{ julie levin russo }

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.

Media Fetish: The Vidshow! - Brown University, April 2008

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:17:09 GMT

It's important to us that Media Fetish: The Vidshow! be not only a fleeting local event, but a permanent virtual installation that the community can share. To that end, I have much belatedly transcribed excerpts of our remarks on the vids to post here. The full playlist is in the original entry; cut are a handful of vids where our observations are already more or less documented online, as well as familiar background information. Apologies for the abridgements, and for the sustained inelegance that comes of translating our extemporaneous performance to text. We were having a great time!

~ Julie Levin Russo and Francesca Coppa

FEMINIST FETISHISM

:: California Crew : Oh Boy : Quantum Leap ::

FC: There's a lot of female desire on that screen. Quantum Leap, like much genre television, follows this formula that fans often talk about: what they call the "bimbo of the week" phenomenon, where a man who has a thru-arc gets to meet a new, narratively disposable woman every week, who we see once and then never see again. By editing the women together, the Cali Crew has created this sort of swamp of physical desire -- all of the women appear in this three minutes -- and so, rather than have this sense of them as a disposable entity, what you actually get is a picture of them swamping the lead (pushing him, shoving him, holding him down, grabbing him). And I would say that what they've done is figured the female audience, that they've actually created a narrative space for themselves by editing this swamp of desiring women, of the female fans themselves, onto the screen.

JLR: It's so perfect with the lyrics, too -- "you don't know what you've been missing" -- writing that audience and their desires and what they value in that narrative back into the text.

FC: And also the women, right? "You don't know what you've been missing," because women don't matter on television. They come into the story, they go out of the story, and it's OK that we never see them again -- now we do, and in this kind of tidal-waving force. Obviously it also constructs Sam Beckett, the lead, as an object of physical desire, so that he is very much NOT the agent of the reception of all this lust.

:: Rache & Sandy : Hot Hot Hot : multifandom ::

FC: The subtitle of "Hot Hot Hot" is "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness." One of the things I want to be clear about is that, in addition to women as filmmakers, this is privileging a distinctly female way of seeing. What the Media Cannibals made "A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness" do, and what you're really wanting to do when you watch this vid: they are showing you how the desiring female fan watches television. And one of the things that they're doing is constructing patterns. It's essentially showing the tropes that the female fan community has fetishized and found sexy -- which is not how women are supposed to watch television.

JLR: The last thing I wanted to emphasize about this is that it takes some history to get to this vid, because it's the work in community building that has come before it in other vids, and also in other aspects of fandom and fan fiction, that have created this taxonomy that's recognizable to people that they can then catalogue. In multifandom vids that use so many sources I'm always also tempted to read them as allegories for fans themselves. I think part of what it's saying in creating this largely joyous collection (there's a lot of dancing in this vid) is: "look how much fun we're having -- we're really hot!"

FC: I think that's true. And I think the argument of the vid is that television, properly viewed, is a fountain of polymorphous perversity. You also notice that the prettiness is very polymorphous -- there were straight couples, men, women, gay couples -- some that are in the text (Queer as Folk), some that are constructed. There's no limitation on the way that the sexuality goes, and some of that stuff is intended to be sexual in the text and some of it's not, or at least not to the degree to which fans are willing to admit.

:: Media Cannibals : Detachable Penis : The Professionals ::

FC: This vid stages the fan's love/hate relationship with television. The Professionals is a British cop show, and clearly we love the show and we love these guys, and yet the distinctively female aesthetic of the vid is both enjoying them showing off their penises, but also is a critique of violence and all sorts of other phallocentric stuff.

JLR: The reason I really wanted that vid in this show, which is about media technology as a fetish, is that it demonstrates the way that masculinity is a prosthesis. In the buddy cop show, which is all about the really intense homosocial relationship between these guys, there's so much anxiety around stabilizing their masculinity that it just erupts in all of these phallic images: their guns and their knives, these accessories that they need in order to feel appropriately manly. And so "Detachable Penis" is viewing the technologies that this TV show is using, through this fan technology, to create a critique or an argument about that (and its gayness).

VIDDING VIDDING

:: laurashapiro & halcyon_shift : I Put You There : Giles, original animation ::

JLR: This vid gives a little bit of the background about the motivation behind the kinds of queer and feminist readings we've been playing out in this show, because it offers the media fetishist's position of deep love for this televisual object that's indifferent to her existence. But it's talking about how vidding as a technology, and in this case literally animation as a technology, is a way of asserting agency over those representations, and reinserting the fan back into that story. The particular object is Giles, but I don't think it has to be Giles, it could be anyone, and I don't think it necessarily even has to be a character: you could also read it as, in a broader sense, about the absence of female fans' desires and stories from those narratives, and the way that vids, through reappropriating those images, can insert those desires and stories back in.

FC: You can see that in something like "Oh Boy," the figuring of female desire -- that's the grandmother of this vid.

:: Seah & Margie : Walking on the Ground : multifandom ::

JLR: This vid screened at VividCon, which is a fan convention for vidding that's been going on since 2002. So I think you can see in this vid a certain historical consciousness about this art form. It tells the story of fans' engagement with media technologies through clips of the ways that screen texts have represented technologies. I think it's very overtly framed politically in terms of struggles between fans and the industry: with every new technology, they're trying to put the brakes on what fans are doing with it, and at every stage, fans have refused and have continued appropriating these videos, moved into every new technological form to do bigger and more beautiful things with it.

FC: This vid is so clean and beautiful that it's hard to notice how complex it is. There's a framing narrative of a slide projector, and this is a shot from M*A*S*H, of them showing one of those films that they used to show in the mess hall -- there's about ten layers in this video! I think it's really easy when you're watching this vid to disregard the framing narrative of the [changing screens].

:: counteragent : Destiny Calling : vidding ::

JLR: This last metavid we're showing is a quite recent vid which was made as a tribute to vidding. On the one hand, this is very much just about vids=joy, the headline of this vid -- a simple celebration of a bunch of vids that this newbie vidder really really loves. At the same time, I think it's very much a product of this moment, since YouTube and since "Closer" leaked on YouTube, of vidding coming into some consciousness of what its intervention is in this larger world of DIY media, and how it looks to the outside world, and what it's actually doing that's unique and important. So I think through highlighting this vidder's personal canon of great vids, you'll see it's explicitly framed as a statement of what is awesome about vidding [today].

FC: It's sort of the grassroots version of me traveling around with my talk. Vidders are perfectly capable of articulating their own rationale for why they want to be included in the process.

JLR: I think the ideal viewer of this vid is someone who's actually seen most of the vids that are in it, and so has a sense, when those are referenced briefly, of the larger work. The reason that right now there can be a vid that references so many other vids from so many different fandoms is because digital video and internet video have set the stage for vidding itself to become a sort of fandom. With VividCon (the convention) and with the accessibility of vids, I think they've really captured the imagination of a lot more fans, and so fans have become interested in the form of vidding and in watching vids for the craft and not necessarily because they're saying something about the particular show that they watch.

GENDER TROUBLE

JLR: This brings us to the last group of vids that I call Gender Trouble, which I think actually depend on this whole history that has come before, in terms of the tradition of feminist critique, but also in terms of the increasing dialogue between vidding as a subculture and other forms of internet video and mainstream concerns about the media. And also [in terms of] the increasingly advanced technologies that people are using to vid, and the cross-pollination between different aesthetics and techniques. These vids are putting all of those elements, both historical and contemporary, together to make what I hope you will think are very beautiful and complex artworks that are making really interesting arguments.

:: absolutedestiny : I Enjoy Being a Girl : Alias, Buffy, BSG, Firefly, Veronica Mars ::

JLR: I think this is a very playful question about what actually it means to be a girl, and how femininity is represented. One of the things I think it's trying to suggest is that our work as viewers and fans has the potential to redefine what it might mean to be a girl through the particular elements of these televisual texts that we are drawn to and that we celebrate. It's responding very positively to a new genre of television -- the "ass-kicking girl genre teen show" -- and celebrating a revised notion of what femininity could appear as on television and in the viewing practices of fans.

:: sockkpuppett : Vogue : 300 ::

JLR: This is a vid which I think again asks the question: how is femininity represented? But as you'll see, in a much different way.

FC: Twice, both in this and "Being a Girl," you're getting violence being aestheticized as dance as a kind of feminist refusal. This is an incredibly violent movie, and there's a kind of refusal to see it as a rampage of murder, and instead to cast it as the dancefloor. It actually is staging a different way of seeing -- so is "Being a Girl," by the way: as much as it's giving credence to a new kind of femininity, it is also refusing the violence of the narrative and positing that as a certain kind of dance routine. It's staged as a musical spectacular, and saying: we like musical spectacular! And luminosity's doing that with "Vogue," with its attention to the body. She's looking at all these warriors, at how beautiful they are, and framing the battlefield as a dancefloor, which in some ways is making it camp by refusing its overt meaning about seriousness, masculinity (all the swords are phallic). So I think it is really staging a feminist way of seeing, and a feminist puncturing of the incredible pomposity of Frank Miller's 300, with its incredibly violent pretentious kind of narrative.

JLR: I think it's making a pretty convincing argument that what 300 is actually about is the spectacle of male bodies, and the way that really feminizes masculinity, because they're there just to be half-naked and making these beautiful movements on this beautiful, shiny screen -- that's all surface. I think what she's saying is: if we're going to go see 300, we're seeing shirtless men.

FC: I've been arguing in other venues that television, with its bringing of the body into the private sphere of the home, and allowing you to pause and fast-forward, has allowed women some of their first ability to fetishize without being in public space where they could get hurt. In other words, men have been able to congregate in public space to look at women's bodies in a way that women have not been able to do the reverse. And I think actually bringing certain modes of viewing into the house, into the domestic sphere (the VCR), has allowed you to look real close when you could not get to men and look at them real close. You could make an argument that this is a kind of reverse objectification.

:: obsessive24 : Piece of Me : Britney Spears ::

JLR: I think this presents in a lot of ways a much more pessimistic analysis of the representation of femininity, and particularly of the role of audiences within that. It delves quite deeply into the violence that media technologies can visit upon women, and really asks us as fans or viewers to think about how we might be complicit in that.

FC: This is what the world without fan vidding looks like, right? Unfortunately this is what mainstream values will do to you.

JLR: This vid is actually quite unusual in being about a real person rather than about TV or movie characters. One of the reasons people don't often make real person vids is because of the difficulty of finding enough footage, which is why there are a lot of stills of photos and magazines and also very pixellated, bad quality YouTube videos that are incorporated into this vid. But I actually think that the way that makes you aware of the materiality of those different media technologies gives it a lot of richness.

FC: This is Britney's song. I think what's interesting about it is that she has an actual music video illustrating her song that puts more weight on the resistant phrase "do you want a piece of me?" i.e. "I'll take you on -- I'm up for a fight." And I think the vidder is saying that it's a pose, you're not going to win the fight. There's a sense in which the actual song is a pretty noble attempt on Britney's part to portray her media trouble as a kind of belligerence. I think the vidder is suggesting that that's a game you can't really win, and in fact the extent to which she herself is complicit in these images -- that posing that challenge to the viewer from that side of the camera is a failed attempt.

JLR: I think one of the wonderful things about this vid is that, through making a vid about Britney to a Britney song, it gives her a voice. But at the same time, as you were saying, it's ultimately not very optimistic about whether she does really have a voice within this system, and whether her agressive stance in this song is actually going to get her anywhere.

Josh Guilford: I think that one of the really interesting things about a lot of these videos is that they seem to raise issues about that question of voicing, about that question of democracy value that's latched onto video production. I think it's important that they're not the kind of video like Britney Spears videos that only deal with this issue as publicity and exposure, but also that the operation and function of a video like "Closer" in the context of YouTube, this new context of distribution and dissemination, brings up all these issues which people were reluctant to discuss surrounding censorship and surrounding different contexts of reception.

JLR: Right now there's a really intense conversation going on among the vidding community about visibility and about publicity, and what kind of publicity we're prepared to take on, and what are the costs and benefits of that process.

FC: I think that one of the ways in which vidding is interesting for women is to give them the behind-the-camera role, to take them out from being the subject of the gaze and turn them into the women behind the camera. And so what's odd about the visibility is that on some level part of the anxiety is that vidders, if they figure themselves at all, will figure themselves in these kinds of allusive ways, or will figure themselves in identification with men (I'm Spock). But the way that the art is becoming visible, the women don't want to be visible, and I think they don't for the Britney Spears reason. Despite the traditional sense that wants the camera on women, they don't want to be on camera, they want to control the camera. [...] And I think that for a community that was so much about vidding itself as taking control of the camera, so much about shifting where your position was to stay behind it, that then this moment of visibility is a particular problem for women vidders. In remix culture there seems to be less debate about whether or not to take the fame and money when it comes than the women, and some people say it's because we're too invested in a kind of utopian gift community at our own loss, that it will actually hurt us to continue to do this stuff non-profit. But I do think your point is closer, I think women are more suspicious of visibility, and feeling that it leads you to the Britney Spears place, maybe too close to the wrong kind of visibility, and that we're willing to trade not getting anything.

Lynne Joyrich: It's just so interesting that they're facing the same issues now as a producing community as what they're dealing with, because if vidding is so much about taking the private consumption of TV but making it public, or showing how public forms of mass culture actually relate to your private desires, it's all about that play of public and private. But then they have to figure out themselves: how do I deal with my weird relationship between publicity and privacy?

