You can view a TV rip of Madonna’s entire performance (which also featured LMFAO, Cee Lo Green, Nicki Minaj, and M.I.A.) on YouTube, and Luminosity’s vid on blip.tv, which is a queer feminist critique of the movie 300, which was itself based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller. Honestly, for most of the halftime show I was mostly just staring open-mouthed at the screen; Madonna is nothing else if not a consummate performer, and she hit this one out of the park.

Watching the halftime show and Luminosity’s vid back to back, however, produces some interesting–and uncomfortable–conjunctions. Namely, both fandom and the larger pop culture which it critiques and draws upon have some similar problems.

In her notes to reposting the vid on blip.tv, Francesca Coppa notes that Luminosity “conflates the battlefield and the dance floor, subjecting the men to a female and queer gaze and setting Madonna up as this world’s reigning pagan goddess.” Very true, and at least one blogger, Obsidian Wings, picked up on the camp aspects of Madonna’s reappropriation of the “Vogue” vid’s aesthetic almost immediately: contrary to the lyrics, it does matter whether you’re a boy or a girl, as the vid makes clear. What I’m interested in, however, are the ways in which song, vid, and halftime show all make similar maneuvers, particularly around those issues of gender and of race.

The original “Vogue” song of course refers to a style of dance invented in Harlem and appropriated by Madonna for the song and its music video. The story of most pop music in the 20th century is of course the story of white musicians appropriating black performers’ styles and innovations and repackaging them for a “mainstream” (read: white) audience, and the tried-and-true strategy only continues in the 21st century, from Justin Bieber to–especially in the third song of the Super Bowl set, “Gimme All Your Luvin’”–Madonna herself, whose performance prominently deployed the more au courant star power of performers of color, including Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., in service to the blonde Queen’s latest reinvention. M.I.A. in particular earned censure–not least from Madonna herself–for giving the middle finger to the national television cameras during her verse.

Similarly, as much as it skewers the hypermasculine gender presentation of the movie 300, Luminosity’s vid doesn’t (can’t?) do much to problematize the exceedingly questionable racialization of the Persian Wars that Frank Miller’s graphic novel exults in–the good guys are the manly Spartans, and the bad guys(?) are the effeminate Persians. (To say nothing of Miller’s extraordinarily biased presentation of history, as David Brin notes in this post.) They may all get down on the dance floor, but unlike what the song says, it does make a difference if you’re black or white.

My point here is not so much that all of this is anything new (it’s not), but rather that viewing the vid and the halftime show together provides a textbook example of the ways in which fandom (and any pop culture critique based in pop culture itself), and vidding in particular, is limited by its working, in some senses, with found objects. Fandom is unquestionably a fascinating space of critique, remixing, and reinvention, but ultimately pure remixing, no matter how creative, makes it very difficult to introduce radically new elements, or to go beyond what you’re given to work with.

Of course, introducing radical new elements, as uncomfortable and difficult as it is and has been for fandom, may not be what strikes a pop cultural chord in the larger sphere at all. Madonna has shown herself constantly willing to reinvent herself over the course of her career, and the idea of infinitely revising a concept around a central core is of course intimately familiar to fans in general and to writers of fanfic especially. Furthermore, it’s no coincidence that this performance in particular was Madonna’s latest reintroduction to global pop cultural relevance, after the lackluster performance of her previous album, her divorce from Guy Ritchie, and above all the meteoric rise of Lady Gaga to the pop music firmament had somewhat dented the Queen’s crown. But her new album MDNA hits stores in the States March 26, and concert dates for her upcoming world tour are already selling out. Long live the Queen.

It turns out that, although fannish behavior is generally understood in the mainstream media as mere excess, fans do, increasingly, matter in at least two situations: when we distill cultural consumption trends for cultural producers, and thereby constitute a target demographic, and when our beloved source material turns out to bring newly-layered perspectives to real political issues, thus leading commentators to visit, or at least imagine a visit to, our world. The latter version of fandom on the front pages gives us more credit, but it is also more potentially volatile. It’s exciting to be a part of the “comics fans welcoming the development”(link), but it’s scary to know that so much of what one holds dear can simultaneously be presented to a careless and unforgiving public. Could I handle (and here comes the spoiler alert for the current Buffyverse development) a public trashing of the Buffy comics and of a woman’s reproductive rights on the same day? Add to that the reversion of shipping to its earlier meaning, of human labor facilitating the transfer of resources and capital, and it all starts to sound pretty overwhelming.

