{ julie levin russo }

transitions

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:41:22 GMT

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

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

Many thanks to my readers!

IV/4/. Queer Economies

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 03:21:15 GMT

The conclusion to the saga of OurChart.com illustrates once again the vulnerability of fan communities when they rely on corporately controlled infrastructure, confirming the importance of efforts like the OTW's to advocate for the autonomy of fan labor. The site shut down abruptly in January 2009, vaporizing the contributions and connections created by its active network of users. In Chaiken's farewell blog entry, which gave one week's notice of the closure, she wrote that "Showtime is not only OurChart's parent but one of Our Community's greatest champions... that's why in our final season of The L Word, we've decided to combine forces and host OurChart on sho.com" (Gannon). This explanation was disingenuous, since hosting OurChart on Sho.com meant, in reality, that all the collectively generated content of the social network "chart" disappeared [Figure 13], and Sho.com now simply offered authorized tie-in content with token gestures of interactivity, such as "Q&A [with Chaiken]... behind-the-scenes podcasts... video specials... message boards... swag" and an "official" wiki. In a feeble attempt to continue a social media strategy, the star feature of Sho.com's OurChart page was a text box that allowed fans to post questions for Chaiken directly to an unmoderated twitter account, perhaps an inadvisable move since it was immediately inundated with exclamations of outrage by OurChart.com members [Figure 14]. Their outcry was in vain, however; public information about why the site folded was slim, but it seems likely that, with The L Word entering its final season, the promotional value of OurChart.com was largely exhausted, and Showtime thus eliminated its funding (as in the case of FanLib's archive, it wasn't feasible for such an expensive venture to become self-supporting). The lesson for new media marketers is that, while fan communities encompass a wealth of productive labor, very little of this labor can be monetized directly. Only this profitable surplus is of interest to corporations, but it is subjective and collective desires in excess of this expropriation that sustain the dynamic productivity of fandom. Autonomy is thus vital to the very processes of valorization that the industry is increasingly eager to exploit. The lesson for fans is that, if we depend on proprietary platforms like OurChart.com, our creativity and community will remain at risk until we fully conform to capitalist dictates.

Chaiken's styling of "Our Community" as effectively her trademark points to an issue raised frequently in discussions of OurChart: the status of this "our." The Wall Street Journal speculated that the "stigma of slash" may be one factor that "has made some mainstream authors and TV networks wary of... looking for ways to capitalize on fan fiction and its large audience" (Jurgensen). In this context, the relationship of queer fan production to media convergence is embroiled in double binds: would "we" prefer to end up marginalized or assimilated, unpaid or commercialized, subculture or target market? One well-founded fear that animates endeavors like the Organization for Transformative Works is that the "mainstreaming" of fan fiction may privilege and aggrandize heteronormative practices that are palatable to the industry while driving fandom's queerer traditions further underground. But The L Word is a test case for the opposite concern: what if the same-sex romances that populate slash are commodifiable after all? As I've explored, the program deploys normative tactics across its textual and metatextual worlds in order to adapt lesbian identities to the ideological, demographic, and economic demands of corporate profit models. I would argue, however, that the fan labor The L Word attempts to reify as brand-name lesbianism is nonetheless queer labor. This is not to say that fanworks are necessarily queer in content -- even slash stories often express the same conservative conventions that tend to be represented on television. My claim is that we could conceptualize the labor of subjectification and desire, in form, as queer labor. This libidinal labor is pivotal to the entertainment industry since, as immaterial commodities, mass media products require their audiences to work to valorize them. In addition to the stakes of defining the "our" that echoes through market discourses, then, we might ask whose interests "we" agitate for from a Marxist perspective. Late capitalism's labor relations are far more enmeshed with gender and sexuality than Marxism has typically acknowledged, and it is vital that we reincorporate these dimensions into our analyses of work in the era of convergence.

My study of the The L Word's onscreen and online mobilization of present-day working conditions is an exemplar of the trend toward commodifying queer labor, but it is not only in instances of gay media or gay fandom that we must consider this issue. Convergence as a whole is characterized by queer dynamics in its epistemologies (Chapter II), technologies (Chapter III), and economies, and fan production accentuates the inherent contradictions and instabilities of this capitalist system. If the value of media properties is produced by the immaterial labor of their consumers, in what sense do corporations own them? If today's social factory relies on autonomous networks of communicative subjects, how can corporations expropriate their work? Fandom is scrambling to find its own answers to these questions, and despite the fact that fan labor is fundamentally integrated with capitalism, it is crucial to maintain some degree of disaffiliation between fan communities and commercial institutions. Queer female fan practices embody an opportunity to galvanize antagonism within the industrial transformations in progress, and understanding, engaging, and defending the autonomy of these collectives will contribute to everyone's freedom to labor queerly.

IV/3/C The Archive of Our Own

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:38:09 GMT

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

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

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

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

IV/2/C Friends Plus

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:16:06 GMT

The implementation of the "chart" on OurChart.com materializes the many contradictions and insufficiencies that delineate The L Word's ideology of commodity lesbianism. Much like the program itself, the website must find an equilibrium between appealing to its niche fan base and to mainstream users and companies. But where the TV series titillates to attract straight male viewers, OurChart.com takes an opposing tack: desexualizing its lesbian orientation in order to render it as a palatable assortment of consumer positions encompassing popular culture, chic style, and liberal politics. With unusual coyness for an L Word tie-in, the venture is billed as a "site where women can connect" ("About Us"), thus sidestepping queer sex by emphasizing an assumed gender stability that erases male and transgender fans. In keeping with the franchise's signature circularity, season 5 episodes recapitulated criticisms similar to these, commenting self-referentially on the development of the existing OurChart.com. In the season premiere, Alice (now an executive of the fictional OurChart just as actress Leisha Hailey is a partner in the actual site) films an installment of her video podcast "Alice in Lesbo Land." Her interview with Phyllis Kroll (Cybill Shepherd), a middle-aged woman who has recently come out, is an occasion for a didactic review of some of the lesbian buzzwords ("stone butch," "vanilla," "trannies") that comprise the social network's lingua franca. However Max, who is behind the camera, questions the status of this common idiom, arguing with Alice about the eponymous "our" in relation to his transgender identity:

Alice: I feel like we're getting a little off-topic here for OurChart.
Max: Why is it off-topic?
Alice: Well, I mean, OurChart is for lesbians.
Max: I thought OurChart is for everybody. It's OUR chart, doesn't that suggest it's inclusive?

When Max then posts about his gender transition on OurChart "to educate people" [Figure 7], he angers Alice as well as his fellow bloggers, who continue to insist that it's a "lesbian space." By presenting this fabricated outrage over the boundaries of "lesbian" as originating from users themselves, The L Word disavows it's own role in perpetuating and even constructing transgender exclusion while backhandedly reinforcing the impression that the site is for women only. And when Alice grudgingly concedes that Max can continue writing a featured blog, it appears as if OurChart simply offers a neutral forum where the lesbian community can negotiate existing tensions while mobilizing this fictional narrative to inoculate the real life OurChart.com against charges of discrimination.

Nowhere is the gap between OurChart.com's claims and its capabilities more stark than in the failure of its hyperbolic promise to tell you who has hooked up with who (which, according to the program's diegetic logic, has been the Chart's primary impetus all along). Ficera's intuitive skepticism about the database project seems to prefigure its technocultural limitations, and these deficits are compounded by a conflict between the sexual archive concept and the site's move to advance a desexed, advertising-friendly brand of lesbianism. In contrast to The L Word's onscreen graphics portraying an imaginary interface with an intimate network, "friend" connections on OurChart.com conveyed no more information than they would on a typical online social network (send anyone a request, whatever your relationship is, and they choose whether to approve it). In a small concession to the original idea, a second type of connection was added later, dubbed "friends plus." The site defined this modality in the vaguest possible terms, with no mandate that it involve a sexual liaison:

We've created friends plus for everyone who's more-than-just-a-friend: exes, one-night stands, long-term partners, and any other players in your own personal dyke drama. Ever been secretly in love with your best friend? Kept up an intense relationship with an ex? Found yourself in a group of girls who've all slept with each other? Been out with a girl but weren't sure you were on a date? So have we. All of these are your friends plus.

Now, there is a certain radical quality to this open-ended articulation of community, in that it doesn't privilege the expected forms of coupling over more ephemeral interpersonal bonds. But in the context of OurChart.com, this cloud of intimacy functions as a smokescreen for the site's singular interest in labeling identities: the production of commodity lesbianism at any of these nodes. Whatever axes of their relationships users might wish to chart, OurChart.com engineered its equivalence between lesbian network and internet network to operates far better ideologically than technologically. Unlike the navigable data visualizations that represent Alice's online Chart in the episodes, OurChart.com's Flash animation of its user-generated Chart could only display about fifty of one person's friends in isolation [Figure 8]. The notion of the Chart is a pivotal device in The L Word's framing discourses, but its instantiation in OurChart.com demonstrates that it acts as an alibi, an ideal of connection for the purpose of community building that masks the franchise's investment in assembling immaterial workers into a virtual factory.

Because, despite OurChart.com's heavy reliance on professional content to impose a consistent tone, its users did work. The site's social network was in fact a lively one, with plenty of conversations, opinions, relationships, and no doubt hookups being forged beyond its "celesbian" encounters. The fan fiction thread numbered among many active forum topics [Figure 9] -- while the offerings in The L Word fic are strikingly sparse in the usual venues for Law & Order: SVU or Battlestar Galactica femslash (LiveJournal and standalone archives, for example; note that there are around 200 stories for The L Word vs. thousands for the other programs at {http://fanfiction.net/tv}), in this case creativity seemed to thrive under the auspices of the official brand. We could speculate that this idiosyncratic pattern was elicited by the ostensible correspondence between the aspirations, culture, and sexuality of the viewers, characters, and producers of the series as "authentic" lesbians, and enhanced by the latters' inviting attitude toward fans. While it is becoming more common for entertainment companies to celebrate fan fiction in principle, it still rarely garners direct acknowledgement or sponsorship due to its potential interference with brand integrity and control. Because Showtime outsourced much of the labor of OurChart.com to an autonomous, emergent community, the network could not guarantee that the subjectivities and discourses circulating within its social network factory would conform to its intentions and interests. Certainly, Max's fictional invasion of this "lesbian space" raises the possibility that OurChart's construction of a static, homonormative lesbian identity along gender lines might be challenged. But if any such challenges occurred under the banner (and literally, the logo) of The L Word, could these unruly connections offer any significant disruption to the expropriation of users' labor? Much like the reflexive incorporation of fans' objections into the program itself, any unexpected, creative, critical, or even outright rebellious moments that erupted on OurChart.com play into the impression that the site was an authentic reflection of and platform for lesbian community. In an era of real subsumption, simply by following the edict to "be subjects" -- to desire, communicate, and invest immaterial commodities with meaning -- fans are performing lesbianism as labor in accordance with The L Word's teachings. The crucial fault line in this capitalist monolith, however, is that OurChart.com does not capture the whole of this labor and its value: subjectivity is productive in excess of what a corporate framework can rationalize. In the next section, I will locate the tensions and antagonisms that this excess can generate within fandom's queer economy

IV/4/Z End Matter

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:21:32 GMT

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

/ Illustrations

/ Works Cited

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IV/2/B The Official Social Network

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:26:12 GMT

Much of the existing academic work on The L Word's fan intensities might be fruitfully informed by this theoretical perspective, and this project is informed in turn by my colleagues' analyses. Amy Villarejo evokes the excess value enumerated above when she proposes that we "imagine TV as a site of transcoding, where that commodity that is our collective attention is bought and sold (this is, after all, what ratings measure, and what advertisers and networks trade), but where we as spectators also are not entirely equivalent to that commodity" (389). Villarejo reiterates that, in an era when "capital has been invested at an affective level... [the] labor of the production, circulation, and manipulation of affect... becomes crucial" (391). Because this affective juncture has oriented marketing to minority desires, she asserts that "queer studies needs rigorous economic analysis and intervention into audience research... that can redress the so-called 'research' undertaken by market studies and polling groups who benefit from overemphasizing the riches of the gay market" (396). The L Word is a prime example of these tactics of homonormative commodification, and Villarajo writes that the program "is a melodrama for a digital age... [with an] overt sense of a network or set of ties among strangers [that] comes in an early drawing Alice makes of the web that emerges from Shane’s sexual life" (398) -- that is, the Chart. Through this trope, "characters' movement between home and work, family and friends, invokes some of the material of lesbian life that has been central to lesbians' political aims, only to defuse that material or transcode it into this loosely-defined sense of 'connection' that is the series' most apt figure" (399). In other words, the Chart is among the gestures enabling the market logic that renders lesbian identity as commodity rather than political affinity. For Villarejo, the transition to digital television is a key element in this emerging configuration but, by the same token, "digital television, with its expanded spectrum and hundreds of offerings, has already taught us, I want to argue, how to juggle multiple realities, divergent stories, and not just at the level of what is on television" (402). Thus, convergence furnishes a set of conditions that facilitate capitalist expropriation of a "gay market," but these same conditions provide the ground for queer disruptions of this trend.

Michele Aaron also references today's media transformations when she observes that, in the case of The L Word, "the actual airing of the show becomes just one way in which it is experienced, or bought into, by a queer audience" (66). She therefore suggests an "extraterrestrial avenue" for queer TV studies that takes as its object "this queer community and discourse generated by but existing beyond the analogue... forged via other media (satellite, cable, the internet) and... linked to the television programme from which it originates, [while] it also operates independently of it" (66). This provisional independence could be associated with the ways that "visual pleasure... engages our desire for, or to be, on-screen characters counter to our 'normal' sexual orientation" (70), and Aaron advises that, following psychoanalytic film theory, "television must be reconsidered, therefore, for its potential influence on subject formation" (71) if we are to understand the significance of "extraterrestrial" formations. M. Catherine Jonet and Laura Anh Williams likewise urge us toward more complex models of reception, offering a counterpoint to the many scathing criticisms of The L Word's imposition of normative identities. In their view, "The L Word is a 'restive' text" (153): due to its "conflicting impetuses of representational insufficiency and recuperation... [its] representation of lesbians and queer women will always be insufficient. It will never achieve the 'truth,' authenticity, or even the 'inside glimpse'" (155). Rather than regarding the program's relentless claims to authenticity as an unyielding ideological tactic, that is, Jonet and Williams imply that their inevitable failure opens onto an ambivalent terrain that is fertile for queer readings. These articles thus advance a precarious understanding of The L Word's commodified viewer and an optimistic outlook on the possibilities of queer engagement.

