This text is copyright 2000 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.
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cyborg sex in public, fan fiction on-line, and a fantasy of political consumption
by Julie Levin Russo (ejulie@brown.edu)
12.13.00
The "Just Between..." series by G. L. Dartt is an extremely popular and
monstrously long serialized lesbian romance found at www.northco.net/~janeway/:
it currently has 35 chapters, each approaching novella length, and according to a
web counter, the latest installment has been accessed by about 3,000 readers since it
was posted three weeks before this was written. 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, to the tune of 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. To the uninitiated,
fan fiction may, at first glance, seem a bizarre, laughably obsessive, inartistic, and
highly marginal subcultural quirk. Yet academic critics have argued that fan fiction
is an active mode of reception that challenges the culture industry's domination of
popular meanings and mythologies, and fan writers have agreed. Judging from the
brief example above, fan fiction seems to be a site where a number of complex
discourses intersect at an erotic crossroads:
* the validity of non-heterosexualities
* the boundaries between human and machine bodies and minds
* the place of sexuality in a woman's public professional life
* the virulent controls placed on sexuality by a patriarchy structured around
reproduction
* the taboo against an embodied erotics in much of mass media
* the possibilities and limitations of romance as a conventional genre
* 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, fan fiction is 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 (kinda creepy!), that
they have communities built around them--these things are surprising. Neither the
layman's or the ethnographer's perspective on fan fiction that I glossed above
seems to do justice to this. The recent evolution of fan fiction is also intimately knit
with the transformations that new forms of technology and communications, such
as the internet, are generating in our culture. It is only a tiny corner of a vast
cultural movement, but as such it can serve as a fertile example of what new
possibilities are opening up.
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 readers who appropriate materials from mass culture
in the process of making meanings that fulfill their own needs and desires. 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. It is based on a rigidly binary model
of production and consumption as two discrete moments, in which reception can be
theorized in isolation, 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 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.
This vision may sound too abstract to be connected with politics, and indeed
my analysis isn't political in the sense of dealing with the concrete, observable
realities of people's everyday struggles with their oppressors. You won't find here
many specific examples of how fans have changed the world. Part of my point is
that it's difficult to conceive of such examples because we haven't yet learned to
think of political power as within the purview of mass media consumers. I also
turn away from empirics in order to suggest that political conflicts often take
intangible forms. My work engages these conflicts by creating a framework for
how to see (how to imagine, even) what kinds of tactics consumers (that is, all
of us) use that have the potential to reshape our culture--no real world politics ever
got anywhere without first being able to ask new questions and to imagine things
differently.
One of the lessons fan fiction teaches is that mass culture can be much more
fertile if you fantasize about it. I am writing about fanfic because it has captivated
both my intellect and my desires. It is sexy and playful. And it provides an
especially concrete embodiment of the creative processes that are associated with
reception, and the way they are evolving along with the development of electronic
media. I will discuss audience theorists' conventional interpretations of fan fiction,
but I am proposing a different approach. I will argue that in order to effectively
address the question of how fans' activities are related to the dominant systems of
power in our culture, it is necessary to create a more abstract, more theoretical
model. I go on to experiment with a theoretical framework for understanding erotic
fan fiction, one which not only allows for more complex ways in which it may be
restructuring consumption/production, but also argues that these mutations are
intimately bound up with progressive changes in other discourses (such as
sexuality). My metaphorics combines the cyborg's boundary disruptions with
public renegotiations of sex and desire to encourage new couplings between fans,
industries, and academics. I anticipate that this framework can be applied fruitfully
both to fan texts themselves, and to the contexts of their production and
distribution.
a fanfic FAQ [1]
* Where does fan fiction come from, and why haven't I heard of it?
Fan fiction is generally considered to have been invented within Star Trek
fan culture in the 1970's, although it may have existed in some form in earlier
decades.[2] It arose at about the same time in several other fandoms, and continued
to spread and gain popularity. Until recently, fan fiction was primarily distributed
in fan-printed zines. Shows with enthusiastic followings have a number of
conventions each year where fans meet to socialize, attend events, and shop for
commercial and fan-produced merchandise. These 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. The zines, each of which was under the
control of an editor or two, generally contained both stories and artwork, and some
had very high production values. Editors and writers were known for cooperating
with each other, and those who were experienced often held workshops or panels at
conventions.
