Transformative Works and Cultures, No. 11 (September 15, 2012) Editorial

TWC Editors, Authors and authorship

Theory

Natasha Simonova, Fan fiction and the author in the early 17th century: The case of Sidney's "Arcadia"

Nicol e Lamerichs, The mediation of fandom in Karin Giphart's "Maak me blij"

Kyra Hunting, "Queer as Folk" and the trouble with slash

Praxis

Alexandra Elisabeth Herzog, "But this is my story and this is how I wanted to write it": Author’s notes

as a fannish claim to power in fan fiction writing

Mark C. Lashley, Lip dubbing on YouTube: Participatory culture and cultural globalization

Heather Osborne, Performing self, performing character: Exploring gender performativity in online

role-playing games

Symposium

D. Wilson, Queer bandom: A research journey in eight parts

Sharon Wheeler, How a "Professionals" slash writer disrupts readers' expectations

Paul Mason, A history of RPGs: Made by fans; played by fans

Staci Stutsman, Blogging and blooks: Communal authorship in a contemporary context

Review

Francesca Coppa, "Digital fandom," by Paul Booth

Melanie E. S. Kohnen, "Legitimating television," by Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Editorial

Authors and authorship

TWC Editor

[0.1] Abstract— This issue contains several essays that examine authorship and authorial identity.

[0.2] Keywords— Analysis; Authorship; Fan fiction

TWC Editor. 2012. "Authors and Authorship." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0467.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Fan fiction challenges and questions authorial control as fans rewrite the source text

—and also as fannish tropes are shared and archetypal characters and narratives repeatedly get rewritten. The stunning popularity of E. L. James's erotic trilogy, beginning with Fifty Shades of Grey, published in 2011 after originally appearing as Twilight fan fiction, has only foregrounded the endless circulation of ideas and tropes, even as it has called into question notions of authorship. This general issue of TWC, No. 11, contains several essays that examine authorship and authorial identity: Alexandra Herzog studies reader/writer power struggles played out in author's notes to fan fiction; Staci Stutsman writes about blog authors appropriating their reader comments; Mark Lashley discusses lip dubbers who appropriate performance, if not authorship, across national and ethnic boundaries; and Heather Osborne discusses gamers who author their own virtual identities. Within the context of derivative works and transformation, confronting the author means also considering her relationship with ancillary texts, both officially approved and not, fans, and fan artworks.

[1.2] Part of the changes for fan studies include an everbroadening understanding of what constitutes fans and transformative works while simultaneously restricting that understanding enough so that the terms remain meaningful. The challenge going forward—

for fan studies in general and TWC in particular—will be to expand the notion of what constitutes fandom without losing core ideas of identity and meaning, and to broaden the scope of study to better negotiate the concepts of fan and fandom within all aspects of life and media engagement.

2. Theory and Praxis

[2.1] The Theory and Praxis essays in this issue range broadly, indicating the breadth of fan studies: the English literary canon, YouTube, the politics of the fan fiction genre of mpreg, and the gender identity of online avatars are all discussed here. These essays indicate the crucial need for close readings and analysis as they are read with and against broader concepts and theoretical frameworks. Natasha Simonova, in "Fan Fiction and the Author in the Early 17th Century: The Case of Sidney's Arcadia, " writes against the myriad theories that posit an originary moment for fan fiction. Simonova argues for the early modern era as a point of origin for fan fiction with Sir Philip Sidney's romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Its fragmentary nature and the surrounding culture's different perceptions of authorship created a context that permitted writers to freely adapt and adopt plotlines and characters, filling in gaps and expanding the narratives. Although Simonova focuses on this particular case study, her essay's ultimate focus is on "early modern conceptions of authorship, originality, and literary property" and its influence and opposition to current debates surrounding these issues. Nicolle Lamerichs's "The Mediation of Fandom in Karin Giphart's Maak me blij, " like Simonova's essay, looks for fannish tropes and narrative structures in nonfannish fiction, in this case a 2005 Dutch novel. The novel itself features fans and thus selfreflexively looks at the connections between lesbian fiction and fan fiction.

[2.2] Kyra Hunting's " Queer as Folk and the Trouble with Slash," like Lamerich, focuses on the role of fans and fan studies within queer culture. Hunting addresses the discrepancy between a show that already includes queer and explicit sexualities and its fan fictions, which often shy away from the more political aspects of such representations. Looking at the heteronormativity of many Queer as Folk mpreg stories, Hunting challenges the way fan studies often describes the political relations between texts and fan texts. The other essay in this issue that focuses on fan fiction studies is a Praxis essay, Alexandra Elisabeth Herzog's

"'But this is my story and this is how I wanted to write it': Author's Notes as a Fannish Claim to Power in Fan Fiction Writing." Herzog studies the particular fan fiction paratext of author's notes—authorial comments appended to a piece of fan fiction that provide further information and context—to address the power struggle between readers and writers used to generate meaning. Because the fan fiction writer lacks the infrastructural, clearly delineated lines that exist in published fiction, she asserts her authorial power, Herzog argues, within and through these specific paratexts.

[2.3] The final two Praxis essays move toward the performative by looking at video and gaming performances. Both essays also look at the ideological frameworks in which these performances operate. Mark C. Lashley's "Lip Dubbing on YouTube: Participatory Culture and Cultural Globalization" reads lip dubbers as transnational creators as they appropriate and alter popular songs, thus resituating them within their own cultural contexts and performing them with their own, often nonWestern, bodies. By rereading participatory culture as a

"contested cultural space" (¶1.1), Lashley does not celebrate YouTube creators as radical and subversive; rather, he acknowledges their role within a global Western cultural economy. Finally, Heather Osborne looks at virtual performances in online gaming, in particular gender expressions within the games. Her "Performing Self, Performing Character:

Exploring Gender Performativity in Online RolePlaying Games" analyzes data from an online survey that addresses gamers' gender and sexualities as well as their respective representations. Osborne finds that the roles explored in the game can be crucial to overall acceptance and empathy among players.

3. Symposium and Review

[3.1] Symposium likewise covers a range of diverse topics and methodologies in a variety of stylistic approaches. D. Wilson's highly personal meditation on "Queer Bandom: A Research Journey in Eight Parts" merges the author's personal journeys of following several bands around the country with meditations on queer space and time in the shifting discourses of online band fandom. This essay is proof of the value of a category that bridges the personal and the political, the fannish and the academic. Sharon Wheeler, in "From Secret Police to Gay Utopia: How a Professionals Slash Writer Disrupts Readers'

Expectations" focuses on one show— The Professionals (1977–1983), an British secretagent drama with an early fan following—and one alternate universe fan fiction series by a single author, Rhiannon, analyzing the five stories that comprise the series in detail. Wheeler's essay emphasizes that fan fiction is not only important as social and anthropological documents, but also as artistic works in their own right.

[3.2] The remaining two Symposium essays shift away from the more narrowly defined Western fan fiction media fandom. Paul Mason looks toward the beginnings of tabletop roleplaying games in "RPG Transformations: Fan or Pro?" Unlike in media fandom, where the lines between production and fandom often remain firm on both sides, RPG fandom is more difficult to categorize, both in terms of authorship and creativity. Mason addresses these differences as he offers an important historical overview of the early years of Dungeons & Dragons and its fans. Staci Stutsman also addresses the unclear boundaries of authorship in

"Blogging and Blooks: Communal Authorship in a Contemporary Context," in which she studies popular blogs and the tendency to turn blog posts, including selected comments, into publications. Stutsman explores the authority of the blog owner when choosing and selecting comments and when casting commenters and blog readers as characters within the book.

Stutsman explores the various authorial dynamics in these books, where communal authorship lies at its center yet is only partially acknowledged within the publishing industry.

[3.3] Francesca Coppa's review of Paul Booth's Digital Fandom (Peter Lang, 2010) focuses on the use of fan cultures, and in particular multimedia digital fan works, to address the general tenets of media studies, all while creating a valuable addition to the field of fan studies. And Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine look at the shifting demands of media studies in the convergence age in Legitimating Television (Routledge, 2011). Focusing primarily on its effects on television, Newman and Levine offer a critical view at the current state of television studies. Melanie E. S. Kohnen's review offers a critical summary of this important contribution to television and media studies.

4. Coming up

[4.1] The next two issues of TWC, Nos. 12 and 13, will appear in spring 2013 as guestedited special issues: Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma coedit the special issue on Transnational Boys' Love, and Matthew Costello's special issue focuses on transformation and comics.

[4.2] TWC No. 14 will be an open, unthemed issue, and we welcome general submissions.

We particularly encourage fans to submit Symposium essays. We encourage all potential authors to read the submission guidelines

(http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions).

The close date for receipt of copy for No. 14 is March 15, 2013.

5. Acknowledgments

[5.1] It is not possible to properly acknowledge the depth of appreciation we feel toward everyone who has helped make this issue of TWC possible. They have suffered hard deadlines, late nights, and short due dates. As always, we thank the authors in this issue, whose original work makes TWC possible; the peer reviewers, who freely provide their time and expertise; the editorial team members, whose engagement with and solicitation of material is so valuable; and the production team members, who transform rough manuscripts into publishable documents.

[5.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 11 in an editorial capacity: Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Alexandra Jenkins (Symposium); and Louisa Stein (Review).

