Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

So given the topic of our first response papers and the enduring topics of fan interactions with media we have been discussing, I thought I’d bring up an ongoing story in the Star Wars fan world.

A film called Fanboys was filmed in early 2006 about a group of Star Wars fans that journey to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch before the release of The Phantom Menace in order to steal a copy for their friend who is dying of cancer and will not make it till the world premiere. Sounds like a pretty reasonable film premise…. albeit a bit similar to the “Free Hat” episode of South Park.

Well the film basically kept getting delayed until eventually reshoots were done by a different director almost a year after filming had ended due to scheduling conflicts. After all of this, a version of the film was edited which removed the cancer plotline altogether after certain test screenings found the subplot ‘depressing’.

When the news broke about this on Aint it Cool News and Darkhorizons, a petition was started by a group of fans to “Stop Darth Weinstein” – Harvey Weinstein’s The Weinstein Company is releasing the film -to ensure that the original version is released to theaters. The petition has picked up mainstream coverage including articles in the Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair and the New York Post as well as less visible coverage through facebook and myspace petition groups.

I find this whole ordeal really interesting as it shows a level of dedication and assertiveness sometimes lost upon fans. It’s refreshing to see fans who care so much about their text are willing to work so hard to protect a little film like Fanboys. It remains to be seen if their efforts will actually have any effect as currently both versions of the film have been shown to test audiences and it is still unclear which version will get a release but in any case their petition has made a significant impact and is yet another example of fans exercising power over their texts.

Furthermore, much of our focus upon fan interactions with media has been upon the transformative aspects (I.E.-Slash as redefining character relationships,  fan productions of non-canon or loose canon storylines, etc) but we have not discussed at length the degree of power fans can exercise over their text’s future.  This form of power seems remarkably relevant given our discussions of the relationships between producers and fans; when a producer can have power over fan produced content such as in the FanLib example.

Today’s “Doonesbury” comic deals with some issues that I’ve been thinking about in relationship to the vidding discussion, namely, who gets to define fair use?

Currently in the Doonesbury story arc, characters are enrolled in “The Poetry of Barack Obama”. The context of this particular comic strip is the recent contention that Obama lifted some of the text of his speeches from a political ally (Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick). Regarding this practice, Hillary Clinton said: “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in. It’s change you can Xerox.”

The comic, however, takes a different tack, putting the reacquisition of language in a more fannish context, utilizing the language of hip-hop and music remixing. Or does it? Any Trudeau fans? Is this comic critical of rewriting practices? Critical of the academy’s reading strategies? Does the fact that (stereotypical deadhead/stoner–here, in an orange shirt) Zonker, endorses the “collaborative” assignment, mean anything?

P.S. The Universal Press Syndicate guidelines allow educators/students the use of 7 images per year free of charge, providing they are used in an academic context. Not that I’m endorsing one particular fair use policy over another, but it’s nice (for me, the blogger) to know that this post is doing nothing illegal.

I don’t mean to piggy-back on Brandon’s comment in class today about ethnicity issues surrounding the fandoms we’ve studied thus far…

But…

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Kathy had the last word in class today (Kathy, speak up if I misparaphrase you): Star Trek takes a stab at addressing the ethnic issue by giving Deep Space Nine a black captain, Benjamin Sisko, as an attempt to draw in black viewers.

However, a multicultural cast does not a multicultural show make: having a black character does not mean that the show will tackle issues pertinent to the black community. In a discussion we had on the way to lunch, Diana pointed out that Star Trek has attempted to break the racial divide since the very start with Uhura, a groundbreaking character because she was a black woman in a role of (debateable) power on television. We continued on to discuss how Uhura as a black character was, quite frankly, white-washed and placed in a form that would be easy for a majority white audience to swallow. The problem, we concluded, is that Star Trek, and many other shows, have not progressed from that early model.

