Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom

Posting during the semester has proven to be harder to accomplish than I anticipated. However, I do want to announce some good news!

The book I coedited with Sharon Ross, Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, is now available. You can see check it out at amazon here.

We had a terrific group of contributors, and are very happy with the results. Thanks to everyone involved!

Click here to browse the index.

Luminosity, Vidding, and Auteurism

Luminosity has been one of my very favorite vidders for years now. I’ve shown her vids in class and I’ve been thinking of talking about one of her Supernatural vids, Bricks, for an In Media Res vidding week in January (not to be confused with the current In Media Res fandom week, where I chose to talk about Gossip Girl–will be posting tomorrow…)

So for the most part I’m thrilled that she’s finally getting all of this well deserved attention. And yet I’m noting in myself a little ambivalence, too, at the direction the conversation seems to be heading, and I’m trying to get to the core of why that is.

I think part of it is that Luminosity as a vidder, and more specifically the vids that are being focused on–Vogue and Woman’s Work–are easy for media scholars and public criticism to get behind because they echo academic and popular critical practices and theoretical stances. I share Henry’s concerns about Woman’s Work—that while it presents a resonant critique of the horror genre, it does a disservice to Supernatural’s more complex stance (and at times genre-revisionist tactics) towards masculinity and femininity. I prefer Bricks’ complex representation of Sam and Dean and the program’s rendering of issues of masculinity. The difference isn’t only that these vids are critical while others are emotional (as Jason and Kristina point out here and here), although certainly there are differences in affect. The difference is in the layers of critical positioning, the nuances of each moment; my favorite vids can’t be summed up with one thesis statement.

Also there’s a way that the prevalence of auteurist discourse in vidding specifically and fandom in general (something I mentioned in the authorship workshop at Unboxing) that makes vidding culture and a vidder like Luminosity accessible for popular and academic recognition. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t recognize her skill, creativity, style, and influence (really, I am an enormous fan of Luminosity), but that we should be aware when we’re recreating auteurist discourse, and the ideological implications therein.

For vidding and fandom specifically, in female authorship communities, auteurism is especially significant in its heralding of female producers as meaning makers with cultural import. And in this way, it’s perhaps even more important that Luminosity be lauded, as an auteur, in all of these levels of public discourse.

But I guess I’m afraid that public discourse will move on, having paid Luminosity public due, without delving into the complexity of the majority of her vids or of vidding culture(s) as a whole, leaving the many realms of perhaps less accessible female creative authorship unacknowledged and unexplored.

From Bouncers to Unboxing

My apologies for the unexplained absence—some of you know that I was busy with another form of production, the production of another human being: something I can’t quite get over. So yes, Penelope Lane Stein was born on August 28^th, 2007, and has since viewed an inordinate amount of TV, including a 6 hour marathon of Gossip Girl. 

Over the last few months, I took a (not entirely voluntary) pause in my normal media consumption and analysis, as I found myself inexplicably drawn to watching an unusual set of programming for me.  I could have sworn that during the latter months of my pregnancy I would be eating up marathons of Roswell, but instead I watched hour upon hour of What Not to Wear, America’s Next Top Model, Flip This House, and of course let’s not forget A Baby Story and Bringing Home Baby.  Future posts may revisit these excursions into reality/self-improvement programming.

But what has finally inspired my return to blogging was the invigorating Unboxing TV symposium at MIT this past weekend. What fascinated me most about this conference was how it functioned as a moment of self-definition for TV studies, and yet what we all seemed to recognize most clearly is how necessarily eclectic and non-institutionalized TV studies is in this moment—and most likely will remain.  I was also especially glad to see this conference serve as an opportunity for scholars who include in their work an exploration of fans, fannishness, and fandom (I’m not going to say fan studies scholars, because this was primarily a TV studies conference, and so didn’t include many of the scholars who are studying fans primarily rather than the media primarily) to engage in dialogue with TV scholars whose work focuses on the industry and institutionalized discourses of TV.  I hope that the conversations that occurred on day two, rather than fracturing further this community of scholars, revealed the complementary and shared interests of these different approaches to media and its reception.

I’m sure many of the participants will be blogging (or have already begun to do so) about the symposium, and I will have more to say as well as I go through my notes, but here’s my back on board note—I want to say thanks again to the organizers for such an invigorating experience.  It snapped me out of bouncers and bottles mode, and now I’m raring to talk about TV, fans, and more TV.  Plus, now I have a little fangirl to inculcate into the ways of fannish <i>and</i> academic overanalysis.

Fanboy/Fangirl?

