This text is copyright 2001 by Julie Levin Russo, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
cyborg sex in public, fan fiction on-line, and a fantasy of political
consumption
by Julie Levin Russo (ejulie@brown.edu)
11.01



	The "Just Between..." series by G. L. Dartt  is an extremely popular and
monstrously long serialized lesbian romance found on-line at
www.northco.net/~janeway/.  After three years in progress, it has finally
topped out at 50 chapters, each approaching novella length, and according to
web counters, it was typical for each new installment to have logged several
thousand readers within a few weeks of posting.  The erotic couple that is the
focus of these stories is not the average fare of sexually explicit fiction,
however: the heroines are Captain Kathryn Janeway and the cybernetically
enhanced Seven of Nine from the television show Star Trek: Voyager.  In the
first chapter, "Just Between Us," Janeway is struggling with her attraction to
Seven, which she believes is incompatible with her duty to her ship and crew, a
moral code which has kept her celibate for five years.  Meanwhile, Seven is
"researching" a sexuality that is new and strange to her, as she spent most of
her life as a drone of the malevolent aliens called the Borg.  They are
perplexed and curious about lesbianism, which is something of a foreign concept
to both of them.  Seven decides that the appropriate course of action is to
show up naked in Janeway's bed, spread out in all her cyborg glory: 


The blonde hair had been loosened from the tight bun the Borg customarily wore,
flung across the pillow like the finest gold.  The soft grey of her abdominal
implant framed the bottom of her full breasts, before spreading across her flat
stomach and around her back, an offshoot tracking partway down the left leg
which, together with its elegant partner, seemed to run on forever.


After a short debate in which bodily desire wins out over propriety, the two
women make love for the first time, spurred on by Seven's naive pick up line:
"'Captain,' Seven said huskily when Janeway finally ended the kiss.  'I wish to
engage in non-reproductive copulation with you.'"  
	This narrative is part of a tradition called fan fiction: amateur stories
about characters lifted from television, movies, or other mass media.  Fan
fiction has existed within organized fan communities for at least 30 years,[1]
and continues to grow in popularity.  But it is still a phenomenon that most
people may never have heard of, and at first glance it may seem bizarre,
laughably obsessive, inartistic, or highly marginal.  On the other hand, fan
fiction has attracted academic attention since the 1980's: theorists have
argued that it is an active mode of reception that challenges the culture
industry's domination of popular meanings and mythologies.  Fan writers
themselves may approach their work with any combination of seriousness or
self-mockery, salaciousness or radicalism.  Putting these various perspectives
aside for the moment, and examining only the brief example I cited above, fan
fiction seems to be a site where a number of complex discourses intersect at an
erotic crossroads: 


*  the boundaries between human and machine bodies and minds
*  the place of sexuality in a woman's public professional life
*  the status of "lesbian" as an identity category or practice
*  the virulent controls placed on sexuality by a patriarchy structured around
reproduction 
*  the taboo against an embodied erotics in much of mass media
*  the prospect that any text (even a corporately owned one) can remain safely
contained within authorial borders
*  the economic system of exchange (fan fiction on the internet is freely
available)
*  the distinction between a consumer of culture and a producer of it


That is, I would first like to make a case for the fact that fan fiction is
meaningful, as well as cool and fun and weird: the very idea that people would
spend time and energy writing stories about TV characters, much less that these
stories are so involved and interesting, that they have lots of sex in them,
that they have communities built around them--these things are surprising.  It
is important to cultivate an academic approach to fan fiction that does justice
at some level to fan fiction's strangeness, which is part of its interest and
excitement.
	I first embarked on this project because I discovered a disjuncture between
my own experience of fan fiction (which has so delightfully captivated both my
intellect and my libido) and the critical consensus about it, which seemed
stilted in comparison.  In this paper, I present a gloss of the methodological
origins of audience studies, and of well known academic work on fan fiction
within this tradition, including a closer reading of the book Textual Poachers,
by Henry <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a>.  I argue that conventional perspectives on fan fiction are
limited, first of all, because extreme and rapid changes in fan fiction
production and distribution facilitated by the internet make their demographic
basis obsolete.  More importantly, this work demonstrates the limitations of
conventional reception theory, which understands popular audiences as active
readers who appropriate materials from mass culture in the process of making
meanings that fulfill their own needs and desires.  By theorizing reception in
isolation, this paradigm tacitly models production and consumption as discrete
moments, ultimately implying that the audience is free to read rebelliously but
helplessly denied access to the mechanisms of cultural production.  While I
don't mean to ignore the very real economic and social dominance of the mass
media industry, I do believe it is politically important to interrogate how
mass media consumers and their resistant meanings may be participating in
hegemonic power struggles.  In order to ask these questions, it is necessary to
turn to new methodologies for the study of reception which postulate
realistically intricate and expansive connections between the site of
production and the site of consumption, which acknowledge that the two modes
are in play simultaneously, and are composed of and connected by a diffuse web
of practices that have both material and ideological components. 
	Addressing myself to these problems, I go on to convene an alternative
framework for understanding the relationship of fan fiction to mass media
production, one based in critical theory.  I turn to two specific moments in
feminist and queer theory, Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" and Berlant and
Warner's "Sex in Public," to allow for more complex and imaginative ways in
which fan fiction (re)structures consumption, and to suggest how these
mutations are intimately bound up with progressive changes in other discourses
(such as sexuality).  I emphasize the models these theorists provide for
understanding the magnitude of current cultural transformations, and for
recognizing the opportunities that are consequently appearing to undermine and
recast modern oppressions.  The cyborg is a metaphoric figure for resistance
from within terrifying new dominations; public sex is a challenge to the most
intimate foundations of patriarchal capitalism.  Put together they make cyborg
sex: non-sexual reproduction plus non-reproductive sex equals a potentially
powerful fantasy of a site for political resistance and change.  
	I subsequently use this formulation to help generate an original analysis
of what is strange and exciting about fan fiction, treating first the specific
case of erotic stories about the aforementioned Captain Janeway and Seven of
Nine.  Through a close reading of the story "Freeing Kathryn," by Paulann
Hughes, I argue that J/7 smut wrestles with both queer sexual modes and the
boundaries of the human, merging these two post-reproductive sites into a
single erotic narrative.  This story illustrates the fact that mass culture is
hegemonic, and as such it is not an ideological monolith: its meanings are
constantly contested in a dynamic dialogue with their resistant or marginal
counterparts.  What is most interesting about J/7 fiction, then, is what its
textual tendencies can tell us about the complex conversations that take place
between consumers and the mass media outside the expected boundaries of
television, and in particular about the relationship of these texts to the
technologies and communities that provide relatively independent environments
for fan interpretations.
	Finally, I discuss fan fiction production, distribution, and containment
more generally.  Beginning from the conviction that it is vital to consider
reception in terms of both its immediate environment and its potential social
consequences, I argue that fan fiction illustrates (in its narratives and
especially in its circumstances) new and provocative challenges to cultural
dominations.  These challenges are centered in the internet and the ways its
technologies are reorganizing relations of power, but they incorporate
titillating questions about sex, identity, corporeality, privacy, and
ownership.  That is, I am actually using fan fiction as an example.  I am
primarily interested in proposing methodological alternatives to conventional
reception studies, with the objective of providing a framework for how to see
(how to imagine, even) what kinds of tactics consumers exercise that have the
potential to reshape our culture.  Fan fiction provides an especially concrete
embodiment of the creative processes that are associated with reception, and
its recent evolution is intimately knit with the transformations that new forms
of technology and communications are generating in our lives.  It is only a
tiny corner of a vast movement, but as such it can serve as a fruitful
illustration of what new possibilities are opening up.  I acknowledge that fan
fiction is not inherently subversive, and it is not going to change the world
all by itself, but it demonstrates in microcosm an array of hotly contested
struggles in which the winners have yet to be declared.

	 

Infinite Perversity in Infinite Combinations [2]