Shows that attempt to target the minority community are aired either on cable or on basic broadcast channels that suffer from lack of viewers (the channel that comes to mind is UPN, now called My9, in New York—it’s known for showing black sitcoms and was nearly pulled from the air, sparking a huge debate in New York over the silencing of minority voices within various media mediums). That is not to say that the major broadcasting networks such as ABC or CBS, which have primarily white viewers, haven’t tried to target the minority market. The George Lopez Show was a fairly successful show on ABC for a number of years, but was eventually cancelled in favor of other (re: whiter) shows. I personally couldn’t stand the show because, as was said previously about Uhura, I felt that the show took the Latino family and made it palatable to a white audience and, in the process of doing so, sacrificed certain elements that would have made it more attractive, and identifiable, to the Latino community (sometimes it’s just not enough to see a Latino face on television–you have to believe it’s real, and The George Lopez Show just wasn’t real to me). The show (or the producers of the show?) chose instead to tailor their network line-up to appeal to their most reliable market which happens to be dominantly white.

When thinking about why it is that the fandoms we’ve been studying is mostly comprised of white middle class Americans, maybe we should consider what it is about the texts themselves that attract a certain ethnic following. Not to be cynical, but is there an avarice on the part of the producer to play towards the tastes of the ethnic majority? And what happens when a certain fandom becomes deeply associated with a certain group? For example, white fans of hip-hop are referred to by the pejorative “wigger”; on the flip side, growing up in a predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood in the South Bronx, I was often accused of “acting white” because I liked Friends and listened to bubblegum pop music.  This isn’t only limited to the question of ethnicity–these same questions can apply to the issue of gender within fandom…

I don’t know, I can’t think of a proper conclusion. I’d like to hear what you guys think.

Before the screening Tuesday night, Lauren and I briefly the various meanings that the word ‘fandom‘ can possibly have.  The Wikipedia definition touches on the fact that fandom can refer to narrow or broad subcultures. The term has been used in a wide array of ways throughout class and blog discussions, and I definitely felt uncertain while writing my paper about whether or not I was using the term correctly.  To me, fandom refers mostly to the phenomenon of people clustering towards a text.  For example, in my paper I referred to Star Trek as the “object of a fandom.”  Considering that I have already handed in my paper, I hope that I was on the right page as far as my usage.  But, the main goal of my post is to hopefully illicit discussion and establish a flexible class definition of fandom. 

So, I have a few thoughts after tonight’s (most excellent) slash video screening that are largely related to the brief discussion we had a couple of weeks ago about the insularity of the slash community, i.e., should/do non-slashers have the right to view slash vids without a proper context/introduction and make what they will of them? (Apologies if I repeat some of the points I already made in my comment on Ariel’s post from awhile ago, but I feel like this topic was incompletely discussed.)

While I appreciate Lauren and Nicole’s close reading of the slash videos, I am not convinced that you need to have a specific, slash-oriented introduction to understand the videos. Eye contact to imply a relationship, the paralleling of violence and sexuality, the conjunction of specific song lyrics with characters and actions–all of these are things that a reasonable critical person could read out of a slash video knowing nothing about slash. Taking intro to film might help, but I don’t think even a “normal” (uncritical) viewer could mistake the meaning of a video like Closer, even if they knew nothing about slash.

To follow up on that, I think that “normal” people can produce slash, even if they are not working within the slash community, per se. I’m a big fan of the nonexclusivity of categories, so I (respectfully) disagree with Lauren’s categorization of “Brokeback to the Future” as being resolutely not a vid. Although I think the point about the different social/artistic traditions vids and parody-trailers come out of was a good one, “Brokeback to the Future” used many of the elements we discussed as being integral to slash-vids–they eye-contact between the characters establishing a relationship, their physical touching, the clever use of material outside of the source (in the other vids, the song lyrics; in this vid, the relationship to the “Brokeback Mountain” trailer)–all of these things scream “VID!” to me. There’s also nothing that indicates that the comedy troupe who produced this video did not have a slasher among them. If that were the case, would that make this a vid? Why can’t it be both a vid and a parody movie trailer, authorship aside (the same way Shakespeare, for example, is both a great classic and pop culture, depending on the tradition from which you read it)?

