Karen Hellekson

New journal announcement and call for papers: Transformative Works and Cultures

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000–8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000–7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500–2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500–2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review AT transformativeworks DOT org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor AT transformativeworks DOT org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for US Letter or European A4. Please feel free to link, download, print, distribute, or post.

SFRA 2008, to be held in Lawrence, Kansas, July 10–13, 2008, will be held jointly with the Campbell Conference at the Holiday Inn Holidome and Convention Center. The Web site for the combined conventions is here: http://www.continuinged.ku.edu/programs/campbell/

At the Web site are hotel information and rates, and registration forms (fees go up after April 30).

Paper and panel proposals should be sent to me at karenhellekson AT karenhellekson DOT com. In addition to a short abstract, I also need to know whether the participant has AV needs.

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal here. Please feel free to comment in either space.

Here’s my day job: I copyedit journals and books. I take a manuscript. I run it through a bunch of macros to make it all clean and pretty. I code it for the typesetter. And then I edit it. I think I spend most of my time styling references. It’s hard to say. It all kind of blends together, boldface journal numbers, italic journal names, with or without periods, Index Medicus versus Biosis.

When I edit something, I don’t really read it. That seems weird but it’s better that way. I’m not focusing on content, because that was taken care of, one presumes, during peer review. I’m focusing on grammatical sense, subject-verb agreement, proper styling of P values, reconciliation of references, proper capitalization in display type, tricky italicization in things like restriction enzymes. And I write notes like this to the author: “Figure 3 is reprinted from a copyrighted source. Please ensure that permission paperwork is on file with the production editor.” Or, “Song lyrics epigraphs have all been struck. Please approve. If you reinstate, please ensure that you have paid the relevant fees to the copyright holder, and make sure the release paperwork is on file with the production editor.”

I know very well that the author had no idea she had no right to reprint Figure 3, because after all, she created it. But it was published elsewhere, and so she doesn’t own the copyright. The journal she printed it in does, and they must release it—which they will do for a fee. And I know that although the single lines of popular songs used as epigraphs to head each chapter probably fall within fair use, the publisher doesn’t care, as is their prerogative. They don’t want to get sued, so they ask me to cut all song lyrics, regardless of length, thus simply avoiding the whole problem.

I think something is wrong with copyright, or the way it’s interpreted. I think it’s ironic that I’m asked to do something I so fundamentally disagree with. I think that I have to do it anyway.

Here’s my fandom life: Not enough time to write, too much heavy-duty revision macro-level beta’ing that really takes quite a bit of time but results in a publishable story, and it makes me proud to see it even if my name isn’t on it. A fan archive, three complete virtual seasons, round robins, a mailing list, a fan LiveJournal (LJ), some writing awards, betas I love, people who always send me feedback, friends who support me because they just…get it. And the love, oh the love, for a text so rich and so meaningful for me that it has the capacity to reduce me to tears: the canon source, and then that valuable thing that comes after, the community-generated metatext.

Here’s my thinky life: I am not an academic. I have a PhD. My specialty is science fiction literature. Meta = fanfic = literary criticism, all of it looping together, the impetus for the one the same as the impetus for the other. I write for money and so sometimes it’s hard to write for love, even though I like the pay for the latter better. I published a personal essay about writing fanfic, and I still get notes about it. It was reprinted somewhere. I put together a book proposal and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet was the result. I look around and I see connection, and I have a solely authored book proposal in me about the connection between fandom and articulations of history and historiography, but my strength really isn’t in my thinkiness or my meta. It’s in my practical knowledge of the publishing field, my ability to execute a complex project on time, and my ability to direct the work of others. That’s how I contribute to fandom, and that’s how I contribute to scholarship.

Here’s why I combined them in OTW: Get a bunch of people together who can actually execute a plan. Do you know how rare that is? I don’t really know them and that’s okay. I don’t share a fandom with most of them, plus my primary fandom is on the lists, not LJ, and I’m always slightly puzzled because I don’t have time to follow the metatext that is LJ, so I’m always a little behind. The bunch of people who are in charge seem articulate and smart, and if they say they are going to do something, then they do it. They are trying to create a long-lasting structure on a solid base. They are doing legal-type stuff that is important. And they are doing it all, the entire project, to protect something valuable.