[5.3] The following people worked on TWC No. 11 in a production capacity: Rrain Prior (production editor); Beth Friedman, Shoshanna Green, and Mara Greengrass (copyeditors);

Wendy M. Carr, Kristen Murphy, and sunusn (layout); and Kallista Angeloff, Amanda Georgeanne Retartha, Carmen Montopoli, and Vickie West (proofreaders).

[5.4] TWC thanks the journal project's Organization for Transformative Works board liaison, Francesca Coppa. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.

[5.5] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers and Symposium reviewers who provided service for TWC

No. 11: Rebecca Black, Alexandria Brennan, Rebecca Bryant, Sharon Goetz, Sara Howe, Melanie Kohnen, Anne Kustritz, Edward Wilson Lee, Alexis Lothian, Esther MacCallum

Stewart, Amanda Odom, Juli Parrish, Mafalda Stasi, Michael Strangelove, Ika Willis, and Liz Woledge.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Praxis

Fan fiction and the author in the early 17th century: The case of

Sidney's Arcadia

Natasha Simonova

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

[0.1] Abstract— An analysis of the body of supplements and continuations written during the first half of the 17th century around Sir Philip Sidney's romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, may usefully be approached as a precedent for fan fiction practice. The incomplete nature of the Arcadia as published left a number of textual gaps that were filled by later writers, with many of their works coming to be included within subsequent reissues of the Arcadia itself. The texts discussed include William Alexander and James Johnstoun's supplements to book 3, Richard Belling's Sixth Booke, Anna Weamys's Continuation, Gervase Markham's English Arcadia, and an anonymous Historie of Arcadia in manuscript. Like contemporary fan fiction, these works adopt Sidney's characters and setting in order to fill apparent gaps, propel the story toward a happy ending, or recast it in an altogether different mold.

Moreover, the paratextual materials surrounding these texts—including prefaces, dedications, and commendatory poems—provide important evidence about early modern conceptions of authorship, originality, and literary property.

[0.2] Keywords— Authorship; Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Paratext; Philip Sidney

Simonova, Natasha. 2012. "Fan Fiction and the Author in the Early 17th Century: The Case of Sidney's Arcadia. " Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0399.

1. The "perfect-unperfect" Arcadia

[1.1] Fan fiction has many origin stories, be it Star Trek in the 1960s, Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s, or Virgil continuing Homer's story in the Aeneid. As with any idea or movement, a precise genesis is difficult to determine. I propose an alternative originary moment at the turn of the 17th century, after the death of Sir Philip Sidney and the subsequent publication of his work. Although much bibliographic and critical work has been done on Sidney's Arcadia and (to a significantly lesser extent) its continuations, these texts have not previously been approached from the perspective

of fan studies (note 1). However, they both anticipate current practice and constitute an important moment in the history of fan fiction, while their framing gives a factual basis for common generalizations about historical conceptions of literary property. Like contemporary fan fiction, the Arcadia supplements and continuations adopt Sidney's

characters and setting in order to fill apparent gaps, propel the story toward a happy ending, and recast it in a different mold. Moreover, the paratextual materials surrounding these texts (including prefaces, dedications, and commendatory poems) furnish evidence for the ways in which early modern writers and readers approached the subject of continuing another's work.

[1.2] The early modern period makes for a useful starting point for many reasons.

The rise of print technology not only led to different ways of engaging with the written word, but also resulted in a growing literary marketplace, in which money could be made from books and the author's name increasingly served as a sign of differentiation and value (Shakespeare's King Lear, not the anonymous King Leir). The first British copyright act would not be passed until 1710, and it took many more years and test cases before it had much to say about transformative work, rather than exact textual reproduction. Yet even in the absence of legal controls, there was a longstanding cultural debate over the value of derivative writing and authors' more intangible rights. The terms used in this debate were often unstable and contradictory, with the same writers decrying plagiaristic theft in others while defending their own noble practice of imitation. However, such disputes show our current ideas about literary property—unstable and contradictory as these remain—in the process of formation.

[1.3] At the same time, prose fiction was emerging as a major narrative genre. In many ways, the romances of the 16th and 17th centuries were as conductive to fan fiction as their descendants in modern science fiction and fantasy: they were long, sprawling works with a wide geographical reach and large casts of characters, all of whom were liable to fall in and out of love, undertake quests, become enchanted, and have children who might grow up to have adventures of their own. Patricia Parker characterizes the genre as an "inescapable" one that "both projects and postpones or wanders from a projected ending" with proliferating narratives (1979, 13)—much like current serial television (note 2). Such openended texts were thus particularly

welcoming to readers' interventions and continuations.

[1.4] Philip Sidney's Arcadia, moreover, was a special case. Although it became one of the most popular English romances, the text as published was unfinished. Sidney had originally written a complete version of the story in five parts, now called the Old Arcadia, which circulated in manuscript only and was not rediscovered until the 20th century. However, he then began to rewrite the text, greatly expanding it from a straightforward romantic comedy to an epic full of interpolated flashbacks, civil war, and captivity, which made it difficult to see how Sidney might reconcile this narrative to the happy pastoral conclusion of the Old Arcadia. At the time of Sidney's sudden death in 1586, the revised New Arcadia—already longer than the entirety of the old

version despite being incomplete—had reached the middle of book 3 before breaking off in the midst of a decisive battle, and in the middle of a sentence. Sidney was thus an author always already dead, transformed by that death from an undistinguished courtier into a muchcelebrated hero and poet. His literary reputation was stewarded by those closest to him, including his friend, Fulke Greville, and his sister, Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, to whom the romance was dedicated. Its full title was The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and in many ways she took over ownership of the work (note 3).

[1.5] In 1590, the New Arcadia appeared in quarto, edited by Greville and his associates. This text abruptly breaks off at the end of Sidney's revised manuscript, with the words "Whereat ashamed, (as hauing never done so much before in his life)"

(1590, fol. 360v). Three years later, however, another version of the Arcadia ("Now since the first edition augmented and ended") was published in the larger folio format, edited by the Countess of Pembroke herself. As a preface by her secretary, Hugh Sanford, states, the countess was "moued" by the textual errors that "disfigured" the quarto edition to correct it, "But as often in repairing a ruinous house, the mending of some olde part occasioneth the making of some new: so here her honourable labour begonne in correcting the faults, ended in supplying the defectes; by the view of what was ill done guided to the consideration of what was not done" (1593, sig. ¶4r). What Mary Sidney did was attach the last three books of the Old Arcadia to the New, providing an ending for the story. These Old Arcadia books were only lightly edited to remove obvious contradictions, with a note marking the gap: "How this combate ended, how the Ladies by the comming of the discouered forces were deliuered, and restored to Basilius… is altogether vnknowne. What afterward chaunced, out of the Authors owne writings and conceits hath bene supplied, as foloweth" (1593, Ff3r). The break is portrayed as the result of missing material that in some way took place but then vanished into the absence of Sidney's death, rather than the joining of two very different versions of the story. Still, the disjuncture between the battlefilled captivity episode and the pastoral conclusion remains apparent; it is not just a matter of rearranging the characters into position.

[1.6] John Florio called this composite edition "that perfectvnperfect Arcadia, which all our world yet weepes…[that Sidney] lived not to mend or end it: since this end wee see of it; though at first above all, now is not answerable to the precedents" (1603, R3r). However, Mary Sidney clearly considered this the best and most complete reflection of her brother's intentions. From 1598, the volume of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia grew to become a collection of Sidney's literary works in various genres; Sidney was the organizing principle of the Arcadia, which was to contain all that he had written and no more. Thus, the authorial nature of the Old Arcadia ending

is what makes it canonical, abrupt though the break may be. As Sanford writes in the preface:

[1.7] Though [readers] finde not here what might be expected, they may finde neuerthelesse as much as was intended, the conclusion, not the perfection of Arcadia: and that no further than the Authours own writings, or knowen determinations could direct…I dare affirme…that Sir Philip Sidneis writings can no more be perfected without Sir Philip Sidney, then Apelles pictures without Apelles. (1593, ¶4r)

2. Bridging the gap

[2.1] Yet while Sanford describes the gap in book 3 as fundamentally unfillable, at least two of its readers thought that something might be done about it, even in the absence of Sidney. The Scottish dramatist Sir William Alexander composed a

"Supplement," which was first printed as an insert around 1616 and included within the Arcadia from the 1621 edition onward (note 4). Another appeared in the 1638

Arcadia, advertised as containing "a twofold supplement of a defect in the third Book: the one by Sr. W. A. Knight; the other, by Mr. Ja. Johnstoun ScotoBrit. dedicated to K. James, and now annexed to this work, for the Readers benefit" (note 5).

