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November 2011

[META] Fans and their Failure of Whiteness

The “Race and Ethnicity” issue of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures is live! The subject of race represents a critical yet still under-developed area within fan studies, so kudos to the editors of the Journal for bringing us this issue.

Perhaps a part of the reason for the neglect is that fans are more or less seen as white – a situation discussed in a really wonderful essay from the Journal titled “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization and the Discursive Construction of Fandom”. As its author Mel Stanfill points out, fans tend to be constructed as a failed kind of whiteness. This in turn reinforces the centrality (or “hegemonic” nature, to get academic) of whiteness as a symbolic category. If “whiteness” (which has just recently begun to receive critical attention itself) holds within itself assumptions about maturity, rationality and heteronormativity then fans, at least in popular discourses, fail to achieve it. They are whiteness gone wrong — out of control, dysfunctional, sexually deviant and usually single. Just think about every stereotypical fan you’ve ever seen on TV or in the movies – The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, the main characters of Big Bang Theory, the dueling Trekkers and Star Wars fans of Fanboys… and who could forget Barbara Adams in the documentary Trekkies, who wore her Star Trek uniform to jury duty and called herself “The Commander”? (My students certainly won’t let that go any time soon).

Stanfill’s is an essay about representation… but what about fans in reality? Granted, it is unlikely that we will ever have a complete grasp on who, where and what fans are. I think I can say, though, just from having been in fan gatherings, both on-line and in real time, that, in reality, fans are a reasonably diverse bunch. In reality, we are of different colours and from different countries. In reality, many are invested in marriages and families; many do identify as heterosexual. Many have girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers. Still others are single and looking for the right person.

To that extent, it might be said that many fans are invested in heteronormativity. But there is a question on my mind, especially as my first time teaching a course on fan cultures draws to a close. If you want to see the discourses of normality at work, try teaching a bunch of 18-to-20-year olds about fans. The pressure of “normal” is intense and maddening, which is why Stanfill’s section on fandom as a kind of queerness or sexual deviance resonated so powerfully for me. Supposedly fandom is becoming increasingly accepted by the mainstream yet, in many contexts, it remains a dirty little secret. It is a kind of closet, even for some who are in long-term relationships with persons of the opposite sex. It is a fetish, an interest that draws energy away from the heteronormative ideal of relationships and reproduction. And don’t get me wrong: to me this queerness is a wonderful thing. I celebrate it, because it tells the truth that no one is normal, that normal is a lie and a scary one at that. No one really wants to be “normal”, do they?

More than ever, I feel that fandom, even when not explicitly having anything to do with anything sexual, is queer. I know I can get into trouble for saying this, but after watching a bunch of teenagers leaping to reassure themselves and each other that they are “not like that bunch” [of fans], that “those people” [fans] are dangerous and unbalanced; and after having a few students confess to me privately that they are fans but who aren’t ready to talk about it in front of their peers… I think that the notion of fandom as queer might have some potential.

Of course, this is not really the point of Stanfill’s article. Indeed, because fans are represented as white, they are, in Stanfill’s words, “still recuperable”. They can still reclaim their privilege as white folks. Perhaps by trying to argue for the queerness of fans, I am turning attention away from the real point of the essay which is that whiteness remains the normative category against which all other categories are measured. If nothing else, fans should be able to understand how such insidious ideas as the “normal” and the “centre” create prejudice and do real harm to people. Fans have every reason to be open, tolerant and accepting of every kind of difference. At our best, we can and have achieved that ideal. But we are not always at our best, and one of the best arguments for studying whiteness is that it can force us to think about what we unconsciously believe to be normal, central and mainstream.

[META] After Henry Jenkins: Transmedia Fandom

“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries — a world where anything is possible.

“Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”
– The Matrix (1999)

I had the rare privilege of hearing Prof. Henry Jenkins speak at the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities recently, on the subject of “Transmedia: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” It was quite enjoyable, and very interesting, but in the end I found myself in an odd place, acafannishly speaking.

