What the Chinese Are Making of Avatar

Several years ago, I met a remarkable young man named Lucifer Chu in Shanghai. Chu had been the person who first translated the works of J.R.R. Tolkien into Chinese, after a considerable push to convince publishers that there was a market for fantasy and science fiction in China. He took the proceeds from the sales of the Lord of the Rings to launch a fantasy foundation, which promoted fantastical literature in Taiwan and mainland China, and he translated more than 30 fantasy novels for the Chinese market. As of a few years ago, almost all of the fantasy novels and role playing games available in Taiwan were translated by Chu and he was making in roads into getting these same works published for the mainland. He argued that the fantastic played crucial roles in Chinese folk and literary traditions but the genre had largely been eradicated there as a consequence of Maoist policies during the Cultural Revolution which promoted socialist realism and saw fantasy as western and decadent. Chu argued that bringing fantasy literature back into China was a way of helping his people rediscover their dreams and reimagine their future.

As I have been speaking with my USC student Lifang He about her work on the fan cultures which have quickly grown up around Avatar in China, I've wondered what connections, if any, exist between these two efforts to promote the fantastical imagination in that country. Are the young men and women we read about here the offspring of Chu's efforts? Are they connecting with western fan culture on line? This piece offers us some tantalizing glimpses into the many different ways Chinese fans have mobilized around and fantasized about James Cameron's blockbuster.

The American press has been following the commercial success of Avatar in China primarily as a business issue -- exploring what it might tell us about other opportunities for selling media in this country, using it to shadow Google's turmoil in the country, and marginally exploring why China was pushing the film from many of the nation's movie theaters. Yet, this piece takes us inside the world of Chinese Avatar fans, helping us to better understand what the film looks like from their perspective.

Avatar and Chinese Fan Culture
Lifang He

James Cameron's new movie Avatar is breaking the box office record in China. It is the highest grossing movie in Chinese movie history, achieving around 1.02 billion USD (Xinhua News, 2010). The influence and popularity of Avatar is spectacular and fans were crazy about the movie. Because of the limited IMAX 3D theaters in China, the movie tickets are in short supply and the price is very high. The tickets are officially priced at USD 18-26 but resold at up to USD 60. There are only11 IMAX 3D theaters in China.

Despite the ticket prices, Chinese fans waited overnight outside the store for many hours, similar to people waiting outside the Apple Store for the new iPhone. White collared professionals in small cities took their annual leave and made group trips to nearby big cities for the IMAX 3D version. Enthusiastic fans watched it multiple times in three different versions: IMAX 3D, 3D and 2D.

Being a fan of Avatar goes beyond the theater screens; it floods into a variety of online fan activities. When the Chinese government wanted to pull the 2D Avatar off most of the theaters to provide screens to the new released movie Confucius, many online fans called for a boycott of Confucius. Chinese audiences are becoming more and more active, embracing aspects of participatory culture and fandom, and seeking to more directly shape their entertainment options.

In this essay, Chinese fan culture will be discussed by examining various Avatar fan activities on one of the growing online communities, Baidu Tieba, a user driven network. Fan produced media will give us some clues as to how the young people react to the movie Avatar and why they are enthusiastic about the movie.

Collecting and Sharing Information
As of February 2010, users at Baidu Tieba generated 36,187 topics and 452, 509 posts about Avatar (Baidu, 2010). These posts involved the sharing of relevant information and the discussion of the characters, director, story, plot and other interests.
The planet Pandora draws most of the attention. Fans are very interested in the Pandora world because the movie only provides a glimpse of its ecology and culture. Fans established an online study group to learn the Na'vi language, planet, trees, customs, colors, lifestyle in Pandora etc. A fan bought an English version of Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora and shared the content with other fans (link). Some fans can't understand English very well, so they are waiting for the Chinese version of the book. As one fan explained "no matter how expensive the book is, I still want to buy the Chinese version although my monthly salary is only 800 RMB (120USD) a month."
Some fans complained that the Chinese translation of the movie were really bad and posted the correct translation for other people. Similar to the Chinese translation team who volunteered to work on English and Chinese translation of American TV shows like Lost, 24, and CSI, they are very dedicated.

As Neytiri draws many discussions on the web, fans wanted to make Jake as popular as Neytiri so they tried to build the buzz online. In these efforts, they collected all kinds of pictures and posters from the movie and other media. They also discussed Jake's hair, dress style, facial expression, and his pure smile in the movie. For instance, fans chatted about when Jake had the best smile in the movie. The first time Jake ran out of the research institute when he first got his avatar, his smile was regarded as the most pure and innocent.

Fans were also eager to explore all kinds of information from the production, back-story to the reception process. For example, they talked about the sex scene that was cut off from screen, explored the different versions of trailers, the couple's relationship in the movie, and their stories in the future. Other interesting discussions included the best time to use the restroom during the movie. They indicated that it is better to go to the toilet when the movie was at 56 minutes so they won't miss a lot of exciting moments.

Fans share the knowledge with all the members of Tieba community, circulating the information and inviting other members to participate in the discussion. As Pierre Levy wrote "no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity" (Levy, 1998).

Fan Writing

Besides collecting and sharing information about the movie, fan writing is another emerging form of fan activity on the web. Because of the restrictions of the Chinese publication rules, the internet provides more free space for fans to publish their work and most of their work is much better than what has been written by the professional journalists, covering comprehensive stories about the evolution of IMAX 3D technology, the background of director, back-stories of the characters.

Some fans also wrote a parallel story based on the Chinese current social issues. As a famous blogger, Chenpeng Li wrote, the story of how the alien Na'vi are pulled off their homeland by humans is similar to Chinese residents being forced to leave their homes and land by the Chinese government (Sina.com, 2010). Avatar is a great metaphor of nail house dwellers against big property developers. "Nail House" refers to home or buildings of people who refused to move when the property needs to be demolished by the government for development (Wiki, 2010). In Li's blog, he wrote

"in 2154, a land development company RDA went to Pandora to get more land and living resources with the assertion that the residents who agree to move out can get attractive compensation. The residents refused to move out since they have lived there for many generations, just like the Na'vi people who didn't want to move because their roots were under the tree. RDA has a strong relationship with the government and also has other supports such as city managers acting as low-level government officials, responsible for maintaining city laws and rules. A disagreement erupted and started a fight between the RDA and the residents. "

Li regarded Jake as the leader who betrayed the Housing Demolition Office, referred Colonel Quarles as the chief city manager and the Na'vi people as the Chinese residents who are pulled off their land. The last scenario about Neytiri beating Colonel Quarles represents the extreme military power that was defeated by the Chinese mass residents.

Chinese fans also associated themselves with another Hollywood movie UP, which tells a story of a 78-year-old man Carl Fredricksen who refused to move out from his neighborhood. He made his house as a makeshift airship to fly to his dream place Paradise Falls using thousands of the balloons. A popular Chinese blogger, Han Han commented on his blog:

"UP provides the Chinese citizens with a new perspective toward house demolition. Chinese residential tenants only have the right to use the land for 70 years, and after 70 years the land use rights belong to the government and the houses are regarded as private owned property. Both the movie UP and Chinese government provided us a solution to cope with the house demolition. UP tells us to lift the house off the ground by the helium balloons; and the Chinese government tells us that don't think too much because after 70 years, the houses will probably collapse" (Han, 2009).

In recent years, China has been experiencing a fast period of urbanization and many old buildings and neighborhood have been torn down for modern shopping malls and skyscrapers. Over 30 million residents have been forced to move from their homes (Hays, 2008). Li referred the movie to some cases in China that residents refused compensation deals and fighted with the government. Fuzheng Tang who poured gas and burn herself to protect her three floor home from Chengdu violent home demolition, Pan Rong who threw self-made petrol bomb to the demolition crew, and Chongqing nail house are the all real cases for anti-demolition.

Avatar and UP are a good reflection of recent Chinese social problems, showing a lack of citizen rights and choices. As Han said " brutal demolition can only happen in foreign planets and China, which foreigners can't image" (Sina.com, 2010). Chinese fans found both movies quite related to their life and both provide them with a story that they can share and discuss. The only Chinese popular TV series Snail House (Wo Ju), also titled Dwelling Narrowness, that can truly reflect their life tells a real story about how average Chinese people became house slaves in Shanghai in an environment of rising home prices and official corruption, was eventually banned by the government. Li regarded Avatar as the best movie that eulogizes the nail house successfully fighting against forcible demolition in China. The forcible city managers, house demolition office, Chinese City Demolition Ordinance was vividly analogized in the movie (Sina, 2010).

Fans Creative Work

Besides collecting and sharing knowledge and fan writing, fans also use other ways to create their own works such as costume play, Avatar paintings, etc. One of the most popular works online is the costume play by a couple from Chongqing. They dressed like Jake and Neytiri and posted their Avatar pictures online, which has over 94630 viewers (Baidu, 2010).

Vidding is another way for them to participate in the creation. Three kinds of videos will be shown here to showcase the vidding culture in China. The first one is a theme song vid, which remixes the video "I See You" and "My Heart Will Go On." Fans find that the stories of two theme songs are very similar: both are love stories and the main actors in the two movies both died. For example, the lyrics of "My Heart Will Go On" has the words "I see you" that can match with the content of Avatar. Here is the video of "I See You."

Also fans made another version of Titanic with "I See You."

In another video, fans used photoshop to make Avatar posters for the celebrities such as Obama, Yao Ming and Li Yuchun and used their Avatar photos as materials to make the video, which can be played here. Similar to the fans of Kung Fu Panda, they like using Photoshop software to make posters with different themes such as Harry Potter, Lust, Caution, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.

Another vid is created by a World of Warcraft fan J J. Because the worlds of Warcraft and Pandora are very similar, he incorporated the video clips from the WOW game and made a WOW version of Avatar, which is very popular among Chinese fans. Here is the video.

Why fans are so enthusiastic?
The Internet and digital technology has given fans unprecedented access to information and has changed the concept of freedom of choice and creative expression. Because of the national system and media censorship, Chinese people can not say anything they want. But online community provides a good platform for the fans to say something they can't in real life.

Online community also provides them a way to relieve the stress and escape from the reality because they face so much pressure from all aspects of society such as intense high school graduation examination, competitive job hunting, etc. In addition, playing around in the Internet is not regarded as a serious hobby by Chinese old generation who are very realistic and more concerned about their children's future such as going to a good university and having a decent job.

Chinese youth are tired of Chinese serious mainstream film culture because Chinese films lack the creativity that American TV shows and movies have. Avatar created a dream and an ideal world that Chinese fans can't have in reality. As a famous movie director Lu Chuan said, "Avatar made me realize that what we lack is not technology. I suddenly realized how far away our films are from simple beauty, crystal-clear purity and passionate dreams" (Sina.com, 2010).

Conclusion

Since its launch, Avatar has developed a huge enthusiastic fan base in China. Although Chinese fans are not exposed to as much media products as Americans because of the unequal international distribution, they are very active in learning and understanding what's happening with the movie. Internet and new technologies provide them a medium to participate in the media production and distribute their work online. They collect and circulate information, participate in the discussion, and create their own works to contribute to the Avatar community. It is a great representation of creativity and self-expression.

Avatar has also had a revolutionary impact on Chinese movie industry, stimulating the development of the local movie making. Chinese Film Association and Chinese Film Art Research Center hosted a conference meeting in January 2010, discussing how to improve Chinese movies. The professor Shixian Huang from Beijing Film Academy criticized the famous Chinese film director Yimou Zhang's recent work A Simple Noodle Story, which was only taken several months to be finished and is a very low quality movie. The secretary-general from China Movie Forums indicated that the main film audience is generation 80s and 90s who are enthusiastic with the non-reality films which lacks in China. He appealed to the Chinese government that China should give support and help to such kind of films. Some other interesting questions are also raised in this meeting such as how to nurture the audiences by the series films, how to cultivate the young talents, how to bring the technology to the movie making, etc.

China is in a transition period where old system and new system are colliding and they haven't developed a very stable system yet. In the future, with political and social policy more and more open and transparent, there will be more freedom for movie production. It will be also be easier for the Hollywood filmmakers to promote their films and other media extensions.

Lifang He is from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in Journalism. After college, she was hired by two global advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Euro RSCG Worldwide. At these agencies, she worked as a strategic planner for a variety of international brands including but not limited to Nike and Nokia and gained experience in consumer and market research and developing brand strategies. Since August of 2009, she has been pursuing her Master's degree in Communication Management at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was while attending a USC class taught by Henry Jenkins that her academic interest turned toward transmedia planning and studying fan culture. Her specific areas of interest in these fields revolve around digital culture, brand communities, and how brands relate to and engage fans.

References:

Baidu (2010). Retrieved Jan. 20, 2010

Baidu Tieba (n.b.). Retrieved Jan.20, 2010

Chuan, Lu (2010). Avatar Critics. Sina.com. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Han, Han (2010). Sina Blog. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010, f

Hays, Jeffrey (2008). Urban Life in China. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010

Itzkoff, Dave (2010). You Saw What in Avatar? New York Times.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture.

Levy, Pierre (1998). Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace.

Li, Chenpeng (2010). Story of Avatar and Nail House. Sina.com. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Nail House. Wikipedia. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Sentinel, Asia (2010). Avatar vs. Confucius in China. Korea Times. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Xin Hua News (2010). Retrieved Jan. 20, 2010.

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• Film: Newswire:Chinese Government Pulls Avatar from 2D Screens (avclub.com)

Vidding Kung Fu Panda in China

From time to time, I use this space to showcase the global dimensions of the kinds of participatory culture which so often concern us here. When I first started to write about fan culture, for example, the circuit along which fan produced works traveled did not extend much beyond the borders of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and perhaps Australia. American fans knew little about fan culture in other parts of the world and indeed, there was often speculation about why fandom was such a distinctly American phenomenon.

Now, fans online connect with others all over the world, often responding in real time to the same texts, conspiring to spread compelling media content from one culture to the other, and we are seeing a corresponding globalization of fan studies. Yet, some countries remain largely outside of field of view, because of language barriers, cultural differences, political policies, and alternative tech platforms.

Consequently, most of us know very little about how fan production practices have spread to China -- which is too often described in terms of its piracy of American content and too little discussed in terms of its creative repurposing of that content to reflect their own cultural interests. So, I am really excited over these next two installments to share some glimpses into fan culture in China -- specifically focusing on the vidding community there (but also discussing other forms of fan participation.)

These two posts were created by Lifang He, an Annenberg student who took my transmedia entertainment class in the fall and who is doing an independent study with me this term to expand her understanding of the concept of participatory culture. Here, she talks about how Kung Fu Panda got read in relation to the economic crisis in China, and next time, she will tackle the array of different fan responses to Avatar.

Kung Fu Panda vidding and Chinese fan culture
Lifang He

In this paper, I'm going to write about a Chinese vid based on a movie Kung Fu Panda as it is a great example of fan made extensions in China. I'll introduce the background of the movie, discuss the relationship between the vid and the original movie, and also I'll talk about fan's role in the vidding and Chinese fan culture.

Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 animated comedy movie directed by John Stevenson and produced by DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. It tells a story of a clumsy panda bear Po, who unenthusiastically works as a waiter for his father's noodle restaurant and eventually achieves his dream and becomes a master of martial arts.

According to Sina Entertainment (2008), this movie achieved significant monetary success after it was released on July 20, 2008 in China, which had hit approximately 14 million USD box office sales in the first ten days.

This Hollywood made Chinese movie is much better than other Chinese made Chinese movies, which proves American's leading ability to create entertainment and market Chinese culture. The movie is filled with Chinese elements. The key character Panda is China's national treasure and the other characters in the movie such as the monkey, snake, red crowned crane, tiger and mantis are the classic representatives of Chinese martial arts. Moreover, the Chinese imagery was used so well that Chinese audience felt very excited to discuss how great the movie is. As a famous Chinese film director Lu Chuan commented on his blog, " the movie brought big laugh to Chinese people. It was a big surprise. Our familiar culture is no longer a burden for the creativity, instead it becomes an active and vivid entertainment" (Lu Chuan, 2008).

In response to the success of the movie, a lot of discussion was generated online between the audience and the animation filmmaker after its first release. Fans posted reviews on their blogs and discussed their favorite characters on Bulletin Board System (BBS). Also hey used Photoshop software to make posters with different themes such as Harry Potter, Lust, Caution, Pirates of the Caribbean, which attracted a lot of buzz. They also created music videos and wrote lyrics to compliment the movie, which were posted on social networking sites. After knowing that The Kaboom of Doom, a sequel of Kung Fu Panda, has been currently in pre-production and will be released in 2011 (Wiki, 2009), fans started to make their own versions of the movie.

Among all of these fan activities, producing vids and sharing with other fans on Chinese social networking sites is one of the most popular ways for them to express their love to the movie. They wrote scripts, re-edited video clips using the original footage and did the voice over to tell a new story. Unlike American viding culture that has a relatively long history, Chinese vidding only emerged a couple of years ago owing to the video sharing websites such as Youtube.com, Tudou.com. There's no centralized grassroots community for vidding in China and Chinese vidding culture is very casual. An example to help exemplify how fans use this to publicize their opinions is a vid called Gu Piao Panda (Stock Panda), which is widely spread online and applauded by the fans.

Gu Piao Panda is a three-minute short film, which links Po to China's unsound stock market and tells a parallel story about stock panda. The story starts from a scene that Po was a legend in the stock market, but it turns out that it is just a dream. In reality, he is a rookie stock investor and his money is all tied up in stock because of the global recession. Po is so sad that he goes back home to talk to his goose father and his father persuades him to withdraw money from the stock market because of the bearish market situation. Po has a strong belief that he will become a guru in the financial world someday and the only reason he hasn't achieved that yet is because he hasn't met his teacher. His father has no choice and encourages him to attend a stock master competition at somewhere in the mountain. Po tries so hard to get into the competition and there are three competitive groups --- the happiness group with monkey in it, the fighting group with tiger in it and the desire group with red crowned crane in it. These three groups represent the three different types of stock operators. Then, Po attends the competition and finally his teacher finds him and teaches him how to become a successful fund manger. In the vid, the creator doesn't show an ending in the video, and instead he poses a question that if Po will become a stock master finally.

There are many similarities between the original movie and fan made vid. First of all, both of the film and fan vid chose Po as a main character as he is a good character to conceive the new stories and has become a prototype based on which fans have developed distinct characters in various contexts. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is an every Panda who masters some area through his persistent effort. Gu Piao Panda is a rookie stock operator and finally achieves success as a stock master. In other vids such as Real Estate Price, the key character panda is portrayed as a junior real estate developer who finally becomes a hero to save the real estate from subprime lending crisis. Moreover, the storylines of the two movies are very similar. Specifically, Gu Piao Panda creates a story that Po is a rookie stock operator who wants to become a stock master. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is a worker at his father's noodle restaurant who wants to become a kungfu fighter. Also, they both fight for an evil in the two videos. In Gu Piao Panda, he fights for the stagnant stock market. In Kung Fu Panda, he fights for Tai Lung. Furthermore, Po attends the competition to become a master in two movies either as a kung fu master or financial guru. In the original movie, he fights for a kung fu secret book. In the vid, he fights for two cars as the competition awards. When examining the video clips, it is apparent that fans use the same video clip to convey the same meaning in the different context. They just choose the video clips they like from the original movie to tell their stories. Other vids such as Real Estate Price, Kung Fu Competition, Certificates are all associated with the current social issues to tell different stories.

Real Estate Price

Kung Fu Competition

Certificates

This parody is so popular that fans keep spreading it online because there's so much fun in the video. Some popular terms and events used in this vid are funny in the context of Chinese culture. For example, they use the word "Niu Bi" (newby) to describe how successful Po is in the stock market in his dreams. They also use the word "Tao" (trapped in the market) to explain that his money is all tied up to the stock account. Real figures are also incorporated to make the audiences feel more attached to the story. For instance, Po's goose father persuades him to withdraw the money because the current stock index is above 2000 points - which is where the Chinese stock market was registering at that time when this vid was made. In addition, they use Dong Bei language, a northern Chinese dialect that often associated with Chinese cross talk to voice over the video. This brought more joy to the audiences, especially during the global depression era.

Gu Piao Panda and other vids are great examples showing that Chinese fans' role has changed from audience to active producers. They are not just passively receiving the information, but becoming publishers. The Internet has become a platform for them to distribute their works. This emerges an Internet culture called kuso, which is very popular in China. Kuso, originated from a Japanese word, is a popular subculture in China that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people (Wiki, 2009). Some interesting quotes from ESWN Culture Blog that can explain the popularity of Chinese kuso culture are, "Kuso is people deconstruct burning satire." "Kuso is an art criticism loved by people". "Kuso is people's ordinary, yet interesting, spiritual pursuit." (Soong, Roland & Qing, Huang, 2006)

The most classic case of Chinese Kuso culture is a fan-made short movie called The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bread based on a famous movie Wu Ji (The Promise) directed by Kaige Chen. A Chinese fan, Hu Ge, felt disappointed with Wu Ji and made his own spoof right after the movie was released. This fan-made movie joked about the film Wu Ji and dominant serious journalistic work, attracting huge fan following. From this fan made film, kuso has become more and more popular in China and represents a type of Chinese fan culture in the Internet.

There are two main reasons can account for the popularity of kuso culture in China. One important reason is that Chinese youth are suffering from social pressure and kuso provides a way for them to relieve themselves from the real pressure. They are a new generation who is tired of serious mainstream culture and kuso becomes a way for them to express themselves online. Moreover, kuso requires less technical skills and technology requirement and cheaper cost of movie production makes it possible for fans to make their own videos. Also the video sharing websites give the audiences a good platform to distribute and create a huge opportunity to show their own works.

Lifang He is from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in Journalism. After college, she was hired by two global advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Euro RSCG Worldwide. At these agencies, she worked as a strategic planner for a variety of international brands including but not limited to Nike and Nokia and gained experience in consumer and market research and developing brand strategies. Since August of 2009, she has been pursuing her Master's degree in Communication Management at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was while attending a USC class taught by Henry Jenkins that her academic interest turned toward transmedia planning and studying fan culture. Her specific areas of interest in these fields revolve around digital culture, brand communities, and how brands relate to and engage fans.

References:
Chuan, Lu (2008). Kung Fu Panda and Hollywood Movie. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kung Fu Panda Ticket sales(2008). Sina entertainment. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009
Kung Fu Panda. Wikipedia. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009
Kuso Culture. Baidu. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.
Maureen Fan (2008). Kung Fu Panda Hits A Sore Spot in China: Why a Quintessentially Chinese Movie Was Made in Hollywood. Washington Post Foreign Service. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.
Qi, Cai & Ying, Xie (2009). The Internet kuso culture in China. CulChina.Net. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.
Qing, Huang (2006). Parody can help people ease work pressure. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009
Soong, Roland (n.d.). The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bun. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part One)

If you are interested in Lost, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Star Wars, Fan Studies, or Transmedia Entertainment and you are not reading the work of Jonathan Gray, then you aren't doing it right! And let's face it, if you weren't interested in at least one of the above, then you probably have simply stumbled onto my blog by mistake.

Given that I am interested in all of the above, I keep stumbling onto Gray's work and each time I do, I come away a little better educated than I did before. Gray has got to be one of the most productive -- and provocative -- writers working in media studies today. This guy really is an extratextual! And he's someone I'm finding myself working with more and more. He's a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium network of scholars; he's edited several books where my essays have appeared; and he's been working behind the scenes to help pull together our Transmedia, Hollywood events this month. And he's now teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I did my PhD.

So, it's a pleasure to share this interview with you. The first installment covers everything from his recent work on parody, popular culture, and politics to his long-standing interest in fans and anti-fans. Mostly, Part Two focuses around his significant new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010). I wrote a blurb for this book, so I got to read it months ago, but it is just now hitting the shelves and starting to have a real impact on how we theorize and criticize everything from movie trailers to action figures.

Jonathan, you are a highly prolific writer who has published books on a broad range of topics. What do you see as the unifying theme(s) running through your work?

One of my key interests lies in how audiences operationalize media, or, in simpler terms, how meaning is created between items of media and their audiences. More specifically, I'm intrigued with how meaning for something can be created outside of that thing itself. Thus my first book was about how parody aims to "hijack" the meanings of various other genres, recontextualizing how we make sense of them. And the recent book, Show Sold Separately, is about how all those things that surround a film or television show, from DVD bonus materials to ad campaigns, merchandise to fan-created texts, actually play a key role in creating meaning. Satire TV, meanwhile, was in one sense a book about how politics and the news come to make sense in entertainment television. Television Entertainment was a little different, but is most clearly indicative of another central and intersecting strand of my work, which involves exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of media entertainment.

One of your primary contributions to the space of fan studies has been to focus attention on "nonfans" and "antifans." Why have these groups been neglected in audience research for so long? How do they relate to older categories like negotiated and oppositional readers? And what do they add to our understanding of fan culture?

Functionally, fans tend to be easier to study, at least from a cultural studies, qualitative perspective. When one is going to spend a portion of one's life sitting down and chatting with people about their media consumption, or reading their postings online, it's understandable that one would gravitate towards those audiences who are most literate about their subject, and most excited. "Snowball" sampling tends to pick up more fans too, since they can often be keen to be interviewed. Theoretically, a lot of qualitative audience research was motivated in part by a desire to show media consumers as not so hopelessly lost in the system as some suggest, and thus it was rhetorically important to make that case with fans.

But along the way, the risk has developed that fans stand in for audiences in general, when many audiences aren't fans, or define their fandom in very different terms. A particular danger here is that fans tend to know the whole object, and they tend to be very close to it. But what about those audiences who, for instance, know they hate something, even though they haven't ever watched it, or have only seen bits? They also have a relationship to the text, and it's created meaning for them, but it's a relationship that we've not studied too closely. Hence my interest in anti-fans. And then somewhere in the middle are those people who might watch semi-regularly, who have opinions on a show, and to whom the show means something, but who miss episodes and who have poor knowledge of background information. Surely much media consumption is casual and "meh"-ish: non-fans. But what is the show to them, and how do they construct it?

I'd see fandom, non-fandom, and anti-fandom as a completely different dimension from oppositional, dominant, or negotiated readings. After all, as fan studies have shown, some fan readings are deeply oppositional, some are dominant. Similarly with anti-fans and non-fans. As to your final question about what studying such viewers would add, they'll allow us to understand how affect works more clearly. Fandom involves anti-fandom (think of the Star Wars fan who hates Trek, since his galaxy isn't big enough for both franchises, or of X-Philes who hated the addition of the Terminator in the final seasons), and vice-versa (many haters are performing a love for something else). So just as we can't truly understand a concept like gender without interrogating both "masculinity" and "femininity," we won't truly get how affect works generally, or even how fandom works specifically, till we explore anti-fandom a little more.

Some critics have argued that news parody programs cheapen political discourse, trivializing important matters, and represent the further shift away from hard news and towards "news entertainment." Your Satire TV book takes a different perspective. What impact do you think such programs have on civic engagement and democratic participation?

That complaint, that The Daily Show and its colleagues take viewers away from hard news, always seems to forget that very few satiric shows actually compete with the news in timeslot. It also seeks to blame satire for the failings of the news. If people aren't watching the news, it's not because Jon Stewart is doing magic tricks in the circus tent down the road: it's because the news is often a seriously debased entity, reporting in a slack, half-ass way, addressed to an older white male audience, often with little interest in others, in a manner that is often the true circus act. So first off, I'd respond to that criticism by saying that if satire TV is so often being compared to the news, that's because the news is doing something wrong. And if people are trusting Stewart more than many newscasters, the productive question would be what is the news doing wrong and what is Stewart doing right, not how is Jon Stewart responsible for the fall of democracy.

But if we move away from comparing them, and consider the shows in and of themselves, their contributions are many. On one level, they're not afraid to be critical or to ruffle feathers. They also speak in a language that many understand, inviting us in, not just using "inside the Beltway" lingo. When successful, they encourage many of us to care about politics in the first place, and they encourage us to be savvy, attentive, critical citizens, watching and listening to politicians and newscasters with our guard up. They are media literacy teachers, while also being voices that empower us to be citizens, rather than cajole us or guilt trip us into caring about politics.

Satire TV mostly focuses on the role such programs played under the Bush administration. We are now a year into the Obama administration. How has his presidency changed the relevance and tone of The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and other such programs? Why are there not shows about Obama in the same way that Lil Bush made fun of his predecessor?

Satirists aren't going after Obama as much, as you note. Which is a pity, since every person in power needs to be subjected to a satirist's sting. I'm a big fan of the medieval Fool model. But we're in a two party system, and therein lies the problem, since too often it requires a binaristic way of looking at politics, whereby criticism of one "side" becomes, whether it wants to be or not, support for the other. On one hand, then, if your job is to make fun of stupid things said and done by people in power, how could you be expected to see the Democrats when at times you need to look through Rush Limbaugh is encouraging people note to donate to Haitian relief since it'll only embolden Obama, when Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino are claiming there were no terrorist attacks under Bush, when Glenn Beck is being Glenn Beck, when Jonah Goldberg is saying the Na'vi should've been Catholic in Avatar, when Sarah Palin thinks universal healthcare is a secret Nazi "death panel" plot, and when Dick Cheney is doing his best Emperor Palpatine impression? As they did under Bush, the Republicans just give way too much A-grade material to satirists. And on the other hand, if your sympathies lean left, as most satirists' do, it must prove hard to focus on Obama when it means supporting the Birthers and the Tea Baggers as a result.

I'm not someone who feels it's impossible to satirize Obama. But satirists go after crazy politics, and until the Republicans find a way to instill a semblance of sanity in their ranks, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and co. will likely continue to focus on the Republicans. While that takes the eye off the presidency - which worries me - it's still a vital task.

You've written about "news fans" and I find myself returning to this concept in trying to think about the cult that currently surrounds Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Are we at a moment where reactionary politics is fueled as much by the fan followings of talk show and news personalities as it is by Washington-based leaders?

It certainly seems that way, doesn't it? Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity on the right are all doing pretty well. And I'd bet that more folk on the left identify with Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann than with many politicians. Rumor has it that Lou Dobbs is even planning a presidential run [shudders]. Granted, few other fan objects get the chance to "cover" their fans on a weekly basis, so there is something of an echo chamber effect. But the more that we find political mobilization looking like fandom, the more that we need to think seriously about the connections. Liesbet Van Zoonen has an excellent book called Entertaining the Citizen in which she broaches the topic, Cornel Sandvoss has done some thinking about this, and you have too. But sadly the folk who study fans and the folk who study politics and journalism have been so successfully segregated from one another in most instances that there's nowhere near enough analysis along those lines.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 24, 2010

Camille Bacon-Smith and Henry Jenkins at Gaylaxicon 1992 (Part Two)

Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, moderated by Shoshanna, at Gaylaxicon 92, a science fiction convention by and for gay fandom and its friends, on 18 July 1992. At that time Henry was about to publish Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992); Camille had published Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture (U. of Penn. Press, 1992). Shoshanna is a fan. All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested.

Shoshanna: I wanted to ask you guys to bring this back to media fandom a bit, and talk about the ways that you see media fans doing something different, and what--since the title of this is "The sociology of media fandom"--how do fans behave that's not the way Lucasfilm behaves? If you find that interesting. And where do you think that comes from?
Camille: Well, first... I don't do sociology, I do anthropology. It's a little bit different. But that's okay, because that's what we called this panel anyway. So if there's any sociologists out there who are sitting there saying, "That's not sociology," I know that.

NB: That's another territorial battle in itself.

Camille: Yes, it is.

Henry: I'd say we poach right across that one and keep going...

Shoshanna: And we're not going to fight that one.

Camille: It's hard for me to say because one of the things that I really feel strongly about is that media fans are doing something, in a particular way, that is a folk process that goes on in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of things, everywhere all around the world. The problem we have is that we tend to think that what happens in straight white male America is the norm. In fact, it is the exception. And what women in media fandom, what the guys who come into media fandom, are doing is what everybody else all over the world is doing. They are taking the items of their culture, they are recombining them, remanufacturing them... The notion of originality has to do with how well you can represent the norm, what you can bring to the aesthetic conventions of what you already hold dear. The important thing is not to write a slash story that's completely different from every other slash story. This would be a total waste of effort. No one would want to read it. The point is, you want to write the slash story that is the best slash story because it does what everybody else does, better. It does the same theme, but does it with a little more insight. Or even with the same amount of insight as this other story you liked. Or you're recombining this element instead of that element. But this whole notion that you have to be different to be good is different from--it's what we think of as high art, but it's different from the way most of the world conducts its art.

Henry: If I could follow up on that... The other thing that I think is radically different is the economic relations involved in fandom. What excites me is the degree to which fandom is really based on the communal notion that you have something that you want to share with the community, not you have something you want to make a profit off of. And fandom at its best is when fans... The circuit is a good example of this. Things are distributed at cost. Ideally, zine publishing as it started was a matter of, I will charge you what it cost to produce the zine, with maybe enough more to let me start up the next zine. You're not profiteering off of zine publishing. The fan filk clubs trade tapes back and forth. The fan video artists make, you know, "Send me a tape and I'll give you a copy of my videos." I see some danger of that changing, and I'm a little concerned at the advent of semi-pro filk organizations that publish conglomerate filk, or at some of the new conglomerates of zine publishing that are just sucking in zines and selling them, and there's now a middleman between the writer and the reader. What I like about fandom is that, unlike in professional publishing, the writer and the reader actually have something to say to each other. I write a letter to a zine editor and say, "I'd like to read your zine." She sends it back to me. I write back and say, "That was a great story. I really liked this, this, and this." That creates a channel in which the reader can become a writer, the writer is always a reader, the roles are not as rigidly bound up apart from each other, and that sense of possessiveness and profiteering is absent, in favor of a sense of community, of sharing, of giving back. You write your stories to be read by your friends, you don't write them to be read by your customers, and I think that that is something that's really important about fandom, and very different from the notions of intellectual properties that we've been talking about, in corporate America.
Camille: And again, much like the rest of the world has conducted its art since time began.

Henry: Absolutely.

BT: [mostly unintelligible; then:] ...having their [i.e. fans'] own community, partly because no one else wants to be in it [Laughter] and partly because it's something that's theirs and they don't want other people in it. So fans become possessive about some of the academic interest in the community.
<

em>Shoshanna: I would suggest that it's not just possessive, it's defensive. Because we've seen so many Newsweek magazine articles that begin, "Hang on! You're being beamed to one of those weirdo Trekkie cons!" And there's a sense of being made fun of. It's very exciting for me to be up here sitting on this panel between two academic authors who are not making fun of us. And that's because they are us.

Camille: Oh, I saw the first review of my book. It was written by a literary scholar, and the funny thing was, several of the people who brought this to my attention laughed and said, it doesn't look like he even quite knows what anthropology is. But his positive evaluation of the book, and he really thought this was a positive evaluation of the book, was that when he started reading this book he thought these people were really really weird. And I was sufficiently persuasive that by the end he didn't think they were quite as weird as he had when he started. And it's like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Back up. Read it over again. Read my lips, you know? You're weird.

Henry: I talk in the book some about this policing of boundaries. There are these stereotypes out there. And I've had the same sets of experiences, where in the academic community they read it and say, you took a subject that I thought was indefensible, you took a subject that... I thought I could not be made sympathetic with these people at all, and I started to understand where they were coming from. And that to me is powerful praise, because that's the fight we're fighting out here. The mundane world does not get it. It simply does not get what fandom's about, and it needs to be explained to them. Once it's explained, I think there's not the hostility, maybe, as much. There's a certain fear... slash provokes its own anxieties within the homophobia of the culture we live in, there's a certain fear about women writing their own stories about men--that spooks the daylights out of a lot of men in our society--but the notion of, once you start thinking intelligently about what's going on here, one can change. But fandom is defensive, for very good reasons.

Camille: But you don't want those guys poking around in your dresser drawers.

NB: You can answer this question, or not answer this question, because this particular fan convention is a Gay-laxicon, and... I've read countless analyses of how the straight mundane community reacts to fandom, or media fandom or what have you, and I've gotten varied reactions from people in the--when I say "gay," I mean gay, lesbian, bisexual, trisexual, whatever--I've gotten varied responses from people within the gay community. Depending on which parts... I mean, anything from politically correct lesbian feminists who say, why are you writing about all these men, to again, the breaking up of the notion that it's all a bunch of heterosexual... I mean, I am a fanzine editor, and I thought I was the only lesbian who liked to read and write male slash stories, until I met a whole bunch of other lesbians, and bisexuals and what have you, and met a couple of gay men. And so you've got a significant part of the gay community in this. And then there are gay men, a few, a minority, that like to write slash stories, and then other gay men who sit there and say, this is not realistic, or a man I talked to was saying, "Slash writers aren't writing about me," was one reaction I talked to somebody about. So I'd like to see whether you have any comments about, or what you would think about sociological, anthropological, what have you, about how all this impacts on the gay community, and gay fandom.