[2.2] Johnstoun's dedication introduces many of the issues faced by the Sidney continuators, in a way highlighted by slippages in his syntax. Johnstoun begins as a reader of the Arcadia and ends up transformed by it:

[2.3] Having, Sir, at some idle houres oft and oft evolved the worke of Sir Philip Sidney, intituled his Arcadia, I was carried with such pleasure in perusing the same, that I could never find an end of reading: while at length my braine transported with the Idea's of his conceit, brought forth a little complement, of what was rather desired than wanting in him…True it is, that whatsoever is wanting in him, can no more be filled up but by himselfe, than one man can invest anothers mind: yet I have assayed to play the Ape, albeit I cannot represent the author. (1638, aa1r)

[2.4] As Gavin Alexander notes, Johnstoun translates the revised text's incompletion

"into a matter of readerly practice" (2006, 274)—the unfinished status of the work is replaced by the endless pleasure of reading it, and Johnstoun is so possessed that his text is almost inevitably "brought forth." Like Sanford, Johnstoun stresses a distinction between what is "desired" and "wanting" in the Arcadia even as he shifts from one word to the other. This allows him to speak of a lack in the text without impugning the

"perfection" of what is there. The task of imitating the Arcadia is thus recast as the aping representation of Sidney himself, even though "invest[ing] anothers mind"

remains impossible. Using the dedication to seek preferment, Johnstoun emphasizes the display of his own "travell and diligence herein." Although Sidney provides him with material, the very limits of the task make it more difficult:

[2.5] I am sure otherwise to have a warrant in his owne writings for my invention. The language, so far as I could, I have borrowed from himselfe;

and if I be more compendious [i.e., brief] herein, than need were, I am bound within the limits of his owne conceits, which I durst not exceed.

(1638, aa1v)

[2.6] William Alexander uses similar terms to describe the other bridging passage. In a note at the end of his supplement, Alexander writes, "If this little Essay have not that perfection which is required for supplying the want in that place for which it was intended, yet shall it serve as shadow to give luster to the rest" (1621, Ff5v). Looking back some years later, he further explains his ambitions:

[2.7] And though being there but an Imitator, I could not really give the Principall it self, but only as it were the Pourtrait, and that done by too gross a Pencil, Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum. It were enough to be excellent by being Second to Sidney, since who ever could be that, behoved to be before others. (Garrett 1996, 199)

[2.8] Alexander links mimesis, the imitation of nature, with artistic imitation: Sidney's Arcadia becomes the reality that he depicts, the original of which his text is a copy. If he can "give luster" to Sidney, then Sidney also gives luster to him: by imitating Sidney, he is effectively jumping the queue of the writers who follow him, inviting comparisons with no one else. Writing such a supplement therefore becomes a legitimate means of displaying one's creative abilities.

[2.9] Alexander and Johnstoun find similar strategies of concluding the battle of the New Arcadia and returning the characters to their Old Arcadia positions, and each does so as "compendious[ly]" as possible. Both supplements take up the story, as Alexander later wrote, "beginning at the very half Sentence, where he left with the Combat betwixt Zelmane and Anaxius, and continuing till the Ladies were returned to their Father" (Garrett 1996, 199). In that sentence, Anaxius steps back under Zelmane's onslaught, "Whereat ashamed, as having never done so much before in his life…" In both supplements, Anaxius is about to redouble his blows when he is

"suddenly arrested" by the sound of approaching rescue (1621, Ee2r; 1638, aa2r). As Gavin Alexander argues, the interrupted fight mirrors the interrupted nature of Sidney's text, making the break appear deliberate (2006, 43). By immediately ending the confrontation between Anaxius and Zelmane and moving on to the final battle begun by the arrival of Musidorus, both supplement writers signal the terms of their

engagement: they turn the halfsentence into a herald of conclusion, beginning the movement toward the final books.

[2.10] Both Alexander and Johnstoun also choose to honor the author himself through the figure of Philisides, a minor character who serves as Sidney's avatar in the Arcadia. In the Old Arcadia, he is only one of the shepherds appearing in the poetic eclogues, but the revised edition expands his role into that of a shepherdknight, with the first mention of his name set in italic capital letters for emphasis. Alexander and Johnstoun both bring Philisides on stage for the climactic rescue, as one of the two mysterious knights accompanying Musidorus. Attempting to define what is "wanting"

in the Arcadia, Johnstoun concludes: "There is nothing missing but himself; and yet his person is so well represented in his worke, that if he any wayes could be absented from the assertion of the Ladies liberty, it was needfull, because he left in the midst;

that by that want his want should be livelier deciphered" (1638, aa1r). Sidney's work on the Arcadia is recast as a chivalrous quest to free the heroines, from which he could only have been "absented" by death.

[2.11] Thus, in matching up their depiction to reality, both Alexander and Johnstoun

must go on to kill him off (note 6). In both cases, death results from a wound to the

thigh, where Sidney himself was shot at the battle of Zutphen. Alexander writes,

"Suddenly a Dart (none knew to whose hand the honour of it was due) did wound him in the thigh" (1621, Ee2v). Though less anachronistic than a musket, the source of this dart in the middle of a sword fight remains mysterious, almost as though it comes flying in from outside the Arcadia. The weapon is poisoned, and in Johnstoun's version, Philisides is offered amputation of the affected leg: "His best relief was to have wanted the whole." However, he refuses, "wishing rather to bee altogether dissolved, than live in part" (1638, bb1r). There seems to be a metafictional element to this passage;

continuing the Arcadia is repeatedly referred to as "adding a limb," so that the maimed body is a metaphor for the maimed text. Gavin Alexander writes that Johnstoun creates "an equation between the whole and yet partial works and the whole and yet interrupted Sidney: he will not 'live in part' and so dies whole, before his time; his Arcadia lives 'in part' but should be viewed as a whole from which something is lacking rather than a fragment." Johnstoun's supplement is "designed to stitch the prosthetic ending from the 'old' Arcadia to the body of the 'new'" (2006, 276). I would add that Johnstoun's text itself is the prosthesis, mimicking the main body of the Arcadia as closely as possible in order to leave it whole, though it may "want" Sidney himself.

[2.12] For Alexander and Johnstoun, Sidney's death "in the midst" of rewriting the Arcadia, represented by them in the middle of the Arcadia itself, serves as both a justification and a limit for their project. The fact that the author must be depicted and then killed off in such a way—something that, with the exception of particularly

metafictional fandoms, does not have much equivalent in presentday practice—

suggests the unusual circumstances in which these supplement writers were working.

It is also a departure from their scrupulous adherence to Sidney's plot: in the appended books of the Old Arcadia, Philisides reappears alive. Alexander acknowledges this in his endnote:

[2.13] I have onely heerein conformed my selfe to that which preceeded my beginning, and was knowne to be that admirable Authors owne, but doe differ in some things from that which followes, specially in the death of Philisides, making choise of a course, whereby I might best manifest what affection I beare to the memorie of him, whom I tooke to be alluded unto by that name. (1621, Ff5v)

[2.14] He repeats the sentiment later, stating that out of "Love to the Author's Memory," he had been "intending further…to have altered all that followed after my Addition" (Garrett 1996, 199)—presumably rewriting the Old Arcadia material to make it a better fit. For Alexander, there was clearly a distinction between the revised material, which "was knowne to be that Admirable Authors owne," and the appended books, which might be altered for the purpose of better honoring Sidney's memory.

[2.15] As Florio had complained, the gap in book 3 called into question the ending that followed it. Although Sanford had stressed the unity of the work, from 1613

onward, the explanatory note was expanded to provide a fuller account of Sidney's working practice. It describes the New Arcadia as a collection of "loose sheets" in the process of revision, "without any certain disposition or perfect order":

[2.16] What conclusion it should haue had, or how far the Work haue bene extended (had it had his last hand thereunto) was onely knowne to his own spirit, where only those admirable Images were (and no where else) to bee cast.

[2.17] And here we are likewise vtterly depriued of the relation how this combat ended [etc.]…all which vnfortunate mayme we must be content to suffer with the rest. (1613, Ee5r)

[2.18] Because Sidney never finished the revision, we cannot know how he might have chosen to end his rewritten work. The "vnfortunate mayme" in book 3, which may be closed by a supplement, is thus not the only incompletion; it opens a space for later writers in its wake, extending to the conclusion of even an "augmented and ended" Arcadia.

3. A Sixth Booke

[3.1] The original ending of the Old Arcadia served as an abrupt retreat from the eucatastrophe of the plot and an ironic gesture toward Continental romances, with their proliferation of side narratives and progeny. None of the plotlines mentioned is crucial, while the suggestion of writerly boredom adds to the narrator's display of sprezzatura:

[3.2] But the solemnities of these marriages, with the Arcadian pastorals full of many comical adventures…the strange story of the fair queens Artaxia of Persia and Erona of Lydia, with the prince Plangus's wonderful chances…

the shepherdish loves of Menalcas with Kalodoulus's daughter, and the poor hopes of the poor Philisides, in the pursuit of his affections, the strange continuances of Klaius's and Strephon's desire, lastly the son of Pyrocles named Pyrophilus, and Melidora the fair daughter of Pamela by Musidorus, who even at their birth entered into admirable fortunes, may awake some other spirit to exercise his pen wherewith mine is already dulled. (Robertson 1973, 417)

[3.3] Yet the ending advertised in 1593 alters these lines to include additional characters whose fates are actually central to the revised Arcadia but are left unresolved. It thus becomes a real invitation, a suggestion of incompletion at odds with the general happy ending. This left room for some writers to continue beyond the bounds of the romance, providing it with their own conclusions.

[3.4] One of these, Richard Belling's A Sixth Booke to the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (first published in 1624, and included within the folio from 1627), makes its relationship clear in the title: it is not a separate story but the last part of a whole (note 7). A series of commendatory verses in the original Dublin quarto is vital for articulating the text's connection to the Arcadia, stressing Belling's imitation of Sidney as well as his Irish national identity. Because these poems are intended to advertise the work, they reveal a great deal about how Belling's contemporaries perceived a successful continuation.