	In my politics, it is important to ask of subcultural phenomena not only
how and why they arise and what their internal operations are, but also what
changes they may precipitate, in turn, in the mainstream ideologies and
conditions they spring out of.  I have not yet come across an effective model
in cultural studies for theorizing when and how popular resistance has the
power to reshape society, and when it is successfully contained by a stable
hegemony--often the discipline simply assumes that any space for expressing
alternative meanings is subversive.  This does not mean, however, that it is
time to give up on this question, which is a vital link between academic
discourse and political struggles.  
	In the field of audience studies, there has been a shift from seeing
popular audiences as passive receptors of the hypnotizing messages of mass
culture, to understanding them as active meaning-makers who interpret media
texts in diverse and unpredictable ways according to their own imperatives. 
The latter framework, widely considered to be progressive, nevertheless focuses
on the one-way street from production to consumption, and still begs the
question of how mass media reception influences production and the power
relations that sustain it--the question that activates a political reading.[3] 
That is, reception is generally theorized in isolation, as a moment discrete
from and in opposition to cultural production.  This implies (perhaps
inadvertently) that, although the audience can read the material handed down
from on high in resistant ways, this process doesn't give them any access to or
have any effect on the mechanisms of this production.  While I concede that the
mass media industry is insulated in real and important ways from direct
intervention by its audiences, I do think it is important to contemplate
reception from within a more complex, more imaginative model of the
production/consumption system.  The two modes are composed of and connected by
a diffuse web of practices that have both material and ideological components,
breeding an environment in which seemingly distant operations may have
reciprocal effects.  Consumer and producer are contingent positions that
different people or groups may occupy at different times, or even
simultaneously, and sometimes it is difficult to distinguish one from the
other.
	Scholarship on fan fiction tends to fall broadly within the tradition of
reception studies that I object to here.[4]  Particular interest has been given
to a sub-category called "slash": stories that depict or presume a romantic
and/or sexual relationship between two characters of the same gender.  Slash
always has been (and remains) a substantial genre of fan fiction; it takes its
name from the mark in the code for early Kirk-Spock romances in the Star Trek
tradition (K/S).[5]  Traditionally, almost all slash was about male couples,
and was written by straight women.  Academics have often focused on exploring
and interpreting this fascinating demographic quirk.[6]  I would like to
advance two reasons why it is time to reapproach the study of fan fiction from
a new direction.  
	First, and most literally, the internet boom has made possible remarkable
transformations in the production and distribution of fan fiction, and slash is
now being written and read by a diverse cross section of the on-line
population.  Until a few years ago (perhaps five), fan fiction was primarily
distributed in fan-produced zines.[7]  Fan conventions were the main place
where people could find out about and subscribe to zines, as well as network
with other fans around their creative work.  Although there was considerable
enthusiasm and activity around fan fiction among die-hard fans, it was mostly
contained within their relatively marginal subcultures.  With the rapid
popularization of the internet, however, fan fiction underwent a striking
evolution.  Whereas its ties to conventions and formalized zines had previously
kept its distribution fairly circumscribed, as the internet expanded fan
fiction became much more freely accessible.  There was an explosion in the
number of readers and writers, and in the volume and diversity of stories
produced (which included an unprecedented abundance of lesbian slash).  Fan
fiction began to go on-line in the early days of usenet groups, and continues
to thrive in the dynamic and passionate cyber-communities of newsgroups, email
lists, and chat forums.  There are also huge numbers of personal and archival
web pages, as well as organizational structures like web rings.  Although some
print zines still exist, the majority of fan fiction is now produced and
distributed in cyberspace.  The web is changing the tenor of fan communities,
increasing the popularity of fanfic and its recognition by mainstream culture,
creating new tensions in the relationship between fans and the culture
industry, and demanding new approaches to fandom from academics.  Work based on
the demographic dominance of middle-class white women in fan fiction circles,
while still historically interesting, is now factually obsolete.[8]
	My second and more complex departure is a methodological one.  Reception
researchers originally turned away from the critical traditions that were the
purview of literary theory (and then cultural studies) because they found
theoretical models to be too abstract and streamlined to reflect the
complexities of lived relations.  For example, David Morley writes that "the
'speculative' approach...in which the theorist simply attempts to imagine the
possible implications of spectator positioning by the text...can, at times,
lead to inappropriate 'universalizations' of analysis which turn out to be
premised on particular assumptions" (25).  To rectify this problem, scholars
(beginning with Morley) widely incorporated a social science standard:
ethnography.  Ethnography is seen to have several main advantages (in contrast
to theory): it prevents the researcher from making things up about audiences by
theorizing in the abstract, and creates the possibility that s/he could "be
surprised" by the data collected; and it provides a way of linking the textual
moment of reception to "a more historicized insight into the ways in which
'audience activity' is related to social and political structures and
processes" (Ang 101) through the researcher's acts of interpretation.  I will
argue that ethnographically influenced work also has serious limitations which
make the categorical rejection of theory unduly extravagant.  Ethnography's
focus on the descriptive, the demonstrable, the representative, and the
concrete closes off intellectual inquiry to the imaginative power to perceive
connections that are not directly observable, but nonetheless culturally
central.  In particular, it is extremely difficult within this model to ask
questions about how the activities of fans may influence and even reshape the
dynamic relations of power which organize our society--that is, political
questions.
	At least, to a typical reception theorist, doing "political" scholarship
seems to mean describing the relations of power (e.g. gender, race, class) that
provide the context for and shape audience activity, rather than exploring the
political influence that audience's acts of reception themselves might command.
 Take, as a specific example of the limitations I've argued for in general
terms, the book Textual Poachers by Henry <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a>, the most authoritative and
most theoretical study of fan fiction and culture to date.  In Textual
Poachers, <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> makes some of the seminal claims about fan fiction: arguing
against popular and academic "stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social
misfits, and mindless consumers," he proposes that "fans actively assert their
mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their
own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions.  In the
process...they become active participants in the construction and circulation
of textual meanings" (23-24).  This formulation goes one step beyond
understanding popular reception only as resistant reading--<a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> allows that
fan writers are producers (in some sense) of culture.  This framework draws on
Michel de Certeau's "poaching" metaphor, which conceptualizes reading not as
the passive absorption of authorial meaning passed down from positions of
dominance, but as "an ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for
control over its meanings" (24).  But de Certeau's model theorizes only "ways
that the subordinate classes elude or escape institutional control" (26), and
pessimistically disregards the possibility that their tactics might have any
effect on these dominant institutions--readers are poachers, not guerrillas. 
<a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> agrees that "fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and
social weakness...lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural
production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence the
entertainment industry's decisions" (26).  
	This rather abrupt halt in the optimistic flow of <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a>'s ideas exposes
some of the contradictions in his account: if readers (not to mention fan
writers) can produce meaning, but it is still only members of the culture
industry who have power as Producers, there is some confusion over what exactly
production is, or at least how it should be evaluated.  That is, it is not
clear whether he wants to ultimately adhere to economic definitions of
consumption and production that privilege the commercial, or whether he is
proposing that fan activities could radically redefine these terms: this is a
theoretical question he avoids wrestling with by remaining primarily in the
realm of the descriptive.  <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> does strongly emphasize that "Fandom
constitutes a base for consumer activism" (278), but he understands this only
in its most narrowly literal formulation, as bids by television fans to
influence programming decisions.[9]  By leaving no route open to theorize fans'
interactions with the deeper underpinnings of the systems of cultural
production, <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> is effectively constructing reception as a process whose
effects are contained within the fan community.[10]  Although he lays an
important critical foundation for an understanding of fan fiction, he ends up
(in contrast to the usual spin on his work) painting a very disempowering
picture of the mass media consumer.  Disempowering in that it is extremely
difficult, if you accept the terms of his analysis, to ask questions about the
impact that fans' textual work might have within the network of social and
economic relations that generate the media in the first place.
	Theoretical traditions can provide an invaluable methodological foundation
for work which allows for and is enriched by the meanings and relations
imaginable beyond fan fiction's literal and observable features.  I am
certainly indebted, in my work, to claims that critics like <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> have made:
by arguing that fan fiction is a powerfully productive site of resistant
expression, they lay the groundwork for a political reading, and I take up
their analytic structure of examining the discursive attributes of fan texts
and the contexts of their production and distribution in relation to each
other.  But in my view, postulating realistically complex and expansive
connections between the site of production and the site of consumption is a
necessary precursor to completing the circuit of reception: that is, to
interrogating how the resistant meanings that can be a by-product of mass media
consumption may or may not contribute to political change.
	In the story I described at the beginning of this paper there was an actual
cyborg (Seven of Nine), nesting within the bodily and social transformations of
cyberculture.  The obvious connection is to Donna Haraway's classic feminist
essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985).  Haraway's work has since been extended by a
generation of theorists, but I would like to interface directly with the
seminal moment her essay represents, for several reasons: I like the idea of
putting the dynamics of the present into dialogue with past prescience, and I
find a model in Haraway's figurative treatment of the cyborg for how to speak
literally and metaphorically at the same time.  But in particular, this essay
is important in offering the suggestion that the same transmutations,
fragmentations, and systematizations that enable terrifying new dominations
simultaneously give rise to the most fertile ground for its subversion, that
one can be within ideologies (as one always is) and still not reproduce them. 
Haraway theorizes that we are on the cusp of a global social transformation
with as great a significance as the industrial revolution.  This is the shift
from what she calls "hierarchical dominations" to an "informatics of
domination," a technological culture which breaks down the stable boundaries
which formerly constituted the "human" until "Any objects or persons can be
reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no 'natural'
architectures constrain system design" (283).  In her view, any effective
politics must not only address itself to science and technology, but
appropriate this new domain's positionalities and tactics.  To this end, she
imagines the figure of the cyborg as an embodiment of this internal site of
resistance.  Exactly what a cyborg is remains in the realm of speculation, but
it is certainly a being that destabilizes all the traditional boundaries of
meaning (organic/technological, material/fictional, public/private,
male/female), and takes pleasure in this unresolved state of undefinition and
contradiction; a being without origin or end or physical form; a being that
recognizes the inseparability of ideologies and social realities; a being of
uncomfortably close and productive couplings and of radical play. 
	Unlike Seven of Nine in the fan story, however, one thing Haraway's
(metaphorical, disembodied, indeterminate) cyborg doesn't do very well is have
sex.  In her formulation, part of the frightening and subversive promise of the
cyborg is the transformation of "sex" into "genetic engineering" (282),
replication, non- (or post-) sexual reproduction.  She tacitly recognizes the
germ of social change in this demystifying shift: "Sexual reproduction is one
kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function
of the system environment.  Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer
reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural
objects like organisms and families" (282).  What she fails to see is that by
envisioning only non sexual reproduction as an alternative to sexual
reproduction, she collapses sex into reproduction (a move reminiscent of the
very ideology she criticizes), and leaves out half the picture--namely, the
possibility of non-reproductive sex.  What is missing is a true cyborg sex,
that would bring together both replication and bodily pleasure in a way that
could fatally compromise the allure of patriarchal reproductive sexuality.
	By visualizing new, non-reproductive modes of sexuality, the work of
Berlant and Warner can contribute the other half of this formulation.  For
them, (queer) sexual counterpublics are the privileged site of resistance to
hierarchical (pre-cyborg) dominations (e.g. racial, economic, gender
oppressions), because these dominations are founded in large part on the
constructed private space of heterosexual intimacy.  They explain that a
necessary part of the transition to modernity (in particular, to capitalism)
was the fabrication of an idea of personhood which depended upon a bounded
domestic realm where autonomous subjects could be created.  Sex was privatized
(made a personal, private part of identity) so that it could, as supposedly the
most intimate relation of all, provide a nucleus for this zone insulated from
public instability and upheaval.  A vast array of everyday social practices
endow the idea of the heterosexual couple with a "sense of rightness" called
"heteronormativity," a tacit domination that is dispersed throughout culture,
and which preserves the ideological functions of privatized sex.  Understanding
personhood and national belonging as conditions with their source in private
heterosexual domesticity also makes it possible to gloss over the way citizens
are implicated in national systems of injustice.  But the shield of privacy
with which sex seems so naturally to be protected is in fact completely
illusory: intimacy has always been publicly mediated, both because it can be
defined only in opposition to the economy and the state, and because it seems
to require constant legislative interventions to maintain its integrity.  
	Berlant and Warner argue that the potential to change our social system
lies in freeing sex and intimacy from their "obnoxiously cramped" position as
the linchpin of economic and cultural dominations.  Turning to queer sexual
subcultures that already exist as their model for how to generate other sexual
possibilities, they point out that "Making a queer world has required the
development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic
space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation" (362). 
By "public" sex, Berlant and Warner mean not so much sex that is out in the
open as sexual relationships that don't pretend they have no connection to any
social context, that can be a foundation for new communities that may then
become dissenting political bodies, "public in the sense of accessible,
available to memory, and sustained through collective activity" (364).  The
conversation between this strategy of resistance and Haraway's cyborg metaphor
offers a vision of a fully transgressive cyborg sex, which combines a public
erotics (non-reproductive sex) with futuristic boundary subversions like
replication (non-sexual reproduction) into a compelling threat to the
ideological stability of patriarchal capitalism.  This imaginative model of a
site for political agitation offers a structural response to the
interpenetration of an extensive network of different dominations.  As such, it
provides one ground from which to begin to ask questions about how the
resistant meanings encoded in fan-written texts, as well as their modes of
production and distribution, are engaged in shaping larger political realities.
	There is a lot of obvious synergy here.  The cyborg was always a
metaphorically queer figure, and the doctrine of public sex is at least
implicitly addressed to the ways new technologies are restructuring privacy. 
Television, and now the internet, straddles the boundary between public
discourse and private space in an uncomfortable compromise.  Fan writers have
always played in this grey area as well, dismembering and recombining
narratives in cyborgean acts of creation.  The lesbian is both a queer figure
who besieges heterosexual domesticity and a dangerous species of cyborg whose
altered body threatens all sorts of boundaries.  That is, I have culled my
theory with specifics in mind, intending a methodological demonstration of the
kinds of advantages critical theory, more generally and in an infinite array of
applications, can bring to the study of mass culture consumption.  My framework
is most specific and most literal when it is read along with my featured texts:
the relations on TV and in fan imaginations between Star Trek: Voyager's
Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine.