JLR: It's a really good point that explicitly part of the question that's happening is how do we represent ourselves to the larger audience, very literally. It's part of the use of technologies like imeem, which is a media sharing site that a lot of vidders have adopted who were willing to have their work seen and linked to by people outside of the community, and also of what Francesca's doing by going on tour to contextualize vidding for a lot of different audiences. There's some sort of consensus that we have to take charge of the way we're represented in the same way that we've taken charge of that in these screen texts.

[ 06 April 2008 ]

pre-VVC vidrecs (2/2) - everything else

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:56:48 GMT

The problem with becoming a vidding fan, as an obsessive person, is that there will always be more to watch. I seriously have a SPREADSHEET of vids to catch up on. Thanks to par_avion, veni_vidi_vids is now compiling recs via delicious, which is invaluable for keeping tabs on the buzz. I also have charmax's A-Z of women-centric vids, geekturnedvamp's girls girls girls playlist, and laurashapiro's IBARW vids of color list queued up to go through. But I'm about to be deluged with vividcon, so this is it for my back-catalogue at the moment. Except I do still have ambitions of making the rounds of Torchwood (as a preview, run don't walk to fan_eunice's Papa Don't Preach for the boys and sapote3's The Test for the girls). NB: fanworksfinder is being buggy, so I haven't ported over any of this recent spate of reviews.

3 newish vids

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: Origin Stories
music: "Coffee" by Aesop Rock featuring John Darnielle
fandom: BtVS/Angel (Robin, Nikki, Kendra, Dana, Spike)
availability: download, imeem
summary: It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat.
comments: What I'd like to comment on with respect to this vid, especially with my very limited knowledge of the source, is the comment(ary) itself. Its entire trajectory -- the genesis of the vid in the Sweet Charity auction, the collaborative creative process, the pointed intervention within larger meta debates on race, the overwhelming feedback from its audience, the word-of-mouth ripples, and the vidder and viddee's retrospective analysis/response posts (linked) -- is an exemplar of what vidding at its best can be and do as a community-based political art form.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Sawatte Kawatte (Touch! Change!)
music: Spitz [J-pop]
focus: Hiro/Ando
availability: download, imeem
summary: Hiro needs Ando.
comments: The POV in this vid is true genius. It looks, and sounds, and TASTES like Hiro's remarkable charm and exuberance, without skirting the darkness that he faces (somehow without dimming his buoyancy). Its narrative is plenty strong enough to sustain the unintelligible language, and throughout these two (the BEST of the show itself) are just impossibly loving and lovable.

vidder(s): charmax
title: Angel with an Attitude
music: The Ditty Bops
fandom: Pushing Daisies (Chuck)
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Being born again is fun.
comments: It's impossible not to smile while watching this, yet it's more complex than many lighthearted vids. A virtuosic harmony between show, song, and editing, with so many delightful visual links and transitions. I especially love the dead folks sequence leading into the car chase bridge. And it seems it's an effective recruiter vid!

3 oldish vids

vidder(s): renenet
title: Man in Motion
music: John Parr, "St. Elmo's Fire"
fandom: The Matrix trilogy
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: Neo is Jesus, get it?
comments: I had the pleasure of watching this for the first time in the presence of the vidder, and discussing it with her. Out of the gajillion vids I've been watching lately, it's one of the few that have truly gotten under my skin, that I've wanted to see many times, that I'm dying to TEACH. Because if there ever were a metaphor for fan power in the age of convergence, it's The Matrix, right? But The Matrix has always troubled me (or at least, I learned at school that it's troubling) because of its paradigm of disembodiment, common to so much cyber-utopianism. These battles will NOT be fought only in the virtual video-game world, but in the ravaged material dystopia. And of course, as a corporate franchise, The Matrix is selling back to us our fantasies of liberation. So I watched this vid for the first time (not knowing it's officially dubbed a LKBV) and want: "YES, THIS is the critique I've always wanted!" Committing unrelentingly to schmoopy 80s cliche, it exposes the facile, derivative emptiness of this narrative. But, precisely through wallowing in this romanticism, it's creating a subject position that's incredibly complex (more so than the trilogy itself) -- because what it ALSO captures is how much we DO believe this fantasy (both its slash dimension and its utopian dimension), giving us (yes, even me) an occasion to revel in it shamelessly. That, to me, is the most evolved inflection of the Lord King Bad Vid mode.

vidder(s): marycrawford
title: Improper Dancing
music: Electric Six
fandom: multi (Club Vivid)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Just don't scare the horses.
comments: I don't think we can ever have too many multifandom dancevids. What sets this one apart is the unrivaled diversity of the sources used. Fantastic dancing (and other more unexpected) parallels make for a wondrous celebration of how the exuberant, ridiculous, "improper" moments are often the ones that fans cherish the most.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: The Girl or the Weapon
music: Michael Andrews
fandom: Firefly/Serenity
availability: download, imeem
summary: Who we gonna find in there when she wakes up? The girl? Or the weapon?
comments: This magnificent experimental vid to an instrumental score tells River's story in colors, movement, and impressions. Its psychedelic style suggests one rendering of the synthetic and mind-bending way River herself perceives the world. [(Written months ago --->) Rapidly becoming one of my very favorite vidders, though I've managed to review her work only sporadically.]

3 cyborgean Sarah Connor Chronicles vids

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Does Cameron Dream of Electric Sheep?
music: "Black Gold Blues" from Laura Veirs
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: See title.
comments: It's fantastic how alien this vid feels -- quite unfamiliar and jarring in a way that takes you to Cameron. The fast cutting is remarkable. And it's balanced by the clarity of the vid's overarching structure. The trajectory from Cameron as a machine and like a machine to her burgeoning, uneasy humanity in her relationships with humans was palpable (I LOVE THE SARAH/CAMERON PART). That's something I'm really missing in the show: a sense of her interiority and development. Culminating in the bizarre and haunting aria of the ending.

vidder(s): halcyon_shift
title: Human Behavior
music: Bjork
availability: download (divx)
summary: There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic.
comments: This vid's powerful opening sequence intercuts Cameron's performance of "human behavior" with the grisly pragmatism of flesh that is her reality. In a loose POV that encompasses both her meticulous observation of the Connor family and the way they see her, it unfolds its rhetorical strategy of juxtaposition in unexpected directions. I read it as a reflection on the staggering violence that humans inflict on each other in the name of their emotions (a genocidal drive of which Cameron is a by-product) -- ultimately no more humane than the entirely entirely unsentimental intersubjectivity that they find so unsettling in Cameron. Less about Cameron learning feelings than about humans learning to be killing machines. With awesome jump cuts!

vidder(s): serrico
title: Paris Is Burning
music: St. Vincent
availability: download (wmv)
summary: We are dancing a black waltz.
comments: Waltzing with machines is the best way I can describe this. And the humans are losing that chess game. In the tradition of vids that render violence as dance, this portrait of a war seductively traces the relentlessness of a technological enemy. The theme is perfectly captured in its second shot of the world as the Terminator's snow globe. Check out 1:27-1:28, but I'm probably most gleeful about the flourish of data from 1:48-1:58.

In a perfect world, I would have had time to write something about all the following vids as well. In this one, I'm just going to rec them and leave it at that.

3 instant classics (metavids)
Plenty of smart folks have had a LOT to say about these.

vidder(s): thingswithwings
title: The Glass
music: Angelo Badalamenti, from A Very Long Engagement (instrumental)
focus: multifandom slash (boy and girl varieties)
availability: download (temporary), imeem
summary: A long time ago, Henry Jenkins wrote an article that had a line in it that got deservedly famous in fandom. He said, of Kirk and Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, that slash is what happens when you take away the glass. And even though that article is mostly obsolete nowadays, that line still resonates with me. So I made a vid about it.

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: Hourglass
music: Squeeze
focus: Groundhog Day, the trope
availability: download, imeem
summary: All this has happened before and will happen again. [don't miss the linked post with notes]

vidder(s): ash48
title: Channel Hopping
music: various TV Theme tunes
focus: Supernatural
availability: download (filefront), YouTube
summary: The Boys watch TV.

3 politically engaged Heroes vids
I'm probably a bad person for not reviewing these, but I'm becoming increasingly sensitized to the many things that annoy me about Heroes, and I just can't spend any more time with it.

vidder(s): shati
title: Persona
music: Blue Man Group
focus: (Bob) The Haitian
availability: download, imeem
summary: Every morning I put it on / I walk outside and I am gone

vidder(s): lcsbanana
title: Jack, or, Adventures in Reading Against the Text
music: The Nields
focus: Niki, Claire, Monica
availability: download (scroll down)
summary: A fanvid for the show they should have made.

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: Grace Cathedral Hill
music: The Decemberists
focus: Maya
availability: download, imeem
summary: I emphasize with Maya and her struggle and her confusion and wish that things were different, or could have been different for her.

3 Niki/Jessica vids
I think it's NEAT that there are THREE vids about the dimension of Heroes that pushes my buttons in a GOOD way -- the problem of self-identity mediated by mirrors, the problem of representing the split subject onscreen, and of course, the doppelcest.

vidder(s): charmax
title: The Wreckoning
music: BoomKat
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Jessica pov. It's all about the jekyll & Hyde, the love/hate, the sub/dom, the protector/protected relationship of Niki and Jessica.

vidder(s): martoufmarty
title: Wasted
music: And One
availability: download (not currently available), imeem
summary: The song is about plastic surgery. Michele thinks I'm crazy for thinking that it fit Nikki/Jessica. To me, it fits. Perfectly. There's just something about it.

vidder(s): fahrbotdrusilla
title: Only
music: Nine Inch Nails
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: Niki thinks she's going insane.

It's a disgrace that I haven't been reviewing femslash vids more concertedly. Please accept the following bonus rec as a gesture of contrition:

vidder(s): charmax
title: I'm Your Man
music: Patricia O Callaghan
focus: hot girls everywhere
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: A celebration of media clichés.

BREAKING: I just officially got into VVC!!!!!!!!!!!

pre-VVC vidrecs (1/2) - Battlestar Galactica

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:01:30 GMT

In keeping with the networked structure of our collective brain, this post forks off from heyiya's Cylon meta and virtual vidshow (you can read my reviews of the older vids she picked in my previous BSG recs post). It's my rendering of an emergent BSG vidding meme that has been circulating between heyiya, beccatoria, kiki_miserychic and I, building on work already underway in the fandom at large. My first purpose here is gleefully to announce heyiya's new vid:

vidder(s): heyiya
title: Sons and Daughters
music: The Decemberists
focus: Cylons
availability: download (divx), vimeo
summary: A downloadable history.
comments:This is the BSG vid about futurity and biotechnology that I have always craved. It began life as one of those lightning bolts of musical inspiration: Alexis heard the song and instantly SAW its future, and when she played it for me it was similarly revelatory. I'm utterly in awe of her for tackling the ambitious project herself -- as her second vid! -- rather than delegating it to Sweet Charity or somesuch. My experience collaborating on this was comparable to my Sweet Charity commission: I offered elaborate feedback and recommendations from an early stage of the process, largely focused on creating and refining the vid's overall structure, while Alexis did all the MAGIC. The most difficult thing about vidding this song, from where I sat, was the sparsity of variable lyrics (the three actual verses run out at about 1:20, and the rest is just assorted repetitions) -- lacking that narrative crutch was a major headache, especially given the abstraction of the thematic material. So IMNSHO I'm particularly proud of the clarity of its construction, because believe me, we spent a long time floundering with the second half (Alexis almost always obeyed my suggestions in the end :P). I don't necessarily want to discuss the content of the vid, because my better half already meta'd, and from my perspective it contains, in itself, its entire thesis. There is nothing, nothing about it that I don't love to a profound and overwhelming degree. It will make you feel like a Cylon.

vidder(s): beccatoria
title: there's a war going on for your mind, laura
music: The Flobots
focus: everything
availability: download, imeem
summary: Laura Roslin and the Cylon Hybrid engage in a rap battle.
comments: Another vid that I (and Alexis) beta'd, but in this case only very lightly. This one, as far as I can tell, emerged fully formed from Becka's brilliant brain. What I did contribute was saying to her, when she couldn't figure out where to go after the first half, "That old woman's voice? That's the Hybrid talking." Kaboom. This vid is a tour de force. It spans the entire series to date in a collage of associative, fast-paced fragments, relentlessly astonishing in their resonances with the lyrics, striking in their political tenor. But my very favorite aspect is its self-reflexive correlation of broadcast media technologies and networked Cylon communication through editing (the interpolation of the Hybrid) and effects (visual static). And of course Laura is at the center of it all.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: so say we all (Handlebars)
music: The Flobots
focus: season 4.0
availability: download (temporary), vimeo
summary: I can ride my bike with no handlebars.
comments: I take no credit whatsoever for this one, for the record, but it intersects with this lineage because it was Becka's inspiration to vid The Flobots. kiki_miserychic's psalm of season 4.0 is more meditative: fast cutting and motion punctuate its deliberate pacing only sparingly, to great effect. But it shares the sort of hallucinatory juxtaposition of The Flobots' evocative lyrics with a flow of surprising scenes. Likewise, an awareness of media and politics is woven throughout. "I can show you how to scratch a record / I can take apart the remote control / And I can almost put it back together" exemplifies what I love most about this vid, and the entire swath from "I can design an engine" through "I can split the atoms of a molecule" makes me jump up and down in delight. And finally, the endings of the song and the season are MFEO.