But, you might counter, that day is every day. It’s not as though the Buffy comics are any kind of critical darling of any mainstream reviewing sphere, and reproductive rights are rarely afforded unqualified support outside feminist-identified media outlets. As Mark Greif has argued in his n+1 piece, On Repressive Sentimentalism, in much of public conversation, “safe medical abortion, a fundamental social good in any sexually egalitarian society, an invention to be celebrated like the polio vaccine, must disguise itself as everything but what it is—the freedom from involuntary motherhood, owed to any woman young or old, to let her shape a life equal in freedom to those of men.” Whether or not one personally agrees with the entirety of Greif’s statement, and it happens that I do without reservations, the fact that the conversation has been forced into sentimental terrain improper to policy discussion is indisputable. Should I, then, be so surprised that the comments section on The Guardian article about Buffy’s hypothetical abortion contains hostility, both to abortion, and to the Buffy comics, as well as a particular contempt for their shared page space in this instance? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean that the intensity of my emotional response is without important context.

Fandom, as the EW article makes clear, is, for many of us, a space in which to explore desire, including its enactments and their concomitant consequences, beyond the constraints of those social worlds we otherwise inhabit, circumscribed as they are by such external factors as geographic location. This is not to deny that fandom itself is volatile, in its own way, already — fandom, too, is a world inhabited by human beings and therefore all the messiness of human communication. However, its volatility is different from the often-predictable kind of the public sphere, the kind that can have so many long, unproductive conversations about reproductive rights. In fandom, however, sentimentality is given its own space, and given the freedom to flourish according to the trajectories of individuals and specific sub-groups of fans, so that it doesn’t (in the best of times) seep into conversations that are actually about something else entirely, without first making its presence known. Abortion is something of a limit case for the roped-off sphere of sentimentality, hence my anticipation of emotional upheaval of unpredictable proportions at this latest development.

As Joss Whedon, creator of the Buffyverse well knows, popular culture has an incredible power to inspire meaningful conversation about important issues, particularly when there is a visible, engaged and savvy fanbase following each new development with a critical but generous sensibility. His choice to go public about his own approval of Buffy’s decision to get an abortion was not made randomly, or, I don’t think, as a cynical attempt to make money. There are much easier ways for him to make money than by temporarily drumming up interest in an installment of the ninth season of a long-arc serial. To be clear, this isn’t to say that I think that the comics belong on the same playing field as fanworks — they are a for-profit enterprise, and they engage regularly in various kinds of sensationalist marketing, and their authors deserve many of the serious criticism they’ve received from fans. However, I think that there is a serious distinction to be made between sensationalist marketing and an incitement to public conversation about a currently-contentious political issue, particularly one which lies at the center of the feminism that has, since the beginning, informed the concept of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In a moment in which fans are being noticed more and more by the mainstream media, in more and less exploitative ways, I think it’s important that we register these opportunities to take note of the differences between the conversations we’re able to have with one another, and the conversations that happen next to us, and, if only tangentially, about us. I am a Buffy comics fan, and I am excited about this most recent development. I’m so excited about it that I’m reading comments sections in The Guardian that I know will break my heart. But I know that I want the conversation to be happening, and I have hope that even 10% of the joy that is the intersection of Buffy and feminism will somehow seep into it. Shipping, to unite my two threads, might still strike many as akin to a million schoolgirl crushes, transcribed onto a notebook during study hall. But if it is more than that — if it constitutes a veritable reconsideration of how relationships are structured within complex social worlds, then the possibility of abortion starts to look less like a topical news item, and more like a social reality worth incorporating into the unfolding canon of any story that wishes to speak directly to a contemporary audience.

Fandom intersects with all of these events in a number of large and complex ways, and as a global phenomenon, it’s no surprise that fans in different parts of the world have had different reactions to various recent developments. Just among my digital acquaintances, reactions to MegaUpload, for instance, have ranged from the general sentiment that its operators’ alleged violations were so flagrant that they deserved to be indicted, to noting the detrimental effect the demise of file-sharing sites has on emerging economies in particular, since people working in emerging economies literally cannot afford to legitimately buy the media that Big Content sells.