It’s past time that I link to the conversations going on at Henry Jenkins’ blog as part of the fanboy/fangirl detante.

My conversation with Robert Jones is now pretty much old news, but if you didn’t catch it,  it’s here and here.

Check out all the weekly installments–and also the extensive conversations happening in response at the livejournal community set up for the purpose: fandebate.

Robert Jones writes on “Pink vs. Blue: The Emergence of Women in Machinima”

[The following is an abstract by Robert Jones of an essay which will appear in a forthcoming Machinima Reader. It informs the discussion between Robert and myself at Henry Jenkins' blog posted here]

 

Similar to the pioneering hobbyists from the early days of both radio and the personal computer, creators of machinima adapted the technology of video game engines and appropriated it for their own purposes. In fact, the histories of radio and the personal computer parallel that of machinima, providing a better understanding of this growing phenomenon. Overwhelmingly, the lack of female presence in the early days of development of these technologies becomes the unifying historical trend that offers insight into the relationship between gender and technology. Only through understanding machinima’s place within the history of communication technology can we fully grasp the breadth of this phenomenon. Therefore, this article proposes to explore the role that women play in machinima’s history and demonstrate how it falls within the larger historical context of women in technology.

Dating back to early radio, the discourse around technology situated it as something to be mastered by men and to be merely used by women. Making machinima has always required some sort of technical ability whether it be simply getting the game footage in an editable video form or completely repurposing a game engine. The technical skills necessary thus served as a barrier to women, who have long internalized the cultural message that technology is for men. The origin of machinima was born out of First Person Shooters like DOOM and Quake which found their fan-base among young men. With their militaristic narratives and warrior aesthetic, FPS’s create what Jenkins (199 identifies as a gendered play space that mostly appeals to males. To date, the most popular and commercially successful machinima series is Red vs. Blue based on Halo, the space marine FPS. Because the majority of machinima gets made within FPS’s, the lack of women producing machinima makes sense. This however changes with the introduction of The Sims 2. Maxis, the game’s developer, noticed the popularity of a photo album function within the original Sims game, whereby players were using the screenshot function to document the lives and stories of their characters. For the sequel they created an interface that allowed players to record their gameplay and easily manipulate the camera in the 3D environment, in effect turning the game into a machinima studio. In addition, Maxis marketed the moviemaking functionality through their website (creating space for players to upload their movies) and a competition (a machinima film festival). The result has been a tremendous increase in women making machinima. Jenkins would explain this as a difference in the play space. The Sims, unlike most FPS’s, has no violent element to it. Instead, it is about building and maintaining virtual relationships.

I would certainly agree with Jenkins that the difference in the game’s content plays an important part in its popularity and by extension more machinima produced by women; however, I want to argue that The Sims 2 increased the production of machinima by women due to making the interface more user-friendly and thus accessible by women. This by no means implies an innate inability on the behalf of the women as many stereotypes would suggest. Instead, this reveals a long history of gendering technology as exclusively male. By situating machinima within this larger gendered history of technology I hope to provide a better sense of where it comes from so that we can determine where it is going.

Jenkins, H. (1998). ‘Complete Freedom of Movement’: Video games as gendered play spaces. In J Cassell and H. Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and computer games, pp. 262-297. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 

The Cheerleader Won’t Save Herself (or It’s Man Devouring Man, My Dear, and Who Are We to Deny it in Here?)

I was all set to write a fairly frustrated post about gender representation and identification in Heroes, and how a show that seemed to hold so much promise could go–for me at least- so very wrong. And then the season finale was just so good that I’ve had to completely temper my argument.

So, instead of a post about gender representation, misogyny, and even anti-Semitism in Heroes (and I’ll still have to touch on those topics) I find myself writing (much less provokingly perhaps) on seriality, ideology, unevenness and expectation. And of course fan engagement.[1]

Now, normally I proclaim myself to be a fan of uneven televisual texts. It’s part of the reason I love serial television–I love the ups and the downs, the horrid lows and the sublime highs brought about by too many episodes a season and shifting groups of writers, The organic unpredictability of serial network television makes a program like, say, Smallville (which I’ve written about quite a bit)–or Heroes, as it turns out–a wild ride. Smallville used to be a testament to the transcendent possibilities of unevenness. Only because it had the possibility to be so ideologically problematic could it also reach the highs of celebrating otherness and queerness as the thematic heart of the show. Now it’s reverted to celebrating normativity and condemning otherness, and that’s the price we have to pay for having a show that queered Superman and imagined the value of his friendship with the misunderstood, ambiguous Lex Luthor.