One thing I especially enjoy about watching post-4.0 BSG vids is witnessing how different artists use the finale's stunning final shot. Along with the three above, you can see two more examples in beccatoria's Tricks and our Tomorrow series -- I'd give Tricks the award for being cleverest (it's the only one that doesn't place the closing shot as pretty much the closing shot of the vid), but each does something original and lovely with the footage.

Another interesting trend in evidence here is the metatextual framing of vids as artifacts that exist within the source's universe. heyiya had the genius idea of staging Sons & Daughters as output of the Cylon historical database, and I suggested that she convey that conceit in the credits. Becka formatted her epic as a transmission from the Hybrid to Laura. And kiki_miserychic told me after the fact that she was independently conceiving of Handlebars as a sort of audiovisual hymn sung by the Hybrid (I recommend listening to the lead male rapper as the voice of the Cylon God in both cases). There are certainly other vids with self-reflexive framing devices, usually by way of meta-commentary on media technologies (see, for example, Jackie K's If You Were In My Movie, wherein the vid is Daria's school project, and wistful_fever's Documentary, wherein the vid is a video made for one actor by another), but I think BSG and other Sci-Fi open up a whole alternate set of exciting possibilities in this vein. A case in point: after we had this discussion, kiki_miserychic went on to create a femslashy Cylon download:

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Memory Vid
music: "Teach Me How to Drown" by Unto Ashes
focus: Caprica/Athena
availability: download (temporary), vimeo

Now that we've assimilated her, you can expect further experimental vidlets along these lines to materialize soon... ;D

more techno-futuristic BSG vids

vidder(s): aycheb
title: Babies
music: Pulp
focus: eponymous
availability: download
summary: Love is the plan, the plan is… Shameless plagiary of James Tiptree Jnr, sexual conflict, evolutionary theory and gratuitous space porn.
comments: This is the best (and probably only) BSG vid [before 2008] focused on reproduction as a theme (my obsession). First of all, it mobilizes one of my favorite vidding modes: the perverse juxtaposition of an upbeat song with violent and disturbing imagery. It's done with special subtlety and complexity in this case -- because aycheb perfectly captures the subtlety and complexity of how reproduction operates in BSG. Hera, in particular, is simultaneously the profound miracle of love that the song implies, and the harbinger of the post-human apocalypse. And, as the song implies, she's the biological product of Helo and Sharon's lovemaking, but just as much the techno-spawn of Gaius and Six's Cylon future. I adore how the vid is structured around images of (bio)technology (like Gaius's lab and the resurrection ship), and including Kara and Leoben's anti-romance in parallel underlines the death drive that runs uneasily within these couplings.

vidder(s): crickets
title: Karma Police
music: Radiohead
focus: Final Four
availability: download (temporary), imeem, youtube
summary: For a minute there they lost themselves.
comments: A retrospective look at the atrocities the F4 committed against Cylons in the name of humanity, accentuating the magnitude of their coming out trauma. Aggressive colorizing and texturizing of the footage adds to the sense of extreme disorientation, but what really sells it for me is the vid's beautifully executed closing disintegration into the Cylon signal.

vidder(s): m_a_r_i_k_s
title: Lord's Prayer
music: E Nomine
focus: Cylons, Gaius
availability: download, youtube
summary: When I first heard this song the initial idea was to make a vid about the cylons mostly and their conflict with humanity through the aspect of their faith. Turned out they're much more connected to their "parents", than I thought. :)
comments: A rollicking goth-creepy meditation on the staggering violence committed in the name of faith. Summoning a much darker Cylon POV than "Sons & Daughters," this vid emphasizes, though the interchangeability of the seven models and their kinship with centurions and raiders, how fundamentalism can turn people into killing machines.

vidder(s): bop_radar
title: Southside
music: Moby
focus: Lee, Kara, Sharon, Helo
availability: download, imeem
summary: The idea for this vid came from Lee Adama's 'we're not a civilisation, we're a gang' speech sparking with a memory I had of Moby saying this song was about street gangs in a post-apocalyptic future.
comments: This upbeat action vid does a glorious job of depicting our favorite pilots' journeys as a high-speed chase across the universe. bop_radar froths a loosely linear chain of charged character moments into a generous helping of space battles, displaying a deft touch and expert attention to motion.

And now, inspired by daybreak777's BSG character study recs...

BSG female character studies
[there are more Starbuck, Roslin, and Kendra vids in my first recs post -- and I'm still searching for the great Cain vid]

vidder(s): beccatoria
title: Ghosts
music: Set the Fire to the Third Bar - Snow Patrol feat. Martha Wainwright
focus: Caprica Six (Caprica/head!Gaius, Caprica/Tigh, Caprica/D'Anna)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Caprica Six is a love letter no one has ever read.
comments: This vid takes very seriously the problem of how, visually, to tell the story of a love affair with someone who doesn't exist, and in the process conveys a sense of almost unbearable longing. The song is haunting (NB: there is no second bar) and consequently much vidded, I know (there's a stunning Jack/Ianto version by sol_se, and apparently a Kara/Lee rendition as well); you should watch this even if you think it's already defined for you, because Becka really sells it. She created a Byzantine, impressionistic structure, which I nonetheless find eloquent and fluid -- I don't think only because I became very intimate with it in the course of betaing. I can't even highlight favorite moments because so much of it is just breathtaking. Moreover, the vid feels IMPORTANT to me, an indictment of how much time BSG as a show (and often as a fandom) spends with Gauis and his wet dreams and how little considering their relationship from Caprica's POV. Here is her story: the incredible emotional and physical violence she endures in her fruitless quest for a partner who can match her bottomless capacity for love. It's sobering how different her fantasy lover is from Gaius and Gaius's (take note of how sparingly actual Gaius is used -- because it's not about him).

vidder(s): aycheb
title: Safe From Harm
music: Massive Attack
focus: Laura Roslin
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Laura dreams.
comments: It's a travesty that I didn't see this vid until recently, when par_avion sat me down with it. I love it more and more each time I watch it -- it makes me FEEL the loss and the rage that Laura feels. It's particularly effective how the vid is anchored in her physical frailty, contrasting that with her ferocious power of spirit. Telling her story largely chronologically stitches a convincing case out of the escalating atrocities for a totally coherent and moving interpretation of Laura -- not making her actions justifiable, but certainly comprehensible.

vidder(s): jarrow
title: Falling From the Sky
music: Vast
focus: Starbuck (seasons 1 + 2)
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: A deeper look at the many pilots Starbuck has failed, including herself.
comments: It's perhaps a perverse reading of a story about failure, but my favorite aspect of this unique portrait of Starbuck as a professional is the sense of her competence, even in the face of loss (such a departure from many other vids that depict her tailspin toward self-destruction). jarrow expertly uses flashback effects to evoke a tight POV, and deploys motion with a virtuosity that befits a vid about flying, culminating in the exhilarating vertigo of its big finish.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Barcelona
music: Jewel
focus: Sharon (Athena/Helo, Boomer/Chief)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Sharon and the meaning of mercy.
comments: That's our emo kid! A Cylon coming out story before that was cool, this vid takes Sharon on a journey concluding in her -- and her human community's -- acceptance of her kinship with machines. I appreciated the sensual editing, with long crossfades and superimpositions, and the moments in Sharon's life accented on the choruses of "let me fly" punctuated the story perfectly.

vidder(s): nicole_anell
title: Jolene
music: The White Stripes (covering Dolly Parton)
focus: Cally (Cally/Chief, and if you're me also Cally/Boomer)
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: "The Ties That Bind" constructed the Chief being a Cylon like a romantic/sexual betrayal, and it knocked all the sub right out of my subtext, and I couldn't even conceive a universe where that's not awesome.
comments: In an astonishingly complex mobilization of the iconic (and let's not forget girlslashy) song, this vid renders Cally's literal rivals for the Chief's affections (Boomer and later Tory) as a metaphor for Cylonicity itself -- the aspect of her partner that is truly taking him away from her. This can't have been an easy motif to construct visually, and the fact that (to me at least) it read with total clarity is a testament to the elegant and layered editing. When, around 0:30, the first repetition of the refrain shifts us from Boomer as lover to Boomer as Cylon sleeper agent my mouth dropped open, and the next 30 seconds are chilling in their incongruous brutality. And then, while I keep trying to pinpoint particularly effective moments in the long transitional section (~1:10-1:50), I just can't, because each time I watch it I appreciate the details more -- it weaves disparate conflicts of their past and the Chief's dawning awareness of his Cylon identity into the perfect bridge to Cally's suspicions of Tory. On first viewing, I found the loose non-linear structure slightly muddling, but the rich intercutting of heterogenous moments really grew on me, and I think the limited footage and metaphorical theme demanded it.

vidder(s): sabaceanbabe
title: Nobody Knows
music: Pink
focus: Racetrack (fanonical Racetrack/Helo, Racetrack/Kat, and so on if you really squint)
availability: download, streaming
summary: This song spoke to me of a woman who was interrupted in living her life by something over which she had no control, nor would she ever have control of it.
comments: Let me get this out of the way: I hate the song choice. It's relentlessly earnest, and that almost never works for me (even in girlslash vids). Plus, I'm convinced by dualbunny's thesis that Starbuck IS Pink, but Racetrack, for all that she's awesome, is just NOT. That said, I think this is an exemplar of strategies for vidding minor characters, because sabaceanbabe turns Racetrack's fleeting appearances in the background into the story itself: the loneliness of being the one nobody notices. The vid raised my familiar ire about BSG's throwaway women in a very satisfying way, and made me happy that Racetrack is (miraculously!) still with us. She's so pretty!

vidder(s): hollywoodgrrl
title: The Greatest
music: Cat Power
focus: Kat (Kat/Kara)
availability: download (wmv), youtube
summary: This vid is dedicated to the two greatest Viper Jocks in the Colonial Fleet: Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Louanne "Kat" Katraine. Live fast, die young.
comments: An elegy for one (two?) of our favorite dead lesbians. This vid quietly captures how brutal it is to be a girl pilot -- and I think foregrounding Kat is a clever tactic in this operation, since she's so many of the things that Starbuck is, without Starbuck's privilege of exceptionality (and resurrection).

vidder(s): notpiecebypiece
title: All Fall Down
music: One Republic
focus: Tory (Tory/Laura)
availability: imeem
summary: It's about how Tory was always there for Roslin but when Tory needed Roslin, she wasn't there and Tory had to go through all her shit alone. Poor abandoned Tory.
comments: notpiecebypiece disavows that this is "Serious Vidding," which is a sign of the vidding times: burgeoning popularity, visibility, and artistic achievement alongside widening hierarchies of distinction. Let this be a reminder of the value of vids without ambitions beyond feeding our Id vortex in our psychic living rooms. It's not flashy, but it offers a lucid, original, and important interpretation of an otherwise quite opaque character AND HER DEFINING LESBIAN CRUSH. It's utterly shameless, and fills me -- perhaps me more than anyone ever -- with ardent and flaily joy.

The BSG vids I've enjoyed but not reviewed are in this playlist -- let me know if I've missed anything important (that's not hetshippy or boy-focused)?

BSG vids: Tomorrow 4.0 COMPLETE

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:53:55 GMT

Remember in April when I announced the first in a series of Battlestar Galactica season 4 crack vidlets? beccatoria and my Plan was to mashup each episode with audio from the Prelinger Archives of mid-century sponsored films, thereby creating our own archive that chronicles the season against the backdrop of our own cultural and technological history. Months later, the project is complete! Part one, at least, with the rest to come when BSG returns in 2009.

Length: 9:20 (10 parts, mostly under 60 seconds each)
Stream: youtube or imeem (embedded under the cut)
Download: 61MB AVI
Links: original posts @ beccatoria or @ thearchive2 / xposted @ vidding + bsg_crack

I'm absurdly proud of how these vids emerged as a collaborative artwork, and I think you can witness our skills improving as the series progresses.

For a more sober portrait of season 4.0 (or as a reference point for anyone who might be arriving at this post without a sense of what a more typical fanvid looks like), let me recommend beccatoria's Tricks (to Bruce Springseen's "Magic"). In addition to its elegant distillation of S4's key moments and themes, this vid is notable for contrasting them with a heartbreaking montage of earlier BSG scenes, and for an ingenious use of the final episode's final shot (interspersed throughout on the refrain). It's also technically dazzling, and could be taken as an exemplar of Windows Movie Maker vidding. WMM offers a very limited palette of capabilities, but Becka pushes them to their limits, perfecting the rhythm with extensive time toggles. I had the pleasure of doing some light beta duty on this.

Finally, one of the perks of selecting concepts for Tomorrow was having an excuse to plumb the depths of the remarkable Prelinger collection. Here's a sampling of the sort of deranged gems found therein. They may be of special interest to media studies professors, as many would make excellent teaching tools. FYI, the archive also includes myriad promotional/educational narrative films and musicals, which I skipped over.

five amazing films used in vidlets

A Communications Primer (1953)
This film was made by Charles and Ray Eames, which makes it more intelligent and visually striking than most educational films. It deals with the semantics of communication, breaking down the concept into a flow chart of choosing, coding, sending, receiving, decoding, and understanding messages.