A few fandoms eschewed the convention scene in favor of "circuit"
distribution, a more direct and diffuse system where one fan was in charge of
collecting new stories, and if you wanted to read them, you simply sent that person
a stamped and addressed envelope.
Although there was considerable enthusiasm and activity around fan fiction
among die-hard fans, it was mostly contained within the relatively marginal
convention subculture. It is only with the rise of the internet that fan fiction is even
beginning to come into a more general popular consciousness.
* How has the internet changed fan fiction?
With the rapid popularization of the internet, fan fiction underwent a
dramatic 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. 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.
* Who writes fan fiction?
Historically, fan writers were overwhelmingly middle-class white women,
demographically. But with the internet boom, fandom's creative base appears to
have diversified dramatically. There have not been any studies to date about the
current demographics of fan fiction or of particular genres of it, and given the way
the internet's technologies allow people to efface fixed bodies in favor of more fluid
models of identity, I wonder whether such a study would be useful or advisable.
At the very least, a demographic approach to fan fiction today would have to
carefully define the connections and breaks between a person's on-line identity
(which might only be a name or also include information about gender, race [human
or non-], geography, sexual orientation, etc.) and their "real" identity. In
cyberspace, people may not only self-identify as, for example, genderless or
Vulcan, but be accepted as such by their fan community.
* How much fan fiction is out there? And how much of it has sex in it?
Quantifying the internet precisely is a complicated project, and certainly
beyond the scope of this paper. Merely to give an example: fanfiction.net boasts
more than 76,000 stories archived, and lists just about every TV series you can
think of--and since authors have to register and voluntarily submit their stories, that
is probably only a fraction of the fan fiction that exists.
Romance is perhaps the most common theme of fan fiction, and among
romantic stories a sizeable minority contain explicit sex. This is to say (not very
scientifically) that there is a lot of "adult" fanfic out there. It tends to be archived
separately from the stories that are appropriate for minors, who are an important
segment of many fan communities. Stories are generally rated using the codes for
film: G-NC-17.
* What is slash?
"Slash" refers to stories that depict or presume a romantic and/or sexual
relationship between two characters of the same gender (or occasionally to stories
about gender-swapping). Slash has been around since the beginnings 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). It always has been (and remains) a substantial
genre of fan fiction. Slash has also 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. Slash has also attracted a
lot of critical attention from academics (I will discuss their analyses in the next
section).
* Is there slash about female characters?
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. Either way, slash about women is gaining momentum--its prototypical pair
is Xena and Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess. Some writers choose to call it
by other names such as "subtext fiction," perhaps to distinguish it from the gay
male stories that still predominate.
While I am still skeptical of demographics and hierarchies, I will depart
from that for a moment to point out that the majority of lesbian slash is probably
either rather low-quality pornographic stories by straight men or more involved and
better-written romances by queer women (although I am sure that bad stories by
women, good stories by men, and even stories by queer men and straight women
also exist).
For this paper, I am taking fan fiction about Captain Janeway and Seven of
Nine from Star Trek: Voyager as my example. This is, first of all, because these
are the stories closest to my heart as a fan and fan writer. Given that there is
already a sizeable body of theoretical work about male slash, I also thought it would
be valuable to work with a female couple. 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 ("subtext"). I find it interesting that most J/7 fic
appears to be produced by apparent lesbians who form strong communities on-line
(given that, at first glance, Seven seems coded for male sexuality on screen). There
are also theoretical synergies to my choice which will become apparent. I should
also mention that I am particularly interested in erotic work because I would like to
explore the cultural function or disruption that pornographic writing might fulfill in
general; fan smut combines these possibilities with the possibilities of fan fiction in
unique ways.
canon [3]
All the major analyses of fan fiction are affiliated with the field of reception
theory, so 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.
Ethnography is seen to have several main advantages: 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.