Finally, my impression about the controversy surrounding non-slashers viewing slash was that the problem wasn’t that non-slashers couldn’t understand the basic content of slash videos (who has a relationship with whom, is that relationship happy/sad/repressed/violent, etc.), but that they understood the videos perfectly well and didn’t like the way the characters were used and/or the way sexuality was expressed (violently, homosexually, for example). I’ve already elaborated my thoughts on this issue below, but to bring up a few that seem especially relevant now: At what point are you a slasher–when do you gain the authority to create a vid, view a vid, show other people how to view a vid? Is it even possible to define this category? Can we really categorically say that the Brokeback to the Future folks can’t interpret vids properly, when they used so many techniques of veteran vidders? Is every vid sacred? Why can’t we (“normal people”)  look at vids that show violence against women and say, That’s not okay? Can only vidders themselves do this (like “Women’s Work”)? What about vids that show pedophilic relationships? Are we assuming that once you’re a “vidder” or part of that community (if we can decide what that means), you interpret these vids in the same way? Or is your opinion okay no matter what it is, just as long as you’re a vidder, and that’s what counts?

hey…. so i’m certain (and hope) people will feel free to talk about whatever they please here – including questions raised at the end about the commercial aspect of porn, and the fine line between accepted forms of pornography and slash… etc. etc.

but i have  a few questions that were sparked by today’s conversation that i guess have been simmering under the surface for some time that i’d like to spew here – and i’d love to hear your thoghts.

first, to build on the point of anthropological representation that bizzy brought up… I know that more frequently today throughout the field of anthropology, scholars are struggling with the “right”/”best” process of representing the Other to minimalize objectification/exotification/etc. – to the point that few scholars have taken the extreme stance that they cannot/should not be allowed to produce works about anyone outside of the group that the anthropologist identifies with… (I can’t remember for the life of me which theorists argue which points but both Jay Ruby (ch 8!) and Terence Turner add compelling insight to the discourse surrounding representation.) ANYWAY – applying this crucial debate to fan productions and slash has raised a series of interesting questions for me:

- do slashers (specifically heterosexual women) even have the right to create this politically charged, self-serving portrayal of homosexuality/homoeroticism (even when readers understand that it is taking place in a fictional realm) when they themselves do not identify with the identities being objectified?

- if so, then do slashers need to be actively engaging in the  political discourse surrounding their practices instead of maybe shying away from them by keeping the mass media and public away?

- do slashers have a political/social responsibility to their queer subject matter? (this reminds me of some of the discussion we had when considering the subversive nature of subcultures… and if fan production isn’t actually a political statement but just pure enjoyment and so on…)

i also worry that by even asking these questions i’m perpetuating something similar to what ariel mentioned when comparing how lesbian porn and men’s consumption of it is not analyzed with critical vigor as slash… but is instead socially acceptable (to a degree) and financially lucrative to boot.

but alas, i am left with this unnerving sense of the denial/ignorance of the potential power of slash if we just leave this paradoxical debate with: “it’s just hott.”

by Nicole Boyle and Lauren Smith

Our fan artifact is more of a whole fan infrastructure. The Organization of Transformative Works is an ongoing fan movement that began in 2007 as a response to a corporation’s attempt to set up a profitable online archive– called FanLib– for writers to post their fanfiction. Many fans reacted with outrage: Why should an organization of outsiders try to make a profit out of them? As we’ve discussed in class, fandom has historically resisted the idea of fans making a profit from their fannish writing; partially because of fear of legal prosecution, the tradition of fandom as a gift economy works as a self-policing moral imperative. Fans who attempt to charge for their fanfiction are almost universally condemned by their peers. FanLib’s attempt to profit from its “user-generated content”, therefore, was seen as an ultimate violation: a corporate organization in the realm of passionate amateurs, a board comprised of men in a traditionally female space, disregarding fandom’s pre-existing mores in– for the cherry on the cake– a condescending manner. (A BusinessWeek article notes: “The genius of FanLib is realizing that fans can be happy just being recognized“).