The Story of Television (1956)
Shows efforts of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the creation, development and introduction of the all-electronic TV system; explains how science made television a working reality. David Sarnoff tells of the early research and experiments... Actual scenes from TV "firsts" are included -- President Roosevelt opening the 1939 New York World's Fair, the visit of the King and Queen of England, and the 1940 Republican Convention in Philadelphia. Animated diagrams demonstrate how a TV camera converts electronic beams into a picture.

Television Tomorrow (1945)
Part of a series of post-WWII job recruitment films aimed at soon-to-be ex-servicemen. Of great historical interest and reasonably accurate about television behind the scenes and in the future.

In the Suburbs (1957)
This is the movie about suburbia as it is widely imagined in pop culture: a place where educated white middle-class couples moved after World War II in an escape from crowded cities, seeking a patch of green and a better life for their children. And In the Suburbs is in fact an accurate film about this singular place and time in American history... Produced as an audiovisual aid for Redbook magazine ad salespeople to convince national advertisers they could deliver them the suburban market, it's also a rich evocation of postwar affluence and the suburban "market-in-place"... "In the Suburbs" is one of the most remarkable and unusual sponsored films ever made. It escapes the triteness for which advertising films have ever been criticized, and its own values look a lot like those of the avant-garde.

Stop Driving Us Crazy! (1959)
Rusty, a spy from Mars, pays a visit to Earth and discovers how its inhabitants disrespect one another by driving poorly. The film espouses a Christian viewpoint on safety, stating that "reckless driving is a sin." The 1950s-style animation is great.

five amazing films not (yet) used in vidlets

To New Horizons (1940)
Definitive document of pre-World War II futuristic utopian thinking, as envisioned by General Motors. Documents the "Futurama" exhibit in GM's "Highways and Horizons" pavilion at the World's Fair, which looks ahead to the "wonder world of 1960."

The Challenge of Ideas [part 1] (1961)
Edward R. Murrow hosts this early-60s film, which seems to be designed to explain the Cold War to service personnel, though there is also some implication that it may have been shown to the general public as well. A motley assortment of stars, such as John Wayne, Lowell Thomas, and Helen Hayes also appear at various points to explain the ideological differences between the capitalist and communist systems.

Round and Round (1939)
This short film employs fluid stop motion animation to present the inner workings of a manufacturer. While aspects of business such as product sales, wages, and the purchase of raw materials are explored, viewers are never told of how profits are generated and used to benefit the company. David dubbed this "capitalism for tots!"

A Welcome Guest in the House (1957)
Once upon a time the FCC required TV stations to air news, public service, and public affairs programming, and limited advertising. This 1950's film from the National Association of Broadcasters tries to explain why by way of the education of a boy. Because of these requirements and the marginally stricter code of the NAB, TV "will always be a welcome guest in the house." We are told that TV is a free system, based on the free flow of goods and ideas, based on quality and taste.

Leave It to Roll-Oh (1940)
Tongue-in-cheek film showing a domestic robot freeing housewives of their chores (and intimating that their work is hardly necessary); actually a promo showing how relays and switches function in the modern automobile. Shown at the New York World's Fair in 1940.

bibliographic

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:06:58 GMT

I'm gearing up to draft my chapter on The L Word, which (with the exception of two preliminary salvos seen at fandebate) consists of entirely new research and writing. Yikes. My listing herein is largely for my own reference, but I'd treasure any bibliographic pearls of wisdom that you can cast before me, dear readers.

First of all, I'm trying to familiarize myself with interesting published work on the show, so let me know if you've seen any? I've got Reading The L Word as my proverbial beach reading, plus Candace Moore's article in a recent Cinema Journal.

Also, I'm sorting out whether this is the place to bring in radical queer political thought, like Warner, Berlant, Edelman, and Puar, which I desperately need to catch up on.

But mostly, I'm giving myself a crash course in Autonomist Marxism. Some of my fellow grad students are generously joining me in a summer reading group, and here's our tentative plan for an 8-week syllabus, compiled by David Bering-Porter (my better half):

Maurizio Lazarrato:
"Biopolitics/Bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity"
"General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour"
From The Revolutions of Capitalism
"'Semiotic Pluralism' and the New Government of Signs: Homage to Felix Guattari"
"Struggle, Event, Media"
"Vital Strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the Metaphysics of Contemporary Capitalism" by Alberto Toscano

The Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno

The Poltiics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century by Antonio Negri

miscellany from these anthologies:
Autonomia: Post-Political Politics by Sylvere Lotringer
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt

The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital by Leopoldina Fortunati

The Micropolitics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present by Jason Read

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism by Nick Dyer-WItheford

Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age by Tiziana Terranova

SELECTIONS (TBD) from all of these, obviously, given my lazy reading habits.

Meanwhile, thanks to Wendy's excellent advising, I have exciting plans to move much of the BSG chapter's theory section to the diss's digital-focused conclusion, and lead into media hybrids instead with an expanded framework for hybridity incorporating both racial and queer notions of passing. For the former, I'm looking at Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua, and Chela Sandoval; for the latter, Judiths Butler and Halberstam -- who am I missing? I'm woefully subliterate in both queer and race theory. Oh, and apparently I should go to Tom Foster to learn more about technicity (he wrote The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, but I think I can start with his essays in a couple anthologies that I already own). And I probably shouldn't leave out Haraway.

The recently-completed SVU chapter was a puzzle. I feel like it needs something more about the closet and/or queer representation, but in poking around I didn't turn up anything useful. Help?

Finally, I proposed to David the thought experiment of listing one's Top Ten Essays. This category is somewhat flexible, but the idea is that they have to be self-contained short works rather than books or book chapters. Here's mine: not necessarily my Top Ten Best, but my Top Ten Favorite -- the essays I find myself returning to over and over, that stick in my memory, that make me squee (let me know if you want me to share scans of the missing ones):

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. "Sex in Public." The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by During and Simon. Routledge, 1993.

Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss. Routledge, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7.

Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event, Context." Limited, Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Feuer, Jane. "The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology." Regarding Television, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. Greenwood Publishing, 1983.

Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding." The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by During and Simon. Routledge, 1993.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto." The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by During and Simon. Routledge, 1993.

Joyrich, Lynne. "Epistemology of the Console." Critical Inquiry Vol. 27, No. 3 (2001): 439-67.

Keenan, Thomas. "Windows: of vulnerability." The Phantom Public Sphere, edited by Social Text Collective and Bruce Robbins. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

I'm about to order a huge pile of books...

II/4/Z End Matter

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:06:15 GMT

The draft of Chapter II / Private Eyes is now complete! I should add illustrations at some point, but there are none at this time.

My most recent feedback on the original essay was by email, more than a year ago, from Sam/itsnotaword/NW. I finally replied last week (what? a year is not an unreasonable turnaround time on a non-essential email in my world, srsly) and the address is dead. So I'll share the response with you here. She informed me that SVU and Xena share Liz Freidman as sometime producer -- good detective work.

I'm finishing up a dissertation chapter update of the Olivia project, and I did add some later events in the saga, including the infamous Baer quote and the speculation about Mariska. It's really interesting to hear that there might be a material (as opposed to just a stylistic) connection to Xena. Overall, I tried to highlight the potential commercial advantage of "subtext" in this version, particularly in the context of TV/internet convergence. The whole massive debate remains fascinating, but it all seems very long ago, now. I really do appreciate hearing from you about the essay, though! While I'm sure I didn't succeed in making it entirely accessible, it is very gratifying that fellow fans read it and got something out of it.

/ Works Cited

Ang, Ien. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. Routledge, 1995.

B, Angie. “SVU's Detective Benson Attracts Lesbian Fans.” AfterEllen.com May 2004. 25 Jun 2008 {http://www.afterellen.com/archive/ellen/TV/svu.html}.

Bathrick, Serafina. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Women at Home and at Work.” MTM: 'Quality Television'. Ed. Jane Feuer et al. British Film Institute, 1985.

Beirne, Rebecca. “Introduction.” Televising Queer Women: A Reader. Ed. Rebecca Beirne. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Identity in Feminist Television Criticism.” Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader. Ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D'Acci, & Lynn Spigel. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Busse, Kristina. “semi-public spaces and attention economy.” Ephemeral Traces 11 May 2007. 25 Jun 2008 {http://kbusse.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/semi-public-spaces-and-attention-economy/}.

Chonin, Neva. “With hot 'Law & Order' squad's focus on sex crime, suddenly everybody's watching the detectives.” San Francisco Chronicle 23 Mar 2005. 17 Jun 2008 {http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/23/DDGHTBSLLF1.DTL}.

Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Ed. Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse. McFarland & Company, 2006.

Cuklanz, Lisa M. Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Feuer, Jane. “Narrative Form in American Network Television.” High Theory/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film. Ed. Colin MacCabe. Palgrave Macmillan, 1986.

Fiske, John. “Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience.” Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power. Ed. Ellen Seiter et al. Routledge, 1991.

Hastie, Amelie. “The Epistemological Stakes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Television Criticism and Marketing Demands.” Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. Elana Levine & Lisa Parks. Duke University Press, 2007.

Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. McFarland & Company, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Television: The Critical View. Ed. Horace Newcomb. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Jones, Sara Gwenllian. “Starring Lucy Lawless?” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 14.1 (2000): 9-22.

---. “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters.” Screen 43.1 (2002): 79-90.

Joyrich, Lynne. “Epistemology of the Console.” Critical Inquiry 27.3 (2001): 439-467.

---. Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture. Indiana University Press, 1996.

Lentz, Kirsten Marthe. “Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television.” Camera Obscura 15.43 (2000): 45-93.

Lothian, Alexis, Kristina Busse, and Robin Anne Reid. “'Yearning Void and Infinite Potential': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space .” English Language Notes 42.5 (2007): 103-111.

Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. NYU Press, 2001.

Rabinovitz, Lauren. “Ms.-Representation: The Politics of Feminist Sitcoms.” Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays. Ed. Lauren Rabinovitz & Mary Beth Haralovich. Duke University Press, 1999.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.

Spigel, Lynn. “The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Post-War America.” Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader. Ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D'Acci, & Lynn Spigel. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Streeter, Thomas, and Wendy Wahl. “Audience Theory and Feminism: Property, Gender, and the Television Audience.” Camera Obscura 33/34 (1994): 243-261.

Torres, Sasha. “Television/Feminism: HeartBeat and Prime Time Lesbianism.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, David M. Halperin, & Michele Aina Barale. Routledge, 1993.

Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Stanford University Press, 1996.

II/4/. My Girlfriend Olivia

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:54:03 GMT

After previewing selections from the original version of this chapter while it was a work in progress, Sally Forth jokingly told me that she "Can't wait to get to the 'Olivia is really gay' part" (personal correspondence [email], 26 June 2004). Needless to say, there is no such part: my analysis has not solved any of the enigmas of the closet, whether on the axis straight/gay, TV/internet, or its other intertwined polarities. The price to be paid for such complexity is a refusal of the sort of politics of representation that Sally Forth rousingly renders:

In order to be free, we must be seen... For this reason, the struggle to become visible has been part of every civil rights movement in this country. Conservatives are constantly fighting against the realistic portrayal of gays and lesbians in the media. By making us invisible, they can define us, control us, and stop us from fully participating in this culture... It is why the closet is so destructive.

While this call can be deployed strategically, the threshold of hidden/visible is itself caught up in the closet's structural logic. As the case of Olivia Benson demonstrates, seeing a lesbian on television is far from a simple procedure, and what looks like a "realistic portrayal" is contingent on localized viewing strategies. Because visuality seems to promise transparency, I have elided it, here, in favor of the density of textual hermeneutics. In the epistemological labyrinth of subtext (the diegetic zone of connotation), extratext (the program's outside, so far as it is delineable), paratext (its official framing materials), metatext (its nebula of ancillary knowledge), and intertext (its promiscuous network of connections), I root some of the irrepressible fertility of the closet. If the "private eyes" of my title are watching, they do so in ways that cross the borders of both privacy and seeing, performing detective work that illuminates a tangled ecology of meaning, power, and desire. The closet is their terrain, and despite its oppressive fickleness I'd venture that it generates as well as conceals truths, opens as well as closes doors. This is perhaps little consolation, though, to the bitter fans who called for Olivia to come out, struggling with TPTB over ownership of her image.

My traitorous restraint in refusing this opportunity to return a verdict in their favor does little to settle the critic/fan conundrum, either. As my own rejoinder to those who insist on enforcing Olivia's heterosexuality, my work here is conceived as engaging rather than merely commenting on this expansive and interactive battleground. Posted online since mid-2004 as a node in the diffuse matrix of Olivia fandom, this article too has permeable boundaries, and is open to wanton intersections and to continual reconfiguration. Thus if, in one sense, I've created a colossal tease for those who may wish to prove conclusively that Olivia is a lesbian, in another, this ardent critique has been the supreme erotic encounter between Olivia (my fellow detective) and I, in defiance of the frontier dividing the real world from the one on the (TV or computer) screen -- and what could be more substantial evidence that Olivia swings my way than that? Nonetheless, it remains unclear how Olivia can be my girlfriend within an academic project, or how such a project can satisfy fandom's desires. Part of the puzzle is differentiating serious work from salacious leisure, a margin that late capitalism renders ever more coy. The explicit incorporation of fan labor into the media industry undermines the distinction between professional and amateur production, which debunks the fantasy that consumers inhabit an entirely separate sphere from producers. Following a contrasting strategic imaginary, it can be in the promotional interest of creators to present themselves as familiar with (and to) fandom. Meanwhile, as consumer engagement is increasingly valued, the importance of desire as an interface between media commodities and their reception, as a form of productivity in itself, comes to the fore. The industrial escalation of television's identity crisis makes it imperative to consider the confluences between outside and inside, public and private, reality and fiction that lend the libidinal economies of slash and its closets their powerful vitality.