Candace Moore has worked specifically on The L Word screening parties (plus OurChart.com's "virtual" version) as "peripheral sites of production, where queer female consumers become incorporated into the production process (through audience surveillance and interaction) and where lines between private/public, producer/consumer, and insider/outsider are blurred" (126). She notes once again "the unquantifiable nature of television consumption and fandom... [g]iven OnDemand, DVRs, TV-on-DVD, online viewing technologies, as well as group screenings" (127) and suggests that one motivation behind OurChart.com, like Nielsen's social network, is covert market research. While "queer female cyber-identities are 'charted' (i.e. organized) on the site, and thus made ever more accessible to Viacom, the conglomerate that owns Showtime Networks, as a market demographic," it is equally true that identity is not so easily rationalized, since here "anyone can declare him- or herself a 'lesbian,' or indeed a 'friend of'" (134). So if Moore is realistic about the retrenchment of capitalist logics animating The L Word's show of involvement with its fan community, she concludes that the program is nonetheless "dependent upon fan identification, recognition, and at least partial belief in the notions of identity and community which the show founds itself upon and also 'works on'... [and thus] is also predicated on the fan culture it has promulgated" (136). This negotiation between fan communities and the media industry is endemic to late capitalism, and given that both sides have their share of power in this milieu, the outcome of mediations between capital and fan laborers is far from a foregone conclusion.

As a corollary, though, Kelly Kessler emphasizes that capital is rapidly adapting its strategies of containment to optimize the burgeoning gay media market. "As corporations take control of fansites through pimped-out network/studio/label-sponsored sites," she writes, "an increased level of policing of fan art/fiction/chat/use of images or texts seems to work to limit types of fan activity.... Increased visibility seems to be exchanged for complicity in a vision most conducive to the studios'/labels'/corporations' own economic or ideological goals" (Kessler). This trend was very much in evidence at OurChart.com, where "Showtime took a site once more focused on individual fan postings on random topics [official and unofficial message boards] and molded it to one that foregrounds characteristics seen [as] desirable by dominant culture, the economic imperatives of the culture industry, and the very characteristics of the show critiqued by fans." Corralling the fandom within a corporate framework entailed, in particular, that "the network-sponsored site erase[d] the butch, the bi, the trans, the working class, the Midwestern or rural, all in favor of creating a largely idealized and perhaps marketable (to both men and women) image of lesbianism." Once again, however, these problematic dynamics did not necessarily go unchallenged. Humorist Kim Ficera raises one obvious objection to OurChart's attempt to commodify intimate networks as so much market data. When it was introduced onscreen, she recalls, "we saw ourselves in the Chart," but in addition to the thrill of recognition "we were reminded of exactly how incestuous our sexual behaviours are" (112). The Chart is haunting in its insinuation that "our exes -- four, five or sixty times removed -- aren't really removed at all, but rather re-posited [sic] into a familiar lesbian landscape... [because] one thing the lesbian world isn't is Large" (112-113). "Uncomfortable sexual connections are made every day -- that's life," Ficera opines -- "But we really don't need to keep a record of them" (114). This acknowledgement, however oblique, of the contentious power relations of archives indicates that queer subjectivities cannot simply be translated into online databases without resistance. There are certainly losses when an "official social network" is superimposed onto a fan community, but there is also lossiness: noise and tension that belie doomsday scenarios of total subsumption by capital. I hope that my case study of The L Word's fan-driven internet promotions extends these analyses of their contingent and ambivalent character by offering a theoretical scaffold for the labor negotiations in progress.

IV/3/A Antagonism

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:19:07 GMT

The emerging struggles of late capitalism, including fans' negotiations over compensation and ownership in the context of convergence, bear little resemblance to the class struggles of traditional Marxism. For what was once a revolutionary theory, the disintegration of any effective framework for mass resistance has been conspicuous, and today Marx's predictions that capitalism would inevitably collapse under the strain of its own contradictions ring hollow. Autonomist Marxism relocates resistance in the constitutive autonomy of the immaterial laborer, who works within collective networks and through subjective communication that cannot be fully rationalized or contained. We might envisage fan communities, for instance, in Negri's assurance that "during the course of capitalist development, there have always existed gaps -- partially in the sphere of circulation -- which are independent of direct capitalist control. In these gaps, certain use-values have been defined, and sometimes, communities which are rooted in such values have come into existence" (98). Today, workers' "antagonism which has never ceased to exist" (84) gathers new intensity "by virtue of the socialized worker's independence" and "capacity to reappropriate control of the labour process" (85). Moulier's introduction to Negri's book summarizes the fundamental doctrine of Autonomism, which harmonizes with other post-structuralist formulations of resistance from within: "On a theoretical level operaismo affirms the internal and structural limits of capitalism's capacity for integration. For operaismo in fact, the working class must certainly be within capital, but above all against it, otherwise capital could no longer function. Therefore the unilateral domination of capitalist control can never obtain. Subversion and revolution constitute a permanent possibility which lies at the very heart of the system" (25). This viewpoint is conceptually seductive, but suffers some of the same difficulties as Marx's original hypothesis, in that it seems to assume subversion as an automatic function of immaterial labor, with little attention to the specific praxis that might constitute cohesive antagonism as opposed to reincorporation. In his analysis of Lazzarato, Antonio Toscano suggests that the reconstitution of the idea of a general intellect "is in a sense an attempt to prolong the autonomist belief in the priority of productive or constructive resistance over its capture by the mechanisms of power and its reproduction, a way of thinking cooperation as prior to and relatively independent from capitalist self-valorization... it might be worth pausing to question the almost unbridled optimism of this thesis" (79). In answer to this provocation, I pause here to scrutinize the Autonomist concept of antagonism more closely.

I turn to Jason Read for the most trenchant and measured synthesis of this position, which effectively mediates between the optimistic and pessimistic poles of the Marxist continuum. Read opens with an acknowledgement that, today, "it is more and more clear that world is made and transformed by the immense productive powers of labor, which produce not only the wealth of objects but also the knowledge, affects, and desires that constitute the lived world, and yet capital's domination of the productive power seems to me more and more entrenched" (15). His book is an attempt to puzzle out this apparent contradiction between intensifying "subjectification" and "subjection," that is, "between the total subjection of sociality and subjectivity to capital and the concomitant development of a subjective and social power irreducible to abstract labor" (119). Read argues that we should understand the antagonism intrinsic to this contradiction not as a by-product of capitalist domination, but as the very productive force driving capitalist development toward real subsumption, as Marx chronicled in his account in Capital of the proletarian struggle to shorten the length of the working day. Following Marx, Read theorizes that "the technological and social transformations of the capitalist mode of production are neither the pure product of capitalism nor of resistance to capitalism but rather are formed by the antagonistic interplay of the competing strategies: capitalist strategies to expand surplus value and the workers' strategies to expand needs and desires" (111). He thus posits the coextensivity of expanding techniques of both domination and resistance as a defining characteristic of the capitalist system.

Our contemporary circumstances are no different, and "subjection too produces, or at least makes possible, its own resistances... The subjection/subjectification of living labor does not resolve the basic antagonism of living labor but, rather, displaces it" (144). Late capitalism brings an amplification of this dynamic, however, because "as real subsumption penetrates all social relations, it increasingly puts to work forms of social knowledge that it neither owns nor directly controls" (133). Building on the Autonomist assessment of today's configuration of immaterial laborers in the social factory, Read observes that, "in continually stressing the active participation of living labor and of cooperative networks" (149), industry "produces fixed capital not as machinery but in the subjectivity of the worker... [which] exists and is produced outside of the temporal and spatial control of the capitalist" (130). In other words, as subjection under capitalism escalates, so too does the capacity of subjectification to subvert and exceed its limits. Read's analysis doesn't solve the crisis of advanced Marxism by offering a coherent revolutionary program: his instantiation of resistance remains rather abstract. But we must acknowledge that his teleology is different from Marx's -- at issue is not the overthrow of capitalism, but collective interventions in its evolution that wrest control of greater degrees of freedom, creativity, and justice. By continuing to pry open the cracks in capitalism's containment of labor power, we can pressure capitalism to innovate toward increasing accommodation of autonomous subjectivities. The concept of antagonism frames laborers, including fans, as a collectivity whose desires are not commensurate with those of a corporate system, and this alone is a crucial corrective to the prevailing understanding of convergence culture.

At this point it may seem warranted to investigate another axis of antagonism that is often absent from studies of fan production, namely queer theories of political action. I view sexuality as integral to the femslash fandoms that I'm concerned with in this project, and admittedly, the aspiration to preserve such queer subcultures in the midst of transformations in our media economies animates my inquiry. Many scholars have analyzed the homonormativity at work in constituting the ideal gay (as opposed to queer) consumer for neoliberal capitalism, most notably Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, and mounting a critique of The L Word on this front is a worthy endeavor. Within a framework that claims subjectivity and collectivity as productive for capitalism, however, I am not convinced that queerness is the sine qua non of resistance, despite my own emphasis on the potential of open erotic fan communities. On the side of skepticism, Rosemary Hennessy conducts a trenchant indictment of a trend she calls "avant-garde queer theory," exemplified by such thinkers as Michael Warner, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, and David Halperin (54). In Profit and Pleasure, she positions this nexus as part of the intellectual heritage of a "pervasive ideological mandate to disconnect sexuality from capitalist production" (37) that has plagued Marxist thought since Engels's "historical inability to understand the role of domestic labor in capitalist production" (41) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This blind spot was exacerbated by psychoanalytic attempts to materialize sexuality, beginning with Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, who ultimately "contend that sexuality originates in innate instinctual drives... [so it] remains in fundamental ways outside the social order" (42). After "a short-lived but vital willingness to make use of Marxism as a critical framework to link sexual oppression to global capitalism" (45-46) on the part of the Gay Left in the 1970's was frustrated by "the intractable refusal of many of the existing socialist groups to meaningfully address sexuality" (49), the rise of cultural studies meant that the "retreat from Marxism and alternative rush to Foucauldian materialism virtually dominated the analysis of sexuality" (49). This paved the way for the maturation of queer theory in the 1990's which, following the early prominence of a "textual approach to identity as signification" (53), came of age with a turn to cultural materialism, most significantly by the "avant-garde" theorists listed above.

Hennessey makes a crucial distinction between these resolutely post-marxist cultural materialists and Marxist historical materialists: the former, while they may discuss capitalism and class relations, are finally "founding their conceptions of materiality only in symbolic processes [which] means that social struggle, or what they call antagonism, is anchored only in the sign" (61). This school of thought unfairly rejects the Marxist approach as necessarily totalizing, when in fact "historical materialism understands social life to be historically and materially produced through relations of labor... [but not] without the ways of making sense, normative practices (culture-ideology), and the laws (state organization) that are part of the material production of social life" (59). The danger of the cultural materialist orientation, according to Hennessy, is that its political program will amount to "a left sexual politics" that focuses on "civil rights within capitalism" (67). A case in point is that the "porous, gender-flexible, and playful subjects" celebrated by avant-garde queer theory are easily adapted to "postindustrial economies [that] increasingly require a high-tech systems management consciousness that knows that identity, like knowledge, is performative" (68). Given that "since the late nineteenth century the growth of consumer culture has depended on the formation and continual retooling of a desiring subject" (69), desire does not stand outside capitalism and ground resistance in and of itself. Instead of a politics of perversions, performance and polysemy, Hennessey calls for "a ruthless interruption of the often less visible relations of labor that have made use of dominant as well as counter-hegemonic sexual identities" (68). On this basis, I will set aside, for the purposes of this chapter, queer theory's analyses of how particular normative subjectivities (including heterosexuality and homosexuality) are constructed by capitalism in opposition to queer counterpublics, and ask rather how queer forms of desire sustain the economy of immaterial labor while also exceeding its bounds.

Kevin Floyd's work suggests one avenue for situating this virtual excess within the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism, while proposing (more magnanimously than Hennessy) a potential detente between Marxism and queer theory -- despite noting, once again, that the former has been notoriously insensate to issues of sexuality. While their theory is deeply involved with subjectivity and the economic role of reproductive labor, the Autonomists have hardly been an exception in this regard, despite interventions in the 1970s by important but largely peripheral Italian feminist Marxists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. In his book The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Floyd argues that we could read recent developments in queer theory, characterized by intersectionality and a refusal to particularize and compartmentalize sexuality from other dimensions of cultural experience, as converging with Marxism on the basis of a shared concern with social totality. He posits that today, "the ever more complex internal differentiation of capitalist social relations, in particular a reification of sexual desire" (197) has paradoxically set the stage for new forms of "queer worldmaking," or, "the production of historically and socially situated, bounded totalities of queer praxis inherently critical of the ultimately global horizon of neoliberalized capital" (199). Floyd observes that political economists (including Harvey) describe capitalism as a system constantly troping toward crisis due to its "constant tendency to undermine the very institutional preconditions that ensure the prospects for additional accumulation" (34). Given this "fundamental social volatility that capital's objective contradictions consistently produce... socially broad, historically conditioned strategies [are] necessary to keep crisis at bay" (34). While Fordism, he claims, was "highly dependent on the corporate and governmental construction of a certain kind of social stability... the breakup of Fordism... makes accumulation increasingly dependent on social instability" (195). This instability can furnish the conditions of possibility for "socially subordinate, historically conditioned publics defined by critical practices and knowledges inseparable from the labor of sustaining these publics" (208). However, Floyd also sees in this transition a worrying "dispersal of a queer population... as part of a more general strategy of population dispersal, a strategy that has among its objectives neutralizing the forms of collective praxis of which such populations are capable, privatizing collectivity itself out of existence" (204). Now, Autonomist Marxism would assert precisely the opposite, emphasizing that late capitalism's labor regime requires communicative networks and autonomous collective action. Without necessarily embracing this optimism, queer Marxisms would benefit from an engagement with Autonomism's sophisticated account of subjectivity's intimate relation to capitalism, particularly its framing of antagonism as constitutive of this relation. Like queer desires, antagonism is situated inside the horizon of capitalism, and I propose that queer desires can in fact be an aspect of antagonism.

IV/3/. Archive Wars: FanLib vs. OTW

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:13:22 GMT

In contrast to the relatively harmonious deployment of OurChart.com as a user-generated, fan-driven, for-profit corporate promotion, new media marketing company FanLib's dramatic descent into infamy stands as an object lesson in unsuccessful exploitation of fan labor. Beginning in 2003, the start-up licensed custom software for running online fan writing contests to entertainment concerns including HarperCollins Publishers and Showtime. In addition to these commissioned projects, FanLib launched a commercial fan fiction archive in 2007, offering its industry partners the opportunity for "integrated customized marketing... capitalizing on existing communities around media" (Nicole). To build interest in the site, the company issued flattering invitations to visible influencers and prolific writers in fandom, but as the people they courted started investigating the business behind the emails, the sense that it was instigated by outsiders and motivated by profit quickly raised hackles. Henry Jenkins summarized the facts that emerged in this grassroots probe, which sent FanLib's image and credibility among their target users into a downward spiral:

FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel [sic] for all legal actions... all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives... [who] talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream"... they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced... [and finally] the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing... (source)

While FanLib was blundering its appeal to the established fan community, this community was organizing to publicize its objections, reassert its values, and advocate for its interests. On LiveJournal, a group called "Life Without Fanlib" was soon set up to track the issue and host a firestorm of discussion. According to FanLib's behind-the-scenes promotional materials, they promised to "Produce consumer-generated media that is ready for the marketplace. The result: More value for marketers, more manageability for producers" (McNamara). The company found that it was not as effortless to commodify, monetize, and manage this surplus labor as they had speculated.