While there are deeper critiques of these assumptions that I could make, I will
merely point out that, while some studies in the ethnographic vein have been
interesting and valuable, others have demonstrated that it is possible to write
ethnographies that do not fulfill either of these positive conditions. One of my main
frustrations with reception scholars is that they see their work as "political" because
it describes the relations of power (e.g. gender, race, class) that provide the context
for and shape audience activity. They do not explore the political influence that
audience's acts of reception themselves might command.[4]
The first academic acknowledgement of fan fiction was actually closer to
traditional feminist criticism than to ethnography: sci-fi writer Joanna Russ's essay
about K/S slash "Pornography by women, for women, with love." Motivated by
the admittedly 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. While it was a fascinating achievement in its
time, this interpretation is now obsolete, since the advent of the internet has brought
on an explosion in the diversity of slash writing and writers, and an analysis based
on a particular kind of woman writing a particular kind of gay romance is no longer
accurate or relevant. The first book about Trek fan fiction, Enterprising Women,
by Camille Bacon-Smith, is essentially an ethnography that supports Russ's
conclusion, elaborating on the empowering and supportive community women
create in slash culture. This approach, while not uninteresting, stops at offering
women a coded way of expressing resistance, without asking questions about how
this mode of expression might succeed or fail at altering the oppressive material or
ideological realities that make it necessary in the first place.
Henry Jenkins and Constance Penley are the two most prolific and
recognized writers on fan fiction. Penley's work is unique in its emphasis on
technology within a feminist framework: in "Brownian Motion," she makes the
case that both the content and the context of slash fiction are a site for "debate
[about] the issues of women's relation to the technologies of science, the mind, and
the body" (158-9). However, the connections she makes around these issues are
unfocused and undertheorized, and she tends to raise an array of interesting
questions without effectively answering them. As an example particularly suited to
this paper, Penley identifies "the deepest wish of Star Trek fan culture: that the
fandom matter, that what the fans do can affect the world in significant ways," and
argues that "it is not enough for the critic to identify this wish and be satisfied with
designating it as a symptom" (152). Instead of going on to attempt to address the
tantalizing issue of whether fans are actually fulfilling their wish, though, she
continues with a discussion of how they share the preoccupations and ideologies of
Trek (hearkening back to the hypodermic model). While she is not an
ethnographer, her tendency toward the descriptive reflects the influence of
ethnography on her work.
Jenkins's book Textual Poachers is the most authoritative and most
theoretical study of fan fiction and culture to date. Taking this book as an analysis
representative of ethnographically oriented reception theory at its most interesting, I
would like to look at it closely here. Jenkins's work has been widely influential,
the response to it gleefully positive, and I have not come across any other critic who
shares my frustrations with it. My disappointment is probably due to the fact that
he does come to a number of exciting conclusions, but it seems to me that he
doesn't take them far enough, leaving me in the intellectual version of coitus
interruptus. I see in his analysis the seeds of a theory that would do justice to the
bizarre and intricate configurations of fan fiction, but they are planted in the infertile
soil of ethnographic criticism (where they may be able to take root, but not take
flight). I think it is important for me to situate my own project in relation to what I
see as the weaknesses of Jenkins's work.
In Textual Poachers, Jenkins 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--Jenkins 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. Jenkins 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 Jenkins'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 never gets around to
asking. Jenkins oscillates between legitimizing the activities of fan communities by
describing them as similar to the structures of the commercial mass media, and
lauding fans for organizing themselves according to kinder, gentler models--for
example, two nearby quotes: "Much as science fiction conventions provide a market
for commercially produced goods...[they] are also a marketplace for fan-produced
artworks" (47); "fandom...blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers,
spectators and participants, the commercial and the homecrafted" (45). This
ambivalence about how to value productive activity implies an uncertainty about
what form of social power fans do (or don't) have, a question Jenkins avoids
wrestling with by remaining primarily in the realm of the descriptive.
Jenkins seems to admit to fantasies that fan fiction's expressions of
resistance might have political consequences, writing that fans' "activities pose
important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation
and circulation of meanings" (23), and that "fans have found the very forces that
reinforce patriarchal authority to contain tools by which to critique that authority"
(284). But he is consistently unable to follow up these suggestive statements by
asking questions about how reception and related processes actually go on to affect
these dominant institutions and relations. Rather than attempting to connect fan
culture to a sense of radical politics in a larger social and conceptual scale, he
contents himself with discussing at length the communities fans generate in their
immediate vicinity. Jenkins 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. I can easily imagine far more revolutionary influences fans might want
to have on the mass media system, including reshaping the power relations that
determine who is in a position to make that programming and targeting the
dominant ideologies that programming tends to express. By leaving no route open
to theorize fans' interactions with these deeper underpinnings of their "lived
relations," Jenkins is effectively constructing reception as a process whose effects
are contained within the fan community. 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. That is, 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:
its political impact.