Camille: What I did when I was working on my book, particularly when I hit slash, was, my field, folklore, is overwhelmingly gay. It's overwhelmingly gay. So this may be one of the few fields in academia where heterosexual people are in the minority. And so it was very easy for me to just go to any number of my classmates and just, cold, slap a fanzine on their desk and say, tell me what you make of this. Generally speaking, the gay men thought it was hysterically funny, and there was this Professionals story called "Masquerade." [It's on the circuit.] When they hit "Masquerade," they would come back to me and they would say, "I've seen it." Not, "I've seen this story," but "I've seen this in real life. I have seen this dance," they would call it, this first-time dance. There were some stories that were totally ludicrous, and in fact one very dear friend, who is a gay man and who does write the stories, and in fact likes the most romantic, just to be authentically slash will deliberately put at least five impossible sexual acts into his stories. [Laughter.] And he called me up one day and he was devastated, because his library had just gotten in a copy of the Joy of Gay Sex and he discovered one of his impossible sexual acts was in fact possible. [Laughter.] So now he had to think up another one. I'm looking for a picture here, I can't find it... Because one of the things that--yes, I found it. However, one day... [She is getting ready to hold her book up; laughter.] Now this is not a wildly filthy picture I'm going to open this book up to. However, this picture came in one day and I showed it to one of my friends, and first his mouth dropped open. Then a couple of hours later, we were in the archives, he came back with a friend of his, and said, show him the picture. And his mouth dropped open. Now the thing is, that's the picture. [She holds it up. It's on page 185, for all you folks reading along; it's a TACS portrait of Doyle, shrouded in mist and gazing piercingly out at you, with his shirt and jacket open to show his chest and his trousers unzipped to show pubic hair but no genitalia. It originally appeared in Discovered in a Graveyard.] Now these are people who had no idea who this person was, but it sort of got them. The gay women that I showed it to had no interest in it at all; they thought that this was totally politically incorrectly stupid. And they basically said, you know, if I want to read men together, I'll read The Deerslayer; I don't have to read these, you know? And they would say to me, where are the stories about the two women? And I would say, I don't have any. Or I only have these, and I'd give them copies of this one fanzine that I had, and it would be, like, this thick, and it maybe had two pages [of female slash]. And they would say, well, I'm not interested in this anyway, and they'd put it aside [? unclear].
<

strong>Henry: I could address your question. Your question poses a number of possible responses to me, all of which, I think, are important to raise. One is that one of the problems I've had with Joanna Russ and other writers who have written about slash--is that the question is often posed as, why do straight women want to write sex about gay men? And it became immediately clear to me, as I was doing this, exactly what you're saying: there are large numbers of lesbians and bisexual women in the slash community, and there needs to be a way to account for that pleasure. I'm not sure I fully address it, but at least I think it comes up in my book, with accounts that don't hinge on heterosexual fantasies, which I think some of the earlier accounts did pose a very heterocentrist conception of what is going on when people read and write slash. The second point I'd make, and I'm going three different directions here, is that I've shared this with David Halperin, a colleague of mine and a noted gay historian, and he became very excited and has written an essay comparing the myths of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to slash. [Laughter.] Because his work is about Greek sexuality, and his point was, the ancient Greeks went back and reread Homer, and the Greeks had a sexuality which was based on a much broader range of sexual object choices than present-day society--he doesn't like to use the word "homosexual," or "gay," because it's inappropriate historically--but same-sex relationships were quite regular. When they reread the Iliad , they slashed it, in effect. And there are lots of Greek manuscripts about Achilles and his charioteer, that Homer probably didn't read those relationships as lovers. But many of the Greeks did, and, in fact, began to rewrite it. So he sees slash as continuing with that, and there's now a great deal of excitement in the gay and lesbian studies community about it. And the third point I would make is more personal, which grows out of my own experience reading slash, as someone who had thought of himself in primarily heterosexual terms; I'm married, I have a son. But in the process of reading slash, I discovered that I was bi. I discovered something that was very important to me, that I really did take pleasure in this, that this fantasy really appealed to me, it opened me up to a variety of other types of experiences to think about, [to think about] my sexuality in very different terms. And I think that that process is potentially going on more large scale in our society right now. If you look at Penthouse Letters right now, for example, they've moved gradually over the ten years of porn reading that I've gone through from having ménage à trois scenarios that involved two men and one woman and the two men don't touch, to having the woman direct the men to suck each other off, to now there are now columns of gay scenarios, first-time stories, published for the predominantly straight readership of Penthouse, which are completely two gay men, or a gay man introducing a straight man to the experience of gay sex is what normally the scenario is. That's just a broadening of acceptance of this in the straight male community. And I think slash is part of--could potentially be part of that process of changing the homophobia in our society, or at least opening straight men to admit their own bisexuality, and to admit desires that they're not publicly allowed to express, the very desires that are repressed in the television narratives slash builds on.

Camille: I just wanted to add something that I thought was very interesting. I started my study in 1982. And what I found was that the representation of gay and bisexual women in particular increased dramatically in fandom after 1986, when Joanna Russ's article came out. [This article was published in two versions. One, aimed at non-fans and entitled "Pornography By Women, For Women, With Love," was in her collection of essays Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts (Crossing Press, 1985); the other, aimed at fans and entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," was published in a K/S zine--I think it was Nome 8 but I'm not certain. It has been circulating informally in fandom since.] That article seemed to make-- It was not really just a matter of that an audience became aware of this that didn't know about it, but an audience also was told that it was for them. And I think that was a very important thing for many people, because many people said that that's where they heard about it.

NB: [unclear; in Darkover fandom, lesbian slash is written] not only by lesbians, and bisexuals maybe, but by perfectly straight women who maybe are just exploring that tiny bit of bisexuality, and some of them... a couple of the best lesbian slash--I mean, they have that lesbian slash feel that's been in the professionally published anthologies, have been written by women I know are straight, and some of them by straight men... [something unclear, suggesting that Darkover fandom/fan writing isn't segregated by gender or orientation, unlike media fandom, which] is kind of segregated, you know... I am a writer of lesbian as well as male slash, and I can't, you know... I just wrote a Thelma and Louise story, and it was published, and the editor called me up and said it's getting a positive response, and I'd like to think that there are some straight women who are responding positively, as well as gay women and everybody else. One of the big problems with lesbian media slash is the lack of credible women; it probably is the main problem, that tv and movies don't give us... They are terrified of women in pairs; look at the big brouhaha over Thelma and Louise.

Henry: But I think it's possible to reclaim those characters in the margin. I've read Yar/Troi stories, for example--which are a stretch, and a big one--but there is a way in which you're playing two different styles of femininity against each other that works on the printed page.

NB: I wrote an Uhura/Saavik story, which will be published in the fall--I mean, that's a real stretch, but I was just fantasizing...

Henry: Blake's 7 characters... The treatment of women on Blake's 7 lends itself to some interesting slash pairings as well.

Male audience member: [unclear; he'd like to bring it back to] the question of appropriating cultural icons for dissemination. I don't know--how large is the typical circulation for a fanzine? How many fanzines are there? What is the approximate composition of the people who write and read fanzines? [something unclear; then] Part of the question for the art is that people tend, in my knowledge of folk culture, people tend to appropriate, but they produce art for local consumption, a very small community rather than a mass community, which gets back to the difference between Lucasfilm, which is producing a mass amount of stuff [laughter], or now we have the technology for self-publishing large amounts of [unclear; of slash SW stories] for your family, for your friends, for your local club. My real question is, what is the population? I don't know.

Henry: Maybe you can answer this better than I can, Camille; you have numbers in the book. I swore off counting things in my book.

Camille: Yeah, okay. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of fanzines. There were over thirty thousand people who had written in them when I stopped counting in 1986. The fanzines that I know that have sold the most are pretty much mainstream genzines--well, not genzines; what that word means has changed its meaning in fandom, in the fan community. The ones that have sold the most are some of the oldest zines, and they're still selling. Jean Lorrah's Night of the Twin Moons has sold--each individual fanzine has sold over five thousand copies. DL regularly will sell out her Star Trek, basically PG-rated fanzines with no slash content, and she can sell out fifteen hundred copies regularly, and she comes out with two or three different ones a year. Slash... the most explosively distributed fanzine that I recall in slash was Courts of Honor. It sold six hundred--they printed six hundred copies. And I believe Nome, which is another very big, very well-respected Trek zine, does between six and seven hundred copies. So we're talking very different numbers for slash. And once you leave Star Trek, the numbers drop dramatically, so that a print run for a minor... less... for what used to be called a "fringe" fandom, but fandom has changed, is between two hundred and a hundred copies. So the numbers really start to drop off pretty sharply when you get into slash, and that's a major move up in slash. Now what was the other question?

Shoshanna: In terms of number of fans, it's worth saying that there are fan communities on every English-speaking continent. There are very large ones in the States, obviously; there are very large ones in Great Britain; there's a good-sized fan community in Australia; there are also smaller fan communities that I know of, because I've visited them, in France and in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is really small, the one I know of. But anywhere that these media products are available, there are fans.

Camille: It is also not true that the appropriation of materials is only done in very small communities for very small distribution. Because what often happens, and has happened since at least the fifteenth century, or actually the twelfth, I suppose, is stories may start in a small community, but they will travel very rapidly. So for example, the story of Cinderella originated in China in the fourth century, traveled all over, all over the world. So these kinds of folk articles have as much globe-trotting capacity as what we're doing today. It takes a little bit longer; it may take a few hundred years instead of a few hundred milliseconds, but this stuff has always traveled.

Henry: One of the things that interests me is precisely the global circulation of zines. You read zines from England, Australia, Iceland. These zines are read, and people can build a national or even international reputation in fandom that nobody on the street would have even heard of. Artists at cons... I have JK's artwork on the cover of the book, and that may mean something to media fans, and her name on a painting at MediaWest, say, will up its price six, seven hundred dollars fairly regularly. My publisher, of course, never heard of her. This is, so far as I know, the first commercial book cover that JK has ever done. But I chose it with the confidence that that name recognition would be there for media fans, and it would be a signal that this book, despite its kind of academic title, is addressed to them as well. The notion in our society that women, particularly, have so few outlets for gaining status, that women who are in low-paying jobs, who are in secretarial positions, who are, you know, in service sector jobs, can gain a national and international reputation as an artist, as a writer, as an editor, is a very important aspect of fandom, I think; precisely that it is a larger community that you can become important in. And I think that matters to people on a lot of levels; I think it's really important that such a space exists.

Camille: It really matters if you travel, because you can travel from house to house all around the world; it's really great fun.

Henry: And at the same time, the process, like the folk process... I ran into Leslie Fish's filk songs in the southern cons, for example, where people sang the songs but had no idea that Leslie Fish had written them. They had become so much part of a community and had traveled, like your Cinderella story, across these spaces, often without people knowing, intermediate, where they had come from, and they really had been taken up as a folk text, in a very traditional sense, the same way, presumably, earlier folk songs lost their authors in the process.

Shoshanna: And, circularly enough, there is a filk song--filk music is science fiction folk music--there is a filk song entitled "Look What They've Done to My Song," which is the filk singer who goes to a convention and hears other people singing his song, only they've changed it. [Laughter.]

Camille: Yes, and he probably stole the tune anyway.

Shoshanna: We have about three minutes left. Do you guys have wrap-up comments, or does any audience member want to get something in quick? [Pause.] All right, sum your books up in two minutes each.

Henry: Well, rather than summing my book up, I wanted to stress that we're not unique in this. There are large numbers of graduate students and junior faculty people out there who, like me, came up through fandom, who are part of the fan community and who are now choosing, in whatever discipline they're in, to write about it. I know of so many projects out there that I think are real important dialogue beginning to take place, at least in media studies and film studies, between fans and the academic way of approaching media. And I think fandom offers the academy new models for criticism, new models of engaging with texts that are going to be very productive. We're learning from you, and I'm glad to be part of you at the same time.

Camille: Well, I suppose that it's time to 'fess up. All the while that I was doing my book, I was an academic, and that's all I did. And I would actually write stories, and I would go around from group to group, and get them to finish the stories for me, and tell me what to write, so that I'd know what was going on, and what the process was. But when I finished the book and put it all away, I discovered there was this one little set of stories that I couldn't put away. And so somehow I had gone native in this one little tiny section, and the problem is... It's not the big section like, you know, Star Trek--If I ever saw Kirk and Spock again...well, you know, I'm here. One of the reasons we don't have many people here [at the con] is they're probably all over watching Bill and Len's Excellent Adventure as we speak, because they're at the Civic Center, Shatner and Nimoy [at a CreationCon the same weekend]. But there's this little tiny group called Pros--The Professionals. And it's a show that you've never seen, unless you're from England, in which case you won't admit to having seen it because it is total trash. Oh, it is, it is...if it wasn't trash I wouldn't like it. [Laughter.] But I couldn't--some of the stories were really neat and I couldn't stop. So, if anybody's got anything that's been written in the last two years about the Professionals, I want it. And I want it now! [Laughter.]

Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith at Gaylaxicon 1992 (Part One)

This week, I am continuing to share a second piece from the historic archives of the Aca-Fan world: an exchange between Camille Bacon-Smith and myself at Gaylaxicon 1992. You should know that both Enterprising Women and Textual Poachers were very new books at the time this exchange took place, having appeared just a few months apart, and that the fan world was still trying to process what it meant to be the object of academic study. I would later, in fact, write an essay on the Gaylaxians themselves which appeared in my book (written with John Tulloch), Science Fiction Audiences, and was reprinted in an edited form in Fans, Bloggers and Gamers. I am hoping that these documents may be a source of nostalgia for some and a historical resource for others. In this segment, the two authors introduce themselves, their relations to fandom, and the central arguments of their books, and then instantly get pulled into a discussion of copyright and authorial rights, issues never far from the surface when fandom is concerned.

Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, moderated by Shoshanna, at Gaylaxicon 92, a science fiction convention by and for gay fandom and its friends, on 18 July 1992. At that time Henry was about to publish Textual poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992); Camille had published Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture (U. of Penn. Press, 1992). Shoshanna is a fan. All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested.

Shoshanna: Welcome to the panel on Sociology of media fandom. My name is Shoshanna, and I'm moderating this panel because I'm not actually one of the experts on it. [Camille and Henry laugh.] I'm here to introduce people. On my left is Henry Jenkins, whose book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is about to be released [it is, of course, now available]; and on my right is Camille Bacon-Smith, whose book Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture is already out. Camille and Henry have been studying, and have written books on, media fandom, which is a little different from science fiction fandom in that we're talking about fans of television and movie characters, mostly, rather than of science fiction books. But it's a similar kind of community. And they've written very interesting books from somewhat different perspectives. Camille came out of anthropology and ethnology, and she was a science fiction fan but she was not a media fan when she began the study--she went into the community because it looked like an interesting thing to study. Henry, on the other hand, comes from a different academic discipline--he's coming out of popular culture and media studies--and he was a media fan already. That's part of the reason he went into that academic field; he was a fan, and it looked like an interesting tool with which to look at what he was already doing. So we have two people with two interesting books coming at the same community with two different takes, looking at some of the interesting things that people in this community do. For instance, the community is largely female, as you can see if you look around the room--we welcome men [Henry laughs]--but heavily focused on male characters. When female characters are used by the fans who write stories about television characters, it can be problematic; that's one of the things we're going to talk about. And in particular one of the things that fans do--I am a media fan, and I do all the things I'm talking about, I am the community that they're studying [Laughter; Camille sings "We are the world..."]... One of the things that we fans do frequently--not always, and not even most of us, but many of us--is write homoerotic, homosexual stories, where we take two characters, almost always male, like Kirk and Spock, or Starsky and Hutch, and create them as lovers. And we write pornography, or erotica, or whatever word you like, but definitely one of the reasons is because it turns us on, and one of the reasons is because we're really interested in the characters. These range from PG-rated to triple-X-your-mother-would-die. And the question of why does this almost entirely female community write all this almost entirely gay male erotica is a really interesting question that I hope we can get into. I'm just laying out some introductory comments on these people; I'm going to now ask each of them to talk about takes they want to take and things they want to talk about on this panel. Camille, why don't you start, since your book is already out, and some of these people may have read it?

Camille: Okay. What did you want me to say about it?

Shoshanna: Bring up some interesting questions, or particular things that surprised you about the community that you found, so we can talk about them.

Camille: Okay, well... The reason I studied this community at all was because I'd actually started to study the science fiction community; that's my next book. But while I was studying science fiction fans, I kept bumping into these attitudes, or I'd talk to these guy fans and they'd say, "Well, gee, you should have been here before all these women came in with their Spock ears, and screaming teenybopper things." And then I was, of course, talking to women, and they'd say, "I am in Star Trek fandom." And I'd say, "How did you get into it?" and they'd say things like, "Well, I'd been reading science fiction since I was nine or ten..." and a funny thing about that--when I asked guys how they got interested in science fiction, they'd say, "Well, I started reading it when I was nine or ten." And so it was like, hmm...something's wrong here. You know? These women, who seemed to be in their twenties and thirties and forties and fifties, didn't look like the teenyboppers with Spock ears who went screaming after stars, and passing out, and behaving like I did when I was thirteen and the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. They have master's degrees, this woman is a chemist, this woman is a botanist, this woman is an English literature professor... So I had this real peculiar dichotomy, difference, between the perception of women in the science fiction community and what those women really turned out to be. So I decided that the more interesting question at that time was, well, if these women are not doing what everybody thinks they're doing, what the hell is it that they're doing? So that's what I went to find out. What I found out was that they were writing. Just thousands and thousands of stories. Billions and billions of stories. And every one of them had sentient life. Well, most of them had sentient life; some of them just had mad rutting sex, and they're the ones I collect the most. [Laughter.] Can you say "hatstand"? That is a very insider word for a story that is very very short and exists only for the purpose of presenting a sex scene.

Shoshanna: It originates from a British fan who looked at these stories once and said of the men in them, "They're all bent as bloody hatstands!"

Camille: Yes. So I started studying this, and then I started studying what people were reading and writing, and then... why were they writing this? I mean, not just for slash but for just about everything I read, I sort of had this question: Why do all the women have to be so young, so smart, so god-awful perky, and in particular, at the end, why do they have to be so dead?

Shoshanna: In the stories that the women are writing?

Camille: Yes, in the stories that the women are writing. And with the slash stories, you know, gee...hmm... Where are the women? Where are the women in these stories? Why are there no women? And of course in the hurt/comfort story, "you only hurt the one you love"...and why? So I had all these "why" questions, and I spent years in school being told that "why" was a question you couldn't answer, that it was an inappropriate question to ask, and that I had to restructure my question into something that was more askable. But unfortunately I never got past six years old. So "why" remained my question, and that's what I'm trying to answer.

Henry: Well, as Shoshanna mentioned, I have been part of the fandom, I guess for fifteen years now. I discovered it when I was in high school. I'd always been attached to television shows like Batman when I was a kid, playacting in the back yard, reading Forrest Ackerman publications and so forth. Between high school and college I started going to cons, and met a number of people that I liked. At that time I was involved with the woman who is now my partner, and she really introduced me to the fanzine scene. And part of getting to know her was getting to know fanzines, and understanding them. Initially I thought, "This is not something I'm interested in." The questions they were asking, trying to patch up holes in episodes, I said, "Well, it's because the production crew screwed up." My initial move as a male fan and male reader was to say, any problems I couldn't account for within the text, I accounted for by appealing to outside forces, like authors and producers. And this [what the female fans were doing] is a very unusual way to read, to actually feel comfortable making up part of the story, to be involved enough with these characters to feel that I have the right to speak about them, and to move beyond my respect for the author. And that growth process really changed the way I thought about television, and the way in which I thought about the media, and really got me excited about media.

So I decided to go to graduate school and study media, so that I could teach and talk about television. And what I encountered there was a variant of "Get a life." That is, the way in which academics talk about the audience, by and large, is not unlike the way mundane journalists talk about fandom: as mindless consumption, as stupid passive acceptance of whatever the text gives out; you just sort of suck it in, "yes, I've been programmed by the television show." And I said, this doesn't make any sense, given what I'm seeing going on out there in fandom; be it panel discussions of episodes, or zine writing, or other forms of fan creativity, it just doesn't match up with the stereotypes. So I decided that it was important to me, as a fan, to write a book that addressed that set of stereotypes, and is addressed doubly to a fan readership, which I think needs to hear about itself and needs to be proud of itself, and to an academic readership, which I think needs to hear what's going on out there, what fandom is about. And I wrote it in communication with the fan community; some of the people I worked with on the book are in this room. It was an ethnographic project in some senses; it was also text-based. I spend a fair amount of time talking about what goes on in letterzine criticism, what goes on in certain forms of fanzine writing. And it's also aware of structures of television, the way in which the fanzine stories relate to the structures of the original episode.

I should explain the title, Textual Poachers. Camille, I think, has a much more reader-friendly title, Enterprising Women; you know more or less what she's getting at, there. "Textual poachers" is a metaphor that runs through the book, and one that has a certain resonance in many academic communities, but I've found that fans don't always know what to do with it. It comes out of the work of a French sociologist, Michel de Certeau, who argues that reading, essentially, is a matter of appropriation. As we read, we take up materials that someone else created for their reasons, and we make them our own. We take them over and reallocate them, to speak to alternative interests. And I think that's certainly, dramatically, what takes place in Star Trek fandom or other fandoms. People don't just literally reproduce the episode; they rewrite it. They restructure its orientation. I have a subsection in my book called "Ten Ways to Write a Television Show." It identifies ten very different ways that fans restructure the television shows they're given, to make them speak to the alternative interests of that particular community. And the term "poaching" refers to that.

And I think what's important about it is that it also recognizes the power relations that are involved, and the political dimension of what it means to be a fan. Which is that there's someone out there who controls the means of production and the networks, who controls what makes it on the airwaves, and controls the content. And we as viewers are in subordinate positions; but we have the power that the traditional poachers, the original peasant rebel groups, had to take up the resources belonging to the landowners and reroute them, and make them our own. You can think about Robin Hood as a classic poacher, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. And, essentially, what I see taking place in fandom is that process, where we steal the cultural resources that belong to the networks and we remake them, to speak to what we as fans want them to be, be they concerns as women, or racial concerns, sexual politics questions or whatever. That's what I think happens most of the time, when people are engaged in fan writing, in one way or another. And I'd like to talk some about intellectual property at some point in this, but I wanted to move on to other questions.

Camille: Could I address one other thing?

Henry: Sure.

Camille: One of the things that's real interesting about Henry's book is that, historically... I'm an anthropologist, but my specialty is folklore. And I study folk esthetic production, and I've studied it historically as well as contemporary folklore. And one of the interesting things is that the "folk" have done precisely the same thing, historically, as far back as you can imagine.

Henry: Absolutely.
Camille: In the forties, people would appropriate the tunes to pop songs so that they could write their own ballads, and even our national anthem is appropriated from a drinking song. So this concept of appropriating the artifacts of our culture is a long-standing tradition; it has been in practice far longer than copyright or trademark law have been.
Henry: Just to follow up on that...this is absolutely right. One reason we don't see it as political--and fans often don't talk about themselves as political, even though this tactic is one that most marginal groups and political groups have used, and certainly is part of folklore going way way back--is that we don't have a politics of cultural preference that mirrors things like the politics of sexual preference. We don't think of our cultural choices as political, or as part of our political life. But if the personal is political, in that aesthetic judgements have a great deal of political dimension as well, and even if we don't talk about the political content of fan writing, simply the act of choosing a text that means something to you, and using it in a way that violates intellectual property, that violates copyright law, to make it your own, is, to my mind, a profoundly political act.

BT, in audience: [unclear; suggesting that women may understand texts differently than men do.]

Camille: Mm-hmm.

Henry: Absolutely.

Shoshanna: And what we're looking at here is women--the fan community being largely women--understand Kirk and Spock differently from the way straight male culture does, and the way that Gene Roddenberry did, and reappropriate what they see, and recontextualize it for their own use.

Henry: I had said I would say something about intellectual property... There's a slogan that I've heard--I don't even know the source of it--that says, "If creativity is a field, copyright is a fence." And I like that as a statement of what I think fandom is about. That is, we as a culture have crushed the potential for cultural production, by creating fences around intellectual property. And I'm very much opposed-- I think copyright is ultimately the death of culture. That the notion of individual authorship, individual possession, and corporate right to control characters ultimately prevents the kind of growth and cross-pollination of culture that we see in classic folktales, for example. The character of Coyote, and the character of Bre'r Rabbit, and the character of King Arthur have been rewritten countless times without regard to any boundaries separating authors and readers. What fandom does is precisely refuse to recognize those boundaries. It's our perfect right-- They beam into our living room every week, and we have the right to tell stories about them, because they are part of our culture.

Camille: I remember in--I think it was eighty-three, the Baltimore WorldCon--does anybody remember when Baltimore's WorldCon was? [Pause.] You're all too young to have been alive then, I know. There was a really interesting panel among the professional science fiction writers, the commercially published science fiction writers, because it was right about that time that the controversy over Marion Zimmer Bradley's sponsored fanzines came up. Because writers were very much afraid of the precedent that Marion Zimmer Bradley's allowing fans who did not ask her specific permission to write stories in her universe, what implications that would have as a precedent for their ownership of their own characters and universes. Because what they feared was that, if this terrible movement got out of hand, there was the potential for a change in the law, and they would by precedent have the right to control their own characters taken away from them. So this was right at the point where shared universes were coming into being; it was before Merovingian Nights, before Damnation Alley--I think that's Roger Zelazny's shared universe--and this whole concept of, if you share the universe, have you lost the rights to it? And if you share the universe today, and want it back tomorrow, do you have the right to take it back, or have you lost the right altogether? It was a huge controversy at the time, it was a major, major controversy in the Science Fiction Writers of America [a world-wide, not just US, professional organization], and the entire thing pretty much died down, not because it was even tested by law, but simply because people began to realize that there is a certain etiquette and courtesy that goes on. That material that is borrowed tends to remain at the folk level, and in material that moves out of the folk level, there is a very carefully maintained sense of etiquette. So that people ask people if they can use their characters; even fans ask other fans if they can use the characters they created. And this very interesting thing goes on in fan writing, that they will use the commercial characters with impunity, but ask permission for the character that the fan writer created. And I think that this has been a very interesting balancing force in this whole ownership of creativity kind of argument.

Shoshanna: I want to mention in this context the Lucasfilm flap, which happened at about the same time as what Camille is talking about. Fans were writing Star Wars fan stories, and some of these were slash stories, and that means stories that pair two characters and set them up as gay, so we're talking Han and Luke as lovers, or whatever.

BT: Actually, the stories Lucasfilm saw and objected to were all straight stories.

Shoshanna: Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. So Lucasfilm was objecting to explicit straight stories. And what they said was, "You may not do this. This is our property. We will let you use the characters for things that we approve of, but you are not currently following the family values of the Star Wars films, and so we will not let you do this. We will sue." And what happened was, first of all, Lucasfilm's lawyers were bigger than our lawyers, and so people stopped publishing this stuff, but it went underground, and it throve underground, and I've seen a number of stories that begin, "Lucasfilm says we can't do this. Lucasfilm has no right to say we can't do this. I am doing this partly to piss Lucasfilm off." And there were other fans who said Lucasfilm did have the right. So the whole issue of intellectual property became crucial there, and it centered around sexuality, which I find interesting.

Henry: I actually in the book have a quote from the Lucasfilm lawyers, which says, [reading from the book] "Lucasfilm LTD does own all rights to the Star Wars characters, and we're going to insist upon no pornography. This may mean no fanzines if this measure is what is necessary to stop the few from darkening the reputation our company is so proud of. Since all of the Star Wars saga is PG-rated, any story these publishers print should also be PG. Lucasfilm does not produce any X-rated Star Wars episodes, so why should we be placed in a light where people think we do? You don't own these characters and can't publish anything about them without permission." And so that's the language that Lucasfilm was using. And many fans, as Shoshanna was suggesting, turned that back and said, "no. You don't have the right to determine what these characters mean, you don't have the right to determine what our fantasies involving them are going to look like, and we will continue to do so," but to protect themselves, pushed themselves further underground, toward a circuit structure rather than a fanzine structure. Because I've got in my files a number of circuit stories involving Star Wars characters that came out after that.

Camille: But I didn't talk about them in my book, and I don't recall your talking about those particular stories...

Henry: I just acknowledge the existence of them, but I don't discuss them directly, because I didn't want to--

Camille: --didn't want to get sued, didn't want the other person to get sued.

NB, in audience: That's kind of died down, Lucasfilm, because I just recently read a Star Wars story that has been published in a zine.

Shoshanna: Oh, yeah. It's died down. On the other hand, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has just sicced her lawyers on a fanzine publisher and confiscated all unsold issues because they made unauthorized use of a character of hers. It still goes on. It's still a fight.

NB: Oh, yeah. C. J. Cherryh, I heard her in a panel at Darkover Grand Council, where she said anyone--she has a trademark, not a copyright, it's a trademark, and anyone who writes in her universe without her permission, she's going to sue them. I'm a fanzine editor, and I had to reject a story because it was based in C. J. Cherryh's universe, and I can not afford to be sued, and the story is now on the circuit. I haven't read it, I understand it's wonderful--I've read the author's other stories--and I'm sorry I couldn't use it.

Henry: The interesting thing about trademark is that trademark originated to protect the consumer against false advertising. The whole point of trademark law two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, when it was set up in this country, was that you want to be able to tell that this is an authentic good by a producer, not a fake one. The legal precedent over the last how-many-umpteen years has rewritten it completely, so that it's now to protect the producers against the consumers taking up, for their own use, those characters. And it's even gotten to the point where academics have difficulty writing about trademarked characters. Camille and I were both involved in a book on Batman, in which no artwork was allowed to be reproduced, because DC had trademark control over everything, and had not authorized the project, with the result that the cover of The Many Faces of the Batman has to suggest "Batman-ness" without having anything on it that is literally Batman. And its potential for stifling, again, intellectual growth, cultural growth, communication of subcultures, is astonishing.

Male audience member: I think it goes beyond media fiction, and goes on into all fiction; and not just fiction, but even in things like software, there's a movement to patent ideas for computer programs, and it's really very disturbing. And I wonder what is behind it [? unclear] in our society, what is the sociological phenomenon that's going on.

Camille: Property. It's territory and property. It's the sort of thing that you can say, "My wife, my husband, my child. My book." We tend to perceive things in terms of property, and what we have, we hold, and we'll fight to protect the fact that it's ours. Even though we want desperately for everybody else to make use of it, we want to control that use as well, because it's ours.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Escapade 1993: A Blast From the Past (Part One)

Next week, I will be joining Constance Penley and Shoshanna at Escapade, a long-running Southern California slash convention, for a discussion of fandom and academia. The event marks the 17th anniversary of a public conversation the three of us, along with Meg G. had held at the same convention shortly after my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was published. As we have been preparing for this reunion (I'm bummed that Meg is not going to be able to join us), Shoshanna pulled out of some long forgotten trunk the hard copy transcript of that original conversation, which was circulating in fandom for some years, but which has never been published. The conversation represents an interesting snap shot to how the slash fan world was responding to the growing academic attention being pointed in their direction.

The early 1990s had been a bumper period for fan studies since it also saw the publication of some of Penley's ground-breaking essays on slash and of Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Some have described this moment as the birth of fan studies, though as this discussion makes clear there was a long history of academic writing about fandom and about slash before our work was published. Yet, it is fair to say that our three projects exerted a very strong influence on subsequent academic research on this topic and helped to pave the way for Aca-Fen who have followed us.

This transcript captures the raucous, free-floating character of that original conversation and helps us to situate this moment of fan research in a larger historical context. I've been thinking a lot about this as I have been teaching my USC seminar on fan culture. In many ways, these books emerged at a key crossroads in American cultural politics -- on the one hand, they came just as the Third Wave of American feminism was starting to emerge, defining itself as much around its cultural preferences as around specific policy differences with the previous generation. In some ways, Bacon-Smith's focus in her book still reflects the Second Wave rhetoric and agenda, no doubt also a product of the fan women with whom she did much of her research, while Penley and I, in different ways, were grasping towards the concepts about gender and sexual politics which would be further articulated in the coming years.

At the same time, there are passing jokes here which remind us that the early Clinton years were a period of increased visibility for issues of sexual identity in American society: while the first generation of slash scholarship had wondered why straight women would read stories about gay men, there are many fans here who are out of the closset and eager to complicate such a framing of the issue. Shoshana, along with Cynthia Jenkins, was my collaborator on "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," which was one fo the first academic essays to acknowledge the strong presence of queers in slash fandom.

And we can see here that fandom itself is still defining its language and practices -- note the use here of "songtapes" throughout rather than the term, "vids," which is apt to be how we would describe these fan-made music videos today.

Next week, I am going to share a second transcript from the archives of the history of fan research -- this one a panel at Gaylaxicon which dealt more directly with issues of sexuality and fandom. If you enjoy these transcripts, please thank Shoshanna for her hard work compiling them and seeking permission from the fans quoted to share them with you. You will note some fans choose to remain nameless (or remained so because we were no longer able to identify them or reach them for permission). We have respected, as far as we know, fan's own choices about how to be identified in this transcript.

Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, Meg G, Shoshanna, and others, at Escapade III, 6 February 1993.

Escapade is an annual slash convention. At that time Henry had published Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992. Constance had published, among other things, "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology," in Penley and Ross, eds., Technoculture; and "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture," in Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, eds., Cultural studies, Routledge, 1992. Meg and Shoshanna were fans. Many other speakers could not be identified on tape, and are listed as "?". All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested.

Shoshanna: This is the panel on academia and fandom, the way academia looks at fandom and the way we look back.

Meg: You have to first of all give the two alternative titles that we came up with for this panel.

Shoshanna: Oh, yeah. My alternative title that, for some reason, they would not accept, was The ivory tower meets the collapsible jade pagoda [Laughter]. They wouldn't accept that.

Constance: Inflatable jade pagoda.

Shoshanna: I thought it was "collapsible," but then, I don't like K/S. What was the other one? If not Acamedia...

Meg: Oh, when we talked about fans among the academics, you know, wandering lonely in this alien land... [Laughter]

Shoshana: Um, if there's anyone at this con who hasn't noticed me yet--because I'm fairly pushy--I'm Shoshanna, I'm just a fan. [Laughter] Well, I'm not just a fan. This is Constance Penley, who has written several articles on fandom and the community and intellectual-type stuff; I really meant to reread them the week before I came [to the con], but I moved the week before I came, and that took priority, so I can't say a lot specific about your work, but you will in a minute.

Constance: Yep.

Shoshanna: This is Henry Jenkins, who just wrote a book called Textual poachers, a study of fandom, particularly focussing on slash, on filk, on songtapes, on community, on reading strategies. Both these people are also fans; they're not just academics who come in and go, "Oh, look at the weird ones!"

Meg: Insiders and outsiders at the same time.

Shoshanna: Yeah. Bicultural, sort of. [Laughter] Well, they are two different cultures. They really are. I mean, I straddle the line too. I'm a fan and an academic... This panel [in the program book] listed "Jenkins, Penley, et al." [Pointing to Henry, to Constance, to herself, and to Meg,] Jenkins, Penley, "et," and "al."

Meg: You can call me Al. [Laughter]

?: But where's Sam?

Shoshana: He's leapt into, um...Henry? [Laughter; Henry says, "Oh, boy..."] Can you imagine Sam's face if he leapt into this art show? [Laughter] Can you imagine Al's face if Sam leapt into this art show? Meg, what do you want to say about yourself?

Meg: Well, let's see. I guess I can say that I sort of straddle the line because I'm an academic librarian in my mundane, day-to-day life. I have had an interest for quite some time in how academics view fandom, and once academics started viewing slash fandom I got even more interested in it. I wouldn't say that I'm really an academic, in that the only Master's I have is a library one, and not a real one, as anyone else in these other fields would tell you, so I don't count that way. I did however do some librarian-like things for this panel which include this. I run into some people still who say, well, slash should be private, and shouldn't be studied, and I wanted to make the point with this that it's too late. [Holds up a binder.] This is the bibliography, this is the academic and public media things discussing slash. Not fandom, slash. [Oohs and ahs; a cry of "where?"] This is a bibliography of all of that stuff, everything that I've found.

Shoshanna: [responding to an audience question on the side] It's almost certainly not complete.

Henry: It's not; I've got stuff that isn't on her list.
Meg: Anybody that has anything I don't have, send it to me so I can keep expanding it. If there's anything on here you want to look at, hit me up to look at the notebook; the chapters from the books [i.e. Henry's and Camille Bacon-Smith's books on fandom] are in here but you should buy the full books if you're interested in them. So this sort of validates the reality of the topic of the panel, in that it's too late, and it's been too late for years now; they found us. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Constance: I was happy that Jennifer and Christine [the convention chairs] wanted to put this panel together, because it made me go back and think about how I got into this. And I realized that one of the things I can say about my interest in slash fandom--I know Henry's going to talk a bit about how he was a fan before he was an academic, but I wasn't. And I came to slash fandom when I first started seeing stuff and started ordering it, and more of it, and more of it [Laughter] and for me it was the best--call it pornography, call it erotic writing, whatever--I had ever responded to, you know? I just thought it was great. But then just the idea that all of these women were getting together to--I do feminist film theory and television studies. And a lot of what I do is dealing with people who have these ideas about women consumers of mass culture.

?: Yes, but are they accurate ideas?

Constance: No, they are not; no, they are not.

Meg: There's something to do with passivity...

Constance: Yes, there's something about... You know, consumers are supposed to be bad enough, but you know, the most passive, degraded consumers are supposed to be women consumers of mass culture. So much of this just seemed wrong to me in every way. And interestingly, even some of the women, some of the feminists who are writing about women in mass culture who are quite sympathetic, still came up with what I thought were really very reductive descriptions of what went on when women were dealing with mass culture. So I got an invitation to IdiCon IV; I guess I'd just been ordering so much stuff that you know, somehow... And I went to that, and one of the things I realized was that I'm a fan of slash fandom. [Laughter] That's what my fan activity is. I mean, of course I--you know, to read K/S I went back and completely made myself over as a Star Trek fan, because I couldn't understand any of it, unless I understood the show.

Shoshanna: Are you a fan of slash, or a fan of slash fandom?