The rise of “intellectual property” rights over the past century or so is part and parcel of the neoliberalization first of so-called advanced industrial societies, and then the rest of the world; the shredding of social safety nets globally; the commercialization of scholarship and the reduction of the value of all knowledge to the price it is projected to fetch in the so-called “free market”; the patent-ization of scientific research part and parcel with increased corporate profiteering therefrom. IPR are used systematically to disenfranchise and disempower vulnerable groups at all levels of societies globally, and then, the disenfranchisement complete, to sell that content back to those groups at immense profit–but only at fair market price, of course.

As a historian, I’m painfully aware that today’s current, very stringent global intellectual property regime is very much a recent and contingent phenomenon, and as a classicist and a fan, I was particularly dismayed to see the U.S. Supreme Court rule in favor of copyright maximalists in Golan v. Holder, finding that works could be legally re-copyrighted and removed from the public domain. It would be foolish, as a historian, to claim that fandom predates the age of mechanical reproduction and the rise of seriality in storytelling, but one doesn’t have to be much of a literature scholar to see that creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and that creative works have always been inspired by one another. If Vergil had had to pay money to Homer’s estate to use characters from The Illiad, there probably would have been no Aeneid, and that loss wouldn’t just have diminished ancient Greek and Latin poetry.

I mentioned my work for the Organization for Transformative Works to a mutual acquaintance (the business manager of a well-known fantasy author) recently, and it was almost comical how my interlocutor’s defenses rose the instant I uttered the words “fair use.” I understand, and absolutely support, the desire and right of creators to make money from their own creative works, but one of the things that I think tends to get lost in these discussions is the fact that overall creators aren’t being very well served by Big Content. In the first place it’s a myth, as someone on my Twitter feed observed, that content is only created by “professionals”; and in the second place, Big Content is not in the business of giving creators money: as an industry, it’s in the business of making money for itself. Advocates for SOPA/PIPA and ACTA like to position themselves as defending the rights of creators, but the current intellectual property regime is set up to favor corporations. Furthermore, the global scope of that regime, and the way in which restrictive additions in one part of the world tend to be taken up by the rest of its participants (Golan v. Holder was held up as an instance of bringing U.S. law into line with global practice, and actions in the MegaUpload case were taken as far away from the States as Hong Kong and New Zealand) only increase the margin of that favorability.

Fandom, to try to knit the two halves of this post into a coherent union, is very much somewhere in the vast creative territory between outright plagiarism–which no one, I think, would support or condone–and the avowed creative debt of explicit borrowing and that position has only become more difficult to maintain in recent years. The OTW’s work to extend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemption for vidding that we won in 2010 is an excellent example of how difficult it is to carve out a legal space for fair use fan practices even under current law (I invite you to sign the petition to uphold the right to create remix videos before February 10, 2012, cosponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation). I’m proud of the OTW’s past and continuing work in this area, but the events of the past fortnight are more than sufficient proof that the battlefield is anything but stagnant, and vigilance remains the price of the very limited liberties we now possess.

Dru Pagliassotti and I have launched a blog, Yaoi Research: http://www.yaoiresearch.com. Formal work about yaoi and boys’ love is finally beginning to appear but we saw a need for a central place to publish more informal content than that in a journal or book.

If you study, create, and/or enjoy yaoi, BL, and/or male/male romance and would like to contribute well-informed descriptive or analytical writing to our blog, please contact us: admin@yaoiresearch.com.

We’re hoping for posts about ongoing work, observations and opinions, reviews, commentary, analyses, and research notes and queries. Discussions of fanfic, artwork, original stories and novels, including slash and gay comics and fiction, are welcome, as are posts about context, creation, or consumption across historical periods, regions, and cultures.

Graduate students, professors, independent scholars, publishers, and published mangaka, dōjinshika, and novelists are especially encouraged to contribute. If you do, please take a look at our submission guidelines.

You don’t need to present original research or in-depth analysis, just interesting ideas that may stimulate thought. Although we request that posts be in English, if it is not your first language we will help you copyedit your contribution should you wish.