In Jenkins'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. There is also a hierarchy of sex in Jenkins'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.
cyborg sex / public sex
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). While I would not suggest that a theoretical
methodology (as opposed to interpretations of concrete observations) is the only
useful approach to mass media reception, the categorical rejection of theory seems
unproductive and extravagant. Ethnography is supported by its own assumptions
and has its own pitfalls, after all. I have argued that Jenkins, for example, ends up
basing his analysis of fan fiction on a model of reception that doesn't situate
consumption within a larger cultural mechanics, and that this narrow lens makes it
impossible for him to propose that mass culture consumers have more than a highly
circumscribed and vague political empowerment. This is partially a result, I think,
of his dedication to dealing only with what is concrete and demonstrable. I am
certainly indebted, in my work, to claims that critics like Jenkins 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. In this paper, however, I am approaching
my object of study in a different way. I would like to delineate a theoretical
framework (custom-tailored to J/7 fan fiction) that will allow me to read the
metaphorical meanings and relations imaginable beyond its literal and observable
features. I turn to two specific moments in feminist and queer theory, Haraway's
"A Cyborg Manifesto" and Berlant and Warner's "Sex in Public," to specify how
modes of sexual expression are intimately coupled with the patriarchal capitalist
system (including consumption and production). In my view, constructing
theoretical connections like these 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 her influential 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto," 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). This is a
world where (for example) information, communication, miniaturization,
instrumentality, optimization, pluralism (rather than essence, nature, opposition,
labor) are the privileged terms. 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 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. Most
importantly, what the idea of the cyborg does is suggest the possibility that the
same transmutations, fragmentations, and systematizations that enable this
terrifying new domination 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.
It is Haraway's position on sex and reproduction that I want to read most
closely. 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). But throughout her essay, she conflates pre-cyborg sex and
reproduction in a way that actually obfuscates the sexual alternative that she is
proposing. She tantalizingly mentions "Cyborg 'sex'" but is able to define it only
in opposition to "organic reproduction" (272). And in her "caricature" of Marxism
and radical feminism, she draws connections between the two by outlining the
different but complimentary ways they make analogies between sex, reproduction,
and labor (280-81), without questioning the logic by which they conflate these
terms. In another paragraph, she begins by claiming that "The new technologies
affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction," but moves
immediately to cyborg-infiltrated "ties of sexuality and instrumentality," without
ever untangling these pre-cyborg relations around reproductive sex (288). Falling
into the trap of the very ideology she criticizes, what she fails to see is that by
envisioning only non-sexual reproduction as an alternative to sexual reproduction,
she collapses sex into reproduction, 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. Their core
project in "Sex in Public" is to denaturalize the constructed private space of
heterosexual intimacy which is a foundation of the oppressive economic, racial, and
sexual relations of our culture, and to agitate for the formation of (queer) sexual
counterpublics as an effective means of resistance. Drawing on the work of
Habermas and Foucault, they offer a fuller elaboration of how reproductive sex is
typically constitutive of hierarchical (i.e. pre-cyborg) dominations. To summarize:
a necessary part of the transition to modernity (in particular, to capitalism) was the
fabrication of an idea of personhood which depended upon the relations of the
heterosexual couple within the domestic space. This was supposedly a bounded
realm where autonomous subjects could be created, only to go out from it into a
fully separate public economic world, and then return to it as a safe haven. 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. 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. In the everyday operation of this ideological strategy, the
myth of private intimacy is entangled with a vast array of social practices which
may seem to have nothing to do with sex, including "paying taxes, being disgusted,
philandering, bequeathing, celebrating a holiday, investing for the future, teaching,
disposing of a corpse, carrying wallet photos..." (359-60). Collectively, these
practices endow the idea of the heterosexual couple with a "sense of rightness" that
Berlant and Warner call "heteronormativity," a tacit domination that is dispersed
throughout culture, and which preserves the ideological functions of privatized sex.
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). In this formulation (in contrast to Haraway's), it
is new, non-reproductive modes of sexuality thatcarry the possibility of breaking
down the heteronormative model. Put together, these theorists offer 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 resistance 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.
NEW VOY "reading treksmut" J/7 [NC-17] 1/1 [5]
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.[6] 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.[7] 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[8]
is ordered by and focused in a single female figure: the Queen (as of an insect
colony). Both maternal and sexual (just look at her! [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.[9]
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]. 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.
