My dissertation, which I've been posting here in installments since mid-2007, is finally finished! You can download the finished project here, if you're interested.

With that, there will be no further public content at this LJ. If you'd still like to keep up with my professional life, you can follow jlr_blog

Many thanks to my readers!

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.

The cover of the "fanisode" 'zine features a photograph of The L Word's cast posed around a bed frame on a deserted beach, draped in satiny, revealing garments, and staring vacantly out at their assumed audience. We could take this image as a metaphorical portrait of the network's vision of fan community: a neatly assembled, perfectly groomed, politically isolated demographic frozen in their consumer rictus. In its online promotions, The L Word constantly reasserts its own simulacral portrayals as the coordinates of fan labor, demonstrating the limits of its gestures toward participatory engagement. Perhaps because of this insistent homology between purportedly lesbian diegetic, production, and audience worlds, The L Word fandom has a very different orientation from the two femslash fandoms discussed in previous chapters. While the program's viewers have been vocal in their celebrations, commentaries, and critiques, this productive expression seems to reverberate primarily within the closed circuit of Chaiken's authority, addressed hierarchically upward to its corporate pantheon. But as my other case studies have explored, media fandom manifests alternative aspirations to queer female community that more concertedly oppose schemes like the "official social network," which aim to corral desiring subjects in a virtual factory as immaterial workers. FanLib's gambit to harness creators' labor in a commercial archive foregrounded certain underlying constraints of online fandom, namely its reliance on websites and infrastructure controlled by corporations and on the tacit sanction of media conglomerates. As a response, a watershed post by Astolat called for "An Archive of One's Own" that could materialize fandom's values of autonomy, openness, collectivity and gifting in a platform owned and run by fans {http://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html}. Her manifesto catalyzed a grassroots campaign to lay the groundwork for this project, headquartered in the LiveJournal community "fanarchive" (later renamed "otw_news"). This insurgency coalesced because it had become essential for the community to react not only to FanLib, but to more widespread pressures on fandom's labor relations prompted by the industrial innovations of convergence. Companies' escalating interest in exploiting productive subjectivities has met with resistance, that is, not necessarily to capitalism as a totality, but certainly to its unilateral imposition of new working conditions.

The consensus among fans active in the archive venture was that protecting their community's traditions of self-valorization would require a cultural and legal scaffold as well as a technological one. Barely a month after Astolat's provocation, a board of directors convened to plan the launch of a non-profit, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) {http://transformativeworks.org}, to advocate for the interests of fan producers. The OTW adopted a multi-pronged approach, wherein several distinct projects run by volunteer committees synergistically intervene in fandom's shift toward the mainstream, supporting established practices and representing them to outsiders. In addition to the archive itself, these projects comprise a wiki to chronicle subcultural lore {http://fanlore.org}, other efforts in historical preservation that include a partnership with Special Collections at the University of Iowa, a legal support network, and an academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures (I served on the editorial team for its inaugural year). The organizing and unifying figure for these various stratagems is "legitimacy," as the opening of the OTW's mission statement pronounces: "We envision a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity" {http://transformativeworks.org/about/believe}. Legitimacy is an overdetermined ambition that permeates the undertaking on all levels, from the OTW's tactical emphasis on the legally defensible notion of transformation to its own bureaucratic structure, which furnishes the anarchic vastness of fandom with a reassuringly centralized facade. Alexis Lothian further observes that legitimacy motivates the OTW's resolute affirmation of the anticommercial model of fandom, noting that the organization "tries to protect fan communities by insisting that these are subcultural groupings constituted in support of capital... [and for] all its demonization of the for-profit fan archive sites, OTW is keen to point out how the fanworks they archive will continue to aid in others' profit" (Lothian). She is referring to passages from the Frequently Asked Questions, which states (under "Legal > Does the OTW support the commercialization of fanfic?") that the OTW aims "first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy.... These fans create vibrant and active communities around the work they are celebrating, tend to spend heaps of money on the original work and associated merchandise, and encourage others to buy also. They are not competing with the original creator's work and if anything help to promote it" {http://transformativeworks.org/faq}. These assurances are strategically savvy on the part of a small-scale operation opposing corporate giants, but they demonstrate that the OTW's sphere of action is limited by its given economic conditions, and while it may confront many important injustices, capitalism is not among them.