II/. Private Eyes

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:30:38 GMT

Let me introduce you to Olivia Benson: a dedicated yet personally tormented detective who investigates sex crimes in New York City, sporting a deadly weapon, a leather jacket, and a short haircut. She's hopelessly in love with assistant district attorney Alexandra Cabot, who prosecutes her cases -- they're each others' domestic partners, occasional lovers, or secret crushes, depending on who is telling the story. That is, these individuals are fictional characters on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), and the question of whether Olivia could be Alex's (or anyone's) girlfriend is a particularly contested one across online SVU fandom: some fans are determined to claim her as gay, while others insist that she's straight. While there is clearly intense investment on both sides in definitively verifying the answer, there is at the same time significant confusion about the proper source of the necessary evidence: text, subtext, or metatext. In this chapter, I chronicle the inquests of three detectives with parallel mandates to uncover the truths of desire: the TV character, who is hot on the trail of New York City's sex offenders; the SVU fan, who watches the show vigilantly for clues to who is in Olivia's heart and in her bed; and the television scholar, who is fascinated by these epistemological conundrums, driven to investigate how we might know things about television, about audiences, and about sexuality. I maintain that the projects of these three detectives are intertwined in multivalent networks that link knowledge, desire, and spectatorship across diverse registers. Within this intertextual architecture, the question of whether Olivia is "really" a lesbian is inextricable from broader ambiguities that infuse the conflicted relations between texts and audiences, academics and fans, gender and consumption, hermeneutics and erotics.

My own romance with Olivia Benson began with a chance conversation at my local coffeeshop that catalyzed an addiction to USA's nightly SVU reruns. Because of my preexisting fluency in subtextual viewing protocols, the availability of the Olivia/Alex dyad transformed SVU, for me, into a compelling nexus of speculation, imagination, and desire. Olivia and Alex are indeed a power couple of female slash fandom, one among a scattered pantheon of classic OTPs: One True Pairing that certain media seem to invite us to recognize by portraying a profound (if not explicitly romantic) relationship between two characters (an archetype that, in the world of femslash, does not much predate Xena: Warrior Princess). My personal engagement with their saga depends on the contingencies that shape television viewership -- daily routines, a fortuitous meeting, and the topographies of social networks and lesbian subcultures (both on- and offline) -- demonstrating how interpretations of (and libidinal encounters with) SVU the program are entangled with internet fandom and with everyday life. Television criticism often leans toward one or the other side of the border separating diegetic content from audience reception, examining one territory in relative isolation. Here, I attempt to plot the intersections between screen text and fan text, taking them as mutually constitutive. This process incorporates the disintegration of a number of linked binaries, since the indeterminacy of inside/outside or gay/straight impinges on the stability of private/public, fiction/reality, fan/critic, leisure/work, and other oppositions. Crucial among them is the rapidly dissolving frontier between television and the internet, which brings the interdependence of TV producers and consumers ever more out into the open.

The subtext of my argument is the notion that television is itself in the closet about its digital tendencies, largely as a defense mechanism for preserving broadcast's profit models and margins. Like the question so often posed about Olivia -- "is she or isn't she?" -- the question "is it or isn't it TV?" has high stakes in hierarchical economies of power, and is addressed with a parallel coyness. Moreover, these taxonomic teases are interlaced as well as analogous: as slash fandom becomes increasingly visible and pervasive, under conditions of increasingly competitive and diffuse distribution and attention, its cultivation (or at least negotiation) takes on increasing importance as an industrial strategy. Convergence, in other words, is queer, in content as well as in form. In this milieu, my analysis consists not of cracking the case of Olivia Benson where the aforementioned detectives remain stymied, but rather of mapping the specifically televisual limits that circumscribe their inquiries, especially at the hazardous junctions of epistemological endeavors, erotic investments, and capitalist economics. I can offer no incontrovertible proof that Olivia is a lesbian, no stable hierarchy of meaning among text, subtext, and metatext: any evidence that might be tendered is always already ensnared in the vortex of the closet, wherein the secret truths of (homo)sexuality are simultaneously exposed and effaced in relentless fluctuations between binary poles. What I present here is the more nuanced claim that Olivia is the fulcrum of an apparatus of lesbian desire that operates at the volatile interchanges permeating these geographies, including those that constitute television as a mass medium. Given television's interpenetration with its social context, with online paratexts, with the competencies and orientations of its viewers, the desires and procedures of my three detectives (the character, the fan, and the critic) mirror and structure each other in their pursuit of a verdict. I maintain that it is ultimately in such irresolvable enigmas that the most fruitful prospects for knowledge, passion, and profit lie.

II/3/C Reality/Fiction

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:54:22 GMT

The fluctuating topology of television's text and metatext, denotation and connotation, canon and fanon is a conceptual challenge to sexuality as an epistemological project, but it also intrudes quite concretely at the points of contact between the territories of production and consumption on either side of the screen. I have already noted television's formal and historical inclination, as a medium which endeavors to be coextensive with everyday life, to unfocus comfortable demarcations of all sorts; Jane Feuer writes that "Television as an ideological apparatus strives to break down any barriers between the fictional diegesis, the advertising diegesis, and the diegesis of the viewing family, finding it advantageous to assume all three are one and the same" (105). The commercial advantage of this blurring of fiction and reality, always manifested in the flow between programs and commercials and between programs and behind-the-scenes gossip and personalities, becomes increasingly conspicuous as the internet renders the perspectives of fans and media professionals increasingly accessible to each other. The San Francisco Chronicle infamously reported that "[SVU executive producer Neal] Baer admits tweaking fans with veiled references to Sapphic love. 'We read the fan sites. We know that people are into the Alex-Olivia thing. All the codes are in there'" (Chonin), a confession that is less interesting as an outright legitimization of "subtext" than as a junction in the ongoing course of Olivia-centric negotiations across shifting valences of textual meaning and power. The fourth wall was even more dramatically breached when, after her tremendous investment in analyzing Olivia, Sally Forth contacted portraying actress Mariska Hargitay to share her commentary: Hargitay responded directly, and allowed Sally to post a synopsis of their phone interview on her web page. Such close encounters between the organs of fan production and the organs of media production are a corollary of the industry's intensifying attention to modes and sites of fannish engagement.

Among Hargitay's "candid and sincere" answers: "She greatly appreciates all the mail she receives, including the letters from gay viewers who relate to Olivia Benson... It saddens her to think she has hurt anyone's feelings... The fact that Olivia is seen as ambiguous is interesting because her character clearly engages the viewers' imagination" (Forth #answers). Her apologia alludes to the background of the 2004 conversation: a comment Hargitay made on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in April 2003 that turned out to be a PR blunder (one that addressing the fandom via Sally Forth might rectify). During the Conan interview, Hargitay expressed what some took to be homophobic discomfort with aspersions cast on her own heterosexuality by lesbian readings of Olivia. The phenomenon to which she there reacted -- a certain slippage between Olivia's character persona and Mariska's star persona -- relies on a multifaceted intersection of real and fictional worlds:

SVU's positioning as a drama that engages social issues "ripped from the headlines" with sensationalized realism (no doubt one reason why many rape victims contact Hargitay, which led her to include extensive sexual assault resources and information on her personal web page {http://mariska.com/resources/});
particular parallels between Mariska's and Olivia's personal lives (until the point, not long before this appearance, when the former began publicly dating a male actor, who she later married and had a child with while continuing her role on SVU): both were single workaholics whose careers seemingly kept them too busy for a relationship;
persistent rumors that Hargitay is herself in the closet, which are perhaps especially compelling to fans seeking "real" evidence about Olivia's orientation;
SVU's aforementioned detective training program: if we accept the procedural's premise that the truth must be precisely what is not visible at first glance, following Olivia's trail routinely leads to probing for the real person behind her.

The Conan incident, in this broader context of actor/character intermixture, catalyzed a conspiracy theory that a fan community elaborated collectively over SVU's ensuing seasons. They hypothesized that the explanation for a pronounced transformation in Olivia's gender presentation was a systematic "de-dykefication" orchestrated by Hargitay (among the clues catalogued: the lengthening of Olivia's near-crewcut through awkward stages of dyed and hairsprayed shags, mullets, and bobs; fake tanning and other unfortunate skin treatments; plot contrivances that called for Olivia to dress up in high-femme "drag"; an overall shift to more feminine fashions; the advent of equally feminized character traits, such as baby-craziness and emotional outbursts dubbed "unpretty crying"; increasing threat of "manvils" [clumsily manufactured boyfriends or exes]; even a noticeable change in the way Olivia walks). While we cannot solve the mystery of the motives behind what amounted to an assault on the character beloved by lesbian fandom, fans' arguments for a guilty verdict are themselves evidence of a volatile collision of instabilities and inequalities around television's deployment of the subtextual closet, exacerbated in an era when its own identity is increasingly suspect.

If, in its early days, slash was sometimes condemned as "character rape," for fans of "butch" Olivia her feminization was the true violence, and their vehement expressions of rage and betrayal were commensurate with such an atrocity. In a "rant" on the subject, one LiveJournaler captures the intractable, intolerable position that results:

I really feel that the consumption of fandom has changed my opinions. Because, while reading these MH [Mariska Hargitay] articles, seeing the pictures, I get the picture of a woman who's trying to reclaim ownership of her character from the fans who see the character as gay. There is no separation between actor and character... And it pisses me off because Olivia Benson is NOT the property of Mariska Hargitay. Once those little images leave the cathode ray clutter, it becomes the property of the audience. (trancer21) {http://trancer21.livejournal.com/8081.html?format=light}

In other words, the entanglement of "actor and character" is itself inextricable from the entanglement of "cathode ray" and audience that generates interpretive concords about Olivia and Mariska's text and paratext, and these epistemological snarls are in turn ensnared in the economics of the industry. For Olivia is certainly not "the property of the audience" proportionally to her status as property within the apparatus of corporate ownership, buttressed by the legal mechanism of copyright and the system of mass distribution and financing. However, the devices of ownership are still unable to contain her in these bounds, and in keeping with the futility of binary enclosure, the siege of Olivia onscreen stimulated an efflorescence of "snark" (sarcastic criticism) online. Following the conjecture that elements of Mariska Hargitay's persona were forcibly grafted onto Olivia Benson, much of it lampooned the resulting monstrous mutant: Oliska Hargenson. As far as I can tell, this portmanteau was coined as the punch-line of the parodic fanfic "It Ain't Her" by newbie_2u {http://community.livejournal.com/ob_fangrrl/217186.html}, which features Detectives Munch and Tutuola investigating Olivia's apparent disappearance. It is an example of a smattering of "meta" stories treating this theme, and others often refigure the extratextual battle fans framed in terms of Olivia vs. Mariska as an angst-ridden erotic drama of Olivia/Mariska. One rendition reverses the familiar hierarchy, portraying Olivia as the stronger and realer double, and Mariska as the television viewer who falls prey to her charms:

She grew Olivia out, strand by re-touched strand. She tried to stop herself from disappearing, as she felt the camera draw her inside it... But she still felt herself fading. Watching Olivia, failing to see herself, falling helplessly in love with her possessor... Mariska was afraid to sleep. She was afraid that she wanted Olivia to find her. Afraid of her dreams that bled into reality. (giantessmess) {http://community.livejournal.com/ob_fangrrl/197094.html}

Here, it is Olivia who "possesses" Mariska, in both spectral and propertied senses, infiltrating "reality" with uncanny spectacle. It is not incidental that the memetic conspiracy in which these artifacts participate was largely located in a LiveJournal community: this and comparable distributed, interactive web networks haunt television like fanon Olivia haunts Mariska, perturbing the economies of corporate possession. In this context, paranoia on both sides about Mariska and Olivia commingling seems well-founded: today, TV's existence depends on its interpenetration with fan fictions.

II/3/B Straight/Gay

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:06:51 GMT

As in the instance of the Olivia/Alex Shipper's Manifesto, it is online fandom's technological substrate that capacitates particular registers in the open casefile on Olivia Benson's sexuality. Although SVU fans of various orientations display an intense investment in definitively determining the truth, there is significant confusion about where to locate legitimate evidence. The hermeneutic uncertainties of fan discourse parallel those vexing scholarly discourse (to the extent that these domains are distinct), revolving around the axes between television's inside and outside, knowledges private and public, and media producers and consumers. Given the indeterminacy of the borders of both heterosexuality and textuality, there is little hope of closing the case once and for all, but the inquests and debates can illuminate the prolific operations of the closet. While social networking interfaces tend to gather like-minded fans to discuss a loose cloud of topics, more linear message boards may invite heterogeneous fans to discuss a clearly defined topic, and as such are a platform where such debates almost inevitably erupt.