NEW VOY "reading treksmut" J/7 [NC-17] 1/1 [11]


Seven: "I am an individual."
Borg Queen: "You are only repeating their words.  You sound like a mindless
automaton."


	This ironic exchange is from "Dark Frontier," one of Voyager's most popular
episodes.  The struggle it depicts between human and machine is inflected as a
lesbian love triangle: Captain Kathryn Janeway and the Borg Queen, Voyager's
ultimate arch-rivals, vie for control of Seven of Nine's mind and body:


Borg Queen (to Seven): "They've taken you apart and recreated you in their own
image.  But at the core, you are still mine."
...
Janeway: "She's one of us."


The Borg are TV's favorite personification of the apocalyptic potential of
Haraway's cyborg.  They were introduced in the series Star Trek: The Next
Generation and starred in the film Star Trek: First Contact, and their
appearances on Voyager have continued to elaborate and personalize their
mythology.[12]  The Borg are one of Trek's most malignant and powerful alien
races, and it is the ways they capitalize on core anxieties of our rapidly
technologizing civilization that generates their terror and fascination.[13] 
They are a "collective" of trillions of cyborg "drones," where all thoughts are
shared in an unbounded flow of information, and individual choice and agency
are replaced by single-minded efficiency and perfection.  The ultimate
totalitarian imperialists, their only goal and activity is expanding their
domination of more and more worlds and races, without humanist distractions
like morality and democracy.  They reproduce by "assimilation," penetrating
(usually the necks of) organic life forms with two spidery "tubules" in the
wrist which inject microscopic machines ("nanoprobes") that convert their
victims into cyborgs from the inside out, claiming not only their bodies but
also their "distinctiveness," their knowledge and memories.  This public and
communal process maintains a perverse version of sexual and familial imagery
(drawing heavily on vampiric connotations of polluted blood), but this
obliquely sexualized reproduction is destructive of life/individuality rather
than generative of it, and irrevocably bypasses private genital intimacy--it is
notable, however, that assimilation is not purely replication (making copies)
OR procreation (giving birth to offspring).  
	The infinite, impersonal communion of the mostly male-appearing Borg[14] is
ordered by and focused in a single female figure: the Queen (as of an insect
colony).  Both maternal and sexual [fig. 1], the Queen exists as a decapitated
cyborg head suspended in the collective's command center like a computer's
processor, the metaphoric unitary mind and identity of the civilization
("disembodiment is the epitome of perfection" she says in "Unimatrix Zero"). 
But she has a robotic body that she can couple with when it is convenient, and
a distinct personality.  Through the Borg, and in particular through the figure
of the Queen (for example, her statements quoted above, which turn typical
criticisms of the Borg on humans), Star Trek gives air time to tensions within
and alternatives to its almost relentless liberal humanism.  Characters like
Captain Janeway dogmatically maintain that losing one's individuality to live
as a Borg drone is a fate far worse than death, but the show (and the Queen
explicitly) also suggests the pleasure of being Borg: the satisfaction of
perfect efficiency, unmarred by personal quibbles (order supplanting chaos);
omnipotence and immortality; utterly complete closeness to and sharing with
one's family and the larger community (never being alone, continual "borgasm"
[Dery]); a fortified, modular cyborg body that can both penetrate and be
penetrated (Fuchs)...
	When the character of Seven of Nine (a former Borg) was introduced at the
beginning of Star Trek: Voyager's fourth season (1997), the move was widely
spoken of as a transparent ploy to increase the show's popularity in the
coveted 18-24 year-old male ratings bracket--this from a series that had
originally made TV history by instating the first woman in Trek who was captain
for longer than a cameo.  But in spite of her Barbie-doll body and skin-tight
outfit, Seven does not fit easily into satisfying stereotypes of the female sex
object.  A word about her fictional origins is in order: a former human (Annika
Hansen) assimilated at age 6, she was assigned as the Borg liaison to Captain
Janeway for certain negotiations.  During a daring escape, Janeway severed
Seven's link to the collective, effectively deassimilating her by force, and
insisted that she be re-humanized against her will [fig. 2].  Most of her
cybernetic implants were rejected by her body and removed (a fascinating
medical discourse), and she has taken on a basically human (if somewhat
topheavy) appearance.  Permanent reminders of her Borg past and cyborg present
remain, however, in metallic ornaments visible on her face and hand (and who
knows where else!).  Her transition to "individuality" in speech, behavior,
affect, and thought have been much more gradual and incomplete than her
physical transformation.  In contrast to your typical bimbo (even of the action
hero variety) she is extremely intelligent and physically powerful, talks
almost as if she were a robot, is for the most part logical and emotionless (as
well as arrogant), and is relentlessly desexualized (her naivete, social
incompetence, and self-assuredness have been enough to cow most men who have
shown an interest).  Seven is, ultimately, a complex "grab bag of signifiers":
she combines codes of the porn star, the independent woman, the cyborg/alien,
the fetish slave, even the geek, into a site where almost all the conflicts of
Voyager, and all conflict with the Captain, can be localized.[15]
	In Seven's journey toward "humanity" Captain Janeway quickly took on the
role of primary mentor.  In the show's explicit narrative, this is generally
justified as a result of Janeway's sense of responsibility to Seven, or as a
manifestation of her maternal instincts.  The two women have developed an
intense and conspicuous bond, however, an emotionally potent and often highly
contentious relationship that is not necessarily contained by the superimposed
teacher-student reading.  This is what many lesbian fans of Voyager identify as
"subtext": narrative and visual structures that, while on the most literal
level disavowing any erotic content, nevertheless invite a lesbian
interpretation [fig. 3].[16]  Janeway (like Seven) has her own sexual hangups. 
She points out constantly that her professional duties as Captain require that
she sublimate her personal needs for fulfilling emotional and sexual
relationships: a timely rendition of the working woman's conflict between
public and private spheres.[17]  Janeway's closeness to Seven is both a
counterpoint to her self-enforced celibacy and a political struggle: her mania
for maintaining traditional Western values in the hostile elsewhere that is the
Delta Quadrant (where her ship is stranded) seems to express itself in her
obsession with de Borgifying Seven.  This intersection between intimate
relationships and questions of the human and the public is often manifested in
J/7 fan fiction, which hones in on the way Voyager quietly sets these relations
up as lesbian (by endowing Janeway and Seven's relationship with such
ambience).  In this sense, there are other ways of reading Seven's porn star
coded body than as man-bait.
	That is, the point of this long digression into the television text is not
only to provide a context for the fiction to follow, but to acknowledge that
the show is already doing some of the work.  Like much of popular culture, it
manifests all the dynamism of hegemony by capitalizing on both the
predictability of the dominant ideology and its exciting tensions with
resistant or marginal formations.  I do not intend to claim that fan writers
are creating something subversive out of nothing in simple opposition to the
dominant TV text.  While there are certainly pairings and styles that are far
more independent of screen subtext than J/7, fan fiction is by definition a
genre of poaching, as it were, which means that there must be something
attractive in the lord's preserve that fans want to get their hands on.  Fan
texts are also not immune to mainstream ideology: a romance in which Seven
becomes fully human and ends up marrying Janeway, for example, is hardly a
bastion of radicalism.  What is interesting about fan fiction is not that it is
inherently revolutionary, but that it makes manifest the complex interactivity
that characterizes the relationship between consumers and the mass media, its
surprising scope, and the technologies and communities that support this
unpredictable interpretive agency.
	Many fan writers say that what they do is fix things that are wrong with
the shows they love, or pick up and carry out possibilities that are
unavailable to television.  In the case of erotic fan fiction, one thing fans
seem to indignantly assert is lacking in the mass media is public characters
and discourses that are meaningfully embodied and erotic.  Slash makes the
additional demand that queer sexuality and relationships be publicly
celebrated.  Although fan stories about two men having a relationship have been
around for three decades, it is only much more recently that large numbers of
lesbian slash stories have been available.  This may be because of the
internet's role in making fan fiction accessible to a more diverse group of fan
readers and writers, or it may have more to do with the historical dearth of
strong female characters in the mass media.  Within Trek fandom, J/7 is the
first female pairing to develop a large following, perhaps because the
characters have the archetypal qualities of a slash couple: a screen
relationship fraught with deep emotional connection and conflict.
	I must acknowledge, here, one of the major unresolved tensions of this
paper, coalescing around its "lesbian" theme.  Instinctively, I want to claim
J/7 fan fiction as a lesbian phenomenon, as in made by and for real world
lesbians.  I have no demographic data or representative sampling to offer
(indeed I resist these approaches), but from my own extensive web surfing it
does seem to me that the majority of J/7 fiction is of relatively high artistic
quality, and is written by people who identify themselves as women.  Or at
least, most writers come across convincingly as lesbians discursively, and
approach lesbianism in their work with an insider's respect and humor.  Part of
my fantasy is that J/7 fiction (and perhaps female slash more generally) can be
read as a quirky example of how lesbians make their own collective spaces to
meditate on and oppose a sexist and heteronormative culture.  On the other
hand, it is central to my argument that I move beyond models that depend on
fixed identities (and certainly on demographic claims).  The lesbian-ness of
J/7 may be interpreted as a strategic position, a queer practice, or a
metaphor, but attaching it literally to corporeal individuals living out a
relatively stable sexual orientation seems antithetical to my project and to
the theoretical framework I have delineated.  Rather than try to mediate
between these two interpretations, I will simply point out that both of them
are at work in the arguments that follow (giving a touch of the cyborg to the
my theoretical fantasy itself, perhaps).  Interestingly, I find an analogue to
my own dilemma in J/7 stories themselves.  As I will show, they often combine
reactionary narrative conventions (like plugging Janeway and Seven into the
structure of a heterosexual romance) with elements that threaten this status
quo (like manifestations of cyborg sex), with unpredictable results.[18]
	In the thousands of J/7 stories published on the internet, it is typical
for there to be some acknowledgement of the contemporary strangeness of lesbian
relationships in mainstream culture: becoming involved with a woman may be new
and unexpected, or require research beforehand (in Seven's case).  However, I
have never read a story where one of the characters had to agonize over coming
out--in fact, in this imaginary future, lesbianism seems to be a fairly
commonplace act more often than an identity.  A debate about how a romantic
relationship can fit into Janeway's role as captain is another common trope. 
And J/7 always deals in some way with Seven's Borg hybridity, as a character
trait and as a bodily characteristic, and also, tacitly or explicitly, with
Janeway's relationship to Seven's pre-human self.  Janeway often ends up
affirming that Seven is sexually desirable in spite or because of her visibly
cybernetic body.  As a genre, J/7 smut spins an erotic narrative out of the
tensions and intersections in the unmapped, post-reproductive territories
beyond the boundaries of humanity and heteronormativity.  That said, J/7
stories exhibit an impressive diversity of styles: they range in length from
vignettes of a few pages to novel-size series; they may conform to the codes of
romance or be dark SM fantasies that capitalize on Janeway and Seven's
on-screen power dynamics.  I offer a closer reading of one story, "Freeing
Kathryn," by Paulann Hughes, as a more detailed and specific taste of some of
the possibilities of active consumption that fan fiction can exemplify.  No one
story is typical of J/7 fiction, but this one combines several recurring
elements, and strikes a balance between romance and more original narrative
structures.
	The plot of "Freeing Kathryn" revolves around a subtly enumerated
interrogation of how and why Janeway and Seven's sexual relationship should be
made public knowledge.  For Seven, Janeway's struggle to reconcile her needs as
a captain and as a woman is connected to Seven's own acceptance on Voyager as a
former Borg.  At the beginning of the story, the two women are already lovers,
but only in stolen moments on the sly, and this "had left Seven feeling as
though there was no difference between being the queen's drone and being
Kathryn Janeway's partner."  She worries that "the ambitious Starfleet Captain
would feel humiliated to have others know she had copulated with a Borg." 
Seven can no longer deal with their stilted, secret liaison, but Janeway is
certain that her duty to the ship compels her to rigidly compartmentalize her
life into personal and public zones: "She gave Seven every private minute she
could spare...Whatever was left of her when she was done being Captain belonged
to Seven...It was the reminder of what the four pips on her collar had cost
her."  When another woman falls in love with Seven (an alien hybrid also,
incidentally) it precipitates a crisis, and Janeway realizes she must "'make it
clear that Seven is taken'" if she wants to maintain a monogamous romance with
her.  She orchestrates an elaborate scene in the mess hall that puts her erotic
bond with Seven on display: 