[3.5] Several of the commendators praise the similarities between Belling and Sidney in both "matter" (that is, continuing the story of Arcadia) and style. W. Martyn writes that "surely both being gone / Next age will write your characters in one" (1624, A3r), with Sidney and Belling merging into each other. Another poem similarly elides the differences between their authorship:

[3.6] Thus much Ile say, That if this age were blest

Againe by him, whose soule is now at rest,

The ne're enough admired Sidney, and

He to thy Booke would but vouch safe his hand,

Thou hast therein such wittie smoothnesse showne,

Is out of doubt it would be thought his owne. (A4v)

[3.7] Only handwriting separates Belling from the original, yet even when praising their equality, Sidney still emerges the clear superior: he has only to rise from the grave to take credit for Belling's work. Martyn actually imagines him doing so, so that the text becomes a scene of haunting: "I read thy booke on[e] night late, and did feare / Still as I read, I saw appearing there / Sir Philip Sidney's ghost" (1624, A3r).

[3.8] Authors were frequently imagined as living on through their texts, which could confer a kind of "printmade immortality" (Eisenstein 1979, 121). For the continuation writers, however, there is a fine balance between raising Sidney from the dead and carving out their own territory. The metaphor of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul, is frequently used in commendatory verses to describe Sidney's spirit infusing his continuator. Yet Belling himself does not accept this metaphor: if his writing is such a good imitation, it is through Belling's own labor rather than passive possession by Sidney. Belling's purpose, as he insists in his preface, is far from literary forgery:

[3.9] Yet let no man judge wrongfully of my endeavours: I have added a limme to Apelles picture; but my minde never entertain'd such vaine hopes, to thinke it of perfection sufficient to delude the eyes of the most vulgar, with the likenesse in the workmanship. No, no, I doe not follow Pythagoras his opinion of transmigrations: I am well assur'd divine Sidney's soule is not infus'd into me, whose Iudgment was only able to finish, what his Invention was only worthy to undertake. (1624, A3r)

[3.10] Where the commendators join Belling and Sidney, Belling separates them out again and emphasizes the gulf between them. Despite the humility of tone, this serves to transfer primary agency for the Sixth Booke from Sidney back to Belling himself; as he notes, "To strive to lessen the greatnesse of the attempt, were to take away the glorie of the action" (1624, A3r). One of the commendatory verses picks up on this phrase, showing how the reputation of Belling's work is inseparable from its relationship to Sidney:

[3.11] 'Tis true, th'attempt was great; nor blame I that,

Since greatest actions left as patternes bee

For imitation, which t'have offer'd at

So well as thou hast done, will honour thee.

And if thy Booke misse of the due applause,

Th'unimmitable president's the cause. (1624, A2v)

[3.12] This encapsulates the contradictions inherent in ideas of literary imitation: Sidney is praised both for leaving a pattern for followers and for being "unimmitable."

For a continuation writer, Sidney's renown is a doubleedged sword—it is an honor to approximate him, yet one also risks being overshadowed by him.

[3.13] The risk is potentially greater for Belling because of his nationality. Although in the London folios Belling is described as "R.B. of Lincolnes Inne, Esq.," his work—

particularly the 1624 quarto—has much stronger associations with his native Ireland than with the Inns of Court (note 8). It seems no coincidence that the quarto followed

soon after the Dublin publication of the Arcadia of 1621; as with the 1599 Edinburgh edition, the dissemination of Sidney's romance seems to have inspired local continuators. The commendatory poems credit Belling with a renewal of Ireland's ancient literary reputation, damaged in the recent colonial upheavals (1624, A3v).

Moreover, the derivative nature of his work is negated in some measure by Belling's nationality. Speaking into a "high silence" of national literature, he can be both a renewer of the "old learning" and a generic pioneer:

[3.14] Thou art the first who with thy welltun'd reed

Awak'd thy countries Muse, and led thereby

Into the pleasant fields of Arcady

Her flockes, her Pastors, and the sportfull crue

Of all her youth that shall thy steps pursue. (1624, A3v–A4r)

[3.15] The metaphor of following footsteps, which Belling (quoting the Thebaid) uses at the conclusion of his work to describe his relation to Sidney is here transferred to Belling himself as the initiator of an Irish romance tradition (1624, 100). Given Sidney's major role in English letters, Belling's Sixth Booke represents an Irish appropriation of his text as a symbol of national equality. Significantly, the only paratext retained for the London folio is Belling's modest preface, in which he admits,"That he should undergo that burden, whose mother tongue differs as much from this language, as Irish from English; augments the danger of the enterprise, and gives your expectation perhaps an assurance what the event must be" (1624, A3r).

The national difference becomes representative of the stylistic distance between himself and Sidney, but at the same time, this distance "augments" both "the danger"

and the potential glory.

[3.16] In completing the Arcadia, Belling takes the threads listed in its final lines as a program: like the supplements, his Sixth Booke is characterized by a narrative

economy that drives all the plotlines toward closure in either marriage or death (note

9). The endings nest inside each other, all in about 25,000 words: the story of

Amphialus and Helen is concluded during a tournament for the princes' double wedding; while narrating his adventures, Amphialus relates the fates of Plangus,

Erona, and Artaxia; and a final pastoral interlude mentions Kalodulus's daughter, Strephon, and Klaius. At times, even the characters are disbelieving that things could be so simple, that " Apollo would leave so plaine a way for us to track out the footsteps of his obscure misteries" (1624, E1r). The twin urges of the narrative are summed up when Basilius tells Helen, "The sweetly delivered strangenesse of the storie, would still ravish the hearers with a desire of a further cause of attentivenesse, did not a greater desire in us vvho know your vertues, hasten to heare the end of your much pittied distresse"; the haste wins out (1624, G3v). The only digression involves Amphialus's retrospective narration of his misfortunes (which does introduce new characters), but this is necessary to motivate his change of heart regarding Helen: "These former accidents, most deare Lady…made me reflect upon my ungratefull selfe, & consider how cruell I had beene to you" (1624, K4v). In modeling the events of his story so closely on Sidney's, Belling creates a circular momentum that prevents the spiraling outward of narrative, ending instead with recapitulation and equilibrium. The final lines describe all the major characters departing from Arcadia, "leaving Basilius and Gynecia, when they had accompanied them to the frontiers of Arcadia, to the happie quiet of their after life" (1624, O2r). The borders of Arcadia here become the border at which the reader is forced to stop. Instead of following the newlyweds to possible new adventures, we are left with characters to whom nothing more will happen.

4. "This inspired Minerva"

[4.1] Belling's work is A Sixth Booke; it is the only book of the Arcadia to lack the definite article. In fact, another conclusion for the story was published in 1651, though it was never included within the Arcadia folio. This small octavo volume is titled A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia…written by a young gentlewoman, Mris A.W. (Anna Weamys), and its preliminaries continue to stress the twin facts of the author's youth and gender.

[4.2] In fact, several of the continuation writers (including Alexander, Belling, and the author of the Historie) emphasize their youth at the time of composition. In his preface, Belling states, "To add to Sir Philip Sidney, I know is rashnesse; a fault pardonable in me, if custome might as well excuse the offence, as youth may prescribe in offending in this kinde" (1624, A3r). Today, fan fiction is often spoken of as a trainingwheels stage in a writer's development, easier because it does not require the creation of a setting and characters. It is tempting to see the same sentiment being expressed in the 17th century, but Belling's "kinde" of offense may also comprise writing a romance, a genre frequently denigrated by association with women and the young. Sidney himself described the Arcadia as the product of "a young head, not so wel staied as I would it were" (1593, ¶3v). In any case, the antecedent for Belling's "fault" is clearly "rashnesse"'—approaching such an inimitable

text demonstrates youthful, reckless courage, rather than the timidity of a fledgling author.

[4.3] Being a woman was potentially a greater disadvantage for a continuator.

Despite the links between women and romance, 17thcentury conduct books discouraged women from reading such texts, let alone writing them. The prefatory matter for Weamys's Continuation has attracted critics' attention for the unusually positive picture of female authorship painted therein, symbolized by F. Vaughan's call in the final commendatory poem to "Lay by your Needles Ladies, take the Pen, / The onely difference 'twixt you and Men" (1651, ¶7v). Still, women's authorship is not a given but, like the idea of continuing Sidney's Arcadia, a problem for Weamys's commendators to address and resolve.

[4.4] Although one poet advises the reader to "[view] the Virgin there, and here the Art" (1651, ¶6r), Weamys's status as a woman—her appeal as a young woman writing in an eroticized genre—is an inescapable part of her authorship. The publisher takes particular care to present both her "person and style" to the gaze of a male reader:

[4.5] Lo here Pigmalion's breathing statue, Sir Philip's fantasie incarnate: both Pamela's Majestie, and Philoclea's Humilitie exprest to the life, in the person and style of this Virago. In brief, no other than the lively Ghost of Sydney, by a happie transmigration speaks through the organs of this inspired Minerva. If any Critical ear, disrealish the shrilness of the Note; let it be tuned to Apollo's Lyre, and the harmonie will soon be perceived to be much better; and the Ladie appear much more delightfull to her Musidorus.

(1651, ¶4r–v)

[4.6] Weamys embodies Sidney's characters as well as portraying them: she is Galatea, given life by a man's art, and conveying his voice imperfectly through her shrill "organs." Meanwhile, Sidney is praised for the ability of his "prophetical spirit" to predict—even create—the existence of Weamys herself. The idea of transmigration, rejected by Belling, is repeatedly invoked to transfer agency for the Continuation to Sidney—that is, "If a Male Soul, by Transmigration, can / Pass to a Female, and Her spirits Man" (1651, ¶8r). Another writer sees Sidney defying death "with a timely Metempsychosis":

[4.7] He breathes through female Organs, yet retains

His masculine vigour in Heroick strains.