On Voyager, 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.[10] 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. 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. 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 conversations that take place between consumers and
the mass media outside the expected boundaries of television, and the technologies
and communities that provide relatively independent environments for fan
interpretations.
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. Whereas prime-time TV's social space must be
purged of nudity and sex, which are relegated to private realms, fan writers create
alternative communities where they can demand that their shared mythologies
narrate people as having sexual anatomy, desire and gratification. Slash makes the
additional demand that queer sexuality and relationships be publicly celebrated. 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 wrestles with both queer
sexual modes and the boundaries of the human, merging these two post-
reproductive sites into a single erotic narrative. 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. They
seem to be posted on the net by small and overlapping virtual communities (perhaps
made up mostly of queer women) who give artistic encouragement to each other. 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.
Fittingly, Seven's analytical defense of why their sex should be opened up to
cyborg possibilities is rendered incoherent by her desire itself: "'Let meÞ show
youÞ It is what I want. The tubules will add to the waysÞ the ways in which I am
able to stimulateÞ ...Kathryn ... My BorgÞ hand is more flexible and stronger
thanÞ the otherÞ therefore I am ableÞ'" 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).[11]
"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 perfectly 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 theory's political engagement is a matter of its facility
to ask 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. Reception theory's model of these systems as a circuit, with
linear paths running between discrete nodes of activity, unnecessarily simplifies the
kinds of relations that may exist between disparate sites in culture. Only a more
diffuse, more malleable model of consumption and production as two of a number
of processes that are happening simultaneously and that have complex relationships
to each other within a larger mechanics (a web, perhaps) can fully activate the
question of how consumers are participating in hegemonic power struggles. To
interface this with my theoretical specifics: we must 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.[12] 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: that is, 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,'"[13] 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 this 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. Jenkins 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 an actual 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:[14]
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 satirically highlights the fan's supposed subservience to the
power of the corporation by appropriating the ultimate dominant discourse,
Christianity--and by doing so suggests that this fan isn't feeling so subservient. Or
rather, it expresses a fannish tension between the real frustration of depending on
the media industry, which is indeed very powerful, for cultural raw materials, and
this 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)
As in this example, these disclaimers also can 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
this 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.
Jenkins 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. In the New York Times this 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.
It's as if the net is the consummate actualization of the incipient structural
transformations that fan fiction embodies.
In "Selling Wine Without Bottles," John Perry Barlow conveniently
explores the consequences the world wide web may have for intellectual property
law. 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. 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).
As this example suggests, the internet is like nothing anybody has ever seen
before. Along with other recently developed technologies, it is transfiguring culture
so acutely and so rapidly that we are experiencing a pervasive sense of emergence
without being able to pin down what exactly is being engendered. 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).
I would argue 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 it is
telling that perhaps the net's biggest industry, both commercial and cottage, (as well
as its biggest controversy) is porn. 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.
Weighing in before the Times, J. Brown wrote, in a 1997 on-line column:
There are good reasons for the studios to worry: Before the Internet was a
media force, studios had a long-time habit of looking the other way when it
came to fan fiction, because those hand-copied print zines that published it
didn't get much exposure. But on the Web, where anyone can conceivably
publish to millions of people, fan fiction has entered a new dimension.
In focusing on the internet's prospects for popular distribution, Brown
acknowledges that the possibilities are not just a matter of quantity. 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: 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 Jenkins
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 Jenkins: 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 for a resistant architecture of 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 fantasy 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. 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.
notes
[1]. FAQ=Frequently Asked Questions. On the internet, information about
fandom is often presented in this format.
[2]. I have heard that there was a series of adult fan comics that had an
underground circulation in the 1930's (?), but I have been unable to find any further
information. They were called the "Tijuana bibles."
[3]. "Canon" is the term fans use for the officially sanctioned narrative of a show:
the things that have happened or have been referred to on screen (and sometimes in
published novels or guides). This distinguishes it from their own narratives, which
are often substantially different.
[4]. The sources for the information in these two paragraphs were primarily Ang,
Corner, Morley.
[5]. This is the way the subject heading would appear on a story posted to a usenet
group such as alt.startrek.creative.erotica.
[6]. 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."
[7]. See Gonzalez for a detailed discussion of the cyborg as "symptom."
[8]. 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"
[9]. Thanks to Timothy Burke for sharing this perspective--I attribute the quote to
him.
[10]. 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."
[11]. 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, after all, hybrids.
[12]. This summary is based on Fiske (312).