Best Wishes for the New Year / あけましておめでとう.

Briefly put, there were times when I felt quite certain that I had made a mistake. I had endeavoured to get students to reason through things, to see what they have in common with those “other” people, the fans, the weird ones. I’m still not confident that I pulled it off. Some came in as fans and left as fans. Others…not so much.

But some amazing things happened towards the end of last semester. When I asked them to create a fanwork for their final project, there was love suddenly pouring out of them. Not all, of course. There were still a few resistant ones, but most of them astonished me. One girl painted a large, elaborate image based on the television show V. If I ever needed proof that every text has a fan community around it…!   Some kids made their first fanvids. Others did animations. One kid brought me a painted skateboard covered in images from his favourite bands.

In short, I was amazed by the degree of creativity and passion these kids could bring to a project. And it seemed to confirm what people like Henry Jenkins have been writing about participatory culture. He/they have been arguing that people, particularly youth, are increasingly accustomed to living their creative lives through media. Media are the matter and the tools that surround us, and we use them in the same way that someone generations ago would pick up a stick and whittle something out of it.

On the whole, I must say it was a rewarding experience. Well, it had better be, because tomorrow I begin teaching the same course again…to three more sections of 40 students each. I know one thing I have learned: keep the fanwork assignment, and make it earlier in the semester so these young fanlings can share and enjoy each other’s works!

A final reason why a viable hybrid economy for fan work is unlikely to emerge soon is that many of the fans who would power it may not be prepared to imagine the possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages of such a system. Up to now, fans and fan scholars have rarely even speculated about the potential inherent in linking fan work to commodity culture. … The most important question here is not whether fans will at some point be given the option to commodify and monetize their works, but how the fan community in general will deal with new modes of fannish production emerging alongside the traditional gift economy.

It strikes me, however, that the issue here may not be a question of waiting for new modes of fannish production to emerge, but of recognizing the fact that, in many cases, they already have emerged.

Noppe mentions the example of the Japanese dôjinshi market several times in her piece, quite sensibly in light of the fact that the fannish/”amateur” dôjin production sphere is perhaps the pre-eminent example of a hybrid economy. In Japan, fan-created comic books and, in recent years, animation, video games, and other forms of media have not only been wildly successful in the semi-sequestered fannish economy, but have been picked up by professional companies for further production and wider distribution, going on to launch their creators into fully professional careers and spawning mega-hit transmedia franchises that have defined whole eras in the Japanese contents industry. Moreover, despite a lack of explicitly permissive laws, the line between professional and “amateur” or fannish production in Japanese media is often quite fuzzy: professional creators routinely sell fan works of their own professional media creations, or even actual professionally produced elements of their creation such as production stills, at dôjin (“like-minded”) markets, the largest of which is Comiket in Tokyo.

Although the Japanese contents industry undoubtedly possesses the most highly developed “hybrid” economy in the Laurence Lessig-derived sense that Noppe discusses, there are ample signs that the English-language contents industry is already starting to develop in a similar direction, particularly in the world of book publishing. Multiple professional authors working today in YA and SFF avowedly came out of fandom, whether putting their fan fiction-honed writing skills to work on wholly original works or “filing off the serial numbers” and selling works that were originally fannish as entirely “original” novels and stories. Moreover, while it seems that formerly professional authors were reluctant to discuss their roots in fan fiction, more and more authors (not coincidentally, overwhelmingly female) are not only willing to own their fannish roots, but to “cross streams” and jump back into fandom for exchanges such as Yuletide, among other forms of fannish activity.

At the same time, the rise of ebooks and of high-quality self-publishing operations such as Lulu have made it easier than ever for fans to make their content, whether original or fannish or a hybrid of the two (never, as the above discussion should make clear, very clearly separated in the first place), available to others for free, at cost, or for profit with very little extra effort. These developments are transforming not only fandom, but also the contents industry, leading not only to reactionary legislative efforts such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. Congress but also to true innovation in both the fannish and professional contents spheres, some of which Henry Jenkins has discussed in his continuing investigations of professional transmedia storytelling.

