IP and Gender convention remarks

I gave my talk at the IP and Gender convention, and luckily, Rebecca Tushnet blogged the entire thing, in real time, as it was happening. You can read her summaries of everybody’s remarks here:

Keynote
part 1
part 2 (includes my talk)
part 3

In addition, the IP/Gender Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property’s official Web site at American University College of Law is here. The panels and remarks were recorded and may be audiocast or webcast, so do please check the official site, because they will put up the content shortly.

I’ll put up a bare-bones outline of my paper in a bit, but Tushnet’s post certainly well summarizes what I talked about!

SF fan wikis: source, reference, world

[0.0] SFRA 2008 was in Lawrence, Kansas, this year, and I was head of the academic programming. Sadly, I was kept so busy that I only managed to attend paper sessions and roundtables that I was on, but I enjoyed meeting all the people I’d corresponded with. My paper, entitled “SF Fan Wikis: Source, Reference, World,” was really the only fan-oriented paper at SFRA, although one of SFRA’s recent goals is to respond better to the needs of scholars in nonprint media. Meanwhile, here is a short recap of the high points of my talk.

1. Wikis and fans

[1.1] “SF Fan Wikis” discussed fans as one subset of the communities comprising Web 2.0—that is, an interactive web focused on participation and communities, as Tapcott and Williams note in their definition of the old Web versus Web 2.0 in Wikinomics (2008 rev. ed.). It’s important to realize that the reason fan studies is becoming such a hot topic is that interactivity on the Web is now far more mainstream, and is thus attracting more attention, particularly in terms of copyright violation. Much of the scholarly work done on fans is applicable to other groups who are now congregating online, and even if the sense of the word fan doesn’t quite fit my understanding of what they do, it’s clear that they’re engaging in ways that I’d describe as fannish.

[1.2] Much has been written on fans who publish fanfic in zines or on the Internet, and about fans who blog, particularly in the LiveJournal blogsphere. However, less work has been done on fans who engage with their source material via wikis. Wiki collaborative software permits group authorship, usually of a site that organizes factual information. Wikis are useful because they shield users from code but result in a nice product, and it’s easy to cross-reference and hotlink. In addition, wiki software tracks changes, so it’s possible to negotiate edits. Wikipedia is the most famous example of a repository of factual information, and it resonantes beyond its genre: encyclopedias, with its attendant rules about documentation, disinterested author stance, and lack of bias. So ubiquitous is Wikipedia that the look of a wiki immediately implies factual information, which makes parody sites, such as the Fandom Wank Wiki, all the more amusing by the mere juxtaposition of form and content.

[1.3] The essence of the wiki is facts by consensus. This is discussed in Wikinomics (and the authors explain why this actually works), but it was more famously emphasized by Stephen Colbert, whose notions of truthiness (“knowledge ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual explanation, or facts”) and Wikiality (“together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”) emphasize the slippery nature of truth and the danger of agreeing on something when perhaps it has no basis in fact.

2. How fans use wikis

[2.1] I had hoped to find examples of fans using wikis to create fiction. I envisioned a fabulous shared world, with many authors contributing to a sprawling story that was meant to be read not vertically but horizontally, with hyperlinks taking you from one place to another in a meandering version of a choose your own adventure story, but without explicit cues to jump to a new page. However, I only found a single example of this: P/Virt. Even more disappointingly, the wiki was set up by a hopeful soul in December 2007 and then not populated. One of the people who attended my talk suggested that this might be because there isn’t sole authorship, so people aren’t credited for their work but subsumed into a collective, and thus they are less likely to contribute. To this I’ll add the fact that there aren’t too many hyperlinked stories anyway, so hyperlinking and horizontalness in storytelling may just not appeal.

[2.2] Far more common are fan wikis used to organize factual information. Good examples are the Battlestar Wiki, which gathers together information from both versions of the show; the Stargate Wiki, for which I volunteered under my fan name; and Memory Alpha, the best-known fan wiki in Star Trek fandom. (For those wondering whether an alpha implies a beta, yes: there is also a Memory Beta for licensed Star Trek products, such as games, novels, and comics.)

[2.3] Although the flattening of authority is a mark of wikis, with all contributors treated more or less equally in that all have posting and updating privileges unless they get themselves banned or unless the page is locked, status can still be conferred on posters by contributing excellent articles and usefully updating existing ones, with this information all tracked through the wiki software. Fans whose pages are rarely reverted are reliable posters. Fan wikis will never officially have true authority; only a producer associated with the program will have that. (Some TV shows are now setting up wikis for fans to contribute to; one particularly interesting one, because of the confusing lack of parallelism between truth and fiction, is dedicated to The Tudors.) However, for fan wikis, authority is generated by faithfulness to canon, thus permitting the main criterion for judging the content. A wiki contributor’s depth of canonical knowledge through close readings of the source text will be rewarded.

3. How do wikis fit into fan culture?

[3.1] I have identified three important ways that wikis fit into fan culture. First, of course, is the sheer usefulness of providing canonical information in an easy-to-navigate way. Fanfic writers will use wikis to fact check details of their story, from spellings to the color of someone’s eyes. Second is the privileged place accorded by the community to those who collect factual information about a source text: it’s useful information, and the community will reward it, primarily by visiting the wiki and increasing the hit count, but secondarily by linking to the wiki from their home page or crediting it in a story’s header. And third, providing this information better permits meta (thinking about thinking) to be generated by the community, so it provides a factual base for interpretation, although fan wiki entries themselves rarely engage in interpretation.