Who hears't may some brave Amazon seem to be,

Not Mars but Mercury's Champion, Zelmane.

And well he may: for doubtless such is she,

Perfection gives t' Arcadia's Geographie. (1651, ¶6v)

[4.8] Weamys's femininity is complicated by her role as a manlike "Virago" receiving inspiration from the undoubtedly masculine Sidney, and by the phallic contradiction of her "Feminine Pen" (1651, ¶4r). Fortunately, Sidney's own text provides a model for this transgressive mixture of male and female—not Pamela or Philoclea, but the "brave Amazon" Zelmane, actually the prince Pyrocles in disguise. Sidney's reincarnation in Weamys thus echoes this kind of heroic crossdressing.

[4.9] The rest of this poem, however, muddies the agency behind both texts still further: "Arcadia thus henceforth disputed is, / Whether Sir Philip's or the Countesses." Weamys's continuation is elided with Mary Sidney's work on the 1593

edition. Their efforts are linked because they are both women, each reciprocally authorizing the other. Moreover, like the countess's editing, Weamys's project is necessitated by the need to finish the Arcadia, to give "perfection" to its "Geographie."

One poem, which describes the project of continuation using heavily gendered terms, promises that Weamys

[4.10] Handsomly will set

An end to what great Sydney did beget,

But never perfected, these Embryons she

Doth Mid wife forth in full maturitie.

Nor is't, where things are left undone, a sin,

To seek to end what greater ones begin. (1651, ¶5v)

[4.11] Like the countess, Weamys serves as midwife (though not mother) to the unfinished textual embryo begot by Sidney. The last two lines spell out what other continuations only imply: it is the Arcadia's gaps that prevent their work from being a transgressive "sin." The poem's conclusion, moreover, points to the essential distinction between Sidney and Weamys as the only judgment that can ultimately be made about their works. Critics should "not with a Frown compare them, but a Smile":

"Then this of both, let nothing else be said, / This Sydney's self did write, but this a Maid" (1651, ¶5v).

[4.12] The narrative voice in this maid's Continuation is at once assertive and deferential. In her dedication, she praises "the Learned Sidney" and writes that her

"ambition was not raised to so high a pitch, as the Title now manifests it to be, until I received Commands from those that cannot be disobeyed"—perhaps her father or her aristocratic dedicatees (1651, ¶3v). Much of her narrative overlaps with Sidney's, and at one point she refers the reader directly to him, as Belling does at the start of his work: "And after many strange accidents had apparently been discovered, as the famous Sir Philip Sydney fully declares, Pyrocles and Musidorus were found to be alive" (1651, D5v). Throughout the text, Weamys repeatedly mentions her own inability to describe the events she is relating: not only martial interludes (as when

Plangus and Plexirtus "entered they into so fierce a fight, that it goes beyond my memorie to declare all the passages thereof," G4v), but also moments of heightened emotion: " Helena's joy at the hearing of this news, was too great for my dull expression" (1651, C6r). These may seem like insecure disclaimers, but the reminders of Weamys's authorial identity actually allow her firmer control over the plot, picking up and dropping the various threads and speeding them toward a resolution. It prevents the endless proliferation of narrative that would "make two large a storie"

(1651, H1v). Like Belling, Weamys is interested in swiftly arranging her characters'

marriages, who are advised to "Finish therefore the knot, that no crosses or calamities can unfinish, without further deferrings" (1651, H2v–H3r). Marriage is a force of conclusion, a bulwark against further "crosses or calamities." A quadruple—and after the resolution of the Urania plot, quintuple—wedding finishes the story. This is followed by the spontaneous deaths of those (Klaius and Philisides) who have no one to marry, so that their plotlines may also come to a stop. Weamys, like Belling, ends with a general dispersal from Arcadia:

[4.13] Then after all Ceremonies accomplished, they retired severally to their flourishing Kingdoms…where they…were fruitfull in their renowned Families. And when they had sufficiently participated of the pleasures of this world, they resigned their Crowns to their lawfull Successours, and ended their days in Peace and Quietness. (1651, N4r)

[4.14] Her ending, however, is even more conclusive than Belling's: she collapses the life span between marriage and death, denying the possibility of further adventures. Because none of the second generation is named, it exists only to emphasize the smoothness of the succession and does not suggest any narrative potential. "Ended their days in Peace and Quietness" is an unquestionably final line.

5. The Arcadia "quite metamorphosed"

[5.1] A very different take on the Arcadia, written around the same time as Weamys's Continuation, demonstrates the historical circumstances denied by Weamys's tidy conclusion. An undated anonymous manuscript, currently held in the Beinecke Library, is titled The Historie of Arcadia, or an Addition to and a Continuance Of Sir Phillip Sydney's ARCADIA (note 10). This obscure text was never printed, probably owing to its explicit political content. In a preface, the author apologizes for it as the fruit of his "greene studies," which

[5.2] should not have had so earely a springe, if I had not bene incited thereto, by the Author, of the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia; who in the close of his History, doth seeme to invite some other, to the continuance of

relatinge those occurrences, which his greater employments did abridge him of time, to consummate: to fulfil therefore, in some parte, his desire, I have adventured to proceed in the relation…hoping that this my slender fabricke, may stand the more firmely, because the foundation of it was layed, by so excellente an Artificer. (1)

[5.3] This author takes the ending of the Arcadia as a direct invitation, as well as a sign of incompletion due to Sidney's other "employments"; he thus seems to write at Sidney's own incitement, basing his work firmly upon Arcadian foundations.

[5.4] Indeed, the Historie begins in the recognizable form of a sixthbook continuation, "consummat[ing]" the Arcadia's various loose threads. Its author attentively recalls the details of Sidney's plot and is a good mimic of his prose, even if this is mainly through (as Johnstoun had put it) using "language…borrowed from himself." By the end of its first section, however (book 6 out of a total 9), the story has taken a very different turn. As the writer acknowledges in his preface, he has not confined himself to concluding the plotlines left open in invitation by Sidney:

[5.5] The bounds of whose desire I have presumed to passe, since the various…transactions of the Arcadian state, were, after the decease of King Basileus, quite metamorphosed, from amorous expressions and…pastoral enterludes; into serene counsells and politicke consultations, which afterwards produced both forraine and domestike actions…which harsh subiect, I hope, may…in some measure, render my imperfect sentences, and rough style excusable; as I doubt not, but your candour, will make a favourable construction of my presumption, in transgressinge Sr Phillip Sidney's desire. (1)

[5.6] Somewhat disingenuously, the writer attributes the changing genre of his work to the subsequent "transactions of the Arcadian state," as if he were relating the history of real events.

[5.7] In some measure, of course, this is exactly what he is doing, as the affairs of Arcadia are "metamorphosed" into a direct allegory for English history. Pamela's father, husband, and daughter are all killed off at the end of book 6, for example, so that she can take the throne as an analogue for Queen Elizabeth. By book 9, the plot and characters of the Arcadia have been left behind entirely, in favor of detailed description of the civil wars fought by Pamela's grandson, Aristanax (Charles I), ending with an account of his execution. Each book covers a single reign, but this final catastrophe interrupts the succession "by the end both of the king, and kingdome of Arcadia wherewith this my history also, of Arcadia shall have an end" (255). The Historie ends with a rupture, like the Arcadia itself, but here it is the king's death

rather than the author's that puts a period to the story: "For this author at any rate, Arcadia's existence as Arcadia is totally dependent on its monarchical form of government…Not only the kingdom but the genre itself is thus destroyed by the king's execution" (Potter 1989, 94). Allegorical readings of the Arcadia were common in this period, as Sidney's work was reinterpreted in light of the new political romances, and royalists used the genre as a way of understanding their situation (note 11). However, the Historie's author is aware that he is "transgressinge Sr Phillip Sidney's desire"

through this radical extension of his story. This is the only continuation to constitute such a departure from the source, a contrast to the conformism of the texts already discussed, and perhaps a sign of the historical stresses motivating its composition.

Instead of fixing the gaps in the Arcadia, this author uses Sidney's text as a jumpingoff point to address his own contemporary concerns under an increasingly thin veil of romance. In fact, the Historie seems to have been read (so far as the manuscript was read at all) more for its historical content than as a sequel. The back pages include two attempts to decode the names and places mentioned, and eighteenthcentury notes on the flyleaf describe it only as "an Allegorical History of the Grand Rebellion begun 1640."

6. Markham's intolerable allusion

[6.1] Apart from this somewhat anomalous text, the most extensive of the Arcadia continuations (and the first chronologically) was written by Gervase Markham, an author better known for his extensive nonfiction works. Ben Jonson once observed that

"Markham (who added his English Arcadia) was not of the number of the faithful, i.e.

poets, and but a base fellow" (1988, 465), and many modern commentators have also dismissed him as a prolific hack. In the 1590s, however, Markham was associated with the Earl of Essex, who had close ties to Sidney; he had married Sidney's widow, and his sister, Penelope Rich, was known to be the Stella of Sidney's sonnets. An Arcadia continuation might therefore have been designed by Markham to please Essex and his associates. The preface states, in standard dedicatory terms, that "the name and methode [were] neither of mine election…For that power which did (and there was great reason it euer should to do) gouerne all the powers within mee, by a forcible commandement bound mee to doe what is done" (1613, A3v).

