Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities

"Convergence" is a buzzword for the trend toward combining formerly distinct media and communications channels (voice, music, TV and video, data and code) into more integrated systems.  These emerging multimedia networks go hand-in-hand with intensified corporate convergence in the entertainment and IT industries.  But they are also associated with a breakdown in the divide between producers and consumers of entertainment and with increased opportunities for viewer/user participation in the media experience.  In this dynamic and over-hyped context of rapid technological and industrial change, there has been an explosion of mainstream popular and commercial interest in once marginal fan practices.  As television remediates to accommodate the digital, distributed platforms distinctive of the web, subcultural investment in media properties (characterized by communities of epistemological and erotic engagement, which produce and share resources, knowledge, art, fiction, and videos) accrues a central economic importance.  Economic, that is, in at least two senses of the term: by transacting their identity, sexuality, and relationships through entertainment brands fans invest them with meaning, and thus entertainment brands must invest in fans as a key component of their corporate strategy.  Such revaluation of fan labor, in turn, brings to the fore a number of constitutive material, ideological, regulatory, and textual struggles over control, ownership, and discipline.  My dissertation takes my own involvement with online lesbian TV fandom as a paradigmatic case of the operations and stakes of this transformation, going beyond overzealous celebrations or condemnations of participatory consumer culture to interrogate our culture's promiscuous economies of desire and re/production.

In the introduction, "Indiscreet Media," I survey a quarter-century of scholarship on fan activity, mapping the disciplinary and technocultural challenges that have driven this work's continuing development, from early ethnographic studies to the diverse aca[demic]-fan community today.  I identify this tradition's fruitful theoretical interventions, as well as persistent tensions and omissions, which are exacerbated in a context of accelerating digitization and convergence of media networks.  The three core chapters that follow then take three series-specific fandoms as case studies, which further explore and interrogate televisual/digital convergence, relations of consumption and production, and mediated sexuality.  Each chapter analyzes its artifact across three intertwined registers: screen texts (television programs, though acknowledging their increasingly fluid borders), metatexts (ancillary materials disseminated by the industry), and fan texts (specifically, lesbian readings and writings). 

Chapter one III, "The Shape of Things to Come," explores Battlestar Galactica's narratives of lesbian motherhood, beginning from the claim that television reproduces itself by yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry.  As it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with extra-broadcast content, television has new opportunities to intensify its intercourse with fans and to propagate its texts.  At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unauthorized fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and "labor" (in its multiple senses) in an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.  Such "orphan" texts are fertile ground for queer desires and families to germinate.

Chapter two II, "Private Eyes," shifts from reproductive to epistemological economies.  Here, I investigate the alleged crimes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actress Mariska Hargitay and her character Olivia Benson, chronicling and analyzing a collective conspiracy theory of lesbian invisibility.  In both critical and fan discourse, debates about where to locate the queerness of television oscillate irresolvably between the aforementioned three sites (texts, contexts, and fan texts), and the instability of sexual/textual knowledge contaminates the "real" of celebrities' and fans' identities.  Parody via the caricatured hybrid "Oliska Hargenson" illustrates these border wars and the relations of power and inequality that persist despite the convergence of media registers.

Building on the appeal to a politics of visibility among SVU fans, but turning to a more self-consciously queer mode of representation, chapter three IV, "Labors of Love," interrogates The L Word's interpellation of a lesbian media public.  At the intersection of virtual community, material subculture, and marketing spectacle, online tie-ins (such as an official fan-written episode [1] and a social networking promotion [2]) attempt to monetize subjectivity and desire, exposing both the possibilities and the limits of such transmedia strategies.

Finally, in my conclusion, "We the Audience," I synthesize these arguments to offer a panoramic view of the struggles between undisciplined participation and capitalist reincorporation in today's convergent mediasphere.  Fan activities (whether literally or only metaphorically "queer") are thoroughly implicated in television's corporate economy, even as their economies of desire spawn alternative models of value, knowledge, and community.  As immaterial goods, the hallmark of late capitalism, mass media texts depend on the interpretive and libidinal labor of their consumers to invest them with value.  This creates a paradox: the only way for the entertainment industry to profit from the texts that they supposedly own is to turn them over to their audiences to make what they will of them, thus challenging this very conception of ownership and its ensuing hierarchies of production and reproduction, authorized and perverse readings.  Given the myriad ways fans are wired into today's media circuit, the classic valorization of fan production as subversive and oppositional is no longer sustainable.  Nonetheless, fandom is an instructive limit case of post-industrial capitalism and its heteronormative foundations, because what it highlights by carrying productive consumption to its extreme is the system's constitutive contradictions and excesses.