Most people are excited about the Archive Of Our Own, but here’s what I’m excited about: an academic journal that welcomes, instead of rejects or overtly mocks, fan studies as a topic. That uses a Creative Commons copyright license so that the author can use that figure again if she wants. That thinks that teeny little snips of song lyrics fall within fair use. That will permit words from television programs or film to appear in print. That has open access, so readers don’t need a subscription to read the content. That is online, because more people will see it that way. That permits, even encourages, close readings of film, TV shows, or pieces of fan art, such as fanfic or vids. That has a way for readers to comment so they can engage in dialogue with the writers. And, most importantly, that takes as a given the notion that fans provide something valuable to our culture that ought to be analyzed.

My name is Karen Hellekson. I’m a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, and I’m the coeditor, with Kristina Busse, of Transformative Works and Cultures, a new peer-reviewed journal in the field of media studies that is especially interested in work by and about fans.

This post is part of Why I Joined OTW Week. Everything I say here is me, me, me, and I’m not speaking in any official capacity.

The Organization for Transformative Works (on LJ as otw_news) has formally announced the existence of a new peer-reviewed academic journal affiliated with the org, Transformative Works and Cultures. Kristina Busse (on LJ as kbusse) and I are coediting the journal. Our editorial e-mail address is editor AT transformativeworks DOT org.

The post there explains everything, so I won’t repeat any of it here. Do feel free to comment there with any concerns or thoughts.

If you want to volunteer for the Journal project, particularly if you have editorial, copyediting, or CSS/HTML experience, then do please contact the Volunteers committee (volunteers AT transformativeworks DOT org) to get put on the list. When we have a journal job that needs doing, we’ll submit the request through Volunteers to get a list of people qualified to do the task. (Please note that for the Journal project, fan pseuds are not used, only professional names.)

I’m very excited about this project, and I welcome the opportunity to work again with Kristina, my coeditor for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities…, as well as the rest of the awesome editorial team.

We wanted that press release out there because we will soon be issuing a call for papers for our first issue. Yes. Stay tuned at otw_news for more info!

SFRA 2008 will be held in Lawrence, Kansas, in conjunction with the Campbell Conference on July 10–13 (Thurs. through Sun.) at the University of Kansas. Individual abstracts or panel presentations comprising three or four papers are invited on any topic, but we particularly welcome abstracts on the conference’s broad theme, “Creating, Reading, and Teaching Science Fiction.” SFRA also encourages panels and papers analyzing SF in nonliterary media, a recent extension of SFRA’s traditional focus.

Abstracts should be sent to Karen Hellekson at karenhellekson AT karenhellekson DOT com.

Abstracts should either be typed into the body of an e-mail or attached as a document. Moderators will be randomly chosen among the panels that are made up. Important: Presenters who require audiovisual equipment should indicate what they will need.

In addition, a Proceedings volume is planned. Authors are encouraged to drop off their papers at the SFRA meeting to be considered for the printed volume. These papers will be treated as drafts, and papers chosen for inclusion in the volume will be revised before publication.

Proposals are due by Monday, March 31, 2008.

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal blog here. Comments welcome in either space.

Mark Andrejevic. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. $29.95 hardcover. 325p. ISBN 978-0-7006-1528-5.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In iSpy, part of Kansas’s CultureAmerica series, Andrejevic focuses on the trade-off between privacy and convenience. He argues that although the Internet provides unprecedented access and tools, it comes at a cost, and users need to consider that cost. The business models that lie behind corporations’ giving users such ostensibly “free” access—Google and its ilk—are just that: business models. They are providing something useful to the user, and in exchange, the user gives up private information, which is often used to target advertising at an incredibly specific level. Further, the user doesn’t know about or have access to that private information; the user doesn’t even know whether it’s correct.

[1.2] This book is not a love song to the Internet and the communities housed there; it’s a warning shout. Users, perhaps without really noticing it, are becoming complicit in creating organizational models that do not favor them, and these models are fast becoming codified as simply the way things are, something users accept because they think that the convenience factor outweighs the cost. Consider Gmail, for example. I use it and love it. I actually believe Google when they tell me that the discreet ads that pop up are based on computerized keyword searches and that nobody is reading my e-mail. I know that there’s a trade-off between privacy and convenience, between cost and benefit, and obviously, I’m paying the price and choosing the benefit of convenience. But I have no idea what information Google collects about me, or what they plan to with it. I have to trust them, and I have to hope that they won’t betray that trust.