To FanLib, the vast commons of freely exchanged fanworks perhaps appeared as if it simply lacked a businessperson with the savvy to privatize it. But in fact, creative fandom has a rich tradition of conceptualizing its labor in ways that reject financial profit as a criteria for value (although I must emphasize again that this does not place it in outright opposition to capitalism). For this reason, fan production is often understood as a women's "gift economy" or, in the words of Karen Hellekson, a "gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts... that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male)... to permit performance of gendered, alternative, queered identity" (116). This stance is practical as well as principled, because "at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation" (114). Abigail De Kosnik has advocated against this position, writing that since "FanLib will not be the last attempt to commodify fan fiction" (119), fans risk "waiting too long to decide to profit from their innovative art form, and allowing an interloper to package the genre in its first commercially viable format" (120) -- or even worse, "fan fiction may not be monetized at all... [and] only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain" (124). The two sides of this debate seem to claim, respectively, that creative fandom is threatened by capitalist procedures like payment or that it is threatened by NOT accommodating these procedures. I would counter that, in either scenario, fans work and profit from their work in some way (remember that the wage no longer defines productive labor), and the crucial question is not whether this work is financially compensated but whether the conditions of this labor are free and fair. In this view, all options would ideally be open to fan communities as they negotiate norms for a changing media ecology, and it is problematic if the industry precludes in advance either the preservation of a gift economy or the extraction of income (futures that are not mutually exclusive within the diversity of fan formations). Because these negotiations are currently in process, Marxist analysis is critical to mediating today's struggles over fan labor.

In this regard, we can take a cue from Lilithilien, who posted "Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom" in "Life Without FanLib." She asserts that, according to Marx,

capitalism deprives our work from being the expression of our creativity and self-realization... This is what FanLib wants to do with fan-created stories... The only use they have for stories (their "value proposition," as they keep saying) is as products to be utilized and commodified. In this effort, we are merely workers in their fanfic factory. This is pure and simple fetishization -- the rewards FanLib offers are a stand in for what we (or at least some of us) really want: good stories to read, a receptive audience for what we write, and a place where our creativity and uniqueness is valued. (source)

For Lilithilien, that is, there is more at stake in the expropriation of fan labor than whether or not fans are the ones reaping the profits. She urges us to consider what may be lost if fanworks are reified as commodities and the value of fan communities is mystified so that it appears to be commercial rather than social. Before fans either reject or embrace capitalism's terms for participation in the media economy, then, we should assess our structural position within this system as workers. FanLib's emphasis on "mainstreaming" fan fiction evokes the multiple axes of domination that constrain working conditions, and the normative assumptions of the "mainstream" seemed to persist unmarked in the company's willful ignorance of their repugnance to many fans. These assumptions include equivalences between market price and value, between value and public recognition, and between recognition and hierarchical authority, and as Hellekson suggests, they are entangled with patriarchal and heteronormative coordinates of gender and sexuality. One of FanLib's ads vividly illustrates the clash with the feminist and queer ethos that delineates the fan fiction subculture in question: the "Pink Guy/Blue Dude" image [Figure 12], which figured "Life without Fan Fiction" as a skinny, nerdy boy and "Fan Fiction at FanLib.com" as a muscular, shirtless man, implied that FanLib's corporate model masculinizes an activity that is otherwise markedly effeminate. This offended a predominantly female community that nurtures alternative and perverse expressions of gender and sexuality, raising ire at the insinuation that FanLib's macho brand of commodification is the only legitimate way to envision fanfic. Fandom's response was to form, through grassroots mobilization online, a non-profit organization with the mission of protecting the self-valorization of this anticommercial, egalitarian commons (a project I will explore in section C/3). As for FanLib, their archive was shut down in prelude to a buyout by Disney in 2008 (Ali), no doubt rendering them a success in their terms whether or not the site was able to recoup its 3 million in venture capital, which seems unlikely (Cygnet). In order to untangle the competing conceptions of fan labor embodied in FanLib and The L Word's promotions versus a subcultural gift economy, I will now turn to Marxist theories of the antagonism between workers and capital.

IV/2/A The Social Factory

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:21:17 GMT

Marx already recognized that advancements in information technologies are integral to the expansion of capitalism, writing in The Communist Manifesto that it is "by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, [AND] by the immensely facilitated means of communication" that the capitalist economy "draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization" (59) -- but today this role is escalating. In The Condition of Post-Modernity, one of the key texts delineating the transition to late capitalism, David Harvey observes that, in prelude, "the progress of Fordism internationally... relied heavily upon new-found capacities to gather, evaluate, and disseminate information" (137). What is novel under post-Fordism is that information has progressed from being an important by-product of production systems to a product in its own right, with its own markets and its own producers and consumers. As Joseph Stigliz puts it, "knowledge itself becomes a key commodity, to be produced and sold to the highest bidder" (159). The amplification of concern and controversy over intellectual property controls is one instance of the effects of this decisive shift. Beyond the exchange of informational commodities, however, communication furnishes the platform for subjectivity, which is now an equally vital axis of economic value. According to Harvey, the late capitalist manufacturing regime of "flexible accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption side, therefore, by a much greater attention to quick-changing fashions and the mobilization of the artiﬁces of need inducement and cultural transformation that this implies" (156). When affective connotations of lifestyle and identity become the key selling point, that is, an immaterial aura of desire becomes the key product. Under these conditions, social communication, or "control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagation of popular taste and culture[,] have likewise become vital weapons in the competitive struggle" (160). Consider, for example, the rise of expansive and multimodal marketing strategies including branding, product placement, transmedia, and the overarching corporate consolidation of entertainment (the other meaning of "media convergence") -- evidence that investment in communicative infrastructure and management is essential to maximizing the value of subjectivity as immaterial labor.

Intersecting with these assessments of present-day industry by political economists, social theorists have articulated the notion of an information economy. Hardt and Negri christen this new milieu "Empire," defining its topography as "a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes" (319-20). The network model is simultaneously metaphorical and literal: relations of power in Empire behave like computerized communications systems, and they also are in large part implanted in the deployment of network technologies. In this "information economy" of "deterritorialized production" and "immaterial labor," the methods of production, the commodities produced, and the subjectivities of the producer-consumers become increasingly intertwined. Ultimately, since "the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations" (293), "the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities... needs, social relations, bodies, and minds -- which is to say, they produce producers" (232). Manuel Castells also blends the figurative and material aspects of networks when he pronounces "a new form of society": this "network society" is "characterized by... the flexibility and instability of work, and the individualization of labor[, and by] a culture of real virtuality constructed by a pervasive, interconnected, and diversified media system" (1). Castells' thesis is that, in the network society, "The new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation... The sites of this power are people's minds... This is why identities are so important, and ultimately, so powerful" (424-25). That is, as the network becomes the dominant organizational form across all cultural registers, the immaterial dimensions of discourse, spectacle, and subjectivity come to occupy a position of unprecedented privilege in the economic landscape. Thus capacities for communication, in terms of both human "software" and technological hardware, scaffold late capitalism's regime of value.

For their part, Autonomists have theorized this conjuncture by refining Marx's concept of real subsumption to provide a diagnosis of our current circumstances. Building on their work and on his own re-readings of Marx's texts, Jason Read explains that the continuum from formal to real subsumption encapsulates the evolution of capitalism. Formal subsumption is characterized by "the imposition of the wage on preexisting social and technological structures" (10), in other words, by layering capitalism's structural abstractions, including money as a universal exchange and the mystification that workers must sell their labor power, over given material cultures. At some point, however, the limit of the surplus value that can be extracted by simply extending labor is reached (for example, the length of the workday can be increased only so many hours), and capitalism must begin to reshape the constraints of work in order to render the available labor time more productive. In the course of this process, capitalism permeates and appropriates more and more domains of life, such that "what is originally outside of capital, the social and technical conditions of labor, becomes internalized" (114). This amounts to "a transformation... of the knowledges, desires, and practices constitutive of social relations" (113), and we can say that today, with the incorporation of subjectivity itself into capitalist production, we have fully arrived at the state of real subsumption. In Negri's classic Autonomist text, The Politics of Subversion, he maintains that the transition to real subsumption entails a qualitative shift in the organization of work, writing that "the movement from capital's subjection of society to the active prefiguration of society by capital involves, within it, the constitution of an increasingly high and intense degree of productive cooperation... At this point, in order to exist, individual labour needs to be inserted into the framework of social labour [and] collectivity is a necessary condition for work" (82). Because labor relations grow in complexity and scope until they are coextensive with the entirety of social relations, real subsumption hinges on the emergence of collective communications networks.

Autonomism has termed this late capitalist schema the "social factory." As Negri describes it, here "work abandons the [literal] factory in order to find, precisely in the social, a place adequate to the functions of concentrating productive activity and transforming it into value. The prerequisites of these processes are present in, and diffused throughout, society... [including] such infrastructures as communications networks" (89). This is to say that the present-day analogue of the Fordist factory's machines, which constitute fixed capital that needs living labor to animate it, is the matrix of technological and cultural assets that are activated by their collective users. Negri contends that, because communication is integral to economic labor, particularly the labor of subjectivity itself, late capitalism dictates that "every subject of this productive complex is caught up in overpowering cooperative networks" (77). So today's "socialized worker... is a producer, but not only a producer of value and surplus value; s/he is also the producer of the social cooperation necessary for work" (80), that is, a producer of the collective conditions of production as well as of products themselves. Autonomists understand labor power within this system in terms of Marx's concept of the "general intellect," amounting to knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, the burgeoning significance of which we now recognize as the information economy. Paulo Virno reconfigured this idea away from what Marx conceived of "as a scientific objectified capacity, as a system of machines" (65), arguing that "the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in... formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and 'linguistic games'.... thoughts and discourses which function as productive 'machines'" (106). Virno asserts that, in order for late capitalism to function, "it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction" (65), thus mandating that the workforce retain a degree of autonomy from objectification and rationalization. This notion of an "intellectuality of the masses," in Virno's words, is akin to what some thinkers today evangelize as "collective intelligence": the idea that a group of organisms can form a symbiosis that is more productive than the sum of their individual knowledge and labor power. From a Marxist perspective, "collective intelligence" is prescribed by the late capitalist economic network, an artifact of its subsumption of all spheres of sociality -- however, this does not imply that labor is always fully subservient to capitalist demands.

According to Virno, a consequence of the transition to the social factory is that, in contrast to the Fordist model which divided labor from leisure (when the worker might "read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations"), there is now no "threshold separating labor time from non-labor time... since the 'life of the mind' is included fully within the time-space of production, an essential homogeneity prevails" (103). Because a wage is now the only distinguishing factor, Virno suggests "it could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment" (103). Think of this in terms of fan production: setting aside the massive scale of the television industry, the activities of paid and unpaid creative workers are not functionally different. Fans research, write, film, edit, and discuss media stories, often with a high level of skill and dedication, while professionals assert their own fannish credibility by conveying the impression that they work for fun. As labor becomes increasingly nebulous and omnipresent, expanding to encompass all social and subjective activity, "the productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process... Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor" (Virno 103). This ecology generates challenges, in turn, for capitalist expropriation. As Negri puts it: "Value exists wherever social locations of working cooperation are to be found and wherever accumulated and hidden labour is extracted from the turgid depths of society. This value is not reducible to a common standard. Rather, it is excessive... [so] we must abandon the illusory notion of measurement" (91-92). The Nielsen company's measurement of television ratings, for example, has been pushed toward an assortment of experimental metrics that aim to capture the "excessive" value of subjectivity and collectivity. Among them is 2007's Hey! Nielsen, "a new online social community, with... features such as ratings (like Q Ratings), the ability to submit opinions and comments, to connect and to create a network of recommenders... Its goal is to get fans rating, reviewing and blogging about their favorite shows, movies and stars" (MacDermid). By creating a social networking website in an attempt to mine qualitative data in communicative form, Nielsen acknowledges the unruly, unquantifiable character of late capitalism's immaterial commodities. The reporter quotes Nielsen executive Peter Blackshaw, who says that "understanding passion is the next frontier of market research... we are paying very close attention to the root drivers and nuances around this level of emotion-charged consumer engagement." Because affective and subjective labor are now the foremost axes of value, Virno proposes that the culture industry occupies a privileged place in this regime:

[it] is an industry among others... [but] it also plays the role of industry of the means of production. Traditionally, the industry of the means of production is the industry that produces machinery and other instruments to be used in the most varied sectors of production. However, in a situation in which the means of production are not reducible to machines but consist of linguistic-cognitive competencies inseparable from living labor... [t]he culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then destined to function also as means of production (61)

Mass media and entertainment are effectively a machine shop for the social factory, furnishing the equipment for immaterial laborers within a communicative network. Autonomism's pivotal argument is that this labor, which is necessarily collective in organization and ubiquitous in scope, is not simply absorbed without resistance into the smooth space of capitalism, but rather negotiated through a process of struggle with capitalism's perpetually insufficient procedures.

IV/1/. Charting The L Word

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:18:23 GMT

An hour-long special created to air with the series finale of The L Word on Showtime pays tribute to the program's heritage and legacy. Here, producers and writers, cast members, minor celebrities, and an omniscient female narrator reflect on The L Word -- purportedly the culmination of years of media history, beginning with TV's first lesbian kiss on L.A. Law in 1991 -- as a force for social change. Although interviewees always return to this refrain about the program's positive influence on gay equality at the level of the personal (by speaking to isolated or underprivileged youth) and the political (by portraying national issues like the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy and the lack of rights for same-sex parents), the special also reviews some of The L Word's more controversial and problematic choices. Mixing contradictory narratives of inclusivity ("it's not about being gay, it's about being human," opines classical guitarist Sharon Isbin) and exclusivity (it's "a place of collective belonging" characterized by weekly viewing parties at lesbian homes and bars), it captures the dilemma of a niche show that must simultaneously appeal to a mainstream audience. Before The L Word, the fact that "lesbians on TV served more to titillate than to illustrate" was a common complaint; nonetheless we should respect The L Word because it "unapologetically went 'all the way'" in its sex scenes to ensure that "straight people watched." By staking its very premise on the commercial viability of this overlap between the interests of gay and straight viewers, The L Word's 2004 premiere heralded a moment when "lesbianism seemed poised for popularity." But according to the narrator, this alchemy did not come easily in the program's early seasons, as "its assumed audience felt most left behind. Many lesbians felt the show had failed to deliver on its central promise: to represent the community in an accurate way." The L Word's producers thus found themselves trapped between irreconcilable imperatives to be realistic and to be aspirational, to reflect lesbians authentically and to "break out of stereotypes" (with the latter leanings preferred due to the wider allure of glossy fantasy). One solution was to intervene in our cultural understanding of what constitutes "real" lesbianism. Amidst criticism that the program portrayed only rich, beautiful, feminine women with no "Birkenstocks and flannel" in sight, for example, costume designer Cynthia Summers took it upon herself to "challenge the way lesbians think they should be looking or need to be looking to be able to be identified as 'a lesbian.'" We must then concede that The L Word is "definitely representative of some lesbians" (Kate Clinton), facilitating Hilary Rosen's claim that critiques of the program's inauthenticity are inauthentic themselves, since they evidently come from "people who don't know that many lesbians." These tensions -- between normativity and sexuality, between lesbian and mainstream audiences, between realistic and positive representations, and between portraying and fabricating a community -- structured The L Word's achievements and limitations throughout its six-season run.