Constance: I'm a fan of--well, both! But if I really have to say where my biggest fannishness is, it's slash fandom. The idea of it and the actuality of it. So in terms of how that intersected with my interests or how that influenced me, at this point it's so difficult to say. But I do know that the three areas that I've been working in are so congruent with what goes on in slash fandom. I've been very interested in popular science or technoculture, so I wrote this one piece on how slash fans make decisions about technology in everyday life in the fan culture. So it was about making songtapes, and about fans and VCRs, and then the last half of this piece was on fantasies of technology in the stories themselves. I'm just interested in various parts of American culture where Americans are thinking through the human relation to technology, and how that might be a democratic relation to technology, with equal access to all. So this was like a perfect example, to be able to talk about this in a very positive way. So just to shamelessly hustle my own publication, that chapter is in this book that I co-edited called Technoculture, and it's all original essays that we got people to write, about hackers, AIDS activists, radical office workers, slash fans, in other words all these people out there who are just, shall we say, appropriating high technology and mass media in ways that they were not supposed to be able to do. So that was the context [of her piece]; I wanted to put that in. The other areas of work that I do have been kind of responsible for helping to start the notorious field of masculinity studies in academia [Laughter], and just this week a book that I edited called Male Trouble came out. And Henry is in that. And all those essays deal with new configurations of masculinity that are found, you know, all over American film and television right now. Fraught versions of it, slashed versions of it--even when they don't know they're slashed [Laughter]--

Shoshanna: Lethal Weapon 3.

Constance: --utopian versions of masculinity. So that was an interest I already had, but certainly what was going on in slash fandom, with the attempt to try to come up with better versions of masculinity--I learned a lot from that. And then the third area I've been interested in is pornography. I just always felt that as a feminist, I was just so sick of the pornography debates, so sick of the Women Against Pornography movement, I was so sick of everybody assuming that every feminist was anti-pornography. And I also saw this as a major obstacle to feminism becoming more accepted and more popular in this country, largely because of the way the media have taken this up; so many people think that all feminists are anti-pornography, and of course anti-sex, and anti-men, and everything else. So anyway, I decided that I really had to go ahead and confront this head-on. So I'm now doing, as far as I know, about the only course in this country--I teach at U. C. Santa Barbara, and I'm doing a course on hard-core pornographic film. And if you read the Santa Barbara News Press tomorrow morning [Laughter] you can see a little comment on my course. The Santa Barbara County Citizens Against Pornography lodged a protest with my chancellor, so... This is, you know, kind of historical pornography, stag films, things like that, going all the way back to the teens and twenties; it's right on up to the big high-production-value films of the seventies: Deep Throat, Inside Misty Beethoven, Behind the Green Door, and right up through lesbian sex videos, gay male hardcore; I'm showing a bunch of the safer-sex shorts from Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, where you've got these really hot vignettes that are meant to demonstrate safer-sex techniques that are still really hot. And I introduce my students to the slash idea in this course, because the emphasis of the course is on people knowing what pornography actually is, rather than what they're told it is, and also on how pornography figures into people's lives. Because one of the things that I've really learned from slash fandom is that so few people have any description or any idea of what pornography means for people, what it can mean for people, what just being able to write your sexual ideas and desires can mean, for a sense of personal liberation, but other kinds of liberation as well. So by this time, I mean, to sum it up, my academic ideas are my fannish ideas, and my involvement is slash fandom is--they're just so tied up together it's impossible to tell. I never thought of myself as studying the fandom, maybe because I was too involved in it, but also because I was--I think of my work as trying to write, so that other people working on women in popular culture, women in consumer culture, women in pornography, so that they can learn from slash fandom what I've learned from slash fandom. So it seems like a kind of work of translation.

Henry: As Constance suggested, I came to academia via fandom to begin with. I have been a media fan for about fifteen years now, starting back in late high school/early undergraduate days, going to cons, meeting the woman who's now my wife via fandom, and she started me reading zines, which were very alien to where I as a male fan was coming from. I can remember early conversations where we'd be discussing an error, or problem, in one of the Star Trek episodes, and I would keep saying well, that problem is there because continuity screwed up, and because the director didn't do his research; I would always refer to the production process to explain the problem. And she would say, well, maybe this is going on in Kirk's life... [Laughter] And it was very curious to me, as we were dating and getting to know each other, that there was such a profound difference in the way in which we read. And I learned, through her, to really appreciate that style of playing with the text, that openness, that flexibility, and started reading zines, and it really started me-- At that time I was planning to be a political scientist. It was not at all what I had planned to do in my life, to go into media studies. But I got so excited about film, about television, by being a fan, by listening to people talk passionately about popular culture and their engagement with it, that I decided that the thing to do was to go to graduate school and study film and television, because that's where my excitement was, that's what did it for me; maybe I could become a professional fan in some fashion [Laughter]. And I arrived at the University of Iowa, and the very first course I took there, I got assigned an article called "Star Trek and the bubble-gum fallacy," by Lawrence and Jewett, which I take on early on in Textual Poachers. But essentially it argued, well, this is an incredible cult religion that has grown up around Star Trek, and it's very much like the Manson family [Laughter]. Like, the Manson family was really attached to the Beatles, and they read it [the Beatles' music] oddly, and they went out and killed people, and these people have just devoted their entire lives to Star Trek. And it begins with an assertion that, well, when you ask these people why they like the show they really can't tell you why they like the show; it's just like bubble gum. And I thought, how incredibly odd, if these guys dealt with the cons that I've dealt with, that they think fans are inarticulate! And it was highly disingenuous, because it included cites to Star Trek Lives, and The World of Star Trek, and other early books that were in fact quoting fans very extensively, so he knew that these writers knew that fans were articulate, and had closed the door to them. So I, in my very first class as a graduate student, said to the instructor, look, I'm going to write an essay that responds to this. Because I was really irked. And so I wrote what was the earliest draft of my first essay on Star Trek, "Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten" was first coming into being as a graduate student, writing out of anger at the way in which fans had been written about. And it ended up getting published, one of my first publications, in a journal, and from that I got asked to write a book. [Laughter; Meg is holding up each piece he mentions as he mentions it.] She's got it all right here, my entire oeuvre.

Meg: I don't have the bubble-gum one, because it's only about fandom, it's not about slash. This is just slash.

Henry: Slash was something I discovered fairly late in this whole process. And I have to admit I was initially a little uneasy about the idea of plunging into slash. The first couple of pieces [that he read] were really painful pieces; they were hurt/comfort slash stories and they sort of threw me out. And part of it was, even when I read nice stories, there was a sense of, not with my body! [Laughter] Not that I was homophobic exactly, but that I was uncomfortable with the way in which women were writing about men's bodies, and having them doing things that it didn't seem to me would cause me a great deal of pleasure to have done to my body, and I had some trouble reading this fantasy and projecting it outward. As it's gone along, though, slash has really changed how I think about my own sexuality, in a very direct way. I had for years fought an awareness of gay impulses in myself, had fled away from those with a great deal of fear. I now talk of myself as bisexual. I'm in a monogamous relationship more than a decade old that is heterosexual, but my sense of myself, and the label that I attach to myself, have changed through reading slash and recognizing the meaningfulness of those fantasies, and tapping them into thoughts and fantasies I had going very very far back.

So slash really changed me in that way, and has led me to be much more open about dealing with questions of sexuality in my work as a scholar. I just got through teaching a course called "Gender, sexuality, and popular culture," that included some slash stories in it, some of M. Fae Glasgow's stories, and that really was an attempt to engage more fully with the whole issue of sexual identity, and it started with writing about slash for Textual Poachers. So now I can honestly say, as my button [which he's wearing on his shirt] suggests, yes, I am both a male and a slash fan, and have really become excited, because I think that slash really speaks to men, including straight men, in a way that a lot of popular culture doesn't. The sorts of themes I talk about in terms of slash in the book, that breaking through of the barriers to intimacy between men, the creation of communication across the kind of walls that we as men put up around ourselves, is a very profound fantasy that a lot of men have. And I think back about the reality of my friendships with other men...

One of my best friends as an undergraduate just about died of cancer, and I didn't know it. He just had disappeared for nine months. He couldn't communicate to me this vulnerability, and he was seriously ill before I ever found out and went to his bedside and we talked about it for the first time. But that was the reality, that I didn't notice, he wasn't communicating, and we were both into our little walls to the point that none of the stuff that's in slash was a possibility. The thought of crying, of communicating, of talking between men is so rare in our culture that slash really represents to me one of the few places where you can talk about those questions, where you can engage with it and fantasize about it. And I wish I had friendships with other men that were as good as the sorts of images that crop up in slash. But it's something that politically is very important to me, that I, going back to an undergraduate, during the same time period, ironically enough, was doing male consciousness-raising sessions. And I had been talking about masculinity as an issue, and a lot of my own writing that isn't about fandom deals with questions of gender or masculinity in one way or another. But it was slash, I think, that really opened me up fully to the implications at a most personal level of what I was actually talking about, and helped me understand that much better.

So this book has been both personally and professionally a really important one to me. It's one that was intended to be written as a fan as well as an academic, to both academic and fan audiences. I've been gratified by the responses on both sides.

One last thing I want to say before we open it up was what had changed within the academy over the last ten years that allows this work to be done. That is--I'm thinking about film and media studies--we as a discipline had to define ourselves in opposition to fans and buffs in order to gain admission to the academy. That is, if you're going to be taken seriously, and you're writing about popular culture, the last thing you want to do is be accused of being a fan. Right? You want to say, I am an academic. I'm studying this just like you study art history and you study music history, and you study literature. And you push away those personal implications of this stuff in your own life, and you devalue them. And I think a lot of the attacks on fans by academics previous to us grew out of their desire and discomfort at the relationship or parallel between academic engagement with popular culture and fan engagement with popular culture. I began a conference paper recently by turning to the audience and saying, you know, we've been talking about television this entire weekend, many of you traveled all the way across the country to be here with us today, and I just wanted to say--get a life, will you? [Laughter] And sort of turn the table around and realize that the stereotype of the academic and the fan are virtually the same.

It's only now that there is a secure base for film and media studies within the academy that it is possible for people like me to go through graduate school publicly as a fan, to assert, to out myself as a fan, which a number of people, academics and fans, have referred to in letters about Textual Poachers, that I outed myself as a fan within the academy. And I've in fact heard very negative things from some academics as a result of that. I was quoted in Lingua Franca as saying that I'm a fan first and an academic second, which is actually a misquote. It was a chronological statement; it wasn't a statement of priority. But I said that the things I write about grow out of things that I care about as a fan, and that I choose to write about them and engage with them as an academic as well. But I got a lot of ribbing and uncomfortable remarks from other academics because of that statement.

But I think it is now possible to be a fan academic in the infrastructure of the academy as it's now evolved. And now I get letters from all over the country from graduate students who are writing about their fandoms. Not just fandoms that are included in our world of media fandom, but Stevie Nicks fans, or soap opera fans, and any number of people are beginning to write as fan academics. I know of at least one anthology of fan academic stuff that's in the pipeline right now, of academics writing about fandom, and almost all of the people in it are graduate students or junior faculty who came to the academy as fans of one sort or another, and are writing about things they passionately care about. And so that's why this year Camille's book came out, and my book came out, and Constance's work has been coming out over the last couple of years on this stuff, that it suddenly seems like all of a sudden the academy has discovered fandom. It isn't, in fact; academics have written about fans for a long time. But we discovered a way to talk to fandom about our work, and to talk as fans within the academy. And that's what's changed, is the ability for you to talk back to us, and for us to try to create some dialogue. And it's something that as a student of popular culture I care about very much, is taking what's going on in the academy about popular culture, and breaking down those barriers to talk to the popular communities about it, and it's something I keep struggling in my own work to find more and more ways to do, to engage in discussions like we're having today.

?: But the question we need to know is, should fans be allowed to serve in the military? [Laughter]

Henry: It's probably too late for that...it's a question of identity versus practice. You can have the identity of a fan and be in the military, just don't practice it. [Laughter] I mean, I wouldn't want to take a shower with one... [Laughter]

?: It's too late; they've already got pictures of Spock and Kirk hanging in astronauts' mess halls.

Shoshanna: As a fan, I've been really fascinated to read a lot of the academic work on fandom because it gives me a new language in which to think about what I'm doing. Sometimes it manages to put into words things that I had not been able to put into words before. Sometimes it tells me things I didn't know before. Sometimes it tells me things I didn't know, and I still don't know after they've told me, because I don't believe them for a minute. [Laughter] But even then, unless it's just complete garbage, it forces me to sit down and think about what they're saying, and why it's wrong, and how it works. Camille Bacon-Smith's book I have some real problems with--a lot of people are nodding--but the fact that she wrote it, in the language that she did, meant that I could then try to think about it in that language, and come up with, why doesn't this work, and what's going on...

Constance: What is she on?

Shoshanna: Yeah... um... I'm sorry, train of thought derailed.

Constance: The language it gives you.

Shoshanna: Yeah, um... We have a language we use as fans to talk, and I also speak academic--I have a Master's in history, although I'm now grading classes for Henry in film and television--and I like being able to speak both languages. I gave a copy of Henry's book to my parents--a copy to my father and a copy to my mother, because they're divorced--partly as a way of saying, this is what I've been doing for the last ten years; here it is described in a language you can understand, a language that maybe won't make it seem so stupid to you. It didn't work for my mother; she was infuriated by the book, she was really angered by it. It made her very angry.

?: Why? The book or the subject?

Shoshana: Both. As far as I could tell--and you have to understand, I don't get along with my mother, and I don't share many values with her--as far as I could tell, she was angered that fans spend so much effort on this worthless pastime--

Constance: Oh, yes.

Shoshanna: --and that academics spend so much effort studying this worthless pastime. [Laughter] She thought both of these were a waste.

Meg: It's okay to spend that much time and effort studying Shakespeare, but not Star Trek.

Shoshanna: There's a line I heard somebody say yesterday--I don't remember who said it, just in the middle of a panel or something, talking to someone, and talking about somebody who was particularly impassioned on a subject, and they turned to this person and said, get a hobby! [Laughter] I thought that was beautiful.

Jane: [unclear; what she always thinks of are] those guys that sneer at the big fat media girls, with their Trekkie stuff, who sit in their shows with their friends, and they watch them over and over, and talk about them; as they sit there with their beer guts and watch the Super Bowl, and talk about the plays over and over with all their buddies... [more, unclear; laughter]

?: It was it interesting that you said "Shakespeare," or whoever it was who said "Shakespeare," because that is exactly what was said in a discussion that I had with people who were studying Shakespeare, until I said, yes, but Shakespeare was the television of his time.

Meg: Shakespeare is popular culture. [General sounds of agreement.]

?: And we didn't continue the dialogue, because I think they're still thinking about it.

Meg: Well, the usual comeback to that is that now there's been hundreds of years and it's been proven to be more than popular culture, because it has staying power and it's a classic.

Henry: But the point is that Shakespeare was still popular culture as of the turn of the century. We're not talking hundreds of years ago. It was still a lively part [of popular culture]. And the academy robbed it from popular culture and killed it and stuffed it and put it in a museum. [Laughter] And then sits around and feels proud of itself, that it's done something vital for the survival of mankind.

Meg: Getting it out of the hands of those horrible populists.
(MORE TO COME)

How to Get Academic Credit While Attending San Diego Comic-Con: An Interview With Matthew J. Smith

Today, I wanted to share with you a fascinating experiment in media education which is conducted each year as part of the San Diego Comic-Con. I've written about the centrality of Comic-Con as a meeting point between fans and producers and as a site where academics interested in promoting the study of comics co-exist side by side with dealer's rooms and discussions with comics creators.

This past year, I had a chance to consult with two students who were part of a program being offered by Matthew J. Smith, a comics scholar who teaches classes in media studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH. Every year, he organizes a team of students who conduct individual and collective ethnographic projects trying to make sense of the complexity and diversity of Comic-Con. He's now in the process of recruiting students for this year's program so I told him I'd help him spread the word. What follows is an interview with Smith about his ethnographic instruction and about the culture of Comic-Con. At the end, I tell you where you can go to be considered as a recruit for this educational program.

Can you give me some sense of the approach you take to teaching ethnographic research on the ground at Comic-Con?

Students are responsible for several readings before they get to San Diego, so that we can have an informed discussion about ethnographic tools when we meet. But from our first night onward, students are thrown into the deep end of the pool, being asked to record observations and make modest interpretations starting with "Preview Night" on the floor of the convention hall floor. Thereafter, there's a good deal of note taking, and of course talking through observations and constructing interpretations with peers in daily "Breakfast Briefings." After the first few days, students are encouraged to compliment their observations by doing interviews with informants. Some students find their individual topics evolving as we progress through the week, which is just fine with me! However, they do have a week to process the experience and think through their material more before their final narratives are due.

What goals do you set for your participants?

My primary goal is to help students become more media literate for having had the experience. Popular culture is created and marketed with them in mind. If nothing else, I really want them to be aware of their role in this process and exercise greater agency in their future interactions with it.

In addition, I'd like students to realize that they can discover meaning through ethnographic methods. I don't think that the tools of ethnography are taught as widely as they should be and this is an opportunity to expose students to them in what is essentially a laboratory setting.

Comic-Con has emerged as perhaps the most important interfaces between the entertainment industry and the public. What shifts have you and your students noticed in terms of the industry's engagement with fans in recent years?

What stands out to me is the way in which Con is now a multi-media experience in and of itself. I'm not just talking about the multiple media industries that are represented on site, but the way that Con is experienced by both those who are physically there--supplemented by constant Twittering, for example--and also by those who are elsewhere around the country. I return from San Diego feeling like one of the fortunate few who get to attend the Super Bowl, as friends and colleagues come up to me and say, "I saw Con on TV (or read about it online or got the feed) and knew you were there." For that moment, I am the coolest person in the room.

Within the more than 100,000 people gathered at Comic-Con, there are representatives of a broad range of different fan subcultures. How do you and your students deal with the diversity of different fan interests represented?

Some students find the scale overwhelming for the first few days. Given so much to process, I encourage students to focus their individual projects on areas of interest to their individual intellectual interests or pop culture tastes (e.g., Marvel Comics panels). With some filters in place, the stimuli become a bit more manageable. However, I love it when students start to look out for things for one another. Often at our "Breakfast Briefings" they begin to ask one another if they are aware of this event or that person's signing appearance in the hall latter in the day. These moments of overlapping interest really make us a learning community within the 100,000 person crowd.

Many attending the con now beline to the major presentations in Hall H and Hall 20. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what goes on at Comic-Con. What aspects of Comic-Con culture have emerged through your collaborative research efforts that we would miss if the focus was only on the major events?

Where to start!? My students have found nooks and crannies of popular culture that I would not have thought to explore in twenty trips to Con. Let me share a small sample of some of the project titles to give you a sense of what they have focused on in the past: • Twitter as a Means of Direct Dialogue between Creators & Fans • Aggressive Marketing & its Impact on Consumers at San Diego Comic Con • "State Your Name and Your Purpose": The Talk of Marvel Comics Fans • Fanbois at Comic-Con: Queer Consumer/Producer Interface & the Intransitive Writing of Comics • Hollywood Comes to Comic-Con International: An Examination of Glamour & Glitz • Video Games: On the Bottom Looking Up

Comic-Con is one of the most racially diverse fan gatherings I've ever attended. Has your research offered any insights into how and why this con attracts more minority participants than most other fan gatherings?

In three years my students have initiated eighteen different projects, and while a number have investigated demographics like gender and sexual orientation, none have addressed race explicitly. It's a great topic that some student could investigate this summer! My own impression is that California's diversity helps set up the climate for Con's diversity. Beyond that, is it that popular culture fans judge you by your interests first and not the color of your skin?

There has been a dramatic increase of female attendees at Comic-Con in recent years, partially in response to Twilight and True Blood, and this has generated some tensions with long-time attendees. What insights has your team's research yielded into these sources of friction?

I'm waiting for the student who wants to tackle this project! Over the last two years my students and I have certainly noted the outright hostility directed towards the Twilighters and found ourselves at a loss for how one minority (the comics fan) can turn on another. Is it anger at the encroachment of Hollywood on the Con finding an outlet at long last? Is it a matter of gender? Is it that the cross-over between interests doesn't quite overlap as much as other groups present (e.g., a video gamer can also be a comics fan)? I hope we have a student or two who will want to tackle these kinds of questions this summer.

Your students give a public presentation of their findings every year as part of the Con. How has the Comic-Con community responded to their representations of their norms and practices? How does this public presentation impact the kinds of work your students do?

The reception for my students has been tremendous. Whereas most academic presentations are lucky to draw an audience larger than the number of presenters behind the dais, my students typically draw a crowd of 80+ curious minds. The best audience members are those who want to challenge or extend my students' claims, weighing their own perceptions against those of my students. I love to see that kind of interaction as the students are challenged to either further defend their conclusions or engage in expanding/refocusing their thoughts. I think knowing that a public presentation is an integral part their task focuses their work for the week that we are there and makes them accountable to an audience of more than just me as the instructor.

Critics might argue that the duration of a con is not sufficient time to really immerse yourself into any kind of rich cultural community and that there are serious problems with performing "instant ethnography." What do you see as the strengths and limits of the work your team does each year?

That's entirely a fair critique. I try to keep the course from making the pretension that it is the only course in ethnography one would ever need. To the contrary, I explicitly state that this experience is a mere appetizer meant to whet one's appetites for more and richer ethnographic projects in the future. In Communication Studies in particular, I see a lot of programs where students are typically trained as either survey administers or rhetorical critics, and I want to introduce them to another viable way of coming to know the world around them.

What qualifications are you looking for from prospective students in your program?

There are no academic prerequisite, per se, other than that one be currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program and in good academic standing at one's home institution (which usually means minimally a 2.0 cumulative higher grade point average). The course is really designed to be introductory in its approach, although I've had graduate students participate each year who report learning something new. Beyond that, I've found that the most successful students are intellectual curious, open-minded, and willing to work hard. The experience is intensive: Students find themselves on the go for five consecutive days and that takes stamina. Even so, it is terrifically rewarding to come to the end of the experience and know that you discovered something new about culture and its exercise.

Matthew J. Smith teaches courses in media studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH, including "Graphic Storytelling: Comic Books as Culture," "The Graphic Novels of Alan Moore," and a week-long field study at Comic-Con International each summer (details of the latter may be found at www.powerofcomics.com/fieldstudy). In 2009, Wittenberg University's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award. Along with Randy Duncan, he is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture (Continuum, 2009), a textbook for college-level comics arts studies courses. The two are also editing the forthcoming Comics Criticism: Methods and Applications.

The Field Study at Comic-Con
Earn academic credit while studying the dynamics of marketing and fan culture at the largest comic arts event on the continent, July 21-25, 2010.
For complete program details and costs go here.

Application deadline is March 1, 2010

The Last Airbender or The Last Straw?, or How Loraine Became a Fan Activist

This is another installment in our ongoing series about fan-activism and the ways certain kinds of groups are bridging between our experiences with interest-driven networks in participatory culture and public participation. This chapter tells the story of Loraine Sammy and the Racebender campaign, which challenged the white-washed casting of the feature film version of The Last Airbender. Thanks to the production chops of Anna Van Someren, we are able to share much of Sammy's story in her own words, so do take time to watch the video segments attached to this piece.

As I have been working with Van Someren and Shesthova, two members of our research team, to prepare this piece for publication, I am reminded of work I did more than a decade ago around the Gaylaxians, a gay-lesbian-bi-trans science fiction fan group which made a concerted effort to get a sympathetic queer character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The campaign failed in the short run in that the producers ultimately deflected or misdirected their requests, continually rephrasing them into how Star Trek might deal with the "issue" of gay rights, while the group wanted to show a future where being gay was not an issue. I am struck now by the growing number of science fiction series, British and American, which have matter of fact portrayals of same sex relationships, including Battlestar Galactica (whose show runner Ron Moore cut his teeth working on the Star Trek franchise.) I've never seen any one directly trace these shifts in the representation of sexuality in science fiction back to the Gaylaxians, but I have a sense that in the end, the campaign had some impact on our culture, even when its initial goal was lost. I hope the same can be said for the efforts of the Racebending efforts -- they have lost the battle but will they win the war? (For more on the Gaylaxians, see Science Fiction Audiences or Fans, Bloggers and Gamers.)

Our connection to Racebending and Loraine Sammy came through a member of the research group Lori Kido Lopez, a doctoral student at Annenberg.... who is including Racebending in her Ph.D. research.

Loraine and The Last Airbender
by Anna Van Someren and Sangita Shresthova

Loraine Sammy grew up in Vancouver, Canada reading and collecting comic books. It was her love of comics that drew her to "this new thing called the internet", where she hoped to connect with others who liked comics too. She became involved with many fandoms, including those of Star Trek and Harry Potter, and participated in several forums, mostly online. She is now conscious of the ways in which her own race, or rather its invisibility online, played out in these spaces. She also recalls how the online debates now referred to as Racefail'09, the issues surrounding race in science fiction worlds brought out by these discussions, and the people she met through this raised her awareness of racism within fantasy spaces and its impact on every day life.

Although she was a quiet observer during the Racefail discussions, Loraine's personal investment in and commitment to the fantasy worlds she loved eventually led her to take action on issues of race and representation. Like many other fans, she was captivated by the world portrayed in Avatar the Last Airbender. Nickelodeon's production of the cartoon drew heavily from Asian cultures throughout history and around the world. The meticulous research informing the characters, clothing, and practices of the tribes and characters has resulted in a show so rich and accurate in detail that teachers have been known to use it for school projects.

For some fans, the show provided the excitement of recognizing familiar cultural symbols; for others, it offered an invitation to identify, explore, and trace East Asian, Chinese, and Japanese cultural identities woven between real life and fantasy. When Paramount Pictures cast the live-action movie version of the epic, and chose white actors to play the four main characters, Loraine and many others were galvanized to take action.

"Narratives that people put faith in"

What is the role of an engaged citizen? What would a high school civics teacher most hope her students learn? Typical lists of civic competencies prioritize content knowledge about the workings of government, but are more and more likely to include intellectual skills such as "critical thinking", "perspective-taking" and dispositions such as "personal efficacy" and "desire for community involvement". Loraine is thinking about the ways in which market forces control how culture and identity get represented in society. She feels empowered enough to voice her opinion and - as we will see - transform the monologue that is the Hollywood apparatus into an open conversation across dispersed networks. How is it that a cartoon on television can motivate this kind of engagement? In our research, we're particularly interested in exactly how and why stories - often fictional - launch, support, and frame social and political movements.

At Futures of Entertainment, we recorded a conversation between Henry Jenkins and Stephen Duncombe, NYU Professor and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Their discussion, about how we interact with narratives in ways that can motivate participation, illuminates Loraine's trajectory from a rather private engagement with popular culture to a more public engagement with society:

Democracy as Communal Creation

Fans of The Last Airbender initially organized under the slogan Aang Ain't White, using a Live Journal account to explain their argument, offer resources for joining the effort, and track their own visibility in the news. Live Journal worked well as an online headquarters, as many of the fans already had accounts at the site. Loraine herself had "a good amount of people" following her on LiveJournal, so in that way she was "able to be a trumpet for the cause".

The main strategy of Aang Ain't White was a letter-writing campaign, alerting Paramount Pictures about fans' disappointment in the casting process, and asking for the film to be re-cast. Fans also created a sister Facebook group to protest the casting.

Along with fan activist Marissa Minna Lee, Loraine worked to evolve this first campaign into the broader "Racebending" movement, and became one of the movement's primary leaders as it grew and drew in more supporters.

The existence of the Racebending campaign is "an act of communal creation" itself, and boasts an abundance of enthusiastic, active and creative production efforts. A search of the word "racebending" on Youtube yields over eighty videos, including videos like "Fighting Casting Racism", personal pledges to boycott the movie, and a slideshow called "A Brief History of Yellowface in Pictures".

A visual essay posted on the Aang Ain't White LiveJournal account inspired Youtube user chaobunny12 to produce the video essays, including Asian Culture in the Avatar World, juxtaposing images from the Airbender cartoon with images showing the Asian architecture, dress, and practices which inform and style the story world. Chaobunny's work in turn roused doldolfijntje to create a response video, similar in construction but focused specifically on comparing images of Airbender's water tribe to images depicting Inuit culture.

Pooling their skills in illustration and design, fanartists have created a compelling campaign of smart taglines paired with a simple representation of Aang, powerful in its recollection of street-art stenciling techniques. This collectively produced work has been distributed via postcards, banners, stickers, buttons, a visual guide to the controversy, and t-shirts.

[Read the fascinating story of the campaign's copyright battle with Viacom and Zazzle here and here].

At the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con, Racebending organizers Mike Le and Dariane Nabor invited artists to collaborate on a sketchbook, which they've now shared online. Response from the larger fan network included more creative endeavors: a comic titled "Heresies" at penny-arcade.com, blog posts at angryblackwoman.com, and more, and "a brief and incomplete history...of white actors taking strong Asian roles", featuring 10 video clips with commentary on Hyphen Magazine's blog.

Partnerships and Alliances

These actions encouraged The Last Airbender protest - specifically Racebending - to towards a network of alliances with other groups, many of which did not grow out of popular culture fandom. In particular, the Racebending's alliance with the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (or MANAA), a activist organization which advocates "balanced, sensitive and positive portrayals of Asian Americans" in American media. The collaboration with MANAA moved Racebending into a new space and group's website now indicates that they view The Last Airbender within the larger context of a systematic mis-and-under representation of minorities in media. In many ways, the alliance between Aang Ain't White and MANAA becomes a productive meeting place for two communities that mobilize and work in very different ways. Aang Ain't White emerged quickly, in response to a particular problem and is now on the cusp of more sustained political action. More established and broader in scope, MANAA also plays a watchdog role, although it relies more on actions based in protest, rather than creative production.

Through its interaction with organizations like MANAA, the Racebending movement in general and Loraine specifically now align themselves with activism around race representation. Racebending now defines it's mission as follows:

"We want Paramount Pictures - and all Hollywood studios - to know that supporting and hiring actors of color in prominent roles will help build passionate, devoted audiences. The appeal of Hollywood's films will expand with greater attention to the face of modern America." (source: Racebending)

Mobilization around The Last Airbender became a first step towards a deeper, sustained and overtly political engagement with race in popular media.

From Fandom to Activism: A "thick" politics

For Loraine, The Last Airbender became a point of entry into a growing and sustained mobilization around race in popular media. Through her deepening involvement in Racebending, Loraine journeyed from participatory culture towards an active engagement with participatory democracy. In thinking about her personal trajectory, we recall Henry Jenkins' discussion of the Digital Youth Project in "'Geeking Out' for Democracy" published in Threshold magazine:

"In a recent report, documenting a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic study of young people's lives on and off line, the Digital Youth Project suggests three potential modes of engagement which shape young people's participation in these online communities. First, many young people go on line to "hang out" with friends they already know from schools and their neighborhoods. Second, they may "mess around" with programs, tools, and platforms, just to see what they can do. And third, they may "geek out" as fans, bloggers, and gamers, digging deep into an area of intense interest to them, moving beyond their local community to connect with others who share their passions.... For the past few decades, we've increasingly talked about those people who have been most invested in public policy as "wonks," a term implying that our civic and political life has increasingly been left to the experts, something to be discussed in specialized language. When a policy wonk speaks, most of us come away very impressed by how much the wonk knows but also a little bit depressed about how little we know. It's a language which encourages us to entrust more control over our lives to Big Brother and Sister, but which has turned many of us off to the idea of getting involved. But what if more of us had the chance to "geek out" about politics?"

For Loraine "geeking out" as a fan of Avatar the Last Airbender was a key and crucial step towards "geeking out" on politics. Throughout this journey, her perspectives, approaches and motivations remain rooted in participatory culture, moving us towards a richer definition what Stephen Duncombe calls "thick politics":

In this conversation, Henry Jenkins speaks to the "changing the norms of your society rather than changing the rules of your society", and Racebending is an effort to do just that, by "advocating just and equal opportunity in film and television." For Loraine, Racebending has become journey from fandom to activism; from participatory culture to civic engagement.

"Going Bonkers" (Revisited): A Father-Son Conversation About Pee-Wee (Part Two)

Henry 3: Parents at the time were nervous about the show and the influence it might have on young people because they were "spooked" by the Pee-Wee personality. Mr. Rogers seems much more contained in his effeminacy while Pee-Wee was flamboyant and in your face, yet they are drawing on the same cultural reservoir, where men who spend too much time and show too much interest in children as seen as, well, a little abnormal. Yet, children always felt a strong kinship with Pee-Wee, embraced his innocence and playfulness, and that may be why the character is receiving such an out-pouring of love and affection from young adults right now.

Where adults some ambiguities about gender and sexuality, kids saw a "mystery" about how an adult could act like a kid or how a kid could look like an adult. Here's what I wrote in "Going Bonkers" about the appeal of the show to you and your kindergarten classmates: "What makes Pee-Wee's Playhouse 'fun' for the preschoolers, then, is the way that it operates as a kind of anti-kindergarten where playful 'misbehavior' takes precedence over 'good conduct,' children are urged to 'scream real loud' at the slightest provocations, making a mess is an acknowledged source of pleasure, 'grown-ups' act like children and parental strictures no longer apply."

So, it sounds like I may have gotten it right if you imagine yourself seeing Pee-Wee's campy moments in terms of "getting wacky...being snotty...going cuckoo" as the title song for the old series put it or "going bonkers" as you described it to me so many years ago. The point I made was that you and the other kids used the phrase, "going bonkers" to refer to what they found amusing about Pee-Wee and what embarrased them about the behavior of their classmates at school. Pee-Wee somehow created a space where it was OK to "go bonkers" and it may also have been a space where sexually charged jokes can never-the-less come across as sexually innocent.

Pee-Wee always surrounds such jokes with an air of plausible deniability. That's why one of the most striking moments in the stage performance for me was when the show does an overt shout out to the progress towards gay marriage in response to a "why don't you marry her" joke between Pee-Wee and Chairy. It's impossible to imagine such a joke on the original show, where the gay references were a matter of coding -- the use of iconic gay figures like the black cowboy or the fireman, use of sexually ambiguous figures like Reba the Mail-Lady or the drag queen like persona of Miss Yvonne, campy re-readings of vintage educational films (like the manners film so ripe in subtext shown during the play), and prissy gestures (especially around Pee-Wee and Jambi) and campy jokes (like the Sham-Wow or other infomercial themed gags running through the show) -- but this gag rests on a shared understanding between the performers and the audience that the show is actively promoting gay marriage.

We can think of this as the moment Pee-Wee comes out of the closet, only to close the door again. By comparison, characters spend half of the play coming in and out of the bathroom and Pee-Wee could joke about "playing with himself" on the original series while taping up his face in front of the bathroom mirror. The networks famously prohibited the show from depicting Pee-Wee exiting the bathroom with tissue stuck to the bottom of his shoe, a joke that nevertheless made it on the air during the first season.

So, yes, adults and children watch different shows -- and that's always been part of the fun. The original stage production had both late night shows with all-adult audiences and early matinees just for kids, but they met happily in the middle, laughing at the same gags, often for very different reasons.

Henry 4: One of the best discoveries for me in reading you article was your fairly deep psychological analysis of the ways kids distance themselves from Pee Wee, even as they identify with him. You're certainly right that I cringed when classmates ran around knocking things over and screeching because I wanted to feel more grown up than they were. I was an only child, and I wanted to feel special. In a family of graduate students that meant being serious all the time. But watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse did give me a safe time to be a kid, if only vicariously.

One of the kids you interviewed, Kate, described her dream of opening a construction company - a surprisingly practical goal for a five year old girl. But when you asked her if she would build a playhouse for Pee-Wee she said, "I would tell them that I saw that show that they wanted, but I have a lot of work to do and I can't do it... And I don't like, when I go home home, you see, my boss, he likes me to work and not go home and watch TV all the time." Kate's story makes me really sad. She's trying so hard to earn respect that she can't allow herself to be five. It starts that young.

I could be way off, but I'm guessing Kate's father worked for a construction company, and that she was basically modeling her ideal future self after him.

You, of course, spent a lot of your time writing; so one of the ways I learned to feel grown up and earn approval was to write. Perhaps partially because you studied fan cultures, and partially because I had such a mismatched pile of action figures, I found it natural to write crossover stories about TV characters. As you accurately describe one of my typical plots, "Batman and Dr. Who can join forces to combat Count Dracula and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man." (That's The Doctor, by the way. Not Dr. Who.)

Anyway, I may not have put myself in a room with Pee-Wee either, but I liked the idea that I could control what happened next in the story. I came up with hypotheses - "What if...?" or "What would Pee-Wee say if...?"

I therefore find it all the more revealing that I ended up following such a similar path when I grew up.

For a while after college I became a screenwriter for a regional professional wrestling company. As it happens, wrestlers, like Pee-Wee, tend to go bonkers and act like children in grown up bodies. Every Saturday night we held another show - another installment of the story - and I had a definite role in deciding what happened next. In learning to write for the characters, I often tried to capture the voice of particular WWF and WWE wrestlers who represented similar archteypes.

I thought of my job in very practical terms. I was trying to build my resume, collect a portfolio, make industry contacts. But turn the picture around just slightly and you see a very different picture. In a sense, I was able to make my childhood idols act out stories like giant action figures and use the crowd the way a child would use teddy bears at a tea party. They were there to enjoy my presentation.

Currently I am a TV critic and entertainment reporter at BuddyTV, a Seattle dot com. Last week I attended a party at CBS to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Survivor. 250 of the 301 former contestants were there, dancing and talking all around me. Since I have seen every episode of the show's 19 seasons to date, that was a hair-raisingly exciting opportunity for me as a fan, let alone a reporter. To add to the crossover feel, I was especially excited to run into former WWE wrestler and Survivor contestant Ashley Massaro, who I had previously only encountered from the stands of 70,000 seat stadiums.

