INDISCRETE MEDIA: QUEER ECONOMIES OF CONVERGENCE
My book project reconceptualizes fan production, particularly the explicit and implicit conflicts between fans and the entertainment industry, for the era of convergence. In answer to pre-digital narratives about the subversive potential of fandom’s gift economy and present-day celebrations of participatory culture, I argue that media consumption today is neither completely oppositional to nor completely aligned with corporate structures. Capitalism is constituted by a constant antagonism, as the very productivity that renders it so dynamic as an economic system is always troping toward the limit of its capacity for containment. In this context, we need to examine the mounting tensions between fans’ voluntary creative labor and commercial transmedia (along with everything in between).
Growing interest in media convergence has intersected with a range of academic discourses and contributed to the widening orbit of fan studies. I formulate new dialogues between these cultural studies approaches and perspectives from critical and media theory, including media archaeology, Marxism, and gender and sexuality studies. In particular, I maintain that queer theory offers conceptions of excessive desire and subjectivity that can illuminate the surplus productivity of our media landscape. Thus, I propose that convergence follows a queer logic, an assertion that is based in the traditions of fan production (that is, creating interpretations and artworks that mine mass media for same-sex romances and erotics) which are now colliding with dominant industrial forms. It is also based in the more abstract contention that desire is a vital axis of the culture industries in late capitalism. Today’s media are both indiscrete and indiscreet, and the pun gestures to the inextricability of these ideas.
My objects are drawn from the subculture of femslash: an online interpretive community around readings of female same-sex relationships in popular culture texts. Building on my own and others’ analyses of fan phenomena, I investigate how convergence shapes the evolution of femslash formations. More importantly, however, I investigate how the queer dimensions of creative fandom, exemplified by femslash formations, shape convergence. I call for analyses of present-day media transformations to consider sexuality, because technoculture is constituted in the articulation of bodies with information, subjects with capitalism, and desire with production. Overall, through mapping the interventions generated by queer female fan communities, I argue that the technologies, discourses, and subjectivities of convergence pose structural challenges to economies of reproduction, circulation, and value that define the antagonisms shaping media evolution. This book is itself a vector of desire for queer media futures that remain open to our simultaneous complicity with and resistance to capitalism and sustain the proliferation of surplus productivity within consumption.
CHAPTERS
Drawing on the infrastructures of media theory, queer theory, Marxist theory, and other critical traditions, my three case studies extrapolate from particular objects broader claims about the emerging power relations of today’s media ecology. I elucidate the tensions not only between fans and the industry but between consumption and capitalism that delimit possibilities of containment and resistance within our technocultural milieu. My work is structured in reflexive strata, with the assumption that the layers of the phenomena under discussion can and do echo each other. Each of the three chapters counterpoises three intertwined dimensions of one television program and its queer female fandom: screen text, online promotion, and fan production. Each also frames this matrix with a theoretical interpretation of a major aspect of convergence that reflects the logic of its object, corresponding to the following figures:
The closet – a certain coyness deployed by the entertainment industry in attempts to manage the interdependence of television and the internet, production and consumption, or desire and deviance.
The hybrid – a provisional, impure, and often queer synthesis across the boundaries of technology and embodiment whose legacy remains in dispute.
The worker – a negotiation between corporations and consumers over the immaterial labor conditions of subjectivity and desire.
In Chapter II, “Private Eyes,” I follow three analogous detectives as they investigate sexuality: the scholar, the fan, and the Law & Order: SVU (NBC, 1999-present) character Olivia Benson. In both television studies debates about the coordinates of queer representation and SVU fandom’s debates about whether Olivia “is” a lesbian, knowledge of sexuality is thwarted by an endless oscillation of contradictory evidence drawn from onscreen portrayals, viewer interpretations, and cultural conditions. This is a textual economy, and I theorize it as a closet formation (Sedgwick) that continually produces fascination and frustration with categorical instability across our society’s array of linked binaries. Among them is the binary of television and the internet, and while there are no official online tie-ins here, fans have deciphered behind-the-scenes interviews with executives and actors, readily available on the web, for corroboration of their hunches. This detective work mirrors the gendered genre of the procedural with its impetus toward certainty and closure, and slash fan fiction stories about Olivia render this incitement as erotic in a mutually constitutive circuit.