[6.2] By the time Markham's English Arcadia was published, however—the first part in 1607, the second in 1613—Essex had been executed after his illfated rebellion, and Penelope Rich had died. The first volume was entered in the Stationers' Register as

" the Countesse of BEDFORDes Arcadia | begynninge where the Countesse of PEMBROOKEs endes" (Arber 1876, 133). The Countess of Bedford was seen as a successor to Mary Sidney's literary patronage, and Markham was related to her by marriage, but for whatever reason, the dedication fell through. Markham's work

appeared without an aristocratic patron, and he was called upon to volubly defend it in prefaces attached to each of the two parts. Markham writes that he had "aduentured to cast into the world this Orphan, which howeuer it was once begot by noble parents…is now like a vagabond inforst to begge, and liue vpon miserable charitie"

(1607, A4r). He later claims that his lack of dedication has made critics more harsh in judging his work.

[6.3] The criticisms Markham faces are specifically related to his "arrogancie immitation, affectation, and euen absurd ignorance" in continuing the Arcadia (1607, A2r) . His "crimes" are in the shadowy area of literary property, and the prefaces are remarkable for how directly they address this. First, he defends his choice of title, protesting that "thogh it be only excellent in [Sidney], yet hath it likewise beene vsed by others…without either pride or ostentation, men taking libertie to lay their hystories in Countries by them most affected" (1607, A2r). This mixing of terms demonstrates the multiple meanings of "Arcadia" in this period as the title and setting of Sidney's renowned work; a pastoral realm inherited from classical writers; and an actual part of ancient Greece, and thus open to anyone as a setting for their "hystories." Markham is right in stating that multiple other titles that include the word Arcadia had been published, before and after Sidney, and he sees no reason why his cannot be one of them.

[6.4] However, Markham is not simply setting his work in a region of Greece; he is, as the title page proclaims, "Alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending."

Thus, he goes on to offer further justification for his project:

[6.5] Next for mine allusion and imitation, which beareth a colour of much greater vainglorie: mine excuse must onely bee the worthinesse of former presidents, as Virgill from Homer, Ariosto from Baiardo, famous Spencer from renowned Chaucer, and I with as good priuiledge, from the onely to be admired Sir Philip Sydney…who were our age but blest with his liuing breath, he would himselfe confesse the honie hee drew both from Heliodorus, and Diana. (1607, A2r–A2v)

[6.6] As many defenders of fan fiction still do, Markham situates himself within a long tradition of imitation, including ancient and modern, and foreign and English examples. In fact, he comes close to suggesting that there is no such thing as originality in literature, only a continuous sequence of borrowing. Sidney himself is raised from the dead to admit his sources: "Markham wants to see Sidney not as an unapproachable monument, selfcreated and inimitable, but as a writer among writers, taking his place in a continuum of reading and writing and encouraging Markham to do the same" (Alexander 2006, 271).

[6.7] This argument was evidently controversial, because in his second preface (after another defence of the title), Markham takes it up again:

[6.8] Another sayes, the alusion is not tollerable; as if pooremen should not borrow from the rich, or that vertue should euer liue so alone, that no man should dare to bee her imitator. Nay, saies a third, the great hightreason of all, is to make Noble Sir Phillip Sidney acquainted, either with Diana, or else Heliodorus, as if the excellency of his minde had disdained that which first brought it to perfection (Iudiciall reading) o no, were he on the earth, he would…tell them, that his contemplatiue labour first brought him to actiue worthinesse. (1613, A4r—A4v)

[6.9] Adopting Sidney's own voice, Markham once more denies the possibility of a great original work that does not arise from previous sources. His view of the literary world is densely intertextual, though not devoid of hierarchies and notions of literary property. In an extension of humanist educational precepts, reading and writing are equated with the contemplative and active lives, so that the act of writing an imitative work becomes equivalent to the imitation of virtue advocated in Sidney's "Defence of Poesie" (1595).

[6.10] Unlike the other sequels discussed earlier (with the exception of the Historie), Markham's English Arcadia is a generational continuation: it concerns the fates of Pyrophilus and Melidora, the children named in the last lines of Sidney's Arcadia.

Markham begins with an imitation of Sidney that amplifies his elaborate rhetorical style, rendering it almost unreadable with flourishes, and this has probably accounted for the low reputation of his work. However, as the story continues, the borrowings from Sidney become less fundamental. Markham is "Alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending," not writing a sixth book to the Arcadia, and he does not display the other continuators' strong impulse toward closure and narrative economy.

The second volume of the English Arcadia (1613) is only " The end of the first Booke, "

although—whether through lack of patronage or continuing criticism—no more of this

"Work in Progress" was ever published.

7. Conclusions

[7.1] The fact that the Arcadia continuations were composed by two Scotsmen, an Irishman, a woman, a defeated royalist, and a "hack" writer like Markham demonstrates the broad popularity of Sidney's romance and the different points of view that were brought to bear upon it. It would be an exaggeration, however, to conclude that continuations were a specifically subaltern genre in this period, or to interpret these writers' works (as some critics have done) exclusively in light of their

biographies. On the other hand, these different subject positions certainly affected how their relationship to Sidney, the quintessential English poetknight, was framed and defined.

[7.2] It is difficult to say whether these readers saw themselves as part of a fandom in the same way we do today. Vera Keller (2011) recently explored the idea of the lover or amateur as fan in early modern culture within a slightly different context. For literary fandoms, the study of historical readership relies on scanty evidence: library inventories, chance remarks in diaries, and readers' annotations in their books. The many editions and surviving copies of the Arcadia—over 400 in the English Short Title Catalogue—certainly show that this was a valuable and wellloved text. Seventeenthcentury conduct manuals cautioned women against reading it lest it encourage amorous thoughts, and one of them draws an explicit link between reading and writing: "Instead of reading Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, let them learn the grounds of good huswifery. I like not the female Poetess at any hand" (Hackett 2000, 10). In their surveys of annotations in Arcadia copies, Peter Lindenbaum (1997) and Heidi Brayman Hackel (2005) demonstrate that readers were not only combing through it for moral sententia and quotable descriptions, but also engaging with the plot, a type of reading that Lindenbaum (somewhat teleologically) describes as "protonovelistic" (1997, 89).

The Arcadia continuations and their paratexts are thus particularly important in showing the actions such reader responses might lead to: as Johnstoun writes, "I was carried with such pleasure in perusing the same, that I could never find an end of reading" (1638, aa1r).

[7.3] The resulting continuations all use techniques familiar to readers of fan fiction—

for example, they rely on memories of past events in order to situate themselves within the continuity of the Arcadia, and they highlight the characters' most prominent attributes (Pamela's dignity, Philoclea's humility, Anaxius's pride) to make them appear consistent. Of course, this does not protect them from later accusations of being out of character: one critic, for example, complains that the heroines are

"'transmigrated' almost unrecognizably" in Weamys's hands, so that "the reader is disturbed to see" it (Salzman 1985, 131). In a passage that demonstrates the affective power of characterization, A. D. G. Wiles claims that Helen and Amphialus in the English Arcadia "do not even vaguely resemble Sidney's characters"; he indignantly concludes, "Markham has profaned these noble characters; and what is worse, he suddenly breaks off his account of them, leaving these evil implications upon them"

(1933, 124–25).

[7.4] We cannot know whether 17thcentury readers would have shared these criticisms. Unfortunately, apart from commendatory verses and prefaces, there is little evidence for the continuations' contemporary reception. There was certainly no legal

impediment to their publication; although the Arcadia's publisher once prosecuted a piracy of the text, there was no equivalent action involving a continuation, and in fact

many of them came to be included within the folio (note 12). The 1638 edition of the

Arcadia contained not only Sidney's works, but the two supplements by Alexander and Johnstoun, as well as Belling's Sixth Booke, all advertised as additions for the benefit

of the reader (note 13).

[7.5] On the other hand, as I have shown, all of these texts do include some paratextual explanation or apology for their project in continuing the Arcadia. Clearly such appropriation was not merely a given of this literary culture. Just as presentday fan fiction disclaimers, with their focus on legal ownership and possible litigation ("Don't own; don't sue"), say something about our attitudes toward literary property, these statements shed light on early 17thcentury views about authorship and originality. They also demonstrate the enduring appeal of textual gaps for readers wishing to know what would happen next within the world Sidney had created.

Although it is hard to say whether Weamys or Markham would have felt any kinship with the two Arcadia stories currently housed in the fan fiction Archive of Our Own (http://archiveofourown.org/), I believe that these texts reveal an unbroken tradition of a specific type of engagement with literature, to which we have only recently given a name.

8. Notes

1. In providing a history of what she calls archontic literature, Abigail Derecho

gestures toward the Arcadia material (particularly Weamys's Continuation and Mary Wroth's 1621 Urania, which is not technically a sequel) for the beginning of fan fiction as a strategy for "subordinated groups seeking adequate means of expression" (2006, 67). However, her analysis is necessarily quite brief and general, collapsing the distinction between various forms of intertextuality.

2. This was particularly true of Continental romance cycles (like Palmerin or Amadis de Gaule), which might include a dozen volumes written over more a century by various authors. Although such works lie outside my scope here, they also provide an important fan fiction precedent.

