Last weekend I attended the Console-ing Passions conference at UC Santa Barbara. The event, focusing on feminist media studies, has been held roughly every two years since 1992. While it is still primarily concerned with television (as it started as a counter to the predominance of film studies in the 1980s), it has always welcomed papers and presentations on a wide array of media. However, and despite occasional calls to broaden its official purview, it still importantly maintains its central focus on feminist analysis and politics. This focus has helped it maintain a particular sensibility and community over the years, and this year’s event was no exception. Indeed, it was easily one of the best conferences I’ve attended in recent years.

I should say upfront that much of this was due to the setting. Santa Barbara is one of those supernaturally beautiful places, with mountains, the Pacific Ocean, lush vegetation, and near-perfect weather. The UCSB campus, like every other UC campus I’ve ever been to, makes the best of use of this environment, with open spaces, winding walkways, low-slung buildings, and sunlit rooms. The event organizers, UCSB Film and Media Studies professors Anna Everett and Lisa Parks, shrewdly planned the schedule to make the most of this setting, with extended breaks between some sessions, over an hour for lunch each day, and two outdoor receptions (including one on Goleta Beach, adjacent to UCSB).

I bring all this up because it makes a qualitative difference in the conference experience. The best conferences are about what happens in the spaces between the panels: in hallways, restaurants, hotel bars, and (yes) beaches. I’m not as up on my Richard Florida as I should be in this regard, but there’s clearly something about the effective organization of time and space that foster greater intellectual and creative energies. It’s a lesson I hope the leaders of SCMS heed as that conference continues to expand.

The theme for this year’s CP, broadly speaking, was gender and production. Most panels took this issue head-on, presenting work ranging from the theorization of “production” per se, to representations of media production on television, to the conditions and practices of actual media production. This focus indicates the growing expansion of media studies’ objects and methods of study. The days when entire conferences would consist of dozens of individual “readings” of particular films or TV series are thankfully long gone. Instead, effective media scholarship-i.e., “doing” media studies-requires interaction with (if not mastery of) a wide array of theories, methods, media forms, texts, producers, and users. Despite the increased expectations this places on media scholars, students, and practitioners, this is how it should be. Media is too chaotic and important to be carved only into arbitrary approaches or areas of focus. There is so much to learn-about methodologies, about industrial practices, about different formal paradigms, about reception communities-that can benefit us all in ways, I think, that our present moment, with its cultural, economic, technological, political and even biological uncertainties, demands.

That said, CP’s feminist ethos still provides an effective, and critically important, banner under which the new media studies can productively work. At CP, feminism is not so much a discrete approach (as it still tends to be taught) as an overarching principle: i.e., advancing work that broadens our understanding of gendered categories, and contributes to the improvement of the lives of real women and men. Here as well the organization of the event contributed to this goal, as not only media scholars but media producers and media fans interacted in this space; I saw presentations and/or chit-chatted with women television writers, studio executives, porn producers, and media acafen throughout the weekend. As someone who otherwise occupies several central social positions of contemporary American heteronormative patriarchy (white, middle-aged, straight, married, and parenting), I feel it’s important to listen to and engage in these discussions as much as possible.

(That said, I don’t mean to suggest that this makes it all or only “work”; I had a blast all weekend.)

Coming up in the next two installments: CP-presented work on gender in television programming, and work on gender in television production.

OK, now it was over two months ago; great googly moogly! I’ve finished my summer session class, and, while I’m neck deep in writing projects, they are, indeed, writing projects. Which means I’m writing. So here I am. Writing.

Two months on, and MIT 5 is still relevant in this post-iPhone age. Not only that, this panel, on Battlestar Galactica (BSG) and its fandoms, was the most intriguing panel of the weekend for me, and has given me a lot to chew on as I work through my own issues with authorship and fandom.

Before I get into it, though, I want to point to Julie Levin Russo’s podcasts of the panel. She organized, moderated, and presented on the panel, and recorded it all for posterity. I found these ‘casts to be immensely useful in revisiting these papers. All too often, conference papers recede from memory all too quickly once you’ve left the airport back home on Sunday night. They only function from that point out not as memory, but as a vaguely documented trace of scholarship (i.e., a line on the vita). True, they’ll hopefully also evolve into something more permanent, like an article or book chapter. However, the moment itself is gone, unless recorded. Maybe I’ve just got a thing for reruns, but I really appreciate being able to hear this panel again. Thank you, Julie!