she said, loud enough to regain the attention of those who had politely stopped
staring at her, 'The Commander has been kind enough to give me the day off to
spend with you, Darling, so, I'm not on duty.  So you can dispense with the
rank and call me Kathryn.'  Then she added for the benefit of those whose chins
hadn't yet hit their tables, 'Like you do when we're alone'...and gave her a
kiss that was intended to appear anything but chaste.


It is only after this public performance that the couple can retire to the
privacy of the holodeck for the day-long tryst they'd been denying themselves. 
Even as this romance fails to challenge the heteronormative understanding of
relationships as aimed toward a monogamous 'marriage,' it works against these
dominations in more interesting ways, elaborating a world where a professional
woman can (or must) have a public lesbian sexuality.  In this way, it
dramatically reconceives sexuality, heterosexuality, and most importantly,
humanity.
	Because one more thing must happen before Janeway and Seven's love is truly
consummated: Seven's Borg half must be productively consolidated with their
newly integrated sex life.  Seven's most threatening Borg apparatus turns into
a sex toy, forcing Janeway to confront the boundary anxieties that are holding
her back: 


She sat, transfixed, as Seven used her left hand, her Borg hand, to caress and
excite herself...she marveled that something so inhuman as that hand could move
with such purposeful tenderness.  But then, when she saw Seven extend and
insert her assimilation tubules into her opening, it terrified her and she
grabbed her lover's hand, forcing her to stop.[19]


Fittingly, Seven's analytical defense of why their sex should be opened up to
cyborg possibilities is rendered incoherent by her desire itself: "'Let me€
show you€ It is what I want. The tubules will add to the ways€ the ways in
which I am able to stimulate€  ...Kathryn ... My Borg€ hand is more flexible
and stronger than€ the other€ therefore I am able€'"  This desire infects
Janeway, and overcomes her inhibitions: "She knew she was being selfish,
stealing Seven's release for herself, but she couldn't help it. She couldn't
stop it. She had to be the recipient of that hand's potential... 'Show me,' she
begged and Seven, instantly, obliged her."  It is this moment of cyborg sexual
synthesis, specifically, that 'frees' Janeway to have a happy, healthy
relationship, the Borg hand that represents all the potential of their newly
public love:


She laced her fingers with Seven's Borg ones and drew that hand to her lips.
She placed small but satisfying kisses on each finger, each implant. "Darling?
Why haven't you ever used this hand on me before?"

Seven could not prevent herself from smiling. As brilliant as the more
experienced woman was, she had made a habit of missing the obvious. "You never
allowed it, Kathryn."

"Oh," she said. "Well, that was dumb."

"Indeed." She removed her hand from Kathryn's and edged it toward her partner's
thighs. "Shall I demonstrate its other uses?"


So their narrative can end with a rousing affirmation of duality and hybridity
(in the form of Seven's cyborg name--half of it human, from before her
assimilation).[20]


"Do you know why I never pushed you about letting me call you 'Annika'?"

"Because I forbid you from doing so?"

She laughed, "Well, there was that, but, it's more because I realized some time
ago that Annika is someone I never knew. That you, the woman I love and have
always intended to spend my life loving, are Seven of Nine. Not Borg. Not
human. But the best of both."