3. Pender (2011) explores Mary Sidney's important role in the creation of Sidney as an

author. For more on the Arcadia's composition and publication history, see Woudhuysen (1966), Alexander (2006), and Skretkowicz (1986, 1987). A full checklist of the Arcadia editions I discuss can be found in JuelJensen (1987).

4. For the complex publication history of this text, see Wiles (1956) and Mitchell and

Foster (1969). Coincidentally, 1621 was also the year of Mary Sidney's death, although

her attitude toward Alexander's supplement is unknown.

5. With its dedication to James VI/I, addressing him only as king of Scotland,

Johnstoun's supplement was probably written long before its publication—possibly following the 1599 Edinburgh edition of the Arcadia. Johnstoun's supplement is relegated to the back of the volume rather than included within the text like Alexander's, whether because of Alexander's priority or his higher social rank.

6. Anna Weamys's Continuation also depicts the death of Philisides on its last pages, this time in his pastoral guise as a melancholy shepherd who dies for love, refusing to name his beloved. The refusal may be an acknowledgment of the historical distance between Weamys's Continuation and the original text, so that a biographical note in the 1655 edition of the Arcadia states, "I dare confidently averr that the wards of this lock are grown so rustie with time, that a modern key will scarce unlock it" (1655, b3v). It is also possible that Weamys did not recognize Philisides as Sidney, though the placement of his death at the conclusion of her work seems significant. See Cullen (1994, liv–lv).

7. This author is also called Bellings or Belings; I use the spelling in the Dublin quarto.

8. In later life, Belling would become a prominent politician and historian of the Irish

Confederation; see his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

9. He avoids only Philisides, probably because he is following an edition that includes

Alexander's supplement, and the nextgeneration stories of Pyrophilus and Melidora.

10. On the basis of the interest in and knowledge of military campaigns, I believe the

Historie was probably written by a male royalist; I therefore refer to the author as

"he."

11. Charles I was famously supposed to have recited Pamela's prayer from the Arcadia on the eve of his execution, which led to an extended attack by John Milton in Eikonoklastes (1649). This incident is discussed by Dobranski (2005) and Magnus (1991). For political readings of the Arcadia, see Patterson (1984).

12. On the Edinburgh piracy of the Arcadia and the resulting law case, see Plomer (1899) and Judge (1934, 101–10).

13. No more continuations were included after 1638—whether because the Arcadia's popularity was on the wane or because all the gaps were seen as sufficiently filled. By the time the 1655 edition was published, its editors wanted additions that would explicate the 75yearold text rather than continue it.

9. Works cited

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Alexander, William. 1621. "A Supplement of the said defect by Sir W.A." In The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia…Now the fift time published, 127–46. Dublin: Societie of Stationers.

Arber, Edward, ed. 1876. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 AD. Volume 3. London: Privately printed.

Belling, Richard. 1624. A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Dublin: Societie of Stationers.

Brayman Hackel, Heidi. 2005. Reading Material in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cullen, Patrick C. 1994. Introduction to A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, by Anna Weamys, xvii–lxxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hackett, Helen. 2000. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Historie of Arcadia: Or an Addition to and a Continuance of Sir Phillip Sydney's Arcadia. n.d. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Osborn MS b. 107.

Johnstoun, James. 1638. "A Supplement to the third booke of Arcadia." In The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia…Now the ninth time published, with a twofold supplement of a defect in the third Book, sig. aa2r–bb4r. London: I. Waterson and R.

Young.

Jonson, Ben. 1988. "Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden." In The Complete Poems, edited by George Parfitt, 459–80. London: Penguin.

Judge, Cyril Bathurst. 1934. Elizabethan BookPirates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

JuelJensen, Bent. 1987. "Sir Philip Sidney, 1554–1586: A Checklist of Early Editions of His Works." In Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, edited by Dennis Kay, 289–314. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Keller, Vera. 2011. "The 'Lover' and Early Modern Fandom." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 7. doi:10.3983/twc.2011.0351.

Lindenbaum, Peter. 1997. "Sidney's Arcadia as Cultural Monument and ProtoNovel."

In Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, edited by Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti, 80–94. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Magnus, Elizabeth M. 1991. "Originality and Plagiarism in Areopagitica and

Eikonoklastes. " English Literary Renaissance 21:87–101. doi:10.1111/j.1475

6757.1991.tb01020.x.

Markham, Gervase. 1607. The English Arcadia, Alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending. London: Edward Allde for Henrie Rocket.

Markham, Gervase. 1613. The second and last part of the first booke of the English Arcadia. London: Nicholas Okes for Thomas Saunders.

Mitchell, Alison, and Katharine Foster. 1969. "Sir William Alexander's Supplement to Book III of Sidney's Arcadia. " Bibliographical Notes 24:235–41.

Parker, Patricia. 1979. Inescapable Romance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Patterson, Annabel. 1984. Censorship and Interpretation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Pender, Patricia. 2011. "The Ghost and the Machine in the Sidney Family Corpus."

Studies in English Literature 51:65–85. doi:10.1353/sel.2011.0000.

Plomer, Henry R. 1899. "The Edinburgh Edition of Sidney's 'Arcadia.'" Library 2:195–

205. doi:10.1093/library/s2I.2.195.

Potter, Lois. 1989. Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Sidney, Philip. 1590. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London: John Windet for William Ponsonby.

Sidney, Philip. 1593. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia…Now since the first edition augmented and ended. London: William Ponsonby.

Sidney, Philip. 1598. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia…Now the third time published, with sundry new additions of the same Author. London: William Ponsonby.

Sidney, Philip. 1613. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia…Now the fourth time published, with some new Additions. London: Humphrey Lownes for Mathew Lownes.

Sidney, Philip. 1621. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia…Now the fift time published, with some new Additions. Also a Supplement of a defect in the third part of this History, By Sir W. Alexander. Dublin: Society of Stationers.

Sidney, Philip. 1638. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia…Now the ninth time published, with a twofold supplement of a defect in the third Book: the one by Sir W.A.

Knight; the other, by Mr. Ja. Johnstoun ScotoBrit, dedicated to King James, and now annexed to this work, for the Readers benefit. Whereunto is also added a sixth Booke, by R.B. of Lincolnes Inne Esq. London: J. Waterson and R. Young.

Sidney, Philip. 1655. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia…The tenth edition. With his Life and Death; a brief Table of the principal heads, and som other new Additions.

William DuGard for George Calvert and Thomas Pierreport.

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Weamys, Anna. 1651. A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia. London: William Bentley for Thomas Heath.

Wiles, A. D. G. 1933. "The Continuations of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. " PhD diss., Princeton University.

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1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Theory

The mediation of fandom in Karin Giphart's Maak me blij

Nicol e Lamerichs

Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

[0.1] Abstract— The plot of the Dutch novel Maak me blij (Make me happy) (2005) by Karin Giphart draws from the culture of online fan communities. It describes the life of a lesbian in her late 20s, Ziggy, who has a terminally ill mother. Ziggy is an active fan who writes and reads femmeslash fan fiction—that is, lesbian interpretations of characters from mainstream series such as Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). By providing through Ziggy a personal view of fan communities and the genres that flourish there, Maak me blij connects the romantic motives of original lesbian fiction with its underground sister, fan fiction. The novel draws from various source texts and illustrates how fans interpret texts within a wider literary landscape. I use the concept of intermediality to analyze how Maak me blij mediates different types of original fiction (lesbian romances, science fiction) and fan fiction (femmeslash, Star Trek fan fiction) to establish new views on fandom and its construction of gender and intimacy. These motives are not only apparent within the text itself but also within the character of Ziggy as a fan writer with her own original alien characters.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan fiction; Femmeslash; Femslash; Intermediality; Lesbian fiction; Original fiction; Pro fic

Lamerichs, Nicolle. 2012. "The Mediation of Fandom in Karin Giphart's Maak me blij. " Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0407.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Ziggy is a lesbian in her late 20s who lives in Amsterdam. She goes to the right gay bars, knows who's who, and has plenty of dates. She is also a geek with a rat named Spock, she writes smutty fan fiction, and she is always eager to check updates of fiction that she likes. Online, she discusses television series, writes about them, and meets virtually with friends all over the world. Although Ziggy enjoys the local lesbian community, fan communities appear to be her real home. She is primarily interested in Star Trek: Voyager and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction. Her room is filled with binders collecting the fan fiction she has printed out. Ziggy's life is so characteristic of the fan experience that it is hard to believe that she is fictional.

[1.2] Maak me blij (Make me happy) (2005) by Karin Giphart integrates fandom into

a fullfledged lesbian novel (note 1). It tells the story of a female fan and the value

that she attaches to fan spaces in relation to the lesbian/queer spaces she inhabits.

Maak me blij combines original and fan writing explicitly through its main character, an active writer of fan fiction. The novel also includes Ziggywritten fan texts based on Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) that depict an original character that Ziggy has created who is half Klingon. Within Ziggy's fan fiction, a common theme emerges of displacement—displacement between the author and reader, and between existing characters pulled from an originary source text and the fan. It is not unusual for characters in fan fiction to behave in fannish ways and reveal themselves through their fan fiction as supposed authors or readers (Busse 2006); similarly, within socalled Mary Sue fan fiction, original characters are often avatars for the fan herself (Pflieger 1999). Maak me blij, however, provides a unique portrayal of a female fan that represents fannish culture as it is lived and experienced. The fan becomes a character who herself writes characters that reflect her own personality, as opposed to a character who behaves as a fan or author.