[3.2] Wikis have at their core the idea of fact. However, of all the fan wikis I looked at, Memory Alpha is the most interesting because it took this idea of fact and took it one step further, into the realm, I submit, of the creative:

[3.3] Memory Alpha’s primary point of view is that of a character inside the fictional Star Trek universe—an archivist at Memory Alpha, the Federation library planet.

Star Trek universe articles should be written as if the described person, object, or event actually existed or occurred, exactly like in a normal encyclopedia, but with an omniscient writer. Think of Memory Alpha as an encyclopedia that exists in the Star Trek universe. [source]

[3.4] Contributors are thus invited into a future world, one looking back on the events of the Star Trek universe as though they really happened, taking on the point of view of a disinterested observer examining long-dead people and events and reporting on them. By taking this stance, Memory Alpha becomes a far-flung fictive text meant to be read not as a story but as a collection of facts that, taken together, create a world. Maybe instead of seeking fiction in wiki through creation of something wholly new, like in the P/Virt universe, we ought to seek fiction in all wikis through the creation of a set of bits of information presented factually, and as we sort through them, the mental construction of the world by contributors and by readers becomes the creative act.

To the axis mundi

Introduction

On Saturday, March 22, Karen Hellekson and Craig Jacobsen were the hosts for a special lunchtime presentation held at ICFA-29 in Orlando, Florida, entitled “To the Axis Mundi: ICFA in the Pull of the Magic Kingdom.” The hour-long PowerPoint presentation was the first in an ongoing project we’re calling DWORPF: Disney World Ongoing Research Project in the Fantastic. We plan follow-up presentations in the future.

We visited the Magic Kingdom on Tuesday and took about 280 pictures between us. Even these were not enough. In addition to the images below, we found a few on the Internet, mostly of attractions that we were unable to photograph, such as the interior of sets, and of attractions that exist only virtually, such as little green CGI monsters. We were at the park from the time of its opening at 9 a.m. to the time of its closing at about 1 a.m., after which we had an entirely new kind of adventure: that of lost taxi driver desperately trying to pretend he knows where he’s going.

Note: There are many images behind the cut. It may take a while for the full page to load. Because the large images were sucking down the bandwidth to an amazing degree and my Photobucket account was complaining, I have provided 300p previews, plus a link for you to click on to view the beautiful full-size version. If you can’t view the big images, it’s because Photobucket shut me down again. Sorry! Sorry!

Fandom Wank and history

At ICFA-29, I presented a paper entitled “Fandom Wank and History.” Here’s its abstract. The same basic information has been accepted for publication in an edited volume about community and online tools. I plan to expand the essay greatly by adding in a discussion of The Ms.Scribe Story to illustrate how blog-based historical texts are generated with the benefit of time and hindsight.

Abstract: Fandom Wank and history

Historical discourse is firmly situated in the realm of the trace: a document, be it a bill of sale or the registry of a wedding, provides unmistakable proof that an event occurred, and historians study such traces to construct a narrative document based (one hopes) in fact. As the realm of res gestae (things done), history’s rhetorical activity is one of telling the truth. However, the Internet muddies this historical trace by permitting deliberate rewriting and obfuscation: blog posts can be rewritten; Web sites can be taken down; online comments can be edited.

One site that dramatically illustrates the possibility of this activity in the realm of fandom is Fandom Wank, a blog-based online community that exists solely to describe—and mock—fandom blowups. Descriptions of altered traces abound: offending entries edited, entire blogs deleted, entries locked or deleted, comments disabled. Yet next to these descriptions of altered traces may sit proof of the original text: damning screen shots, IP address traces, links to archived Web pages. The wank I used to illustrate my paper, chosen because it was recent, because it has sensational elements, and because it illustrated all my points, is called How NOT to Date a Celebrity.

Fandom Wank foregrounds the activity of fans who use blogs to collaboratively write a kind of history of an event as it happens by tracking elements of the trace even as the trace is being erased and literally rewritten, thus constructing a new form of historical writing, with its own rules of acceptable proof of the trace. I argue that fan blogs discussing current events in fan culture are actually historical writings that are imbued with community-specific meaning. The point of such an activity is to create a collaborative text that brings together relevant traces, documentation, and testimony in an effort to construct a persuasive document.

Everything Old Is New Again

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal blog here. Feel free to comment in either place if you like. This is a summary of the presentation I gave at SFRA 2007.

1. Introduction

[1.1] I had several requests from people who wanted a copy of the paper I presented at SFRA 2007 (our panel was against some mighty stiff competition!). Although I spoke off notes and a proper paper does not exist, I’ve reconstructed the bones of my argument here. I hasten to add that our panel was not a proper panel, where we read papers stuffed with theoretical frameworks and dense quotations from critics; rather, we spoke to spark discussion with the audience and create a dialogue.

[1.2] The panel was called, “The Golden Age of SFTV Is Now,” and we discussed current SFTV offerings. Several of the texts I discussed are not yet available in the United States, notably both series of Life On Mars (LOM) and series 3 of Doctor Who (DW). At the request of audience members, I got rid of all specific textual examples of DW series 3 to avoid spoiling anyone, and I will do that here. However, spoilers may exist for all aired eps of the following programs in particular: Battlestar Galactica (BSG), LOM, ReGenesis, and series 1 and 2 of DW.

