My installment of Henry Jenkins' "Gender and Fan Culture" blog series, a conversation with Hector Postigo about labor, technology, and desire in the late capitalist fanscape, is posted here (also livejournal mirrored).

My short reverie "Hairgate! TV's Coiffure Controversies and Lesbian Locks" is out in Camera Obscura (Vol. 22, No. 2) (excerpt).

[another version of the abstract for the ongoing BSG project, submitted to SCMS]

Love is television's reproductive technology: yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry, TV depends for its self-perpetuation on our desire for its endlessly multiplying texts. On the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica, love is likewise the cybernetic Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and "the shape of things to come." Hybridity is "the shape of things to come" for broadcast media as well: it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with exclusive online content, offering television intensified opportunities to proliferate its texts and its intercourse with fans. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor within an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.

This paper analyzes and contrasts an official fan filmmaking contest on the Battlestar Galactica website and fan music videos created in the context of online communities. Videomaker Toolkit exemplifies the industry's dance of permissiveness and containment, while fan works demonstrate that the text's open networks, like the Fleet's networked computers, are vulnerable to unorthodox technologies of love. I focus particularly on the queerness of Battlestar Galactica's alternative families (both on- and offscreen), which becomes increasingly notable as television learns that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.

BSG, Videomaker, and fanvids foreground the ways that both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately contain and channel these desires. I will argue that, even though fan activities (whether literally or metaphorically queer) are thoroughly implicated in television's consumer economy, there are aspects of their queer families that are unavailable to capitalist poaching.

I have an article in this anthology. It's creative commons, so you can download the entire book! info below reposted from http://post.thing.net/node/1633.

Edited by Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli
Editorial Assistance: Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer
Copy Editing: Wietske Maas - Design: Kernow Craig
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures<br />Supported by: Paradiso, Amsterdam
ISBN: 978-90-78146-03-2

Order a copy of this book by sending an email to: info@networkcultures.org
A PDF of this publication can be downloaded for free at [NOT SAFE FOR WORK!]
low-res, 2MB: http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/24.pdf
hi-res, 9MB: http://www.networkcultures.org/clickme/pdf/clickmeReader_9MB.pdf

C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader is an anthology that collects the best materials of two years debate: from The Art and Politics of Netporn conference held in 2005 in Amsterdam to the 2007 C'Lick Me festival in Paradiso, Amsterdam. C'Lick Me opens the field of 'Internet pornology'. Based on non-conventional approaches, mixing academics, artists and activists, the C'Lick Me Reader reclaims a critical post-enthusiastic, post-censorship perspective on netporn, a dark field that has been dominated thus far by dodgy commerce and filtering. The C'Lick Me reader covers the rise of the netporn society from Usenet underground to the blogosphere, analyses economic data and search engines traffic, compares sex work with the work of fantasy, disability and accessibility. The C'Lick Me reader also expands the no tion of digital desire, and smashes the predicatable boundaries of porn debates, depicting a broader libidinal spectrum from fetish subcultures to digital alienation, from code pornography to war pornography. The reader concludes by re-contextualising the queer discourse into a post-porn scenario.

Contributions by: Adam Arvidsson, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Manuel Bonik, Mikita Brottman, Florian Cramer, Samantha Culp, Barbara DeGenevieve, Mark Dery, Michael Goddard, Stewart Home, Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Julie Levin Russo, Regina Lynn, Sergio Messina, Mireille Miller-Young, Tim Noonan, Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear, Matteo Pasquinelli, Audacia Ray, Andreas Schaale, Nishant Shah, Tim Stuettgen, Matthew Zook.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

SECTION 1: THE RISE OF THE NETPORN SOCIETY

Regina Lynn
Sex Drive: Where Sex and Tech Come Together

Mark Dery
Naked Lunch: Talking Realcore with Sergio Messina

Nishant Shah
PlayBlog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace

Audacia Ray
Sex on the Open Market: Sex Workers Harness the Power of the Internet

Adam Arvidsson
Netporn: the Work of Fantasy in the Information Society

Manuel Bonik and Andreas Schaale
The Naked Truth: Internet Eroticism and the Search

Tim Noonan
Netporn, Sexuality and the Politics of Disability: A Catalyst for Access, Inclusion and Acceptance?