Melanie Kohnen opened the panel with an overview of BSG’s much-discussed war-on-terror iconography and thematics. She argues that the series complicates default media constructions of terrorism and religious fervor by remixing its elements. For example, in BSG, it is the ostensible “bad guys” (the Cylons) who are evangelical monotheists, and the “good guys” (the humans) who (in S3’s “New Caprica” arc) mount an insurgency and plot suicide bombings. Such “remixing” occurs throughout the series, over axes of politics, gender, religion, ethnicity, and technology, questioning the strategies of power, and the tactics of resistance.

Next, Sarah Toton described the history of online BSG fandom from its “old school” roots in single-edited webistes of 1990s webrings (maintained by fans of the original 1978-80 series) to the more open-source, collaborative communities inspired by the new series (link to full paper). Along the way, and in addition to this generational split, fan expression has been gendered. The parameters of BattlestarWiki, for example, are only relatively open in that it seeks to assemble “factual” information about characters, places, events, and objects within the BSG universe (and as if it itself existed in that universe), and marginalizes more interpretive and speculative arguments and accounts of the series. Still, it, and other sites, are potential sites of collaborative canon (or at least “fanon”) generation, and for that reason, should continue to be explored and expanded.

Toton’s paper commanded most of the Q&A, but I can’t recall what transpired. Julie did record it as well, though, so maybe I’ll go back and hear it again!

The final two papers were most interesting to me in exploring the interface of the “sourcetext” (fanspeak for the actual TV episode, in this case) and fan desire.

Anne Kustritz examined the issue of relationships in long-running media texts, arguing that possibilities work best for fans when they remain possible, i.e, left open. BSG, over its first two seaasons, developed an intricate network of possible romantic entanglements, as most of its characters regularly interacted with each other. However, these possibilities, Kustritz argues, began to be shut down as the series went on, with definitive, and heteronormative, relationships becoming the norm into S3.

My observation for Anne (two months later!) is that sustaining openness, on a tightly serialized program like BSG, strains its realist conventions. In other words, while some fans may want the possibilities to linger, others, and the writers, may want to move the story on. There’s no narrative movement, no decisions, no regrets, if nothing tangible happens. That said, I agree that it’s sadly conventional in most of its choices in this regard (though there’s still going to be a lot to say/write about Kara Thrace and her passions when it’s all said and done next spring…).

On a similar path, Julie Levin Russo explored the queer possibilites the series has opened up thus far, revealing tensions between fans’ desires (their multiform love for the characters and its possibilities) and authorial actions that complicate that love. She donned her “girl slash goggles,” her chosen love technology, to show how queer modes of love could be found in the gaps and interstices of the text. (Note: you can see Russo, and the BSG GSGs, in the video clip of her paper). Most persuasively, she pointed out how the video clips made available on the official BSG site for fanvid production were generic and CGI-centric, favoring a particular kind of fanboy techno-love, in contrast to the fangirl-produced, character-centered fanvids at iMeem and elsewhere.

This paper was as compelling an account of queer online media fandom as I’ve ever read or heard. The primary point, about whose love is validated, and how, was particularly relevant to ongoing debates about the parameters of fandom. While at the time I thought she was a mite unfair to Ron Moore when she criticized his excuse for not having any gay characters on BSG, in retrospect (i.e., in “watching” the rerun of her paper), I can see her point. He is fighting the “good fight” on many fronts (as Kohnen argued), but obviously taking on heteornormativity isn’t one of them. It is telling that the one definitive space opened up for a “queerer” love on the show – the quaintly domestic and sorta Pottery Barn-ish threesome of D’Anna, Caprica, and Gaius – while vaguely utopian (as with much of the Cylon ethos, to the show’s credit), was also limited to these three “baddies,” and fell apart anyway pretty quickly (though it has to be said, that was all Gaius’ fault!).

So, a strong, thought-provoking panel overall, and one I was glad to revisit. This meta-issue about the boundaries of the “official” text and fan desires/creativity is particularly relevant to my work right now, as is the problematic gendered constructions of “fans” (“girls” and “boys”) and “The Powers That Be” (by the media, by fans, by academics, and by acafans). These papers gave me a lot to process.

Next up, the final MIT 5 retrospective!: Getting Lost (or “where the hell is Building 1?!?”)

Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova have a great discussion in this week’s Fan Debate offering, querying not only the limits of the category “fan,” but what does all these gendered distinctions offer to the discussion. I’m particularly in agreement with Ksenia’s points about how the construction of fandom in academia and in particular fan communities has itself structured what “counts” as “fandom.” To wit, here she wonders whether, in all the current focus on LiveJournal-centered fandom (in academic writing, at least), we’ve lost contact with other, more mundane, and more numerous, venues and practices:

That’s one of the striking things about sites like Livejournal for me – the way it places personal thoughts and conversation into a semi-public, semi-permanent arena – and the accessibility of blogs and discussion boards is obviously a gift for fan-scholars. But obviously, if we rely on those easily-accessible forms of fan discourse, we’re also overlooking all the more elusive discussion that goes on every day in the living room or the staff canteen, and perhaps we risk taking the part as representative of the whole. Again, let’s bear in mind that there are a lot of people, male and female, like myself – who enjoyed Serenity and Firefly but don’t create anything about it or engage in any communities about it. A lot of people who value a specific cultural text and for whom that text is an important part of their lives don’t engage in easily-recognisable, visible, traditional fan behaviour.