As it happens, I had already been friends with past contestants, and had known a few before they became TV "characters." I have a far more nuanced sense than most of the line between the people and their on-screen counterparts, the real life events and the TV storylines. But none the less, blogging could legitimately be seen as another opportunity for me to tell stories surrounding my favorite TV characters. Since I have no control over what they say or do, the only thing left to dream up are the questions. It may sound like a loss but it doesn't feel like one. There are no action figures here. You don't have to pull anyone's red bow tie to make them talk. I can just ask them questions and they'll tell me things.

My original goal had been to set up a face to face interview with Paul Reubens (or, if he preferred, Pee-Wee Herman.) It would have been a surreal and awesome moment of life coming full circle. Lots of people had childhood dreams. I guess, in a way, that was mine. Unfortunately, I couldn't ascertain who his agent is, or how to contact them, as we normally rely heavily on long standing relationships with network laisons. Perhaps I'll work that one out eventually.

I would like to see these career directions as a very happy ending to the dilemmas you pose about children feeling pressured to become practical and to deny their impulse to play. I play for a living, and then I do improv theater and compete on a co-ed kickball team with other young professionals for fun.

Still, I do have to admit that the fact I can't remember Pee Wee's Playhouse very well - or that reading about my five year old self feels like reading a fictional story - is disconcerting. Did I, at some point, divorce this other, playful personality in order to join the adult world? Are they gone? Or did I simply incorporate them?

Henry 3: When we were packing up our stuff at Senior House to get ready to move from Cambridge to Los Angeles, we stumbled upon your old Pee-Wee's Playhouse action set in the basement. It had already survived multiple moves since Madison, but we've never wanted to be the parents who could be accused of tossing out our son's old collectibles and besides, if you didn't want it, I sure as hell did, so even though it was a bit musty and mal-shapen at this point, we packed it for another move and it remains in our new storage unit. I don't know what it says that I can still tell you where the toy resides, more or less, while you may well have forgotten you had it.

What does this say about how childhood experiences inform parent's cultural memory as much or more than they inform children's recollections?

For me, there was something breathtaking when the curtains opened for the first time and we saw the playhouse there on stage (redesigned slightly by Gary Panther but more or less as we remembered it) and when we saw Pee-Wee being cradled in the loving and anthropomorphic arms of Chairy once again. The Playhouse itself was a magical place -- whether as a small scale play set or as a full sized set in front of us in the theater. I felt a similar sense of breaking down the walls between fantasy and reality when I visited the Hollywood Museum recently and discovered that Pee-Wee's legendary missing bicycle was on display there. No wonder he couldn't find it in the basement of the Alamo, I thought; it's been on the third floor of the old Max Factor factory all along.

In the essay, I wrote about how central the playhouse itself was in the kids drawings and the stories. Certainly they were fascinated by Pee-Wee but the Playhouse was a space "where anything could happen" and that incited their own interactions with the story. They might imagine themselves playing with Pee-Wee or not (as in Kate's story above, where Pee-Wee could only exist as a character on a television show or another classmates where Pee-Wee lived "once upon a time in a place called Pee-Wee Land where everyone looked and acted like Pee-Wee") but the playhouse was a space where they, too, could come and play -- if only in their fantasies.

And part of what I described in the essay was the ways they interacted with and around the television show, how they "played" with its content, activity that often looked very different from adult expectations about what it meant to watch the show. Indeed, it's content was being integrated into their everyday life and as your action figure reference above suggests, mixed up with other stories. Here's part of how I described the party: "A large stuffed He-Man doll was used alternately as a 'seat belt,' lying across the lap of several children or as an imaginary playmate, addressed as a 'naughty' child and even spanked to the objection of some participants who felt he was not being 'bad.' One girl watched part of the episode through the eyes of a Man-At-Arms mask....A Silverhawks doll, with a telescopic eye, was passed around the circle so that all could get a chance to look at the 'tiny tiny tiny TV set' with its distorting lens." In another words, Pee-Wee's Playhouse had become the site of play (and provided the soundtrack for play with other television content), with kids drawing each other's attention back to the screen when something silly or interesting happened.

A very different mode of engagement takes place when these 5 year olds, now in their late 20, go to see Pee-Wee on stage now. The Pee-Wee Herman Show is one of the most richly interactive experiences I've ever had in the theater. Some of it starts with Pee-Wee's invitation to "shout real loud" whenever he says the secret word and thus the encouragement to make ourselves part of the experience of the show -- an act which breaks down the fourth wall and gives us a much more immediate access to what's happening in the playhouse. Often, interactive theater crashes and burns, producing displeasure, because the audience doesn't know what's expected of it, and here, we know the rules, we know what our role is, and participating is a way of returning to a more child-like state of enjoyment.

Of course, this level of passionate engagement starts well before we are invited to join -- with the opening ovation we talked about earlier -- and extends beyond the requested participation -- the audience ended up singing along with an opening segment that incorporates familiar television jingles or in response to Magic Screen's "connect the dots" jingle. Here, as with the Playhouse Play Set, we are invited not just to watch the show but to join the play. And for me, that was an experience I faced with uninhibited delight.

Of course, I'm still trying to adjust to a world where I can shout loud enough that Pee-Wee actually hears me. Last week, when I sent out a tweet expressing my enthusiasm about the show, Pee-Wee Herman retweeted the message to his followers with the simple addition, "fun!!" I certainly hope Pee-Wee's having the time of his life up there. He deserves it.

Welcome back, Pee-Wee. We love you and we've missed you.

"Going Bonkers" (Revisited): A Father-Son Conversation About Pee-Wee (Part One)

This conversation contains mild spoilers about The Pee-Wee Herman Show.

Henry 3:In the late 1980s, when Pee-Wee's Playhouse was in its prime, I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and you were in Kindergarten and we were each in our own ways huge fans of the series. My essay, "'Going Bonkers': Children, Play and Pee-Wee," was one of my first academic publications, appearing in Camera Obscura in 1988, and subsequently reprinted in Constance Penley and Sharon Willis's Male Trouble and in my own The Wow Climax.

In the process of writing the article, we hosted a Pee-Wee Party at our apartment and you played a central role in the research process, identifying who to invite and why, discussing with me what you observed about the experience. At the party, your kindergarten classmate watched and commented on episodes, made up stories, drew pictures, and play games around the Pee-Wee characters, though as you noted, they were often "going bonkers" and not totally focused on the series.

The essay is still taught today and I often encounter people who still imagine that you are in kindergarten, since you are such a vivid voice in the piece, forgetting that several decades have past since "that crazy show" (as one of your friends called it) was on the air. Paul Reubens, who played Pee-Wee Herman, is now 57 years old, after all, though still extraordinarily nimble. He's bringing back The Pee-Wee Herman Show after all of this time, reconstructing something approximating the sets of the Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and giving live performances at Club Nokia here in Los Angeles.

Your mother, you, and I were lucky enough to get sixth row tickets to the opening performance of the show. I thought we could use this blog post to reflect on that experience and at the same time, reflect back on what Pee-Wee meant in our lives several decades ago.

I don't know about you but I felt positively misty-eyed when Pee-Wee walked back on the stage in character for the first time in several decades, only to be met with an extended, impassioned standing ovation from the audience.

When I was young, I remember reading about a stage revival of The Howdy Dowdy Show, where Buffalo Bill and Clarabell took to the road to visit college campuses and reconnect with members of the Peanut Gallery who had grown up watching the series. I'm sure the experience must have been very similar for you and others of your generation.

Henry 4: 24 years have passed since our Pee-Wee Party.

This morning I read "Going Bonkers" for the first time as an adult. It was a great read, but sort of unsettling. The Henry in the story - the 5 year old me - feels like a stranger. There are some similarities. We're both fans, and as storytellers we steal heavily from TV. We have playful sides, but we're irked by classmates whose behavior seems age-inappropriate. We're both close with our dads.

Really, though, I'm tempted to say I've never met this Henry kid. I don't remember what it was like to be him.

I do remember a few details of the party. I know that I was excited to be the center of attention, and to enjoy the show with my friends from school. But I was worried they wouldn't have seen Pee-Wee's Playhouse before. I didn't know some of them as well as I wanted to, and even at the age of 5 I was afraid they would think it was strange that I was so excited about the show.

I also remember that I insisted on inviting a pretty little girl from my kindergarten class named Stephanie. I had met her on the first day of school and proceeded to break down sobbing in front of her when my mom left. Awkward! I was intensely curious about her story and her crayon drawing. Some things never change.

I almost feel guilty telling you, my memories of Pee-Wee's Playhouse were very vague before I saw the play. I couldn't have told you that Conky was a robot or that Jambi The Genie was a disembodied head. The moment when the curtain lifted and everyone sang was something of a revelation for me because so many memories came rushing back at once.

Perhaps it speaks to the disconnected way kids watch television that the stage and puppets reminded me of the toy replicas I used to play with more so than the TV show originals. Ask me to describe the plot of even one episode of the series and I still couldn't do it. Pee-Wee's Playhouse has become, for me, a set of props, sets, catch phrases, funny voices and mannerisms, rather than a story. Judging from your article, it always was.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is an ordered narrative I could quote scene for scene, and at moments line for line. I have watched that movie around once every other year since I was in kindergarten. But it's that Pee-Wee I remember far better than the Pee-Wee from television.

None the less, like you, I was thrilled to see Pee Wee step on stage, and it was emotional to see him get such an exceptional standing ovation. I know what a long road this has been for him because it stretches back before most of my memories formed. To me, Paul Reubens' appearance in Batman Returns had seemed like a long-awaited comeback. That was 18 years ago.

He really did look exactly the same with all that makeup on. His voices and body language seemed so displaced from time that they almost shouldn't have been possible today. We were seeing the past come to life. But your experience was sure to have been different from mine because you saw Pee-Wee originally as a parent.

Henry 3: Pee-Wee's Playhouse always had a double address. Pee-Wee told an interviewer at the time, "The most fun we had writing the show was when we could come up with stuff we knew was going to kill the five-year-olds." yet it was also clear that he was fully aware of addressing a large adult population -- some of whom were parents watching the show with their children, but many of whom were young single, often queer adults, watching the show for their own entertainment. How could it be otherwise? The character and some of his friends emerged through The Groundlings, one of the legendary improv comedy groups; The original Pee-Wee Herman Show, on stage and then as an HBO special, was intended as an adults-only spoof of traditional kiddie show. Only gradually was the project reconceived as an actual Saturday morning program for children, one cast mostly with veterans of experimental theater. The great underground comics creator Gary Panther was a key contributor to the set design. The music for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure came from Danny Elfman who at the time was crossing over from Oingo Boingo and the Negative Zone to become a more mainstream composer. And of course, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was directed by Tim Burton who was crossing over from doing animated shorts into live action feature.

At the time, most of the adult discussion centered around the "queerness" of Pee-Wee at a moment of increased gay visibility in American culture and on the eve of the gays in the military debate which would shape the early years of the Clinton administration. So, the show adults saw was radically different from the show that kids saw. Even so, before you can say there was nothing like it on television before, keep in mind it was also evoking memories, also very faint in my case, of earlier children shows with almost equally surreal hosts and characters -- specifically those associated with Soupy Sales (who passed away last year) and Pinky Lee.

On a more personal level, I also have some difficulty recovering who I was when I watched the show. I was a young graduate student still trying to find my voice as a scholar, doing some of my first explicitly ethnographic research. I remember writing the essay sitting in a walk in closset in our apartment which we had converted into a home office. It was incredible narrow and there was still a coat bar hanging over my desk. The computer cord stretched down the hall and into the bathroom. On the day I was writing this essay, I wrote in a burst of inspiration for several hours without thinking to hit the save key. All of a sudden, young Henry came racing down the hall in desperation for the john, tripped over the cord, and I watched with sputtering rage as all of that writing -- the better part of the essay -- disappeared in a flash. That moment came to mind when Pee-Wee did an extended bit in the stage show centering around an out of date computer and the sputtering sounds it made when trying to go online. So, for me, too, there is something unnerving about seeing the Pee-Wee character, seemingly unchanged, a figure of eternal youth, which allows me to reflect on the changes in my own life and which embodies a new beginning at the same time.

Your point about remembering Pee-Wee as a series of fragmented impressions is a key one. Lynn Spigel and I did an essay on the Adam West Batman series which found something similar. When we interviewed people who had grown up watching the series, some 25-30 years earlier, they recalled isolated elements, mostly recurring details, from the show, but had difficulty reconstructing whole storylines. They were much better at connecting elements of the show to aspects of their own personal identity, using it to explain who they were, who they had become, and how they had gotten there, than they were at discussing the show as a series of episodic narratives.

I do think this is consistent with the distracted, interactive, ways that the children in our study watched the show, but it may also tell us something bigger about how our memories of popular culture work. I am finding myself thinking about how many recurring elements from the show Pee-Wee included in this performance -- not simply reconnecting the character to popular memory but also the Playhouse world. After all, he's talking about making a Pee-Wee's Playhouse movie and not simply a Pee-Wee movie. And that may be why both of us felt flashes of recognition as we recovered things we once knew and had forgotten as we watched the show. To some degree, the producers are shrewdly reigniting smoldering memories, even as they are playing on our more generalized affection for the host's persona and as they are tapping a pent up anger many felt that Pee-Wee was prematurely and unjustly removed from circulation. The new show seems very much aimed at adults who happened to be the same five year olds who Pee-Wee enjoyed entertaining two decades ago and for many of them, it is all about rediscovering a place which is at once faintly remembered and beloved. In a way, it is an experience of re-remembering things that are on the threshold of our consciousness and bringing it back to a more central place in the popular imagination.

Henry 4: Maybe you shouldn't have put the computer cord in the bathroom. I'd trip over that now.

I do feel dreadful, though, and all the more impressed by your essay, knowing it was a repeat. There's nothing worse than losing a work of perfect self-expression and then needing to mechanically repeat yourself. When I was in college I used to write these long, meticulous posts on a message board that would automatically log you off if you weren't active within an hour. Then if you tried to hit the back button to reclaim your message you just got a blank form. There was nothing that topped off a frustrating day quite like losing one of those posts. I had some long walks home knowing I'd spent all evening without anyone even being able to enjoy my geeky insights.

I think as a five year old I was fairly unaware of the queerness in Pee-Wee. Rewatching some of my childhood favorites as an adult was very eye opening. The Ghostbusters swilled liquor, swore and had one night stands? Danny Zucko in Grease sings about female orgasms? And don't even get me started on Roger and Jessica Rabbit. Where was I during this? 'Going bonkers' on the Hoppity Hop apparently.

I do remember thinking there was something amusing about the scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure where Pee-Wee offers Francis' father a choice of gum - fruit or licorice. You could just tell from Pee-Wee's tone of voice that fruit was a peculiar answer, though really, when was the last time you saw licorice gum? That's why I'm convinced that kids must watch all movies the way I watch foreign movies. They know they won't understand more than every other line, but they can still get the drift.

I was very struck during the new Pee Wee Herman Show by how the audience would laugh uproariously when Pee Wee did the old bits I remember but go quiet when he made jokes that seemed out of place. When he tells Chairy how glad he is he doesn't have to deal with all that mushy girl stuff, she asks him how he avoids it and he holds up his left hand. The audience blanched and then, at the perfect moment, he explained. "Abstinence ring! Haha!" If I'd been five I would have vaguely wondered what an abstinence ring was and just enjoyed his laugh. Now, there was no doubt in my mind what he was talking about but it sort of took my breath away. For viewers who haven't seen him since they were kids, those jokes ran the risk of being pop culture blasphemy in the middle of this sentimental journey. I actually don't think the audience liked some of those jokes.

On the other hand, the jokes where a mute man in a giant bear costume plays charades to explain he's got gas from eating chili were almost inexplicably hilarious to me. They relied on a five year old's sense of humor. I'm telling you: Even though I can't remember the plots of the old episodes, I still sense that I was watching the new play from a kid's point of view as much as an adult's.

It sort of points to the old philosophical question: Is perception reality? If most kids perceived the Pee-Wee Herman Show to be sarcastic, rebellious, gross, but basically clean, then wasn't that show as real as the one about queerness that you saw?

(More To Come)

Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 -- A Syllabus

I'm back at my desk after what was far too short a break! MIT gave us all of January off to focus on our own research as well as to participate in their Independent Activities Period. USC's semester starts, gulp, today, so my rhythms felt all wrong through late December and early January. But here we are -- once more into the breech.

Today, I am going to be teaching the first session of a graduate seminar on "Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0," and so I wanted to share the syllabus with my readers here, given the level of unexpected interest I received when I posted my syllabi last fall for the Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment and New Media Literacies classes. I am in a very happy place right now with my teaching -- starting over at USC is freeing me to form new kinds of classes which grow more from my own research interests rather than the institutional needs of sustaining an under-staffed program. I am thus developing classes around key concepts in my own work which are allowing me to introduce myself and my thinking to this new community. Surprisingly, given how central the study of fans has been to the trajectory of my research from graduate school forward, this is the first time I have ever taught a full class around this topic.

There are many ways you could conceptualize such a subject. A key choice I faced was between a course on fan culture, which would be centrally about what fans do and think, and a course in fan studies, which would map the emergence of and influence of a new academic field focused on the study of fandom and other forms of participatory culture. On the undergraduate level, I would have taken the first approach but on the graduate level, I opted for the second -- trying to map the evolution of a field of research centered around the study of fan communities and showing how it has spoken to a broader range of debates in media and cultural studies over the past two decades. As you will see, teaching a course right now, I found it impossible to separate out the discussion of fan culture from contemporary debates about web 2.0 and so I made that problematic, contradictory, and evolving relationship a key theme for the students to investigate. Do not misunderstand me -- I am not assuming an easy match between the three terms in my title. The shifting relations between those three terms is a central concern in the class.

I think it speaks to the richness of the space of fan research that I have included as many works as I have and I still feel inadequate because it is easy to identify gaps and omissions here -- key writers (many of them friends, some of them readers of this blog) that I could not include. Some of the topics I am focusing on are over-crowded with research and some are just emerging. I opted to cover a broader range of topics rather than focusing only on works which are canonical to the space of fan studies. All I can say is that I am sorry about the gaps but rest assured that this other work will surface in class discussion and no doubt play key roles in student papers.

I am hoping that in publishing this syllabus here, I can introduce some of the lesser known texts here (as well as the overall framework) to others teaching classes in this area and to researchers around the world who often write me trying to identify work on fan cultures. I'd love to hear from either groups here and happy to share more of what you are doing. Regular readers may anticipate more posts this semester in the fan studies space, just as last term saw more posts on transmedia topics.

COMM 620
Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0

Speaking at South by Southwest several years ago, I joked that "Web 2.0 was fandom without the stigma." By this, I meant that sites like YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, and Wikipedia have made visible a set of cultural practices and logics that had been taking root within fandom over the past hundred-plus years, expanding their cultural influence by broadening and diversifying participation. In many ways, these practices have been encoded into the business models shaping so-called Web 2.0 companies, which have in turn made them far more mainstream, have increased their visibility, and have incorporated them into commercial production and marketing practices. The result has been a blurring between the grassroots practices I call participatory culture and the commercial practices being called Web 2.0.

Fans have become some of the sharpest critics of Web 2.0, asking a series of important questions about how these companies operate, how they generate value for their participants, and what expectations participants should have around the content they provide and the social networks they entrust to these companies. Given this trajectory, a familiarity with fandom may provide an important key for understanding many new forms of cultural production and participation and, more generally, the logic through which social networks operate.

So, to define our three terms, at least provisionally, fandom refers to the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties; participatory culture refers more broadly to any kind of cultural production which starts at the grassroots level and which is open to broad participation; and Web 2.0 is a business model that sustains many web-based projects that rely on principles such as user-creation and moderation, social networking, and "crowdsourcing."

That said, the debates about Web 2.0 are only the most recent set of issues in cultural and media studies which have been shaped by the emergence of a field of research focused on fans and fandom. Fan studies:

• emerged from the Birmingham School's investigations of subcultures and resistance


• became quickly entwined with debates in Third Wave Feminism and queer studies


• has been a key space for understanding how taste and cultural discrimination operates


• has increasingly been a site of investigation for researchers trying to understand informal learning or emergent conceptions of the citizen/consumer


• has shaped legal discussions around appropriation, transformative work, and remix culture


• has become a useful window for understanding how globalization is reshaping our everyday lives.

This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• trace the history of fandom from the amateur press associations of the 19th Century to its modern manifestations


• describe the evolution of fan studies from the Birmingham School work on subcultures and media audiences to contemporary work on digital media


• discuss a range of theoretical framing and methodologies which have been used to explain the cultural, social, political, legal, and economic impact of fandom


• arbitrate the most common critiques surrounding the Web 2.0 business model


• situate fan practices in relation to broader trends toward social networks, online communities, and remix culture


• develop their own distinctive contribution to the field of fan studies, one which reflects their own theoretical and methodological commitments

Assignments:

• Students will be expected to post regular weekly comments reacting to the readings on the Blackboard site for the class. (20 percent)



• Students will write a short five-page autoethnography describing their own history as a fan of popular entertainment. You should explore whether or not you think of yourself as a fan, what kinds of fan practices you engage with, how you define a fan, how you became invested in the media franchises that have been part of your life, and how your feelings about being a fan might have adjusted over time. (15 percent) (Due on January 19)
• Students will develop an annotated bibliography which explores one of the theoretical debates that have been central to the field of fan studies. These might include those which we've identified for the class, or they might also include other topics more relevant to the student's own research. What are the key contributions of fan studies literature to this larger field of inquiry? What models from these theoretical traditions have informed work in fan studies? (20 Percent) (Due on Feb 23)



• Students will read Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0" [http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html] and Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle, "Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On" [http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/28/web2009_websquared-whitepaper.pdf and write a five-page response which discusses what you see as the most significant similarities and differences between fan practice (as we've read about it in the class) and the business model associated with Web 2.0. (15 percent) (Due on April 6)



• Students will write a 10-15 page essay on a topic of your own choosing (in consultation with the instructor) which you feel grows out of the subjects and issues we've been exploring throughout the class. The paper will ideally build on the annotated bibliography created for the earlier assignment. Students will do short 10 minute presentation of their findings during final exam week. (40 percent) (Due on Last Day of the Class.)

Books:
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. (New York: New
York UP, 2006)
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the
Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006)
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, Fandom: Identities and Communities in A Mediated World. (New York: New York UP, 2007)
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (New York: Polity, 2009)
Seth, Wimbledon Green (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2005)
Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Data Base Animals (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009)
Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. (New York: New Press, 2007)

DAY 1
From Subculture to Fan Culture, From Fan Culture to Web 2.0
Screening: "Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media" (In-progress by Patricia Lange)

Recommended Reading:
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, "Why Study Fans?" (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington)
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, "Introduction: Works in Progress" (Hellekson and Busse)

DAY 2
Fan Studies and Cultural Resistance
Janice Radway "The Readers and Their Romances," Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984)
John Fiske, "The Cultural Economy of Fandom," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992)
Camille Bacon-Smith, "Identity and Risk" and "Suffering and Solace," Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992)
Constance Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture" in Cultural Studies (edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler)
Henry Jenkins, "It's Not a Fairy Tale Anymore!': Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast," Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992)
Matt Hills, "Fan Cultures Between Community and 'Resistance'," Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002)

Recommended Reading:
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, "Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: 'I'm Not My Mother," Genders Online Journal 38, 2003
Henry Jenkins, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching," (Jenkins)
John Tulloch, "Cult, Talk and Audiences," Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods (London: Arnold, 2000)

DAY 3
Tracing the History of Participatory Culture
Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensibility," The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 2009)
Paula Petrik. "The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870-1886," in Elliot West and Paula Petrik (eds.) Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. (Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1992)
Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991).
Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Recommended Reading:
Susan J. Douglas, "Popular Culture and Populist Technology: The Amateur Operators, 1906-1912," Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1989)
Chad Dell, "Lookit That Hunk of a Man': Subversive Pleasures, Female Fandom and
Professional Wrestling," in Cheryl Harris and Anne Alexander (eds.) Theorizing
Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1998).

DAY 4
Fans and Online Community
Henry Jenkins, "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Look Stupid': alt.tv.twinpeaks, the
Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery" (Jenkins)
Sharon Marie Ross, "Fascinated With Fandom: Cautiously Aware Viewers of Xena and Buffy," Beyond the Box: Television and The Internet (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
Rebecca Lucy Busker, "LiveJournal and the Shaping of Fan Discourse," Transformative Works and Cultures 1, 2008
Alan Wexelblat, "An Auteur in the Age of the Internet: JMS, Babylon 5, and The Net" in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

DAY 5
Fandom and Queer Studies
Kristina Busse, "My Life is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances" (Hellekson and Busse)
Eden Lacker, Barbara Lynn Lucas, and Robin Anne Reid, "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh" (Hellekson and Busse)
Richard Dyer, "Judy Garland and Gay Men," Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: McMillian, 1986)
Henry Jenkins, "Out of the Closet and Into the Universe" and "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking" (Jenkins)

Recommended Reading:
Erica Rand, "Older Heads on Younger Bodies," Barbie's Queer Accessories (Durham: Duke UP, 1995).
Sean Griffin, "'You've Never Had a Friend Like Me': Target Marketing Disney to a Gay
Community," Tinker Bells and Evil Queens: The Disney Company From Inside Out (New York: New York UP, 2000).

DAY 6
Performing Fandom
Kurt Lancaster, "Welcome Aboard, Ambassador: Creating a Surrogate Performance with the Babylon Project," Interacting with Babylon 5 (Austin: U of Texas P, 2001)
Francesca Coppa, "Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance" (Hellekson and Busse)
Robert Drew, "Anyone Can Do It': Forging a Participatory Culture in Karaoke Bars," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
Sharon Mazer, "'Real' Wrestling, 'Real' Life" in Nicholas Sammond (ed.) Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasures and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Durham: Duke UP, 2005).
Cornel Sandvoss, "A Text Called Home: Fandom Between Performance and Place," Fans (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)

Recommended Reading:
Nick Couldry, "On the Set of The Sopranos: 'Inside' A Fan's Construction of Nearness" (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington)

DAY 7
Fan Aesthetics; Fan Taste
Abigail Derecho, "Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History and Several Theories of Fan Fiction"(Hellekson and Busse)
Catherine Driscoll, "One True Pairing: The Romance of Pornography and the Pornography of Romance" (Hellekson and Busse)
Sheenagh Pugh, "What Else and What If," The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (London: Seren, 2006)
Roberta Pearson, "Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies and Sherlockians" (Gray, Sandvoss, and
Harrington)
Jonathan Gray, "Anti-Fandom and the Moral Text: Television Without Pity and Textual
Dislike," American Behavioral Scientist 48(7), 806-22
Alan McKee, "Which is the Best Doctor Who Story?: A Case Study in Value Judgment Outside the Academies," Intensities 1, 2001

Recommended Reading:
Mafalda Stasi, "The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest" (Hellekson and Busse)

DAY 8
Vidders and Fan Filmmakers
Francesca Coppa, "Women, 'Star Trek' and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Transformative Works and Cultures 1, 2008.
Joshua Green and Jean Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (New York: Polity, 2009)
Louisa Ellen Stein, "This Dratted Thing: Fannish Storytelling Through New Media" (Hellekson and Busse)

DAY 9
Fans or Pirates?
Lawrence Lessig, "Two Economies: Commercial and Sharing," Remix: Making Art and
Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Ecology (New York: Penquin, 2008)
Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe and Lewis Kaye, "Your Second Life?: Goodwill and the Performance of Intellectual Property in Online Digital Gaming," Cultural Studies 20, 2006
J.D. Lasica, "Inside the Movie Underground," "When Personal and Mass Media Collide,"
"Remixing the Digital Future," Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons)
Hector Postigo, "Video Game Appropriation through Modifications: Attitudes Concerning
Intellectual Property among Modders and Fan," Convergence, 2008.

Recommended Reading:
Rebecca Tushnet, "Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and The Rights of the Author" (Gray,
Sandvoss, and Harrington)

DAY 10
Collectors
John Bloom, "Cardboard Patriarchy: Adult Baseball Card Collecting and the Nostalgia for a Presexual Past," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
Chuck Tyron, "The Rise of the Movie Geek: DVD Culture, Cinematic Knowledge, and The Home Viewer," Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers UP, 2009)
Seth, Wimbledon Green (New York: Drawn and Quarterly, 2005)
Mary DesJardin, "Ephemeral Culture/eBay Culture: Film Collectables and Fan Investments," Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Nathan Scott Epley (eds.), Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (New York: Routledge, 2006)

DAY 11
Fan Labor, Moral Economy, and the Gift Economy
Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins, "The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Audience Research and Convergence Culture," in Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (eds.) Media Industries: History, Theory and Method (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor," Producing Culture for the Digital Economy (Pluto, 2004)
Suzanne Scott, "Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary Content
Models," Transformative Works and Cultures 3, 2009
Lewis Hyde, "The Bond" and "The Gift Community," The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2008)
Mark Andrejevic, "Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor," in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden)

DAY 12
Produsers and Lead Users
John Banks and Mark Deuze, "Co-Creative Labor," International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(5), 2009
Darren Brabham, "Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases," Convergence, 2008.
Axel Bruns, "The Key Characteristics of Produsage," Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (London: Peter Lang, 2008)
Sam Ford, "Fandemonium: A Tag Team Approach to Enabling and Mobilizing Fans,"
Convergence Culture Consortium White Paper, 2007

Recommended Reading:
Stephen Brown, "Harry Potter and the Fandom Menace," Bernard Cova, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar (eds.) Consumer Tribes (Oxford and Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007)
Eric Von Hippel, "Development of Products by Lead Users," Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)

DAY 13
Learning Through Fandom
Lauren Lewis, Rebecca Black, and Bill Tomlinson, "Let Everyone Play: An Educational
Perspective on Why Fan Fiction Is, or Should Be, Legal," International Journal of
Learning and Media 1(1), 2009
Patricia G. Lange and Mizuko Ito, "Creative Production," Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010)
Erica Rosenfeld Halverson and Richard Halverson, "Fantasy Baseball: The Case for Competitive Fandom," Games and Culture 3(3-4), 2008
Henry Jenkins, "How Many Star Fleet Officers Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb: Star Trek at MIT," Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek (London: Routledge, 1995)
Jason Mittell, "Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and The Case of Lostpedia," Transformative Works and Cultures 3, 2009

DAY 14
Fan Activism
Steven Duncombe, Dream: Reimaginaing Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007)
Henry Jenkins, "How Dumbledore's Army is Transforming Our World: An Interview with HP Alliance's Andrew Slack," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 23 2009
Derek Johnson, "Enfranchising the Consumer: Alternate Realities, Institutional Politics, and the Digital Public Sphere," Franchising Media Worlds: Content Networks and the Collaborative Production of Culture, diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009
Henry Jenkins, "How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part One): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, October 5 2006

DAY 15
Global Fans
Henry Jenkins, "Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in the Age of Media
Convergence" (Jenkins)
Nancy K. Baym and Robert Burnett (2009). "Amateur Experts: International Fan Labor in Swedish Independent Music." International Journal of Cultural Studies. 12(5): 1-17
Xiaochang Li, "New Contexts, New Audiences," Dis/Locating Audience: Transnational Media Flows and the Online Circulation of East Asian Television Drama, Unpublished Master's Thesis, Comparative Media Studies, MIT, 2009
Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Data Base Animals (Mineappolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009)
Aswin Punathambekar, "Between Rowdies and Rasikas: Rethinking Fan Activity in Indian Film Culture" (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington)

How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics

Last time, I shared with you the first of a series of occassional field reports and thought pieces from a team I have been putting together at MIT and USC to reflect on what we perceive as a potential continuum from engagement with participatory culture (especially fan communities and practices) and public participation in civic and political activities. As we described last time, this work is currently at a conceptual level as we gather examples of groups which are using elements from popular culture to provide a bridge into real world social and political concerns. Eventually we hope to do more indepth case studies working with organizations and their members to identify best practices that may be increasing young people's civic engagement and from there, develop materials which may foster even greater public participation. This reserarch has been funded in part by the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT (funded by the Knight Foundation) and reflects my involvement in a new John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation initiative focused on youth, new media, and public participation.

This time, Flourish Klink, a Master's Candidate in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, shares some of our current thinking about "fictional story worlds" which offer resources that these groups are deploying to think through and intervene in complex real world problems.

The idea may seem radical at first -- breaking with the largely rationalist drive of most contemporary activism. We have had less trouble accepting the premise that works of realist literature -- Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath -- can become the focal point for movements for social change than we have buying the idea that fantastical realms may do so, even though there is a long history. As someone who has spent much of my life in fandom, I have long seen examples of science fiction inspiring fans to rally support around NASA and manned space flight, say, or more recently, slash fans being moved to actively engage with issues of concern to the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual community or to join fights against censorship and for free expression.

But what has intrigued me the most in recent years is the way fan communities, especially around fantasy texts, are inspiring activism around human rights issues. The green politics often implicit in Anime has sparked growing awareness of environmental issues while J.K. Rowling's background in Amnesty International helps to explain why the Harry Potter books are leading young people to be concerned with repressive governments and human dignity.

The temptation is to evaluate such movements through a focus on the author's implicit or explicit political commitments, yet we may also explore how fans have used these popular platforms as raw materials for their own public engagement, seeking inspiration there for ways they might work through complex real world issues. It is this focus on fandom as a site for exploring and engaging with social concerns that is the central focus of this second installment in the series.

If you know of any groups who are doing interesting work which fuses participatory culture and public participation, please contact me at hjenkins@usc.edu. We are trying to identify as many examples as we can at this stage in our research.

Once upon a time, a hare saw a tortoise ambling along, and began to mock him. The hare challenged the tortoise to a race, and the tortoise accepted. When they began, the hare immediately shot ahead. After running for some time, the hare was very far ahead of the tortoise, so he decided to sit down and have a rest before continuing the race. Sitting under a shady tree, the hare soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him, and by the time the hare woke up, the tortoise had already passed the finish line. The moral of this story is that slow and steady wins the race.

As they read stories like this one, out of Aesop's fables, children are primed to seek meanings and morals in the stories they read. What we are taught as children follows us throughout our lives. As teens and adults, we continue to look for meanings in the stories we read. "That was such an inspiring book," we say, or "that movie was so depressing. It really made me feel like there's nothing I can do to fix this messed-up world."

Sometimes, we are inspired to emulate aspects of our favorite stories. For example, when reading The Lord of the Rings, a fan might be inspired by Frodo's willingness to embark upon a long, perilous and dangerous journey, even before he really knows what it will entail, and even though every part of him wants to take the easier route:
"

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. 'I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."

Frodo's self-sacrifice and bravery might inspire us to take a chance - to try something new, perhaps. One can imagine that a person might read about Frodo's choice and decide that they, too, can take a journey to a dangerous place for the good of mankind - and sign up for the Peace Corps. Or, on a smaller scale, someone might just decide to start serving the homeless and mentally ill, overcoming her cultural revulsion against and fear of people less fortunate than herself.

This kind of inspiration really relies on you "buying into" the story's world. It doesn't matter whether Frodo is saying heroic things if you find Lord of the Rings boring and Tolkien's style dry as dust. In some sense, if you really care about a story, the characters in it become figures that live in your mind, role models, if you will.

Now think of a different situation. Imagine that, instead of our fictional do-gooder being inspired by Frodo's speech, she is inspired by a persuasive person. Perhaps she goes to a lecture about the issue of homelessness in her town, and at this lecture she meets a woman who runs a soup kitchen and who convinces her to overcome her nervousness at volunteering there. How is this situation different from the first? How is it the same? Is the first situation even realistic? Is the second situation? These are some of the sub-questions we're struggling with in our civic engagement research.

It is well known that people who are involved in the high arts are more likely to volunteer in their communities. However, the reasons for this correlation are not clear. Are people actually inspired to volunteer by high arts? Is it only high arts that can inspire people to become more civically engaged, or can popular culture do it, too? Or is there a more complex situation underpinning the NEA study and these questions?

As Anna ably chronicled in the last post in this series, there are plenty of civically engaged organizations which, to a greater or lesser degree, have formed around particular pop culture texts. There's a wide variety of ways that these organizations activate popular culture. Some of them grew organically out of a fan culture; others were concerned with a particular issue and then decided to use a story to make that issue more compelling. Some started off as very tightly focused on one issue - for instance, Racebending began life as a protest against white actors being cast in Asian roles in the movie The Last Airbender - and eventually branched out into more concerns. Others have always cast their net a bit wider. Still others began as tightly focused and continue to be tightly focused, such as Verb Noire, an e-publishing company dedicated to publishing fiction about groups that have been historically underrepresented in sci-fi and fantasy. What all these organizations have in common, however, is that they mobilize stories to encourage people to become more civically engaged - and in many cases, they were inspired and mobilized by stories.

There's a lot more complexity in the way that these organizations deal with the stories they refer to than might initially meet the eye. In Textual Poachers, Henry refers to fandom as a mix of "fascination and frustration." Never is that more clear than in these organizations. Some of them, like Verb Noire, are dealing directly with aspects of their fandom that they don't like. Other organizations have to negotiate complex and differing understandings of their core story: the Harry Potter Alliance's "What would Dumbledore do?" campaign relies on a perception of Dumbledore as a positive or "good" character, which not all Harry Potter fans share. Some, like Racebending, are dealing with multiple instantiations of a single story and their slight variations, drawing inspiration from some but not all of these versions.