[13]. Quoted from a discussion of this topic in a 1997 New York Times article by
Amy Harmon.
[14]. 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).
bibliography
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Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power. ed. Seiter;
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Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation
of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Barlow, John Perry. "Selling Wine Without Bottles: the Economy of Mind on the
Global Net." Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture. ed. Leeson, Lynn
Hershman. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996.
Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael. "Sex in Public." The Cultural Studies
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Boadicea. "The Dress." http://members.tripod.com/~Appelsini/B1.html
Brown, Janelle. "Fan Fiction on the Line." 1997.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/synapse/feature/97/31/brown4a_text.html
Case, Sue-Ellen. The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print
Culture. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. trans. Rendall, Steven F.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
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Corner, John. "Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts, and Methods." Mass
Media and Society (second edition). ed. Curran; Gurevitch. London; New
York: Arnold, 1996.
Dartt, G. L. "Just Between Us." http://www.northco.net/~janeway/jb01us.htm
the author's page: http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/ns/greenoaks/Home.html
Dery, Mark. "Slashing the Borg: Resistance is Fertile." 1996.
http://www.dds.nl/~n5m/texts/markdery.htm
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Fisher, Deborah. "Building a Better Borg." startrek.com spotlight, 05.22.00.
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/111732.html
Fiske, John. "Conclusion: the Popular Economy." Television Culture. London:
Routledge, 1987.
Fuchs, Cynthia J. "'Death is Irrelevant': Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of
Male Hysteria." The Cyborg Handbook. ed. Gray, Chris Hables. New
York; London: Routledge, 1995.
Gaines, Jane M. Contested Culture: the Image, the Voice, and the Law. Chapel
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Goldberg, Jonathan. "Recalling Totalities: the Mirrored Stages of Arnold
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York; London: Routledge, 1995.
Golding, Peter and Murdock, Graham. "Culture, Communications, and Political
Economy." Mass Media and Society (second edition). ed. Curran;
Gurevitch. London; New York: Arnold, 1996.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research."
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Hall, Stuart. "Encoding, decoding." The Cultural Studies Reader. ed. During,
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Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto." The Cultural Studies Reader. ed.
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Hughes, Paulann. "Freeing Kathryn."
http://pinkrabbit.simplenet.com/subtextfic/voyager/hughes/freeing
kathryn.htm
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New
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Morley, David. "Changing Paradigms in Audience Studies." Remote Control:
Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power. ed. Seiter; Borchers;
Kreutzner; Warth. London; New York: Routledge, 1989.
Penley, Constance. "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology."
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more links
the largest fan fiction site
http://www.fanfiction.net/
"Fan Fiction on the Net"
http://members.aol.com/KSNicholas/fanfic/
"The Definitive Guide to Star Trek Fan Fiction on the Web"
This incredible directory has unfortunately disappeared. It may come back
someday; until then, you might try this one as an alternative. It has just started, but
hopefully it will keep growing.
http://www.trekiverse.org/links
alt.startrek.creative archive
http://www.trekiverse.org/frame.html
a large archive of lesbian slash from many different shows
http://pinkrabbit.simplenet.com/subtextfic/rabbitframe.htm
J/7 fan fiction by web site
http://pweb.netcom.com/~dmkrebs/fflink.htm
a large archive of lesbian Voyager fan fiction
http://www.fortunecity.com/village/jett/404/
"The Official Star Trek Web Site!"
http://www.startrek.com/
[all URLs given in these sections are operable as of 12/13/00]
acknowledgements
Patty, thank you. Not just for midwifing my own feat of non-sexual reproduction,
which would not have been conceived, much less born, without your participation,
but also for encouraging me to imagine radical new possibilities for myself.
I had numerous conversations with people (both embodied and virtual) about this
paper throughout the writing process that were invaluable to my intellectual work
and to my morale. In particular, I would like to thank Timothy Burke, Atara Stein,
Tenderware, and Judith Gran for their enthusiasm and generosity with their ideas
and feedback.
A tip of my virtual hat to the fabulous freaks of ASCEM
(alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated), who created a community where I could
combine highbrow, lowbrow, and just plain libidinous pleasures. Whatever my
studies in RL (real life), I could never have written this without that degree from
TSU (Treksmut University).
And of course, thanks to all the people I love who listened to me obsess about this
paper incessantly, trusting that someday the rest of Julie would return from thesis-
space.