[1.3] Although the book covers a host of topics, including commerce, war, politics, and monitoring, I’m going to focus here on chapter 5, “iMedia: The Case of Interactive TV,” because this is where his ideas have the most to do with fan culture. Andrejevic isn’t a fan and he isn’t embedded in fan culture, but his ideas affect the fannish sphere, particularly in his analysis of how producers of content use fans.

2. iMedia: The Case of Interactive TV

[2.1] Andrejevic focuses in this chapter on connection between the user and the act of marketing. He analyzes the fan site Television Without Pity (TWoP), which provides hilarious parodic summaries of currently running TV shows and invites readers to comment. The snide sniping of writers and readers united against the producers creates a fan community that ostensibly engages around the source text, but that in reality uses the source text as a pretext for this engagement. Andrejevic’s goal is to show how “interactivity can be enlisted by producers as a form of instant feedback . . . as well as a marketing tool and an invitation for viewers to identify with the imperatives of the producers” (137).

[2.2] Andrejevic distances himself from the fannish sphere after acknowledging its existence (via Jenkins, of course) and gracefully admitting that a fanwork may be “significantly more creative and interesting than the raw material from which it is crafted” (138). Fanworks, however, are not his focus; rather, he pays attention to the engagement itself and its relationship to the producer. He defines the fannish online audience merely as a group of TV viewers from all over the world who use the Internet to engage in critique and discussion. To analyze patterns of engagement at TWoP, he ran a poll and invited comments. For his subject position, therefore, he presents himself as disinterested outsider.

[2.3] An important part of the fans’ enjoyment is the fact that intense engagement in the community increases the pleasure they take from the text. Some note that they watch TV shows, even bad ones, just to read the TWoP recaps by their favorite writers, so they can be in the joke. Others just follow the show online via recaps, without ever actually watching it. The show, in short, becomes not text but pretext. The fan activity becomes the thing itself, rather than a means to an end, and the show is just raw material, to be skewered and parodied.

[2.4] Andrejevic’s focus on production and consumption follows Jenkins’s well-established, often-rehashed notions of participatory culture, but to this reading, Andrejevic adds “the promise of shared control, the invitation to participate in the production process,” which he thinks “doubles as an invitation to internalize the imperatives of producers” (149). At TWoP, for example, marketing is directly analyzed in dedicated threads on this topic. But do the producers of media actually take fan feedback into account? Can TWoP’s consumption result in production?

[2.5] The answer is yes, but indirectly. It can be inferred that producers read TWoP because shout-outs, or direct allusion in the TV show to something that appeared on TWoP, sometimes appear. Online bulletin boards provide more than audience reaction; they also provide a kind of audience research, a window into the customer that producers need to pay attention to, and Andrejevic quotes a few producers (of ER and Survivor) who monitored online activity and took it into account. Yet this kind of attention is rarely cited by Andrejevic’s interviewees as an imperative for engaging with TWoP. They’re there for entertainment and snark; they’re there for their own contributions to be read and valued; and they’re skeptical that they can actually make a difference. Producers are revealed to hold all the power, to be unassailable and ultimately unreachable, despite the shout-outs; they comprise the “inner sanctum” (155).

[2.6] This snarkastic distancing follows political notions of interactivity described by Jodi Dean, in which the skeptical subject (here, the fan) is working entirely in a symbolic order, attempting to prove that he or she is not a dupe. This results, paradoxically, in Dean’s “perverse logic of celebrity . . . one in which the subject takes pleasure in the very failure of its attempt to make an impression on a debunked symbolic order” (153). The posters at TWoP can therefore be seen as people who wish to be perceived as savvy subjects, as nondupes, people who do not believe in the implicit promises of the producers.

[2.7] The savvy viewer therefore engages while simultaneously knowing that such engagement will not result in change. The producers are the real insiders, of course, but TWoP posters feel like insiders themselves because of their engagement through a skeptical subject position. They are not “naive victims” (156). By engaging, by showing themselves, by posting, the savvy viewers are accepting “an invitation proffered by interactive media: for audiences to reveal themselves in increasing detail to producers” (156).

[2.8] Andrejevic concludes the chapter by revisiting Habermas’s notion of refeudalization, which he started the chapter by defining as “the relegation of members of the public to the role of observers of the spectacle of power—a spectacle framed by the mass media in the form of pundits, celebrities, and political elites” (135). This results in media organizations serving the powerful. TWoP and similar interactive sites seem to argue for the existence of refeudalization because these open sites fit the bill for being a public sphere: anyone can post (although TWoP deletes posts and bans members to keep community standards), and Andrejevic notes that such open forums tend to be female-gendered spaces, a “savvy but domesticated interactivity” (159).