Then, too, relatively simple fictional worlds often provide a starting point for hard thinking about the nuanced real world - hard thinking that goes beyond just "I want to be like Frodo." For example, the Harry Potter Alliance is doing this sort of hard thinking about the issue of witch hunts in Nigeria. In these witch hunts, parents are persuaded to ostracize and abuse their disobedient children, calling them "witches," in the name of performing an exorcism. The pastors who perform the exorcisms frequently charge a great deal of money for the service; if the parents cannot pay, they are told their only option is to completely ostracize or even kill their child. The children who survive often have suffered horrific wounds and incredible emotional trauma, and they are left alone in the world, if they aren't lucky enough to be taken into an orphanage or shelter.

Naturally, witches and wizards are an important part of the Harry Potter books - and the persecution of witches and wizards is an important part of the Harry Potter books. In fact, Harry's aunt and uncle subject him to fairly horrible neglect as a result of his wizarding talents. On the surface, there would seem to be a very direct correlation between the witch-hunts in Nigeria and Harry Potter's childhood in the Harry Potter books, a correlation which the Harry Potter Alliance might rally around.

In reality, however, this correlation was only the start of the conversation. Rather than simply seeing the similarities between Harry's life and the life of a persecuted African child, members of the Harry Potter Alliance also looked for the differences. They discussed, and are still discussing, how the cultural differences between Africa and the developed West might be clouding their understanding of the issue. They discussed the differences between the witch hunts in Nigeria and persecution of Wiccans in the United States (and came to the conclusion that Harry Potter fandom's typical claim - that the books don't lead to witchcraft - is, on some level, complicit with the idea that it is wrong to be Wiccan). And they discussed the ways that cultural flows between churches in the United States and churches in Africa may have contributed to the increased number of witch hunts that are taking place today. In fact, the conversation is still continuing, as they struggle with the question of how to make an intervention without behaving paternalistically towards the African groups involved.

This sort of discussion can take place because the Harry Potter Alliance exists in the context of participatory culture. Rather than receiving information from a central source, group members have access to a social network and to easy email communication with organizers: there's plenty of opportunity for group members to become engaged in debate about the organizations' understanding of the stories they're focused on, and the organizations' actions. This increased communication can sometimes lead to unending debate, it's true: in some more decentralized groups, it can be difficult to come to a decision. When making choices quickly is important, there's nothing like centralized authority. But sometimes, like when the Harry Potter Alliance was thinking about witch hunts in Africa, a longer, slower thought process is appropriate, leading to better decisions. To quote a story with a moral: "slow and steady wins the race!"

On Chuck and Carrot Mobs: Mapping the Connections Between Participatory Culture and Public Participation

One of my proudest moments at the Futures of the Entertainment 4 conference was moderating a session on Transmedia for Social Change, which closed off the first day of the event. This panel brought together a number of people who I have encounter recently through my research on the relations between participatory culture and public participation: Stephen Duncombe - NYU, author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy (The New Press); Andrew Slack - The Harry Potter Alliance; Noessa Higa - Visionaire Media; Lorraine Sammy - Co-creator Racebending; and Jedidiah Jenkins-Director of Public & Media Relations, Invisible Children.

For many attending this event, their discussion of new forms of activism that have emerged around the borders of transmedia entertainment were particularly eye opening While we were able to draw connections across these various projects, none of the panelists had met before and most did not know what the others were doing. It was exciting to see the shift in tone at the conference as we moved from talking about business plans to talking about human rights and social justice. I wanted to share the video of this session with you here.

During my introduction to the panel, I referenced the research we've begun to do trying to better understand how engagement with participatory culture, especially with fandom, may be teaching the skills and creating identities which can be applied to campaigns for social change. This project has launched since my move to California and is being conducted jointly with researchers at USC, MIT, and Tufts. What follows is the first of a series of reports on this still new research initiative, written by members of my team. Anna Van Someren, who wrote this first installment, joined the team having already served as the production manager on Project New Media Literacies, and with a background in media production, media literacy instruction, and social activism. Here, she gives an overview of what we are trying to do.

On Chuck and Carrot Mobs: Mapping the Connections Between Participatory Culture and Public Participation
by Anna Van Someren

I was on my 8th (excruciating) rep, struggling with some kind of bowflex-looking machine when my personal trainer asked what I do for work. As usual, I had the fleeting wish that I could say something short and concrete, something like "preschool teacher" or "novelist". Because really, did this woman care any more than the typical dentist who asks such questions with both hands inside your mouth? Could I finally come up with something a little less opaque than "researcher at MIT"? If I did, could I for once muster the self-discipline it takes not to ramble incomprehensibly?

I tried a new approach, and asked if she had a favorite television show. "Battlestar Galactica!" - her face lit up as she described the Starbuck costume her friend was helping her create for Halloween. "Well, say a Battlestar Galactica fan group became interested in doing some work for social change, work that maybe addresses an issue brought up by the show. The group I'm working with is looking at how people who organize around a story they love, and then decide to take some kind of public action." She seemed genuinely interested, so I continued with more detail during front lunges. I think I may have gotten a bit rambly, but I'll try not to here.

As readers of this blog know, Henry has moved to LA and is now the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Although he has relinquished his role as principal investigator at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (funded by the Knight Foundation), his work on participatory culture and civic engagement has spawned a new research project supported in part by the center. This project is bi-coastal; on the east coast we have myself, research advisor Clement Chau and research assistant Flourish Klink. Representing the west coast out at USC with Henry we have research director Sangita Shresthova (CMS alum '03) along with more than a dozen Annenberg School students whose work relates directly to our research interests.

Our early conversations circled around the skills needed to become involved in public discourse. We discussed emerging forms of engagement, such as the Carrotmob project, which might be considered civic because of its socially beneficial goal of protecting the environment. Carrotmob organizes competitions in which local businesses pledge to make ecological improvements to their practices. The business with the best pledge enjoys an environmentally-motivated flash mob: 'carrotmobbers' receive instructions via blog posts and twitter about where and when to show up and spend.

The 'Finale & a Footlong' Save Chuck campaign is another recent initiative working to leverage consumer power. In April 2009, organizers mobilized fans of the television show Chuck to buy footlong sandwiches at Subway, a main sponsor, on the night of the show's finale. Fans were instructed to leave a note in the Subway suggestion box mentioning the campaign, and Chuck star Zach Levi described it as "a way for non-Nielson fans to show their love of the show by directly supporting one of Chuck's key advertisers".

These two projects have entirely different goals, and some might say Save Chuck is a far cry from civic engagement, but it's interesting to note that the skills and strategies being used are so similar. We began to wonder if participants in campaigns like Save Chuck might stand to gain some of the skills and knowledge needed to become active citizens. With so many young people so engaged with popular culture, this potential is critical to understand. In Convergence Culture, Henry describes how popular culture can function as a civic playground, where lower stakes allow for a greater diversity of opinions than tolerated in political arenas. "One way that popular culture can enable a more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel ...popular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture."

Of course, there are differing definitions of what an 'engaged citizenry' looks like. CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement, works with three primary categories: civic activities, electoral activities, and political voice activities. In Civic Life Online, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker define civic engagement broadly and simply as "any activity aimed at improving one's community". In his book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam considers civic engagement to be on the decline, and bemoans the social ties we've lost now that we spend more time "isolated" in front of the television. Some share his pessimism, worrying that the millennial generation lacks an interest in the workings of government, but it's important to remember that we're not talking about something static or stabilized. In their paper Young Citizens and Civic Learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age Lance Bennett, Alison Rank and Christopher Wells remind us that "citizenship is a dynamic social construction that reflects changing social and political conditions."

So how does the dimension of popular culture fit into our understanding of citizenship? Voting, joining a political party, or doing community service are concrete, measurable activities that have long been defined as civic. What does loving a television show have to do with any of this? It's helpful here to consider two opposing views of democracy described by Stephen Coleman in Civic Life Online. Although he's talking specifically about youth e-citizenship here, he offers a useful model, describing the conflict between democracy viewed as "an established and reasonably just system, with which young people should be encouraged to engage" and as "a political as well as cultural aspiration, most likely to be realized through networks in which young people engage with one another". The second view is expansive; it describes a realm where citizens are empowered not only to participate in the public arena, but to shape it. It's a view that does not contain activity within a strictly political sphere, but embraces cultural citizenship. This aligns well with Peter Levine's definition of civic engagement as not only political activism, deliberation, and problem-solving, but also cultural production, or participation in shaping a culture.

If we want to see how engagement with popular culture can fuel social action, Loraine Sammy and her activities with racebending.com provide a rich case study. Fans of Nickelodeon's Avatar: the Last Airbender animation series were frustrated and disappointed by the casting process for the live-action movie version. Paramount cast the main characters, who are Asian in the original series, with white actors. Avatar fans came together to create the LiveJournal-based Aang Ain't White campaign, which attempted to pressure Paramount with a letter-writing campaign. Loraine, who spoke on the Transmedia for Social Change panel at Futures of Entertainment 4, helped grow Aang Ain't White into the racebending movement, "a coalition and community dedicated to encouraging fair casting practices". She and other participants volunteer their time, talents and skills to advocate on behalf of this cause, which has now reached beyond the Avatar movie and may begin to play a watchdog role in Hollywood.

There are so many aspects we want to explore about the racebending community, and others like it. It's intriguing to think about how fiction and fantasy can captivate us on an emotional level, providing a narrative structure that can motivate us to seek change in the real world. We're also curious about how individuals develop their identities as citizens - is it possible that participants in the Save Chuck campaign were developing a sense of empowerment and efficacy in the world - exercising their civic muscles, as it were? Our primary interest right now lies with the nature of participatory culture communities, like racebending.

We consider a participatory culture to be one where:

1. there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. there is strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
3. there is some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. members believe their contributions matter
5. members feel some degree of social connection with one another

How do these characteristics work together to encourage and support civic engagement? To find out, we'll be looking at participatory culture communities engaged in some type of social or public action. We're specifically interested in groups which originally gelled around shared interest in popular culture and then become somehow involved in public discourse. Racebending is an excellent example, and is one of our planned case studies, along with the Harry Potter Alliance, Invisible Children, Browncoats, Anonymous, and possibly the hacktivism inspired by Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother.

This winter we'll be conducting interviews with members and founders of these groups, asking questions about their operations, their membership, and their activities. By spring we hope to have a stronger grasp on our research question, how do the characteristics of participatory culture environments support the kinds of social learning, deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse? In order to share our thoughts and findings in advance of our white paper, we'll be posting updates here. This introduction marks the start of our series, so stay tuned for more from our team, and please share your ideas, critiques, and comments.

If you know of other groups or projects who are deploying fan culture/popular culture as a springboard for social change, please let us know. We are trying to cast a wide net right now to identify examples which might help us better understand these emerging forms of activism. We are especially interested in examples from outside the United States.

If you are interested in this discussion of civic engagement and participatory culture, you might also want to check out this video produced by the MacArthur Foundation and showcasing the thinkin of Joe Kahne, who is part of the new research hub MacArthur is creating to think about these issues.

Joe Kahne on Civic Participation Online and Off from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment -- A Syllabus

Given the interest out there in transmedia or cross-media entertainment, I thought I would share the syllabus for the course I am teaching this fall at the University of Southern California. I am still shifting some details, as I deal with the scheduling of guest speakers, but all of the speakers listed have agreed to come. The readings are a good starter set for people wanting to do more thinking on this emerging area of research. I will be sharing reflections about the course material here throughout the fall, since I'm sure working through these readings in a class context is going to spark me to do some fresh thinking on the topic. I'd love to hear from others out there teaching transmedia or cross-media topics.

If you know someone at USC who you think might want to take this class, let them know. I still have room for more students.

Course Description and Outcomes:

We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit "synergies" between different parts of the medium system and "maximize touch-points" with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

The course is broken down into five basic units: "Foundations" offers an overview of the current movement towards transmedia or cross-platform entertainment; "Narrative Structures" introduces the basic toolkit available to contemporary storytellers, digging deeply into issues around seriality, and examining what it might mean to think of a story as a structure of information; "World Building" deals with what it means to think of contemporary media franchises in terms of "worlds" or "universes" which unfold across many different media systems; "Audience Matters" links transmedia storytelling to issues of audience engagement and in the process, considers how fans might contribute unofficial extensions to favorite media texts; and "Tracing the History of Transmedia" pulls back to consider key moments in the evolution of transmedia entertainment, moving from the late 19th century to the present.

In this course, we will be exploring the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling through:

• Critically examining commercial and grassroots texts which contribute to larger media franchises (mobisodes and webisodes, comics, games).
• Developing a theoretical framework for understanding how storytelling works in this new environment with a particular emphasis upon issues of world building, cultural attractors, and cultural activators.
• Tracing the historical context from which modern transmedia practices emerged, including consideration of the contributions of such key figures as P.T. Barnum, L. Frank Baum, Feuillade, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, Walt Disney, George Lucas, DC and Marvel Comics, and Joss Whedon.
• Exploring what transmedia approaches contribute to such key genres as science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero, suspense, soap opera, teen and reality television.
• Listening to cutting-edge thinkers from the media industry talk about the challenges and opportunities which transmedia entertainment offers, walking through cases of contemporary projects that have deployed cross-platform strategies.
• Putting these ideas into action through working with a team of fellow students to develop and pitch transmedia strategies around an existing media property.

Required Books:

Pat Harrington and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 636 pages.

Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 136 pages.

Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (Marvel Comics, 2003), 216 pages.

Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995),
416 pages.

Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007), 136 pages.

All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class.

Grading and Assignments:

Commercial Extension Paper 20 percent
Grassroots Extension Paper 20 percent
Final Project - Franchise Development Project 40 percent
Class Forums 20 percent

In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be expected to immerse themselves into at least one major media franchise for the duration of the term. You should consume as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to the series as a whole.

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PAPER: For the first paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining one commercially produced media extension (comic, website, game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.). You should try to address such issues as its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural attractors/activators. (Due Sept. 23)(20 Percent)

GRASSROOTS EXTENSION PAPER: For the second paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining a fan-made extension (fan fiction, discussion list, video, etc.) and try to understand where the audience has sought to attach themselves to the franchise, what they add to the story world, how they respond to or route around the invitational strategies of the series, and how they reshape our understanding of the characters, plot or world of the original franchise. (Due Nov. 18) (20 Percent)

FINAL PROJECT - FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Students will be organized into teams, which for the purpose of this exercise will function as transmedia companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book, novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions, though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. By the end of the term, your team will be "pitching" this property. The pitch should include a briefing book that describes:

1) the core defining properties of the property
2) a description of the intended audience(s)
3) a discussion of the specific plans for each media platform you are going to deploy
4) an overall description for how you will seek to integrate the different media platforms to create a coherent world
5) a business plan which includes likely costs and revenue and the time table for rolling out the various media elements
6) parallel examples of other properties which have deployed the strategies being described

The pitch itself will be a 20 minute group presentation, followed by 10 minutes of questioning. The presentation should give us a "taste" of what the property is like as well as to lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. For an example of what these pitches might look like, watch the materials assembled at http://www.educationarcade.org/SiDA/videos, which shows how a similar activity was conducted at MIT. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific media platform as well as to contribute to the over-all strategies for spreading the property across media systems. The group will select its own team leader who will be responsible for contacts with the instructor and will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed. Team Members will check in with the instructor on Week Ten and Week Fourteen to review their progress on the assignment. Presentation (Dec.7, 9) Briefing Book (Dec. 14) (40 Percent)

CLASS FORUM: For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a substantive question or comments via the class forum on BlackBoard. Comments should reflect an understanding of the readings for that day as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that we can explore through class discussions or with the visiting speakers. (20 Percent)

Class Schedule:

*Guest Speakers are tentative, subject to availability. Shifts in speakers and thus topics and readings may occur after the semester starts.

Part One: Foundations

Week 1
August 24: Transmedia Storytelling 101

Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101" Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmeda Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

Geoff Long, "What Is Transmedia Storytelling", Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php, pp. 13-69.

August 26 Intertextual Commodities?

P. David Marshall, "The New Intertextual Commodity" in Dan Harries (ed.) The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 69-81.

Derek Johnson, "Intelligent Design or Godless Universe? The Creative Challenges of World Building and Franchise Development," Franchising Media Worlds: Content Networks and The Collaborative Production of Culture, PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009. pp.170-279.

Watch:
Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy

Week 2
August 31: Media Mix in Japan

Anne Allison, "Pokemon: Getting Monsters and Communicating Capitalism," Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 192-233.

David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, "Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children's Media Culture" In Joseph Tobin (ed.) Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 12-33.

Mizuko Ito, "Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix," Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge, MIT, 2008), pp. 97-110.

September 2: Toys and Tales

Jeff Gomez, "Creating Blockbuster Worlds" (unpublished)

Henry Jenkins, "Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/05/an_interview_with_starlight_ru.html

Mark Federman, "What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message," http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm

Guest Speakers:
Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner
Jordan Greenhill, DivX

Week 3
September 7 is the Labor Day holiday

September 9: Transmedia Branding

Faris Yacob, "I Believe Children are the Future," http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future

Henry Jenkins, "How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning...", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_storytelling_be.html
http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_storytelling_be_1.html

Guest Speaker: Faris Yacob, McCann Erickson New York

Week 4

September 14 Heroes and Alchemists: The New Storytelling

The 9th Wonders, Chapters 1-9 http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_library.shtml?novel=9

Henry Jenkins, "We Had So Many Stories to Tell': The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html

Carolyn Handler Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2006), "Using a Transmedia Approach", pp. 149-164 (Rec.)

Guest Speakers: Mauricio Mota, Mark Warshaw, Here Come the Alchemists

Part Two: Narrative Structures

September 16: Seriality

Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), "Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque Narrative Formation," pp. 31-70.

Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin, pp. 429-438.

Watch:
The Wire
http://www.amazon.com/Wire-Complete-Fourth-Season/dp/B000QXDJLI/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1197321529&sr=8-1

"Young Prop Joe"
"Bunk and McNulty"
"Young Omar"

Jennifer Haywood, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), "Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial," pp. 21-51. (rec)

Week 5
September 21: Soaps Go Transmedia

Sharon Marie Ross, "Managing Millennials: Teen Expectations of Tele-Participation," Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (London: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 124-172.

Sam Ford, "From Oakdale Confidential to L.A. Diaries: Transmedia Storytelling for ATWT," As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture (Master's Thesis), pp. 141-162.

Louisa Stein, "Playing Dress Up: Digital Fashion and Game Extensions of Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl's Second Life," Cinema Journal, pp. 116-122.

Watch:
Gossip Girl: Tales From the Upper East Side
http://www.cwtv.com/thecw/gossip-girl-tales-from-the-upper-east-side

LA Diaries
http://www.cbs.com/daytime/specials/la_diaries/episodes.php

September 23: Creating Alternate Realities

Christy Dena, "Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 41-58.

Jane McGonigal, Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming." Ecologies of Play. Ed. Katie Salen. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 199-228. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.199

Dave Szulborski, "Puppetmastering: Creating a Game" and "Puppetmastering: Running a Game,"This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (New York: New Fiction, 2005), pp. 207-284.

Guest Speaker: Evan Jones, Stitch Media

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PROJECT DUE

Week 6
September 28: Speaking of Serials

Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007) (Required Book)

David Kalat, "The Long Arm of Fantomas" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 211-225.

September 30: The Unfolding Text

Neil Perryman, "Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 21-40.

Lance Perkin,"Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the 'Rules' of Doctor Who Affect the Writing," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 13-24.

Matt Hills, "Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variations on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005) as Cult/Mainstream TV," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 333-343.

Part Three: World-Building

Week 7
October 5: Migratory Characters

William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, "I'm Not Fooled By That Cheap Disguise," in Roberta E. Pearson, The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to A Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 182-213.

Will Brooker, "Establishing the Brand: Year One," Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (London: Continuium, 2001), pp. 36-67.

Bob Kane, "The Legend of the Batman" (1938) and Bob Kane, "The Origins of the Batman," (1948) in Dennis O'Neil (ed.) The Secret Origins of the DC Superheroes (New York: DC, 1976), pp. 36-50.

Bob Kane, "The First Batman" (1956) and Dennis O'Neil, "There Is No Hope in Crime Alley," (1978) The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (New York: DC, 1988).

Guest Speaker: Geoffrey Long, GAMBIT

October 7: World Building in Comics

Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), pp. 129-133.

Jason Bainbridge, "Worlds Within Worlds: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universe," Angela Ndalianis (ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2008) pp. 64-85.

Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, "Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 303-313.

Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (New York: Marvel Comics, 1993) (Required Book)

Alec Austin, "Hybrid Expectations, Expectations Across Media, CMS Thesis, pp. 97-127.

Week 8
October 12: Who Watches the Watchman?

Stuart Moulthrop, "See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 287-303.

Watch:
NBS Nightly News With Ted Philips http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd5cInmK6LQ&playnext_from=PL&feature=PlayList&p=878F6464EEBE32F9&index=10

The Keene Act and YOU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkWGZ1G7TAE&playnext_from=PL&feature=PlayList&p=878F6464EEBE32

Saturday Morning Watchmen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

Guest Speaker: Alex McDowell, Production Designer, Watchmen

October 14: World Building in Science Fiction

Walter Jon Williams, "In What Universe?" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 25-32.

George R.R. Martin, "On the Wild Cards Novels," in Pat Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin (eds.) Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

Cordwainer Smith, "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," and "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," J. J. Pierce (ed.) The Best of Cordwainer Smith (New York: Del Rey, 1975), pp. 124-209, pp. 315-337.

Week 9
October 19: Launching a New World

David Lavery, "Lost and Long-Form Television Narrative" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin),
pp. 313-323.

Guest Speaker: Jesse Alexander, Executive Producer, Year One

October 21: Transmedia and Social Change

TBA

Guest Speaker: Bram Pitoyo, Wild Alchemy

Part Four: Audiences

Week 10
October 26: The Logic of Engagement

Ivan Askwith, "The Expanded Television Text, "Five Logics of Engagement,"; "Lost at Televisions' Crossroads," Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, CMS thesis, pp. 51-150.

Guest Speaker: Ivan Askwith, Big Space Ship

October 28: Expanding the Audience

Kim Moses and Ian Sander, selections from Ghost Whisperer: The Spirit Guide (New York: Titan Books, 2008).

Guest Speaker: Kim Moses, Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer

Week 11
November 2: Fan Productivity

Jesse Walker, "Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the Vidding Underground," Reason, August/September 2008, http://www.reason.com/news/show/127432.html

Francesca Coppa, "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Transformative Works and Cultures (2008), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64

Bud Caddell, "Becoming a Mad-Man," http://drop.io/becomingamadman

November 4: The Encyclopedic Impulse

Janet Murray, "Digital Environments are Encyclopedic," Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83-90.

Bob Rehak, "That Which Survives: Star Trek's Design Network in Fandom and Franchise" (Unpublished), pp. 2-79.

Robert V. Kozinets, "Inno-Tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia" Consumer Tribes (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007), pp. 194-209.

Watch:
Star Trek: Phase II "In Harms Way"
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/episodes.html

Week 12
November 9: The Power of Details

Kristin Thompson, "Not Your Father's Tolkien" and "Interactive Middle Earth," The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp.53-74, p. 224-256

C.S. Lewis, "On Stories," Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harvest, 2002), pp. 3-21.

November 11: Ephemeral Fascinations

Michael Bonesteel, "Henry Darger's Search for the Grail in the Guise of a Celesttial Child" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 253-267.

Amelie Hastie, "The Collector: Material Histories, Colleen Moore's Dollhouse, and Ephemeral Recollection," Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 19-72.

Week 13
November 16 Independent Horrors
James Castonguay, "The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project," in Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (eds.) Nothing That Is: Milllennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2004), pp. 65-86.

The Blair Witch Project Website http://www.blairwitch.com/

Head Trauma Website http://www.headtraumamovie.com/

Guest Speaker: Lance Weiller, Head Trauma

Part Five: Tracing the History of Transmedia

November 18: Before the Rainbow

Neil Harris, "The Operational Aesthetic," Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 59-90.

Mark Evan Swartz, "A Novel Enchantment," Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 161-172.

Week 14
November 23: What Uncle Walt Taught Us

J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State, 2004), pp. 1-91.

Karal Ann Marling, "Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks," in Karal Ann Marling (ed.) Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (Montreal: Centre Canadian d'Architecture, 1997), pp. 29-178. (Rec.)

November 25: Franchises and Attractions

Henry Jenkins, "The Pleasure of Pirates And What It Tells Us About World Building in Branded Entertainment", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/forced_simplicity_and_the_crit.html

Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park industry," Gamasutra, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm


Week 15
November 30: Lessons From Lucas

Jonathon Gray, "Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films," Show Sold Separately (Forthcoming), pp. 232-247.

Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002), "The Fan Betrayed," pp. 79-99, "Canon," pp. 101-114.

Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995) (Required Book)

December 2: Across the Whedonverse

Tanya Krzywinska, "Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning Out of Long Narrative in World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 385-399.

Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007) (Required Book)

Watch:
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog

December 7 Student Presentations

December 9 Student Presentations

And to Think That I Saw It At Comic-Con

Last time, I shared some textual impressions of this year's San Diego Comic-Con. My son, Henry Jenkins IV, took his camera and has agreed to allow me to share with you some of the images he captured of the festivities.

The first two try to capture the experience of the dealer's room at the convention -- the congestion of the floor and the spectacle of the displays (in this case, Mattel was showcasing the continued cultural value of He-Man, Masters of the Universe with this Castle Greyskull replica).

Much of the pleasure of wandering the floor is the chance encounter with costumed fans dressed up as characters from across the full spectrum of popular culture -- in this case, we see the rabbit from Donnie Darko and the Riddler.

If you ever want a precise illustration of the differences between geeks and fan boys, you might want to listen to this exchange between Peter Jackson (fan boy supreme) and James Cameron (the geek's geek) as they talk about their approaches to the filmmaking process. Jackson's fascination is with the rich details of fictional worlds, many of them remembered from childhood viewings and readings, while Cameron is someone who wants to always push to the outer limits of existing cinematographic technologies. When we look at them on stage, we recognize parts of ourselves reflected back. (Alas, I missed a chance to see Tim Burton, another filmmaker, whose work I consistently admire.)

I didn't go to many Hall H style panels but I did wait in a long line to get a chance to see the Lost cast and producers talk about the final season of the series. They made it worth our while with a very lively presentation, including cast members emerging from the audience, and the sharing of year's worth of fan-produced content.

The other time I waited hours in line was to see David Tennant and Russell T. Davies talk about Doctor Who. It's hard to get a non-blurry photograph of Tennant who is full of gawkish energy. But this was as good as my son's camera could get, stretched to the limits of its focal lengths.

How "Dumbledore's Army" Is Transforming Our World: An Interview with the HP Alliance's Andrew Slack (Part Two)

So you're using a language of play, of fantasy, of humor to talk about political change? Much of the time, political leaders deploy a much more serious minded, policy-wonky language. What do you think are the implications of changing the myths and metaphors we use to talk about political change?

I think it's so freaking important to break things down for people in a way that they can understand. We get into this wonky-talk. There are so many organizations doing amazing things, and they mobilize their membership really well - but it doesn't connect to young people. Young people, by and large, care about issues like genocide. They care about issues like poverty, discrimination, environment. They want to be engaged in these things, but the people who are going to be inviting them to engage, have to be thinking about "how do I authentically talk from my heart to this young person in a way that's authentic to their experience and to our shared experience?" One of the reasons why I was successful in beginning the Harry Potter Alliance is because I'm such a hardcore Harry Potter fan. Had I not been such a passionate Harry Potter fan, had I not been caring about this myth so much myself, I wouldn't have been able to translate the message as well.

And so it's important, I think, when talking with people to find out what you have in common, what you're both passionate about, and then to translate that into the real world in a way that makes sense. Activism should be fun. Activism is fun, but of course, the issues can get so heavy. We can get paralyzed by a sense of guilt of not wanting to even look at the problems because they seem so big. And if I look at them, we often ask, "how can I go on with my life?" This is similar in Harry Potter to people saying, ' I can't say Voldemort's name. I'm too scared to even say his name, so I say, you-know-who.' In our world we think, "I can't say AIDS. I can't say poverty. I can't say genocide because if I open my eyes, I'll never be able to look away, and it will ruin my life." And that's not a helpful attitude for anybody. We have to learn how to say the name Voldemort in stride, and how to say these words - genocide, etc. - in stride, and not get caught in this idea that we have to fix it all. We can be part of a larger community playing our part. And that experience can be empowering and fun.

We had a meeting a couple days ago - a conference call. It was for something called Stand Fast. We're working with this amazing organization called STAND, which refers to itself as the student arm of the anti-genocide movement, and they are building a constituency across the world of students who are standing up against genocide in Darfur and now against ethnic cleansing in Eastern Burma. They are funding a civilian protection program in Darfur, where $3.00 protects one woman from being raped for a whole week, and $5.00 protects a whole family in Eastern Burma by providing them with radios. And this is such an empowering concept because you can say to a young person, 'instead of going to a Starbucks and getting a latte, instead of going to a movie, on this particular date, we're going together not go to a movie or give up some sort of luxury item, and $10.00 will fund the protection of one woman in Darfur for a week and a whole family in Eastern Burma - just $10.' A young person can understand that, can grasp that, and can also understand that this is not just about charity - it's not just about your money. It's a political statement when 15 year olds are protecting the lives of people in Darfur and Eastern Burma because their governments have been unable to do it regardless of how many resources they have. That is a political statement, and so we talk about that. But here's how we did it - we got the leaders of the Harry Potter fan community, the biggest names in the Harry Potter fan community of the Websites that - the Leaky Cauldron, Mugglenet, the biggest wizard rock bands - we got them all together to make an announcement that we are going to have a live conference call where you can all come. We had over 200 people come on the conference call under short notice to talk about this one day where we'd all be donating, December 3rd, it just happened. And people can still do this at theHPAlliance.org/civilianprotection. But, and here's where part of the fantasy comes in: we didn't just call it a conference call. We called it a meeting of Dumbledore's Army. We're going to have a Dumbledore's Army meeting - that we're going into a Room of Requirement, where you're given a code to get in. You press pound, and you're in the room of requirement. We talk about, we're in the Room of Requirement now, and just like Harry got up and taught people how to do this, we're going to talk to you about the issues. And everybody was briefed, all the speakers on what to say, and how to talk about this issue - but they did it from their own place and what they're passionate about. And it was just incredible. The response we've had from the people on the call was unbelievable. People giving up smoking. People giving up coffee. People saying, "I'm taking half the money I would have spent on Christmas, and giving it to this. And I'm going to tell all my family that the reason I'm not giving them as much this year is because I gave it to people who need it in Darfur and Burma, and I'm sure they'll be proud of me. And I feel so proud of myself right now."

It was an amazing experience, but it was done through fantasy. We didn't just say we're like Harry. We actually pretended that we are in a Room of Requirement. We are Dumbledore's Army, and we're doing it. And it was really empowering last year when J. K. Rowling said that this is truly an organization that is fighting for the same kinds of values that Dumbledore's Army fought for in the books, and to everyone involved in this organization, the world needs more people like you. And it was a real boost for our morale, and it was an incredible thing to get a message like that from one of our favorite authors.

You've already started down this path - so why don't you say a little more about how the fan community provides part of the infrastructure for something like the HP Alliance?

Yeah, it couldn't happen without the fan community. When we started, I was blogging about these ideas - about the parallels between discrimination in Harry Potter and discrimination based on race or sexuality in our world. Or about political prisoners in Harry Potter and political prisoners in our world. About ignoring Voldemort's return, and ignoring the genocide in Darfur in our world. So I was blogging about this, but no one was reading my blog. You know that wasn't really taking off too fast. Then I met Paul and Joe deGeorge of the wizard rock band Harry and the Potters. These are two guys that started a band where they sang from the perspective of Harry Potter. They still do. They loved the idea of a Dumbledore's Army for the real world, and soon enough we began brainstorming ideas - and I took my blogs, where I provided action alerts for how people can be like Harry and the members of Dumbledore's Army, and they reposted it on their Myspace page. Their Myspace at the time was going out to about 40 or 50,000 profiles. Now it's going out to about 90,000 Myspace profiles. Soon other musicians began to form bands that were wizard rock - bands based off of other characters in the book. Draco and the Malfoys were the bad guy band. The Whomping Willows based off of a tree at Hogwart's . The Moaning Myrtles - there's so many of these bands, and they all began to repost together, collectively, the messages that I was writing. Soon, through these wizard rock bands, we were communicating with over 100,000 Myspace profiles, and then the biggest Harry Potter fan sites wanted to be a part of it as well because this is a community that is just so incredibly enthusiastic, idealistic - believes in the values that are in Harry Potter about love and social change and the values in Amnesty, and they began to post what we were doing.

And they put up our first podcast right before Deathly Hallows, the last book, came out. Thanks to their putting it on their podcast feed at the time, at the peak of Harry Potter's popularity - that podcast was downloaded over 110,000 times, and STAND, one of our partner organizations, saw a huge spike in involvement that month thanks to our efforts. They saw a 40% increase in high school chapter sign ups compared to a normal two week period in July, and over a 50% increase in calls to their hotline - 1-800-GENOCIDE in a two week period compared to a regular two week period in July. This year the wizard rock bands and Mugglenet posted this special project that we were doing with a group in the UK, called Aegis Trust. Aegis Trust works on all sorts of genocide remembrance issues around the Holocaust, around Rwanda, but they had a special project where they were sending letters to the United Nations, asking the Security Council to do something about war criminals that were being given protection, impunity in Sudan, and they ended up sending 10,000 letters to the UN Security Council. Of those 10,000 letters, over three-quarters of them came from the Harry Potter Alliance. We weren't members of government. They were getting a lot of members of governments to write. We got young people. We brought Dumbledore's Army. The Harry Potter Alliance - we have about 3500 people on our e-mail list. We have about 50 chapters. We have about 12,000 Myspace members - about 1500 Facebook members, but we could not have done that without this larger network of wizard rock bands sending it out and of fan sites posting - here's what Dumbledore's Army is doing now. Here's what Harry Potter Alliance are doing now. We're all part of this alliance. Let's all step up to the plate, and even though we reach sometimes about 100,000 people, getting about 8,000 signatures, that's almost 1 in 10 of who we're reaching, and that's a lot as far as action goes because different people are engaged in different ways through our organization.

So that's just one example. In the last year, we've raised well over $15,000 from small donations to fund the protection of thousands of women in Darfur and villagers in Eastern Burma.
In the process we educate young people through podcast interviews with survivors of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, with policy experts, as well as with partnerships with groups like the Genocide Intervention Network and it's student arm STAND, the ENOUGH Project, Amnesty International, Aegis Trust and several other human rights organizations.

And now we are building these chapters and we want them to exist in schools and after school programs. And we want to help shape curriculum on how Social Studies and English are taught, if schools would be open to it.

At the same time, you've been able to build an alliance with some very traditional political organizations and governmental leaders. Could you say a little bit of how they've responded to the Harry Potter Alliance approach?

When I first started calling traditional organizations letting them know that I wanted to help them, I was very afraid that they were going to hang up when I told them the name of the organization is the Harry Potter Alliance. And if I said, HP Alliance, they would think it was The Hewlett Packard Alliance. In fact, one of our board members has been getting mail to the Hewlett Packard Alliance. We've never referred to ourselves as the Hewlett Packard Alliance, but people see HP, and they think Hewlett Packard. (laughter) And that's an alliance I don't want to be part of. So (laughter) when I tell the organizations at first who we are, there's this initial insecurity that I have on how they're going to react, and at first that insecurity proved to be warranted because they didn't know what to do with a group that is named after a fictitious book for young adults and plus, we had no track record. Though despite some challenges here and there, I must say that I was actually impressed with how open minded some people were. I think the best example of this is the Co-Founder of the ENOUGH Project John Prendergast. John is a policy expert on issues of international crisis and truly is a celebrated activist. But John actively looks for outside of the box ideas. When I met him in 2005 and told him about our new organization, my heart was pounding with nerves and he looked at me very intensely and basically said, "Dude. Comic books turned me into an activist. The least I can do is mention this in the book I'm writing with Cheadle." And that's Don Cheadle who starred in Hotel Rwanda. And this was crazy to me. And we are in that book, which was a New York Times best seller. It's called Not On Our Watch: the Mission To End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond and it's an excellent book.

But now when I call up organizations to form coalitions and partnerships I can tell them that we can get you thousands of people to see what they're doing. This strategy is very important to us: connecting Harry Potter fans to NGO's that are doing impressive work. We see they need more people, and we provide them with the people. We tell them, 'look, you know Harry Potter, and you know there's a lot of enthusiasm here. We can channel some of that enthusiasm to this noble work that you're doing by just using examples from the books and this incredible community of people, and we've been in Time magazine - and we've been in The Los Angeles Times.' So you know that sort of helps them take us more seriously now. Now, they want the Harry Potter Alliance to be involved, and then sometimes I'm thinking, I have to kind of pinch myself that now they're coming to us - and there's been a couple examples of them paying us as consultants to help them with recruiting young people to become part of their movement. The best example of that has been with our efforts to get young people educated on the issue of media reform.

We've worked with an organization called Free Press which can be found at freepress.net - Free Press leads a group called the Stop Big Media coalition. And we have a whole campaign where we compare things in Harry Potter that involve media consolidation to media consolidation in our world. Most people don't know much about media consolidation, but when you begin looking at how minorities are not represented fairly in the media, ethnic and racial minorities make up about a third of the US population, and they own I believe less than 3% of commercial TV. Women and minorities make up about 66% of this country, and yet are on television news about 12% of the time. What we see on TV, what we are shown visually, what is defined as "normal" in our culture are white men. The problem here is that the Federal Communications Commission has stacked the deck in the favor a handful of conglomerates to own most media in any given city. And this wipes out independent local media. And we want the FCC to change that, because it affect our outlook on race, it affects our outlook on our own communities, it even affects how foreign news like the genocide in Darfur is covered. The big conglomerates have cut foreign news by around 80% since the 1980's and replaced that with celebrity gossip -which would explain why Brittney Spears is covered more than a genocide that would be stopped if the political will was there.