It’s this notion of “traditional fan behaviour” that really nails it. What’s “traditional” in one venue may be an outlier in another. Part of the problem the whole endeavor of fan studies has is that the parameters of fandom are simultaneously crucial and indefinite. The identification and observation of myriad borders, boundaries, territories, and the like (e.g,. public vs. private message boards, friendslists, official vs. un-official sites, gen vs. slash, etc.) are what seemingly fuels much fan studies…and yet there is no map of the entire fan “universe” (nor could there ever be*). The debate about fandom being either a matter of degree or kind in the past few weeks’ discussion at fandebate and elsewhere points to this missing whole: is it totally distinct (from “regular” reading/viewing), or is it “regular” readingviewing, only amped up the scale?

Moreover, what is it exactly that separates these territories? Gender has been the default marker of this entire discussion, but I’ve always had the nagging feeling that what we’ve really been talking about was more particular practices (and within that, particular kinds of “progressive” creative output and/or reading strategies) than anything as unwieldy as “gender” per se. I’m more interested in understanding these practices first, and understanding how they’re deployed and managed, than in starting from a label of “male” or “female” or “fangirl” or “fanboy.” I hope Will and Ksenia have helped move this discussion forward this week.

* That said, the notion (spectre?) of quantitative analysis and demographics keeps surfacing in these discussions like a kind of epistemological whale in a sea of theorizing, with most acknowledging that it just hasn’t been done enough (but few volunteering to do it!).

Time flies, even in the summer. I’m pulled between several different projects at the moment (and teaching a summer session class) so the ol’ blog sometimes falls off the radar.

Anyway, continuing on with my review of MIT5…

The “Fans and Producers” panel was a highlight of the weekend for me, not only for presenting some work that had been gestating a while, but also for the ensuing discussion and subsequent eruption of academic/fannish (i.e., “acafan”) discussion. As noted earlier, Henry Jenkins has dedicated the summer to this topic on his blog. Kristina Busse has worked hard to keeping several discussions going, and has just added another LJ community to continue the debates started on Henry’s site.

At the panel, this debate was framed in a variety of ways. The first presenters, Joan Giglione and Robert Gustafson, took a more psychological approach to the issue, positing the fan-celebrity encounter as fraught with various anxieties. While I’m fascinated with the overall issue, the presentation itself meandered with little sense of organization (and, ruthless panel moderator that I am, I cut it off at about 22 minutes). I can’t really comment much on it because of this, but important differences with this approach emerged later in the comments.

Sam Ford next presented his work on the longstanding relationship between soap producers and fans (Here’s the full paper (PDF).). This was an important paper in a number of ways, pointing out the complex ways that fans and “TPTB” have viewed (and used) each other in this particular genre, tracing its history over a few decades of viewership, and raising the idea of the “old” (i.e., older than 49) viewer-historian as a key resource not only for soap fandom, but soap production.

Finally, I gave my initial version of my work on the authorship discourses produced around Doctor Who’s Russell T. Davies (the PDF of which will be up on the conference site shortly). While this is part of a larger project on contemporary television authorship, I am developing it into a stand-alone piece about this particular conjunction of “fan” and “producer” discourses–as shaped primarily by press and PR venues–as a model of “cult TV” production and promotion (I’m still working on how I’m dealing with its actual reception, and am in the process of getting up to speed on fan studies).

While the panel went off well, the real indication of its success came in the comments, when the room erupted in response to Joan Giglione’s (it has to be said) dismissive treatment of an audience question. She asked if the questioner (Bob Rehak, if I remember right) if he had “ever been on a Hollywood set.” When he answered no, she and Gustafson threw their hands up as if to say “well, there’s your problem.”

This elicited an intense exchange about the very epistemology of our object(s) of study. Giglione seemingly, and uncritically, located direct observation of “Hollywood sets” as the “truth” of media culture, while most of the room (including myself) viewed such access as but one particular discourse which, while important, does not necessarily trump other accounts. In my case, for the purposes of this paper, I’m more interested in how what goes on on the (Cardiff, not Hollywood) set of Doctor Who is packaged and presented to various publics, than in what the “actual” production is like.