Matthew Zook
Report on the Location of the Internet Adult Industry

SECTION 2: DIGITAL DESIRE BEYOND PORNOGRAPHY

Mark Dery
Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars

Matteo Pasquinelli
Warporn! Warpunk: Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime

Florian Cramer and Stewart Home
Pornographic Coding

Florian Cramer
Sodom Blogging: Alternative Porn and Aesthetic Sensibility

Mikita Brottman
Nightmares in Cyberspace: Urban Legends, Moral Panics and the Dark Side of the Net

Michael Goddard
BBW: Techno-archaism, Excessive Corporeality and Network Sexuality

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
The Obsession of the (Vanishing) Body

SECTION 3: NETPORN AFTER THE QUEER BOOM

Mireille Miller-young
Sexy and Smart: Black Women and the Politics of Self-Authorship in Netporn

Katrien Jacobs
Porn Arousal and Gender Morphing in the Twilight Zone

Barbara DeGenevieve
Ssspread.com: The Hot Bods of Queer Porn

Julie Levin Russo
'The Real Thing': Reframing Queer Pornography for Virtual Spaces

Samantha Culp
First Porn Son: Asian-man.com and the Golden Porn Revolution

Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear
21st Century Schizoid Bear: Masculine transitions Through Net Pornography

Tim Stuttgen
Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-Pornographic Politics

BIOGRAPHIES
WEBOGRAPHY

This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Non Derivative Works 2.5 Netherlands License. No article in this reader may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the author.

We would like to thank all the participants of the conferences 'Art and Politics of Netporn' (2005) and ‘C’Lick Me’ (2007). A special thanks to our director, Emilie Randoe, School of Interactive Media, Amsterdam Polytechnic, for supporting our netporn research programme; to Pierre Ballings and Maarten van Boven, Paradiso, Amsterdam, for hosting the C’Lick Me event and supporting the production of the reader. Thanks to all the authors of the book for collaborating with us over the years, as well as to all the photographers and image-producers on the web whose works have been cited in the different articles.read more »

I'd like to congratulate my students (and myself!) on a triumphant end to the semester. Their acumen, enthusiasm, and commitment were a delight and an inspiration. You can read much of their work at http://tvhere.livejournal.com (I especially recommend the midterm projects!).

as for THIS week's kerfuffle -- I haven't gotten a chance to read any of the FanLib posts yet, mea culpa, but I am saving them in del.icio.us for future diss research. The L Word fan-written script was of course the company's first major project, so doubtless I'll have plenty to say about such issues when I come to chapter 4.

meanwhile, look for me on Henry Jenkins' blog later this summer (in the aftermath of another recent kerfuffle).read more »

as of 8pm on March 23, I have officially passed my qualifying exams and advanced to doctoral candidacy!

essay: http://j-l-r.org/docs/jlrexamessay.pdf
field lists: http://j-l-r.org/docs/jlrfieldlists.pdf

here are some questions I wrote for my orals:

I. Public and Private Spheres: Critical Theories of Politics and Subjectivity

1. You've chosen "privacy" as the overarching theme of your written exam; why do you think this concept unifies your concerns in a useful way? Are the different inflections of "privacy" (you explicitly identify three: sexuality/subjectivity, private property, and information security) really commensurate, or are there disjunctures that you're eliding here? Moreover, given the mutually constitutive functions of public and private and the alleged breakdown of their boundary, particularly via new media that allow the private to permeate the public and vice versa, how are you casting privacy as a coherent theoretical object?

2. Your essay invokes the problem of periodization at several points: in its historical account of capitalism, in its related stake in a postmodernism context, in positing a qualitatively new phase of media convergence, and in the status of the "new" in new media more generally. What sort of course are you charting between notions of continuity and radical break (in relation to how other theorists have negotiated this question)?