This issue has gotten our membership really fired up, and we say what media reform activists always say: "whatever your number one issue is, media reform should be your number two issue because your issue can't be communicated if the media is not free." It's been really exciting - but yeah, so these traditional organizations, whether it's the Save Darfur coalition and the ENOUGH Project, STAND and the Genocide Intervention Network and Aegis Trust, all issues - all organizations that work on genocide related things - or Free Press or the No on Proposition 8 campaign, which we worked on. We recently did something called Wizard Rock the Vote, where we registered close to 900 people. I think they were almost all new voters at wizard rock concerts across the country and online, and that was in partnership with the organization Rock the Vote. They loved us, and it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun for them, too, because these organizations have staff members that are Harry Potter fans. And I personally have put out a couple of videos satirizing Wal-Mart, and because of this fan base, we were able to get two of the videos over 2 million views on YouTube. It just sped out of control, and I mean it's incredible. I call it cultural acupuncture, when you can take something where there's a lot of energy, and then translate it to something else. A lot psychic energy you - psychological energy being placed on something, and you move to make it healthier. It's a remarkable thing to see what we can do, and for teachers and youth workers, I think it's really important to think about what are your students interested in?

I think one of the biggest problems with our education system - I mean I can't stand No Child Left Behind, not just because it hasn't gotten proper funding, but because I wasn't very good at standardized tests in school - and I think they are generally about regurgitating information. I call it, Leave No Imagination Recognized. When engaging young people to become civically minded, find out what they care about. If you're working at an after-school program with inner-city youth, find something that's going to speak to inner-city youth. Are they interested in a specific kind of music? A lot of the kids that I've worked with from inner-city environments have been interested in hip-hop, so can you find yourself a teacher who knows about hip-hop, and gets the people to be part of a contest that's hip-hop oriented - but that involves research to say that the greatest hip-hop music out there, not the kind you hear in clubs per se, but the greatest hip-hop artists have reflected what's been going on in their communities and how things can change. That's the real hip-hop, and to you really work on that - and do some sort of hip-hop activism through organizations like the League of Young Voters, who often times refer to themselves as the League of Pissed Off Voters - that gets young people engaged. Show them episodes of The Wire, the HBO series, and then talk about the issues of crime, poverty, and drugs that are depicted in that series. And then right after that discussion, begin working on a project together. My idea for The Wire is show one episode that's an hour, then the next hour, discuss the issues that are in that episode, and how that reflects your own personal life - and in a third hour, start a project that addresses those issues.

So it should start with a piece of art that provokes the discussion, then have the discussion, and then after the discussion, don't leave it there, turn it into action. And that's one way to engage a specific population of young people, but that same method can be replicated for any group of young people, especially if you have access to video equipment. If you had access to video equipment, if the kids know how to write, you can show them how they can produce videos that will be seen by a lot of people, and how there's more to their world than just where they are - that they really now more than ever - we don't need to be paying lip service to young people that they can change the world. They can do it today, they can do it right now. If they care about something, they can do it, and they will be better at coming up with a video than the teachers. Find writing teachers. Find acting teachers to help them refine their jokes - make their videos funny or emotionally powerful. Have them interview people in their communities on what they care about. Get that stuff up on YouTube - where ever a young person's voice can be heard by the world. Tom Friedman has a great quote that the only competition that now exists is the one between us and our own imaginations. And now it's purely a matter of getting young people the access to these resources to do it, and then getting them to learn how to most effectively make those ideas and things viral. All you got to do is get them to care about something, and then they'll take care of it from there.

We've talked about a number of new media platforms in all of this-- blogs, podcasts, social network sites, YouTube. How important is that infrastructure of new media to enabling the kind of work that you guys are doing?

Without new media, I don't know what we would be doing. I don't think we would exist. We would be like students at Hogwarts without wands. We would be a club at one or two high schools, which would be fine. It's great to be a club at a high school. But we probably would have a hard time being an organization that has 50 clubs that are really active, which we have right now as far as chapters go, and a message that gets out to 100,000 young people in Japan and in places...just all over. We've got kids in Japan that are working on media reform issues in the United States. New media has provided us with an opportunity where you know we always say to young people that they have a voice, that their voice matters. The Harry Potter Alliance communicates with over 100,000 young people across the world. We've gotten to old media, Time magazine, front cover of The Chicago Tribune "Business" section - The Los Angeles Times, etc. None of this could've happened without new media platforms.

Andrew Slack is the founder and executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance where he works on innovative ways to mobilize tens of thousands of Harry Potter fans through a vibrant online community. Andrew has also co-written, acted in, and produced online videos that have been viewed more than 7 million times. He has taught theater workshops and served as a youth worker for children and adolescents throughout the US and Northern Ireland. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University, Andrew is dedicated to learning and extrapolating how modern myth and new media can transform our lives both personally and collectively.

I am looking for other compelling stories of how fans are becoming activists. If your fandom is doing something to make the world a better place, drop me a note. I will try to feature other projects through my blog in the future.

How "Dumbledore's Army" Is Transforming Our World: An Interview with the HP Alliance's Andrew Slack (Part One)

Last weekend, Cynthia and I drove up to San Francisco where I spoke about "Learning From and About Fandom" at Azkatraz, a Harry Potter fan convention. The key note speaker at this year's event was Andrew Slack of the HP Alliance. Slack is a thoughtful young activist whose work is exploring the intersection between politics and popular culture. He's really helped to inspired some of the research I am going to be doing in the coming year about "fan activism" and how we can build a bridge between participatory culture and democratic participation. I interviewed Slack for Journal of Media Literacy earlier this year and I thought this would be a good opportunity to share that interview with my blog readers.

Slack's work is gaining greater visibility at the moment because of the release of the new film, including a recent profile in Newsweek magazine (warning -- the piece is typically patronizing and ill-informed about things fannish but that it exists at all speaks to the impact this group is starting to have in terms of rallying young people to support political change). At the con, Slack spoke about his "What Would Dumbledore Do" campaign, an effort to help map what the "Dumbledore Doctrine" might mean for our contemporary society. You can read more about it here.

The HP Alliance has adopted an unconventional approach to civic engagement -- mobilizing J.K. Rowling's best-selling Harry Potter fantasy novels as a platform for political transformation, linking together traditional activist groups with new style social networks and with fan communities. Its youthful founder, Andrew Slack, wants to create a "Dumbledore's Army" for the real world, adopting fantastical and playful metaphors rather than the language of insider politics, to capture the imagination and change the minds of young Americans. In the process, he is creating a new kind of media literacy education -- one which teaches us to reread and rewrite the contents of popular culture to reverse engineer our society. One can't argue with the success of this group which has deployed podcasts and Facebook to capture the attention of more than 100,000 people, mobilizing them to contribute to the struggles against genocide in Darfur or the battles for worker's rights at Wall-Mart or the campaign against Proposition 8 in California.

The Harry Potter novels taught a generation to read and to write (through fan fiction); Harry Potter now may be teaching that same generation how to change their society. The Harry Potter novels depicted its youth protagonists questioning adult authority, fighting evil, and standing up for their rights. It offers inspirational messages about empowerment and transformation which can fuel meaningful civic action in our own world. For example, in July 2007, the group worked with the Leaky Cauldron, one of the most popular Harry Potter news sites, to organize house parties around the country focused on increasing awareness of the Sudanese genocide. Participants listened to and discussed a podcast which featured real-world political experts -- such as Joe Wilson, former U.S. ambassador; John Prendergast, senior advisor to the International Crisis Group; and Dot Maver, executive director of the Peace Alliance -- alongside performances by Wizard Rock groups such as Harry and the Potters, The Whomping Willows, Draco and the Malfoys, and the Parselmouths. The HP Alliance has created a new form of civic engagement which allows participants to reconcile their activist identities with the pleasurable fantasies that brought the fan community together in the first place.

In this interview, Slack spells out what he calls the "Dumbledore Doctrine," explores how J.K. Rowling infused the fantasy novels with what she had learned as an activist for Amnesty International, and describes how the books have become the springboard for his own campaign for social change. Along the way, he offers insights which may be helpful to other groups who want to build a bridge from participatory culture to participatory culture.

Why don't we begin with the big picture? Can you just describe what the HP Alliance is, and what it's core goals are?

The Harry Potter Alliance, or the HP Alliance is an organization that uses online organizing to educate and mobilize Harry Potter fans toward being engaged in issues around self empowerment as well as social justice by using parallels from the books. With the help of a whole network of fan sites and Harry Potter themed bands, we reach about 100,000 people across the world.

The main parallel we draw on comes from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Harry starts an underground activist group called "Dumbledore's Army" to wake the Ministry of Magic up to the fact that Voldemort has returned. The HP Alliance strives to be a Dumbledore's Army for the real world that is trying to wake the world up to ending the genocide in Darfur.

Recently we have expanded our scope, discussing human rights atrocities in Eastern Burma, and we're going to be incorporating Congo into our vision soon. I'll talk more on exactly what we have done regarding these issues in a moment, but the parallels don't stop with this notion of Dumbledore's Army waking the world up to injustice. The Harry Potter books hit on issues of racism toward people who are not so called "pure blooded" Wizards just as our world continues to not treat people equally based on race. House elves are exploited the way that many employers treat their workers in both sweat shops in developing nations and even in superstores like Wal-Mart. Indigenous groups like the Centaurs are not treated equally just as Indigenous groups in our world are not treated equally. And just as many in our world feel the need to hide in the closet due to their sexual orientation, a character like Remus Lupin hides in the closet because of his identity as a werewolf, Rubeus Hagrid hides in the closet because of his identity as a half-giant, and Harry Potter is literally forced to live inside a closet because of his identity as a Wizard. With each of these parallels, we talk to young people about ways that we can all be like Harry, Hermione, Ron and the other members of Dumbledore's Army and work for justice, equality, and for environments where love and understanding are revered.

The average person we reach is somewhere between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, very passionate, enthusiastic, and idealistic - but often have very few activist outlets that speak to them. And this is no coincidence. Unfortunately, so much of our culture directed at young people is about asking them to consume. It's looking at them as dollar signs, as targets for advertising. But Harry Potter is a great example of a book that hasn't done that. Of course there's merchandising and all that kind of thing, but fundamentally the message of the book is so empowering for young people.

Young people are depicted in the books as often smarter, more aware of what's happening in the world, than their elders, though there are also some great examples where very wise adults have mentored and supported young people as they have taken action in the world. These books represent a very empowering tool for young people, and young people have taken it into their hands - and created Websites and fan fiction, and a whole genre of music called "wizard rock" around Harry Potter. And it's been extraordinary. So we are utilizing all of that energy and momentum to make a difference in the world for social activism. We are essentially asking young people the same question that Harry poses to his fellow members of Dumbledore's Army in the fifth movie, "Every great Wizard in history has started off as nothing more than we are now. If they can do it, why not us?" This is a question that we not only pose to our members, we show them how right now they can start working to be those "great Wizards" that can make a real difference in this world. Whose imprint can have a value that is loving, meaningful, and nothing short of heroic. And the enthusiasm we've seen from young people is just astounding.

By translating some of the world's most pressing issues into the framework of Harry Potter, it makes activism something easier to grasp and less intimidating. Often we show them fun and accessible ways that they can take action and express their passion to make the world better by working with one of our partner NGO's. Not to mention, our chapter members and participants on our forum section come up with their own ideas which they collaborate on together - so while we often make decisions from the top-down, we also are building a way for each member to direct the destiny of what they and the larger organization are working on.

J.K. Rowling used to work with Amnesty International. How do you think that background impacted the books?

Well there's definite parallels between Amnesty's themes and the themes in Harry Potter. One of the main human rights issues that Amnesty works on is for the release of political prisoners.

Harry's godfather, Sirius Black, was a political prisoner. His best friend James Potter and James' wife Lily were murdered and his godson Harry was orphaned. But on top of that trauma, he was accused of committing the murders. Now if he had had a trial, he could have made a case for why he was innocent and how the real killer was still on the loose. But that couldn't happen because the Ministry of Magic had suspended habeas corpus. This all happened at a time of great terror and in times of great terror, governments often lock people away without a fair trial. We need not look very far for that. It's happening right now in our own country. And not only are these prisoners, many of them innocent like Sirius, not only are they locked up without trial, they are subsequently tortured--another issue which Amnesty works hard to stop.

In Harry Potter, the Wizarding prison known as Azkaban is guarded by Dementors. Dementors suck all the happiness from you, and live you in a state of tortured non-stop panic attack/depression. They literally feed off of the unhappiness in your soul until they suck your soul dry. This is the essence of torture and this is what's been getting done to people in Guantanomo Bay and Abu Ghraib and Eastern European prisons that the CIA helped build. People are locked away without a fair trial and then tortured. This is all done under the rationalization that in times of terror, justice must be suspended in the name of freedom. But then the very freedom we profess to stand for gets suspended as well in the name of preying on people's greatest fears rather than praying for our better angels. And this hurts the cause. A society that becomes a tyranny in order to fight for its freedom has destroyed the very purpose for which it is fighting. And in doing so, such a society gives strength to it's opponent. We need not go very far in our research to understand that the torture that our country has committed in Abu Ghraib and Guantaomo Bay has not only been immoral, it has been dreadful on a public relations front. Images of tortured Muslims has become one of al Qaeda's most effective recruiting methods.

And this aspect of a government shooting itself in the foot while selling out it's ideals happens in Harry Potter too. After Dumbledore's Army forces the Ministry of Magic to acknowledge Voldemort's return, the Ministry returns to the days when people are no longer given trials. And in order to look like they are making some headway, they arrest someone innocent named Stan Shunpike. They know the guy is innocent. They arrest him anyway, and he ends up being released by the Death Eaters, and put under the Imperius Curse, thereby becoming one of the Death Eaters.

So these Amnesty themes of political prisoners getting the right to a fair trial and the end of torture are consistent with the Harry Potter books and the values of Amnesty International.
But JK Rowling in her personal work outside of the books, takes that a step further. This can be seen in her charitable work and advocacy on many fronts, including helping children who are caged in Eastern Europe. Besides this incredible work, there's the words that she speaks outside of the confines of the books and these words help articulate the messages of Harry Potter.

Her commencement speech at Harvard in the spring of 2008 was unbelievable. One of the main themes of the speech was around the power of imagination and how we must "imagine better." She said, this doesn't necessarily mean imagining a magical world like she has done, but about building the capacity to imagine oneself in other person's shoes, and in that speech she talks about her experience at Amnesty International as being formative for her imagination. She got to work with people that were so passionate about imagining themselves in other peoples' shoes. And she became one of those people - imagining herself in the shoes of political prisoners, in the shoes of people that have fought for democracy under tyranny. There's a horrific story she tells where she is helping somebody who had been in prison, and as she was guiding this person to the airport, she heard a blood curdling scream. She said she had never heard a scream like this in her life, and it was from a political refugee that had just been informed that because of his dissident activities in his own country, his mother had just been killed. She said it was a scream that will always stay with her. And in talking to the students at Harvard, she was really very, very adamant that those in the United States, which is for now the only world super power, those of us who have the privilege of education also have both an opportunity and a responsibility to to imagine better, and imagine ourselves in other people's shoes. Let me read her quote directly. She says, "If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

What can you tell us about your own relationship to these books? How was the idea of the HP Alliance born?

I already had a very strong interest in the power of a story to grab people and to get them more engaged in living a healthier life and in contributing more in a way that is civically engaged and civic minded. As a college student at Brandeis University I got to explore my feelings around this while at a center for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, while interviewing Civil Rights activists in person throughout the US, and while studying at an acting conservatory in London. It was when I graduated from college, however, that I found Harry Potter. I had heard of the books but had little interest in them.

Upon graduating, I was teaching at a creative theater camp, and I was amazed at the way these children discussed and debated Harry Potter - with so much passion. It was insane. I was intimidated to start reading the books; there was just so many of them. There were four released at the time. The teachers were enthralled by them, and urged me to read them.

I was still resistant. And then I started working in the Boys & Girls Club in Cambridge, and I was working with a completely different socio-economic group of kids - racially and ethnically diverse - yet they, too, were lovers of Harry Potter. One of my colleagues at the Boys & Girls Club of a different race and ethnic and socio-economic background from me was obsessed with the books. She would read them constantly and I couldn't understand how it could be so great - and finally I asked her to hand me the first book, and she did - and I read that first chapter, and I just started laughing so hard.

The first sentence - " Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. " I was surprised. This is a subversive book that right away begins to indict what I eventually started to call a Muggle Minded attitude -- being obsessed with "normalcy," not being interested in imagination, not being able to see outside of one's self. So I was swept away, right away, and by the end of that first chapter, I turned to this young woman who handed me the book and I said, 'I think this book just changed my life.' I raced through those first four books. Read them again and again, and I began making personal connections with them for myself. I think when you read a book about a hero, often times you become the hero, and for me, I would see myself as Harry in specific situations - and issues that I have dealt with in my life around anxiety - fighting Dementors became similar to that. There's a lot of loved ones I have that suffer from addiction, and their struggle with addiction seemed to mirror some characters' struggle to get out of the hold that Voldemort has on them when they follow him as Death Eaters. There's a very addictive quality, and watching what happened to one of the characters and his family around being a Death Eater is interesting because you see the tragedy of what happens to anyone who has a family member that is an addict, as so many young people do. In the case of Voldemort's followers, it's a cult, but it's still got this very addictive element to it, and I'm sure if you go into areas where there's terrorism in the world, a lot of families - like the ones I met and worked with in North Ireland -- experienced that addictive quality. It might not be drug addiction, but having a family member who is in a paramilitary group is a very, very difficult thing to cope with. Even families that sided with them intellectually couldn't deal with the idea of them being imprisoned and all of the horrible things they were doing.

So these books were speaking to such a broad range of very human experiences - including the wish to live a normal life despite adversity. The wish to, in Harry's case, play Quidditch and Exploding Snap and to have a crush on a girl like Cho Chang or Ginny Weasley. And all the while having to contend with darker forces in the world that he is internally connected to. Well I was just swept away by all of this. And the feeling of the story: Harry Potter brought me to this child-like state where everything was fun. I mean the books are so fun. What's different about these books than a lot of other fantasy books is how hilarious they are. They're just full of jokes that go into the day to day existence of characters, and then all of a sudden we're back into that fantasy realm of suspense that you see in books like the wonderful series His Dark Materials, more commonly known as The Golden Compass books. Harry Potter has all of that but it has humor to it, and so it really--I spent years as a comedian and I really connected to her sense of humor. I really connected to her sense of fantasy and imagination - how utterly playful the books are. So I was connecting to them from the point of view of how well written they were, how fun they were, and how much they spoke to me on a personal level in my own life, but then at the end of the fourth book, I was just amazed at what Dumbledore says to Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic at the time. He says, in the wake of Voldemort's return, we've got to get rid of dementors, form alliances with those in foreign lands, and end our attitudes of racism. He then gets up in front of the whole school and says that we must be able to say what we're scared of, which I think is essential for young people to do, and to vocalize their fears and to name their fears. And we must understand that Voldemort's greatest gift is spreading discord and enmity, and that's what we see in our world.

With terrorism, it's not just about killing and the number of people they kill. It's also about the fear that they inflict in those who survive. And that's the same as Voldemort, and Dumbledore says, we can only combat this discord and enmity with an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. And this is what I call this Dumbledore Doctrine - that as the band "Harry and the Potters" say, "the greatest weapon we have is love." That this can actually translate into policy that is really important. And I began thinking, wow, the world needs Dumbledore. The world needs a Dumbledore, and then when I read that fifth book, where Harry starts an activist group named after Dumbledore - Dumbledore's Army - I thought, the world needs a Dumbledore's Army, and I began imagining myself going into the Room of Requirement and meeting with young people as if we were part of Dumbledore's Army - and each of us could be like Harry Potter - could see ourselves in the hero role, not where we're the chosen one to bring down all evil or anything like that, but where each of us plays a valuable part in changing this world, where we are the shapers rather than the spectators of history. I think it's amazing how we in this country with all of our resources have an opportunity to connect with people in our communities as well as people all over the world. And to do so in our relationships but also through volunteering in our communities and service as well as through civic engagement in the political process. That doesn't mean to engage in a partisan fashion, although people can feel free to do that, but the Harry Potter Alliance doesn't advocate for anything in a partisan way. However, we do want people to both volunteer with people at a local AIDS clinic as well as advocate for better treatment of AIDS victims in Africa. We want our young people tutoring underprivileged kids and helping them read, getting them engaged in the Internet and learning those things, but then also challenging the rules of the game that are making it possible for kids to go without food. And to challenge our politicians on both sides of the aisle that need to do something about that.

I think a key part of Harry Potter's popularity is that it is an example of a myth that the world is so hungry for, not just that they are funny books or that they're entertainment or that they're suspenseful or that they help us escape. They do all those things, but these books open our minds and our hearts to benefiting humanity in a way that I think secretly we all know unconsciously needs to happen. And that there's something truly profound about the love that Dumbledore speaks about and the love that Harry has for his friends that ends up being the thing that defeats Voldemort. And we need that love now. Not in any flaky sense of the word, but in a way that comes from deep within us and that we can share from our hearts.

Communal Growing Pains: Fandom and the Evolution of Street Fighter

This is another in a series of essays by my CMS graduate students exploring what personal narrative might contribute to the development of media theory. In this case, Begy blurs the line between games research and fan studies to talk about how he reads the Street Fighter games.

Communal Growing Pains: Fandom and the Evolution of Street Fighter
By Jason Begy

Invasion
In mid October 2007, Japanese game developer Capcom announced what many fans, myself included, thought they never would: the fourth series in the long-running Street Fighter franchise. It had been some eight years since the release of the last official installment, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and the declining popularity of 2D fighting games made another entry seem unlikely. The announcement of the new game generated enormous buzz within the community: for years whenever Capcom mentioned "unannounced projects" our collective heart skipped a beat, only to be disappointed. This time our wishes were granted, but we were ill-prepared for the full ramifications.

The online focal point of the Street Fighter community is the forum at Shoryuken.com. Here fans gather to discuss strategy (for Street Fighter and countless other fighting games), organize local meet-ups and online matches, share fan fiction and fan art, buy and sell all manner of goods, and generally hang out. The forums are known to be somewhat rough: new members are expected to quickly figure things out on their own. This is partially because many of the members are expert players and they come to interact with each other, not guide beginners through the basics. The community is at once tightly-knit and tightly-wound, which makes gaining acceptance extremely difficult yet extremely rewarding.

When Street Fighter IV was released on February 17, 2009 in the United States, all of the gaming press pointed to Shoryuken.com as the place to go for information, strategies, and tips, and the forums were literally and figuratively crippled. Literally because the servers could not handle the traffic, causing the site to continuously crash for several weeks; figuratively because many of the new members created severe social disruption. The best way to illustrate this is probably an analogy: imagine a thousand people spontaneously showing up at Gary Kasparov's house demanding to know how the pawn moves and you are not far off. The publicity also drew in countless trolls simply looking to cause trouble. This influx lead to the phrase "09er," which is derogatory slang for members who joined in 2009. It generally means someone who is disruptive, ignorant, and a fair-weather fan. This is not to say that all new members exhibited such behavior, but a great many did.

External tensions aside, the new members have created conflicting emotions in myself and other older fans. On the one hand, our genre of choice has been declining for nearly fifteen years, so a major new release and public approval is a nice affirmation of our tastes. Furthermore, fighting games are fundamentally social. Playing against other people is the only way to experience these games to their fullest, so a large group of new, eager players is certainly a welcome sight. On the other hand, these new members are quick to say that they have "always" been fans, which usually means they played Street Fighter II (the most popular game in the series) and not the eleven or so games between then and now, which begs the question of whether they will jump ship again when they get bored.

While it sounds strange, I find such statements deeply troubling: to leap from one entry to another while maintaining that you have "always" been a fan is to completely disregard what makes Street Fighter special. But even worse they cast a shadow of doubt over my own status as a "fan."

Origin
The source of these feelings is rooted in my own long history with the Street Fighter franchise. I first encountered Street Fighter II sometime in early elementary school and was immediately mesmerized. It was like nothing I had experienced before: two characters face off in one-on-one martial arts combat, first to win two rounds wins the match. The game could be played against a computer-controlled opponent or against another person. To control their character each player had an eight-way joystick and six attack buttons, corresponding to three punches and three kicks of different speed and strength.

In addition to their basic punches and kicks, each of the eight characters had a variety of "special moves" that were activated via special sequences of directional inputs and button presses. The inputs for these special moves were not given to the players, who were left to discover them for themselves. Each character also had a variety of "combos." A combo is a sequence of normal and special moves that is uninterruptible and usually requires a higher degree of skill to execute. These too were different for each character and left to the players to discover.

I am not sure what it was exactly that I found so compelling. I certainly found the game fun, but there was something else. The Street Fighter characters themselves were unique: each was full of personality, hailing from different countries and having different fighting styles. Each character's punches, kicks, combos and special moves were different, often drastically so. (Well mostly different anyway, back then Ken and Ryu were practically identical, but I will return to their divergent evolution later.) This meant that the experience of playing the game was dependent on the character used, leading to a great deal of variability.

As time wore on, my interest in the game waned; I became focused on other games and activities, and the series carried on without me. While I was peripherally aware of the new games and spin-offs, I was not particularly interested. Then during my sophomore year of college some friends introduced me to Street Fighter Alpha 3. This was the first Street Fighter game I had played in at least five years. In many ways Alpha 3 is far beyond Street Fighter II: the graphics and sound are far superior, there are many more characters, and the combat system is much deeper. My introduction to this game brought two significant realizations. The first was that I still loved playing Street Fighter, and the second was that I had missed out on a lot.

While I was ignoring Street Fighter, Capcom had been quite prolific in the genre. In total five Street Fighter II games were released, followed by four Street Fighter Alpha games, and three Street Fighter III games. There were also two spinoff series: Marvel vs Capcom and Capcom vs SNK. The former series saw four releases, and pitted characters from Street Fighter and other Capcom franchises against characters from the Marvel universe. These games were preceded by two Marvel-only fighting games. The latter series saw two releases, and included characters from Street Fighter and various SNK-developed fighting games (SNK is another Japanese game developer famous for their 2D fighting games). The games were not released in the order I have listed them here, rather multiple series were simultaneously "current." For example, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was released after the first Street Fighter III game. Needless to say this was an enormous amount of content, and since my initial exposure to Alpha 3 I have invested a lot of time, money and effort locating, acquiring and playing all of these games.

Reflection
I recognize that the story of my own "return" to Street Fighter is not unlike those I labeled "invaders" into the community. To be fair, to dedicate oneself to a single genre for fifteen years is to severely limit one's gaming experiences, and one can hardly be blamed for wanting to play other games. For me personally, as I aspire to be a scholar of the medium, devoting large amounts of time to a single genre becomes counter-productive. So am I not in some ways also a fair-weather fan, devoting time and attention when I can, or is convenient? I have not played seriously for almost two years now, and have never played in a tournament setting. These are troubling questions: who am I to say who is or is not a fan when I myself ignored Street Fighter for so many years? When I no longer have the time to dedicate to the game? Do I have a right to call myself a fan, and if so, to distinguish between established fans and newcomers? Something of an answer, I hope, lies in what I have learned by exploring the series' development.

In playing all of the old games, I discovered that just as the series as a whole has a history, so do the game's characters, some of whom have been included in every entry. In each game every character has his or her own story, which changes from game to game. Ryu's story in Street Fighter II is not the same as in Street Fighter III; it is not even consistent between the various entries in each series. A character's story in a game is presented at the end of the single-player mode, after the player has defeated his or her final opponent. As such a given game will contain many contradictory stories, resulting in the continual question of what is or is not canon. However, these ongoing narratives are far less significant than the formal history of the characters.

In a long-running, multi-branched series like Street Fighter there is a constant tension between providing new content and maintaining the brand. For 2D fighters in particular there is also the question of character balance: in an ideal world all characters are equally powerful and viable, yet provide unique play experiences. This is of course impossible, and the games are constantly being adjusted to improve game balance. Characters are added and removed with each release; those that stick around never play exactly the same way twice. Moves and combos are added, removed, and altered. Each character thus has two stories: the traditional story shown when the game is beaten, and the history of their mechanics. The fun of finding and learning long-forgotten Street Fighter games is tracing this history of form, which tells the story of the characters' development in a much more direct and immediate way than a traditional narrative. By looking at these games in sequence one can literally watch a character grow and evolve, learning new techniques, altering the old, removing the ineffective.

Sometimes this mode of storytelling is more intentional than others. The characters Ken and Ryu are perfect examples. In Street Fighter I these two are the only selectable characters; in terms of mechanics they are identical. In Street Fighter II there were eight selectable characters, but Ken and Ryu were still identical: they had the same attacks and special moves, and were distinguishable only by minor differences in appearance. As the Street Fighter II series progressed, Ken and Ryu slowly drifted apart. Ken became weaker and faster, while Ryu became slower and stronger. While these changes were originally intended to create greater variability in the gameplay, they began to become incorporated in the backstory as well. Ken became the hot-headed American, Ryu the stoic Japanese warrior.

While this evolution is interesting, it creates an inherent contradiction. As discussed above, Ken and Ryu were mechanically identical in the first two Street Fighter games. Later on the Street Fighter Alpha series was released, and Ken and Ryu's differences are fully realized. Yet, according to the diegetic narrative, the Alpha series occurs between Street Fighter I and Street Fighter II. Furthermore, games in the spinoff Marvel vs Capcom and Capcom vs SNK series were released alongside the main Street Fighter games, but are not part of the official chronology. So while characters were evolving throughout those games as well, their stories in them do not count in the larger narrative. As a result, the characters exist in two separate timelines: the formal timeline, which tracks the evolution of fighting game design, and the narrative timeline, which is the character's diegetic history. Consequently, players unfamiliar with the formal history miss the enormous amount of meaning being transmitted through the game's mechanics. There is much more meaning and information here than in the diegetic history because most of the latter is deemed non-canon.

This dualistic history then gives rise to the possibility of different "interpretive strategies," to borrow a phrase from Stanley Fish (168). Fish was interested in how readers make sense of texts, so in an application to video games it is worth noting that players make sense of both the fiction and mechanics of the game. In the case of Street Fighter, a player "interprets" both who the character is and how he or she functions in the game. For example, consider an experienced player sitting down to a new Street Fighter game. This player's interpretive strategy will likely be to apply franchise knowledge to this new game. The player may recognize the character Ken and interpret him as the "same" Ken from other games. When playing as Ken he or she will naturally look for special moves and combos that exist in other games and have carried over into the new game. The experienced player thus sees the characters are dynamic and evolving, an impression that becomes stronger as more games in the series are played.

A player new to the series, however, is more likely to see the characters as static, or will at least be unaware of any change. In the games themselves references to formal changes are very rare, almost nonexistent, hence new players can only interpret the character within the context of the one game. This is a conscious design choice: if Capcom required players to be familiar with prior games many potential new players would be alienated. As such in any given game the characters must seem complete enough to provide a satisfying experience and not confuse the player.

In Fish's terms one could say these two types of players belong to different "interpretive communities:"

Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around

(Fish 171).
The two interpretive communities to which fans of Street Fighter belong can generally be described as those who base their understanding of a game on other Street Fighter games, and those who do not; or to put it a different way, those who see the characters as dynamic and those who see them as static.

As with readers of a text, players of a game will likely assign intentions to the author (the developer), in this case Capcom, and here we can see the difference between the two communities. The characters-are-dynamic community will assign intentionality based on formal changes from game to game. For example, if a combo is made harder to execute from one game to the next, this community assumes Capcom thought it was too powerful before, while the removal of a character indicates Capcom thought they were unpopular. As Fish says, such strategies exist prior to reading, or playing, because the player is already aware that some aspects of the game will be different (even if that assumption is based solely on the title it will almost certainly be correct). On the other hand, those who see the characters as static will likely assign intentionality differently because for them there is no prior context. As such each community "writes" their own version of a new Street Fighter game.

However, unlike the processes of interpreting literature that Fish was writing about, within the overall Street Fighter fan community there is a fairly consistent flow from one community to the other. Currently there are many people playing Street Fighter IV who are not familiar with any other game in the franchise, but as soon as they play a second Street Fighter game they will look for familiar characters and try similar strategies, thus beginning movement to the other community. In this instance Fish's model breaks down because the characters-as-constant interpretation can be definitively disproven, whereas Fish was interested in how people can effectively maintain and defend drastically different interpretations of the same text. Even if there is disagreement within the Street Fighter community over the reasons for the change, the fact that the characters do change is fairly apparent. One could argue that Ken in Street Fighter II is not the same character as Ken in Street Fighter III, and hence there are two separate, constant characters named Ken, but this debate seems unlikely to arise amongst the fan community. Regardless it is clear that Capcom wants us to regard them as the same.

Conclusions

While I find these ideas fascinating, the question remains: am I a fan? Can one distinguish between a fan and someone who is merely interested? I may have just demonstrated a relatively large body of esoteric knowledge, but it is entirely possible to come to the same conclusions while despising these games. I think that, at the very least, I can say that the effort expended here qualifies me as fan of Street Fighter, even if not in the traditional sense. (This is sort of a Cartesian approach: I write obsessively, therefore I am.) This idea shows how fandom is a spectrum where the rewards gained are proportional to the investments made. By investing in the series as a whole one gains access to the multiple layers of meaning present in each game and acquires new interpretive strategies. However, different people will invest differently and should not be criticized for making different choices.

In the Street Fighter community new players are essential. They bring new challenges, new opportunities, and give Capcom more reason to keep Street Fighter alive. Right now there is a great fear that new and returning fans will eventually get bored and stop playing, just like they did after Street Fighter II. If they do it will prove to Capcom that there is no market for 2D fighting games anymore, and then there might never be another Street Fighter game. To prevent that the best thing is to be patient with newcomers and make them feel welcome, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. Hopefully with time their investment in the series will grow and they will decide to stick around.

References
Fish, Stanley. Is There A Text In This Class? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Jason Begy graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo where he earned a BA in English (2004) and spent much of his time working for Canisius' Department of Information Technology Services. Begy's undergraduate thesis argued that the rules and mechanics of chess and go were a reflection of the religious traditions of Catholicism and Buddhism, respectively. In 2008, Begy completed an MS in Technical Communication at Northeastern University in Boston, where his coursework focused on information design for the Web and information architecture for internal corporate and university networks. When it comes to game studies, Begy would describe himself as a ludologist and as such believes that the best way to study games is through their rules and mechanics. Begy is part of the research team supporting the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT games lab.

My Secret Life as a Klingon (Part Two)

So, there's a second trip out to Hollywood, this time in order to try on the actual costumes, to make sure that they fit. And I got to wander around through the costume racks, taking note of references to a Cantina sequence and a Vulcan Tea Ceremony, among other things. I overheard the people working there chatting about what color lingerie the blue-skinned Orion girl should wear for the movie. (Pink really would have been a bad choice!) And I got fit for my costume.

Now, by this point, I was starting to get a little anxious about how I am going to pull off a Klingon part when the other Klingons were a good foot taller than me, sometimes more, and most of them naturally had much broader builds. I was going to be the scrawniest Klingon in the Galaxy. They kept reassuring me that they would build me up through the padded costume, though I am fully aware that they are going to be using padded costumes for the other guys too, so we were locked into an armour race that I was never going to win.

That said, the costume they gave me was breathtaking. They had designed helmets for the extras to wear which have built in head-bumps so that they wouldn't have to spend hours in a make-up chair with each of us. I had a floor length great coat made out of a rubbery material designed to look like elephant skin or some alien equivalent. I have big shiny black boots.

Once I put all of this on and looked in the mirror, I felt Klingon down to the souls of my feet.

But there was one small problem: the pants they gave me were way too baggy and kept sliding down. There's a reason why I always wear suspenders and it's only partially a fashion statement. They took my measurements again and then promise me that they will take up the pants more so this won't be a problem on the set. After all, this is the whole reason why I've flown out to LA just to do a costume fitting and am about to fly back to teach class the following morning.

A week later, I met the other cast and crew of the film on the piers at Long Beach for what was going to be an all night long shoot at the secret location they have transformed into a Klingon prison compound. There was an army of us sitting there, waiting, eating the best array of junk food I've ever seen, and trying to cope with what promises to be a "hurry up and wait" kind of evening. There was a minor crisis when the casting director comes around to ask us to take off our jewelry and I realize that there's no way I can take off my wedding ring. It's not that I wasn't willing but after almost 30 years of marriage, my finger has grown around it, and it would take a jeweler's saw to cut it off me. Luckily, just as they were about to throw me off the set, I remembered that my character is supposed to be wearing heavy black gloves and so no one will ever see my ring finger, and they let it pass.

We were led back to the make-up tent, where I spent about half an hour in the chair, as they blacken the bottom part of my face and add a bristle goatee on top of my already scraggly looking beard. From here, we were supposed to wear robes and hoods so that the spoilers who were camped out around the location can't take our pictures. Once we got into costumes and make-up, we began to separate ourselves off by our races: the Klingons start to hang out with the Klingons, the Romulans with the Romulans, and then there are all of the other prisoners who represent an array of classic Trek races, including a guy in a really spectacular costume as a Salt Vampire.