One notable thread, on the officially sponsored yet largely anarchic SVU board at USA Network's web site (the program airs on USA in syndication), can serve as an example of the vehemence and complexity of the testimonies mobilized in attepmts to prove that Olivia is gay or straight {http://web.archive.org/web/20040720081022/http://63.240.52.141/ubb/usa/html/ubb/Forum24/HTML/000155.html (the usanetwork.com forums have since undergone a redesign, and content prior to 2005 is no longer available; unfortunately the second page of this discussion is not archived)}. It begins with a cautious, open-ended query by mariskafans: "So, would anyone be too terribly offended if Olivia started dating a girl?" Tellingly, the question is immediately transmuted into a dispute over Olivia's probable sexual orientation. Some fans consider only the most explicit textual citations admissible as evidence, and say so quite emphatically:

dtobe2008
She is DEFINITELY straight. There have been many episodes where she's had a date with a man and you've seen a few.
teresa985
The fact that she's dated men before on the show, and no women, leads me to believe that she's straight. Unless she flat out says: "I'm dating a woman" or something of that nature, I'm not going to believe she's a lesbian.

Others respond to this literalism by pointing out the inherently partial picture of Olivia's desires that the screen text offers, alongside the possibility of a less rigidly binary sexuality:

Bekster
We don't know that she's straight -- she's mentioned a significant other, what, once? She could definitely be bisexual, which would be great, she's gorgeous!
Kloie
And... just because a girl's slept with men doesn't necessarily mean she's straight. lol

This tactic is then countered with references to extratextual gossip (the avowed heterosexuality of Mariska Hargitay, who portrays Olivia) and TV industry logics (the imperative to appeal to a mass audience and remain within the program's formal constraints):

svu junkie
They will never make Olivia gay 'cause her heterosexuality has already been established. If she decided to 'jump the fence' then they would have to focus on her personal life and we all know they would NEVER do this!! Heck... the show's been on 5 years and we've seen the interior of Olivia's apt. ...what...maybe once??
SVUFreak107
OMG YOU GUYS ARE CRAZY!!! Mariska/Olivia is not gay no matter what it will just screw up her image in real life and no one will like her. It will take people away from teh show not to it!!!

A later poster objects on political grounds, lamenting the casualties of the closet's gendered double-binds:

SVUAddict
I find it very frustrating when females who are strong and assertive immediately get labeled lesbians. Yes, Olivia is tough and independent, but she's also straight and I've grown tired -- in my own life and in Hollywood -- of seeing powerful women labeled as gay. To me, at least, it undermines the potential of straight women to possess these characteristics.

Meanwhile, what is perhaps the most fascinating response overtly describes the influence of fan production on Olivia's hypothesized sexual orientation:

Munchz Hunch
as far as olivia and being gay goes, the only reason i ever thought she WAS gay was because of all the fan fics about her BEING gay! that was what made me question her sexuality... people write fan fics from what they got off the show, and i havent seen every episode, not even CLOSE, so i was wondering after reading those fics if they [Olivia and Alex, etc.] truly WERE gay couples on the show. but that was put to rest after seeing her with cassidy ["Closure"] and with that reporter dude ["The Third Guy"]... so i have had my suspicions, but they were all eventually cleared up.

In this viewer's hierarchy, fan fiction has substantial authority in the investigation of Olivia's sexuality because it is written by those with particular expertise in reading television's signals. However, diegetic verification trumps these fan interpretations, providing a stable resolution to the mystery (at least if one conveniently overlooks the option of bisexuality, as noted above). When priority is given to clues located inside the television text, the implication is that, if some are arriving at the wrong verdict, their viewing strategies must be perverse or deluded. Spank puts this dismissal most succinctly: "This is ridiculous... You lot look for things that aren't there."

Far from the message board debate in both degree and kind, one fan under the pseudonym Sally Forth composed an elaborate riposte to these sorts of scornful reactions to the proposition that Olivia isn't quite straight{http://web.archive.org/web/20060423012451/http://www.sallyforth.info/}. Her exhaustive, expansive, and often excessive "rave," rendered as a rudimentary static web page, is an idiosyncratic and remarkable document of vernacular theory, detailing her observations and arguments concerning Olivia's intimacies with lesbian desire through both textual analysis and broader political critique. Covering everything from obscure inside jokes to the moral, legal, and conceptual battles over social issues like gay visibility and same-sex marriage, Sally's content and links manifest her engagement with fan and media networks even in the absence of technical interactivity. Confirming that "On every SVU-related message board I've seen, the issue of Olivia's sexual preference comes up at some point," she gripes that "Any time I posted that Olivia might be gay or bi, well, let me say, I got my ass kicked. 'You're crazy. That scene / look / action / appearance could mean anything. Olivia Benson is not gay. Get over it!'" Sally, like some of the posters quoted above, is not optimistic about the prospect of Olivia coming out within the constraints of commercial television, writing, "IMHO, TPTB will keep Olivia as she is. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. That is the only way to avoid alienating any fans." But she nonetheless champions the integrity of spectatorial practices, asserting that "The whole point behind subtext is that people can enjoy the show however they wish, without having someone tell them that they're wrong or reading things into the show that aren't there." Her claims are not based solely on a revaluation of fan readings, however: she supports this call for interpretive pluralism with a humorous but meticulously impartial account of the textual "evidence" on both sides of the question "is she or isn't she?" (making the case that those who consider the inquest over at the first glimpse of an onscreen boyfriend just aren't looking hard enough). That is, though she self-identifies as a lesbian fan, for Sally too the figure of Olivia's lesbianism is a shifting jumble of diegetic references and absences, audience competencies and investments, industrial conditions, and political context that is not easily stabilized (and at the same time not easily dismissed). Both ephemeral online discussions and Sally's more concerted manifesto are artifacts of fans' struggle with the complexity and contradictions of the project of representing or locating lesbian desire in the televisual landscape -- its frustrations and its inexhaustibly generative potential.

II/3/A Television/Internet

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:01:34 GMT

Such boundary confusions are figured in fiction, but they are more than just a metaphor. The unreliability of its own perimeter was a founding condition of television: because "experts of the period [the 1950s] agreed that the modern home should blur distinctions between inside and outside spaces," as Lynne Spigel notes, "television was the ideal companion for these suburban homes" (212-213). At the same time, this ambiguity was the source of acute "anxieties," as "popular media expressed uncertainty about the distinction between real and electrical space" (219). In his essay "Television: Set and Screen," Sam Weber theorizes that, "by definition, television takes place in at least three places at once" (117): the places of production, of reception, and the "in between" place of transmission. Television's tendency to perforate and compromise the frontiers between discrete spaces, generating contradictory overlaps and simultaneities, only intensifies with media convergence. Resolution to the enigma of where diegetic authority stops and audience interpretation begins is frustrated by design, as promotional paratexts further erode the circumference of the text, interactive network websites that of the medium, and fansites that of the corporate brand.

Thus, the mystery "is she or isn't she?" is inextricable from the mystery of what television itself is: if we can't determine the latter, evidence for the former will never be stable, rendering convergence a closet brimming with speculation and creativity. Just as television technology -- the signal's perpetual transmission through the walls of the home, the scanning beam or pixels that only simulate a fixed image -- is central to the difficulty of confirming its limits, the internet platforms of television fandom are integral its border wars. In her "Brief History of Media Fandom," Francesca Coppa observes that, from the 1990s, "The movement of fandom online, as well as an increasingly customizable experience, moved slash fandom out into the mainstream" (54), making it more influential in both the production and consumption of mass media. In an initial shift from Usenet, "mailing lists customized fandom by allowing fans to select from among their fannish interests, [then] blogs such as LiveJournal.com... began to be widely adopted across fandom around 2003, where it caused a wide-scale reorganization of fandom infrastructure" (57). Law & Order: SVU, which has aired from 1999 to the present, spanned this transition, which is a factor in the varied geography of its slash following: a compendium of links to author pages, Yahoo mailing lists, LiveJournal communities, multimedia archives, and official web sites at {http://xenawp.org/svu} offers some sense of the broad scope of slash activity around Olivia (pairing her with Alex as well as other female SVU characters).

One artifact that captures the vitality of this network is Cabenson's magnum opus "The Case of the Butch and the Blonde" {http://ship-manifesto.livejournal.com/43570.html}. Written for the LiveJournal community The Shipper's Manifesto (short for "relationshipper"), which invites essays introducing the rationale for and appraisal of a couple in any fandom, this Olivia/Alex handbook provides an invaluable chronicle of the interpretive practices of lesbian-identified viewers. Cabenson's extensive acknowledgements of others' contributions of "feedback, information, and time" (as well as illustrations) reveal the collaborative labor and passion that goes into narrating Olivia and Alex's romance. The post, framed by the community's administrative architecture and with pages of feedback, displays the affordances of LiveJournal's interface, which allows for longer-form and multithreaded discussion (in comparison to a bulletin board or mailing list), relying on the username as a personal space and identity. Nonetheless, Cabenson also thanks the denizens of Television Without Pity (or TWoP, an irreverent TV clearinghouse that hosts a popular SVU forum) and elsewhere, while her manifesto is mirrored at a popular static archive {http://ralst.com/Manifestos.html} and included in the ship_manifesto community's off-LJ search engine. Thus, while sympathetic fans have evidently clustered in an intimate nexus, it is one with fluid margins, and at least in the case of SVU, the walls between LiveJournal slashers and other factions are low. Cabenson demonstrates even more meticulously the porousness between the television diegesis and online fanworks: humorously formulating a legal argument, she presents the "evidence" for Olivia and Alex's lesbian relationship as an encyclopedic catalogue of subtly homoerotic onscreen moments, collectively compiled by a squad of fan investigators and annotated with the fanonical readings that cobble them into an epic love story (complete with links to relevant fan fiction stories alongside the screencaps in the "defense exhibit"). Finally, the personal anecdote with which Cabenson opens ("All Rise for the Honorable Cabenson"), as per ship_manifesto conventions, offers a snapshot of a trajectory of fannish desire via cultural and technological cartographies: finding SVU via familiar femslash OTPs at a seminal multifandom archive, passing through search engines to concentrated Law & Order femslash and the TWoP discussions, and catching up on the show only after-the-fact with USA's reruns. Cabenson's backstory illustrates the increasingly typical pattern of experiencing a television program as subsequent and subordinate to the online interpretive community surrounding it. Her essay serves, in turn, as a central precinct for evangelizing new fans of SVU and the Olivia/Alex pairing. Such complex, protean fan formations indicate that the straight/gay closet is symbiotic with the television/internet closet, revealing that the success of the ostensibly discrete screen text owes more to its unacknowledged subtext and fan text than TPTB would perhaps care to admit.

II/3/. Is She or Isn't She? Olivia vs. Oliska

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:00:11 GMT

MARISKA: A week ago, I'm walking down Seventh Ave. [...] and all of a sudden this guy yells, [...] "Damn! I thought you were a lesbian!"
CONAN: Really? Because of your character [Olivia Benson] on the show?
MARISKA: Yes, everyone thinks that, and I don't know why.
(Mariska Hargitay on Late Night with Conan O'Brien [April 2003], transcribed/quoted by Angie B. at AfterEllen.com)

"Held Within the Beat of Your Heart" is only one node in a vast matrix of textual production, and while I have selected it as an exemplar, all SVU slash to some degree engages the circulation of sexuality across variable strata. In an influential early essay, Henry Jenkins demonstrates the tangled intersections between three hermeneutic levels in a reading of early debates about Kirk/Spock slash that revolved around it's "plausibility." In contention here is the proper equilibrium at the inside/outside nexus: how much responsibility fan writers have to "textual fidelity" from within versus how much leeway they have to "transform" the "primary text" from without (a dispute rendered in fan jargon as "canon" versus "fanon"). Fought on a muddy middle ground where "all fan writing necessarily involves an appropriation of series characters and a reworking of program concepts" (467), this sparring over whether to privilege onscreen or offscreen knowledge, or how even to draw the border between the two, will never yield an undisputed victor. Ultimately, Jenkins concludes that "The reason some fans reject K/S fiction has, in the end, less to do with the stated reason that it violates established characterization than with unstated beliefs about the nature of human sexuality that determine what types of character conduct can be viewed as plausible" (468). In other words, a verdict in Olivia's case could only be provisionally negotiated among three epistemologically incommensurate but inseparable layers: screen texts, fan texts, and the social context that mediates between them.

However, Jenkins's study skirts the question of what elements of the text itself open up (or close down) queer interpretive spaces, taking Star Trek's explicit portrayal of Kirk and Spock as devoted yet platonic companions as given. Sara Gwenllian Jones critiques this tendency in "The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters," pointing out that "In such formulations, slash is interpreted as 'resistant' or 'subversive' because it seems deliberately to ignore or overrule clear textual messages indicating characters' heterosexuality" (81). As such, these analyses are trapped, like the disdainful reactions to slash fiction that Jenkins evaluates, in the homophobia of "a wider cultural logic [that] dictates that heterosexuality can be assumed while homosexuality must be proved" (81). Jones asserts, rather, that slash is "an actualization of latent textual elements" (82). In another article on Xena: Warrior Princess, she elaborates on the theory that connotative clues, or "heteroglossic cultural references which are easily read one way by queer viewers and quite differently by heterosexuals unfamiliar with the queer lexicon" (19), are a deliberate component of the TV industry's market strategy. This perspective relies on a more nuanced understanding of television as a textual form (she is specifically describing "cult television series," but I'd maintain that similar conditions are characteristic of TV in general): "There is always a deficit between what is (or can be) shown and what the avid audience wants to see, explore, develop and know... It is this deficit between what is presented on screen and what is implied or omitted that cult television formats exploit in order to enthrall viewers" (13). In other words, the diverse pleasures fans glean from imaginatively filling in what their favorite shows formally and strategically leave out is a crucial element of marketability. In this sense, Olivia's chronically boyfriend- and girlfriend-less condition is an impetus of SVU's popularity, as it stimulates much of the speculation and argumentation that swirls around her.