The farewell special -- with its melange of talking heads, staged interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, public appearances, news headlines, flashbacks, snapshots, and clips from the show -- also encapsulates The L Word's multiplying and intersecting layers of reality and fiction. It could neither execute nor escape the mandate to translate lesbian culture faithfully onto the small screen, but the program deployed its alternating declarations of either transparency or escapism strategically. This prevarication over The L Word's relationship to real life settled into a reliable circular logic: obviously the more deeply it penetrated into society the more representative it was, and obviously the more it represented current events the more deeply it had penetrated into society. Thus the creators' response to criticisms of its bland homogeneity (which was, in the words of writer/director Angela Robinson, "trying to represent an array of different types of lesbian representations") was rendered as a multicultural menu of bite-sized political references. The examples given in the special, which dedicates four minutes to celebrating butch characters Max, who is working class, and Tasha, who is black, typify The L Word's tendency to bundle minority identities while preserving the white femme consumer as the lesbian norm. Max, initially a woman named Moira who chooses to undergo a medical gender transition, starts out as a recognizable point of contact with the queer communities that exist in parallel to The L Word's West Hollywood fantasia. He is quickly assimilated into stable masculinity, however, and devolves into a caricature of testosterone-induced abusiveness and topical male pregnancy. Tasha, whose relationship with Alice triumphs over personal differences and professional conflicts with her military career, exhibits the program's signature approach to incorporating racial difference. As in the case of other black characters, including straight lead Kit and her bi-racial half-sister Bette, "a figure of racial authenticity" is periodically invoked "to ventriloquize racial transcendence" in order to "depoliticize[ an issue], stressing individualizing, privatized aspects" to support "the elision of 'community' by consumerism" (Osucha). The L Word's open acknowledgement of its commercial dictates, however, effectively inoculates it against such critiques: as entertainment (or so its alibi goes), the program's only option is to portray political realities by packaging identities as commodities.

Although the special was created to commemorate The L Word's finale, it conspicuously foregoes any discussion of the final season, an incoherent fiasco that was reviled by fans and critics. Apparently conceived more as an extended promo for Chaiken's unsuccessful spin-off series (a prison drama called The Farm) than as a consistent conclusion to the characters' narratives, season 6 partially diverges from the program's soap operatic format to become a murder mystery. In the opening of the premiere, one character drowns under suspicious circumstances; after immediately flashing back several months, the remainder of the season consists of a string of storytelling contortions that provide everyone else with a motive for killing her. The final episode withholds the promised resolution to this whodunit, however, retreating instead into maudlin reminiscences, complete with a diegetic tribute video that mirrors the extra-diegetic tribute special. As the characters film, edit, and finally watch their teary farewells to lead couple Bette and Tina, The L Word waxes nostalgic about its own history, evoking in particular its history of self-reflexive gestures. These include Jenny's autobiographical memoir retelling the events of the program's early seasons, later adapted into a film production that furnished the primary motif for season 5, and season 2's subplot about a male roommate who was videotaping the women using hidden cameras, as if to comment on the line The L Word walks between documentary and soft porn. Such elements foreground the interdependence of media form and the program's claims to authenticity -- none more so than a series of webisodes, The Interrogation Tapes, that continued after the television finale. These online bonus features enticed once again with the answers that the episodes deferred, a tease involving even the contradictory codes that characterized the "tape" of each character's questioning by police: video noise that referenced gritty realism but appeared highly stylized, an evidentiary time counter that continued across cuts between multiple cameras and takes. And in place of criminal revelations, the extreme close-ups draw out histrionic confessions about past trauma and emotional relationships, making the characters under "interrogation" seem more akin to the special's interview subjects than to murder suspects. This jarring lurch between genres offers one last rendition of The L Word's structuring paradox: charged with representing both reality and melodrama, both truth and spectacle, what the program does best is leverage one to sell the other. In this section, I propose a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding how The L Word negotiates this terrain by putting authentic identities to work.

IV/. Labor of Love

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:58:40 GMT

As I have explored in the preceding chapters on Law & Order: SVU and Battlestar Galactica, new textual and technocultural formations are intensifying the stresses in today's media ecology. Among these stresses, managing the production of queer readings, desires and appropriations is a nexus of particular concern in the shift from broadcast's centralized and vertical model to the more distributed and horizontal configuration of digital distribution. The 2007 Writers Guild of America strike foregrounded the bottom line of such transactions for the entertainment industry: labor. This dispute between screenwriters and executives illuminated the present-day predicament of mass media, which is hard pressed to keep up with a proliferation of content and platforms while squeezing ever greater efficiency out of its creative workers. It is these conditions that have spurred not only the official exploitation of paid labor as expressed in the AMPTP's demands at the bargaining table, but also the industry's turn to a far more vast, dynamic, and affordable resource: the free labor of fans. Fan production has no doubt always held indirect economic value for corporations as a form of promotion and a stimulus to consumption but, until very recently, this phenomenon was rarely considered openly outside the science fiction niche. Now, as convergence puts pressure on television's obsolescing profit models, hit network shows like Lost (ABC, 2004-present) and its derivatives are adopting cult media's tactics for attracting a loyal and engaged audience -- in short, a fandom -- as marketing's next frontier. In addition to the presumptive value of active and insatiable consumers, the internet's characteristics as a decentralized, immediate, and continuous network make it practicable for the industry to exploit fan labor directly as "user-generated content." By contrast, it is now equally practicable for fans to exploit media commodities directly, as TV and movies, along with their multiplying complement of bonus features, can be downloaded at will to serve as the raw material for unauthorized creative work. Whereas earlier chapters evaluated this juncture in terms of its representations and technologies, I here examine its economic dimension: the emerging labor relations that will shape the future of television and of its queer subcultures.

My coupling of queer subjectivities and post-industrial capitalism is not arbitrary: as commodities themselves become increasingly immaterial, the affective labor of desire, identification, and meaning-making accrues greater economic value. Paraphrasing a 1999 Wired article that boldly proclaimed the death of the "Old Web," Tiziana Terranova suggests that, with "new ways to make the audience work... television and the web converge in the one thing they have in common: their reliance on audience/users as providers of... cultural labour" (95). This labor, which is the productive force behind media convergence, exemplifies the architecture of the larger "digital economy":

It is about specific forms of production (web design, multimedia production, digital services and so on), but it is also about forms of labour we do not immediately recognize as such... These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion... However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect. (79)

Such relatively autonomous and freely conducted labor schemes, fan production included, break down the distinction between waged work and leisure, but this does not place them outside of capitalist demands. In comparison to the sunny forecast for our much vaunted "participatory culture," this view of convergence as expropriation may seem pessimistic: fandom is more commonly celebrated as a "gift economy" or alternative system of exchange that circumvents or even resists capitalism. Terronova argues that this outlook on free labor effaces the reality of its functional integration into the post-industrial economy. Her position does not, however, reduce fans and other digital enthusiasts to unwitting dupes of capitalism, colluding with the incorporation of their authentic practices into a monolithic machine. Terranova emphasizes, by contrast, that "such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive" (94). Given this interdependence, the entertainment industry and its audiences each have collective bargaining power in their immaterial labor negotiations. Resistance exists within the flows of capitalism, and the political project is to boost the turbulence that exceeds its corporate channels.

These channels are fabricated from reactive discipline in the guise of copyright enforcement and ideologies that devalue fan labor, but also increasingly from proactive enticements toward modes of participation that enrich the brand. Outside of cult genres, one of the earliest forays into this terrain among television programs came from The L Word (Showtime, 2004-2009), the first American TV series to make lesbian romance its primary focus. In addition to thematizing issues of lesbian identity and representation onscreen, The L Word has innovated through online promotions that leverage its projected lesbian audience into an interactive fan community. At the intersection of lived subculture, virtual world, and marketing spectacle, the web-based tie-ins OurChart.com (a content portal and social networking site) and "You Write It!" (a platform for fan-written script contests) attempt to mobilize subjectivity as labor, exposing both the possibilities and the limits of such transmedia ventures. Showrunner Ilene Chaiken has spoken of the push to dismantle television's fourth wall in the era of convergence:

In the beginning I said -- and was given a very hard time for saying -- "I don't listen, I write what I want to write." But another way the world has changed since I started doing the show is that the internet has become a big part of our lives. Anybody who writes a TV show would be a fool not to interact with her audience. Our audience is particularly passionate and engaging, so I talk to them and I listen to them. I can't always do what they want to do, but there's an effect of hearing their voices and then deciding what stories to tell. (Wilkes)

Chaiken's growing willingness to listen and interact through the internet is more than a minor update to her job description. Implicit in her comments is the "L word" of her title: Lesbian as a commodity that is produced as much by the "voices" of a "passionate" audience as by the program's own portrayals. There is thus another "L word" here, the one from my title: Labor as an asset of audiences that the industry must now integrate. Both words are taboo in the orbit of television but, as rendered in the case of The L Word, both are central to key transformations in the mass media landscape. In this chapter, I analyze the role of lesbianism as labor in The L Word's commercial empire and, by extension, the role of subjectivity as labor in the emerging economy of convergence. My argument is that, while more and more of fan production is subsumed into a capitalist topology, these conditions correspondingly intensify the underlying antagonism between audiences and corporations. As Terranova puts it, the "desires [of capital and living labour] cease to coincide" when "capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these... processes of valorization" (84), and it is our task to counter that control by sustaining divergent values and desires within it.

IV/3/B You Write It!

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:13:47 GMT

The media industry's emerging strategies to valorize an established reservoir of fan labor perfectly complement their late capitalist context. However, the subsumption of subjectivities and communities with autonomous traditions under a corporate regime generates new antagonisms that demand delicate control. In the case of The L Word, the most heavily engineered expropriation of fan production was a series of user-generated writing contests. Showtime launched this marketing campaign in 2006 with a scheme to prompt a complete "fanisode" (faux television script), contracting the company FanLib to design and run the web-based competition as one of the start-up's earliest projects {http://web.archive.org/web/20060831222949/http://lword.fanlib.com/}. For this initial contest, a member of The L Word's creative team prepared a storyboard that filled in a diegetic gap of several months between the events of seasons 3 and 4, providing descriptions of the individual scenes that would make up an imaginary episode. Participants then voted for their favorite of the user submissions that realized each segment, and finally the winners were awarded prizes and their scenes were assembled into a downloadable PDF version of the final script (Figure 9). This successful venture garnered a mention in The Wall Street Journal's article about the transformation of fan fiction from a "fringe pursuit" to one that "helps unknown authors find mainstream success" (Jurgensen). FanLib shares this assumption that fans' labors of love have the same goals, motivations, standards and economies as professional authorship -- although in their business model, it is the corporation rather than the creators who will reap the profits. Since the "fanisode" wasn't intended for production, we might speculate that it was organized in script format (as opposed to inviting more familiar prose fan fiction) precisely to appeal to aspiring screenwriters with polished skills.

Whether we read this move as nurturing or mercenary, it follows that certain expectations for a lesbian community of creative professionals are part of the impetus for The L Word's FanLib promotions. In the introduction to the PDF 'zine that resulted from the "fanisode," Chaiken celebrated The L Word's fans, who "came at us enthusiastically with your reactions, your objections, your ideas, passions, preferences and opinions as to whether or not we were adequately and authentically representing the way that we live" ("The L Word: A Fanisode"). From the perspective of this politics of representation, encouraging involvement with corporate media-making among The L Word's presumptively lesbian audience is necessary to the project of lesbian visibility. However, as we've seen, the price of this brand of visibility is to render lesbian identity as a reified commodity that can be packaged and sold, not only by professionals but by each contest participant and each OurChart member. The feminist utopia of an "old girls network," wherein mentorship leads to success within mainstream industries, here butts up against the converse heritage of fans' non-commercial systems of value and recognition. Chaiken says that the writing competitions were inspired by the fact that "the fans of The L Word write a lot of fan fiction on their own" ("Meet Molly"), implying that submitting a scene in script form to a contest would have a comparable charm. But the majority of fan authors aren't professional hopefuls like The Wall Street Journal's winning interviewee (who was, incidentally, the only straight man to place in the "fanisode"). Chaiken's equivalence effaces the autonomous norms of fandom's gift economy, which cultivates alternative modes of sharing the characters and stories that originate in the corporate media. If, as The Wall Street Journal posits, "the rise of fan fiction is part of the spread of amateur-created content online... on sites such as YouTube and MySpace" (Jurgensen), we shouldn't expect ventures like FanLib's to negotiate the friction between capitalist mandates and "amateur" subcultures with any more consideration than these other commercial platforms.

Chaiken's statement is from a promotional video on Showtime's official website that presents a later FanLib installment (dubbed "You Write It!"), featuring the lucky winner Molly as she claims her prize -- a visit to the set to see her contribution filmed (Figure 10). "You Write It!" was structured similarly to the "fanisode," but its endgame made good on the promise of the script format by including the victorious submission in an actual television episode (much to the delight of Molly, who was indeed a screenwriting student). It also had more open-ended instructions: "Choose a scene from The L Word seasons 1 or 2 to rewrite as a scene from 'Lez Girls,' Jenny's thinly-veiled, fictional account of The L Word characters' lives." While inviting fan-written scripts may imply a breakdown of the distinction between amateurs and professionals, this video's rhetoric emphatically reasserts the ideological gulf between fans and producers, quashing any intimation that fans' unpaid work could be afforded equal respect. The comments addressed to Molly, while well-meaning, are starkly condescending, informing her of banal aspects of television production as if she didn't already have the knowledge to be a screenwriting success. The "You Write It!" contest was a perfect match with season 5's "Lez Girls," a movie-within-a-TV-show that campily remixed The L Word's early seasons. Molly's scene earned its winning vote tally by enhancing these self-reflexive layers with a Charlie's Angels mashup, alluding to the history of lesbian viewing. In contrast to the discourses of "we" and "our" that characterize much of The L Word's marketing, however, the turn to calling fans "you" highlights the limits of this openness to appropriation. Chaiken may profess an interest in "the way interactivity is taking over our lives" that is borne out in The L Word's cutting-edge online promotions, but this provocation extends only as far as fan labor channels value into the "lesbian" brand -- because "you" work for free. Chaiken's outlook on the FanLib project both reflects and forwards this strategy, and like Jenny, Alice or indeed Chaiken herself, Molly is an exemplar for fans' lessons in commodifying our passions.