It’s always a weird experience for me as a fan to go out and get the unfiltered reactions of non-fans to fandom. The little titillated murmurs that ran through the crowd at the sight of some teen-rated Spike/Angel fanart, or the gobsmacked expressions that greeted the “Buffy Stakes Edward” vid, or the surprised hilarity that the “I am the 1%” superhero macros earned–it’s useful, but also jarring, to remember that my quotidian experience of media, the internet, the world, is often perpendicular to that of people who aren’t fannish. In the Q&A someone asked whether there’s any character or canon that can’t be transformed; rightly, I think, Jenkins answered “no” before proceeding to qualify that answer somewhat in terms of his ideas about what transmedia is, and where it’s going, while I simply considered how, after seeing what people get up to for Yuletide, I’m certain there’s nothing beyond the reach of fandom.

I don’t think there’s a more astute observer of transmedia than Jenkins, at least in English, but the other half of my reaction came from the fact that (as perhaps befits a talk co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media) in the end I found Jenkins, for all that he admittedly stressed the liberating and equalizing potential of transmedia in his talk, dissatisfyingly focused on the corporate rather than the fannish portion of the transmedia equation. In some senses, that focus is all to the good, since I do believe it behooves fans to have a good sense of where the contents industry, so to speak, is headed. But on the other, focusing on industry-produced transmedia totally effaces the fact that fans have been producing transmedia for years, and in many cases, doing it far more radically than any corporation could or will.

To speak concretely, in his talk Jenkins cited DC Comics’ Elseworlds series as, in his view, one of the most radical industry experiment in transmedia storytelling yet: in fannish parlance, Elseworlds is a series of authorized “far” alternate universes, self-contained except for the fact that they feature DC characters. One Elseworld, for example, featured a Soviet Superman; another had him, in a Doctor Who fusion, as the “last son of Gallifrey!” Significantly, as Jenkins pointed out, in the wake of the DC reboot this summer, the Elseworlds line will not continue: even as they embrace transmedia, industry creators are also seeking to control and shape the fannish experience of their canons. (J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore is another excellent example of this trend, as Jenkins discussed.)

Jenkins explicitly noted that, in his view, Elseworlds was “in some ways more transgressive than [the fanworks] we were studying 20 years ago,” which is an interesting observation that certainly speaks to the vastly different levels of personal technology available to fans in the developed world then and now. But Elseworlds is not particularly radical in terms of current fannish practice, and in light of that fact I have to wonder whether corporate and fannish transmedia practices will ever be able to meet, or whether the two are doomed to become increasingly opposed as industrial content starts looking more and more like earlier fannish content while seeking to retain its corporate control. Certainly the fannish freedom to innovate is directly tied to disregard for copyrights, whether under the banner of legal fair use or not: the amount of rights wrangling that must have gone into that Superman/Dr. Who Elseworlds fusion, for example, doesn’t bear thinking about. Conversely, in fandom all someone has to do is think, “Superman/Dr. Who fusion? Awesome!” and start creating it.

In some ways my entire issue is a question of focus: whose changing practice is the more exciting story, fandom or corporations? Which has the greater potential to influence our lives? As for the former, I think both are fascinating; as to the latter, particularly after Jenkins argued persuasively that the global Occupy Wall Street movement must be understood as having a transmedia activist dimension, there’s no way to tell which will ultimately have a greater impact. The quotation that begins this post comes from the end of the first movie in The Matrix franchise, which is Jenkins’ best-known example of a (not entirely successful) transmedia venture outside of Japan (which has been incorporating transmedia into contents industry practice for a long time): Neo could just as well be speaking for fandom to the contents industry as he is speaking for humanity to the machines. The contents industry in general is undoubtedly in a stronger position in broader society than fandom is, and its practices and responses do unquestionably shape fannish landscapes much more than the opposite. But capital may be the only thing, in its ongoing relationship with fandom, on which it has anything like a monopoly. And as corporate content starts looking more fannish, there’s no telling what might happen, to corporate content or to fandom.

[META] Dear Supernatural

When you first began this whole “meta” experiment, I applauded you. I thought the premise of “The Monster at the End of This Show” was brilliant: there’s this hack writer (who turns out to be a prophet) who has written The Dean and Sam Story into a series of books. Each book written by the prophet is an episode of Supernatural. And the books have “fans” who just happen to closely resemble the actual fans of Supernatural the TV show. You poked fun at us but you also poked fun at yourselves, so it was okay (although some fans didn’t like it). You even publicized the existence of Wincest. Okay, fine. I thought it was bold and ground breaking. And “The French Mistake”, last season, was thoroughly brilliant.