The question itself – “Have you ever been on a Hollywood set?” – has stuck with me ever since that weekend, as I’ve pondered its explicit hierarchies of knowledge generation, and considered its several ironies (e.g., Hollywood sets are for the production of fantasy; scholarly access to a Hollywood set does not equate with the labor of Hollywood production, etc.). The knowledge gap it suggests cuts right to the core of what we do as media scholars, drawing in everything from Media Effects to Political Economy to Textual Analysis to Cultural Studies. More to come on this one, I’m certain.

This panel also partially fueled Kristina Busse’s response to the conference (which I’ve mentioned in earlier posts), which revealed another set of knowledge discourses that I (as scholar and panel moderator) had previously neglected: the fans themselves, and particularly the viewpoints of female fans and acafans to issues of knowledge, authorship, and textual authority.

I was (unknowingly) seen as one of the “fanboys” attending other “fanboy” panels, rather than the “fangirl” ones. In retrospect, judging by the company I kept that weekend, I can certainly see how that perception emerged. This realization has been important for me in opening up consideration of various codes of power (in that old Foucaultian sense) in my work and scholarly life: gendered, classed, academic, aged, textual, etc. Perhaps I’ve let these differences slide from my conscious thought too much (especially at conferences, where I’m still getting used to friendly grad students coming up to me about Rerun Nation). Regardless of where this comes from (gender, age, race, class, etc.) I’m working out how to maintain this awareness in future.

Next up in the MIT5 review: Towards a Culture of Collaboration (on interactive and online art)

This summer marks the 25th anniversary of my all-time favorite movie summer, and today is the 25th anniversary of the release of my all-time favorite summer film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Here’s the trailer, in case you’re unfamiliar:

I was 13 years old at the time, so yes, this was also the incredible summer of the likes of Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, The Thing, E.T., Rocky III and Poltergeist (and Porky’s, which came out in March), as well as the peak of my arcade video game addiction (mostly Galaga, Donkey Kong, and Crazy Climber). But TWOK trumped them all.

It’s very difficult to condense what this film means to me in a short blog post. Suffice it to say that the film worked then so well because I was 13 and faced with all the usual early teen life-altering realizations and decisions, which included whether or not I was “outgrowing” my interest in SF, and in Star Trek in particular. We all go through this in one form or another at this point in our lives. If it’s not SF, it’s comics, or stuffed animals, or Barbies, or whatever, all anchoring us to a childhood that other bits of culture (sex, cars, music, drinking, drugs – in actuality or (more likely) in any combination of allusions and representations) are pulling as away from.

TWOK reinscribed Trek (and SF, and fandom in general) back into anxious existence through its wit, panache, thrills, and (yes) heart. Mock all you want, but damn it, Spock’s “death” scene is (still) genuinely moving, as is Nimoy’s voiceover of the familar “Space…the final frontier” delivered a few minutes later. Along the way: some joyous scenery chewing, copious blood and gore (at least for Star Trek), a few bravura effects sequences, and James Horner’s unabashedly bombastic score. I love this film.

I should also point out that the first time I saw this film, way back in a three-plex over by NAU in Flagstaff, Arizona (that’s now, alas, an office suite), was the most engaging moviegoing experience I’ve ever had. A packed house, very into Trek, experiencing it all anew, laughing, gasping, and cheering, and bursting into sustained applause as the closing credits rolled. I went back to Trek opening nights for years thereafter, and I keep hoping that experience happens again in newer films, but nothing has ever come close to that night.

Let me also mention the second-most important film of my all-time movie summer, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

If TWOK reaffirmed one kind of identity, Fast Times introduced to me, mere weeks before I started high school, a particular vision of 1980s teenage life as sexy, scary, irresponsible, depressing, and intoxicating. A world of trying on identities, of figuring out girls as sexual and emotional and intellectual, and navigating your own and your male friends’ changing masculinities. I didn’t live in Southern California, but I could still recognize the film’s situations and archetypes in my own experiences. That is, that big question, “Who are you?”, at this age, and not quite realizing, until much later, that that “you” is fleeting.

I’m missing out on much of the “big” movie summer of ought-seven due to other responsibilities, but I hope the children of 1994 get as much out of this one as I did back in ‘82.

Just a quick heads-up to the goings-on at Henry Jenkins’ blog. He’s invited a couple dozen media scholars (including yours truly) to post and discuss gender, power, academia, and media fandom in a series of posts that will run weekly most of the summer. I’ll bring some of the discussion over here, as events dictate, but in the meantime, go and check it out. The first installment is a discussion between Karen Helleckson and Jason Mittell.