2. Outline of the argument

[2.1] I began by showing a clip from Life On Mars (LOM) that summarized the setup of the show, which is about a cop in Manchester, England, in 2006 who mysteriously gets thrown back into time to 1974, where he returns to police work, but in what seems to him to be a wholly alien world. This clip beautifully illustrates my point about the old and the new colliding. (My other goal was to make people want to see the program, and I like to think that I succeeded. By the way—BEST. SHOW. EVER.)

[2.2] My focus is the rethinking and repurposing of texts to keep them relevant. (See my blog post here about this activity and Robert Heinlein.) I discuss specific changes in the SFTV genre to keep the texts relevant. BSG was repurposed by taking the basic characters and situation from the old show and then entirely reimagining it. LOM creates a collision between the old and the new by having a modern person confront the police procedures of the past, with his ideas, which seem to be a matter of course to us, looked at askance by his work colleagues. DW takes an old franchise and cleverly updates it for a new audience. And ReGenesis’s “twenty minutes into the future” take on the hard sciences deliberately creates collisions between the old and the new, both in the presentation of science and in the topics and themes evident in certain episodes.

3. Changes in the SFTV genre

[3.1] An earlier presentation at the conference by Lisa Yaszek noted that our reading of SFTV still uses criteria established during the cold war. I argue that this is slowly changing, and the new SFTV does certain things to the genre that update it. However, the “new” that I discuss is in opposition to this cold war–era “old,” which is the default way to structure a text, with set ways of reading the genre.

[3.2] One such updating is handheld camera work, originally used in the SF genre by Firefly, and used to great effect by BSG in particular to create a sense of realism and immediacy. This helps with the suspension of disbelief required with SF in general, because SF is not congruent with reality.

[3.3] Another updating is the inclusion of long story arcs, championed by Babylon 5 and before that by the original DW, which featured story arcs that covered an entire season. Many SF shows, such as Farscape, BSG, and ReGenesis, play with long story arcs, which permit better character development as well as complex plots that reward faithful viewing. However, the default in the SFTV genre is still stand-alone eps that can be syndicated.

[3.4] A third updating is the inclusion of a moment of emotional closure at the end of an ep. This is a further nod to character development, and it’s also a nod to audience members (usually the female demographic) whose desire for character closure is equal to the desire for plot-driven narrative closure.

[3.5] Finally, SFTV updates the genre by creating character-driven as well as action-driven stories. SFTV is thus less idea-driven that perhaps it was in the past, particularly during the heyday of the original Star Trek, when SFTV was more a genre of ideas (now it is often action-adventure). Further, plots are created to resonate with current events.

4. Gender, sex, and race

[4.1] Perhaps the most obvious example of gender changes in the SFTV genre is the character of Starbuck on BSG, which recast Starbuck as a woman. BSG also further problematizes gender by creating the Cylons and making them human; the character of Six is a wonderful updating of the robot. BSG in general features many strong women characters. Gender equity is a much bigger deal now, as evidenced by LOM, which features 1974-style overt sexism against a female police officer that strikes the modern audience is patently ridiculous, and which is delicately handled by the protagonist. In both texts, the juxtaposition of old and new makes the point.

[4.2] In addition to gender concerns in the show itself, SFTV is also retooling to appeal to a female audience, partly by casting more women in strong, crucial roles, but also by reworking the stories, as noted above, to include relationship- and character-driven plots.

[4.3] BSG again serves as a good example of the updating of race relations for a new audience. Race is partially subsumed into the Cylons, who now look human. The Other has been recoded as female, and as a robot. DW’s Rose, who is white, is in an interracial relationship with her boyfriend Mickey, who is black. However, my best examples of the problematics of race (and gender) are all from series 3 of DW by Martha, and so I will not discuss them here. Sex is updated in BSG by being treated frankly; however, most shows—including, disappointingly, BSG—do not treat homosexuality very well, despite the fine example of B5 years before in the person of Ivanova. DW’s character Captain Jack, who stars in DW’s spinoff, Torchwood, is bisexual, but he’s a fun, zany, outrageous character from another time and place.

5. Technology

[5.1] Technology is an interesting example in the “everything old is new again” paradigm because several shows treat it as a throwback, notably LOM, which uses old technology (the protagonist tries to use 1974-era tools to perform 2006-era functions, such as tape-recording interviews with suspects); and BSG, in which old technology can’t be infiltrated or subverted by the Cylons and is therefore safer. In these series, technology isn’t an end or an answer or the main driver of the plot; it’s a tool that permits a job to be done.

6. Conclusion

[6.1] SFTV has changed to make the genre more relevant to the concerns of its audience and to permit large-scale storytelling. The new shows do not hit the reset button that so infuriates Star Trek fans, whereby each episode stands alone and the characters never change or grow. The updating permits these more character-driven shows to deal with complex, difficult issues, including ones that mirror current events.

SFRA 2007: Kansas City

What follows is a summary of the papers I heard at the 2007 SFRA meeting in Kansas City. I’ll blog separately about my own paper; and about my thoughts about reimaging and repurposing old texts, and whether or not doing that is worth our time.

This entry is cross-posted at LJ here.

July 5, 2007: Plenary Session: The Importance of Robert A. Heinlein (Goonan, Gunn, Pohl, Steele)

The distinguished authors briefly spoke before inviting discussion. The importance of Robert A. Heinlein (RAH) reached consensus: as Pohl put it, RAH was important because Heinlein put together all the elements of other SF (Smith’s far-flung space opera; Weinbaum’s alien aliens; van Vogt’s alien POV) and made all these astounding things seem normal. Steele noted that RAH was one of the four greats (along with Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke), and he was to SF what Hemingway was to 20th-century American literature: after Hemingway, you couldn’t read or write the same way any more, and with RAH, itw as the same way.