Chapter III, “The Shape of Things to Come,” proposes the conflict between humans and Cylons (robot adversaries who can perfectly mimic humans) in Battlestar Galactica (SyFy, 2003- 2009) as an allegory for the conflict between the television industry and online fandom. Moving from binary oppositions to their hybrid progeny, I focus on the character Hera, the first child of mixed human and Cylon parentage, and her queer family of adoptive mothers. This intimate female collective resembles the community of fan vidders, who appropriate television’s raw materials to create online music videos that represent an alternative future. To understand how reproduction operates at these real and fictional valences, I look to theories of media hybridity from Marshall McLuhan to N. Katherine Hayles. This technological economy, populated by onscreen cyborgs and prosthetics like fans’ Girlslash Goggles, also concerns the intertwined configurations of race, sexuality, and technicity (technologically derived ethnicity). Contrasting fan vids with Battlestar Galactica‘s online promotion Video Maker, which invited derivative videos provided that they conform to certain restrictions, I explore the limits and risks of such efforts to harness fan production for explicitly corporate ends.
With Chapter IV, “Labor of Love,” I arrive at questions about the capitalist economy itself in my evaluation of fandom’s labor relations, as exemplified by The L Word (Showtime, 2004-2009) and its fan-driven marketing schemes. Theorizing late capitalism according to Autonomist Marxist conceptions of immaterial labor, I read The L Word as a didactic illustration of how to render lesbian identification as profitable work. In particular, the character Alice’s chart of a network of lesbian liaisons becomes her job, and it became the job of The L Word‘s fans as well when Showtime launched OurChart.com, a promotional social network that materialized this diegetic trope. Fan-written script contests also mobilized free labor to advertise the program, extending The L Word‘s signature claims to authenticity. However, the company that designed the contests elsewhere catalyzed a revolt within creative fandom that led to the launch of a non-profit advocacy organization, underscoring the boundaries of fans’ tolerance for expropriation. Autonomism maintains that subjectivity is now directly productive for the value of immaterial commodities, and that workers in self-organizing communicative networks have an autonomy that supports their antagonistic relationship to capital.
PROGRESS
In a revised conclusion, I will situate my project within digital media studies. As a corrective to this field’s intermittent resistance to engaging with TV and popular culture, I outline a media archaeological approach to convergence and suggest some alliances with contemporary work on television. My organizing theme is the parallel efforts in poststructuralist theory, media theory, and queer theory to untangle relations between the material and the discursive, and I argue that subjectivity consistently reemerges as their fulcrum. Moreover, then, I discuss my rationale for the centrality of queer theory to my project in terms of its often unwritten synergies with the parameters of media studies. As demonstrated by my new analyses of perverse creative communities around the children’s television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (The Hub, 2010-present) – an unexpected viral hit online – the imperative to include issues of subjectivity and sexuality in our accounts of technological formations is more than a luxury of subculture studies. I argue that queer approaches are fundamental to a theoretical heritage that informs the best of humanities research into the histories and futures of today’s media configurations.
Proposed revisions to the introduction further unpack the often vexed endeavor of modeling the interactions between realities that are material (hardware, bodies, factories) and discursive (software, ideas, texts), a framework that inevitably rests (if sometimes only implicitly) on a theory of subjectivity. I will also restructure the case study sections and incorporate new citations of current work. My overarching aim is to construct a critical framework for understanding the larger transition within which popular entertainment’s current industrial and cultural shifts are embedded. Theoretically elaborated analysis of the implications of convergence for the technological, textual, ideological, and sexual economies of fan production is vital to interventions in our own future as media consumers and producers.