The dynamism of these colliding registers is also apparent in the aforementioned article about Olivia at AfterEllen.com, which corroborates her status as a popular lesbian icon. Angie B. observes smugly that, "While the producers might not understand why a strong androgynous female character works better without a boyfriend, we do." With these connotative tactics in mind, she is less inclined to privilege onscreen evidence: "What little we have seen of Olivia's romantic life has led us to believe she's straight, but the fact that those references are few and far between makes it easier for viewers to speculate about the character's sexuality." Instead, she reverse engineers Olivia's lesbian desire from the proof of fans' desires, to which "almost 200 stories, across at least 30 websites and mailing lists with sections devoted to the examination and expansion of the show's subtext" attest (years later, the numbers are far greater). If this many people see it, the argument goes, there must be something there to see. At the same time, this is at best an ambiguous brand of visibility, and for Angie B. too "subtext" points toward social inequalities: "It may be an indication of how far we need to go in the portrayal of lesbians and bisexual women on television that viewers get excited about a character like Benson despite no clear evidence that she's gay." The dilemma of the vitality of connotation versus the politics of denotation can never be resolved, because it is itself caught up in the closet's aporias, as the homophobic social field structures what differently positioned viewers can and can't see. As an active fan penning a journalistic account, Angie B. (and AfterEllen.com overall) thwarts the critic/fan border as well, further destabilizing authoritative knowledge. In this section, I will explore how vernacular discourses arguing the case of Olivia Benson promiscuously intersect the structuring oppositions of sexuality and television alike.

Hera Has Six Mommies: THE VID

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:52:17 GMT

It is with immeasurable awe, pride, and jubilation that I announce the birth of
Hera Has Six Mommies by tallulah71
a Battlestar Galactica fanvid that I commissioned through Sweet Charity.
{ feedback | download | stream }

I. CONCEPTION
For those who don't know, Sweet Charity is a cyclical auction wherein fans can bid on the creative services of other fans to raise money for a non-profit organization (in this case, the Writers Guild Foundation Industry Support Fund, as I won tallulah71 in January during the WGA strike benefit).

This project came into being when I got the official notification of my winning bid, and in turn emailed "ho" tallulah71 enumerating my BSG femslash fanvids wishlist. Here's an excerpt:

HI I AM DYING OF SQUEE! this is, like, my ultimate Sweet Charity fantasy -- I seriously cannot believe I actually managed to buy you. in case you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of your vids, and plus I'm thrilled to have an occasion to donate to this cause. so thank you!! [...]

- Hera Has Six (or more) Mommies!
OK, this is the vid of my wildest dreams, and a concept that I think is especially well-suited to your artistic and intellectual skills and approach. it's also potentially quite ambitious. it's the story of the alternative kinship networks that coalesce around Hera, and how various configurations of women learn to love each other through being her family (Helo and Gaius can potentially come too). it has one strand tracing the lineage of Cylon mommies (from Athena, to Caprica and Gaius and/or Boomer around the whole "Downloaded" upheaval, to Caprica and Three, to Boomer, and back to Athena) and one strand about the Laura/Maya/Tory love triangle. it's partly an epic romance and partly an apocalyptic battle for the future of humanity, and I elaborated on my picture of it in the talk I wrote for Mary McDonnell! which I'd be very happy for you to read or listen to if you're willing. another fan [carla_scribbles] passed along to me a song I LOVE for this, which is a mashup by Wax Audio...

More than five months later, I can take no credit for any of the remarkable artistry evident in the vid that evolved. I let tallulah71 loose with my notes to generate the narrative, not to mention the stunning visuals, as inspiration dictated. However, it was my great pleasure and privilege to collaborate with her in an intense and often magical betaing process. I returned extensive feedback on three distinct drafts, co-parenting it toward what I hope is the most lucid and elegant communication of this story/interpretation. I couldn't overstate how breathtaking it was to witness the show *I* watch take shape fully onscreen. My betas, friends, and vidding co-conspirators heyiya and beccatoria were likewise invaluable midwives, bringing fresh eyes to the project. Of the many priceless gifts fandom has given me, this vid is the most acutely astounding, and I love it with a ferocity that befits the miracle of bringing something new into the world. I cannot even begin to quantify how much I got more than my money's worth.

II. GESTATION
Recent months have seen intensifying discussions about the modus operandi of vidding (historically and in its contemporary transformations), particularly giandujakiss's musings on the perceived relationships between vids as visual arguments and their written paratexts. In light of this debate, I wanted to weigh in on how I understand the articulation between this collaborative artwork and my more academic projects. Although tallulah71 read an essay of mine on this topic as part of its development, I would not take the vid that emerged as based on, illustrative of, or otherwise subordinate to that document.

Hera Has Six Mommies, for that matter, is far more than an essay: it is what I might call a lens for focusing the all-consuming experience that is my love for this show, which has infiltrated vast reaches of my heart, mind, and body. This focus has coalesced in a variety of tangible iterations in my work over the years, from a talk to a chapter; from a ficlet to a drawing. The essay and the vid alike grow out of this reservoir of obsessive, inexhaustible desire and vitality.

In fact, if I had to hierarchize these artifacts, I'd say it's the vid that is their ultimate apotheosis. I can write endlessly about the technologies of seeing that Battlestar Galactica incites us to cultivate. But here I can instead USE those technologies to SEE, in it's brevity and purity, and take you with me to the show.

III. DELIVERY
I wouldn't call "Hera Has Six Mommies" a meta vid or a political vid or an experimental vid. Though it is a bit of an experiment in slash ensemble rather than couple storytelling, mostly it's your traditional interpretive vid. But if there's nonetheless a meta-level of allegory here (and isn't there always?), it's that we fans are the collective of lesbian mommies who conceive and nurture illegitimate offspring as a labor of love, the queer families who originate a mongrel brood that, like Hera, is part of "the shape of things to come." Hera is our vids, our art, our fics, our hybrids -- the harbinger of a new dawn or a final apocalypse, depending on how you look at it.

"Hera Has Six Mommies" has at least four mommies, and creating it within a cooperative kinship network did feel a little like making a baby, complete with its own erotics and marvels. But really, we can't stop counting there, with the vidder and the videe and the betas, because it was a whole community of femslashers who parented this progeny, who produced the branching lineages that link the women of Battlestar Galactica, via variable couplings and intertexts, into a lesbian family tree. For that reason, I invite all of you to join its geneology and to celebrate its birth.

Please forgive my rhapsodizing -- like every mother, perhaps, my own little one seems to me like the most wondrous exemplar of its kind!

II/2/C Rape/Romance

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:15:02 GMT

Most importantly, my discussion of "Sacrifice" outlines the hermeneutic strategies that are the currency of SVU's onscreen detectives but also of the competencies of its audience. That is, by relentlessly thematizing the investigation of desire through watching for signs, searching for clues, interrogating recalcitrant suspects, and fabricating plausible stories to fit the evidence, SVU is training its viewers to do the same. I've argued that the suggestion of Olivia's lesbianism is insistently activated by the gendered logics of televisual representation overall, and their interpenetration with the precarious homo/hetero binary. And I've argued that SVU as a text demonstrates this topography in its narratives, which symptomatically interweave the quest for truth and justice with the search for the elusive frontier where normal sexuality and relationships cross into deviance, perversion, and violence, where private acts and desires cross into the public discourse of crime and the televisual spectacularization and commodification of sex. Additionally, I'm claiming here that SVU actively invites its viewers to scrutinize these contradictory fields of overlap for the illicit specters that haunt them -- its marketability depends, after all, on the pleasure of learning the ways of sex detectives. Given a series whose premise is discovering clandestine sexual transgressions, how can we not be ever-vigilant, as an audience, for even the subtlest signs and clues? This exercise expands as fans convene their own detective squads, collectively reviewing the facts and producing explanatory narratives in their own gratifying inquests.

The interpretive networks of fans who see Olivia in an erotic relationship with Alex (or other female characters) synthesize and rework SVU's onscreen languages to articulate the results of their libidinal investigations. Shaping this process is a critical awareness, first of all, of the televisual constraints circumscribing the portrayal of sexuality -- particularly, I've emphasized, in "masculine" genres and at the perilous junction of women and the workplace. Angie B. reiterates the widespread recognition that the generic conditions of this detective series dictate that "the show deliberately does not focus on the personal lives of its characters." This attribute incites and justifies disproportionately intensive deductive formulas: in the rubric of one group (Baby Lurches; now offline), for example, "one drink" between characters in the diegetic realm equates to a sexual liaison, once you control for the program's acute representational restraint. Moreover, I'd contend that many fans are also consciously engaged with the ways the more enfolding contortions of the closet manipulate the visibility of lesbian eroticism, both on- and offscreen. One fan fiction author, LostinTranslation, had this to say about the inspiration for the novelette "Held Within the Beat of Your Heart" {http://www.ralst.com/Held1.HTM}:

SVU is a television series about crimes involving sex that rarely explores sexuality itself. Often times SVU traffics in stories involving extreme sexuality, but the underpinnings for such forms of sexual expression are rarely considered beyond a simple psychology that is often heavily moralized. Too often on SVU sexuality is understood within an uncomplicated dynamic of direct cause and effect. Of course, this is nonsense. With Held, I wanted to write a story about a sex crime and sexual expression, I also wanted to write a story in which the two topics would collide in unpleasant ways. I picked a horrific situation because I wanted to use such a thing as the most unlikely of backdrops for a love story. (personal correspondence)

In other words, Lost's work is a response to some of the limitations, contradictions, and erasures that mark SVU's texts, to the inescapable infusion of the show's lexicon with normative hierarchies of power that are often rigid and binarized. Lost's project is to deliberately and interactively formulate an alternative vocabulary that reveals the intimacies that SVU attempts to repress between opposing terms like natural and criminal sexuality, romantic and violent erotics.

The endeavor of selecting an illustrative fan fiction story is even more precarious than with SVU episodes. Even within the loosely-organized agglomeration of web sites, archives, bulletin boards, and blogs that are identifiable as an SVU slash community, there is a staggering diversity of styles, interpretations, and approaches exhibited in fan works. That said, I think "Held Within the Beat of Your Heart" can be taken as typical of the classic subgenre of long stories that mobilize the conventions of lesbian romance, while also engaging slash's beloved "hurt/comfort" trope, wherein one character nurtures another through profound trauma. In a rendition tailored to SVU's signature traumas, "Held" recounts the aftermath of a horrific, almost unthinkable crime: Olivia and Alex have been kidnapped, and our heroine is forced by their captors to sexually violate Alex. While this assault is both an extreme instance and a patent echo of the "sexually-based offenses" SVU screens each week, the text emphasizes that this was one case that was "kicked under the rug as soon as possible" (pt. 1). In a striking contrast to SVU's customarily zealous detective work (one the characters perceive as well), bloody clothes from the scene are given back to the women to be destroyed, and Tutuola "accidentally" wrecks the camera that the perps used to record their brutality (a figure for the television camera, perhaps) -- these are "evidence no one wanted to process" (pt. 2). As in the TV series itself, it is clear that the specter of Olivia and Alex having sex exceeds the bounds of the detectives' epistemological capabilities, and all signs that indicate this prospect must be hastily recontained.

"Held" highlights the precariousness of the boundaries of consent and perversion that SVU, for the most part, works to shore up. Alex's determination to convince Olivia that the latter isn't a rapist is a key element of the story's plot; when Alex first asserts that she "wasn't raped," Olivia bitterly counters that the hospital did a rape kit (pt. 1). By turning to "standard procedure" to classify their experience, Olivia makes manifest the inadequacy of the juridical infrastructure that provides SVU's discursive framework. Alex, in Lost's version, has decidedly kinky tastes that were sickeningly parodied in her non-consensual submission at the hands of the kidnappers. In the course of confessing her proclivities to Olivia, they have this conversation:

"There's one other thing, isn't there?"
Her breath leaving her body in a panic, Alex tried a joke. "No wonder the perps confess to you."
Olivia almost missed it. She stopped from denying their conversation was an interrogation by only a split second. Instead she responded to the assumption underneath Alex's bantering.
"Alex, you're not a perp."
"Are you sure?" (pt. 4)

That is, any hint of sexual deviance, even on the windward side of consensuality, brings the weight of the sex police's criminalizing logics down upon them. The fact that it takes such an excruciating journey through physical and emotional violation to bring these characters to the point where they can love each other and still say "We're not monsters" (pt. 6) calls attention to the ways the closet architecture operating in SVU, and in its televisual and social context, circumscribes the desires that can freely emerge -- and demonstrates fans' engagement with these mortal constraints in their own readings.