RAH was also important because his work, particularly his juveniles, provided a broad entry into SF and made it broadly appealing. He was important (as Gunn noted) in publishing because he pioneered the SF best-seller as a genre; he opened the market in the previously impenetrable-to-SF slicks; and he broadened teh market for juveniles.

Discussion touched on RAH’s libertarian political beliefs; his juveniles as sophisticated, adult SF (but without sex); his career’s rough division into early, middle, and late stages, with the middle stage being his best work; and his problems writing women characters. Discussion also indicated anecdotally that RAH juveniles no longer serve as an entry text into SF for today’s adolescents, because his work strikes adolescents as less relevant.

July 6, 2007: Fighting Futures (Sharp, Yaszek)

Patrick Sharp, in “Monsters from Darwin’s Id,” talked about gender and Darwinism in 1950s SF films, concluding that Darwinism was applied by the films’ creators to argue that the evolution of the use of technology would permit humanity to survive. The threat of the atomic bomb, these films argue, can be defused by rational, science-based society. Women contribute via male selection and do not themselves upset the patriarchal order. Savagery is implicit in a matriarchal structure (as in giant ants); if a woman is in charge, then things are in dire straits indeed.

Lisa Yaszek, in a paper about adapting Golden Age SF written texts to the screen, discussed Judith Merril’s Shadows of the Hearth, which was turned into a film called Atomic Attack, in terms of the change in the role, from word to film, of the female protagonist. The text version focused on the female protagonist’s being thrust into a position of power because of her rationality and her ability to get things done. In the film version, the heroine was subsumed to the civil defense hero, and the heroine ends up going back into the kitchen. Yaszek noted we still judge SF storytelling by the criteria established during the cold war, and that the films created at the time were often helped out (stock footage, or financial support) by the U.S. government in exchange for positive portrayals of the military and the government.

July 6, 2007: New Critical Perspectives on SFTV (Maus, Stannish, Doran, Spirko)

Derek Maus, in “Megaparodies of Fan Culture in the Revived Doctor Who Television Series,” discussed the text’s parody and play with fan culture, where fandom is both warned of the dangers, and celebrated. The Series 2 episode “Love and Monsters” was closely analyzed. Maus also noted that the series used alternative media (Martha Jones’s blog), which connected to the fan base; and also noted that the new show comments directly on current events, further parodying today’s world. He concludes that DW is telling us to pay better attention to what’s important around us: the world is so much darker, madder, and better.

Steven M. Stannish discussed “Orientalism, Egyptomania, and ‘The Pyramids of Mars,’” the latter a 1975 Fourth Doctor adventure. He used Said and other Orientalist theory to argue that the stereotypes presented are comfortable to the viewer by presenting Egyptians and Middle Easterners as a reflection of anxiety. The script and language (including bogus hieroglyphics), as well as the use of modern-day Arabic (subtitled in English) presented as ancient Egyptian create an atmosphere that doesn’t attempt to be realistic, but that this kind of stereotype was comfortable to the viewership, creating a kind of coded shorthand; yet the show was aware of this and likely manipulating these symbols directly.

Christine M. Doran, in “Farscape: The Domestic in Danger,” used criticism on domestic theory to inform a discussion of the character of John Crichton, arguing that Crichton sought to defuse threats to the domestic by turning the alien into a friend, who may then be brought into the family. Farscape is interesting because the one who must change (Aeryn) is female, and a male figure becomes the domesticating force, an interesting gender reversal. The theme of the show is, “Will John humanize the aliens?”

Robert Spirko, in “Cylons vs. Cybermen,” talked about a posthuman world without humans. Media SF is often technophobic; it fears the loss of the human body. Yet Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica present compelling images of the rise of the machine and of new views of humanity. Spirko linked this to the Singularity: the desire to transcend the human body, which may end up going horribly awry, with transcendence resulting in inhumanity.

July 6, 2007: The Golden Age of SFTV Is Now (Rodrigo, Hellekson, Jacobsen)

This mini-panel featured brief sketches of ideas by the three presenters, followed by longer discussion with input from the audience. Shelley Rodrigo discussed technofetishism in techology-based procedural shows like CSI and Bones, which she argues are a kind of revamped SF that ultimately argues that rationality and science will answer all questions and catch the guilty. Karen Hellekson discussed the repurposing and intermixing of the old and the new in such TV shows as Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica (both recently revived) and Life on Mars (set in the past), concluding that the old texts are being tweaked to appeal to a new audience in terms of gender, race, class, and genre expectations. Craig Jacobsen talked about a kind of chimerism of narrative, with a huge number of densely interweaving texts (a trilogy of movies, a trilogy prequel, novel tie-ins, fan fiction, novelizations, DVD commentary, rereleases, etc.) creating a large, unruly whole that problematizes the whole notion of the text or what is available to study—or appropriate to study (what is canonical?).

July 7, 2007: Giant Fallout (Goodridge, De Los Santos, Rockwood)

Kelly L. Goodridge, in “Pacificism and Paranoia in The Day The Earth Stood Still, discussed this important cold war–era film in terms of increasing anxiety. A peaceful alien comes, yet no one will listen to him, and in fact, they seek to destroy him. The film depicts a kind of top-down paranoia, with the fear coming from above: the military. The message, however, is that unity is necessary for humanity’s long-term existence, and that individuals can make a difference in the world.