In reaction, a collection of fanfiction writers on LiveJournal (an enormous hub for media fandom on the internet) began to envision an “Archive of One’s Own“. This multifandom repository for fanfic was envisioned as a non-profit endeavor, run for fans by fans. As the fans’ plans coalesced, and a board for the nonprofit organization formed, their ambitions expanded. Under the new name The Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), they also started to plan for a wiki of fannish history and an academic journal about transformative works. Finally, the OTW took the unprecedented step of planning for a system of legal help for fans whose works come under attack for copyright violations. This is significant, because a large contribution to keeping fans and media fandom underground has been the fannish fear of legal action by the holders of copyrighted material.

To show that they were serious about this new organization, the board members attached their real names to the organization. (Note that Rebecca Tushnet, who we will be reading later on in the semester, is on the board). Also, to ensure that OTW never profited or became too controlled by a single fan, the board decided to apply for non-profit organizational status.

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The OTW’s incorporation has inspired many ripples of reaction around media fandom. Some fans’ reasons for joining/supporting the OTW (gathered from the OTW’s online newsletter) include:

Naomi Novik describes her reason for dedicating herself: I also care about this community that has welcomed me and given me a place to play and grow. I care about and value the creative work I have done here myself and that’s been made by others that I’ve enjoyed. So I am willing to be serious once in a while too, and to buckle down and do some real and not immediately fun work.

Kristina Busse argues from an acafan’s perspective: Context always matters, but rarely as much as it does in fan fiction, created within and meant for a specific community. If we can create an infrastructure that allows such contextualization of individual stories, we might be a long step toward not everyone trying to find the most ridiculous out there example for a story in order to mock both it and fandom through it.

Dafna Greer cares about the public record:I’m tired of journalists getting everything about fandom wrong. I don’t just mean the simple stuff, like what slash is, or that we’re not all 12 (or 45, or whatever the narrative is that week), I mean the whole context of fandom. You have journalists writing about mash-ups as if vidding never existed and about user-generated content as if it was something invented 2 years ago. It’s just embarrassing. Not as a fan, mind you. It’s embarrassing as a journalist.

Speranza wants autonomy for fans, not free content for outsider corporations: The OTW is created on the model of public television or public radio–Channel 13, as we have it in New York. It’s free. There are no ads. Anyone can watch it or listen to it. And a few people who care about public television and who can afford it become ‘members’–you remember the slogan: ‘this is member-supported NPR, this is member-supported Channel 13.’ And so I’m happy to contribute my time, money, and energy to help fans buy servers and write software and keep our ’social network’ a real community. And I hope you will, too.

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Of course, not all fans champion the OTW. The long history of fandom being an underground subculture made some fans wary of change: for example, ethrosdemon relishes the subcultural aspect of media fandom, along a model like Dick Hebdige’s: “Anyway, I didn’t make the choice to bring fandom to the blinding light of day, but in the same breath, I’m not ashamed of it. Yes, we are a subculture obsessed with buttsex, incest, noncon, bestiality, and inside jokes. That’s the appeal, frankly. The SUBcultural aspect is what unites us,” she writes.

Some fans criticized the narrow focus of the OTW:

Purplepopple complains that the OTW will pay too much attention to certain parts of fandom: “Fannish works predate the 1970s. They did not all grow out from the same cultural shared heritage. They were not all tied in to English speaking, Anglo-centric fandom. The concept of fandom predates Star Trek and Harry Potter was not the second biggest most influential fandom after Star Trek.”

Boogieshoes takes issue with OTW’s focus on feminism: “1) i really *don’t* value fandom as a female dominated space – i’d be doing this if there were no girls here tomorrow, and i’d be happy and 2) frankly, *i’d* rather be valued for *what i contribute* than for a genetic quirk i can’t actually control.”

spare_change and Rat Creature points out the problems they have with being represented by acafans: “I don’t think that acafen are the only ones dragging fandom into the public eye. I think that the way they are doing so, however, is just as lame, unrepresentative, and self-serving as FanLib or any ‘look at those wackos’ article on a mainstream news site, though, so I don’t see why I should support them any more than any of the other ways fandom gets publicized.”