3. Several vast theoretical topologies (say, Marxist, Foucauldian, and Lacanian heritages) are compressed and even collapsed in your essay. That is, you seem to focus on their similarities and linkages more than their tensions and divergences. Can you (perhaps taking one or two texts as an example) say more about the distinctions and disarticulations between these methodologies (surrounding a theme such as reproduction, for instance)?

4. You ask the concept of "subjectivity" to cover a lot of ground, here, from sex to privacy and beyond. For example, you tend to use it interchangeably with citations of the body. What is subjectivity (in one or several definitions)? How much or when does it actually overlap with embodied experience, and why is the persistence of the body important? How are subjectivity and its dis/embodiment mediated by technology, particularly in so-called virtual spaces?

5. Relatedly, do you hold to the idea that subjectivity relies on some specter of "otherness," and what is the status of "the other" (or "the Other") in your account? Typical categories of analysis in this vein (gender, race, class) are rather submerged in your work: can you explain why you've opted for this set of theoretical priorities?

II. Cyberpublics: Digital Media and Internet Studies

1. The study of digital media is an unfolding field, incorporating several distinguishable but overlapping methodologies. How would you characterize your own object and approach in relation to this emergent tradition?

2. Various theoretical frameworks for discussing media hybridization have been proposed by critics such as Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, Jay David Bolter, William Boddy, and N. Katherine Hayles, including "convergence," "transmedia," "remediation," and "intermediation." What do you think are the advantages and/or disadvantages of these various models, and again, how would you situate yourself within this landscape?

3. You've called this section "Cyberpublics," but your stance on the discursive or political place of cyberpublics (or any publics) remains unclear. Do you believe in actually existing cyberpublics, and how would you distinguish them from ideologies or fantasies about publicity? How are (new) media technologies significant in constituting such publics, as well as such ideologies or fantasies?

4. How do you weigh surveillance (a visual paradigm) against capture (an informational paradigm)? How are new technologies intervening in panopticism as a conceptual formation, and how do these changes intersect with power and pleasure? What is the future of surveillance and/or dataveillance in our theoretical and protocological environment?

5. This is another zone where you're merging very different terms (the gaze, the disciplines, the archive) and approaches (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida). Can you unpack these relationships a bit more carefully? Is signification/inscription occupying the same position or doing the same work in these three systems?

III. the Public Eye: Television and Audience Studies

1. Television studies has historically been an unusually interdisciplinary field, spanning critical theory, cultural studies, and sociological methodologies. How do you expect to navigate this sometimes rocky terrain in your work? How would you value and reconcile, for example, textual and ethnographic approaches to reception?

2. You're staking your project on the possibility of generalizing from the example of online fandom. How do you see the larger questions activated in your essay (about privacy, subjectivity, power, desire, capitalism, and mediation, to name a few) being materialized in this instance?

3. You imply that &quot;queerness,&quot; as a central trope of your project, can describe the structural and/or political condition of artifacts that aren't specifically homo/sexual (e.g. polysemic texts). How do you define this term, and why have you chosen to generalize it in this way? Do you think any disadvantages or losses go along with rhetorically de-sexualizing "queer" experience?

4. "Resistance" is another unavoidable trope, and its meaning in your essay tends to be slippery, oscillating from Marxist to Foucauldian to psychoanalytic to cultural studies models of this formation. Can you define resistance, or at least situate yourself within this constellation? Where do you locate resistance in the texts you study (and in your own) -- how/where/by who is it possible? Why is resistance desirable, and what are its limitations and/or the limitations of these theories?

5. You hinge your claims about fandom on the idea of a "limit case of capitalism"? What does this mean; what is the difference between a limit and a resistance? Given your appeals to poststructuralism, how do critiques of the idea of "limit" more generally affect your argument here? Alternatively, are there postmodern conceptions of the limit (e.g. &quot;control&quot;) in play?read more »