Oscar De Los Santos, in “Extra Large: Exploring Giant Creature Cinema,” linked films that feature giant creatures (lizards, ants, spiders, etc.) to the anxiety of the bomb and to war. He linked the cold war to the war on terror; the giant creatures mirror the political climate. The cratures embody the anxiety (war, nuclear bomb, epidemic), and the people around it reflect the criticism the film makes (apathy? indifference? agency?). Discussions of The Host (2007), a Korean film inspired by the SARS epidemic, and Transformers, an American film that reassuringly glorifies the military, show that the formula is still active.

Bruce Rockford, in “Heinlein’s Starship Troopers,” discussed both the text version and the film version and overtly linked the hivelike unity of the miltary with the very bugs they are fighting. Citizenship is granted via military service, interestingly linking these two concepts. Rockford noted that the old 1950s films now resonate in a new political climate. Starship Troopers is interesting because the struggle is all; the war is never really won. It results in a stratified society engaged in endless war.

Power, Authority, Authorship

1. Power, Authority, Authorship

[1.1] This continues my MiT5 conference report. Here I discuss some of my thoughts about the historical moment we’re in and the notion of authorship.

[1.2] During Plenary Session 1, Folk Cultures And Digital Cultures, Thomas Pettit spoke about a moment in time (1600s, 1700s, 1800s) that he calls the “Gutenberg parenthesis.” This singular parenthesis (not a dual parentheses) is a moment in time that privileges original composition and passive reproduction, and he argues that this time is coming to an end. The preparenthetical time (1400s, 1500s) focused on unstable, traditional, collective, and performative texts; and the postparenthetical time (1900s, 2000s) appropriates, recontextualizes, borrows, and, again, performs. During the parenthesis, notions of individuality, originality, and canonicity are important, but the focus is on composition rather than performance.

[1.3] Pettit’s ideas were echoed by Heather Blatt in her paper on “Medieval Fan Fiction: The Manipulation Of Continuity,” in which she talked about a particular text that she saw as an antecedent of derivative texts, and she mentioned that during the medieval period, originality was not as highly valued as skilled appropriation and allusion. This links a text’s reception to the worldview of the culture that creates it: What is valued? What is rewarded, and how? During the medieval period, a derivative text that continues the Canterbury Tales is regarded in a way perhaps similar to the reception of a mashup today: a derivative text that comments on a text even as it is itself a new piece of artwork.

[1.4] I’ll discuss the implications for authorship below. But implicit during the entirety of MiT5 was the understanding that the Gutenberg parenthesis, along with all the modernist baggage that allowed it to be privileged in the academy during the 1900s, is coming to an end, and this end is causing anxiety. Part of the anxiety is the need for a new interpretive framework to place the works in: postmodernism? deconstruction? posthumanism? post–something else in some other field? And part of the anxiety is the lack of structures in place to permit a smooth transition. Copyright law regarding derivative works has not kept up, for example, which stifles an entire mode of creativity; and academics who work in the postparenthetical mode also have to worry about things like getting jobs, getting tenure, and getting published while the very validity of their field of study is being contested. Related to validity is, of course, gender, with women more likely to create more derivative, and therefore less valid, work on the margins.

2. The Death Of The Author

[2.1] Roland Barthes’s 1967 poststructuralist essay, “The Death Of The Author,” collected in Image-Music-Text, argues that the reader, not the author, is the locus of interpretation, thus reversing the traditional view of texts, where the reader tries to find a meaning presumably placed there by the author. Language creates meaning for the reader; the author (or, as Barthes has it, “scriptor,” because he wants to get rid of connotations of authority) generates a text, but the text itself is endlessly reread and recreated, each reader and reading unique. The reader and her interpretation are privileged over the author and the author’s intent.

[2.2] The idea of the death of the author takes on a new meaning when we apply it beyond this author-reader reversal and consider it in terms of a postparenthetical era. The move here is in the nature of the reader’s engagement with the text through analysis: appropriation, not citation. The reader disregards the author’s authority in that the integrity of the canonical work is violated. The reader will borrow snippets of the author’s creation and create something new. This new thing simultaneously critiques the original artwork and is itself an artwork, thus turning the active reader into an author and rereversing Barthes’s reversal. Yet for this to happen, the reader-author’s creative engagement with the text is needed. Many readers will simply access and consume the new artwork, with their interpretations still overriding authorial intent even as they perform the work of linking together allusion and inferring new meaning. Some readers will always be lurkers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t creatively interpreting through the work of consumption.

[2.3] Here is a new kind of death of the author: we see an author less as a creator and more as a provider of content to be borrowed. The new author might be called the remixer. Yet the remix itself is a creative act. Recontextualizing information to generate new meaning brings together text, context, primary source author, remixer, and reader-consumer in a sophisticated rerendering of deploying meaning. The move to appropriation results from both the cultural moment and from the new tools available to create texts: wikis, blogs, mashup Web pages, image manipulation software. Kristina Busse and I argued in the introduction to Fan Fiction And Fan Communities In The Age Of The Internet that the tools will affect the creation. Out-of-the-box fic-archiving software such as eFiction, for example, results in Web pages with a particular kind of organization, including title, author, date, length of text, genre, and rating. This replicates and continues well-understand, useful, but existing modes of organization. Yet this same software can be used to create recommended-reading lists, or to organize voting for a fanfic award—the software repurposed to fit a situation it wasn’t intended for. As new tools develop, fans and others will appropriate these tools and put them to creative new uses. The tool itself, not just the artifact created by the tool, may also be appropriated, and redeploying it is also a creative act—the traditional act of an author.