For some reason, the uneveness of Heroes does not inspire the same devotion in me. Perhaps it’s because it initially seemed to hold the promise of total crafting, of narrative complexity thought through from beginning to end. But along the way it’s offered us extremely problematic gender representations (and, I feel, though perhaps this point will end up being highly contested) troubling ethnic representations as well.

One of my grad students wrote a thought provoking paper this semester on the females in Heroes, examining Claire and Nikki as final girls. He pointed out that Claire and Niki are the only two central heroes who don’t embrace their powers as something special but rather see them as monstrous. I’m inclined to agree.

[FINALE SPOILERS FOLLOW]

Hiro vs. Dean–(on gender, academia, fandom, and Heroes vs. Supernatural)

[Author's note: This is a post from the fall 2006, written shortly after Flow, reposted here from livejournal]

This was written as a response to Henry Jenkins’ post, also spurred by Kristina’s comment to him.

In the above linked post, Henry Jenkins argues that we need to refine how we think about gender when we consider the role of the gender divide in fandom and acafandom. I absolutely agree. However, I also feel that as the discourse is being shaped (in acafandom, not fandom) by fanboys–and by fangirls working within the constraints and mandates of academic culture—some programs and forms of reception are always seen as more acceptable than others.

I ran into this most clearly when I first tried to work on Roswell (and consumerist fashion discourses in Roswell as creative cultural work) and found myself on the receiving end of intrigued but nervous stares or overt resistance. [My favorite comment, after my first conference talk as a grad student about genre and Roswell--what would become my dissertation topic--was the person who, after a fair amount of engaged discussion about questions of genre within the panel as a whole, came up to me and said “Well, I can see that you really like Roswell.” Needless to say, I was more than frustrated by that response--although, of course, I did/do really love Roswell.] In the end, I found Smallville a better crossover acafan show, because it had the fanboy Superman cred, and yet I could still work on the queerness in the show itself and in fandom, together with the mixing of genres and the seriality that seemed so rich in Roswell. The political implications of female fans queering Superman, combined with the fanboy interest in comics and superheroes, made Smallville a shoe in for the academic circuit. It didn’t hurt that Smallville was the show closest to my heart—it was a happy combination.

But to return to the new generation of acafan and fan favorites: perhaps it’s premature to trace out a Heroes vs. Supernatural aca vs. fan face off. But I think it’s there, lurking under the surface and in the corners. Now let me say, I adore both shows. I think that this season (with Smallville so on and off, Gilmore Girls treading into Aerie Girls treacle land, and Veronica Mars struggling with its new format and attempt to bridge the niche/mainstream divide) both Heroes and Supernatural are the two stand out shows, the two shows that have captured my heart. Hell, Supernatural has even tempted me away from Clark and Lex (which it would appear not even Veronica Mars could do) and so I’ve begun to dig into the amazing wealth of fanfiction that’s out there.

So, they’re both great programs. I think that they both arguably have the makings of fan “activator” programs, as Henry Jenkins has termed it. Different makings—Heroes is more deeply serial, with multiple arcs that slowly build on each other and might lose the non-work-in-progress lover. Supernatural has the slash built in, the angsty boys with chemistry, and each episode is cohesive while being part of a slowly building serial whole.

It might be the slash potential that’s determined that Supernatural has so much more fan fiction than Heroes. Of course, Supernatural also has a year on Heroes. I’m thinking we’ll see some Heroes fan fiction, but likely not the amount that we see of Supernatural because there aren’t core romantic pairings in quite the same way, no matter how much we may all adore Hiro (and who couldn’t adore Hiro?)

But, given that Supernatural has been on the show for a whole year and a half, and has a fandom that’s starting to rival where Smallville was in its second season, why hasn’t it made an appearance in academic contexts? At Flow, nowhere was it mentioned, except in in-between hall conversations (and this was the conference that was supposed to be like one big in-between hall conversation, and in many ways succeeded at that.) Meanwhile, Heroes was all over the place, the new acafan darling.

Is Supernatural remaining in the shadows because much of the impetus of Supernatural fandom is in the slashiness, and its one thing to slash superman with Lex Luthor, but incest is something that sets off a whole other level of taboo? Is it that there is a more libidinal (slash aside) dimension to fan engagement with Supernatural that perhaps feels somehow excessive to acafans, and therefore something that we don’t want to put out there into the academy, given that we’re treading on tricky ground already by simply basing our careers on the study of pop culture and often outing our own investments? Or is it that the valuation of narrative complexity heralds shows like Heroes and Veronica Mars, and Supernatural doesn’t fall within the same excused intellectual umbrella?