[2.9] If the work that TWoP posters do is just that—work—then it is unpaid labor. Andrejevic lays this against Jenkins’s celebratory notion of textual poaching; Jenkins’s poachers become Andrejevic’s complicit savvy viewers, both tirelessly generating content. By working against TPTB, TWoP posters are actually playing into their hands, providing useful feedback and viewership at no cost to the producers. The producers don’t even have to accord status or insidership in recompense. In the end, the rules of the game aren’t transgressed; they’re codified. TWoP, and by extension any fan activity, does not result in a transformation of media to a better, more democratic genre. Instead, it results in “a reflexive redoubling that amounts to an active form of self-submission” (160).

3. iMedia and fans

[3.1] The move from Jenkins’s hopeful, celebratory reading of fan activity to one that relies on a savvy, self-submissive fan is heralded by two obvious changes: first, the political moment; and second, the advent of interactive technologies—in short, Iraq and the Internet. Both Jenkins and Andrejevic rely on active fans. But the textual poacher, who seizes power by becoming a producer, has become a textual poacher who seizes power in such a way that her productions become in turn a tool of the producer.

[3.2] As a fan, I find such analyses are intellectually interesting, but ultimately, they don’t change my behavior or my motivation for fan engagement. Andrejevic’s ideas reject the notion of fandom as a utopian, democratic sphere, but then again, I never thought it was. Instead, Andrejevic’s ideas force me to assess our culture and the savvy, disinterested stance currently in vogue. I can’t help but view media outlets with cynicism: why else cancel Farscape or Enterprise, both successful shows? (I must be a savvy viewer! I think that pleases me.) I feel powerless, and thus I blog.

[3.3] Fans tell stories to one another about successful fan drives: Bring back Daniel Jackson on Stargate SG-1 and Carson Beckett on Stargate Atlantis! Give us one more season of Star Trek! Renew Beauty and the Beast! Send the Jericho producers peanuts to show you care! We remember these stories because they’re so rare, and we remember them because TPTB actually paid attention to something we were saying and acknowledged our existence—and the work we had to do en masse to generate these huge fan-based responses.

[3.4] Andrejevic reminds us that although sometimes we think that TPTB are paying attention, they will only do so as long as they can get something out of it. Carson Beckett’s coming back will, I hope, be a highly rated media circus. But we’ll be complicit in generating that media circus—after all, when we tune in, we create the ratings. We’ll blog and squee and write fanfic, and the producers will take notes. We can’t go back underground, back to hard-copy fanzines, back to solely face-to-face conventions. The genie is out of the bottle on that one.

[3.5] If it’s a cost-benefit ratio, like Gmail, I’ll pay the price. The producers can reap the benefits of my unpaid labor, because against that, I hold the pleasure of my engagement, which I value more. In fact, if a producer read anything I wrote, I’m pretty sure I’d be pleased and flattered. I perceive the production of texts—the producers’ texts and fanworks—to be in sync with one another, to form a larger artwork, some primary and some derivative. Of course my reading of this metatext is democratic and utopian; it tacitly ranks the derivative work of the fan right up there with the canonical texts created by the producer.

[3.6] But this shouldn’t be any surprise. I’d hate to acknowledge that all this work, all this unpaid labor, was for nothing.

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.

This is cross-posted at my LiveJournal blog here. Do feel free to comment in either space.

1. Reclaiming Heinlein

[1.1] At the 2007 SFRA/Heinlein Centennial meeting, at a panel about Heinlein’s importance in the field of SF literature chaired by prominent SF writers, several people in the audience noted that Heinlein was their gateway into SF. They wished their children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews to share the joy they remembered with Heinlein’s juveniles, and so they gave them as gifts. But, as many audience members noted, these children perceived Heinlein as irrelevant, and they did not enjoy the texts.

[1.2] Why would this be? Some people at the panel thought that it was the fault of the children—that they were not sophisticated enough readers, perhaps; or their minds had been taken over by video games, rendering them unfit for texts that require some kind of attention span. Others thought that the texts dealt with things (like…Nazis) that current children find irrelevant.