So, where is all this going? As a historian, I am professionally allergic to predicting the future, but inasmuch as these developments are happening right now, it seems clear that some kind of rapprochement is in order, not only between fannish and professional content creators, but also between fans and themselves. English-language fandom has historically been highly leery of anything that seems to violate the spirit of the “fannish gift economy,” and with good reason; the non-commercial principles by which fandom has operated are one of the things that set it apart from the mainstream of global cultural economies. But the twenty-first century, for good and for ill, is not the twentieth, and it seems clear that fandom is already in the process of evolving into a different configuration vis-a-vis professionalization and the contents industry. The sooner we recognize that it’s happening, the sooner we can begin to think about and consciously decide how we want to do fandom, and be fans, in light of that fact.

I will admit that (in most cases) I favor fanon over canon. In fact, sometimes the enthusiasm that I feel for a particular original work when all I know is the plot or characters’ names is because I was dragged into canon by an engrossing fanfiction piece or fanon. Of course, I appreciate the original creator or author’s story and character development, but, with fanfiction and other transformative fanworks, or fanon—whether they are from fledgling fans to acafans—the presented opportunities promote something that canon may have been miserly with: hope.

In fanworks, a character can earn redemption, detain (or even hoodwink) Death, or be the awe-struck recipient of other miracles that are just not within his/her grasp in canon. The merging of fanon and canon to showcase an original work’s themes and story in wholeness can be illustrated in a miniseries adaptation of one of my favorite classic literature pieces, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress. (Ironically enough, the novel Oliver Twist is one of the cases in which I prefer the text, canon, instead of all the media adaptations.) Although I have not seen or read every version of the classic, The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) program ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre (which is now, I believe, just called Masterpiece) in 1999 covered Dickens’ book in what I deem as the most comprehensive and best Oliver Twist media version [link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ olivertwist/index.html]. In this three-part series, Mr. Alan Bleasdale, who shares the writing credits with Mr. Dickens and who is a longtime Dickens aficionado, pens the backstory of Oliver’s deceased parents, Mr. Edwin Leeford and Agnes Fleming, and their illicit affair. One could say that their history is pieced together and based from circumstantial evidence, such as hints, facts, documents, and personal effects, that Dickens includes in the book. This backstory, or prequel, also stars two shadowy characters from the novel: a younger Edward Leeford (who later sports the alias Monks amongst folks in the underworld), Oliver’s half brother, and Mrs. Elizabeth Leeford, Edwin’s wife. (The full name of Edwin’s wife is never disclosed by Dickens, so this selection of “Elizabeth” is another fruit of fanon, Bleasdale’s fabrication. Mrs. Leeford is bodily absent from Dickens’ narrative, yet Bleasdale bestows upon her dialogue—a voice.)

Now let me go back to connecting fanon (or fanworks) with hope. Before viewing the actors’ portrayal and dramatization of Mr. Bleasdale’s screenplay, I had never expressed sympathy for Dickens’ Monks. To me, he was a bad seed. (Imagine my disgrace when I later heard Bleasdale’s Edwin echoing my exact sentiments about his son.) In canon, Monks does all that is within his power to erase Oliver’s existence/identity in an episode of enmity for the child and allegiance to his dying mother to gain his inheritance. He eventually dies from an epileptic fit in jail after being incarcerated for reverting to vices. In Bleasdale’s pre-canonical depiction, Edward is a sickly, reluctant boy who is bullied into the vindictive Mrs. Leeford’s schemes, which include murdering Edwin and attempting the murder of the young pregnant Agnes Fleming. Under Mr. Brownlow’s, the lawyer’s, insistence in the miniseries’ third installment, Edward breaks down, along with having a seizure, in front of an audience that includes Oliver Twist and confesses what Mrs. Leeford, his mother, did and how his father’s apathy for Edward hurt Edward the most. Bleasdale’s ending for Monks, in its kindness, grants Edward peace in the New World with a family of his own making. I curiously began to think that perhaps Monks indeed had a conscience. I began to think that perhaps he is not an evil man, or at least not the incarnation of a very nefarious historical figure. Through Dickens’ words, I am introduced to Monks, the dark, unrepentant creature who makes deals with criminals. I only learn of his life story and identity near the novel’s conclusion. In contrast, I encounter Edward as Edward, a human—one scorned by his father on the basis of a medical condition—in the series’ first installment. I meet Edward first and see him as Edward even as he is addressed as Monks by Fagin and his associates in London.