[ a condensed version of this section appeared as You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor at In Media Res ]

IV/1/A Immaterial Labor

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:05:21 GMT

There is one obvious term we could deploy to elucidate The L Word's teetering edifice of authenticity: ideology. But the status of ideological analysis today is dubious. The theory originates in Marxist thought, but its position within dialectical materialism has always been ambivalent. In orthodox Marxism, all ideas arise from the system of production as a set of material relations. However, this system cannot exist without the ideologies that naturalize it, nor are material conditions and ideology clearly separable. Marx and Engels write, "The phantoms formed in the human brain are... necessarily sublimates of their material life-process.... Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and the corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence" (47). Not only is ideology virtually material itself, certain ideas are necessary to the material economic relations of capitalism. Production, for example, cannot exist without consumption, which "posits the object of production as a concept, an internal image, a need, a motive, a purpose" -- as a "desire," in short -- and "Production accordingly produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object" (“Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy” 132-133). In Capital, Marx explains further that the commodity form on which capitalism depends is fundamentally a mystification, "a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (321). Thus it was never clear how we would study the ideological superstructure, society's accumulation of ideas, in isolation from its material base in production -- or vice versa.

The impossibility of extricating supposedly superstructural fictions from the economic base comes to fruition in the work of Louis Althusser. Acknowledging that the "reproduction of labor power" (that is, of the entire economic system) "reveals as its sine qua non... the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology" (133), he ventures the theory of ideology that Marx never fully elaborates (158) (perhaps precisely because it requires engaging the interpenetration of base and superstructure). Althusser insists that ideology must be understood as having a "material existence," and furthermore that this materiality is contextualized in psychoanalytically-inﬂected subjects: "1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology; 2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects" (170). Already in Marx, desire is posed as central to consumption, and Althusser draws on psychoanalysis to theorize this function, defining ideology as the process that constitutes subjects and therefore their desires. He thus posits that ideology and materiality are articulated together via subjectivity, without necessarily resolving this binarization inherited from Marx.

Gramscian thought offers another potential revision of the untenable base/superstructure opposition in the concept of hegemony. Gramsci, according to Stuart Hall, "recognizes the 'plurality' of selves or identities of which the so-called 'subject' of thought and ideas is composed... a consequence of the relationship between 'the self' and the ideological discourses which compose the cultural terrain of a society" (433). Gramsci's model, that is, accommodates a more multiple (rather than dual) understanding of subjectivity, capitalist power, and ideologies role in mediating between them. Laclau and Mouffe identify hegemonic formations with the Althusserian concept of overdetermination -- "the critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity" (104) -- however, they accuse Althusser of drifting away from this territory and into a regressive essentialism (97-98). A resolutely anti-essentialist Marxism, they assert, "afﬁrm[s] the material character of every discursive structure... the progressive affirmation, from Gramsci to Althusser, of the material character of ideologies" (109) and conversely "rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices" (107) -- that is, between superstructure and base. Laclau and Mouffe ultimately characterize societies as radically open, "precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences" (95). Thus over the past half-century, in dialogue with psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory, Marxisms have been reconfigured to reject all stable identities and boundaries, including that between the supposedly material domain of production and the supposedly immaterial domain of ideology.

These theoretical innovations take Marx in new directions but are already implied in his work, where he presciently recognized the incredible vitality of capitalism, which "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society" (The Communist Manifesto 58). As this situation wears on, "the productive forces at the disposal of society... become too powerful" to sustain existing conditions, necessitating either "enforced destruction... [or] the conquest of new markets" (60-61). Frederic Jameson credits Marx with a dialectical outlook on economic transformation, writing that here he "powerfully urges us to... a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously" (Postmodernism 47). One of the products not only of dialectical thinking about capitalism, but of the revolutionary dialectic of the capitalist system itself, is the heralding of what Jameson describes as the "inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously bap/tized 'postindustrial society' (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society... (...a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital)" (3). Also known as late capitalism, this is the capitalist form native to what Jameson anatomizes, more precisely than most, as "postmodernism." While this term is usually deployed in either economic or aesthetic senses, Jameson reminds us elsewhere that "The becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural, has often been identiﬁed as one of the features that characterizes what is now widely known as postmodernity" (“Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” 60) -- what he calls "the libidinalization of the market" (69). At this stage, communication and information merge with technology in its materiality as a means of production, while in turn technology merges with the immateriality of commodification in its reliance on communication and information (56).

Among recent Marxisms, there is one heterodox strain that engages most dynamically with the profound transformations of late capitalism. Autonomia (Autonomism) emerged from a decade of social unrest in Italy, symbolically dated from 1968 (Bifo 149) but scaffolded by intellectual (Moulier 16) and activist (Moulier 5) schemas beginning by 1962. Its roots lie in protests by workers in northern Italy's large factories -- most famously the Taylorist FIAT factory, supposedly the largest in the world with around 100,000 employees (Moulier 13) -- but Autonomism was an emphatically decentralized movement, uniting disparate proletarians, local organizations, and theorists under the banner of the Potere Operaio (Workerists). Taylorism, the late capitalist successor to Fordism's assembly-line model for heavy industry, posits that "society as a whole functions and should function like a factory... [toward] socialization of all relations of production" (Moulier 17), and the Workerists responded with correspondingly innovative tactics of resistance based on the "looseness," "flexibility" and "fluidity" of an "elusive network" that "develops forms of organization and of subjectivity against which there exists no 'classic' response" (Lotringer & Marazzi 20). Social turmoil intensified in Italy throughout the 1970s, matched by rising unemployment, until it culminated in 1977 with a series of violent mass uprisings (Bifo 157-158). By 1974, the majority of the Workerist movement had split from a militant wing known as the Red Brigades, with the remainder adopting the name Autonomism (Lotringer and Marazzi 9). But when the Red Brigades kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro, President of the Christian Democratic Party, in 1978 (Bifo 160), the state took the crime as a pretense to exile or imprison thousands of Autonomists, issuing warrants on April 7, 1979 for intellectuals and activists including well-known thinker Antonio Negri (Lotringer v). These arrests and related repressions were effective at extinguishing Autonomist dissent in Italy, but collaterally they resulted in exiled theorists making contact with French post-structuralists and beyond, expanding the theoretical scope and international reach of their thought (Lotringer vi).

Translations of Autonomist works from Italian are a significant waypoint in this intellectual trajectory, and seminal English collections include the 1980 compendium Autonomia (the source for much of the above history) and Virno and Hardt's recent anthology Radical Thought in Italy. The latter republishes an influential essay by Maurizio Lazzarato on "Immaterial Labor" (this translation had previously appeared under the title "General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labor"). According to Lazzarato's diagnosis, immaterial labor, or "the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity" (132), "seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value" (135). While its "classic forms" encompass "audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities" and "it exists only in the form of networks and flows" (136), immaterial labor is the hegemonic principle of late capitalist work even for those not directly engaged in these hyperskilled activities within the heterogeneous global economy (135). The pivotal premise of this elevation of mental and affective work is that "the 'raw material' of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the 'ideological' environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces": in a milieu that values intellectual property, branding, libidinalization (in Jameson's terms) over the manufacture of material goods, "[subjectivity] becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator" (142). Communication, both in the abstract and as a function of information technologies, plays a vital role as the medium of subject formation and of cooperation between workers -- for Lazzarato, "If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it" (139). It is important to acknowledge the pronounced theoretical lacuna of Lazzarato's work (and indeed of the majority of Autonomist discourse): for a model that relies extensively on subjectivity, it offers little elaboration of this notion or engagement with existing conceptual frameworks (for example psychoanalysis, as per Althusser's approach, or Foucaldian micro-power). Nonetheless, this methodology offers a penetrating explication of late capitalism's directive to "'become subjects'" (134) that is available to be enhanced through continuing dialogue with complimentary traditions.

Immaterial labor can be the primary diagram of production in late capitalism precisely because the economy depends on a new kind of immaterial commodity, one that finds "its use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content" (137) -- that is, by its meaning for subjects. As Lazzarato succinctly puts it, "prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold" (140), thus reversing the Fordist system based in single-purpose factories and turning to "just-in-time" schemes where supply responds to demand. Moreover, the paradigmatic immaterial commodity, not being fixed in a physical object (think of a trademark or an mp3 file, for example), "is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the 'ideological' and cultural environment of the consumer" (137). The crucial ramifications of this ascent of the culture and information industries involve "the integration of the relationship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the product," rendering it "the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer" (141). Lazzarato's assessment of this transformation is ultimately rather optimistic: since capitalism "cannot abolish this double process of 'creativity'; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values" (144), a mechanism that is provisional and precarious. This outlook applies to immaterial labor power as well, for if "the management mandate to 'become subjects of communication' threatens to be even more totalitarian," employers are correspondingly "forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production" (135). It is this autonomy, the relocalization of value in subjects and their self-organizing networks of communication, that gives Autonomism its name. It is critical, however, that we weigh these possibilities for resistance against the perils of a capitalist regime that subsumes ever more of our identity and sociality under its imperatives.

[ read Lazzarato's "Immaterial Labor" online ]

IV/2/. "Where Women Can Connect": OurChart.com

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:22:26 GMT

Another fantasmatic equivalence in play at OurChart.com, beyond plotting a sexual network onto a technical network, is its conflation of onscreen and real life communities. The L Word's ultimate alibi is authenticity, and the website is a winning move in that rhetorical game: because "real" lesbians now chart their relationships just like the characters do, Alice and her friends evidently represent "real" lesbians. Thus OurChart.com not only advertises The L Word but buttresses its structuring ideology, leveraging user participation to heighten the verisimilitude of its portrayals. This was not the program's first attempt to garner cultural credibility by layering behind-the-scenes narratives over its fictional soap opera, and in addition to amplifying the figurative parallel between production world and story world, OurChart.com provided a distribution channel for this ongoing stream of supplemental content. With regular submissions by Chaiken and actors including Beals, Hailey, and Moening promising fans insider access to The L Word empire and the opportunity to interact with its stars, OurChart.com enhanced the impression that the program engages an actually existing lesbian community (a role played here by the site's users). Blogs and videos by paid contributors augmented this pre-packaged material and its subliminal creed of commodity lesbianism, with the implied assumption that, in order to appeal to The L Word's audience, the website must be front-loaded for consumption.

The typical layout of OurChart.com's home page supported the impression that professional content was its main attraction, with editorial blogs and videos on display in the central space while recent user-generated content (along with ads) was relegated to a sidebar (Figure 5). Navigational links led to expanded views of these commercial components, including themed columns by the staff, original web series, and actors' dispatches from the set, as well as to the discussion forums and profiles that comprised the site's social platform. OurChart.com was built on an open-source content management system {http://drupal.org/node/128791}, and its networking features, when they arrived, were relatively commonplace. After filling out a personal profile, users could manage a list of friends, send public notes or private messages, create blog entries, upload pictures, and track their comments on posts throughout the site (Figure 6). As a whole, the organization of OurChart.com showcases once again the characteristic tension of fan-driven promotions: its challenge was to offer enough open interactivity to attract a productive user base while still expressing and enforcing a homogenous brand.

OurChart.com's particular balance of these demands turned out to be an effective one, as the site gained rapidly in popularity and prompted extensive participation. One article reports respectable usage numbers by July 2007 (Kramer), and though the focus here is the appeal of professional programming, conversation in forums, blogs, and comments was also lively. The corporate strategy underpinning OurChart.com follows a broader trend to position gays as a privileged marketing category, and Pete Cashmore cites data suggesting that this move carries over to the internet, where "gay, lesbian and bisexual users are an extremely valuable demographic: social networks and blogs targeting this segment of the audience could perform well" (January 2007). OurChart president Hilary Rosen parrots a similar doctrine in statements that the site will "present marketers with a great opportunity to reach a consumer market that is targeted, financially independent and loyal" (Announcements) and later that "The lesbian community is Internet-savvy and is twice as likely as heterosexual women to consider the Internet their prime source of entertainment" (Becker). Such mavens, and indeed many of the analyses directed at the commodification of gay identity, see this tendency in terms of an aptitude for consumption -- the inference is that the web's primary innovation is increased opportunities for advertising and sales. What the close relationship between The L Word's onscreen representation and online implementation of the "chart" demonstrates, however, is that the transition from broadcast to broadband enables a qualitative intensification that becomes concerned with what the gay demographic can produce as well what it can as consume. The L Word can monetize lesbianism because late capitalism renders subjectivity itself productive through communications networks.

IV/1/C Alice Pieszecki with "The Chart"

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:01:53 GMT

The L Word's most literal exemplar of a career in freelance lesbianism is Alice Pieszecki, a bisexual-identified character who works throughout the series as a queer culture guru for media outlets including LA Magazine, public radio station KCRW, and fictional TV talk show The Look (portrayed by Leisha Hailey, the only out lesbian cast member when the program premiered). Alice is certainly not the first queer woman to draw a diagram visualizing the complex web of hook-ups and break-ups that form the fabric of her community, but she is the first to make this graphic her trademark. The principle of her "chart" is introduced in the pilot episode when she plays a six degrees of sexual separation game with Dana, sketching out the serial couplings that connect the two of them with each other and with several friends. At the end of the scene, the camera tracks over their heads to frame a large white board where Alice keeps a running tally of the links amongst her circle of acquaintances (Figure 17). But it becomes clear that the chart is more than a personal pastime for Alice when, in the opening of the second episode, she pitches it to her editor as a marketable motif for an article (Figure 18): "The point is we are all connected, see? Through love, through loneliness, through one tiny lamentable lapse in judgment. All of us, in our isolation, we reach out from the darkness, from the alienation of modern life, to form these connections." Although her boss is unimpressed, Alice (or more properly, The L Word's writing staff) here exhibits a savvy appreciation for the productivity of networked intimacy under late capitalism. In a marked update from her initial pen-and-paper explanation, Alice now demos the chart on her laptop using a graphics tablet. Only a few scenes later, she has implausibly launched a successful user-generated version online (Figure 19): "You know the chart? OK, I put it on the Internet... This thing is growing. People are adding names, and it's growing exponentially." This vision of a web platform driven by relationships was prescient for its time (January 2004, just before the inception of Facebook) and already signals the harmony between The L Word's rendition of sexual community and the development of digital technologies.

While the network ethos of the chart is ever-present throughout the series, most notably in Alice's talk radio show based on the concept, the chart itself doesn't reappear until the beginning of season 4. Here, in an eruption of metatexual instruction, Alice and Jenny introduce Helena to what is now a vibrant online community, telling her "it's so much fun, you don't know what you're missing! ...It's like a social networking site -- for lesbians" (Figure 20). In Alice's opinion, the core feature of this diversified portal, now dubbed OurChart, is still its "hook-ups page": an interactive visualization of data on who has slept with who. The graphics that represent this interface on screen are artifacts of the program's technological imaginary, unrelated to any recognizable web browser or platform. Although Alice does describe in detail how to add a link by inviting someone to join, this scene's pedagogy is oriented more toward ideology than tangible usage, hyping a fantasy of seamless equivalence between the sexual network and the digital network. OurChart's discourse thus aligns perfectly with late capitalism's marriage of subjectivity and communication. The connectedness that Alice identifies as a hallmark of interpersonal relations in a sexual subculture is likewise a hallmark of the present-day organization of work, which depends increasingly on self-organizing cooperation facilitated by media and information technologies. The L Word styles itself to capitalize on those synergies, with the effect that, for example, the mythology of Shane becomes technical as much as sexual, because as a "hub" ("anyone who has slept with over 50 people," although in Shane's case the number is close to 1000) she is instrumental in binding together the digital as much as the face-to-face social network.