[1.3] Although it certainly seems a truism that excellent literature is always relevant, if only for the beauty of its writing, I’d argue something quite different. Yes, Heinlein is dated. His sexual politics in particular are problematic: his characterizations of female characters are definitely a product of their time, and they haven’t aged well; and as the panelists and audience agreed, Heinlein’s later writing wasn’t as fine as his middle-era stuff. Still, we read, for example, Shakespeare and consider him vitally important.

[1.4] I argue that there are two reasons why we consider Shakespeare relevant for today. First, and most importantly, Shakespeare is crucially important in understanding the English-language literature that came after. There are so many allusions and citations by other authors to Shakespeare that to know nothing about Shakespeare means that you will miss the joke, an entire other layer of meaning implied with a single phrase that evokes an entire other text. You simply can’t hear “to be or not to be” or think of Juliet on a balcony without the entirety of the texts tingeing the context.

[1.5] But second, we continually reinvent Shakespeare, and thus we ensure he remains relevant. In short, Shakespeare is relevant because we make him so. Producers stage Shakespeare interestingly, perhaps by setting it in the Nazi era or some other time period, to comment on current events or to imply certain things about the characters; they may use casting choices laden with contemporary meaning; and scholars analyze Shakespeare in terms he’d find most surprising, such as feminism and deconstruction.

[1.6] If Heinlein is to be relevant to today’s youth, then we must make him so. As teachers, we must reclaim the texts in such a way that it is placed within a framework that new readers will find meaningful. (Perhaps a dense deconstructive or feminist or posthuman reading of Heinlein’s juveniles is in order? Although I’m sure such texts exist and I simply know nothing about them.) Shakespeare’s legacy informs countless other texts; not so with Heinlein. The question then becomes, is Heinlein worth the trouble of reclaiming? Is his work so important to the field of SF that we need to ensure that Heinlein remains perennially relevant? And if he is so darn important, then why isn’t this work being done?

[1.7] I admit that my answer to my question above—is Heinlein worth reclaiming?—would be no. It’s hard to look at a cultural moment so close in time to ours, without the benefit of hindsight, but Heinlein’s prose is not ravishing, his characters timeless, his struggles truly epic, even if they take place on the Moon. It was Philip K. Dick, after all, not Heinlein, who was chosen to expand the pantheon of canonical American writers in the Library of America. I would read Heinlein not for the sheer joy of it, but because he is an important SF figure at a particular moment in time. In short, I would read his books for historical completeness. Of course it’s hard to say where Heinlein will be in twenty years’ time. Dick seems relevant today because he deals with ontological concerns that relate to the human condition. That translates better into today’s climate, although he shares with Heinlein the problem with women characters (when they appear) so endemic in work of, say, the 1950s. Heinlein writes adventure stories about boys and men (and occasionally girls and women), often to teach a lesson, but it’s hard to make didacticism compelling. That’s part of the problem.

[1.8] Of course, it’s unfair to compare Heinlein with Shakespeare. Still, my analogy remains valid: if Heinlein is really that important in the SF pantheon, then we must ensure that he remains so by doing the work that goes along with handing someone a book—work that is apparently not in the process of being done, if the anecdotes told at the panel hold true. Instead of a pat on the head and an “Enjoy!” (which is all that is necessary for Harry Potter), the text may need a gloss: “This one is about individualism,” one may advise; or “When I read this, I thought x, but it strikes me that you might find y more relevant.” Certain books, such as Starship Troopers, may seem more relevant in today’s era of war, of fighting an enemy without ever winning. Teachers need to teach his work, and scholars need to study it for it to be truly reclaimed.

[1.9] Heinlein needs to be analyzed in such a way that we find relevance for today, not merely remembered for its importance at a crucial time in our lives—that golden era when we discover SF and its boundless possibilities, and the direction of our lives is changed forever. That’s what we’re remembering when we hand Heinlein to children. We aren’t remembering Heinlein’s greatness as much as feeling nostalgia for a moment of wonder. To foster that sense of wonder in children today, we should consider choosing another text.

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.

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal blog here. Conversation welcome at either site.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In my red team/blue team debate with Jason Mittell over at Henry Jenkins’s blog (Part 1 and Part 2), I wrote this:

[1.2] You [JM] asked about the political issues of the acceptance of versus the othering of fandom, and I’d turn that around to ask about the political issues of the acceptance of versus the othering of the critic, and of the critical apparatus she uses, because that’s the reason we’re having this conversation: what’s at stake when the critic makes her decisions about what and how to study? Gender is one of those things. Authority and power are others. We’ve come full circle, therefore: the acafan has been reconstituted and redescribed, just as she constitutes and describes her field of study.