But then there was Becky. You wrote a slash fan into your own canon. And even though I was initially offended by her, I forgave you eventually because I still think that you were doing something kind of inventive and groundbreaking. I tried to believe that you didn’t mean to offend me by making the only known representation of a slash fan on television into a ridiculous, over-sexed girl/woman with no sense of boundaries.

Then, in last Friday’s episode, you went too far. I don’t know how or why you thought it would be a good idea to make a good portion of your viewing audience believe that you have nothing but contempt for us. I understand that once you’ve become known for your meta episodes you have to keep trying to push the boundaries, but this?

Yeah, Becky is back. This time she gives Sam a supernatural roofie, basically tricking him into marrying her. When he figures it out, she hits him over the head with a waffle iron and ties him to her bed. She persists in trying to get him to like her even after this. She nearly sells her soul in exchange for his love. She is literally presented as a loser in life, desperate to prove to the shallow, popular folk from her high school days that she is good enough to marry a hot guy. She is depicted as quasi-delusional, criminal and pathetic.

How offended am I? Let me count the ways.

One. Let’s get something on the table here. You don’t know slash, Supernatural. (You don’t even particularly understand fans, apparently, but that’s for another point). We do not write slash because we can’t have Sam-Dean-Cas-Kirk-Spock-whomever in our bed. This is a much more complicated fantasy. We are not hanging about or showing up at conventions out of the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, we’ll run into our boy at the bar and it will be love at first sight and a whirlwind wedding.

Two. We are not a bunch of desperate single virgins. Yes, some of us are single. Some of us are not. Some of us are heterosexual, and some of us are queer. Many of us have satisfying sex lives, and yes, our slashy fantasies may play a part in that, but this makes us not much different from ninety-nine percent of people in the world. How many people out there are totally, absolutely satisfied with heteronormative gender and sexual orientation? How many people manage without fantasies? Please, show me these imaginary “normal” people.

Three. We are not losers. I am certainly not a loser, and the women I know who are into slash are not losers. We have careers and we have a life outside of our fandom. We are interested in social and political causes. We have other interests. We even have social skills.

Four. If we learned that the apocalypse was unleashed (yeah, I’m going back to a Season Five Becky gripe) we would be concerned. We would not persist in our little sex fantasy while other people ran around doing real, important things like saving lives.

Five, and this is a big one. We can and do respect boundaries. Indeed, boundaries are extremely important to us. How else could we function in this world that considers our harmless fantasies as evidence that we are mentally and emotionally unbalanced? We would never hurt our love objects. We would not violate their privacy. We would certainly not kidnap them.

I am so very, very disappointed in you, Supernatural, because you have perpetuated the classic old stereotype of the fan: unbalanced, delusional, apt to cross over into dangerous behaviour at the slimmest pretext. This is especially disappointing from you because you had led me to believe that you understand fandom. I know that your creator, Eric Kripke, is a fanboy. I am pretty sure that your current showrunner, Sera Gamble, is a fangirl. And whatever criticisms I may have had, I had persisted until last Friday in thinking of the previous “meta” episodes as love letters to us. You were playful and knowing. Or at least I thought so. Now it seems that you have absolutely no understanding of fans, even though some of you ARE fans. Don’t you realize that as a fan, you are a victim of prejudice? Well, you just perpetuated that prejudice by mindlessly revisiting the tired old image of the fan as dangerously obsessed loner.

You may think that this is me being wanky and reactionary. It is not. I have been the most equable of fans. I like when you change things up. I loved the Season Five conclusion. I enjoyed Season Six. I loved Soulless Sam. I thought what you did with Cas was great and that his removal from the narrative early this season was a good decision. I thought Season Seven started off with a real bang. Even after the introduction of Becky at the opening of Season Five, I still watched the show eagerly. I forgave you for the first two Becky episodes.

But this, now. I don’t know if I can forgive this, and it breaks my heart.