In contrast to season 1's more innocent reveries on the chart, this particular scene functions as an integrated promotion for the concurrent launch of the actual OurChart.com, itself a promotion for the The L Word in a sort of mise en abyme of transmedia branding. The tie-in website opened in January 2007, on the same day as the season 4 premiere, but its interactive features weren't up and running until several months later (Cashmore), during which time the program's improbable vision hovered before fans as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Industry blogs reported that Chaiken, newly-minted CEO of OurChart, confirmed that "The idea to migrate the chart to the Web grew out of a story line on the show... Now, in the upcoming season, that character will realize that the chart has caught on... At the same time, the real-world chart also will go live" (Davis). In the context of convergence, defined by mobilizing viewership as immaterial labor, harnessing a "real-world" social network to work productively as an online social network is a predictable marketing strategy. But OurChart.com, as portrayed within The L Word's fictional Los Angeles, symptomizes the ideological payload of this move: the fantasy of an unmediated and frictionless correspondence between subjective and digital layers that ignores the intercession of communication technologies and capitalist economies. The site as rendered here is markedly unconstrained by funding or infrastructure -- after Alice "put it on the internet," it just "caught on" with no apparent need for development, staff, advertising, or revenue. Moreover, beyond Alice's assurance that when you add one of your hook-ups to the chart the other party must opt-in, the characters express no hesitancy over the alarming notion of translating intimate sexual histories into a searchable online database. These convenient erasures make OurChart.com formidable as a cutting-edge promotion precisely because it takes the The L Word's economy of lesbianism as labor to its logical conclusion, enticing viewers-cum-users to work toward producing these values in more direct and centralized ways.

A Job Market Fairy Tale

Mon, 18 May 2009 23:56:59 GMT

Once upon a time, when I was but a wee proto-professional in the wide and wondrous field of media studies, I went on the academic job market. Between October and April, I sent out more than 60 applications, and no doubt expended far too much energy in the improbable pursuit of a gainful livelihood. Many times I rejoiced and many times I despaired, and although I learned lessons of patience and humility the uncertain outcome never became easier to bear. I am thus ecstatic to announce a happy ending to this saga:

For the next 2 years I will be serving as Acting Assistant Professor of new media in the Film & Media Studies program of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University!

I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting my colleagues in person because their search did not allow for campus visits. But all signs suggest a fantastic fit between my academic background and future and the program's composition and goals. I'm thrilled at the prospect of contributing to the evolution of the department's offerings in digital media, television, and contemporary visual culture.

Moreover, the position is absurdly accommodating of my continuing professional development. The appointment begins in January 2010 and comprises a 1-2 teaching load over winter and spring terms in 2010 and 4 courses over 3 quarters in the 2010-2011 academic year. I plan to move to the bay area in December, and until then I will be working to complete my PhD (don't expect to hear much from me over the next 6 months). I leave my permanent residence in Providence in mid-June and will return periodically while living at home in Michigan during the summer and fall.

Though I may be one princess who lives happily ever after, I have never been more aware than I was during this process of the centrality of class privilege to my achievements. In the context of a general economic crisis, the depressed academic job market has gotten more coverage than usual this year, much of it (in the New York Times, for example) portraying the plight of grad students as a temporary exception to the status quo. Speaking from my own experience, the problems with academic training and employment are not exceptional, they are structural (hat tip Dave Parry or someone contiguous). The notion that institutions of higher learning support the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake and that the most talented scholars will succeed in a meritocracy provides an ideological alibi for the precarious conditions of academic labor.

Based simply on the numbers, the majority of new professors will not land secure tenure-track jobs in the early stages of their careers, no matter how promising their skills. Because the limited array of post-doctoral and temporary full-time positions isn't adequate to absorb this workforce, most young scholars expect to toil as adjuncts for low pay until their research and teaching profile is more established. In many cases, work that could support emerging PhDs is is piled onto grad students (hat tip Amanda French), and tenured jobs that could support professionals are parceled out into part-time positions without benefits. The university is an industry and we are workers; the more that advanced grad students and new PhDs have to concentrate on paid employment, the harder it is for us to progress in our research and move onto firmer vocational ground. The result is that academics typically spend a decade or more of their lives, through grad school and several years afterwards, not earning a living wage. I am lucky to have financial resources that mitigate this burden, and certainly many with less advantages than I navigate these circumstances with aplomb and go on to distinguished careers. But I can't help remarking that these conditions perpetuate an institutional culture that makes access difficult for those without a commensurate level of economic privilege (and the other dimensions of privilege with which class intersects).

If you'd like to celebrate my accomplishments, I urge you to support organizations and initiatives that advocate for academia as a profession that is equitable and open to all. Marc Bousquet and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor offer some illuminating resources, including (USA):
• The Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions
• The Coalition on the Academic Workforce
• The American Federation of Teachers
• The American Association of University Professors (currently seeking donations for their capital campaign)

I write all this because I feel a certain responsibility to head off the impression that, since I got a desirable job in the end, the system works. It doesn't, to which my brilliant friends who will be left un(der)employed this year attest. However, I think it's fair to say that a tremendous dose of my own tenacious work and careful strategy went into my success. I hope that we can continue to nurture ABDs and new PhDs by sharing knowledge and experience as a collective resource. For starters, I'll point you to the Media Studies Job Search group on Facebook, where I'd be happy to field discussion, and the advice section of the infamous wiki.

Finally, I'd like to convey my deepest thanks to the friends, family, mentors, and peers who have supported me in so many ways through this process.

This entry is crossposted at my web site, and will be the last professional/public installment at this LJ (I'll still post upcoming sections of my dissertation here). Please follow jlr_blog if you're interested (alternately the Indiscrete Media category feed is how I'm actually organizing posts, but they should be functionally interchangeable). I believe I've managed to rejigger the site to allow you to comment there using OpenID or without logging in. I don't plan to create a dedicated account at Dreamwidth.

IV/1/B Lesbian Labor

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:50:35 GMT

As a melodrama driven by intimate relationships, the dimension of work may seem largely irrelevant to the narrative edifice of The L Word, a mere contrivance subordinated to its romantic intrigues. I argue here that this apparent insignificance is in fact a symptom of the program's perfect rendition of the late capitalist transition to immaterial labor, wherein work is diffused throughout the whole life of the subject. All of The L Word's characters, insofar as their employment is represented onscreen, hold jobs in the services and cultural industries, the growth sectors in a post-industrial economy. Consider these examples:

Bette Porter – An art curator and administrator, Bette serves as a high-powered, high-profile high culture gatekeeper in her positions as Director of the California Arts Center (a small but ambitious museum) and later Dean of the California University School of the Arts. Aggressively out as a lesbian, she often champions the work of controversial queer and feminist artists, an agenda referenced in The L Word's opening credits by scenes of Bette and others in a gallery featuring portraits by Catherine Opie.
Tina Kennard – Initially a stay-at-home mom, Tina eventually revives her professional experience in development to volunteer for a non-profit and then launch her second career as the executive of a movie studio. In the latter capacity, she is instrumental in the production of Jenny's autobiographical screenplay.
Jenny Schecter – A struggling writer with literary aspirations, Jenny ends up cashing in on the memoir craze with her semi-fictionalized account of her childhood sexual abuse. Her second work, Lez Girls, retells the story of The L Word from Jenny's perspective, angering many of her friends with unflattering portrayals. Jenny parlays the success of Lez Girls into the rights to write and direct the movie version, despite having no experience in film.
Shane McCutcheon – A freelance hairstylist allegedly modelled after Sally Hershberger of the reality show Shear Genius, Shane's personal brand is fully realized in season 3 with the opening of "Shane for Wax," her own salon chair attached to a hipster skate shop. Shane's signature androgenous look also lands her a gig as a male underwear model for Hugo Boss, with the slogan "you're looking very Shane today."
Dana Fairbanks – Dana is initially afraid to come out because she worries it would adversely affect her career as a professional tennis player, where her income is largely dependent on endorsements. As it turns out, she gets her biggest sponsorship deal, with Subaru, precisely because they are looking for gay celebrities for their "get out and stay out" ad campaign (in the non-fictional world, Subaru's advertising has targeted lesbians and included out tennis star Martina Navratilova as a spokesperson).
Kit Porter – Bette's half-sister Kit, the program's most central straight character, is equally committed to the lesbian community. Beginning the series as a formerly famous soul singer who is now a washed-up alcoholic, Kit pieces her life back together when she buys dyke hangout The Planet, turning the café into a hotspot of lesbian nightlife and later acquiring a second gay club.

Each of these characters exemplifies immaterial skills that are becoming hegemonic under late capitalism: manipulating hierarchies of taste through hype and branding; leveraging personal connections and social networks; communicating productively through various media channels. Moreover, in synergy with the genre of melodrama, they exemplify the interdependence of professional and intimate lives, as their relationships provide the material and the occasions for their career advancement.

To take this even further, we might say that the characters on The L Word exemplify the importance of subjectivity itself as labor. It is their work on themselves (Jenny's identity crisis; Dana's coming out process; Shane's ineffable style) and on their communicative capacities (Bette's taste-making; Tina's movie-making; Kit's community building) that makes them successful at their titular jobs. And when it comes to The L Word, this labor is all concentrated in the production of "lesbian" as an economically meaningful category. Despite their occasional lip-service against ghettoization, it is ultimately as LESBIAN critic/executive/author/hairdresser/ athlete/promoters that the characters thrive professionally, and they model working at being a lesbian as a vocation. Of course, this portrayal is far from disinterested: lesbian is also the category that works as The L Word's brand, the characters' endorsements are the program's ad revenue, and the characters' careers mirror the careers of showrunner Ilene Chaiken and a handful of other professional lesbians in the industry. In a parallel that operates didactically, lesbianism is the program's privileged labor on both sides of the screen, as both its characters and its creators endeavor to render this identity lucrative in capitalist terms. If these characters are employed as lesbians textually, they are also employed as lesbians metatextually in that their job is to be spokeswomen for the program's trademark sexuality.

This strategy is more than an isolated or mercenary symbiosis, however; it is the regime of immaterial labor that makes it viable. The L Word's project to monetize a particular subjective formation is one instance of the generalized subsumption of subjectivity into capitalist production, and the work of its characters or creators as lesbians echoes the work it asks of its audience. Industrially, that is, what is productive for The L Word is not the willingness of its characters to take up the labor of lesbian identification but the willingness of its viewers to take it up. These viewers do not have to "be" lesbians, although that approximation is often convenient, but in order to be inspired to watch and thus to generate revenue for Showtime they have to "buy into" the value of that position. The program promises various remittances that audience members might enjoy in exchange – the voyeuristic pleasure of watching beautiful and often semi-nude women, the narrative pleasure of a soap opera's intimate networks (posited as a particular hallmark of lesbian life), the subcultural pleasure of participating in a recognizable community experience – but whatever their motivation, viewers must make a connection (however contingent or ambivalent) between themselves and The L Word's manufactured lesbian identity that sustains up to 52 minutes, 13 episodes, 6 seasons of involvement. The L Word's self-reflexive storytelling attempts to teach this occupation by example, through its object lessons in laboring to valorize lesbianism. Its characters epitomize the hegemonic orientation of all producer-consumers in a post-industrial era: the imperative to "be subjects" – to desire and to communicate with relative autonomy from any enclosed proletarian arrangement.

dispatches from the twitterverse

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:11:27 GMT

Oh hi blog, no offense, but I do most of my internettery on twitter these days. One of the keys to twitter's wild success has been the capacity of its stripped-down interface to paradoxically inspire a cornucopia of practices driven by the swarming creativity of its users. Although the update box at the top is still captioned "What are you doing?" people type into it any and all information that can be meted out in 140 characters, including reviews, live commentary, poetry, jokes, links, meme responses, calls to action, and messages to friends. The site's open API and ecumenical attitude has facilitated innumerable hacks and mashups that offer workarounds for some of the features that twitter lacks, as well as illuminating and fanciful ways of interfacing with its worldwide cloud of presence.

Notable among creative appropriations of twitter has been its popularity as a platform for parodies and interpretations of celebrities and fictional characters. While some "fakers" are relatively free-standing caricatures, others have congregated into interactive networks of accounts based on the ensemble of a TV show or movie.

I have been actively involved in the Battlestar Galactica twitterverse for going on a year now. I play Tory Foster and also took it upon myself to do some den mothering and archiving -- although I can take little credit for the project's endlessly delightful wit, and most of the participants are still totally anonymous to me. This collaborative fan fictional universe resembles other iterations of character-based role-playing games (RPGs), albeit a very lightweight version, but due to the constraints of twitter it is resistant to outside readers. That is, virtually the only way of following it is to subscribe to all of the 30+ characters with your own twitter account, a commitment that understandably few are willing to make, and there are no good options for preserving the updates collectively for later perusal. I've been struggling to find methods of documenting it and making it accessible to a wider audience, finally setting up a stream in Yahoo! Pipes (although any "digital lifestyle aggregator" that can combine multiple feeds, such as google-owned twitter competitor jaiku, might have served).

Thus, imagine my excitement and confusion when the new website twitterfic.com turned up a few days ago! It has been perplexing and preoccupying enough to inspire me to blog about it, which is no small feat.

First, let me give you the venture at face value according to the unidentified "we" who created it and their twitter account:

"This site is an extension of all the character portrayals on twitter. It is a more robust arena for fans and characters to interact with each other." (source: Hello Fans!)
it is "powered by fans" (source: site footer text)
it is "just for fun" and has no investors or sponsors; it includes google ads in hopes of covering hosting costs (source: twitter queries)

Now, here are some conspicuous absences that gave rise to my confusion:

no integration with the twitter API (beyond displaying a character's tweets on her individual profile page)
no developer and software credits for site design
no Terms of Service
no outreach and promotion before the launch

Perhaps unfairly, it is the beauty of the site that makes me suspicious. The interface (apparently built on Wordpress, although this information isn't given explicitly) is clean and intuitive; kudos to whoever put the effort into constructing something so professional purely as a labor of love. There's no reason to assume that the oversights aren't a corollary of overeager amateurs rather than shady masterminds.

In the context of online fandom today, however, content creators have good reason to be wary. The infamous FanLib archive, for example, courted writers with similarly collegial rhetoric while backhandedly pandering to corporate sponsors, and eventually left its users high and dry when it couldn't make a profit. LiveJournal and YouTube TOSs accounts willy nilly according to their grossly conservative legal policies. Facebook sparked a wankstorm last week when it tried to claim rights to user contributions in perpetuity, calling attention to the vulnerability of ownership in the maelstrom of social media. The most successful fan-run alternatives (such as LJ-replacement Dreamwidth and the OTW's Archive of Our Own) are very careful to express their terms and values with maximum openness.