This story paints a picture of a new mode of intimacy in which two
transformations are considered inseparable from each other: the transformation
of publicity into a space open to sexual and homosexual experience and the
transformation of sex into a pleasurable site for embracing the cyborg's
subversions.  What is exciting about all J/7 smut is that it must, by
definition and even inadvertently, deal with non reproductive sex and bodies,
simultaneously the lesbian kind and the cyborg kind [fig. 4].  I am aware that
J/7 is the only pairing so literally suited to a discussion of cyborg sex and
public sex--I constructed my theoretical framework with J/7 in mind.  Just
because J/7 is the most obvious example, however, does not exclude the
possibility that other fan fiction or other consumers are having the same
conversations in less literal terms, or alternately, that their activities
could be approached within a different framework that would also open them to
political engagement. 



re-imagining reception


	In my formulation, a politically engaged theory must facilitate specific
questions not only about what surprising ideas pop culture articulates, but
about whether these articulations are a significant force in the ongoing
renegotiations of the material and ideological structures that dominate our
culture.  It is interesting that J/7 fan fiction expresses alternative
formations of desire that call oppressive conceptions of privacy and humanity
into question, but it is not clear whether the power to express a resistant
viewpoint is a politically effective power in a hegemony.  The more interesting
potential of this potent elaboration of sexual, social, and bodily alternatives
lies in its relations with dominant ideological and material contexts--in
particular with systems of production and consumption.  In order to theorize
these relations in a novel way, I would like to begin to think about
consumption from the perspective of the cyborg, who sees positions as
contingent, contradictory, unstable, and intangible, and defines culture as
connectivity, simultaneity, impurity, and information.  And from a queer
perspective which calls into question the appropriate distinctions between and
substance of the private and the public.
	The conventional understanding of the economic structure of mass media is
fairly nuanced and complex, and it is actually not accurate to assume that the
TV studio is the producer, the program the product, and the viewer the
consumer.  Media commodities circulate on several different levels, which
entail corresponding role reversals.  First, independent contractors produce a
program and sell it (as a commodity) to distributors.  In the hands of the
distributors (media corporations), the program becomes a producer: it is
responsible for delivering an audience (the commodity) that the station can
sell to advertisers.  The audience's role as a commodity is dependent on the
more abstract realm of the cultural economy, in which viewers produce meanings
and pleasures from television texts (reception)--that is, these meanings and
pleasures are one of the main reasons people watch TV.[21]  Although, for the
sake of simplicity, I will continue to call audiences "consumers," I wanted to
point out that it is not only in speculative, metaphorical terms that this
demarcation is complex and unstable.  I am going to go on to explore both the
concrete traces of fan fiction's interactions with the culture industry's
dominations and their more figurative components.  And I would still like to
keep open the option that, while I'm offering fan fiction as a tangible trace
of meaning-making, less concrete effects of audience activity may be dispersed
in similar ways.
	Simply by existing, fan fiction is implicitly making certain claims about
the boundaries between producers and consumers of mass media: it suggests that
media products don't always meet the needs or satisfy the desires of consumers,
and are therefore subject to continuing work by consumers which destabilizes
their textual perimeters and contests producers' "ownership" of them.  This
idea is standard fare in analyses of fan fiction, and in work on active
audience reception in general.  To take this conflict literally is to describe
the legal disputes and tacit negotiations that are a sort of conversation
between corporations and fans (and not always a polite one).  What critics
don't often point out, in their descriptions of the legal discourses that are
always implicated in the shape of fan culture, is the commonsense weirdness of
intellectual property law.  As subjects in a culture in which these concepts
have been very effectively naturalized, we never step back to ask: how can an
idea or a sign or a character, something which is essentially pure meaning, and
certainly completely immaterial, be fixed as property, to be used (whatever
that means) by only one individual or company or associated with only one
official reading?  How can the boundaries of this kind of property even be
defined in concrete legal terms, in whose interest does such a definition
operate, and does it have internal fissures which are ready-made points of
opposition?  In other words, the law is not a monolith which fans' activities
are situated in simple resistance to, it is as much a piecemeal, contingent,
paradoxical, constantly renegotiated tangle as the fan texts.
	Rosemary J. Coombe gives an excellent elaboration of this in The Cultural
Life of Intellectual Properties, arguing that trademark law is constructed by
overlooking the fact of reception: it assumes any meaning that accrues to a
sign like a logo or character to be the product of a company's creative and
promotional efforts, and not of the activities of the consumers who interpret
it.  Therefore, the corporation is entitled to be the sole beneficiary of all
those meanings; consumers have no rights over them.  However impossible it
sounds in terms of the way messages actually circulate, "The law freezes the
play of signification by legitimating authorship, deeming meaning to be value
properly redounding to those who 'own' the signature or proper name, without
regard to the contributions or interests of those others in whose lives it
figures" (8).  This may be viewed either (pessimistically) as disempowering
consumers in favor of those with more economic clout, or (optimistically) as
putting corporate authority in a rather sticky situation: Coombe points out
that


the law creates the cultural spaces of postmodernism in which mass media images
are authorized and become available for the authorial practices of others.  It
produces fixed, stable identities authored by the celebrity subject, but
simultaneously creates the possibility of places of transgression in which the
signifier's fixity and the celebrity's authority may be contested and resisted.
(125)


	In a brief discussion of fan fiction, Coombe makes an engaging case for the
political productiveness of the form by focusing on the "complex moral economy
in which [fans] legitimize their unorthodox appropriation of the texts" (125). 
She describes fans as engaging in a conscious ethical dialogue and struggle
with the norms embodied by the law--a political practice.  With Coombe's
framework in mind, it is not surprising that the stakes of this engagement are
heightened by the fact that the legal precedents surrounding fan fiction are
vague and uneasy.  Part of the explanation for this may be that fans have few
legal resources in comparison with media conglomerates, so when the
corporations take issue with their activities, they often choose to go further
underground rather than to stand and fight.  But, between the First Amendment
and the aforementioned ambiguousness of the distinction between "derivative
materials and branded properties" and "independent 'creative work,'"[22] the
corporations may not be sure the law will come down on their side.  They are
also forced into compromise by the paradox of their position as producers: they
need to guard their sole possession of their lucrative commodities as a source
of revenue, but for the same reason they need the goodwill of fans.  They can't
afford to indiscriminately alienate the people who spend the most time and
money on their products (the most obvious form of authority that consumers
have), and so they must choose their battles carefully.  
	Whatever the reason, the periodic border wars that have been staged by the
studios as attempts to place constraints on the propagation of fan fiction have
most often taken the form of corporate muscle-flexing through legal threats and
"cease and desist" letters.  In a typical case cited in the New York Times last
year (2000), Fox sent a warning to a Simpsons  fan who had sounds, images, and
video from the show on his web site--he removed the material and was forced to
move (not disappear) by his web server, but not without a flurry of on-line
protest.  Different studios have also taken harder or softer lines toward fan
production, and exercised different strategies.  <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> cites an incident in
the early 80's in which Lucasfilm Ltd. tried crying defamation instead of
trademark violation: a representative wrote "we are going to insist on no
pornography.  This may mean no fanzines if that measure is what's necessary to
stop the few from darkening the reputation our company is so proud of" (31). 
In other words, a corporation might decide that it is only particular kinds of
meaning-making, such as (homo)sexual readings, that it won't countenance
(although in practice this has not been a popular tactic).  The implied
compromise that has been reached through all this legalistic wrangling is that
fan writing is tolerated provided it is strictly not-for-profit, and this
stipulation is likely to stand (in the New York Times, Amy Harmon quotes a 20th
Century Fox spokesman as saying "as long as somebody's not out there trying to
make money with it, I don't think anybody wants to shut them down").  The
point: in spite of (presumably) having dominant social forces on their side,
the studios have been relatively unsuccessful at setting precedents that
contain the proliferation of resistant fan interpretations.  Their impotence
might be due to a calculation that these subcultural readings are ultimately
unthreatening to corporate hegemony, or it might demonstrate the incipient
political power fans have in the multiaccentual terrain of representation (or
both).
	Fans do engage very consciously with the legal inflections of conceptions
of production and products that hover over their activities.  As a nod to the
provisions of intellectual property law, all fan stories carry a disclaimer
that states that "Star Trek, Star Trek Voyager, and the characters in this
story are the property of Paramount" (to give a serviceable, if spartan,
example from a J/7 story).  The degree to which fan writers are aware of the
dominations that circumscribe their work is evident in the more creative
disclaimers that are quite common; here is the most elaborate example I've
seen, by T. Dancinghands:[23]


The Lord's Disclaimer

Our Paramount/Viacom, who art in Hollywood,
Copyrighted be thy name.
Thy profits come,
Thy royalties be honored,
In Asia as they are in the "Free World".
Give us this week our piece of cannon, [sic]
And forgive us our fanfics,
As we forgive the real klunkers you occasionally produce.
And lead us not into litigation,
But deliver us from cancellations.
For thine is the franchise, and the trade marks, and the merchandising,
For ever and ever
Amen


This ingenious spoof expresses a fannish tension between the real frustration
of depending on the media industry, which is indeed very powerful, for cultural
raw materials, and a smug sense that fan activities have special powers of
their own.  My personal favorite disclaimer is the concise pun "The law is
Paramount" (I have also seen Paramount referred to as "Paraborg" in
disclaimers).  "Adult" fanfic is also often accompanied by a disclaimer or
warning about sex (or other potentially disturbing material), usually
describing the specific kind(s) of sex that occur in the story--its legal raison
d'etre is restrictions on underage access to pornography.  A typical warning
might run:


This story contains graphic depictions of sexual intercourse between two women.
If you are under eighteen, easily offended, homophobic, pea brained, or
otherwise hung up, seek out thy entertainment elsewhere cause this just ain't
your bag.  (Reverend Jim)[24]