3. Composition, Authorship, Attribution

[3.1] The Gutenberg parenthesis relies on composition as a writing activity versus performance. But I’d like to extend the term composition to include the term as used by the publishing industry. During composition, the corresponding author is the person who approves or overrides my copyediting choices, corrects the page proofs, corresponds with the production team, and in general shepherds the document through the printing process into its final form. This final form may be traditional printed pages, or it may be an online publication. Increasingly, particularly for journals (as opposed to books), it is both, with the same XML-tagged electronic document used to generate both online and print versions. All this active work goes toward what will become the passive reproduction, on giant printing presses or on the computer screen, of an immutable text.

[3.2] In the publishing industry, we talk about “authors,” never about “writers,” continually reminding ourselves of the primacy of the author’s will in the creation of the text by invoking their authority. “Do whatever the author wants, no matter how insane!” is our motto, because when all is said and done, the publishing industry serves to bring about the will of the author. The reason this is so is attribution: the author’s name appears on it, and so she has the final say, even if it was rewritten by the copyeditor, or entirely ghostwritten by someone else, or written with extensive input from colleagues and students. The entire collaborative corpus of people responsible for bringing a text into being can never be properly acknowledged.

[3.3] Rebecca Tushnet, whose MiT5 presentation was about “Fandom, Fair Use, and Technology: The Uneasy Relationship?”, discussed attribution in legal terms: credit may be given in lieu of money, and in fact, if the author can’t be found to release copyright, it’s acceptable to make a good-faith effort, then reproduce the text or image while crediting it with the information at hand. In derivative texts, particularly those that fly under the copyright radar and are not part of the publishing economy, credit is all that can be given. Fan fiction, for example, relies on attribution. Most Web sites that archive fanfic include a disclaimer line on every page that hotlinks to the copyright holder. Such footers usually also emphasize that the site is the result of fan activity and that no money is being made. Money literally cannot be exchanged, and so attribution is provided in lieu of it. Tushnet noted that the owner or author, as part of her role, has three things: control, compensation, and credit.

[3.4] I argue that the author exists at the intersection of creativity and economy. In the Venn diagram of these two realms, the part that overlaps is the site of the author. She creates, and she stands as the person to credit. Yet this space is contested. Authorship is fraught when the text is collectively formed: a piece of fanfic posted at the blog site LiveJournal is embedded in its context, Kristina Busse has argued, and the fanfic can’t really be considered apart from the comments appended to it, or the social climate and concerns of that moment that inspired the work. In this sort of instance, the author becomes a shorthand way to categorize the text so it can be found. Authorship is also fraught when the basis of the economy moves away from the one created as part of Pettit’s Gutenberg parenthesis—the kind of economy where a stable text is composed and distributed. Underground economies, like those that hold up activities like vidding and writing fan fiction, have different mores and rules, many of which serve to bolster, not undermine, the existing economy based on sole ownership and control.

[3.5] One main reason why derivative activities are so contested is that copyright holders—the big corporations that own the content—continue to agitate to keep the economy the way it is, because they profit by the old organization. YouTube may remove all Comedy Central content, or more than 100,000 Viacom clips uploaded by fans. Star Trek fans have been asked to remove content from their sites for reproducing infringing materials. Trademark Wars On The Web outlines some of the infringing sites and the copyright holder’s response. Sheila Williams, in a wonderful editorial for IAsfm entitled How My Heart Breaks When I Hear That Song, bemoans the impossibility of reprinting modern song lyrics or poetry. Quoting such things, she notes, can have tremendous emotional resonance—and yet current law forbids their use.

[3.6] In such a climate, fan response is to try to fly under the radar. As Tushnet noted in her MiT5 talk, to avoid litigation, they make themselves complicit in maintaining an economy that does not benefit them, and in fact curtails their creative activities.

4. Conclusions

[4.1] The realm of the author, poised between creativity and economy, has become more difficult in the postparenthetical era because ways of creating, interpreting, and disseminating texts are moving faster than intellectual, economic, and legal networks can be created that will legitimize this activity. Although ad hoc methods have sprung up, including intellectual realms like postmodernism and digital realms like YouTube, the transition to a new economy that values and rewards activities that are based on borrowing, appropriating, and recontextualizing has not yet occurred. Even YouTube, which has managed to straddle both economies and make money off the derivative activities of others, has to bow to The Man and remove huge swaths of content.

[4.2] Much is needed before appropriating and recontextualizing can be legitimized. Copyright law needs to be broadened to include a space for creative, derivative texts that will permit free play, and eventually income. Systems of reward, such as tenure, need to be unlinked from the Gutenberg parenthesis of publishing, particularly as texts continue to move away from print. A system of aesthetic evaluation flexible enough to permit performance as well as composition needs to be created. Remixers themselves need to stop making content so difficult to get: they hide it behind locked Web sites, don’t permit copying and distribution, and won’t permit it on YouTube. And derivative authors need to start talking about new ways to handle content that moves beyond helping the corporations with their task of reiterating sole ownership, even when the text has been reshaped.