[META] The Art of Fannish Conversation

Before I committed myself fully to transformational media fandom, tattooed “I heart vampires” across my forehead, and started trying to explain the appeal of slash to men in suits at dinner parties, I was into “CLACK” fandom. For those not in the know, CLACK stands for “Contemporary Literature And Criticism, Kay?” Basically, I mean I was an English major with an internet connection, as well as enough spare time to hang out in the Current Periodicals section of the library, and see what all my potential friends in thought around the world might be up to. I knew they were out there, because they kept appearing to me in sentences I read for school, although they just as often disappeared in the following section of their article. In that moment, though, I’d get a glimpse of the Perfect Conversation, and I’d know that others must be looking to have it, too, realizing the clear superiority of the ephemeral perfect sentence to the knots and tangles of the rest of the argument. Later, I’d discover that the perfect conversation is actually to be had across multiple platforms with committed fans of the Perfect Media Franchise, namely, Buffy. But I’m grateful to have experienced CLACK fandom, as I think it prepared me well for media fandom proper.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, it is an article in CLACK Central, which best articulates the experience I’m talking about. CLACK Central is the magazine n+1, which confirmed for me that others were actively pursuing the Perfect Conversation, the one that would make up for their years of not having had it, and being forced to talk about the wrong details of their days. In n+1, there were book reviews that didn’t shy away from citing insignificant moments from other books. There were articles about what, specifically, is oppressive about the fact that other people go to the gym. There were judgments and love-fests and polemics. It felt like home. The writing was so good that it freed up mental space for me to think about other things. It sounds like I’m being hyperbolic, but the experience is real, of feeling like a good writer is answering a question you’ve had for ages, and freeing you from the fear that it wasn’t even an important question to begin with.

But this peaceful feeling, it turns out, was not the sum of what I’d wanted when I went looking for friends in the library. I’d wanted the Perfect Conversation, and, now that I knew that it was possible, it was time to find the perfect interlocutors. To experience Chathexis. And I was a reader, alone with a book, sometimes giving someone a speech about what I’d read, but not properly entering into conversation based on a shared reading. I was still in the position of closing the magazine and then trying, as fast as possible, to convey the good parts of it to someone else, not realizing that the good parts are not actually the individual quotations, but rather the parts where the writing works for you. According to the n+1 editors in “Chathexis,” I was missing a key component of the Perfect Conversation:

“Where have we had our best conversations? When we were sharing a booth with someone in the back of a dark bar, or lying in bed, or walking somewhere, or nowhere at all, our faces turned in the same direction: outward, toward the world, into which we moved forward together. We arrive at a shared perspective when we do, actually, share a perspective—when we take, quite literally, the same view of things.”

Thrusting a witty summation of everything one has ever though at an uninitiated reader, it turns out, is not the way to establish this kind of shared perspective. It’s funny, actually, that the above quotation is excerpted from the editors’ case against video chat, which, while internally consistent with the CLACK mantra that the written word is uniquely capable of conveying truth, is something that media fandom has convinced me is inherently reductive. Their argument is that, in video chat, as compared to text chat, we over-focus on one another’s facial features and not one another’s ideas, from which we could look out into the wider world together.

This dichotomy between video and word reveals the disconnect that led me to media fandom. While “Chathexis” impeccably describes and contextualizes my pre-Buffy experience of digital life, it rings false in its ignorance of fandom, not just of the emotional resonance of gifs and the significance of the perfect graphic, but also the kinds of fannish friendships that are made possible by television shows. The perfect conversation, for me, it turned out, requires images, some moving, appropriated from what, to me, is much more than a sleep-encouraging good choice on Hulu. I don’t know where this need came from — was there always something suspicious about the “and critcism” part of CLACK? Have I fallen prey to television’s seductive bright lights, at the expense of the purity of the word? I’m pretty sure that’s not it, although it does speak to a certain fear I have, that my insistence that television (with its happy complement, fandom) is nearly perfect falls into some unfortuante traps, of which I should try harder to make myself aware.

I do feel, though, that it’s a good intellectual exercise to connect the experiences described at the upper end of the CLACK hierarchy, and had within my various, intersecting fandom homes. There’s pleasure to be had in finding the thread that connects the two. What I want, sometimes, is to argue that television + fandom is the rightful heir to CLACK. But what is more important is the lively conversation between the two spheres, in which the level of immersion in image-inclusive conversation technologies remains up to the individual user. After all, the core concerns of criticism and fandom, I think, unite in the n+1 editors’ suggestion that “In Gchat, as in life, we are happiest when paying attention—when we belong completely to a conversation that continues. Might this be a model of commitment: truly felt on both sides, mutually desired, without exclusivity?” I’m reminded of Andrea’s excellent post about “disrupting the intimate society.” If this, indeed, is what we are after, then obviously neither minimalist gchat, nor fannish gifspam is the end in itself anyway, and so both must be valued for the readers for whom they work, as well as the conversations for which they work. After all, one can, and almost always does, have accounts on multiple platforms.