Bleasdale’s screenplay, to my delight, allows me to entertain the significance of the family bond. From just one line in the miniseries’ script, I envision the family bond as a symbol for salvation—a symbol of hope. Edward, for the first time in his life, is not shunned by a member of his birth family or belittled on account of his affliction. Even after exposure to Edward’s fit and the man’s confession of ill will, Oliver clasps Edward’s hands in his pair and remarks guilelessly, “I’m sorry, sir. I wish none of this had ever happened.” Now Bleasdale does not explore the fraternal relationship between Oliver and Edward, two orphans, as it is only merely featured (perhaps this might inspire some fanfiction?), but fanon arranges the following premise that does not exist or is not hinted at in canon: the compassionate acknowledgement of the humanity in a person—Edward—whose health condition influences society to hastily label him/her as unacceptable or, from Dickens’ text, a “villain.”

Fanon is a balcony where the readers or viewers can catch a glimpse of some sort of goodness—of something possibly humane—in any character; it gives us hope that no one can truly be evil at heart or that evil is not natal. The, however meager, missing scenes witnessed from this balcony are proof enough of a character’s remorse, heartbreak, and commiseration. Bleasdale’s chase scene of Bill Sikes sets up an unlikely exchange between Fagin and Bill Sikes; this exchange distinctly reveals how much Sikes loved Nancy, his murder victim and accomplice in some of his undertakings. In fact, Oliver Twist in all its forms is represented, enacted, sung, and/or choreographed in which people, both men and women (males and females), of all classes, stations, and ages do bad and good deeds. There are female characters who do bad and good deeds; there are male characters who do bad and good deeds. All men are not inherently “bad,” or wicked. All women are not inherently “bad,” or wicked. Performing one bad deed does not stop one from being human. Doling out one wrong deed does not strictly identify anyone as diabolically evil (perhaps with the tentative exception of Bill Sikes or Bleasdale’s Mrs. Leeford). This is what makes Dickens’ world, his story, timeless. The Nancys still die after refusing aid from the Mr. Brownlows and Rose Maylies. The Bill Sikeses still are murderers. But at least the Oliver Twists still remain kind-hearted and optimistic when careening into misfortunes and misadventures. In canon and fanon, I suppose that this is all I can ask for. No, it is all I can hope for.

This makes me happy. I’m not sure, however, what to make about a more recent Netflix development, namely, the “Holiday Favorites” section. Now, don’t get me wrong, for a long time, our viewing practices have been partially guided by the idea of “holiday favorites.” There’s 24 hours of A Christmas Story, family traditions, newspaper and magazine top 10 lists, etc. It only makes sense to extend this to individual episodes of television series. Special episodes are made to be re-watched as part of the season. However, I paused over a few of the choices on Netflix. For example, the My So-Called Life episode, “So-Called Angels” was recommended in the “holiday favorites” category. For the record, I love this episode, and think it is brilliant. However, I would hate for someone to watch it as a “holiday favorite,” because I think that the removal of context in this case would lead to an inevitable misunderstanding of the episode, and thus, the larger series narrative of which it is a part. One could say the same for this year’s controversial Christmas episode of Glee, which I have not yet watched, but which sounds like it should never, ever be consumed outside the larger, high-context series narrative of Glee.

Perhaps I sound tyrannical. Just two paragraphs up, I was praising the way in which Netflex is re-creating the surprising television moments of my childhood, like giving a chance to a movie with an incomprehensible premise, or trying out a documentary about an unfamiliar issue. But it’s different with television. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by my many marathons with 90s and 21st-Century shows, but I feel that “So-Called Angels” would give new viewers the wrong impression of My So-Called Life, because it’s a heavily serialized drama, whereas 30 Rock’s “Christmas Special,” which was playing on my flight on Wednesday, works just fine in isolation. Sure, it’s more enjoyable for the knowing viewer, because I have context for the character interactions, but there’s no risk of seriously missing the point with “Christmas Special.” There is much less at stake. The episode represents Liz Lemon’s misguided affective politics in a way that is consistent with their representation throughout the series, and one can either take or leave this easily-recognizable ambivalence. “So-Called Angels,” by contrast, represents several characters’ growth, and because savvy audiences take pleasure in their inability to be caught by sentimental traps, this growth is much harder to sell.

