Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

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!

One of the most intriguing things brought up in class today, to me, was Abby’s question of why fans feel like they get to prefer meanings and control access when they take that very ability away from producers. I came up with three answers:

1. Fandom is dangerous. Maybe the obscenity suit was a bit of an exaggeration (^^;;;), but imagine if the people who made Closer were kindergarten teachers. Now imagine if their principals, or parents in their communities saw this video. There would be hell to pay, not only for this but for a lot of slash and explicit fic. There are a lot of jobs and positions in society where saying “I write/draw/edit gay and/or fetish porn about fictional characters/actors/musicians/newscasters” will get you ostracized if not fired (see, this isn’t an exaggeration; note that this website about Internet crime has articles about fic on LJ). One of the primary uses of the fan community really is self-protection, at the very least from people thinking you’re weird, but on a very real level, to protect people who write Snarry from being perceived as people who would actually tie children up in dungeons and molest them. Within fandom, you get to label things with proper warnings, both to protect the producer of the fan text and to protect anyone who might not want to read it (anyone from people like Jamison, experienced fans who don’t want their souls tarnished, to actual honest-to-god innocent children). Especially concerning slash, one of the major things that slashers learn is that we’re doing things with characters that might really upset other fans, who are very invested in a different view of the text (not that they’re not doing the same to us sometimes). And, hearkening back to my fanifesto, fandom is in some sense about caring and emotional investment: we don’t want to harsh on other people’s squee by letting them accidentally read something that they don’t want to see, and we don’t want them to harsh on our squee in response.

2. Texts are produced in a capitalistic system and fan texts are not, by and large. We pay for books and movies and we watch commercials during TV, which means that we’re giving something in fair exchange for a text. In some sense, viewers “own” the text, then. If you buy a painting, the painter has no place to say that you can’t scribble all over it in crayon, because you own it, it’s your property. I think a similar thing happens with fan texts: once we invest our time and money, the text is fair game (I’m saying nothing about the actual legal definition of fair use, though). Fan texts, however, are not paid for, they are shared. You wouldn’t scribble all over a painting in someone else’s house that they’re letting you see, so why would you mess with the meaning of something shared with you (rather than bought by you)? I’m not trying to make this argument necessarily the most logical thing, but more to explain and perhaps justify a feeling of violation on the part of creators of fan works.

3. This is more an exception than an explanation, really: there are times when fans are totally okay with people re-interpreting their works. For example, there’s a practice known as “remixing” in which authors write a missing scene or a different perspective or just generally a re-interpretation of others’ fic. However, remixing is entirely consensual, as it were: authors agree to have their fic remixed. There are conventions for this sort of thing. This, to me, is a huge trend in fandom: anyone is perfectly welcome, as long as they play by the rules (for example, these LJ etiquette rules, all of which were familiar to me but had never been spoken to me at all).

The Kirk/Spock video of Kathy’s last post caused some controversy in 2006 when it was uploaded to YouTube without its creators’ permission. The people who make and distribute fan videos have maintained a general standard of secrecy about it, for various material/legal reasons, and some were irritated at what they saw as their complicated art being flattened and misread without the context that gave it meaning. (This fan sums it up: “I’ve done the whole show-vids-to-nonfans thing, and most of them are boggled and confused. They’re not seeing the same vids we are.”) Henry Jenkins wrote an excellent post on the affair, which I really highly recommend at least skimming before/after you watch the YouTube link.

Of course, I confess, I’m always interested in the analysis fans themselves have to offer regarding their own situations, so I dug around for some fan commentary on the situation.

Metafandom is a popular digest-style roundup of fannish discussions happening on LiveJournal. (We often call those discussion “fannish meta”: hence the name.) These conversations range from the trivial to the deeply philosophical, fandom-specific or genre-spanning. The digest’s moderators try to be as inclusive as possible, so there’s a lot of noise to wade through, but when any big controversy hits LiveJournal media fandom– whether it’s about racist re-casting of characters in alternate-universe fanfiction, “clip theft” in fan videos, or the mores of fanfiction about real people– you can find traces of the discussion as it went down by looking up Metafandom’s archives.

So I visited the archives on the same day of Jenkin’s blog post, to see what the fans were saying. Scroll down to “Fan Vids”: a smattering of opinions about the visibility of fanvideos– a form of art long underground as a matter of course– in the age of mainstream internet media. This fan and this fan digest the Jenkins post for their readers– I’d especially recommend glancing at the comments to those posts, where other fans praise or criticize some of Jenkins’s individual points. This post, and its comments, shed a little more light on the historical reasons that video-makers dig privacy.

Finally, one of my favorite essays on the subject: this post (by a Swarthmore graduate!) will offer a bridge for us in the coming weeks to Convergence Culture and other discussions about money and fandom (which I am fascinated by from a feminist perspective). She quotes, from the very first post I linked to:

It’s been bothering me increasingly in recent months, as fanvids get posted on YouTube (not by the creators), that my non-fannish friends link to them as just another cool internet video. Of course, how would non-fannish folks recognise the incredible violation of fannish etiquette involved in posting a vid to YouTube? They’re insider creations, not intended for general consumption, and so why would non-insiders know the etiquette involved?

And answers:

Well, first what it is is we have to start adjusting to the fact that we’re not insiders anymore — the world got really small really fast, and we are right there in the spotlight, or, as Punk put it, they can see us now. We’ve been on the cutting edge, “hiding” on the internet with our creations, but here in Web 2.0, the user-created web, we can’t hide anymore, we are the internet. And so of course people are going to try and find ways to popularize us — eventually, they will try and find ways to use us to make money.

She herself gets followup from new posts like this, this, and this one (which I quoted at the very beginning of this post).

At any rate– I hope I’ve given you a sense of the conversation that goes around LiveJournal fandom under the skin of big controversies. We talked a little bit in class about the voice of the subject as represented in ethnography like Seiter’s or Radway’s. I think it’s appropriate here to check in with some fannish voices, to accompany Henry Jenkins wearing his ethnographer’s hat.