For some fans, the OTW’s visibility actives the real fear that fannish activities could hold repercussions for one’s personal life. (In Ethan Zuckerman’s post introducing the OTW, he mentions The Church of Subgenius Custody Case, a similar circumstance in which a woman’s online activities impacted her child custody case).

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Finally, sympathetic outsiders to media fandom also reacted to the formation of the new organization:

Ethan Zuckerman, mentioned above, thought it was a good idea: “It’s a fascinating new proto-nonprofit determined to defend media fandom from the excesses of copyright and to help fanfic writers and vidders maintain control of their remixed works.”

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow also came out in favor of the organization: “This is such a good idea. When Naomi [Novik] described it at the WorldCon at a panel that we were on together, I wrote her a check on the spot for $500 to fund the org. I hope she cashes it now that they’ve formally announced.”

The Institute for the Future of the Book agreed: “All looks very promising.”

Bob Rehak himself is on the board of the academic journal: “The editors, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, have kindly invited me to participate on the editorial review board; I accepted with pleasure.”

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We consider the OTW’s incorporation significant because it represents an unprecedented move in media fandom. We’ve talked in class about capitalistic mainstream forces absorbing fan culture– in the manner Dick Hebdige mentioned mainstream fashion absorbing, and taming, punk style– but the OTW came about because a team of fans refused to let themselves become fodder for a FanLib, capitalist organization. Instead, they organized for their own purposes. The OTW is part of the rising visibility of media fandom, just as is the fact that Swarthmore College is offering this class. Sounds cool? Maybe you should write a paper about it and submit it to the journal!

The sports fan seems to be relatively overlooked in most of the literature we have read for the class due to the “mainstream-ness” of it… I, however, feel that this is not the case.  Yes, there are some inactive fans that get season tickets or go to championship games; however, is this so different from average consumers who watch episodes of shows without any real connection to the fandom?  There are a variety of subcultures surrounding sports; take fantasy sports like football and baseball.  Fantasy sports allow for mock drafts, player rankings, and fantasy games that seem quite similiar to fan fiction (in that the fans are taking the characters and putting them on different teams and created situations to see how they will fare.)  It also seemed to fit into several of the “Ten ways to rewrite a television show” that Jenkins discusses on pg. 163.  There can be a refocalization on players that a fan might feel has been overlooked by the media, as well as cross overs and dislocation in the form of different team members playing together. 

Fan artifacts such as jerseys, signed baseballs…etc often illict as much money (if not more) than some of the klingon forehead pieces that we saw on the Trekkies documentary.  The culture of the fans creates the worth of the artifact.  Even though some athletes are more widely recognized, the true fans are a distinct group.  Just as Harry Potter is incredibly mainstream– the fandoms, fan fic, slash and conventions are set apart from the average reader.   I feel that sports fandom is quite similar and worth investigation. 

Slate has a great article on the popular “democratic” websites, like Wikipedia, Digg, and Slashdot. The article looks into the myth that these sites are democratic, equal-opportunity, and created by a large number of people. It shows research that indicates that sites like Wikipedia and Digg are actually run by a very small number of people: 1% of Wikipedia users and about 100 Digg users. These people not only write most of the content, but hold controlling administrative positions with the power to control who submits, edits, and can post to the front page.  

Additionally, the article mentions that these sites have a very hierarchical structure, especially wikipedia, with its many levels of administrators. This isn’t necessarily a harsh criticism, but its something we must take into account.We must be wary of describing any “democratic” culture, including fan cultures and movements. We have to question how many people were actually at the core of the culture. When we talk about trekkies and reference the documentary we saw, are we really talking about “trekkies”, or are we talking about a small subset that’s holding all the sway in how this culture is ideologically interpreted? We have to question how we’re defining fans based on the fan groups we examine, and whether or not we’re excluding a more silent majority. 

Hey, guys, I thought it’d be useful to have a post where we could comment with notices for the rest of the class.  (Hopefully useful, anyway?)

So, for example: I just put all of Twin Peaks on DC++ and it’ll stay there until class time tomorrow.   ^_^