaporizing the contributions and connections created by its active network of users. In Chaiken's farewell blog entry, which gave one week's notice of the closure, she wrote that "Showtime is not only OurChart's parent but one of Our Community's greatest champions... that's why in our final season of The L Word, we've decided to combine forces and host OurChart on sho.com" (Gannon). This explanation was disingenuous, since hosting OurChart on Sho.com meant, in reality, that all the collectively generated content of the social network "chart" disappeared [Figure 13], and Sho.com now simply offered authorized tie-in content with token gestures of interactivity, such as "Q&A [with Chaiken]... behind-the-scenes podcasts... video specials... message boards... swag" and an "official" wiki. In a feeble attempt to continue a social media strategy, the star feature of Sho.com's OurChart page was a text box that allowed fans to post questions for Chaiken directly to an unmoderated twitter account, perhaps an inadvisable move since it was immediately inundated with exclamations of outrage by OurChart.com members [Figure 14]. Their outcry was in vain, however; public information about why the site folded was slim, but it seems likely that, with The L Word entering its final season, the promotional value of OurChart.com was largely exhausted, and Showtime thus eliminated its funding (as in the case of FanLib's archive, it wasn't feasible for such an expensive venture to become self-supporting). The lesson for new media marketers is that, while fan communities encompass a wealth of productive labor, very little of this labor can be monetized directly. Only this profitable surplus is of interest to corporations, but it is subjective and collective desires in excess of this expropriation that sustain the dynamic productivity of fandom. Autonomy is thus vital to the very processes of valorization that the industry is increasingly eager to exploit. The lesson for fans is that, if we depend on proprietary platforms like OurChart.com, our creativity and community will remain at risk until we fully conform to capitalist dictates.
Chaiken's styling of "Our Community" as effectively her trademark points to an issue raised frequently in discussions of OurChart: the status of this "our." The Wall Street Journal speculated that the "stigma of slash" may be one factor that "has made some mainstream authors and TV networks wary of... looking for ways to capitalize on fan fiction and its large audience" (Jurgensen). In this context, the relationship of queer fan production to media convergence is embroiled in double binds: would "we" prefer to end up marginalized or assimilated, unpaid or commercialized, subculture or target market? One well-founded fear that animates endeavors like the Organization for Transformative Works is that the "mainstreaming" of fan fiction may privilege and aggrandize heteronormative practices that are palatable to the industry while driving fandom's queerer traditions further underground. But The L Word is a test case for the opposite concern: what if the same-sex romances that populate slash are commodifiable after all? As I've explored, the program deploys normative tactics across its textual and metatextual worlds in order to adapt lesbian identities to the ideological, demographic, and economic demands of corporate profit models. I would argue, however, that the fan labor The L Word attempts to reify as brand-name lesbianism is nonetheless queer labor. This is not to say that fanworks are necessarily queer in content -- even slash stories often express the same conservative conventions that tend to be represented on television. My claim is that we could conceptualize the labor of subjectification and desire, in form, as queer labor. This libidinal labor is pivotal to the entertainment industry since, as immaterial commodities, mass media products require their audiences to work to valorize them. In addition to the stakes of defining the "our" that echoes through market discourses, then, we might ask whose interests "we" agitate for from a Marxist perspective. Late capitalism's labor relations are far more enmeshed with gender and sexuality than Marxism has typically acknowledged, and it is vital that we reincorporate these dimensions into our analyses of work in the era of convergence.
My study of the The L Word's onscreen and online mobilization of present-day working conditions is an exemplar of the trend toward commodifying queer labor, but it is not only in instances of gay media or gay fandom that we must consider this issue. Convergence as a whole is characterized by queer dynamics in its epistemologies (Chapter II), technologies (Chapter III), and economies, and fan production accentuates the inherent contradictions and instabilities of this capitalist system. If the value of media properties is produced by the immaterial labor of their consumers, in what sense do corporations own them? If today's social factory relies on autonomous networks of communicative subjects, how can corporations expropriate their work? Fandom is scrambling to find its own answers to these questions, and despite the fact that fan labor is fundamentally integrated with capitalism, it is crucial to maintain some degree of disaffiliation between fan communities and commercial institutions. Queer female fan practices embody an opportunity to galvanize antagonism within the industrial transformations in progress, and understanding, engaging, and defending the autonomy of these collectives will contribute to everyone's freedom to labor queerly.
Chaiken's styling of "Our Community" as effectively her trademark points to an issue raised frequently in discussions of OurChart: the status of this "our." The Wall Street Journal speculated that the "stigma of slash" may be one factor that "has made some mainstream authors and TV networks wary of... looking for ways to capitalize on fan fiction and its large audience" (Jurgensen). In this context, the relationship of queer fan production to media convergence is embroiled in double binds: would "we" prefer to end up marginalized or assimilated, unpaid or commercialized, subculture or target market? One well-founded fear that animates endeavors like the Organization for Transformative Works is that the "mainstreaming" of fan fiction may privilege and aggrandize heteronormative practices that are palatable to the industry while driving fandom's queerer traditions further underground. But The L Word is a test case for the opposite concern: what if the same-sex romances that populate slash are commodifiable after all? As I've explored, the program deploys normative tactics across its textual and metatextual worlds in order to adapt lesbian identities to the ideological, demographic, and economic demands of corporate profit models. I would argue, however, that the fan labor The L Word attempts to reify as brand-name lesbianism is nonetheless queer labor. This is not to say that fanworks are necessarily queer in content -- even slash stories often express the same conservative conventions that tend to be represented on television. My claim is that we could conceptualize the labor of subjectification and desire, in form, as queer labor. This libidinal labor is pivotal to the entertainment industry since, as immaterial commodities, mass media products require their audiences to work to valorize them. In addition to the stakes of defining the "our" that echoes through market discourses, then, we might ask whose interests "we" agitate for from a Marxist perspective. Late capitalism's labor relations are far more enmeshed with gender and sexuality than Marxism has typically acknowledged, and it is vital that we reincorporate these dimensions into our analyses of work in the era of convergence.
My study of the The L Word's onscreen and online mobilization of present-day working conditions is an exemplar of the trend toward commodifying queer labor, but it is not only in instances of gay media or gay fandom that we must consider this issue. Convergence as a whole is characterized by queer dynamics in its epistemologies (Chapter II), technologies (Chapter III), and economies, and fan production accentuates the inherent contradictions and instabilities of this capitalist system. If the value of media properties is produced by the immaterial labor of their consumers, in what sense do corporations own them? If today's social factory relies on autonomous networks of communicative subjects, how can corporations expropriate their work? Fandom is scrambling to find its own answers to these questions, and despite the fact that fan labor is fundamentally integrated with capitalism, it is crucial to maintain some degree of disaffiliation between fan communities and commercial institutions. Queer female fan practices embody an opportunity to galvanize antagonism within the industrial transformations in progress, and understanding, engaging, and defending the autonomy of these collectives will contribute to everyone's freedom to labor queerly.