If, as I have argued, the sexual violence that SVU investigates is linked to the discursive violence of the border wars that televisual lesbianism epitomizes, "Held" literalizes this connection. The atrocity of the circumstances that bring Olivia and Alex together seems to suggest that the barrier keeping them apart is so potent that it could only be breached by an act of unspeakable brutality. The fact that, here, Olivia and Alex's first sexual experience together is actually an assault recodes the ideologically-charged indictment of slash as "character rape" because it is "a total violation of established characterizations" (Jenkins 466). It is relatively axiomatic in Olivia fan fiction that she and/or Alex are hindered in expressing their desire for each other by their professions or backgrounds -- just as, on the series, any exploration of their personal lives is almost completely precluded. Following the contours of this loaded configuration, "Held" stipulates that Olivia and Alex weren't romantically involved and never communicated their love before they were abducted. Referencing the diegetic restrictions and intensities that draw the outlines of their relationship, Lost writes that, in Olivia's opinion, "Keeping a distance between herself and her investigators could only help Alex maintain her professional integrity," and as a result, "In all the years they'd known one another, last night's dinner [the occasion of their kidnapping] was probably only the fourth or fifth time they'd dined together without Elliot playing the role of the unacknowledged chaperone" (pt. 1). Thus, the despotic vectors that obstruct Olivia and Alex's desire on TV are translated into a fictional labyrinth of agonizing violation and guilt from whence our heroines, in the end, triumphantly emerge.

Giving poignancy to the women's original enforced distance in the story is a recurring motif of each of the characters remembering watching the other. Many of these memories are, in fact, recapitulations of favorite onscreen moments from episodes of SVU: among Olivia's, "the night she and Elliot surprised [Alex] while she was out on a date, her hair up and dressed in a stunning red cocktail dress;... arguing about a case in the hallway outside her office" (pt. 3); among Alex's, "Olivia incongruously dressed in a shimmering black evening dress, standing next to her in front of the window looking into an interrogation room, their fingers accidentally brushing" (pt. 6). The latter passage continues, "Memories segued into fantasies: Olivia and she walking down a corridor and Olivia suddenly pushing her against the wall and claiming her mouth in a kiss, Olivia showing up late one night at her apartment and taking her from behind as she lay sprawled over the dining room table" (pt. 6). That is, observation and imagination, television and fiction, slide effortlessly into one another, often in the substance of a single event: Alex confesses, "The other night when I asked you out to dinner, I was half pretending it was a date" (pt. 3) -- echoing in a more hopeful erotics the rich leveling economies correlating various planes of sexual violence.

As I (along with commentators like Sally Forth and Angie B.) have theorized SVU as a TV program, the elements that conspire to render Olivia unrepresentable as a lesbian onscreen are ultimately extratextual: our culture's pervasive homophobia; the economic imperative to appeal to a mass audience; the gendered hazards bequeathed to television by historical hierarchies and transformations; the insidious ubiquity of the closet. Fan fiction stories like "Held," however, transpose the impediments to Olivia and Alex's romance from outside the text to inside the characters' psyches, reconstituting these oppressions as their individual fears and inhibitions. Even when fics thematize, as they often do, Olivia or Alex's struggle with prejudice or internalized homophobia, these conditions are still located as hang-ups that, while they may seethe with acknowledged violence, can be processed and (usually) overcome inter/personally. Simultaneously, "Held" (and many other stories) also transpose the fans' procedures of watching (obsessive scrutiny of the characters' attire, vigilance for suspect looks and touches), as well as their tendency to fantasize about what they see, into the heads of the characters, converting the viewers' competencies as sex detectives into Olivia and Alex's erotic waltz. What appears is a kind of machine for collapsing TV's divergent registers into each other, a libidinous interface with the perpetual flows of meaning wherein SVU episodes, industry gossip, and fan production penetrate and transform each other -- and it is in this interactive destabilization of the ostensibly obvious perimeters distinguishing text, audience, and metatext that lesbian desire in the televisual sense operates.

II/2/B Innocence/Guilt

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:06:02 GMT

With its defining focus on "sexually-based offenses," Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is exemplary of these foundational incitements linking genre, knowledge, desire, and violence. Resonances between its stated epistemological mandate to search out the truths of criminal sexuality and a televisually-inflected vigilance around more subterranean investments in family and heteronormativity are typical of SVU, and I'd like to illustrate these structuring principles through a detailed discussion of a single episode. This episode, "Sacrifce" (#50/3.07), which involves a case of gay misidentification, is not classified as one of SVU's "handful of gay-related episodes" (through season 5) by Angie B. (1:P5). Lesbian themes have since been treated occasionally, but never beyond the program's framework of victimization and criminality, and too rarely to ameliorate what is perhaps a symptomatic absence: if, as I've argued, lesbian desire has an especially overdetermined relationship to TV's working women, this apparent reluctance to include it in the range of sexual sensations that SVU mediates may signal the risk already inherent in its hazardous undertow. Nor is "Sacrifce" among the episodes that make frequent appearances in fan catalogues of onscreen "subtext" between Olivia and Alex. While my example is thus idiosyncratic, I've chosen it to analyze how the logics of SVU overall set up epistemological schemas that put forward the possibility of Olivia as lesbian object and subject, even when it doesn't surface in obvious ways. "Sacrifice" demonstrates how homosexuality tends to alternately emerge and disappear in conjunction with violence, family crisis, consumerism and spectacle, and epistemological uncertainty more generally.

Its opening tableau is what we might imagine is a stereotypical scene from gay life: a crowd of men loitering outside a bar, as two negotiate their first date. Just as they are making plans to continue the evening, gunshots ring out, and the incipient romance is disrupted (SVU's constitutive coupling of transgressive desire with violence). When the shots go off, one of the men pulls his gun and dashes away -- he's a cop, we are to assume, so personal life is also interrupted by the professional, here. Next, this gay officer (called Steve) meets up with Olivia and her partner Elliot at the hospital where the unconscious gunshot victim was taken. Their conversation establishes, first of all, the detectives' fluency with the city's licentious gay subculture, perhaps a necessary part of their purview as "panty police" (or, one might speculate, a particular competency of Olivia's, as she does most of the talking). Steve informs them that he believes he spotted the victim in "Puffy's" (near the scene of the crime), and Olivia responds with surprise, "Inside the bar?" "I was on a date," Steve confesses, clarifying what he was doing in what she evidently knows to be a gay establishment, and activating the significance of inside vs. outside so characteristic of the closet. Elliot's main role is to ask, after they've gotten the facts out of the way, if Steve "wants a little discretion on this," making clear the intersection of this incident with the figures of the homophobic police department and the closeted gay cop (where we can't help wondering about Olivia).

The initial phase of their investigation reveals several assumptions typical of the hermeneutics of SVU's sex detectives. First, the unit is involved because "copious fluids" were found (in the victim), raising the suspicion of gang rape -- as if any non-normative sexual behavior (in this case, having multiple partners) must proceed from violence. Second, their reading of the victim as gay, which you'll recall is based solely on the location of the crime (as they presume the sex with men was non-consensual), is unshaken when they note he's wearing a wedding ring. "If he's in a committed relationship," Elliot muses, to which Olivia replies derisively, "He was in a meat market bar. Let's hope his partner's more committed than he is" -- they rely here on stereotypical models of homosexual partnerships (both positive and negative) to interpret the evidence. Third, they immediately verify that the victim has no prior arrests for solicitation (i.e. prostitution), cluing us in to an implicit connection between (homo)sexual criminality and commercialism. Fourth, Detective Munch's opinion is that "Good money's on a hate crime. Perps are usually hetero or closeted and in denial," referencing an awareness of the very real violence that can be provoked by the closet's oppressive architecture. And most importantly, what the discussion of the facts of the case among the SVU team exhibits is that their procedures for investigating sex consist in large part of applying imagination to the evidence to tell speculative stories that fit the crime (e.g. Elliot's: "maybe he was cheating, went out, picked up the wrong guys in the meat market"). One might say that the pleasure of being a detective (particularly for those detectives playing along in the audience) lies in this creative exercise of conjecture.

The problem with SVU's hypothetical account of the crime, in this instance, is that the victim won't accommodate his tale to theirs. When Olivia and Elliot finally catch up with the elusive Wesley at his apartment he is uncooperative, and denies he was raped. The detectives are incredulously confronting him with the "evidence" when his wife and daughter walk in. In this instant juxtaposition of a narrative of gay violence with a portrait of nuclear normativity, the detectives' (and the audience's) interpretation is thrown into fatal disarray (in the sort of entertaining plot twist that advances virtually every episode of SVU). This is the first transposition of the episode, from a sordid saga of homosexual, subcultural sex and violence to a drama of an ordinary family threatened -- and I would argue that the combination is not coincidental. The connection is emphasized by an initial period of confusion when it seems that Wesley's family might be endangered precisely by his gay desires. The detectives question him back at the station:

Wesley: "No one raped me."
Elliot: "Then how do you explain the semen inside of you -- was it consensual?"
Wesley: "I'm married, I've got a kid."
Olivia: "Look, lots of people hit for both teams. Now either you were forced, or you weren't."
Wesley: "OK, I'm bisexual. Are we done?"

Various unmappable territories of sexuality converge here in a hermeneutic sinkhole that renders rape stubbornly indefinable in the binary terms that Olivia insists should characterize it. In her potent line, retaining the opposition between forced and consensual sex dictates abandoning the one segregating desire into homo and hetero (not an insignificant maneuver given that this is our culture's structuring premise, as Sedgwick conceives it). In evidence also is the potential boomerang effect of the vague "lots of people": when Olivia is the one who defends transgressive erotics (as she often is, the foil to her more conservative partner), there's always the risk that her sympathy will be viewed as an insinuation about her own sexuality. Olivia presses Wesley for the "truth" with benevolent frustration that he won't allow SVU to "help" him, demonstrating an axiom of SVU's investigative logics (and those of the culture at large): people -- and television characters -- don't often willingly offer up the verities of their desire; this knowledge can only be produced through vigilant observation and inquest. So, at this point in "Sacrifice," the figure of a family in crisis momentarily overlaps with the concurrent difficulties of delineating both desire (which appears mystifyingly bisexual rather than stably homosexual) and violence -- and hence also with the fissures in the supposedly rock-solid reality of rape itself, the show's ostensible raison d'être (as Olivia expresses their dilemma: "without a complaining witness [the rape] doesn't exist").

Much of this murkiness is conveniently cleared up, though, when there's a break in the case: it turns out Wesley is a gay porn star. In what I'm identifying as the episode's second transposition, another suspect confirms that their "victim" is "not gay... Wesley's strictly gay for pay at 1500 bucks a bang," and any exploration of homosexual (or even bisexual) desire, whether violent or consensual, quite effectively vanishes from the episode as the detectives wholeheartedly adopt this rather simplistic explanation. Thus, homosexuality as the episode's framing perversion is displaced quite baldly onto the commercialization and spectacularization of sexuality, the moral debate transferred from the peccadilloes of (married, closeted) homosexuals to those of pornographers. Whether Wesley is a closeted homo or a closeted porn star, however, the effects of the closet are still in force. The detectives aren't surprised that Wesley refused to come clean, and Tutuola states the obvious: "a straight guy wouldn't want the world to know he's doing gay porn." The SVU team's own moral judgments remain in force: while Elliot tetchily reminds Wesley that "Pornography isn't illegal. Making it isn't illegal" (establishing that, in this episode of SVU, there isn't any bona fide sex crime involved), Wesley responds, "I see the way you're looking at me. I'm scum because I make money having sex." Later, Alex goes to court to remove Wesley's daughter from her parents, on the grounds that "pornography is a form of legal prostitution. The minor's physical, mental, and emotional welfare was corrupted... [by] exposing her to an environment of wanton sexual activity." These attitudes are representative of how SVU's narrative language is shaped by imperatives of normative containment as much as by the legal enforcement of sexuality, whether the deviance in question is homosexuality or another eminently substitutable threat to the conventional family.

The pivotal revelation of Wesley's reluctant stardom comes out simultaneously in two interviews that are intercut with each other as SVU personnel watch through one-way mirrors. Shooting windows and through windows, particularly during interrogations at the station, is a signature visual device of SVU, one that could be interpreted as a self-reflexive commentary on television itself ("Your Window on the World"): an allusion to the privileged point of view of the audience, and to the affinity of this position with the diegetic detective work. The new pornography angle is, of course, even more insistently self-reflexive (as are SVU's many instances of videotaped evidence). When Olivia expresses incredulity about the suspect's gay porn story, he volunteers "I could screen the film for you if you'd like." The detectives don't respond, but the unfulfilled promise of explicit images hovers over the rest of the episode, functioning both to differentiate SVU's text from porn (educating us about the difference between good sex TV and bad sex TV) and simultaneously to destabilize this very distinction -- as SVU is obviously portraying porn (albeit with some delicacy) even as it condemns it. Elliot and Olivia drop in on a porn set, where the camera tracks tightly behind them as they stride through a labyrinthine corridor from the respectable outer office into the sordid interior, passing by the video equipment and crew before they stop short, their backs framing a tableau of Wesley's wife Jaina, in a tawdry maid's outfit, kneeling on the floor between two buff, shirtless men -- a titillating picture indeed. On their second visit, the shots track across the literal border between realist illusion and televisual apparatus, crossing walls sporting lifelike domestic interiors on one side and scaffolding, machinery, and lounging talent on the other. The flick's director goads Olivia by asking her, "You ever thought about doing a movie? You look like you'd be a real natural" -- calling attention, perhaps, to her existence onscreen in a sensationalistic show about sex. In summary, then, "Sacrifice" serves as an example of the ways SVU's language of investigation mediates the normative, as well as criminal, boundaries of sexual acts and desires, mobilizing critical ambivalences at the multivalent intersections of (homo)sexuality and perversion, family and eroticism, consent and violence, sex and consumerism, private acts and public performance, truth and simulation, revelation and concealment -- a diegetic network of structuring ambiguities that reverberates intertextually and metatextually as well.