MiT5 con report

I just got back from MiT5, a three-day extravaganza focused on media studies. What follows are quick summaries of the panels I attended and my thoughts. The abstracts of the conference are available but I can’t link to them individually. I have more thoughts about the conference, but I will post them separately.

Mediating Sexuality

Nathan Scott Epley spoke about “Feminism, Cynicism, And The Return Of The Pinup.” Epley discussed the new pinups, which take the iconography of the old pinups (similar poses) but sex it up for a new sensibility: SuicideGirls (tattooed, Goth, punk, emo, alt—but they’re still all girls). This kind of pinup mimics, displaces, and commodifies the convention of the pinup, yet they are conventially sexist, presenting women as objects to look at, a form of consumption with a dash of irony. The consensus during discussion was that neo-pinups, like classic pinups, don’t reflect anything beyond the sexist gaze. The neo-pinup is not a subversive rereading of classic pinups, but an uncritical, nostalgic look back.

James Nadeu spoke about “Appropriation And Creation In Queer Cinema.” Nadau presented a timeline of gay cinema, beginning with the early filming of stage plays, progressing to documentaries, the independent queer film, and finally Hollywood. Sundance 1992 saw the creation of the so-called New Queer Cinema, and the queer romantic comedy as a genre emerged. Nadau, who showed and commented on clips from several films, including Ernest and Bertram and Gay Propaganda, concluded that queer filmmakers appropriated existing genres in order to comment on both mainstream and queer culture. Discussion centered around the way the gay film inserts the gay experience into the mainstream.

Lien Fan Shen, a published anime author, spoke about “Anime Pleasure As A Playground of Sexuality, Power, And Resistance.” Shen linked anime to Foucault’s notion of pleasure and consumption, noting that pleasure may destablize regulatory powers, and this rupture is performed by anime and manga. She found that the pleasure in anime was linked to (1) common ground; (2) deployment of sexuality; and (3) resistance (because anime is tied to a youth subculture). She provided specific examples in recent manga of void signifiers (unreal landscapes), bodies (inhuman), liminal conditions (women), and taboos (sex, including incest, rape, and homosexuality; nudity; and violence). She concluded that pleasure is related to the will of power, and she posited pleasure as a new way to read anime. Discussion touched on yaoi as texts about gay men written for women.

Linking all the texts was the theme of the process of resistance—versus the products—of the culture that is creating the product.

Fans And Producers

Joan Giglione and Robert Gustafson copresented on “Media Exposure And Fans.” They spoke anecdotally about how fan contact through such media as message boards can result in the producers changing their minds or bringing about change. They suggested that the medium of communication needs to be reanalyzed so that fans and producers can engage better. Their point of view was based in practicality rather than grounded in theory—for instance, they suggested that time spent behind the scenes can greatly inform fans about producers’ agendas. Discussion attempted to link their discussion to theoretical concerns, particularly the notion of producers presenting a persona rather than speaking the truth when they engage with fans.

Sam Ford spoke about “The Changing Modes Of Discourse Between Fan Communities And Soap Opera Producers.” Ford sees soap operas as social texts: the soap provides a pretext for social engagement among fans. The fan interpretive function results not in fan fiction, where missing scenes are literally written, but in conversations along the lines of, “What the writers should have done was…” Soap operas are a huge open-ended text that permits almost endless analysis, with many gaps that fans feel the need to fill, and this filling is performed in a way that results in social engagement.

Derek Kompare, in “Fan/Producer: Cult Television Authorship,” talked about Doctor Who 2005 and its writer-producer, Russell T. Davies, a larger-than-life fanboy who made it big when he became the guiding force behind Doctor Who. Davies’s engagement with the show, foregrounded by the many media outlets he has appeared in, is interesting in terms of the role of authorship when the text being written has a long history. Kompare provided examples of Davies foregrounding his own authorship, including the lack of care of fan response. Doctor Who is being rewritten by Davies to rescue it from cultish oblivion and give the show its rightful place as a cornerstone of British TV.

Creative Transformation

Note: I moderated this panel.

Kristina Busse presented on “Intense Intertextuality: Derivative Works In Context.” Her argument centered on the idea that derivative works such as fan fiction cannot be taken apart from their context, and that the artwork that results is not an artifact in itself but rather a trace of a specific time and place. Place, time, and community all alter reading and judging. She found three aspects in fanfic: (1) intertextuality, (2) performativity, and (3) emotional intimacy. She concluded that the standards used to judge fan fiction and other derivative texts, which tend to assume that the text (the story) is the point, instead will result in its being misread, so different standards must be used for evaluating densely intertextual work.

Francesca Coppa spoke about “Female Video Editors And The Literary Music Video.” She traced the history of the music vid or songvid, which first appeared in Star Trek media fandom in 1975. Coppa showed an early slide vid about Mr. Spock made byKandy Fong that created a story of emotion about an emotionless character. Vidding activity then moved to VCRs, then to today’s vids, which are made on computers. Coppa pointed out that vids are narrative texts: they tell a story with clips set to meaningful music. Because vidders, out of fear of copyright violation concerns, kept tight control over their works, their post-YouTube history is now being overshadowed by genres such as machinima. Coppa metaphorically linked the activity of vidding to Star Trek’s change in direction between the orginal pilot and the show as it eventually aired, with the rational Number One, played by a woman (Majel Barrett), replaced by a rational alien, after which the actress went on to play more stereotypically feminine characters in the Trekverse, eventually becoming the voice of the computer. Vidders, like Number One’s reduction to a disembodied voice, lost their representationality, but they gained control by creating vids.