Whether or not My So-Called Life sells it is up for debate, but I would hate for the terms of the debate to be set by isolated experiences of “So-Called Angels.” My So-Called Life is an important show in the recent history of dramatic representations of queer life, and it would be a shame for an interested viewer to try to enter this history by way of this episode, which allows in an ungenerous interpretation for a purely sentimental reading. With all the criticism that the recent Glee episode has received (much of it by broadly-invested fans), I worry that, where My So-Called Life could offer an interesting counterpoint from the history of queer-friendly television, it is unlikely to do so under Netflix’s rubric.

There are other downsides to the Netflix rubric, of course, not least that it so quickly made itself indispensable in my daily life — -there is surely something sinister in anything that appears so helpful and desire-I-didn’t-even-know-I-had-fulfilling. But maybe the point is that here, like in so many other arenas, fandom has a slightly better option. Instead of “Holiday Favorites,” why not Yuletide? Like Netflix, Yuletide has a history of inviting new viewers into a new view of under-represented source material, but this time, it comes with a context. Not just the simple context of “I like to watch a lot of TV,” but the complex context of fandom, of fic-writing, and of desire-sharing. I love to read “Dear Yuletide Writer” entries on new friends’ journals, because they give me so much insight into what others most long to see in the shared source material that captures our imaginations. I love to see fans’ frustrations with television shows manifesting as desire surpassing resentment, although obviously the resentment is often earned and deserves to be registered. I love to see the incompleteness of imperfect stories taken on as a gift-giving challenge. “A Very Special Fic” can do a lot of things that an equally special episode cannot, not least because it’s addressed to someone who’s intimately familiar with where the new installment fits into, or challenges the narrative as it stands. Sure, there are lurkers on Yuletide fics outside of their own fandoms (I am one of them!) but there is more of an established ethics to lurking in this context than to lurking on Netflix. So, that’s where I’ll be looking to discover new holiday favorites. I look forward to it.

Full disclosure: I had not watched an episode of The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else before I read Christian’s article. There are so many great Web series right now, and there is so much mainstream media content I’m following, that it’s difficult to keep up. That said, once I read Christian’s article, I realized that there was really no excuse for me to have missed this one. After all, like the producers of Real Girl’s Guide, I was once a serious fan of Sex and the City, primarily because of its extended focus on my very favorite theme: women’s friendships. Sadly, as Christian outlines as he situates Real Girl’s Guide as a frustrated (even anti-fannish) response to the direction Sex and the City took with the feature film sequels to the television show, I, along with many others, look back with embarrassment at the series’ missed opportunities to deepen the celebration of women’s friendships by taking seriously the ways in which the category of “woman” intersects with other social categories, including race and sexual identity.

Having watched the first few episodes now, I can personally highly recommend Real Girl’s Guide. Go watch the first episode right now. From the very first episode, I find myself agreeing with Christian’s claim that this seems like an example of fannish critical practices transformed completely into cultural production on the same playing field as SATC. But I also retain my automatic nervous response to any scholarly attempt to locate a telos for fandom, especially one that isn’t my telos, or that of most fans I know. Christian makes clear that many Web series producers “create shows both for commercial reasons (though few make money or get sponsors) and, more importantly, to correct mainstream representations and of the industry in general.” (1.4) Already, these are goals not shared by many fans, particularly when it comes to money-making. So, while I agree with Christian’s insistence that we find modes of understanding that are “rich and appropriate for their objects of study,” and which thus must change as the cultural landscape changes, I want to step back from his implicit desire to get beyond fannish activity “produce[d] solely for affective communities.” (5.5, emphasis mine)

After all, I am a member of several intersecting “solely affective” fan communities, including fan communities whose primary text is a Web series. I agree that fan studies and media studies more broadly should take note of the changing industrial landscape, but I’m not sure about the extent to which fans themselves need to be asked to do this. Some will be interested, but others will focus entirely on the stories, the characters, the dialogue, or even an individual actor. And to relegate this engagement to the sphere of the “solely affective” provides fodder for those who devalue fan practice in its own sphere, as a half-formed mode of engagement with contemporary culture.