Once everyone is in make-up, costume, and robe, we all wereloaded onto a bus and driven some distance away. As we steped off the bus, I set eyes on the set for the first time -- there were cameras on cranes and huge lighting units; there were synthetic boulders and giant fans blowing across the set; and there were massive fire pits in the ground which erupted into flames as the crew test the equipment. It's about this point that it occurs to me that Klingons are not known for their designer eye-wear and that I am very nearsighted. This was going to be the first and last chance I was going to get to see the set in focus. A few minutes later, someone circulated through and asked those of us who are visually impaired to remove our glasses.

You can ask me if J.J. Abrams was on the set that night and I couldn't tell you because I never saw him. I did hear the amplified voice of someone who was directing the scene coming down from on high. I never met the man, though people kept saying that I really should see if I could meet him, if he had specifically asked for me in the movie. It was clear some of the other extras in the scene were there because they had been hardcore fans of the series. Some bragged that they had also done extra work for Battlestar, Star Wars, and even Doctor Who, so some of these fans get around. By this point, there were persistent rumors that I speak fluent Klingon. I do not. I barely speak English and have no gift for foreign languages. And even before I get into conversations with anyone, they are already calling me "the Professor." I suppose that being a professor isn't something I do: it's who I am. In any case, it seemed that when people heard I had written a book on Star Trek, the only mental image they had was that I had written a book on the Klingon language.

They moved us out on the set and gave us our positions. We weren't told very much about what's happening in the scene. Everything is on a need-to-know basis. All we know is that we are Klingons who are guarding prisoners and that things are falling from the sky and exploding all around us. We were told that if we really got into our characters, we'd have a much stronger chance of ending up on screen in the final film, and there was a roving camera just trying to grab expressive closeups. We got no instruction on how to hold our weapons and as I look around, its clear that there's not exactly trained consistency in things like whether guards hold the gun barrel pointing down or up. Some of the guys had military training and we consult with them trying to at least understand human practices in this regard. I don't think I realized before how much extras really are improvising, creating their own characters, with very limited attention from the production staff. I find myself much more attentive watching extras in the backgrounds of shots having gone through this experience. But many of us had real fear that nit-picking fan boys were going to nail us for not holding our weapons the Klingon way!

And then they start staging a range of different vignettes -- at one point, I am trying to keep a group of increasingly unruly prisoners at bay using a disrupter rifle; at another point, I am on guard duty looking out over the prison complex. The most spectacular moment came when I was handed a torch (which are heavier than they look!) and told to lead a group across the compound as the wind blows down upon us and things are blowing up on other sides. Of course, being near sighted, I can't see more than a few feet ahead of me, so the group was zig-zagging like crazy as I try to avoid getting myself blown to bits or running into the blades of the giant fans. There was a real look of terror on my face for those sequences! I know I caused more than a little frustration for the assistant director who is trying to stage this little scene.

And, oh yes, my pants kept sliding lower and lower down my butt: at first, it was hip hop style but in one scene, I had to grab my waist to keep my pants from sliding off altogether. I suppose that the Klingon army like other military organizations is indifferent to matching guards with the right size uniforms. Periodically throughout the evening, I had to have a costume girl try yet again to stitch up the costume so it didn't slide off me. But they never seemed to fully solve the issue.

By this point, between my clumsiness with the guns, my near-sightedness, my slight size, and my baggy pants, I am starting to think of myself much more as a comic than a heroic figure. I am K'henry the Hapless! Fear my fumbles!

As the evening went along, everything starts to become more and more casual. The Salt Vampire is letting us feel his rubby tentacles and everyone seems to want to hold my disrupter. If at first we sorted ourselves by race, we start to just collapse in the green room between takes, indifferent to whoever is sitting next to us. If at first we take everything too seriously, a row of Klingons started singing "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story or doing the "Crank Dat Soulja Boy" dance.

At one point, they planted me on a rock to wait for instructions and forgot about me in the fog of war. I ended up dozing off in the wee hours of the morning and woke up vaguely disoriented, sitting in a Klingon prison compound, holding a disrupter in my hands.

At another point, they lined us all up in various action poses for photographs and we started to joke that we were posing for the action figures, and indeed, the set up reminded me of those little green army guys I played with as a kid.

Somehow, we all managed to stay more or less awake through the night, though I gradually started to feel a level of exhaustion I hadn't felt in decades. They loaded us on the buses, collected our costumes, and sent us along the way.

No, I didn't meet any members of the cast, though I did see some of the Romulans characters with tatooed faces and so I am starting to wonder if one of them was Nero. No, I never met J.J. Abrams. And No, I don't have any photographs of myself dressed as a Klingon. They didn't allow any cameras on the set because they didn't want any of us leaking images prematurely to the media.

I had been telling friends that I had played one of the classic alien races in the film: some imagined a Vulcan, some suggested a Ferengi, but for months, there were no reference to Klingons in the build up to the movie, there was no Klingon footage in the previews, and I got really anxious. I knew from the beginning that as an extra in a scene which involved more than 60 extras, my odds of ending up on screen were pretty small, and I had to keep lowering expectations from the students and staffs who imagined something bigger. I figured that once we had some footage of Klingons, I could start to tell people, but I didn't want to be the blogger who spilled the beans. Eventually, Abrams announced through the blogosphere that he was going to cut the Klingon sequence from the film: "There was a big Klingon subplot in this and we actually ended up having to pull it out because it confused the story in a way that I thought was very cool but unnecessary. So we have these beautiful designs that we're going to have to wait and do elsewhere I guess."

I've read various reasons for his decision, having to do with trying to streamline the character motivations, trying to avoid confusion about the current relationship between Klingons and the Federation for those viewers who only know some of the later Treks where the Klingons are our friends, and having to do with keeping the opening of the film crisp and taunt. It's pretty clear from the dialogue included more or less where the Klingon sequence would have gone. And I'm personally hoping we get to see this footage as a DVD extra.

My biggest disappointment is that we probably will never see Klingon action figures for this film. I had fantasies of getting a figurine of a Klingon in a floor-length elephantine coat holding either a torch or a disruptor.

So, now you have it, the saga of K'Henry the Hapless, the most scrawny Klingon in the Galaxy, and how he ended up on the cutting room floor.

My Secret Life as a Klingon (Part One)

Artist's Approximation created by Ivan Askwith

At long last, I can share with you, oh loyal reader, the utterly true, sometimes comical story of how I became a card-carrying Klingon in the new Star Trek film (well, almost). I've been itching to share this yarn for the past year and a half but had wanted to wait until the film was in the theaters and many of you would have had a chance to see it.

The adventure began with an unexpected e-mail: a Hollywood casting director wrote me to say that J.J. Abrams wanted to include me in the then upcoming Star Trek reboot. At first, to be honest, I thought it was a joke. I had no idea that J.J. Abrams knew who I was. We had not and still haven't ever had any direct contact with each other, though my mind starts to race trying to figure out the chain of events which might have led him to discover me. Might J.J. be a reader of this blog?

My loyal and trustworthy assistant, Amanda, did some followup and got on the phone with the Hollywood type to try to determine what would be involved in shooting "my" scene for the movie. Doing so would require me to take three trips to Los Angeles in a little under a month -- not a small demand given the number of long-standing commitments I had -- and I would need to do so on my own dime. What I was being offered was a chance to become an extra and in Hollywood, in some cases, as I would discover, extras are literally recruited off the streets, and all of them are paid only a minimal wage.

The idea of a full professor at MIT flying to Hollywood to appear as an extra was absurd, but given my life-long love of this particular media franchise, which had inspired two of my books and several more articles, not flying to LA to be an extra in a freaking Star Trek movie would have been equally absurd.

I had to do it, even though it meant postponing some significant meetings, ducking out early from academic conferences, and taking a series of red eye flights, not to mention spending several thousand dollars. I have often joked about boldly going where no humanities scholar has ever gone before and this was going to be a wild ride.

So, I flew out to Hollywood and made my way, straight from the airport, to the Paramount Studio backlots, dragging my suitcase behind me. I was greeted by the casting agent, and was then led along with an army of other people out to what literally amounted to a cattle call. I was lined up against the wall with about fifty or sixty other men as people with clipboards moved along the line, discarding some, shifting some to another wall, and otherwise sorting us out into smaller groups. I was trying to make sense of the patterns: along my wall were men who are for the most part bald and have ample facial hair. So far, I fit the category they were looking for.

But then I became acutely aware that I needed to strain my neck to see the tops of the other men's heads. Most of them looked like they were tall enough to play professional basketball and most of them were black. Indeed, by the time the sorting out process was done, I was the shortest, whitest guy left standing. They then took us one by one into a dressing room area to take our measurements and to get us to try on some costumes for size. I was fit with some heavy leather gloves, some pants which looked like they come from a military uniform, some tall black boots, and a helmet. I glanced down at a clipboard when the costumer wasn't looking and saw the notice, "Klingon Guard," and my heart beat a bit faster. It wasn't until the second trip out to Hollywood that the costumers confirmed that I was indeed going to be given a chance to play a Klingon part. (Indeed, some of the other extras only learned they were in a Star Trek movie when they arrived on the set for our actual shoot.)

Now, keep in mind that being a Klingon has been one of my life-long ambitions. When I was in high school, I went to the DeKalb County Honors Camp, where I majored in drama. I spent the summer in the company of some of the most wacky friends I ever had, doing skits and plays, and when we were not doing that, just cutting up in the hallways. One of the girls in our cohort was a hardcore Trek fan. At this point, I had watched the series as a casual viewer but I had not taken the plunge. But she decided she was going to adapt the script from David Gerrold's "Trouble with Tribbles" for the stage and we were all going to play parts. I met a guy, Edward McNalley (who is still one of my best friends) when he got pulled in from another group to play Spock. I was cast as the Klingon officer who sparks a bar fight with the Enterprise crew when he insults first its captain and then the ship itself. In getting ready to play the part, I started reading every book I could find on the series -- The Making of Star Trek, The World of Star Trek, Star Trek Lives, and of course, the James Blish novelizations of all of the episodes, even the photonovels and the viewmaster slides. That's how you kept up on a series back in the days before any of us had a VCR, though my wife still has audio tapes recorded through alligator clips attached to the television sound system, which she recorded when the series was first being aired. It was through all of this reading that I discovered not only Star Trek but also the fan culture around it.

Flash forward several decades to when I was doing research for Science Fiction Audiences, the book I wrote with John Tulloch. That's when I became a Klingon for a second time. I was trying to do research on Klingon fan culture as a contrast to the female fanzine writers, the GLBT actvists, and the MIT students who figured prominently in that study. In true participant observation fashion, I joined a Klingon role-playing group, seeking to better understand what it was like to walk that particular swagger. In many ways, this Klingon fandom was a branch of the men's movement which was taking shape around Robert Bly's Iron John. Most of those I met were working class men who were embracing a warrior mythology to work through anger and frustrations they had encountered in life. Both men and women involved struck me as experimenting with power and trying to reclaim aspects of masculinity which they saw as under threat elsewhere in the culture. In the end, my research on Klingons was a failed project which never found its way into the final book.

I never really could figure out how to perform Klingon masculinity in a convincing manner and I got lost in the role-play activity. I had been cast as a Klingon ambassador, which I took to be an oxymoron, and so I was proceeding by insulting and abusing the Federation ambassadors with whom I was interacting, much as my character in "Trouble with Tribbles" had intentionally picked a fight with the Enterprise crew. But the guy representing the Federation took it all too personally, could never grasp that I was playing a character, that we were operating in a magic circle, and eventually filed a protest against me, which led to the Klingon high council suggesting that I step down from my post. I guess I played too rough to be a Klingon, go figure.

Skip forward a few more years and I'm being profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The photographer is scoping out my living room when he stumbles on my Bat'leth, a Klingon battle sword, which I have propped up against my fireplace. And he asks if I would be willing to pose with it for a photograph. As a long-time fan, I smell a trap. After all, I've written critically about the ways news coverage depicts fans in costumes with program-related trinkets as people who can't separate fantasy from reality. Even with the release of the new film, I am reading lots of prose about "rubber Vulcan ears" and the like, despite two decades of trying to dismantle those hurtful cliches. But I also relished the absurdity of appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education showing off my Klingon cutlery and so, once again, in for a penny, in for a pound.

So, given that history, I can't tell you the excitement I felt when I called my wife, a fellow lifelong Trekker, to tell her that I was about to become an official Klingon. She was jealous, of course; what wife wouldn't be? But she also was really supportive of this fantasy-fulfilling opportunity.

Next Time: Going on Set, Shooting the Scene, and How the Klingons Ended Up on the Cutting Room Floor.

Five Ways to Start a Conversation About the New Star Trek Film

Spoiler Warning: The following post assumes you saw the new Star Trek film this weekend. If you didn't, you probably shouldn't be reading this post. You should be heading to a multiplex.

Cynthia and I went to see the new Star Trek film this weekend. We have managed to see every Star Trek film together as a couple on opening weekend since the film franchise lost with Star Trek: The Motionless Picture in 1979.

So, the two of us proceeded to spend the better part of the evening going through the film scene by scene armed with a lifetime of fan and critical perspectives on the franchise, trying to figure out what it signals about the future of Trek.

We certainly went into the film with high hopes but also with a certain sense of dread. J.J. Abrams has worked hard to demonstrate to the world that "this is not your father's Star Trek," and the problem is that we are, well, sorta, when you look at our birth certificates and all, part of 'your father''s generation. People like 'Your Father' and even more likely 'Your Mother' have kept Star Trek a viable franchise for more than four decades. None of us object to bringing in new souls for the faith or attracting younger followers but you don't have to write off the old fans to do so.

We certainly were not opposed to the recasting of cherished characters: quite the opposite, many of the franchises we care about -- Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Cyrano, Hamlet, Sam Spade -- have been recast many times with differing results but always with new discoveries to be made. We certainly hoped that having someone other than William Shatner playing the part would rekindle our respect and affection for Kirk, as a character, for example, while we remained skeptical that a new actor could capture the complexity which Leonard Nimoy has achieved through his portrayal of Spock through the years. As a fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series, I'd be hypocritical if I objected to them rethinking the characters or revamping the worlds depicted on the series.

When Cynthia was asked what she thought upon walking out of the theater, she responded that it felt like a Star Trek movie precisely because there were things we loved and things we hated about it. It's been like that from the beginning and it will always be thus.

Rather than write a review of the film, though, I figured I'd throw out some discussion topics. After all, it's exam season around here and so the genre of essay questions comes readily to hand. The following are some of the things we've been debating since we saw the film:

1. For us, the coolest thing in the movie was the image of Vulcan educational practice, which is consistent with previous representations (most notably the scenes of Spock retooling himself in Star Trek III) but also gave us new insights. Vulcans seemingly learn in isolation yet immersed in a rich media landscape. Each climbs down into a well surrounded by screens which flash information, allowing them to progress at their own rate, dig deeper into those things which interest them, and at the same time, develop a certain degree of autonomy from other learners. There are no teachers, at least none represented in the segment we are shown here, but rather the individual learner engaging with a rich set of information appliances. In some ways, this is the future which many educators fear -- one where they have been displaced by the machine. In other ways, it is the future we hope for - one where there are no limits placed on the potentials of individual learners to advance.

But if learning is individualized, why do people come together into what can only be described as a school? Why not locate the learning pod in each home? Why have a structured school day?

In the midst of all of this well-considered if somewhat alien pedagogy, we are introduced to the issue of Spock's bullying by his classmates. The scene where he confronts the Bullies is oddly ritualized, as if he was reporting to them for today's insults and abuses, and as if they were testing his ability to develop the toughness and emotional control to push aside those insults. It's clear elsewhere that he faces a certain degree of prejudice as a result of his half-human/half-Vulcan background -- see the casual deployment of race as a handicap as he is admitted to the Vulcan Science Academy. But here, it is as if there is a system of ritualized bullying designed to test and toughen each student. What if bullying was incorporated into the pedagogical regime as it is more or less in several other educational systems on our planet? Certainly the content of the insults would be different in each case, but the logic of ritualized insults as a way of developing emotional control is not actually alien to the way Earth cultures operate.

2. I've read reviews which suggest that the Uhura in this film represents a progressive reworking of the character from classic Trek. I'm not convinced yet, even though I very much liked the actress who played the part. However limited her role might be ("hailing frequencies are open, Captain"), the original Uhura was defined first and foremost by her contributions as a member of the Enterprise Crew. Whatever subtext there was suggesting a Kirk/Uhura romance, it was just that -- a subtext -- left for fans to infer from a few telling moments in the trajectory of the series, among them, the first interracial kiss on American television -- albeit executed under mind control -- albeit an implied projection of one or both of the character's actual desires.

In the new film, Uhura asserts her professional competence but she never really demonstrates it. How does that make her different from many of the female professionals in classic Trek who are introduced in terms of their professional abilities and then reduced to being the girlfriend of the week for one of the primary characters? Here, more screen time is devoted to her but she's ultimately a love object in some kind of still to be explored romantic triangle between Kirk and Spock. Basically, she's been inserted into the story to discourage fans from writing slash stories, though most of us won't have any trouble figuring out how the exchange of women facilitates an expression of homosocial/homoerotic desire.

The classic definition of a Mary Sue is someone who is claimed to have extraordinary mental abilities, who manages to gain the romantic interests of multiple members of the crew, and who manages to have the information needed to save the ship. In way sense, then, is the new Uhura anything other than a Mary Sue figure in the body of an established character? Surely after forty plus years, Trek can imagine a more compelling female character.

3. I'm still trying to make sense of the implications of Kirk's absurdly rapid rise to command in this version of the story. In the past, we were allowed to admire Kirk for being the youngest Star Fleet captain in Federation history because there was some belief that he had managed to actually earn that rank. Here, he manages to gain command in large part because Captain Pike was an old family friend, and because he had one really successful mission. It's hard to imagine any military system on our planet which would promote someone to a command rank in the way depicted in the film. In doing so, it detracts from Kirk's accomplishments rather than making him seem more heroic. This is further compromised by the fact that we are also promoting all of his friends and letting them go around the universe on a ship together.

We could have imagined a series of several films which showed Kirk and his classmates moving up through the ranks, much as the story might be told by Patrick O'Brien or in the Hornblower series. We could see him learn through mentors, we could seem the partnerships form over time, we could watch the characters grow into themselves, make rookie mistakes, learn how to do the things we see in the older series, and so forth. In comics, we'd call this a Year One story and it's well trod space in the superhero genre at this point.

But there's an impatience here to give these characters everything we want for them without delays, without having to work for it. It's this sense of entitlement which makes this new Kirk as obnoxious as the William Shatner version. What it does do, however, is create a much flatter model for the command of the ship. If there is no age and experience difference between the various crew members, if Kirk is captain because Spock had a really bad day, then the characters are much closer to being equals than on the old version of the series.

This may be closer to our contemporary understanding of how good organizations work -- let's think of it as the Enterprise as a start-up company where a bunch of old college buddies decide they can pool their skills and work together to achieve their mutual dreams. This is not the model of how command worked in other Star Trek series, of course, and it certainly isn't the way military organizations work, but it is very much what I see as some of my students graduate and start to figure out their point of entry into the creative industries.

4. If the narrative makes it all look too easy for the characters, the narrational structure makes it much too easy for the viewers. There's a tendency not so much to ask questions as to hand us answers to the questions fans have been struggling with over the past four decades. So, for example, classic Trek was always carefully not to fully explain how Sarek and Amanda got together, allowing Vulcan restraint to prevent Sarek from fully articulating what he feels towards Spock's mother. As a consequence, there were countless fan fiction narratives trying to imagine how Sarek and Amanda got together -- Jean Lorrah, for my money, wrote the best of these narratives, though there were other great fan novels out there on precisely this theme. Yet, here, the question is asked and answered, overtly, in a single scene.

Ditto the issue of whether Vulcans are incapable of feeling emotion on some biological level or if they have simply developed mental discipline to bring their emotions under their control. Again, this question inspired decades of fan fiction writing and speculation and is here dispatched with a few short sentences.

The mystique that surrounded Spock from the start had to do with things he was feeling but could not express: he is a deeply divided character, one who broods about where he belongs and how he relates to the other Enterprise crewmembers. But this film makes it look ridiculously easy for him to get a girl friend and he is surprisingly comfortable necking with his pretty in the transporter room, an act that it is impossible to imagine Spock prime doing. The original Spock was a deeply private person. It isn't that the new film has made Spock Sexy. The old Spock was a whole lot sexier than the new Spock for all of his hidden depths and emotional uncertainties: the new Spock is just too easy all around and there's no real mystery there. He isn't sexy; he's having sex and that's not the same thing at all.

5. As a stand alone film, it's reasonably engaging: I like most of the cast and think they achieve good chemistry together. The pace is, as has been suggested, good, though most of the action scenes -- except for the free fall sequence -- seem pretty average. It's a flawed work but I'm certainly in for more adventures. My problem is that the film didn't give us much to anticipate for the sequel. In answering its mysteries so easily and not setting up new ones, there's just not that much room for speculation and anticipation.

This would work if it were the pilot episode of a new television series. I haven't loved any of the pilot episodes but they gave me enough reasons to like the characters that I kept watching. It usually takes a good number of episodes for the cast to jell with their characters, for the writers to figure out what they are doing, and for the audience to figure out what is distinctive about the new series. I think I need more momentum to get over the hump than a movie every few years and that's why television would have worked better to relaunch the franchise than a feature film is going to do.

Is this a space where transmedia storytelling practices can create a bridge between this film and the next? Is there other ways that they can allow us to have encounters with these characters as embodied by the new cast? If so, what strategies will be the most effective at strengthening what ever level of identification was created for this new film?
Finally, if there are new fans who are created through this relaunch of Star Trek, which is certainly what Abrams and company are claiming is their goals, what has the film left them to do? What are the gaps and kernels they will work with? It's clear enough what the cultural attractor here is but what is the cultural activator?

Then, again, there's nothing wrong with this film that couldn't have been improved by the addition of Klingons. I will explain later in the week.

History and Fan Studies: A Conversation Between Barbara Ryan and Daniel Cavicchi (Part One)

A little over a year ago, this blog hosted an extended series of conversations between male and female academics doing work around fan studies, cult media, transmedia storytelling, and related topics. The exchanges have become a repository for contemporary work in these areas, a place I regularly send people looking for speakers on panels, contributors to books, or simply resources to support their own research projects. Whatever did or did not get resolved in the space of gender politics, the conversations have helped to promote fan studies more generally. With that in mind, I remain open to further conversations involving researchers who were not featured during the last round but who have interesting things to say to each other.

BARBARA RYAN, of the National University of Singapore, is working on a book about the Ben-Hur event. She invited DANIEL CAVICCHI of the Rhode Island School of Design to discuss some of the issues involved in pushing fan studies back into the 19th century. She got in touch with Dan because of his work on 19th-century U.S. music fans.

BR: Dan, we might begin by mapping our respective routes to this conversation. I think of you as a fan studies scholar who decided to go back in time, while I think of myself as an historian of reading who is trying to learn from fan scholarship. Your first book, on Bruce Springsteen, includes extraordinary conversations with present-day fans. So that's a sociological approach -- if I can just say this in a simple way. Too simple? Anyway, my first book analyzes 19th-century print culture that tried to emphasize how that print was put to use. Something of a reception study, then, but a social history, too. Now, here we are looking at 19th-century U.S. fans, yours being fans of music and mine being fans of Ben-Hur. Is this a new line of inquiry or one we're joining, in progress?

One could say, I guess, that some histories of fandom already exist, that go back as far as we're trying to go. But I see big differences between fan scholarship and even excellent histories of, say, the Astor Place Riot of 1849 or demotic activity in and around Helen Jewett's murder and the trial of her alleged killer, somewhat earlier. We needn't get stuck on specific examples - except maybe to identify some great histories. The point I'm making is that in those histories, I'm aware of not getting a good sense of what was true, or vital, for people who made up the Astor Place mob, or who wore "Robinson caps" to show their support for the clerk accused of murdering Jewett. Obviously, you can't expect full documentation from all participants when you go back that far. And you sure can't do interviews! But the first consideration is: when it is, and when it isn't, right to speak of fandom(s). One way to proceed could be to examine media's role on the grounds that, ultimately, media creates fandom. Does it all come down then, if only in the U.S. setting, to steam-driven printing and cheaper paper, or/and to the profit motive that inspired what has been called "a riot of words" from about the 1840s?

DC: My initial interest in fandom was actually sparked by histories of reading, especially the work of Robert Darnton and Cathy Davidson. But you are correct to say that my primary approach to fandom until now has been rooted in the social sciences. My fieldwork with Springsteen fans, in particular, came out of my studies in ethnomusicology and anthropology in graduate school. After immersing myself in the theories of the cultural studies movement of the late 1980s/early 1990s, I wanted to recover what I thought cultural studies had erased: actual people. My historical study of music fans is similar. I've always loved cultural histories of audiences, but I've found that they often rely on journalistic sources. Given what I know about how contemporary journalism has distorted fan culture, I'm a little suspicious about journalistic accounts.

Instead, I've been trying do "historical anthropology," searching for people's own explanations and testimony about their fandom. It's true that you can't get full documentation and you can't do interviews, but you can find amazingly resonant experiential fragments from untapped sources, like diaries and novels. I'm quite interested in exploring whether those sources might lead one to a fuller "emic" or "experience-near" understanding--as they say in anthropology--of audience passion for theater, literature, music, and other cultural forms. In this regard, I've been much inspired by books like Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

Beyond method, though, which is something we should discuss further, I think there remains a need to more fully historicize the subject of fandom, which will both help us think about its definition and its personal, social, and political functions. I think it is true that there are, already, histories of fan-like behavior, but they are not necessarily intended as such. What historians of fandom might bring to the historical study of popular culture (and events like the Astor Place Riot or the Columbian Exposition, etc.) is a re-interpretation of the evidence and the historical events through the prism of fan studies. Like any of the micro-histories that seem to be popular these days (the history of walking, the history of salt, etc.), "fandom" is a concept that, when used as a focus, might reveal new layers of meaning that were not evident before.

Still, the danger is revisionism--mapping "fandom" onto people and events in the past without justification or with gross distortion. As you note, the key problem in all of this is whether or not we can even speak of "fandom" before 1900, when the word started to gain currency in print as a description of a people or an attitude. It depends on how you define fandom, of course. The narrower or more historically-specific the definition, the less able one will be able to identify it in other contexts and time periods. The broader or general the definition, the less useful it becomes as a description of a distinct phenomenon.

I tend not to think of fandom in terms of "media," actually, which is the luxury of someone who is not housed in a media or communications department. Instead, I tend to think of it as a degree of audiencing, a realm of marked cultural participation that is always relative to, and defined against, "normal" or unmarked cultural participation. These degrees of audiencing might manifest themselves in all sorts of ways in different historical and social contexts.

The "fandom" that scholars have studied thus far have had very much to do with mass-mediated forms of culture and have thus concerned modes of production and reception, commodification, the star system, the twists of encoding/decoding, etc. But I think there might be other modes of marked cultural participation--both in other cultures and in our own past--that might be legitimately brought into, or at least aligned with, "fan studies." Are there behaviors and values that we might identify in, say, music lovers of the 1840s, Ben Hur readers at the turn of the century and contemporary Lost fans today? At the moment, what I see uniting those instances of audiencing has mostly to do with the commodification of culture, which depends on a radical--and sometimes playfully manipulative--reworking of the relationships between performer and audience.

BR: You speak of the functions of fandom, and the possibility that historicization will reveal new things about fans and their activities. That's a motivation for my project, too. But the main thing I want to point out is that your word 'marked' will please many historians because in this field there's much discomfort about having to read minds rather than looking to the documentary record. That said, the Springsteen book includes several vibrant discussions of your own fandom. I wonder if you feel you have a purchase on past fans and fandoms that reflects your experiences of being a Springsteen fan. Maybe more so when past fans or fandoms include music . . . or maybe not.

This raises a general question: is autoethnography still important when analysts move into historical fan studies? Could it help reveal, for instance, 'marks' on certain acts of cultural participation? This is on my mind because autoethnography isn't the norm among historians. I don't see it becoming a norm, either, due to the disciplinary freight on teasing out "how it really was then." I'd like to see autoethnography make headway among historians because I've become aware of how it sometimes helps me figure things out. I tend to agree, though, with Nick Couldry that we don't want autoethnography to become something every fan scholar must do, in print. I tend to agree because I read too much autoethnography -- even from some of its proponents -- that seems to me as uninformative as non-historians' accounts of change over time.

One way I was thinking I might introduce positionality into my Ben-Hur project is to do some ruminating in sidebars. I'm playing with this in a current draft because I think it might materialize for readers outside fan studies how fan scholarship can develop a richer historical field. Some days, this feels crazed: where do I call a halt? Other days, it seems that's the right way to feel about what it means to analyze something as big and amorphous as "culture."

But back to your remarks. It's interesting to hear that you turned to fan studies after reading Davidson and Darnton. They were helpful to me, too. But my first wake-ups came from books by Janice Radway and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. This will date me, but pop culture wasn't taught in my graduate program in 19th-century U.S. literature. I mean, not even best-sellers like Uncle Tom's Cabin on the grounds that they weren't literature. In that setting, Reading the Romance was pretty thrilling for me. Smith's Contingencies of Value is a different kind of project. But it did more than anything else to alert me to the value of historicizing . . . which is part of your project, too. I like your term "historical anthropologist." You see my eagerness to talk about methods!

DC: I like the word "marked," too! Though I must say that I was using it in the original Jakobsonian sense from linguistics, where it indicates the one side of a binary opposition that is aberrant and therefore significant. When we say "how tall are you?" instead of "how short are you?", we weight the opposition of tall and short by making tall "unmarked" and short "marked." That relational approach actually helps me understand fandom better than notions of "excess" or "resistance." (I'm being totally pedantic, I know...you can imagine how my family suffers).

But you are right about "marks" and their importance. I certainly understand the concern with creating an empirical (not empiricist) understanding of the history of fandom. If fandom is about emotional attachment, something that is largely experiential and outside the realm of official institutions and documentation, what evidence would exist from the past to show that it was developing or even existed?

In the opening to his book, Making American Audiences, Richard Butsch recounts an abandoned project on "the change from music making to music listening associated with the dispersion of the phonograph & radio." He admits, "After some preliminary explorations of dusty archives and old books, I concluded it would be difficult to document such private practices...." This is true, but I don't agree that the private practices of audience history are totally lost.

Instead, I've found inspiration in newer approaches to history--the history of the senses, especially, as practiced by Mark M. Smith, Richard Cullen Rath, Emily Ann Thompson and others. Sensory history does what I want to do with audiences--it builds on the innovations of social history in the 1960s to recover a past that was long thought lost. These scholars use the close study of materials, tastes, landscapes, visual imagery, and sounds--combined with biological science and detailed contextual mapping--to articulate ordinary people's sensations of the past.

Autoethnography is a part of this approach, though it isn't called that. One of the useful things that Richard Cullen Rath did in How Early America Sounded, for example, was visit a colonial-era Quaker meeting house and analyze his own experience of the acoustics in the structure as a way to begin making sense of how colonial Quakers might have experienced it. I, too, have visited King's Chapel in Boston for an afternoon organ concert in order to experience how the space might have resonated for 19th century music lovers.

Of course, there's a danger in this: there is no guarantee that my experience of a church in 2007 will be at all the same as someone in the same space in 1842. In fact, most historians of sound would say that our cultural understanding of sound is so different, so changed, that any comparison would be suspect. However, at the same time, the wood, the paint, the instruments, and the acoustics are the same. And I have historical diary accounts from people enthusing about hearing music in that space. It's a matter of taking one's own experience and weighing it with that of someone else, using the materiality of the space and the human body as a sort of constant.

If anything, I really see my approach as that of an historical ethnographer. Historical fieldwork is a little weird, since the implication is that I am conducting observation and interviews with the dead, but in many ways I really do see that as being true. In my research in archives, I am encountering all sorts of people and experiences--through diaries, images, even personal objects--and trying to make sense of those encounters.

The encounters contain the familiar but at the same time there are unexpected things that I don't understand: odd language or design, misplaced emphasis, or, as Robert Darnton pointed out in The Great Cat Massacre, jokes that aren't funny. As an anthropologist tries to make sense of his or her accumulation of encounters with the unexpected in the field, I am trying to do the same in historical research and build some meaning out of the enterprise. The difference is that I can't ask questions and receive answers; but I pursue questions and expect answers and, in general, value the paths opened up to me as I move from diary to diary, object to object. This is most definitely not traditional history, in that it sees the past as a "field" and derives meaning from the means, or process, of historical research rather than the ends. But I don't know how else to do it.

In the end, I have to say that I never thought I was doing auto-ethnography in Tramps Like Us; I just thought I was being a reflexive ethnographer. There's a difference: I'm sympathetic with the phenomenological premise behind the valuing of one's own experience but it seems to me that that approach works best (and is tested) only in tandem with the examination of the experiences of others. How do you see auto-ethnography informing your understanding of Ben Hur readers? What's the relationship between those sidebars and the text you are writing? In general, how do you approach making sense of the evidentiary fragments that inform your work--the letters from readers? How far can you go with that to create convincing or meaningful conclusions?

BR: On historical fieldwork, I remember when a friend in Classics expressed envy of my ability to go visit the home of a 20th-century writer who received fan mail. 'You're so lucky!' he kept saying; 'all I have is scraps of parchment and heaps of rubble.' I recall this because I think there's a point at which we can't speak, even metaphorically, about doing fieldwork in the past.

We can do research but its basis is distinct; I do wonder how that relates to the sorts of things scholars will be able now or later to identify as fandoms. This is just a brain-teaser, really. But it was thought until quite recently that fan mail wasn't a resource for historians of reading because so little has survived. When that turned out to be less true than had been assumed, the next objection was sampling: ok, this school said, now we have fan mail but it isn't representative of all readers. The clearest statement of this position, that I know, isn't at all aware of fan studies scholarship. But it wouldn't be strange if the scholar who took this stand, as recently as 2008, looked at fan studies scholarship, found nothing there about fan mail, and therefore fell back on common sense that, as so often, is hard on the non-normative role - here, that of avid enthusiasts. I haven't figured out why fan researchers who go to great lengths to find subjects to interview are so chary about fan mail. But I plan to do something about this oversight.

So that's me on my soapbox. Where this gets us is "sources untapped" . . . to misquote you . . . that exist to be tapped because of two State-funded institutions. One is libraries that undertake the fairly expensive job of preserving authors' papers but which do so under the lit history rubric of authors as artists. This institutionalization girds the idea, affirmed by the few historians of reading who examine fan mail, that this evidence of reception is best framed in terms of author-reader intimacy.

Backing up this affirmation is the other institution in the mix: the U.S. mail. I explore its impact with help from Friedrich Kittler's sense of "the semi-media monopoly of the post." Kittler is a controversial figure. But I think his radical historicization of media, during the period of most interest to me, helps nudge analysis of the Ben-Hur event toward art/civic topics probed by Couldry, Butsch, Joke Hermes and others.

Where, therefore, you're looking to historians of the senses -- a great initiative -- I'm looking to fan and audience studies that discuss crowds and publics, cohesion and pop culture. As you'd expect, I contextualize the handful of letters saved by the author of Ben-Hur (or someone near him) by looking at clippings scrapbooks commissioned by him or his wife, news articles about Ben-Hur's value as literature, and 19th-century reports of its soaring sales.

I think of my project as step-by-step charting of an event/uality 20th-century critics were happy to telescope into a flat narrative: after critics dissed Ben-Hur, "ordinary" Americans cherished it to best-seller status. My research reveals that that isn't sound chronicling. But we can't see that unless we take fans' letters seriously, probe them as thoroughly as we'd probe any other document, and pay close attention to each letter's date. I use the term 'event/uality' to emphasize that there was nothing inevitable about Ben-Hur's success, understood as an arts enactment of democratic citizenship.

Where do sidebars fit in? In my Introduction, I'm trying out two. The longer summarizes Ben-Hur's plot because it's been my experience that a lot of experts in 19th-century literature and culture haven't read this fan favorite. Usually, books like mine offer plot-summary in the body-text. But I think a sidebar signals more forcefully that I'm not going to analyze Ben-Hur; I'm interested instead in how specially avid readers shaped its event.

The second sidebar will tackle my relationship to Ben-Hur. I want to be up-front that I didn't read this book as a fan, or become a fan by reading it. But I want to clarify too that I'm embedded nonetheless in the Ben-Hur event as - I'll argue - are all my readers, whether they've read Ben-Hur or not. Do you see how these sidebars lace into each other? I hope that that will make them operationalize, for more readers, a sense of the literary politics exposed in Contingencies of Value.

The other thing to say about sidebars is that they'll give readers a chance to skip, or think about skipping, reflexive passages. Quite fun, isn't it, to have this chance to swap thoughts about work in progress? Thanks, Henry!

You mentioned unfunny jokes; in my case, this could be a lexical leap in an archived fan letter, or an illustration on a product sold along with the stage-show of Ben-Hur. Findings of both sorts helped me dig deeper into event/uality in ways that helped me range more widely. The illustration, in particular, led me down unexpected pathways. It's part of the reason, for instance, that just a few weeks ago, a book I'd picked up for leisure reading sprang into focus as more evidence of the global impact of the Ben-Hur event . . . which was, and remains, amazing to me: how far this novel reached, how many lives it touched - how many people it irritated! It was partly with a view to that amazement that I said earlier, where does research stop? But it's more central to my interest in fan mail that researchers devise methods resistant to what Raymond Williams called "the long dominative mode." It's been exciting for me to explore media studies that challenge the premises of literary history, a discipline that found its footing by, among other things, shooting down Ben-Hur and all who liked it.