Rebecca Tushnet, who is a professor of law, spoke about “Fandom, Fair Use, and Technology: The Uneasy Relationship?” She spoke about the trouble copyright law has with dealing with works that are not created for money. Transformed works, versus strict copies, are troublesome in the legal world, and the reasons behind certain legal rulings are not entirely rational or clear, depending on subjective notions of parody and sometimes even on close readings of the texts in question. Attribution as a right of authorship may be provided in lieu of money—and in fact is often preferred. What Tushnet finds troubling is that fans who create derivative works will never be permitted into this economy. Fans self-police to ensure that certain deriviative works, such as vids, are kept locked down, and that no profit is made. This pits fan against fan as their own fellows work against them and traps fans in the existing economy. (Tushnet talks about some of these ideas at more length in her essay Legal Fictions.)

TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica

Melanie E. S. Kohnen presented “Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination Of Contemporary American History.” She linked part of the pleasure of BSG to the fact that it comments on contemporary American politics, particularly 9/11 for the new BSG and the Vietnam war for the old BSG; the programs reverse the wars. The war in Iraq is dealt with in BSG’s occupation/resistance storyline. She pointed out that the obsolete technology so central to BSG’s struggle against the Cylons comments on the freedom of information sharing through the Internet. BSG provides an exploration of America’s mind-set in times of war.

Sarah Toton spoke about BSG’s history in “Reimagining Fan Culture: The Long Journey of Battlestar Galactica.” She ran down the major Web sites associated with BSG, as well as the convoluted history of its resurrection. Fans were upset because the new show was far different in sensibility than the old show—darker, less pleasing, less campy. In a discussion of BSG fan sites, including BattlestarWiki and Battlestargalactica.com, Toton found a gendering of fan activity. Men preferred to generate and organize factual material, and women preferred to generate narrative. Women learn about BSG in order to embed themselves in it, to become a part of it, whereas men learn it to own it.

Anne Kustritz spoke about “Fans’ And Producers’ Manipulation Of Fictional Love Triangles.” The genres of melodrama and soap opera have been made part of new SF shows, in part to appeal to a broader demographic to increase viewership. BSG has a convoluted love triangle at its center. Because there are so many characters, and so many of them interact with each other, canon provides the possibilities of many romantic readings and entanglements, but she argues that this subtext is best left as subtext rather than realized. However, in the end, BSG adheres to today’s heteronormative and class/status distinctions—for example, no overtly homosexual characters have been presented. Stereotypical male and female pleasures are present in the text, but they can’t be fulfilled or sustained.

Julie Levin Russo, in “Labors Of Love: Capitalizing On Fan Economies,” which she suggested might also be called, “There Are Many Copies,” spoke about love and its integral part in BSG’s world. Love, for example, is the Cylon’s method of reproduction. Russo donned pink girlslash goggles and spoke of the difficulty in finding lesbian desire in the interstices of the program—as well as the viewer’s joy in finding gaps and fragments where she could insert herself. The girlslash goggles are an example of an unauthorized mode of interpretation. Russo discussed fans’ concerns with love and motherhood and linked this to an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.

Cult Media And Fan Engagement

Heather Blatt, in “Medieval Fan Fiction: The Manipulation Of Continuity,” used the fifteenth-century text The Siege Of Thebes, by John Lydgate, a sequel to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Blatt sees this kind of work as an antecedent of fan fiction, and like fan fiction, it requires interpretation not just of the text but of the community that created it. Blatt places the text in the medieval tradition of literary creation in which originality was not as highly valued as skilled appropriation and allusion.

Piret Viires spoke about “Innocence Revisited: The Possibilities of Fan Fiction.” She used the Russian girl band t.A.T.u. as an example of Baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulacra; like fanfic, the band is a copy with no origin, their personas read and interpreted by fans without regard to any notion of underlying reality. However, Viires sees this not as ironic but as a return to the innocent, the opposite of today’s preferred reading. This return to the innocence permits rewriting of the originary text and intertextuality, and thinking about it in these terms may provide a new opening for analysis.

Aubree A. Lawrence and Rebecca Herr Stephenson spoke about the upcoming end of the Lost and Harry Potter canons in “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It: Anticipation And Anxiety Over A Closing Canon.” John Fiske’s work (“The cultural economy of fandom,” in The adoring audience, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49 [London: Routledge, 1992]) was used as a base: fan activities involve semiotic productivity (making meaning), enunciative productivity (expressing meaning), and textual productivity. But what happens when the elements that anchor fan production (canon and memes) disappear? They provided a diagram of the movement of networks from inside boxes, to a few focal centers that reach out, to a complete breakdown of any kind of center, which they linked to notions of authorship and to notions of fans and producers.

Keidra Chaney and Raizel Liebler discussed “Canon Versus Fanon: The Manipulation Of Continuity.” They opened with a discussion about categorization and the way it affects the way we construct and organize knowledge, then linked it to the organization of the two realms of canon (the primary source, such as the TV show) and fanon (the fan-created extrapolations from canon that are open to interpretation; it might be called “canon by inference”). They made complex the gap between canon and fanon, suggesting that the stuff in between is in flux and moves, and they also suggested that differences in fandoms might result in different constructions of canon. They posit the existence of an aggregation of content emerging through bottom-up consensus by the public and by fan communities.