As metatxt put it in our conversation about twitterfic, "why no transparency if there's nothing to hide?!"

The fact that the site offers few twitter-oriented features contributes to the appearance that it's trying to leverage the popular but decentralized phenomenon of twitter-based RPGs to promote its own agenda. The features it does offer -- blogs, profiles, groups, and friendslists -- are not unique, and would be available through any number of existing platforms (the pan-fandom LJ-based RPG community Theatrical Muse comes to mind).

Now, in actuality, the impulse to create a social network tailored specifically to extending role-playing on twitter is a legitimate and benign one. I am constantly reminded of the diversity of styles of engagement in fandom, and know better than to assume that my own inspirations and fixations are shared by everyone. I imagine that the hermetic structure of a twitterverse lends each a distinct and autonomous character. Reading between the lines, twitterfic.com seems have to grown out of the True Blood community. For my part, the anarchic, ephemeral, and emergent quality of a twitter network -- precisely what distinguishes it from more formalized RPG systems -- has been what makes the Battlestar Galactica collective compelling. If what I wanted was centralization and elaboration I would have taken my creative energies elsewhere in the first place. But if the True Blood crew and others are motivated to expand their options for interactive storytelling, more power to them for making that a reality.

state of the candidate

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:29:04 GMT

IRL: I have little prospect of a job for next year, although I'm still sending out applications and still hoping a fellowship will materialize. Otherwise I'll take it as it comes. I'm not going to starve, which makes me luckier than many people in this economy. My lease is up at the end of May, and I don't know yet where I'll move.

PHD: I'm unlikely to finish my dissertation on time unless I'm offered a contract that requires me to. But it will be done by the fall, one way or another. I'm doing my darndest to get regular posting going again, so watch this space for the next chapter. In the interest of writing, job hunting, and teaching (proctoring for "Feminist Theories of Sexed Subjectivity"), I've banned myself from all conferences (and other recreational travel) this spring/summer (except for the nearby Media in Transition).

WWW: Likewise, I've largely GAFIAted from online fandom for the moment. My apologies to anyone who misses me -- I miss you too. For the sake of my career and sanity, I have to reduce my internet time and prioritize personal and academic blogs.

But I'm not dead yet! Just thought I might be due for an update to that effect for the benefit of anyone who isn't reading twitter/facebook.

HASTAC Forum: Academic Publishing in the Digital Age

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:04:23 GMT

Academic Publishing in the Digital Age
HASTAC Forum, running NOW through November 16

Following from October's discussion of the importance of Fair Use, this forum will offer an opportunity to extend the dialogue about new challenges and opportunities in academic publishing today. As established print journals tend toward expensive and restricted subscriptions in response to current technological and financial conditions, a counter-movement is growing in support of online access to scholarship as a public good, led by open electronic journals and databases. Are traditional journals a relic of a pre-internet era, or does their publication model still have value in academia? How can either system be economically viable? Given that strict liability copyright standards are a hurdle for print journals, do electronic journals provide a necessary haven for the citation and transformation of proprietary artifacts and work? In a context where everyone can have a blog or home page, what do students and scholars need to know about the benefits and risks of self-publishing? And perhaps most importantly, what new possibilities for intellectual and creative work are capacitated by the web as a platform?

This goal of this forum is to explore the shifting definition of academic publishing in the digital age, as well as to consider the intellectual, creative and technical challenges which digital platforms pose for scholarly publication. The conversation will be co-hosted by HASTAC Scholars Chris Hanson of USC, who has worked for the online journal Vectors, and Julie Levin Russo of Brown, who works for the online journal Transformative Works and Cultures. They will be joined by other members of these publications' editorial and creative teams, including Kristina Busse, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer. Vectors is an international electronic journal that brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, publishing works realized in multimedia that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Transformative Works and Cultures is an Open Access international electronic journal on popular media and fan communities published by the Organization for Transformative Works, and invites authors to embrace the technical possibilities of the web and test the limits of academic writing. Both publications are copyrighted under Creative Commons licenses.

We hope to facilitate a venue in which we may all ask and answer questions about the present and future of digital scholarship. Please come join the discussion at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-02-08Academic-Publishing-in-the-Digital-Age

first round of job applications

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:12:08 GMT

I have FINALLY finished assembling my basic materials -- cover letter (much revised since the version I posted, and with only two customizable sentences /FAIL), CV, dissertation excerpt, and a brand new teaching portfolio -- and sent applications to all the tenure-track jobs with October deadlines.

Here are the reasons I'm applying to every remotely plausible job, even those I don't seem likely to get (or want), for as long as I can stand it (according to advice from Brown's Center for Career Planning and Placement):
- sending out materials is a great way to spread the word about you and your research
- you never know whether the job ad accurately reflects who the department wants to hire
- the ones that would be cut are also the least time-consuming ones, so why not?

Most of these are still open; search on SCMS (members only), Chronicle, and/or H-Net to find them, or let me know if you need the info.

Ohio State University, Department of Women's Studies
Ohio State University, Department of History of Art
University of Michigan, Department of Screen Arts & Cultures
University of South Carolina, Film and Media Studies Program
Macalester College, Humanities and Media and Cultural Studies Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Communication Arts
Whitman College, Department of Rhetoric and Film Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Department of Art History
Ohio University, School of Film
Keene State College, Film Studies
Clemson University, Department of Communication Studies
University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Humanities
Brooklyn College (CUNY), Department of Film
Harvard University, Department of Visual and Environmental Studies
Stony Brook University (SUNY), Department of Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies
California State University at Fullerton, Women's Studies
Catholic University of America, Department of Media Studies
Boston University, Department of Film & Television
NYU (Tisch), Department of Cinema Studies
University of Texas at Austin, Department of Radio-TV-Film
University of Wollongong, School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication
Griffith University, Film and Screen Studies
Central European University (Budapest), Department of Gender Studies

Now here's the list of jobs with November deadlines to which I hope to apply -- I'm sure this will grow as openings continue to be posted. NB: all jobs in English departments specify film/media/cultural studies.

DePaul University, College of Communication
Amherst College, Department of English
Pomona College, Media Studies
Arcadia University, Communications
Trinity College, English Department
University of Virginia, Department of Media Studies
Pace University, Communication Studies Department
University of Massachusetts at Boston, Department of English
Scripps College, Gender and Women's Studies
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Department of English
University of Minnesota, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
College of Charleston, Department of English
McGill University, Department of English
Concordia University, Film Studies
University of Western Ontario, Department of Film Studies
NYU, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
Fordham University, Department of Communication & Media Studies
Queens College (CUNY), Department of Media Studies
Miami University of Ohio, Department of Communication
Denison University, Department of Communication
Bard College, Film and Electronic Arts
Pitzer College, Media Studies

Colby College, Mellon Postdoc in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Duke University, Postdoc in Women's Studies

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 1

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:12:05 GMT

I'm thrilled to be part of the editorial team that brings you the first issue of the new open access, international, peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures! You can read the press release or dive straight into the table of contents. Many thanks go to our tireless editors, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, without whom this project would never have come to fruition.

I'd like to call special attention to the feature I had the greatest hand in, an audio podcast of the presentations and discussion from the post-"fandebate" workshop at Console-ing Passions last Spring. It is our hope that sharing the event virtually will help inspire continuing conversations about gender and other inequalities in fan culture.

TWC is now seeking submissions for future issues including a special issue on video games and gaming. I've included the CFP below; please assist us in spreading the word!

Special Issue: Games as Transformative Works
Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol. 2 (Spring 2009)
Deadline: November 15, 2008
Guest Editor: Rebecca Carlson

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) invites essays on gaming and gaming culture as transformative work. We are interested in game studies in all its theoretical and practical breadth, but even more so in the way fan culture shapes itself around and through gaming interfaces. Potential topics include but are not limited to game audiences as fan cultures; anthropological approaches to game design and game engagement; on- and off-line game experiences; textual and cultural analysis of games; fan appropriations and manipulations of games; and intersections between games and other fan artifacts.

TWC is a new Open Access, international peer-reviewed online journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community. The first issue of TWC (September 2008) is available at http://journal.transformativeworks.org/. TWC accepts rolling electronic submissions of full essays through its Web site, where full guidelines are provided. The final deadline for inclusion in the special games issue is November 15, 2008.

TWC encourages innovative works that situate popular media, fan communities, and transformative works 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. Submissions should fit into one of three categories of varying scope:

Theory: These often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame offer expansive interventions in the field of fan studies. Peer review. Length, 5,000–8,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Praxis: These essays 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. Peer review. Length, 4,000–7,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Symposium: Symposium is a section of concise, thematically contained essays. These short pieces provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures. Editorial review. Length, 1,500–2,500 words.

Submission information: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/about/submissions

upcoming

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:58:25 GMT

I'm delighted to announce that I have been selected as one of this year's HASTAC Scholars! I will be posting regular videoblog entries about web technologies and participatory learning here starting sometime this week. I encourage you to engage with the work of all the HASTAC Scholars, as well as the organization's other exciting projects.

Also, I will be attending the LA Queer Studies Conference on October 10-11. Allow me to call special attention to my panel, which falls bright and early at 9:00-10:30am on Saturday morning:

Mediated Queer Socialities and Identities
Moderator: Mary L. Gray, Indiana University, Communication and Culture

Julie Levin Russo [my correction], Brown University, Modern Culture and Media
Labors of Love: Economies of Identity in The L Word’s Fan-Driven Online Promotions

Alexis Lothian, University of Southern California, English
Doing Boys Like They’re Girls, and Other (Trans)Gendered Subjects: The Queer Subcultural Politics of “Genderfuck” Fan Fiction

Jill A. Bakehorn, UC Davis, Sociology
Bordering on Activism: Authenticity and Identity Politics in Women-Made Porn

on the market

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:23:21 GMT

I'd be grateful for any feedback on this first draft of my cover letter template and dissertation description (for my CV, which is now updated). I've annotated the job letter for your edification; Tenured Radical's blog post is also a good place to start for understanding the formula. Please join the Media Studies Job Search facebook group if you're interested in such topics!

Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities
My dissertation analyzes how the convergence of television and the internet is transforming the relationship between the media industry and its consumers. Taking women's production of fan music videos, fiction, critique, and community as an exemplar of economic, regulatory, and technological struggles emerging today, I undertake three case studies of online lesbian fan formations around three television series. Through these artifacts, and drawing from media archaeology, autonomist Marxism, queer theory and cultural studies, I argue that fan engagement is a contested axis of immaterial labor in late capitalism. By framing convergence's technologies, discourses, and subjectivities as queer, I offer a schema for mapping its challenges to systems of ownership, circulation, and value. My work uniquely synthesizes media studies, fan studies, and industry studies, and makes critical contributions to scholarship on television, digital media, and lesbian representation.

Dear [name or generic search committee],

[1] I am writing to apply for the position of [job] in [department] at [institution], as announced on [source]. My expertise is in television, internet subcultures, and their intersection in fan production, via the critical framework of queer, Marxist, and media theory. Currently, I am completing my dissertation, Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities, under the direction of Lynne Joyrich in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and expect to receive my PhD in the summer of 2009. [one-sentence summary of my strengths tailored to the specific job]

[2] "Convergence" crystallizes a matrix of current cultural phenomena, from corporate consolidation to technical integration to user-generated participation, that are transforming the relationship between media producers and consumers. In my dissertation, my analysis of this formation takes queer female labor in the guise of online fan discussion, fiction, music videos, and community-building as an exemplar of the tensions emerging at the crossroads of television and the internet. Because the media industry is itself reorienting to privilege fan engagement, my approach to larger economic, legal, and ideological negotiations through the lens of fandom is timely. Beyond broadening the scope of fan studies, however, my work brings a unique critical theoretical perspective to bear upon popular "new" media dynamics, constructing a framework drawn from autonomist Marxism, media archaeology, queer theory and cultural studies. The core of my project consists of three localized evaluations of lesbian fan activity around the television programs Battlestar Galactica, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The L Word, with attention to three intertwined registers: the screen texts still defined as television episodes; the transmedia texts online that include tie-ins, promotions, and gossip; and the fan texts produced by interpretive communities. These case studies exemplify disputes over technologies of reproduction (figured by the hybrid), politics of representation (figured by the closet), and commodification of identity (figured by the network), demonstrating that fan economies are a contested axis of immaterial labor in late capitalism. Concluding with an excursion into online video, my dissertation maps the queer interventions and global connections generated by a predominantly female fan subculture, arguing that convergence's technologies, discourses, and subjectivities pose structural challenges to systems of ownership, circulation, and value that corporate media is struggling to reincorporate. I maintain that scrutinizing the increasingly intermediated configuration of television and the internet is necessary to understanding the antagonisms shaping media evolution today.

[3] Beyond my dissertation, I have studied television form, queer spectatorship, digital politics, and cybersexuality, presenting on these topics at numerous conferences and publishing articles on lesbian representation and queer netporn. I currently serve on the founding editorial team of the open access, international, peer-reviewed online journal Transformative Works and Cultures, which exposes me to interdisciplinary scholarship on popular media and fan communities. In my next project, I plan to investigate the ecology of user-generated internet video, examining the ongoing spiral of grassroots participation and capitalist regulation that intersects global struggles over fair use, network infrastructure, visual publics, and self-representation. This expands my work on media fandom to encompass a wider range of subcultural production, with a continuing focus on television futures and on immaterial labor.

[4] My commitment to teaching arises from an investment in endowing young adults with the theoretical tools to think critically about the media engagements that permeate their personal and cultural experience. Pedagogically, I emphasize process-oriented and participatory learning, and mobilize online social media platforms to structure, share, and network course materials and student work. While I accommodate varying learning styles, I have a particular dedication to developing student writing skills, and have taken advantage of programs at Brown's Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning to refine my educational strategies. In my department at Brown, I had the opportunity to teach my own seminar, "Television on the Internet: Private Property in the Public Eye," which introduced students to a variety of methodological frameworks for analyzing how an array of convergent phenomena are reshaping media texts, reception, and production. This venture, along with my training as a teaching assistant for such classes as Introduction to Television Studies, Introduction to Digital Media, and Introduction to Modern Culture and Media, have prepared me to teach core courses offered by [name of department], including [list some]. I am also eager to develop new courses in the areas of [make up some that are relevant to the job description].

[5] [short paragraph expressing specific enthusiasm for the specific job/department]

Please find my curriculum vitae [and list any other materials] enclosed. The names and contact information of my references are included at the end of the CV, and their letters will arrive through Brown's dossier service. [if applicable: My proffered writing sample, "Many Copies: Conceptions of Battlestar Galactica," is a condensed dissertation chapter that is representative of my critical approach to transmedia artifacts.] I would be delighted to provide other materials upon request. Thank you very much for your consideration.

Sincerely,

[me]

NOTES

[1] The first paragraph gives basic information and is highly standardized. Basically, by sentence: 1) what you're applying for; 2) summarize yourself in one sentence (optional); 3) describe your current status (could be two sentences); 4) your pitch -- "I believe that my blah blah blah make me an excellent candidate for this position" (also optional).