[1.3] I want to revisit this because of the terribly fraught nature of the role of the critic. When it comes to media studies, particularly fan studies, it’s sometimes hard to separate the fan from the academic. One thing Kristina Busse and I tried to do in our book was set out the whole “we’re both fans and academics, we think that’s valuable, and here’s why” thing in the Introduction in such a way that the individual contributors could just skip their ethnography and their credentialing. We reasoned that valuable words would be better spent on the topic at hand—yet of course we had to deal with it, because the topic is so problematic.

[1.4] Of course, I’d argue that fans are hardly unique to things like sports of sci-fi TV shows. It’s just that somehow, a fan and active reader of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) somehow has less cred than, to choose an example I’ve used elsewhere, a fan and active reader of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759). Is it somehow more difficult to get a sense of the culture that created the artwork when we’re actually in the cultural moment? Obviously that’s ridiculous, even given the signal/noise ratio. I just don’t see how it could be. We have a far better sense of the resonance of a text because we coexist with its cultural moment and can see the connections. We don’t need to keep revising a text through interpretation to keep it relevant for our culture, as we do with Shakespeare. But ridiculous as it is, I guess we’re stuck with it: academics who work with Renaissance texts don’t have to waste time explaining themselves, but we do.

2. What’s in it for the academic?

[2.1] Here’s the question I want to ask: what’s in it for the person with the power? Why is it important to the academic that she remain disinterested? What’s in it for her to make the thing studied (the fan) different, to declare herself disinterested? I’d argue that the answer is simple: authority—which is, after all, what is being bolstered by every disclaimer the academic makes. The tradition of a disinterested scholar standing to the side, making relevant and pithy comments, is meant to make the findings all the more rigorous, the findings all the more irrefutable. Lots of things come to you if you have authority, such as publications, which result in jobs and tenure. The entire academic system is set up to reward authority, and it would be foolish to not consider it.

[2.2] But what’s in it for the academic if she instead makes herself the same as the thing studied (the fan)—if she self-identifies as a fan? Community, although likely a community with other acanfas, because fans and acanfans don’t always get along. This commodity also has benefits: the old bat’s network would be one example, although since we’re still constructing it, we haven’t gotten all that much use out of it yet.

3. Why we credential

[3.1] I’m not arguing that people should stop with the autoethnography or the credentialing. It’s useful to the reader to know where the researcher is coming from, and certainly the writer may get something out of self-revelation (as in, “OMG! There are other fandoms besides Harry Potter? And they have different rules?”). The standards set by the academic world won’t be wiped away overnight. However, I think it’s useful to think about what those academic standards are there for and what they’re doing: they’re attempting to enforce rigorous research that will result in firm findings, and the reason it does all that is to create a hierarchy of authority that can be used as a system of reward. I’d also argue that some of this is an inappropriate valorization of the scientific method to other realms of study—basically applying the standards used in the sciences to the humanities.

[3.2] In the medical field, it’s become common for the journals to print every researcher’s honorarium, every share held in a relevant business, every possible conflict of interest, to separate the possibility of personal gain from the research done, presumably so the researcher doesn’t say “it’s the best thing ever!” because the drug company is paying her to, or because she owns the company that is marketing the drug or device. And I doubt that oncologists are completely disinterested when they assess new drug combinations for their patients, now matter how measured the prose when they submit their findings to Annals of Clinical Oncology. Even the formulaic format of the scientific research paper, the so-called IMRAD system of organization (introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion), underlines the standing aside, the disinterest, by reporting the research as a process that follows the scientific method and terminates in an end point. It all seems so neat, but of course in practice, it’s not.

[3.3] Obviously oncology is much different than media fandom. But the strict division between practice and analysis is not always appropriate for some realms of study, and media studies (and fan studies) are among those fields. It isn’t wrong to be intensely interested in what I study—isn’t that why I study it, after all? How unfortunate that “it’s wrong to be too interested” is the subtext that we’re responding to when I begin an essay with, “As an active fan of…” or “Let me admit it: I’m a fan.”

[3.4] The red team/blue team debate in Jenkins’s blog is one way to try to move from authority to community, to permit joyful credentialing. It’s a good start.