My ideal is for the industrial landscape to change in such a way that enables the greatest possible range of people to work as full-time cultural producers, telling the stories that audiences, who I like to understand as potential fans, could truly grow to love, and in which they could recognize the world they live in. One side of that coin is industrial change. But the other side, one which cannot be abandoned, insists on valuing the full range of reading practices that enable fans to maximize their engagement with, enjoyment of, and even pleasurable frustration with, their chosen sourcetexts. Those who do not wish to become professional cultural producers ought not to have to see their mode of critique as lesser or contingent on another step in order to be complete. In other words, while I am excited by Christian’s provocative exploration of new intersections of the industrial and the fannish, I am more excited still to become a fan in my chosen way of the fictional storyworld that is Real Girl’s Guide, and so, I’ll take Christian’s article as a recommendation in that spirit.

Perhaps a part of the reason for the neglect is that fans are more or less seen as white – a situation discussed in a really wonderful essay from the Journal titled “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization and the Discursive Construction of Fandom”. As its author Mel Stanfill points out, fans tend to be constructed as a failed kind of whiteness. This in turn reinforces the centrality (or “hegemonic” nature, to get academic) of whiteness as a symbolic category. If “whiteness” (which has just recently begun to receive critical attention itself) holds within itself assumptions about maturity, rationality and heteronormativity then fans, at least in popular discourses, fail to achieve it. They are whiteness gone wrong — out of control, dysfunctional, sexually deviant and usually single. Just think about every stereotypical fan you’ve ever seen on TV or in the movies – The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, the main characters of Big Bang Theory, the dueling Trekkers and Star Wars fans of Fanboys… and who could forget Barbara Adams in the documentary Trekkies, who wore her Star Trek uniform to jury duty and called herself “The Commander”? (My students certainly won’t let that go any time soon).

Stanfill’s is an essay about representation… but what about fans in reality? Granted, it is unlikely that we will ever have a complete grasp on who, where and what fans are. I think I can say, though, just from having been in fan gatherings, both on-line and in real time, that, in reality, fans are a reasonably diverse bunch. In reality, we are of different colours and from different countries. In reality, many are invested in marriages and families; many do identify as heterosexual. Many have girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers. Still others are single and looking for the right person.

To that extent, it might be said that many fans are invested in heteronormativity. But there is a question on my mind, especially as my first time teaching a course on fan cultures draws to a close. If you want to see the discourses of normality at work, try teaching a bunch of 18-to-20-year olds about fans. The pressure of “normal” is intense and maddening, which is why Stanfill’s section on fandom as a kind of queerness or sexual deviance resonated so powerfully for me. Supposedly fandom is becoming increasingly accepted by the mainstream yet, in many contexts, it remains a dirty little secret. It is a kind of closet, even for some who are in long-term relationships with persons of the opposite sex. It is a fetish, an interest that draws energy away from the heteronormative ideal of relationships and reproduction. And don’t get me wrong: to me this queerness is a wonderful thing. I celebrate it, because it tells the truth that no one is normal, that normal is a lie and a scary one at that. No one really wants to be “normal”, do they?

More than ever, I feel that fandom, even when not explicitly having anything to do with anything sexual, is queer. I know I can get into trouble for saying this, but after watching a bunch of teenagers leaping to reassure themselves and each other that they are “not like that bunch” [of fans], that “those people” [fans] are dangerous and unbalanced; and after having a few students confess to me privately that they are fans but who aren’t ready to talk about it in front of their peers… I think that the notion of fandom as queer might have some potential.

Of course, this is not really the point of Stanfill’s article. Indeed, because fans are represented as white, they are, in Stanfill’s words, “still recuperable”. They can still reclaim their privilege as white folks. Perhaps by trying to argue for the queerness of fans, I am turning attention away from the real point of the essay which is that whiteness remains the normative category against which all other categories are measured. If nothing else, fans should be able to understand how such insidious ideas as the “normal” and the “centre” create prejudice and do real harm to people. Fans have every reason to be open, tolerant and accepting of every kind of difference. At our best, we can and have achieved that ideal. But we are not always at our best, and one of the best arguments for studying whiteness is that it can force us to think about what we unconsciously believe to be normal, central and mainstream.