[2] Explain your dissertation and its contribution to the field. I worked from a further breakdown of the formula that went, more or less sentence-by-sentence:
1. context
2. intervention
3. methodology
4. contents
5. conclusions
6. big picture

[3] There seem to be differing opinions about the purpose of the third paragraph, but I adopted the model that says this is where you outline your larger research interests and apocryphal next project (NB: invented completely out of thin air). It could also be a catch-all for anything else you think is important about you, outside of dissertation and teaching.

[4] The teaching paragraph. Others might prefer to go into less detail about nebulous principles and more detail about courses you have taught/would like to teach. I haven't really gotten around to imagining new courses yet.

[5] This is a kind of unofficial paragraph, but I wanted to template out this flexible space rather than attempting to rewrite the whole letter in each case. I think it will prove useful as a spot to construct a tailored pitch. Whether you include it or not, do make sure you conclude with an inventory of all the materials you've sent as part of your application package. I'm also putting my contact info both at the top and the bottom of the letter.

VividCon recs

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:06:28 GMT

Last night I dreamed a brainstorming session for a "visibility"-themed vidshow, covering invisible characters, queer representation (complete with debates on where subtext ends and text begins), and ending with lim's "Us" as a meditation on "mainstreaming" via its literally effaced footage. (I still don't think this tops my waking idea for a vidshow on cyborgs, which also culminates in vidding self-reflexivity.)

Obviously a sign that I should spend today finally finishing this post.

I rationalized attending vividcon by calculating the time and energy I would save catching up on the deluge of premieres through watching them all in one fell swoop. It certainly lived up to my expectations on that account! I plan for this to be the last recs post for a long while. Keep in mind that my taste in vids is idiosyncratic, and this is intended as an inventory of my subjective favorites, not as an objective hierarchy of craftsmanship.

In this vein, I made an executive decision to exclude stand-alone movie vids from this list of recs. While I saw a number of vids from single-movie source at the con that were individually captivating, I don't find movies very interesting on the whole, and thus I don't find movie vids very interesting as a genre.

Complete playlists for all VVC08 vidshows are helpfully compiled HERE.

My Winner's Circle
For all my disclaimers, I imagine this resembles many con-goers' top three (1 and 2 were the selections for in-depth review). The marked similarities here are telling: in addition to Summer Glau, all these vids feature perverse relationships, cleverly manipulated and/or external footage, and a gradually emerging reveal. The latter strategy has a particular payoff in the reception context of VividCon. Typically, one would click through to a vid motivated at minimum by the framing information in the author's post, and often by the supplementary comments of a reccer as well. A premieres show, by contrast, guarantees a captive audience "unspoiled" by any paratexts, creating different narrative opportunities from the internet's temporal and spatial dispersion. And yes, I am about to spoil you.

vidder(s): sweetestdrain
title: Gloria
music: Patti Smith
fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
focus: Sarah/Cameron
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: People say beware, but I don't care.
comments: The premiere of this vid alone was worth the price of admission: watching surprise lesbian robot porn unfold was an unforgettable encounter. Already thrilled with butch Sarah at the beginning (remember how dualbunny taught us that Starbuck IS Pink? well sweetestdrain makes a convincing case that Sarah Connor IS Patti Smith), I may never recover from how thoroughly I was bowled over by my own kinks as the story developed. jagwriter78 recently coined the term "vidfic" -- I think we have here an exemplar of that mode. I'd venture that this is the greatest femslash vid made to date.

vidder(s): obsessive24
title: Climbing Up the Walls
music: Radiohead
fandom: Supernatural, Heroes, Firefly/Serenity
focus: Sam/Dean Winchester, Nathan/Peter Petrelli, Simon/River Tam
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: Siblings. "I am the pick in the ice."
comments: My lack of patience with either Winchesters or Petrellis had me rolling my eyes when this started. My date whispered, "I don't think this is a vid about 80% boys, I think it's a vid about INCEST." Well THAT I can certainly get behind! As the author notes, this is open to multiple readings (and various commentaries are linked) -- personally I experience it as gleefully cracktastic, but I'm aware that there's a darker morality tale lurking within if one takes it seriously. For the uninitiated: these are three wildly popular pairings in fandom, not simply three random pairs of siblings -- this is a metavid about a topical fannish phenomenon. Here's to the queer frontier.

vidder(s): bradcpu
title: Tear You Apart
music: She Wants Revenge
fandom: Firefly
focus: Simon/Kaylee (River)
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: It feels so right.
comments: This vid is fiendishly disorienting until the POV coalesces. Exquisitely edited, deliciously disturbing, and perfectly River. Smart notes by bradcpu: "I tried to make a vid that would look and feel fractured, but not really tell the viewer why it looks fractured until the final segment of the vid. Hopefully the first 2/3 of the vid looks different on a second viewing. I tried to push the River POV by using lots of jump cuts and medical shots (tons of secondary source); and by connecting sexual desire to violence and Reavers, because I would imagine it would have all looked the same in River's head." It worked.

Additional Top Ten Premieres (includes Also Premiering and Fuck You! challenge shows)

vidder(s): Seah + Margie
title: Handlebars
music: The Flobots
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: Ten
availability: download, imeem
summary: I'm the Doctor. Look me up.
comments: I was skeptical that I'd enjoy another vid to this song after spending so much time with kiki_miserychic's BSG 4.0 Handlebars, but it turned out to be refreshing to experience it with a close internal POV. There was another Handlebars vid in Premieres, deejay's Iron Man version, which I also enjoyed (but see above re: not putting movie vids on the list). This is the consummate portrait of a megalomaniacal hero, or, why The Doctor is a jerk.

vidder(s): buffyann
title: This World
music: Zero 7
fandom: BSG
focus: ensemble
availability: download (imeem coming soon)
summary: This world is still afloat, we still have hope.

vidder(s): nightchik
title: Beautiful Struggle
music: Talib Kweli
fandom: Harry Potter
focus: Harry
availability: download
summary: Life is beautiful. Life is a struggle.

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: King of Spain
music: Moxy Fruvous
fandom: Little Mosque on the Prairie
focus: Amaar Rashid
availability: download, imeem
summary: It's not the spiritual enlightenment he was expecting.

vidder(s): heresluck
title: Strength in You
music: Kim Richey
fandom: Gilmore Girls
focus: ~~Lorelei/Rory~~ Lorelei + Rory
availability: download, imeem
summary: I swear I'll be there forever.

vidder(s): cesperanza
title: Supersmart
music: The Headstones
fandom: SGA
focus: meta
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.

vidder(s): keewick
title: 32
music: Regina Spektor
fandom: SGA
focus: Teyla
availability: download
summary: 32 is still a goddamn number.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Special Death
music: Mirah
fandom: Deadwood
focus: Joanie Stubbs
availability: download (divx), vimeo
summary: A terrible mistake was made.

vidder(s): aycheb
title: Scarlet Ribbons
music: Sinead O'Connor
fandom: Buffyverse
focus: slayers
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: She will not sleep on a bed of bones. / Your faces, O my sisters! Your faces filled of light!

vidder(s): lierdumoa
title: How Much Is That Geisha in the Window?
music: "Boyd's Journey" by Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman on the Ravenous (1999) Original Soundtrack; Adam Baldwin, Nathan Fillian and Gina Torres in the "Firefly Extended Gag Reel"
fandom: Firefly (2002), w/ additional source from Serenity (2005), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and Gone with the Wind (1939)
focus: Invisible Asians
availability: download (imeem coming soon)
summary: Fuck you Joss, you racist asshole.

Top Ten Club Vivid Premieres

vidder(s): Abby
title: I Will Survive
music: Gloria Gaynor
fandom: BSG
focus: Number Six
availability: [please help me find it!]
summary: As long as I know how to love I know I'll stay alive.
comments: Frankly, this vid isn't very well constructed, but it doesn't matter because the concept is pure genius. Its wrongness made me dance and scream and short-circuit.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Shut Up and Drive
music: Rhianna
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: Martha (Martha/Ten, but I'm ignoring that)
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Martha > you.

vidder(s): charmax
title: Smiley Faces
music: Gnarls Barkley
fandom: Torchwood
focus: Jack, ensemble
availability: download, vimeo, imeem, youtube
summary: Team Torchwood and "how hard this life can be."

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: Hold Music
music: Architecture in Helsinki
fandom: So NoTORIous
focus: Tori Spelling, Mimi LaRue (her pug) and one of her BFFs, Sasan (Zach Quinto)
availability: download, imeem
summary: For the 98% out there who don’t know anything about the show: It’s a semi-autobiographical comedy about Tori Spelling’s life.

vidder(s): f1renze
title: Television, Television
music: OK Go
fandom: The Sopranos
focus: ensemble
availability: [not posted yet]
summary: Give up the world, give up your life, 'cause you cannot fight the television.

vidder(s): mamoru22
title: A Little Less Conversation
music: Elvis Presley
fandom: Boston Legal
focus: Denny/Alan
availability: download (xvid, mp4), imeem
summary: Because Denny IS Elvis in every way that counts.

vidder(s): millylicious
title: Don't Cha / Seether
music: Party Ben (Pussycat Dolls + Veruca Salt)
fandom: Buffyverse
focus: Buffy/Faith
availability: download, imeem
summary: Two slayers, two seperate paths.

vidder(s): counteragent
title: Ladies Night
music: Kool and the Gang
fandom: multi
focus: hotness
availability: download (xvid, wmv), youtube
summary: Professional competence is sexy.

vidder(s): foomatic
title: Girl 4 All Seasons
music: Northern State
fandom: multi
focus: hotness
availability: download (divx), imeem, youtube
summary: Girls kick ass.

vidder(s): dualbunny
title: Party Join Us
music: "Shin Chan" ending theme
fandom: She-Ra
focus: ensemble
availability: [not posted yet]
summary: dualbunny was DRESSED UP as She-Ra at Club Vivid. Enough said.

Top Ten New-To-Me Vids (does NOT include Action, AMVs, and Second Bananas, which I didn't attend -- sorry!)
Honestly these categories are somewhat arbitrary, as I later discovered that I HAD demonstrably seen a couple of these before -- certainly they were less familiar than those below.

vidder(s): xandra_ptv
title: They
music: Jem
fandom: Big Love
focus: sisterwives (and Bill)
show: Ensemble
availability: download (xvid, wmv), imeem
summary: The problems and paranoia of living the polygamist lifestyle.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: The Lonely People
music: MystiQuintet
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: Rose
show: End of the World
availability: download, imeem
summary: What is the cost of a better life?

vidder(s): charmax
title: Don't Stop Me Now
music: Queen
fandom: Doctor Who
focus: The Master
show: Sense of Play
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Sometimes an evil genius just needs to let his hair down and have some fun.

vidder(s): sisabet
title: Doctor Who on Holiday
music: Dean Gray
fandom: BSG, Farscape, Doctor Who
focus: Cylons, Peacekeepers, Daleks
show: Club Vivid
availability: download [currently broken]
summary: Remix of sockkpuppett's mashup Sci-Fi Friday in a Blender.

vidder(s): counteragent
title: In These Shoes
music: Kirsty MacColl
fandom: Alias
focus: Sydney, Nadia, Rachel [femslash subtext]
show: Nearly New
availability: download, imeem
summary: "In these shoes? I don't think so." Sydney and Nadia and Rachel supporting each other and being awesome.

vidder(s): andrastewhite
title: Baby, You Can Drive My Car
music: The Beatles
fandom: Heroes
focus: Hiro/Ando
show: Joy
availability: download (divx)
summary: "Our life of legend begins!"

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: The Real Slim Shady
music: Eminem
fandom: Starsky & Hutch (mostly)
focus: Everything but the redheads.
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: This vid is a shaggy dog story. You have been warned.

vidder(s): mamoru22
title: Without Me
music: Eminem
fandom: SGA
focus: David Hewlett
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download, imeem
summary: David Hewlett, how are you so awesome?

vidder(s): wistful_fever
title: Chasing Arizona
music: "Meds" by Placebo
fandom: Fall Out Boy RPS
focus: Pete/Patrick AU
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Pete is in love with his best friend. Life is great. Only... his best friend isn't real.

vidder(s): Hana no JudgeHolden Productions
title: Lost in an Anime Dream
music: Jump by Madonna
fandom: ROD TV, Lost in Translation, Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drift, music video for "Jump"
focus: Charlotte
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download
summary: counteragent - "This vid not only merges live action and anime and real-person source in a technologically riveting fashion, it also speaks to both the isolation and connection engendered by our relationship with modern media."

Top Ten NOT New-To-Me Vids (that I haven't gotten around to reccing previously)

vidder(s): heyiya
title: The Future Stops Here
music: Rabbit in Your Headlights by UNKLE featuring Thom Yorke
fandom: 28 Days Later, Children of Men, V for Vendetta
focus: dystopia
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download (mov, avi), imeem, vimeo
summary: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever." - George Orwell

vidder(s): halcyon_shift
title: Big City Life
music: Mattafix
fandom: Dark Angel
focus: Max
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download
summary: It's all good, all the time.

vidder(s): mranderson71
title: This Is Matrix Life
music: “This Is Your Life” by The Dust Brothers feat. Tyler Durden
fandom: The Matrix Trilogy
focus: Fight Club mashup
show: Nearly New
availability: vimeo (with download)
summary: Action-sarcasm.

vidder(s): di_br
title: All the Small Things
music: Blink 182
fandom: The Daily Show + The Colbert Report
focus: Jon/Stephen
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download, youtube
summary: This is a video about the friendship between Jon and Stephen... It's NOT meant to be a slashy vid, but these two don't make things any easier for me, OH NO!

vidder(s): newkidfan
title: The Tree
music: Chanson de L'Arbre by Autour de Lucie
fandom: SGA
focus: McKay/Sheppard
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download (rar), imeem
summary: Since the day John left him, Rodney hasn't moved.

vidder(s): keewick
title: Martina
music: Meryn Cadell
fandom: Veronica Mars
focus: Veronica
show: Push the Envelope
availability: download
summary: Knock on wood.

vidder(s): jarrow
title: About Schroeder
music: No More Kings
fandom: Farscape
focus: John/Chiana
show: Nearly New
availability: download, imeem
summary: Chiana tries to understand John, but he isn't reaching back.

vidder(s): beerbad
title: Early Winter
music: Gwen Stefani
fandom: Grey's Anatomy
focus: Lexie/Meredith Grey
show: Nearly New
availability: download, imeem, youtube

vidder(s): beerbad (with jarrow)
title: Promiscuous Girl
music: "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland
fandom: BSG
focus: Kara/Laura
show: Hip-Hop
availability: download (wmv), imeem, youtube
summary: OTP, baby!

vidder(s): fan_eunice + greensilver
title: Papa Don't Preach
music: Madonna
fandom: Torchwood + Doctor Who
focus: Jack/Master, Jack/Ianto, with Ten as "Papa"
show: Nearly New
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Jack is keeping his baby... yeah, we went there.