As the OTW was taking shape amidst a ferment of agitated fans, its commitment to legitimation was not uncontroversial, and its stance on media fandom's gender politics was likewise contentious. The FAQ ambivalently pledges that "OTW values all fans, and the contributions made by fans of all genders. As the Organization grew out of a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture, we also specifically value that history of women's involvement, and the practices of fandom shaped by women's work" (under "Organization for Transformative Works > Why do the values and mission statements focus on female fans?"). This unique female-centric alignment was discordant with promises of "maximum inclusiveness" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos}, and predictably, it generated "wank," which Lothian defines as "online drama, arguments, and deeply silly conflicts that get out of control." She maintains that the slang term's more familiar connotation remains in play, though, because fandom's truculent wanking is enmeshed with its "sexualized exchange of explicit fiction among women that... not only resembles but often constitutes a kind of ephemeral sexual contact." The most notable aspect of the OTW's legitimation project is that, while it may willingly apply standards given by the law and the market to fan production, it refuses to concede to sexual normativity, insisting on the contrary that its archive and other endeavors provide a reliable and permissive venue for the full range of perversions exhibited in fan fiction. The Archive of Our Own (AO3) itself (which launched in October 2008 and reached open beta in November 2009) offers optional warnings that include "rape/non-con" and "underage" plus a myriad of user-driven tags such as "BDSM... crossdressing... incest... sex pollen... [and] tentacles" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq#content_faq}. In response to incidents like omnibus site http://fanfiction.net's decision to stop hosting explicit stories in 2002 and LiveJournal's 2007 deletion of numerous journals and communities in Harry Potter fandom in a kiddie porn purge {http://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough}, the AO3 vows to safeguard all fic without "illegal or inappropriate content" and never to remove it for "offensiveness" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos#content}. Thus, as Lothian implies, the archive's most vulnerable content (sexually graphic works) and its context (a collective of women) harmonize to constitute a queer female labor formation.

The Archive of Our Own realizes a very different "our" from the homogeneous community represented by OurChart, but both configurations intersect with a feminist attention to professionalization. The archive's open source software platform was coded from scratch by a predominantly female volunteer team, many of whom had no prior programming experience. The undertaking was therefore an opportunity for women to be mentored in skills with high value in the digital economy, much as the "You Write It!" contest positioned the unpaid labor of fan fiction as training for a writing career. Between its infrastructure and its content, the AO3 exhibits the abundance of productive work that sustains fan communities. But in contrast to FanLib and Showtime's outlook, which is formulated to monetize fan labor within a corporate framework, the AO3 acknowledges its implication in late capitalism while nonetheless insisting on the value of amateurism and autonomy. A "chart" of its network structure would reveal intimate ties between women articulated through creative and often erotic production. I contend that this system is queer, but in an admittedly amorphous sense that resists capture in a reified demographic like OurChart's commodity lesbianism. The AO3's refusal of certain capitalist dictates may seem like a nominal gesture, but it is precisely this divergence between some of the interests of fans and some of the interests of industry that generates antagonism. In this case, it is an antagonism on behalf of queer desires, and this vantage constitutes a demand that workers determine their own working conditions for the labor of subjectivity and sexuality. Even while arguing that the gift economy is integral to the capitalist economy, Terranova asserts that "free labour... is not necessarily exploited labour" (91); in its stand against exploitation, the Organization for Transformative works embodies a vital struggle within media convergence.

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:

Alice: I feel like we're getting a little off-topic here for OurChart.
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?

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.

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

I have three more sections of Chatper IV / Labor of Love to post over the next few days, but I'm going to go ahead and put this up now. This will conclude the online portion of my dissertation. I'll make a final entry with information about the complete manuscript by the end of the year.

/ Illustrations

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