As in this example, these disclaimers can also provide a brief commentary on
the social environment that the story's fantasies of queer relations are
situated in.  In this way the legal strictures circumscribing pornography
provide fans with an opportunity to explicitly identify their resistance. 
Disclaimers are like a legal magic forcefield (won with at least the grudging
consent of the media industry) that frees fans to interpretively run amok
without compromising their resistant messages.  On the other hand, disclaimers
do mark real relations of inequality in which fans are on the losing side.  The
rhetoric of disclaimers suggests that fan writers have both these experiences
in mind.
	Disclaimers demonstrate the disjuncture between what is considered
significant in the dominant discourse and in fan discourse: for the studios,
production is apparently only meaningful (that is, threatening to their
containment of their property) if it generates money; "amateur" writing is
allowed to proliferate freely.  For fan writers, it is precisely the freedom to
create texts outside of and in response to capitalist management of narrative
that is valued.  It is not clear whether the corporate tunnel-vision that
conflates products and profit  is a sign that fan production simply can't hope
to operate anywhere near the same level of influence as economics, or whether
it is actually an oversight, and therefore a potential ground for the political
activities of fans to germinate.  The studios' tolerance of fan fiction is
always provisional, and they do show an interest in controlling the expansion
of (versus simply policing) the perimeters of their texts.  For years, there
have been professionally written novels published by the studios that elaborate
on and spin off of television storylines.  And Paramount/Viacom is now holding
an annual Star Trek fan fiction contest, and publishing anthologies of the
winning stories--royalties are even paid to the authors.
	<a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> implies that even though the copyright compromise protects the
studios' status as producers (in economic terms), it leaves space for fans to
challenge their power to dictate the meanings received from TV texts.  I would
argue that the challenge fan fiction poses to dominant models of textual
production is actually far more sweeping.  By narrating around, over, in
between, and parallel to television, it attacks any attempt to see texts as
discrete and bounded events that can be packaged as products.  As manifested in
fanfic, textual meaning is a fluid practice that invites communal participation
in public forums.  The relative lack of legal restrictions on fan fiction is
evidence for fans' contention that characters and stories are public property,
and demonstrates the difficulty of officially legitimizing one meaning over
another.  Even more importantly, fans activities' challenge the definition, as
well as the borders, of products.  Fan writers turn the production of new texts
into an integral part of the process of mass culture consumption, compromising
the rigid dichotomy a capitalist model maintains between the two activities,
and representing production and consumption as interrelated, even similar
operations.  And by harnessing the valuation of their creative enterprises to
things other than money, fans propose alternate understandings of what it is to
be a consumer or a producer.  Parallel to my earlier example of how erotic fan
fiction can stage a redefinition of relationships and categories within
dominant texts by imagining new sexual modes, fanfic refigures on a meta-level
the mass media system it participates in.
	All of this was, for the most part, moot when fan fiction was distributed
in paper zines.  With modes of reproduction and distribution that were shackled
to the physical, the radical possibilities of fan production could circulate in
only very limited ways.  The internet is changing everything.
	Along with other recently developed technologies, the internet is
transfiguring culture rapidly and acutely.  Right now, the net feels like a
maelstrom of competing discourses and interests, and it's anybody's guess who
is going to come out on top.  Theorists, for their part, have advanced many
ideas but few conclusions.  Sadie Plant writes that, unlike any other dominant
social form in cultural memory, "[the Net can] be described as a parallel,
distributed system which not only functions without centralized control but has
also developed as a consequence of localized, piecemeal activities which build
the system from the bottom up" (206).  Mark Poster quotes cyber-guru John Katz
as saying "technology is breaking down the notion of few-to-many
communications.  Some communicators will always be more powerful than others,
but the big idea behind cyber-tales is that for the first time the many are
talking to the many" (194-5).  Poster adds "the information superhighway opens
qualitatively new political opportunities because it creates new loci of
speech" (187).  One example of this unpredictable movement is the imminent
failures of intellectual property law (the main instrument of fan fiction
containment).  
	John Perry Barlow conveniently explores the consequences the world wide web
may have for intellectual property law in  "Selling Wine Without Bottles."  He
points out that we are well on our way to converting to an economy where
information itself is the primary, privileged commodity.  At the same time, the
nature of information is being radically transformed: it is becoming fully
digitized, made up only of electrons, able to travel at the speed of light and
change hands without ever becoming physical.  And it is incredibly easy to
produce and reproduce in a way that books, or even radio or TV programs, never
were.  This is, Barlow argues, a crisis for the organization of property, and
corporations are the ones falling behind.  Their strategy seems to be to ignore
the fact that virtual property is fundamentally different from information that
has physical traces, while aggressively expanding existing law to manhandle it
into submission.  Barlow thinks this simply won't work: "we are sailing into
the future on a sinking ship...Intellectual property law cannot be patched,
retrofitted, or expanded to contain the gasses of digitized expression any more
than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting
spectrum" (149).  Even more provocatively, "Most of the people who actually
create soft property--the programmers, hackers, and Net surfers--already know
this" (149)--it's regular folks who have the upper hand.  Popular practice has
already overrun the boundaries of unenforceable laws: take, for example, the
almost universal habit of software piracy, or the court's impotent attempt to
stop the sharing of music files by shutting down Napster.[25]  As Barlow
presciently quips, "Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of
wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the
Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain"
(153).  The activities that define producers of information and consumers of it
are shifting irrevocably.
	On the other hand, the Powers That Be aren't idly standing by while the
People run amok.  As cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig puts it,


The Internet has an embedded ideology. That ideology has changed. At its birth,
the net protected privacy, freedom of speech and innovation. As the
architecture of the net has evolved, it protects those values less effectively.
Today it is easier to monitor and track behavior on the net, and easier for
network owners to control how the net gets used. That increase in the power to
control is a shift in the ideology of the original net.  (McGrath)


The most powerful communicators are quite effectively re-drafting cyberspace so
that it serves their interests, even if this doesn't visibly disturb the net's
grassroots organization of information.  The sophisticated popular (and
legislative) debate over "internet privacy" crystallizes this shift.  The very
communalism of networked technologies like the internet makes information we
are accustomed to defining as private newly and threateningly public.  We still
assume that controlling who overhears is a natural part of communication, but
these days "We think we're whispering, but we're really broadcasting" (Levy). 
Information becomes the substance of the private (even of the individual), as
the unauthorized collection and distribution of personal data (from our web
surfing histories to our medical or financial records) is identified as the
principal menace to privacy.  As one article puts it, "The interactive nature
of the Internet means that we are no longer simply receivers of entertainment
and information. We are also providers of information that is valuable to those
who want to sell us products and services" (Aidman) -or even more succinctly,
"The Web has evolved into a marketplace, and in the process transformed privacy
from a right to a commodity" (McGrath).  So we are actually paying for the free
exchange of ideas we enjoy on the net in the currency of private data that is
gobbled up by, say, the suppliers of targeted banner ads.
	On the more optimistic side of this debate is the popular triumph in the
struggle for the control of cryptography technology, the intrepid and
indispensable defender of data privacy.  For decades, the government (in
particular agencies responsible for national security like the NSA and FBI)
have opposed any public access to cryptography, arguing that it would make it
impossible to track criminals.  They were forced to cave by a massive public
resistance, and now we send encrypted transmissions on a daily basis.  As one
writer crows, "On one side of the battle were relative nobodies: computer
hackers, academics and wonky civil libertarians.  On the other were some of the
most powerful people in the world: spies, generals and even presidents.  Guess
who won" (Levy).
	This is only one concrete example of the ways cyberspace mucks up
traditional inflections of the public and the private, making the apparently
stable boundary between their domains blurry and permeable.  The rhetorical
question raised here is: if all information can now be universally shared (or
at least distributed), where (in the e-world) do we locate the border between
an insulated private space of subjectivity and intimacy and a public space for
commerce and civics, a distinction that Berlant and Warner identify as
ideologically central to modern capitalism?  In discourse about the internet,
the connection of this question to sex is clear.  One of the anxieties of
"internet privacy" is that formerly private preferences and acts (consuming
porn/surfing porn sites, sharing fantasies with a sexual partner/talking dirty
in chat rooms) will be converted into data in the public domain.  And
pornographic content and activity on-line has been the obsessive hub of much of
the government's e regulatory energy (powered by consumer advocacy),
particularly when this focus is symptomatized as "protecting children" from
inappropriate material.  Indeed, porn is perhaps the net's biggest industry,
both commercial and cottage.  Was consuming pornography (erotic fan fiction
included) formerly a private affair that is now being turned into a public act
or even a community structure?  If you are sitting at your computer at home
talking to 20 people in a gay.com chatroom, are you in private or in public? 
If I were to locate a lesbian public sex in the realm of e possibility, would
it be at the intersection of a new and deviant publicity of sexuality with
traditionally nurturing female private spaces (as they translate on-line), or
at the intersection of conscientiously constructed feminist public discourses
with the shielded private zone of sex talk and images and acts?  What is clear
is that the qualitative transformations in the social field that new
technologies of communication are realizing are confusing and opening up the
terms of the public/private binary (and its sexual investments) along with the
terms of the production/consumption binary.
	I am arguing here that both the theoretical metaphors I explored earlier
interface fruitfully with cyberspace: the net is pregnant with cyborgean
forces, in both their progressive and totalitarian forms.  It puts humans into
new relationships with technology that call into question the boundaries of
identity and the body and fundamentally restructure the fabric of relations
both locally and globally.  And the new and different opportunities the
internet provides for social organization have made sex publicly available and
fantasy publicly expressible in unprecedented ways, potentially lining up with
Berlant and Warner's call for erotically engaged counterpublics.  I am
concerned here only with what these new formations mean for fan fiction: I am
suggesting that they are a powerful and comprehensive realization of the
possibilities for radically restructuring systems of domination that were
already nascent in fans' creative activities.  And I am suggesting that, at
this stage in the emergence of internet culture, hegemonic forces don't
necessarily have these possibilities under control.
	In the New York Times last fall (2000), Ann Powers wrote:


the Internet has changed the relationship between the entertainment industry
and its audience.  Fandom has always pumped the heart of popular culture, but
never before has it come so close to its motor functions...these new
possibilities have...threatened to obliterate the space between fans as
consumers and the industry that profits from their interest.