Or maybe it’s more something we can see from the flip side—Supernatural acafanwork is bound to emerge, but Heroes fits the mold so well of that which can be so easily celebrated in acafan discourses—it’s got the narrative complexity, it’s not particularly taboo, it attracts male and female fans at once (so you don’t have the sense of a female fan community that from the outside might look a little opaque), and it’s got the superhero comics fanboy cred. I’m of course not saying that Heroes shouldn’t be studied, but I can’t help but look at the forces that push Heroes to the fore while Supernatural stays buried, and think that those dynamics are significant. So, yes, I agree—we do need a more nuanced analysis of the role of gender and the gender divide in contemporary audience and fan communities. We also can’t ignore that these dynamics have an effect on how fan culture gets recorded and publicized, and that the future narratives we tell of the histories of fandom may very well be impacted by our awareness of the role gender plays in not only what shows we view but what shows we write about.

 

 

Dichotomies vs. Continuities (on machinima, fan authorship, and gender)

It’s perhaps ironic–now that I think about it, I realize that the paper I was going to give at MiT5 actually would have spoken to the debates that have emerged since the conference. I was going to look at the correlations (and differences) between fanvidding and machinima. Fanvidding is considered both in scholarly circles and among vidders themselves to be primarily a mode of female authorship, emerging out of female reception and authorship communities–not just slash/queer identified communities of course, but certainly many of the more high profile vidders are significant figures in slash fandoms. Machinima on the other hand emerges out of what scholars and video gamers perceive as primarily male spaces of engagement and male modes of interaction–coming out of first person shooter games and a hacking culture that celebrates transforming the system in tandem with creating new texts.

Robert Jones’ essay in _Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet_ offers valuable insight into machinima producers’ value set(s). However, while I am a proponent of being deeply familiar with and really identifying with the values of a community on which one writes (the acafan, scholar/fan, or autoethnographic perspective), one of the resulting pitfalls it that we run the risk of celebrating the values of one (our) community/mode of authorship over others. I feel this happens somewhat in Jones’ essay. In its attempt to delineate the differences between fan fiction and Machinima, the essay seems to set up a hierarchy: it celebrates machinima producers’ ability to change the system and influence future gameplay as being somehow a step beyond the authorship of female fan communities (in the form of fan fiction, art, and vidding.)

I find this delineation of machinima vs. fan fiction creativity somewhat problematic for multiple reasons.

Machinima + Vid?: Interface and Gender in Unofficial Authorship and New Media Studies

[My MiT5 Abstract (the paper that didn't happen--yet, at least)]

On the surface, films made from videogames (machinima), and fan-authored music videos (fanvids) seem to emerge from different worlds. Whereas the aesthetics of machinima have evolved out of hacker videogame culture—out of forums and behaviors that have been discursively gendered male, fanvids have evolved out of the more overtly female media fan communities, in which participants are concerned with exploring characters and romantic relationships in greater depth by authoring their own derivative texts. Although cultural and gendered discourses may seem to separate these two emerging derivative art forms, if we move past these culturally-enforced divisions, we can see inherent similarities in their modes of creativity, if not in the communities within which they have developed.

From livejournal to wordpress–on gender divides, interface, and academia

This blog has been a long time in coming. I’ve hesitated for a year–planning to debut a blog on media and fandom in addition to my participation in acafan livejournal spaces–but not followed through until now. A range of issues have kept me from taking this plunge. I am very aware of the stakes (professional and personal) involved in posting on a blog rather than in (or as well as in) the locked, community spaces of livejournal. At the same time, perhaps I’ve artificially inflated the divide between an interface/network such as wordpress, with access to the blogosphere, and and journal-based social networking community like livejournal, journalfen, greatestjournal, or even vox. I haven’t hesitated to participate in creative spheres such as flickr, but I’ve held off from the world of blogging.

A large part of my hesitation may indeed have been my perception of a gender divide. I have viewed blogs as spaces of professionalized, controlled sharing–one to many communication–rather than the organic community discourse that made livejournal so compelling when I initially discovered it as a pre-dissertation writing grad student. Comments seem more self-censored here in the blogosphere, and the lack of threaded comments has seemed to me to devalue decentralized conversations and the relations between individuals within a shifting whole. Yet, by not participating in these spaces, I realize that I (and we–and here I’m referring to the generation of acafan media scholars with whom I at least partially identify) are cutting ourselves off from valuable discussions, from the possibility of dialogues that need to happen. Yes, we want (or at least, I want) change to happen, but we can’t just sit back and wait for it to occur.