Do you find similar put-downs or posturing in your project? I think you end before Americans heard reports of women standing on their chairs at open-air concerts, to get closer to Wagner's music. But you're seeing, I'm sure, concern about over-avid or rawly untutored reactions to Lind, Bull, Paderewski and so on. What space do you make for anti-fans? Do you feel you need to present a 'fair and balanced' account of those days, or that it's more valuable to focus on all that's currently unknown about receptors 'marked' as lacking or aberrant?

DC: You raise many issues about evidence, here, Barbara, that are worth considering in fan studies. Of course, evidence has always been an issue in the discipline of history--from basic questions of origin and access to standards for evaluation and interpretation. It is generally true that physical traces of the past tend to disappear and become increasingly scattered as time goes on, making the process of piecing together a coherent understanding of past events and experience more and more difficult. That difficulty arises from the principle of accumulation, that one can make conclusions only when enough of the evidence warrants a claim. Worry about conclusions occurs when the evidence is "thin."

However, debates in anthropology have taught me that what constitutes "enough evidence" is often defined by the subject being investigated. Not having enough evidence is often a problem when the goal is to build a general field theory about a past culture or time period; the generalization required at that level of analysis requires a great deal of support to be convincing. A solution to that problem, however, is to scale back and recognize that writing about a fragment, a very limited moment or experience, or even a single voice, can be as worthwhile in creating meaning. In my own work, I can spend months trying to learn as fully as I can about a single person I have encountered in archives--a young clerk and avid music listener trying to make his way in Philadelphia in 1849, the first winner of P.T. Barnum's ticket auction for Jenny Lind's 1850 concert in Boston, etc. At one point I contemplated writing a whole book about the latter! Would that have enabled me to still think through the emergence of music fandom in the United States? Yes, but in a very particular way that might prove unsatisfying to those looking for broader understandings of the sweep of culture and history.

I would emphasize in all this, though, that the one thing that fan studies has taught me is that while much evidence is lost, perhaps even more of it is ignored or overlooked, thanks to the politics of collective memory. In other words, there are traces of the past everywhere, if only someone were to interpret them as so. Maybe that's too literary, or radically postmodern, for a lot of historians. There is something subversive about researching popular fandom at state and private archives like the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the Boston Athaeneum. When I did so, I was mis-using the sources in those places, which were collected and preserved as antiquities or aesthetic treasures, by elites who likely disapproved of the activities I was seeking to value. I should say that I was supported by a competitive fellowship at one of these institutions, so there was nothing really under-handed about doing fan research there, but at the same time, the institutionalized understanding of "history" that shapes research practices at such archives is not set up for a quirky, left-field mining of the collections.

In my case, none of the finding aids so carefully prepared by past curators and archivists were useful for locating materials related to music audiences, or listening, or passionate engagement. Instead, it was a matter of experimenting with lots of open-ended searching in diaries and ephemera. I also started systematically perusing sources catalogued for other histories (religious debates, women's diaries, military history, etc.) and then reading them for what those sources might lend to a study of music loving.

It seems to me that your use of fan letters is similar: you are looking at something that has always existed but has been ignored by researchers or whose meaning has been narrowly prescribed by institutionalized frameworks of interpretation. As you suggest, by taking such letters seriously as historical documentation, we can see (or to be more accurate about it, create) a different history of Ben-Hur's reception.

I do agree that my very focus on music lovers is a way to bring them into a musicology (and a culture) that has spent much time denigrating fan behavior and demoting practices of audiencing to secondary status. I seek to recover such behavior, quite simply, because it's missing, and I think our understanding of American musical life suffers in its absence.

Does that lead me to avoid anti-fans in the research? Not really. The more work I've done on the emergence of music loving, the more I've learned that the binary opposition of fan and anti-fan is itself historical, developing in from the sacralization of high culture and the disciplining of public spectatorship described by Lawrence Levine, John Kasson, and others. After the turn of the century, you are either high or popular, good or bad, etc. In the antebellum period, the valuing of different kinds of audience participation is far more variable and complicated. "Music loving" could be exercised as a focus on the space of the concert hall and a focus on the "work;" an outer enthusiasm, a kind of communal sociability, and/or an internal intensity; and a means for circumventing, embracing, or strategically using the increasingly rigid frameworks of commercial entertainment. Preferred and less-preferred kinds of engagement are sorted out on an institutional and cultural level between 1850 and 1880, but the process is messy and confusing.

I'm not sure that I could focus only on marked receptors, if I tried, because the people I'm investigating are clearly working through the process of "marking" in the first place. In fact, I found myself seeing what I initially thought was elitist and dismissive "anti-fandom" (insisting on reverent silence in the concert hall, for example) as a complexly unfolding reform of previously established behaviors of passionate engagement. There is no doubt that in the context of urbanization and immigration in the mid-19th century that such revisions had ideological consequences that reinforced growing class divisions; I am less certain, however, that the motivations of the particular people who argued for such revisions were uniformly and/or simply about class prejudice. As in Tramps Like Us, I am wrestling a bit with the seeming contradictions of macro- and micro- interpretative frameworks.

I do have my own strategies in writing, of course. Your separating out, in sidebars, of the text of Ben-Hur and your own relationship to Ben-Hur from the event of Ben Hur is necessary for uninformed readers but also highlights the politics involved in your analysis. In my case, I am consciously resisting any privileging of "the work" in my analysis. In part, that absence is meant to re-orient (or perhaps disorient!) my readers so that they can think about music outside of the common frame of composer/text/performance that is so incredibly entrenched in both the academic study of music (musicology has never really experienced a postmodern crisis of definition) and in the music industry.

I am intensely uninterested in working out the lineages of styles or performers that typically occupy music history; instead my focus is resolutely on an alternative history of audience behaviors. I did go out and find some recordings of the operas that music lovers mentioned in their diaries, but I see such texts as only part of the many details that make up the event of reception.

In fact, initially, I prefer NOT knowing what symphony or song is being referenced by an auditor or an artifact--it makes it easier to avoid the work and focus solely on reception behaviors. It allows me, for a brief moment, to explore audiencing in a more open-ended way before my own musicological knowledge and associations narrow my thinking. That suspension of knowing also gets me psychologically closer to the "newness" of musical works that music lovers themselves were experiencing. Maybe it's all pretend, but I find, at least, that experimenting with how I am positioned in my own processes of research and of writing can be worth while.

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Home-Made Hollywood: An Interview With Clive Young (Part Two)

What role have science fiction conventions played in fostering this amateur film
culture? Why has fan cinema been slower to emerge around other genres?

Science Fiction conventions are often run on a shoestring budget, so amateur films constitute free programming; at the same time, sci-fi fans are often attracted to technology-oriented hobbies--like filmmaking. Put them together and it's a tight fit. The modern pop culture and sci-fi conventions blossomed during the 1970s when 1960s sci-fi TV shows entered reruns, most famously Star Trek and Lost In Space. If you were a hobbyist filmmaker and you went to a convention, it was easy to see that a homemade sci-fi flick presenting new adventures of a beloved old franchise could find an appreciative audience at such an event. Likewise--and I'm hardly the first to suggest this--men bond by 'doing,' so a group of male sci-fi fans getting together to explore their fandom through a group activity like filmmaking makes sense. Additionally, since many guys collect memorabilia as an expression of their fandom, a fan production provides a convenient way to rationalize some purchases: "Yes, Honey, I spent $700 on a Stormtrooper costume--but it's for my fan film!"

What place does the female fan practice of "vidding" hold in your account of fan cinema?

To be honest, it's barely present in my book, which is not to imply that Vidding is insignificant. Rather, it's a very different art form, deserving its own in-depth exploration, such as the Vidding History project by the Organization of Transformative Works. I discussed Vids in passing a few times in the book, because to ignore them would be disingenuous; however, it would be presumptuous and insulting to that community for me as an outsider to attempt to tell Vidding's story.

The fan remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has generated much greater visibility than any other fan film in my memory. How typical is that production of fan filmmaking practice in general and what brought that film to such a high level of public consciousness?

There's a lot of elements at play when it comes to the (relative) success of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Primary among them is the fact that you can't see the film. Despite the fact that it has gained a high profile, it isn't readily available on the internet or home video; the only way to see it is to attend one of the scattered screenings held around the country each year by the filmmakers at non-profit cinemas and the like. By using the media to spread the word about the film--but not the film itself--the filmmakers have created a pent-up demand to see it...and fortunately, it is one of those rare cases where the movie actually beats audiences' expectations.

As far as fan filmmaking practice goes, the level of work that went into Raiders was unprecedented up to that point. For three pre-teens in the 1980s to spend seven years shooting a movie without any parental help is unusual enough; once you throw in the fact that they recreated all the major set-pieces of the original--Indiana Jones being chased by a boulder, getting dragged under a truck, fighting in a bar that's on fire, and so forth--it becomes astounding. Besides rooting for the kids--how are they going to pull off the next part?--I think many viewers relate to the film because everyone role-played as a child, whether it was "Cowboys & Indians," "Superheroes" or something else. These kids elevated that experience to the next level by videotaping it. At the same time, the sheer scope of what they achieved is inspiring--they had an impossible, idyllic dream as 11-year-olds and tenaciously made it happen, despite overwhelming odds. That's an experience anyone can get behind.

One of the things I talk about in Homemade Hollywood is how fan films are the offspring of scripted entertainment and Reality TV, and the Raiders adaptation is a great example of this, because you're seeing familiar scripted characters enacted by regular people in real-world settings without the perfect Hollywood sheen. When you see 13-year-old Chris Strompolos as Indy, trying to outrun a 100-lb. boulder made out of fiberglass or hanging off the front of a rolling truck, the look of terror on his face is undeniably real. It's a very analog, visceral experience to view the film and it sucks viewers in, because these days, that's something you often can't get from professional movies.

Ironically, Hollywood reacted to that analog, visceral experience by buying the life-rights to the filmmakers' story in a six-figure deal that made the front page of Variety. In a few years, you can expect to find a professional tribute movie about their amateur tribute movie about yet another movie at your local multiplex.

How has the web reshaped amateur film production, publicity, and distribution?

The web has certainly become the lifeline of the fan film community and has affected all the aspects you listed. Before the mid-Nineties mainstreaming of the internet, there were plenty of fan filmmakers out there, but they weren't aware of each other. In fact, the term "fan film" didn't exist because no one realized that this was a filmmaking movement instead of merely a few isolated movies mentioned in the back pages of enthusiast magazines like CineMagic.

In terms of production, sure, amateur filmmakers use the internet for obvious things like buying costumes or equipment (or, in some cases, pirating editing and effects software), but now they can build a virtual crew as well. For instance, the 2005 fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, was an ambitious, 40-minute effort covered by all the major news channels and downloaded over a million times in its first 48 hours on the web. Part of the appeal was its eye-popping special effects, which were created by a volunteer team of CGI enthusiasts around the world that used the web to recruit artists, exchange files and compile the finished effect shots.

The internet also provides varied levels of distribution, from simple YouTube clips to over-the-top efforts like Revelations, which was available in a variety of forms, from iPod-friendly MP4 files to a Bit Torrent package that that could be burned to DVD-Rs to create a two-disc set--one for the movie and one for the behind-the-scenes extras, naturally.

As for publicity, websites and the blogosphere are certainly the main forum for spreading the word about fan films today, because a simple link will get your work seen. I run a daily fan film blog called FanCinemaToday.com, and I get everything from illiterate emails ("Dude, U rite on my movie?") to professional-quality digital press kits. No press junkets or swag yet, but I can dream (just kidding). Like the films themselves, the publicity efforts range all over the map.

You describe a number of cases where studios have struggled with how to respond to fan films produced about their franchises. What factors have shaped their decisions in regard to fan cinema? How would you characterize the current perceptions in Hollywood towards fan films?

Hollywood has been fairly alarmed by them--and with good reason. While I'm an advocate of fan filmmaking, I think the studios are right to be concerned. If you owned a sleek Maserati and the 12-year-old next door took it for a joyride, you'd be furious even if it came through without a scratch. That's something like what's going on with the studios, because amateurs are basically hijacking these billion-dollar franchises and doing whatever they want with them.

Now, to be fair, 99.9 percent of all fan films are tributes in some form or another, they pose no real monetary threat to a studio's franchise and they don't impact the public consciousness when you compare the number of people who saw The Dark Knight last summer to 6,000 people watching Batman's Bad Day on YouTube. Studios realize this and I think that fuels the current take on such flicks--that they're relatively harmless. At the same time, going after fan filmmakers with IP lawsuits would be a waste of resources because they'd cost more than could be won, plus they'd be a PR nightmare similar to the travails that Warner Brothers experienced when it tried to shut down Harry Potter websites a few years ago.

On the other hand, the current state of things where most studios are looking the other way is going to end sooner or later. To make up an example, let's say you make a $20,000 fan film where Superman goes crazy because of Kryptonite and starts graphically killing babies with his X-ray vision. If it's a well-made film that grabs the eye of a cable news pundit on a slow news day, that could blow up into a serious problem and potentially damage the franchise.

A more likely scenario, however, is that studios will get involved with fan films simply because there's money to be made, whether it's through some form of licensing out characters to the filmmakers, or making the best flicks available on a studio-sanctioned X-Box channel for a buck apiece, or something else entirely.

Lucasfilm has taken an interesting approach to dealing with fan films with its annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. The contest is used to reach out to the fanbase, it appears to show fans great largesse because George Lucas is "allowing" them to make fan tribute movies, and yet it gives Lucasfilm indirect control over what material goes into such flicks, because if you're going to go through all the effort to make a Star Wars fan film, why wouldn't you follow the content guidelines so that you could enter it in the contest?

As you note, far fewer women than men have been involved in the production of
original fan films. Why do you think this pattern has emerged and are there
signs that more women are producing fan movies now than in previous decades?

There are lots of theories about this out there--for instance, that women are more interested in characters' internal lives--an aspect more easily explored through fan fiction--or the comment earlier that guys bond by 'doing' so they gravitate toward a group activity like film production.

I think one overlooked aspect is sheer momentum. Fan fiction took off in the 1960s and 70s with zines and quickly became an outlet for female fans. I suspect that since then, women looking to create new stories for a favorite franchise have looked at the fanfic community and said "That's where my peers are; I guess I'm going in that direction." It's self-perpetuating at this point.

Of course, I'm not a female fan filmmaker and never will be, so I can't speak from a place of authority. As a result, in Homemade Hollywood, I spent a chapter interviewing women filmmakers and a number of them spoke of women being uncomfortable with being in charge. One filmmaker who teaches film to girls noted that the idea of being a director never occurred to her students and when she suggested it, they couldn't envision themselves in that position at all.

With all that in mind, I don't see the current male-to-female amateur filmmaker ratio changing anytime soon. One thing I would like to see is more collaboration between the fanfic and fan film communities. Most fan films would benefit from better characterization and more fully rounded stories; who better to write them than fanfic authors? It's happened in a few cases--most noticeably the aforementioned Star Wars: Revelations--and I think both sides of the equation could benefit from it.

In the case of Star Trek, we are seeing increased collaboration between fans and some of those involved in the commercial franchise itself, including actors, script writers, and technicians. What are the implications of this kind of collaboration for the future of fan cinema?

There are a number of high-profile fan efforts with sophisticated production values now, most noticeably Star Trek: Phase II, a fan series which sports a $100,000 Enterprise bridge set. They've been known to feature Trek alumni such as George Takei ("Sulu") and Walter Koenig ("Checkov") recreating their original roles, and have had original series writers script and sometimes direct their episodes

Quasi-pro efforts like Phase IIdo point the way towards a number of possibilities for fan films in the future beyond obvious things, such as that they may prove to be a "farm league" for tomorrow's professional casts and crews. For instance, fan productions may wind up being used by Hollywood to see if the time is right to bring back a shuttered franchise. Similarly, analyzing fan films based on properties that are still up-and-running may provide insight into what aspects resonate most with die-hard fans. Alternately, if fan films show a trend of including a specific characteristic not in the original--for example, many Star Trek fan films pointedly feature gay characters--they may provide insight into what would realign a troubled franchise with its fanbase.

And as noted before, studios are likely to eventually get involved with fan filmmakers simply because there's money being left on the table under the current arrangement of pretending they're not there. If fans are going to make an amateur production based on your IP, why not sell them a specialized set of rights, props, costumes, digital filmmaking "toolkits" customized to the franchise with trademark sounds, music and "greenscreenable" effects, and rent them space on a special website just for "official fan productions" based on your franchise? Once there are enough decent flicks, they can be repackaged as a TV special, a DVD, or some other product. There's a lot of way studios and fans can work together in a symbiotic fashion that would benefit all parties.

Getting into bed with the studios works for fan films primarily because most filmmakers in the hobby daydream of breaking into Hollywood; such a model would be far less successful if applied to other media like fan fiction, where similar efforts have failed.

Also, another concern is that high-end, high-profile fan productions are a lot of fun to watch, but they can be intimidating to potential fan filmmakers--"Why should I bother if that's what a fan film is supposed to be? I can't do that." Phase II, in particular, is far removed from the underground, "punk rock" aesthetic that has powered so many fan efforts throughout the years.

Ironically, that sheen of perfection is exactly what Hardware Wars parodied back in the 1970s, showing that a fan production didn't have to be perfect--much less made with professional help--to be enjoyable. Perhaps things are coming full-circle and we need a new low-rent flick like Hardware Wars to burst that bubble again. Who knows?

Clive Young is an author/lecturer covering the crossroads between high tech and popular culture. He is the author of the first book about fan films, Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera (Continuum, 2008). He is also senior editor for Pro Sound News and has written for MTV, VH1.com, American Songwriter and numerous other outlets; additionally, he is the author of Crank It Up, an exploration into the world of rock concert roadies. Young has lectured extensively on film and music at many universities, libraries and conventions, and lives in New York with his wife and daughter. Visit his website,
www.cliveyoung.com, and his daily fan film blog, www.fancinematoday.com

Locating Fair Use in the Space Between Fandom and the Art World (Part One)

Earlier this year, I received the following account of the experiences of Stacia Yeapanis, a young artist who straddles the art world and fandom: she produces videos which appropriate footage from popular television shows for the purposes of critical commentary and artworks which use as fannish television shows or deploys The Sims game world as their raw materials.

Her videos, produced for art installations, very much resemble those produced by female fan vidders. As an experiment, she posted one of her vids on YouTube to see how people would respond and as a consequence, she found herself confronting the mechanisms by which corporate media regulates the production and circulation of participatory culture.

I found that her story raised important issues which I wanted to focus attention on through this blog. It came at a time when organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been raising concerns about YouTube policies to police content which push well beyond established norms in copyright protection and erode Fair Use rights of contributors. The EFF's Fred Von Lohmann posted some important critiques of YouTube's new practices in early February, including some recommendations which would have a big impact on the vidding world: "YouTube should fix the Content ID system. Now. The system should not remove videos unless there is a match between the video and audio tracks of a submitted fingerprint." While I have sometimes been critical of the EFF for adopting stances which undercut the Fair Use rights of fans, this time they are defending the rights of anyone to make transformative use of media content via videos.

Today, I am sharing her story and her video. On Friday, I will be sharing response to the stories from others who have been on the front lines of the struggles over fair use and grassroots expression. I'm hoping this will spark some further discussions in fandom, in the art world, and in the circles that shaping intellectual property law.

"Confessions of an Aca-Arta-Femi-Fan"
By Stacia Yeapanis

On December 1st, 2008, I received a takedown notice from YouTube in reference to my first fanvid "We Have a Right to Be Angry." Fox Broadcasting had blocked the video using an automated video ID system that identifies copyrighted content. After much anxiety, I removed my video on December 5th.

In "We Have a Right to be Angry" I appropriate footage from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Charmed. It is edited to "Invincible" sung by Pat Benatar. By uniting the fictional feminist icons of my adult life, Buffy, Xena, and the Halliwell sisters, with a real-life feminist icon from my childhood, Pat Benatar, I explore my own complicated position as a feminist in contemporary society. The women in the video vacillate between running, lying low, and fighting back. As these women from different TV shows pass a sword around, they share collective power that extends beyond the boundaries of their fictional universes. They are fighting cultural patriarchy on its own terms and they are doing it together.

During the 5 days between getting the notice and removing the video, I was extremely conflicted about what to do. As an appropriation artist, I already had a basic understanding of copyright law, and I believe my video falls under fair use. But I was only vaguely aware of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the takedown notice procedures. For example, YouTube did inform me that I had the option to dispute Fox's claim, but I didn't know how long I had to make this decision. If I took too long to consult an attorney, could the situation escalate to an official Cease and Desist letter? If I disputed based on the doctrine of fair use, would Fox back down or take me to court?

I watched my own fanvid over and over again. It seemed to have the answers. In light of the takedown notice, a new meaning that was floating beneath the surface emerged for me. The video was always about the struggle of any feminized (read: marginalized or disadvantaged) group. It was about aggression and injustice. It was about collective power that takes place on many fronts. But now it is also a metaphor for the struggle over meaning between producers and consumers. Mass media corporations are clinging to rigid ways of thinking about who controls meaning and how meaning is made. The feminist icons in my video are now also fighting outdated copyright laws that have begun to prevent the free flow of culture. Their swords are metaphors for fair use. I felt that if I didn't dispute, I would be letting Buffy and the others down. I wanted to fight with them.

At the same time I also began to worry about the difference between theory and practice. Theoretically, fanvids fall under fair use. Most legal scholars who are writing about fanvids in law reviews come to this conclusion, at least where the video is concerned. I would argue that even the uncut audio, which is more often assumed to be infringing, is transformed merely through juxtaposition with the video. But there don't seem to be any case precedents to this effect. Theoretically, appropriation art also falls under fair use. But as we learned from Rogers vs. Koons, conceptual art that rests on a foundation of postmodern theory does not fare well in court. Understanding appropriation art, like fanvids, it isn't a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of having specialized information and understanding how context affects meaning. The Art World is a subculture that is as misunderstood by non-members as Fandom is.

In all of my research since the takedown notice, I have yet to find any discussion online about the shared interests of the Contemporary Art World, Media Fandom and Media Scholarship. Professional appropriation artists seem to have flown under the radar, except in cases when the artist begins to make a lot of money. The few cases I know of (Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince) have all involved appropriation of printed images and only Koons actually had his day in court. (He lost.) At this stage in my research, I'm not aware of any cases involving appropriation art that uses video or audio. The distribution of contemporary art seems to still have the invisibility that fanvid distribution used to have before the advent of the Internet.

I have this suspicion that if I just show my work inside the traditional gallery system, I will be safer from litigation. But if I want to reach across the boundaries of the art world and blur the line between mass-media culture and fine art by posting my work on YouTube, I better watch out. It's almost as if the law is barring me from pursuing hybridity. And that's really the foundation of my practice. My work is a synthesis of conceptual art, already a synthesis of cultural theory and art, and fandom. I'm responding to the ironic appropriation art of the '80s and '90s by adding my sincere Fandom into the mix in order to question cultural hierarchy (i.e. the idea that "high" culture is better or more important than "low" culture). If I can't appropriate, then I can't make my work.

I removed the video from YouTube with the intention of arming myself. It was clear I wasn't quite ready for the big battle against the Big Bad. I want to be part of the movement for reform of copyright law, but there are two problems. One is financial. I don't have any money to go to court. Even if I were to win the case, the costs alone could have a devastating effect on my life. I am an emerging conceptual artist. That means I don't really get paid to make artwork at this point in my career. And two, I'm not sure if I could win. I fear that my hybrid position as artist/ fan and the fact that my art practice rests on conceptual, not visual, strategies would be detrimental to my case and to the cause.

In the next 5 years, maybe this fear will seem absurd. Maybe by then, the law will have stretched itself to make room for the various cultural developments of the last 40 years, namely, postmodern theory and the destabilization of cultural hierarchy through appropriation art, fanvids and other forms of remix culture. In the meantime, it would be beneficial to have more conversation about the parallel development of appropriation in the Art World and in Fandom. It seems pretty significant that fanvids and appropriation art have been developing simultaneously since the '70s and yet their creators seem utterly unaware of each other. There needs to be a stronger acknowledgement of the overlap in the cultural work we are all doing as scholars, artists, fans and lawyers. We are all producers and consumers of our culture. We are all warriors, slayers and witches.

Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based emerging artist and a media fan. Using strategies of accumulation, collection, appropriation and juxtaposition, she explores the emotional, political, and philosophical significance of various forms of cultural participation. By creating hybrid works that employ the histories and languages of both "Low" Culture and "High" Culture, she reveals the cultural and personal spaces where these binaries overlap. Yeapanis currently uses embroidery, video and photography to explore how individuals create meaning from mass media products.

Going "Mad": Creating Fan Fiction 140 Characters at a Time

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it's not going away. We're your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we'll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don't treat us like criminals. -- WeAreSterlingCooper

This is a pretty good statement about the contradictions many fans are experiencing
as they try to interact with media producers in what we've been promised is a
new era of "interactive media". This was written by Bud Caddell, a strategist for
a New York based digital think-tank, Undercurrent, who is also a fan of the AMC
television drama, Mad Men, and "tweets" under the name of Bud Melman, a mailroom clerk at Sterling Cooper advertising. In short, he's an industry insider who is also a fan and someone who consults in advertising who in his spare time enjoys pretending to be a mail clerk at an advertising firm in the 1960s.

Got that? Good. Don't make me repeat myself.

Seriously, the fact that Caddell can be both an industry insider and a fan simply demonstrates the degree to which those lines are blurring from all sides in our contemporary convergence culture; the fact that his fantasies have something to do with his real world identity should also not be a shock to anyone who understands the
psycho-sociology of fandom. Some have argued that Caddell is not a "true
fan" because he's also a "marketer," but that's like saying one can't be both an academic and a fan at the same time. For the record, I'd also call myself a fan of Mad Men! We're all all multitudes within ourselves.

In his 'mundane' guise as Bud Caddell, media consultant, he's posted a fascinating account of how fan fiction emerged around Mad Man through the unlikely channel of Twitter and how this fandom, like so many others, faced legal challenge from the producers of the program they were hoping to help promote.

I am sure that I will lose cool points if I confess that the joys of Twitter have largely escaped me. Anyone who reads this blog knows that brevity is a virtue I do not possess and the idea of blogging at 140 characters at a time is not a hobby I plan to embrace anytime soon. I like to tell people that I am a marathon runner, not a sprinter, but the reality is I just don't know when to stop. But I've been following this story peripherally for a while and was glad to finally get a more detailed and systematic account of what happened. Caddell's account should be required reading for all fans and aca-fen but also for all brand executives and content producers.

As Caddell explains, sometime around the start of the second season of Mad Men, fans began to use the blog platform, Tumblr.com, to post a kind of advice
column, written in the voices of the program's characters, responding to questions from fans, capturing the twisted sexual and interpersonal politics of the early 1960s. Soon, some of these same fans migrated, in character, to Twitter. With a few days after Don Drapper (the ad man protagonist of the series) began tweeting, he had some 3000 subscribers to his update, and his Twitter feed was soon joined by others written by Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling, and a dozen or so other characters -- primary and secondary -- from the series.

We can think of these tweets as fan fiction in its most spared down form -- these tweets
represented attempts to get inside the heads (or inhabit the bodies) of fictional characters and see the represented events from their perspective. Francesca Coppa has made the provocative argument that fan fiction might be understood as much as a kind of theater performance as it is a prose genre. (See her essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet). So, lets think of what was going on here as a kind of performance art.

Initially, many assumed that the tweets were a new promotional device launched
by AMC and their digital advertising agency, Deep Focus. Deep Focus CEO
Ian Schaffer, after all, runs a blog which has enlightened things to say about social media and audience engagement around brands.

Caddell says that he himself initially believed the activity was a deft example of what brand guru Faris Yacob calls "transmedia planning" (Check out this blog post
where I account how the concept of "transmedia planning" has emerged in the brand realm in response to Convergence Culture's account of "transmedia storytelling.") Caddell created his own character, Bud Melman, so he could join the fun:

As an employee in the mailroom, he could have the curse and the good fortune of being invisible, which means I could tweet about what happened before or after the scene you saw on television.

Caddell, the industry insider became an unlikely fan advocate, when Twitter suspended the accounts of nine of the primary Mad Men characters, including Draper, Olson, and Joan Holloway, in response to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act "cease and
desist" notice from AMC's lawyers. Caddell created the website, WeAreSterlingCooper.com, (and the manifesto quoted above), in order to call attention
to this conflict between the fans and the network, not to mention to aggregate the various Mad Men feeds.

As an industry insider, Caddell notes, he was deeply confused by the industry's response to these practices. Mad Men's viewership had been declining sharply during the second season and there was every reason to think that these activities, small scale though they might be, were helping to generate fan interest and buzz again. The fans involved had offered to work with the series producers and promoters, seeking to better coordinate their efforts rather than creating brand confusion. As Caddell explains:

One element of entertainment and media that consumed me at the time as a marketer was the idea of what to offer fans to consume between commercial breaks, episodes and seasons. The twitter characters could provide other fans a way to play and interact between Sundays when the show aired. From a practical perspective, each single character by themselves was a novelty, but together they could weave an intricate web of conversations and events to follow.

Some sense of this potential was realized when Melman and some other fans staged a Twitter-based short story arc involving "a meeting at the Tom Tom Club for drinks and
shenanigans" just to show what could happen if they coordinated their efforts.
(Here, they start to sound more like the kinds of Role Play Game/Fan Fiction
writing activities that occurs in LiveJournalLand.)

So far, these overtures have had a chilly reception. Mark Deuze has suggested at
least two reasons why production companies get anxious around such activities:
the creative department's desire for creative control, the legal department's concerns about controlling copyright. Here, we can add a third: the promotional department's fears about losing control over their brand message. Of the three, the last is perhaps the most absurd, since in reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking "stuck up".

As Caddell writes as a fan in the report's conclusions:

AMC saw most of us as stealing something that was theirs. When in reality, we were expressing our affinity for the characters and the show.

Shifting perspectives and writing as an industry insider, he concludes:

We shouldn't threaten fans with legal notices and we shouldn't isolate them. We should cultivate the relationships we're either lucky or gift to have and help them with their expression of their fandom. Brands should offer as much content in as many types to its audiences with the hopes that they feel to compelled to rearrange them and add novel elements to tell their own stories. We fight to insert ourselves in the conversations of real people, and that is exactly what happened with the Mad Men characters on Twitter. If we cling to this sense that we are the sole owner of creative work, we'll continue to isolate that work from the actual world and the human beings we work to affect.

Fans have consistently raced out ahead of content producers and brand executives in their understanding of the potential of "transmedia entertainment." They are testing new tools, moving into new communities, embracing new forms. Rather than seeking to silence or control them, creative agencies need to observe, document, and where-ever possible, join the game. Caddell's dual status allows him to quickly translate what he's learned as a fan into what his industry needs to learn. I just hope some of them are ready to read and take notes.

Thanks to Joshua Green for calling this report to my attention. Green, a CMS postdoc, and Madeline "Flourish" Klink, a CMS grad student, are listed as consultants on the report.

Capturing Cosplay: The Photographs of Brian Berman (Part Two)

Editor's note: this is my last post for 2008. I will be back after the start of the new year.

Last time, I shared with you a series of photographs of Furry fans taken by Brian Berman and encouraged us to reflect a bit on what they show or fail to show us about this particular subcultural community. To me, these photographs speak to a core issue in fan studies: the question of how we position ourselves vis-a-vis the subjects of our research. Put in its broadest terms, we see different things and say different things if we are writing about a community which we are a member of than when we are dealing with that same community as an outsider.

Brian is very explicit in his artistic statement and in his bio that while he is fascinated by these fan communities, he looks at them as an outsider, a non-participant. This does not mean that his photographs are necessarily hostile to the communities being depicted, but they do, to some degree, hold these fans at a distance. This is the strength of the images in many ways, but it is also what may make them more than a little disturbing to some of us who claim a much closer set of social and emotional ties to fan communities.

By way of contrast, I thought we might look at some of the videos we've been producing about Cosplay for Project New Media Literacies's learning library project. These videos, filmed at an anime convention in Ohio, reflect a perspective much more sympathetic to the fan experience. Indeed, many of the students who worked with us on these videos were themselves anime fans and some of them had a long history of cosplay. Our goal was precisely to escape the outsider perspective of many commercial documentaries about fans, to treat cosplay as a normal and valued mode of cultural expression, and to hopefully introduce these practices to young people who may not have found their way into the cosplay community before.

These photographs were taken by Brian Berman at Onnafest, Newark Gateway Hilton, Newark, NJ 2005.

Anime Family

Chris

Mark and Holly

Rebekah as Avian Firefly

Patricia, Callie & Sonya

Brian Berman was born in New York City in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. After graduating from both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the School of Visual Arts in NYC he started shooting professionally in New York in 1996. He shoots for, and has been featured in, publications such as the New York Times, Esquire, Ojo de Pez, and Capricious Magazine. He has also been featured in shows at the Houston Photo Festival and Wallspace Gallery. The project featured here is part of larger project about how people fulfill a basic human need to fit in by creating their own subcultures. He does not watch anime or own a fursuit.

Letting the Fur Fly: The Photographs of Brian Berman (Part One)

A month or so ago, I got e-mail from Brian Berman, a photographer who often works with fannish subjects. Here's part of what Berman shared with me about the trajectory of his work:

Several years ago I was watching a television report about a group of men who get together once a year, show each other their vacuum cleaners, and then race the vacuums against each other to see who can pick up the most dirt. I was immediately riveted, for obvious reasons, and then rushed to contact the president of the club. I was convinced I had to photograph them. Two months later, while flying back from Los Angeles after having done the shoot, I knew I was on to something. Since then I have been to quite a few conventions/competitions (About fifteen or so). Some of the others include Taxidermy, Furry, Cosplay, Ventriloquism, Dog Disco etc. In the summer of 2007 I photographed at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the fall prior at Onnafest in Newark, N.J. These events are represented by the photos here. I really enjoyed these events and photographing the people that attend them.

The subculture that the participants created is extremely fascinating and something which I admire. It is as if it's their second family. It is an environment where people can create a new visions of themselves and find a place to fit in. At home they live their normal lives, and maybe they aren't happy with that, but at the furry convention they are a sexy tiger skunk or a vicious wolf. At a Cosplay convention they possess super hero powers. They can see through walls and leap over tall buildings. For the other 362 days of the year they exist anonymously on the periphery of their high school or at their jobs or within society in general. But, on that one weekend a year when the convention happens, they can be something completely different.

These photos act as a simple catalog of these unique events, the people that attend them and the worlds they have created.

Brian was willing to let me share these images with the readers of my blog.

I've struggled a lot with my own reactions to these images, which sometimes strike me as haunting, sometimes comic, sometimes highly sympathetic to the subjects and sometimes coldly distanced. I am very much reminded of the work of Diane Arbus, who similarly adopted an almost clinical gaze upon subjects who are often considered "freaks" or "outcasts." Arbus's work continues to evoke controversy because it is often hard to tell what she feels towards the people she photographs, but the very nature of being photographed by Arbus pushes these people from the fringes of society towards greater visibility. Arbus's photographs invite us to take a second look and in some cases, to see ourselves in people who otherwise would not garner that attention.

My sense is that Berman's photographs will spark debates among aca-fen and I see that debate as potentially very productive. Technically, these photographs are beautifully constructed and each one shows us a distinctive human personality underneath the costumes. Does the objective gaze of the camera necessarily leave us trapped outside or is it possible for us to see some of ourselves in these people? Do these images estrange us from these Furries (featured today) or Cosplayers (featured next time)? Or do they allow us to recognize the creativity and craftsmanship of their work, the ways that they draw together personal mythology to move beyond the more mundane aspects of their everyday lives? What do you see when you look at these images?

Today's images were taken at Anthrocon 2006 in Pittsburgh Convention Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dehner and Tank

Firehopper

Fisk Black and Shane LaFleur

Phoenix D

Smash

Zig Zag

Lucy

Lucky Dog

Moonshadow Luna

Silk Paws

Brian Berman was born in New York City in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. After graduating from both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the School of Visual Arts in NYC he started shooting professionally in New York in 1996. He shoots for, and has been featured in, publications such as the New York Times, Esquire, Ojo de Pez, and Capricious Magazine. He has also been featured in shows at the Houston Photo Festival and Wallspace Gallery. The project featured here is part of larger project about how people fulfill a basic human need to fit in by creating their own subcultures. He does not watch anime or own a fursuit.

From Neil Gaiman to J. Michael Straczynski: News on the Julius Schwartz Lecture Series

Late last spring, we held the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of Julius Schwartz Memorial Lectures at MIT. Schwartz had been a founding figure in science fiction fandom and a influential editor at DC comics who was a key influence on the so-called Silver Age of American comics and on genre entertainment more generally. When he passed away, some of his friends put together seed money for us to start a series of public talks by key figures in the space of comics, science fiction, and genre entertainment.

Our first speaker, appropriately enough, was Neil Gaiman, whose work spans comics (The Sandman), fiction (American Gods), cinema (Mirrormask), television (Neverwhere), the blogosphere, and much much more. Gaiman gave a memorable opening lecture on the nature of genre and its influence on the creative process, which is best known for an extended rift on how pornography and musicals follow similar conventions. It was inspired by Linda Williams' Hard Core, but Gaiman took it in his own idiosyncratic directions. As the evening continued, we had a great conversation, which ranged across his career, talked about some of the key themes in his work, and especially dug deep into his ideas about myth, storytelling, and popular entertainment. Anyone whose ever heard Gaiman knows he's a charming and engaging speaker with lots of interesting insights into cultural history and media theory.

In this excerpt from the event, Gaiman talks about his "pulp roots" and his ongoing relationship to genre entertainment