The internet has indeed stimulated the rapid proliferation of fan fiction and
other kinds of public fan response and dialogue.  But what makes it so
conducive to this growth is that its modes of structuring the exchange of
information are a radical departure from economic models.  Before the internet,
fan fiction was either distributed under a more cooperative version of the
capitalist m.o.--editors selected stories for inclusion in zines which were then
sold (at cost), maintaining a fairly stable distinction between writers and
readers--or it was shared privately among small groups of women.  Scholars have
already made much of how fan activities problematize the rigid separation
between producers and consumers, but the internet allows this subversion to be
realized more concretely and completely than in their analyses.  Fan writers
are readers simultaneously, and it becomes impossible to differentiate the two
categories when their other individual forms of participation (posting to
newsgroups and lists, making web pages, linking to other pages, providing
inspiration and feedback, discussing the show) and the public arenas that are
the context for this participation are effectively the same.  With the net as a
resource, any writer with computer access can self-publish instantaneously, to
practically the entire fan fiction audience, for free: a powerful triple
reconstitution of the system of fan production.  
	The web's facility for organizing vast amounts of information into smaller
thematic pockets permits both flexibility and communalism: if you can find one
J/7 web site, you can probably find them all by exploring authors' lists of
links (because authors keep track of and communicate with each other).  And if
you don't have your own web site, you can join a newsgroup or discussion list
and post your stories there, or have them collected at an archive page--another
effect of the persistence of new public forms of community organization.  The
internet's cultural cachet, as well as its properties of wide circulation, has
contributed to the expansion of fan fiction's readership beyond a show's
die-hard fanatics (one of Harmon's interviewees commented "You're getting a lot
of the people who wouldn't be caught dead near a convention...It's different if
you do it on the web").  The increase in numbers has allowed fanfic to
diversify and specialize (to admit much more lesbian fic, for example), while
the web allows a network of connections to be maintained through general
interest newsgroups, pages, archives, and link pages.  Last but not least, all
this abundance can flourish independent of monetary constraints: whatever their
hidden costs, relatively unobtrusive pop-ups and banner ads are supporting a
free internet where fan production can be structured as a new realm of public
pleasures that are individual and communal, generous and limitless, fully
bypassing a system based on the exchange of money between producers and
consumers.  While internet distribution is not quite comparable in scope to
reaching a mass audience, it does achieve a flexibility and freedom that
compromises dominant conceptions of the nature of consumption and production.
	Because the internet is so diffuse, it is impossible to pin down all the
positions where J/7 fic might be popping up.  But if you're looking for an
example of the context in which it is typically created and distributed (in my
rather extensive experience), check out a J/7 page found at
members.aol.com/Tenderware/.  Tenderware's page straddles the private/public
dichotomy: it has a very personal tone, and refers itself to an intimate
network of "friends and family."  But it is interfaced with the high-traffic
thoroughfares of slash fiction as part of a web ring and through its own web of
links.  The personal and the civic have an effortless connectivity.  In
addition to fiction, it offers artwork and articles: an ingeniously
intertextual response to some J/7-related comments made by Jeri Ryan (the actor
who plays Seven of Nine), and an intelligent FAQ that makes references to
<a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> and other studies of fan fiction.  The fic, here, is part of a network
of complex practices that constitute the fan's relationship to the media
industry--critical understanding and ready defense of fan activities,
non-fictional commentary on the show and its meta-texts, deliberate community
building, and consciousness of academic perspectives--and these practices are
being developed and extended in cyberspace together.   Although we could make
educated guesses about the real gender, sexual orientation, race, or class
attached to the alias "Tenderware" in the physical world, internet environments
elude demographics in favor of a freer play with positions and meanings.  And
in spite of its friendly and wholesome appearance, this web page has plenty of
smut, and it is the pleasures of fan smut that its community is organized
around.
	In The Domain-Matrix, Sue-Ellen Case describes her project as (among other
things) "a politics of space with lesbian as the final frontier that
cyber-trekkies may imagine" (56).  Her Star Trek metaphor marks the progressive
pole of what she argues is a fiercely contested struggle over the shape of the
future.  Theorizing the internet as a new kind of space (i.e. cyberspace) that
is radically reconfiguring the architecture of bodies, identity, work, and
society, she (like Haraway) maintains that it is far from decided who will be
in control of sculpting this nascent realm into its final form.  Will
dominations based on difference translate successfully, or will cyberspace take
on the properties of fluidity, connectedness, and embodiedness that Case
metaphorically ascribes to the performing lesbian?  In the case of the battle
that is tacitly being waged in cyberspace between corporations' and fans'
divergent ways of structuring the production and dissemination of meaning, it's
too soon to tell who's going to come out victorious.  Both sides have staked
their ground: the media conglomerates are always expanding their already vast
jurisdiction over entertainment, communications, and technology, but the fans
are stalwart in their financial clout as consumers and have claimed an
extensive internet domain.  Harmon quotes a Lucasfilm spokesperson expressing
the company's helplessness in the face of fanfic: "What can you do?  How can
you control it?  As we look at it, we appreciate the fans, and what would we do
without them?"  And the columnist Steve Silberman points out that the media may
be in over its head in its efforts to dominate fan discourse on the net: "To
attempt to force a community to sprout only in an officially sanctioned garden
is to wage war on the very strengths of the medium you're using to get your
message across."  
	My point is that it is too soon to dismiss reception as a practice whose
effects are contained in its immediate environment.  I have argued that J/7
stories, as an example, are well suited to articulating the anti authoritarian
affinities between the queer and the cyborg (which Case calls two related
"unnatural" figures [97]) in new and exciting ways.  Through their practices on
the internet, fan writers have developed a culture that makes good on the
demands that are inherent in their texts: demands not only for public
narratives that are embodied and erotic, but for new ways of making and
disseminating such narratives.  Fans themselves are the sexy cyborgs they write
about: interfaced with computers and the virtual environments that technology
gives them access to, their on-line personas resist construction as unitary,
embodied, gendered citizens.  From this position in the passageways that the
cyborg opens up between categories, they create a public community (and not
just a textual vision) structured around new sexual and relational
possibilities that are produced and consumed in new ways.  It is in these
connections between the raw material of reception itself and the political
context of that reception that the most interesting and valuable questions
about mass media consumption lie.
	If, as Haraway theorizes, the most powerful mode of opposition operates
from within dominations themselves, fan fiction's position in dialogue with
mass culture might be an influential strategy rather than simply a sign of
fans' enthrallment.  Rather than interpreting the interrelatedness of TV shows
and fanfic as a sign that fans' meaning making is circumscribed by their
dependence on the material provided by the mass media, I would argue that this
deliberate intertextuality is what makes fan fiction (and reception more
generally) textually original and politically interesting.  The power to
appropriate television's signifiers can be seen as expanding rather than
impoverishing the language fans have to comment on their culture.  To
reformulate <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a>: poaching, the particular move which situates a resistant
reading at the very heart of the hegemonic text, is a key tactic because it
engages with hegemonies on their own inexhaustible turf.  Case aligns this sort
of guerrilla warfare with the hacker term voudou, which is cyberpunk-speak for
finding resistant architectures in cyberspace.  One of the defining
characteristics of voudou is that it is "a system which takes found objects,
the trash or litter that the transcendent system leaves behind, and redeploys
them in a useful, hopeful manner" (51-2)--Janeway and Seven are the coffee
grounds and locks of hair that treksmutters use to cast their spells over
television, and, by extension, to hex the patriarchal capitalist status quo.  
	I am not making the claim that fan fiction alone has the power to
destabilize this hegemony, or even that fans are always satisfied with their
power to rework mass narratives.  In spite of its growing popularity, fanfic is
still a phenomenon most people haven't heard of, and only the privileged in our
increasingly stratified economy have access to computers and the incipient
transformations of the internet.  At this point in our theories of culture, it
is often just frustrating to try to answer the question of whether any
particular discourse or relation harbors the seeds of fundamental changes,
within a dominant ideological system which is capable of very sensitive
evolution and expert at incorporating into itself expressions of resistance.  I
am simply presenting fan fiction as a test case to argue for a new
understanding of where radical possibilities might germinate.  Without bringing
a theoretical framework that admits metaphor and imagination to a study of
popular reception, that reads it as part of a complex and interconnected
environment where not only consumption and production, but discourses as
diverse as economics and sex, have the potential to affect each other, it is
impossible to begin to wonder how mass media consumption might relate to
political change.  And if we can't imagine that acts of reception might harbor
such powers, we certainly can't try to measure them in concrete or empirical or
ethnographic ways.  Here, I am only activating these questions by envisioning
what the structures and strategies that would link consumption to politics
might be, and I leave it to others to rework my narrative in their own
productive ways.  One of the lessons fan fiction teaches is that mass culture
can be much more fertile if you fantasize about it, and I will suggest that if
we are not willing, as theorists, to fantasize about the potentialities and not
just the realities of culture as we observe it, we can't hope to be engaged
with the struggles that are in play in that culture.



ENDNOTES********************************

[1].  Academic consensus locates the origins of fan fiction within Star Trek
fan culture in the 1970's, although it may have existed in some form in earlier
decades.  It arose at about the same time in several other fandoms, and
steadily spread and gained popularity.
	In this case, and in many others throughout this paper, I give only the
briefest gloss of a topic that has been extensively treated in earlier studies
(work that has served as an important source for my own).  The most influential
and detailed explorations of fan fiction include "Pornography by Women for
Women, with Love" by Joanna Russ (1985), Enterprising Women: Television Fandom
and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith (1991), "Brownian
Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology" by Constance Penley (1991), and Textual
Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture by Henry <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a> (1992). 
Note #6 glosses all but the latter.

[2].  In the Star Trek canon, there is a Vulcan motto: IDIC or "Infinite
Diversity in Infinite Combinations."  The Star Trek  smut writing community has
adopted this corrupted version: IPIC, "Infinite Perversity in Infinite
Combinations."

[3].  Another critique of reception studies is offered by the field of
political economy, which arose in response to the tendency to theorize the
interpretive agency of marginal groups as universally resistant and subversive.
 Political economy moderates this enthusiasm with attention to the material
circumstances of media production, to paint a more realistic picture of the
power differential between producers and consumers under capitalism.  I think
political economy is an invaluable approach; however, since it privileges the
position of producer and is characterized by a pessimism that is related to its
empiricism, my critique still applies.

[4].  Since all the major analyses of fan fiction are affiliated with the field
of reception theory, a few words are in order about how this branch of cultural
studies got to be the way it is.  In the 50's and 60's, there were essentially
two schools of audience studies, conventionally called "optimistic" and
"pessimistic."  Pessimistic theorists, who were often identified with the
emerging discipline of cultural studies, drew on Marxist, structuralist, and
semiotic critical traditions to advance a "hypodermic" model of media
consumption: an entirely passive audience is injected with a belief system by
texts that are the purveyors of the dominant ideology.  Optimistic inquiry was
associated with the more mainstream "uses and gratifications" school of media
research, which operated within a positivist, quantitative social science
convention and viewed audiences as entirely free to receive any meanings from
media texts.  In the 70's, cultural theorists at the Birmingham Center for
Cultural Studies began to reject the totalizing model of the passive audience
in favor of a more nuanced approach that incorporated some of the assumptions
of "uses and gratifications" researchers: Stuart Hall's seminal 1974 essay
"Encoding, Decoding" attempted to bridge the two by theorizing reception as a
process of active reading that may or may not reproduce the ideologies that are
encoded in a media text.  At around the same time, David Morley first argued
that the antidote to the abstraction of cultural studies debates about whether
audiences make dominant or resistant meanings was qualitative empirical
research: ethnography (his initial influential book was The Nationwide
Audience, 1980).  Although reception theory has undergone significant
development in the past three decades, most scholars remain committed to more
or less ethnographic methodologies.  

[5].  Slash has been a source of controversy since it was invented, and both
the producers of TV shows and more mainstream fans and writers have reacted
badly to it in the past, calling it things like "character rape."  Although it
is unlikely that everyone has come to feel positively about slash, much of this
fervor appears to have died down, and, from what I've observed, slash has
gained a relatively wide acceptance in fan communities.

[6].  The first academic acknowledgement of fan fiction was sci-fi writer
Joanna Russ's essay about K/S slash "Pornography by women, for women, with
love" (admittedly, her methodology is actually closer to traditional feminist
criticism than to ethnography).  Motivated by the titillating question of why
middle-aged housewives were writing gay male porn, Russ argues that the women
who write K/S do so in order to imagine a utopian alternative to their
unsatisfying lives.  They envision an intimate relationship of equals, but
because it is impossible in our culture to conceive of a heterosexual couple in
this way, they make use of two male characters (Kirk and Spock), who can
integrate both masculine and feminine characteristics.  
	All subsequent studies of slash that I have encountered have reinscribed
and built on this demographically-based reading.  The first book about Trek fan
fiction, Enterprising Women, by Camille Bacon-Smith, is an ethnography that
supports Russ's conclusion, elaborating on the empowering and supportive
community women create in slash culture.  Constance Penley's work is unique in
its emphasis on technology within a feminist framework.  However, she still
builds rather predictably on the conclusions about slash elaborated in earlier
scholarship.  While she is not an ethnographer, her tendency toward the
descriptive reflects the influence of ethnography on her work.

[7].  Again, there is an incredibly rich and important body of work on fan
zines and other kinds of fan production, to which the references above can
serve as a starting place.

[8].  It would be theoretically possible to conduct an analysis of the new
demographics of slash, but the internet's fluid models of identity make this
task problematic.  At the very least, a demographic approach to fan fiction
today would have to recognize the breaks between who a person is in the
corporeal realm of RL ("real life") and who they self-identify and are accepted
as in their on-line communities.  The latter persona might disclose no
demographic information, might be at odds with the former, or might include
categorizations that don't exist in RL (genderless, Vulcan, disembodied, etc.);
any study would have to formulate a coherent way of incorporating this
identity's importance in relation to a physical body.  And who knows how you
would collect this sort of data on a large scale.

[9].  In <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a>'s mode of reading, fan fiction is always subordinate to its
parent (father?) text; he writes that "Because popular narratives often fail to
satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and
others unrealized possibilities within the original works.  Because the texts
continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather
must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests" (23).  In other
words, it is fans' torturous enthrallment to an inadequate mass media that
constrains them to add their own ancillary narratives to it.  But it is equally
possible to read the interpenetration of TV and fan texts as a sign that fans
are appropriating the signifiers of mass culture in the service of their
independent narrative and social needs--or to avoid rankings altogether, and
begin by thinking of TV shows and fan writing as related manifestations of
equally legitimate forms of desire.

[10].  There is also a hierarchy of sex in <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/" target="_parent">Jenkins</a>'s work: in his opinion (one
he shares with other fanfic theorists), 

While character sexuality constitutes one of the most striking characteristics
of slash, and most slash fans concede that erotic pleasure is central to their
interest in the genre, it seems false to define this genre exclusively in terms
of its representation of sexuality.  Slash is not so much a genre about sex as
it is a genre about the limitations of traditional masculinity and about
reconfiguring male identity. (191)

Rather than offering something else ("male identity," no less) to take
precedence over and draw attention away from the smut that readers reluctantly
"concede" is important to them, I would like to propose that sexual
explicitness can, in itself, be a primary, privileged realm of significance.

[11].  This is the way the subject heading would appear on a story posted to a
usenet group such as alt.startrek.creative.erotica.  In addition to the title
of the story, this header contains codes for the TV series, the pairing (what
characters/couples the story focuses on), the rating (this most often refers to
the level of sexual explicitness), the part number (most stories are longer and
posted in multiple parts), and sometimes other miscellaneous codes as well.

[12].  For an inside perspective on the Borg, visit the Fisher article for Star
Trek's official web site.  She writes "Despite the enormous popularity of the
Borg with fans, the Star Trek writers have often found them difficult to write
for...In order to have dramatic confrontation that showcases Star Trek:
Voyager's regular characters, for example, you have to pit them against
individuals," and quotes an actor as saying "You can't help but act Borg.  The
costume sticks to your body and you feel controlled and robotic, like you're
encased in something."

[13].  See Gonzalez for a detailed discussion of the cyborg as "symptom."

[14].  See Dery for a reading of the Borg as a figure for the erotics of gay
male leather culture.  He writes: "Anonymous and continuous, the exchange of
fluid data among the Borg conjures the fleeting, faceless sex, in bars,
bathrooms, and public parks...The man-machines evoke RoboCop as drawn by Tom of
Finland"

[15].  Thanks to Timothy Burke for sharing this perspective--the quote is his.

[16].  Except in a few exceptional cases, the idea that mass media texts have
queer narratives running just under the surface tends to be met with skepticism
in the mainstream, and seen as something that is made up (rather desperately,
if justifiably) by deprived queer viewers.  But, in his influential study
Making Things Perfectly Queer, Alexander Doty suggests that "within cultural
production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture's erotic
center, both as a necessary construct by which to define the heterosexual and
the straight (as 'not queer'), and as a position that can be and is occupied in
various ways by otherwise heterosexual and straight-identifying people" (3-4). 
It is only "conventional heterocentrist paradigms, which always already have
decided that expressions of queerness are sub-textual, sub-cultural,
alternative readings" (xii), that make slashy interpretations seem like a
stretch.  The assumption that only fully sanctioned ideologies are palatable to
a mass audience (and therefore are the only messages in mass texts) is based on
a denial that queers constitute a substantial minority of consumers who it is
in the studios' interest to captivate, that people who are not queer can
experience unconscious pleasure from identifying with queer erotics, and that
there are multiple and equally legitimate ways to read the material presented
by a text.  The show Xena: Warrior Princess is the quintessential example of a
case where producers knowingly negotiated the tension between lesbian subtext
and social limits on content, succeeding with both lesbians and a more general
audience. 

[17].  In her interesting column "Why can't Janeway have sex?" Julia Houston,
fan, fan writer, and about.com guide to "Star Trek Fans," writes: "Janeway's
celibacy is part of a long-standing problem Star Trek has had with women and
sex."

[18].  In "Teledildonics," Lisa Moore describes Jeanette Winterson's narrative
style in what is perhaps a similar way: she says it combines a critique of
modernity's putatively fixed subjectivity and sexuality with a recognizably
lesbian inflection of their dissolution that draws on lesbian romance
conventions.  After Haraway, she calls this stylistic hybrid of a post-modern
critique of identity with a celebration of identity based on love "cyborg
writing," and connects it briefly to the new bodily and relational
possibilities available to lesbians on the net.

[19].  It is at this point that the natural connection between lesbians and
cyborgs seems most clear.  One of the most virulent anxieties about lesbians,
both in mainstream culture and within lesbian feminism, is that they will use
some sort of sex toy or prosthesis (like a strap-on dildo) to penetrate the
vagina.  This threatens to reproduce or supplant the penis/phallus.  Seven's
Borg hand, which plays a prominent sexual and emotional role in many other J/7
stories as well, clearly provides a point of intersection where anxieties about
both the lesbian man-woman and the cyborg machine-human can be worked on.

[20].  In many J/7 stories, Janeway actually makes a point of calling Seven
"Annika."  This nudge toward Seven's humanization is an example of how
stabilizing forces are also at work in fan fiction texts.  They are, as I have
said, hybrids.

[21].  This summary is based on Fiske (312).

[22].  Harmon, "In Dull TV Days..."

[23].  Posted to the alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated newsgroup on
8/16/99; also found on the ASCEM web page
(http://tsu_campus.tripod.com/ASCEML).


[24]. Reverend Jim's incredible J/T page is unfortunately defunct at this time.

[25].  The Napster case is more recent than Barlow's article, and it seems that
at this point the obsolescence of intellectual property law is becoming more
widely known.  In an article in The Nation, Eben Moglen points out that, with
the continued development of new and more streamlined channels of information
sharing (e.g. the free software OpenNap), the record industry is going to end
up "with no one to sue but its own customers."  Whether they like it or not,
media corporations' "role as owner-distributors" is fast becoming "a quaint and
diminutive relic of a passe economy."



BIBLIOGRAPHY ETC. FOUND AT www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~julier/thesis/.