[1.3] In Maak me blij, original fiction, fan fiction, and media texts enhance one another's meaning. The novel centers around the writing of slash (homoerotic) fan fiction. In much slash, straight male characters are queered and emotionally confronted with homosexual feelings (BaconSmith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Penley 1997;

Pugh 2005). The term slash connotes erotic intimacy between men; the term femmeslash (also spelled femslash) is thus used to more specifically refer to fiction depicting sexual relations between women. Slash and femmeslash both provide complicated representations of gender and emphases on different types of sexualities, including asexuality as well as samesex sexuality. Maak me blij integrates femmeslash, blending lesbianoriented original fiction (the novel itself) and fan fiction (Ziggy's femmeslash). Scholarship on fan fiction has focused on the relationship between the fan text and the media text it is based on (the source text), but little has been written about fan fiction's relationship to the wider literary landscape. Original fiction that has a component of intext fan fiction, such as Maak me blij, demonstrates the complexity of this textual landscape.

[1.4] Maak me blij mediates different types or genres of narratives—fan fiction, lesbian romance, and science fiction—to query fandom and its construction of gender and intimacy. The plot of the novel draws on the culture of online fan communities, where alternative ideas on gender and sexuality flourish. These ideas can be traced in how the novel represents modern lesbians, narrates its main character, and articulates its romantic plot. I use intermediality—the dispersion of media content across various media platforms—to consider the media as entwined with other texts, both in terms of content and form, within a broader cultural discourse. The term is derived from

intermedium, coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1812) to discuss aesthetic modes in various media and revisited in 1966 by Dick Higgins in his manifesto "Statement on Intermedia"; it became associated with the art scene through the artist network Fluxus. The concept has been developed further in Germany in late 20thcentury aesthetic and literary studies and is sometimes combined with discourses on intertextuality (Helbig 1998; Rajewsky 2005; Meyer, Simanowski, and Zeller 2006).

[1.5] Today intermediality has again become relevant. Creators of art, media, and literature make use of multiple media sources, either to make a new product or to adapt existing content. With the advent of new media and the interest in combining various forms of media, modes such as opera, film, and novels may now also rely on other media, thus becoming hybrids (Helbig 1998). There is an increasing trend toward intermediality in storytelling, described by Jenkins (2006) as transmedia storytelling, wherein various media are used to tell a number of instances of a story.

Each medium retains its own characteristics, and ideally, there is no actual source text because all the texts need to be combined to understand the narrative. The field of fan studies has analyzed the relation between fan fiction and its source text as intertextual or intermedial (Hellekson and Busse 2006). However, fan fiction is best analyzed by putting it into the context of the literary landscape at large and seeing how other genres play a role in the establishment of the fan text, and vice versa.

[1.6] Intermediality is evident in Maak me blij in three ways. First, Maak me blij relates fan fiction, mainstream romance, and lesbian fiction. Second are the novel's references to media texts, such as television series, films, and online discussions; the integration of science fiction, for example, is used not only to influence how the characters relate to each other, but also to narrate the main character. Third are the form of these texts: the novel mediates various types of texts and positions them within, but set apart from, the main text. Some critics classify written text as a single medium and consider it to be intramedial or intertextual (Rajewsky 2005; Lehtonen 2001). Maak me blij, however, features written texts that mimic diverse types of media, such as text messages, email, and fan fiction, which, in terms of style and typography, qualify as intermedial. My analysis is a genre comparison that explores the novel's relations to fan fiction, notably femmeslash, and its original fiction counterpart, lesbian romance. I conclude by combining the levels of intermediality by analyzing how the fan character of Ziggy is focalized.

2. Combining fan fiction and original fiction

[2.1] Maak me blij begins as active fangirl Ziggy is about to leave for Greece with her exgirlfriend, Adisa. Through flashbacks, we learn that Ziggy met Adisa, as borgqueen1456@gay.com, in the fandom of Star Trek: Voyager. Their first date takes

place on the roof of Amsterdam's NEMO museum, which, as Ziggy describes it, looks just like a spaceship. Ziggy and Adisa fall in love. Their relationship is partly grounded in the fan communities they are both part of: "Adisa and I had talked a lot since we met. About Star Trek. Xena. Buffy. Ally. La femme Nikita. Babies, work, friendships.

Dinner and politics. The WAO. Sex" (Adisa en ik hadden sinds onze ontmoeten veel gepraat. Over Star Trek. Xena. Buffy. Ally. La femme Nikita. Baby's, werk, vriendschappen. Eten en politiel. De WAO. Seks) (67) (note 2).

[2.2] Ziggy usually breaks up with her girlfriends quickly, but she considers Adisa special. The only negative side to this otherwise perfect romance is that Adisa takes drugs, but Ziggy learns to cope with this. When Ziggy finds out that Adisa is still in contact with her exgirlfriend, she becomes suspicious and jealous. They go through a rough patch and eventually break up. Adisa, however, refuses to cancel the vacation to Greece that they had booked. While in Greece, Ziggy learns of her mother's death, and Ziggy and Adisa must overcome the logistical problems of leaving the country earlier than planned. In light of recent events, both women are forced to talk things over, and their relationship is repaired.

[2.3] Maak me blij is a work of original fiction, not of fan fiction, but it includes many examples of drafts and snippets of online fan texts that the characters produce, as well as interior scenarios that are narrated as fan fiction. The professional publication of fan texts is a fraught one: fan fiction must often be greatly altered and rewritten. For example, Camille BaconSmith (1992) analyzes professionally written fiction that was published in the mainstream press as part of the official franchises of, for instance, Star Trek. Such publication requires that certain fan values, such as queerness in slash fiction, must be downplayed to meet the demands of the media industry's franchise.

Another strategy is to change the names of the characters and publish the text as original fiction. One fan, for example, published her t.A.T.u. fan fiction by altering the band members' names and gained success with the story as a lesbian novel (Viires 2005, 168). This was the tack taken by E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as Twilight fan fiction and ended up published professionally in 2012

(http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/05/theoriginsof50shadesof

greygomissing.html).

[2.4] Although of course fan fiction may be turned into mainstream works, many authors write both original fiction and fan fiction. BaconSmith (1992) notes that fans who proceed to publish original fiction tend to write in similar genres as their fan fiction, such as science fiction or fantasy. Elizabeth Woledge further argues that scholars should not look at slash only as it is mediated into mainstream texts, but rather "from a literary perspective which could draw parallels to mainstream texts with which slash has no direct derivative relationship" (2005, 51). In a genre comparison of

slash fan fiction and original fiction, Woledge demonstrates that certain themes occur in both slash and mainstream texts, although she primarily compares the works of authors who write both. In a later essay (2006), she calls the correlation between these genres intimatopia, suggesting that romantic or erotic texts in which intimacy is explored bear resemblances that cannot be fully captured by dividing them into, for instance, slash and mainstream texts. This similarity between genres is clear in Maak me blij.

[2.5] Maak me blij stands out as a narrative about the fan community that positions its characters as fans and integrates fan fiction into the larger narrative. Media portrayals of fans are, of course, nothing new; fans have been positioned as characters in various texts, and fans are often mentioned in journalistic accounts.

However, such depictions of fans are prone to stereotypes, particularly of the fan as fanatic (Jenkins 1992; Jensen 1992). The characterization of fans has been discussed in analyses of fan characters (Kociemba 2009) or the integration of the fan community through metafictional strategies, as in Supernatural (2005–present; Garcia 2011).

However, these portrayals are either detached from real fan experiences because they ridicule the experience or, in the case of Supernatural, are a nudge to the invested viewers who watch the series. More realistic and personal descriptions of fandom, such as those in Maak me blij, are quite rare.

[2.6] Importantly, in Maak me blij, Ziggy is fannishly focalized without being reduced to a flat, exaggerated, or stereotypical character. Maak me blij voices how fans invest in existing story worlds and, as I shall explain, how this feeds into the performance of their gender and sexuality. Moreover, it connects the online identities of fans to their offline counterparts. The main relations in the novel—between Ziggy and Adisa, and Ziggy and her mother—are always filtered through their discussions of media texts and fan communities. Fandom is not understood in isolation here as a mere virtual space, but rather is enacted in daily life. It is depicted as a lifestyle with particular values that create social coherence, even if these relations are not primarily founded in fandom.

3. Femmeslash and romance in Maak me blij

[3.1] At first sight, Maak me blij seems to be an autobiography based on Giphart's own experience as a lesbian and a fan. This angle is intensified by the use of firstperson narration. Still, it would be wrong to equate Ziggy with Giphart based only on the subcultures they have in common. Lesbian authors have often been mistaken for their characters and their fiction read as their life stories. As Paula Palmer notes,

"Readers of lesbian fiction tend to identify the author with the characters whom she creates and to envisage a unified authorial voice dominating and controlling the text"

(1993, 38). Although Ziggy is not Giphart, by drawing from her lived experiences,

Giphart succeeds in creating a diverse picture of contemporary lesbian spaces online as well as offline.

[3.2] In Maak me blij, lesbian identity and fan identity are intimately connected, although Ziggy usually introduces herself as a fan rather than lesbian. In her diary, she writes: "Hi, I'm Ziggy and I'm a Trekker, a Xenite (or Bard), and a Slayerette"

(Hallo, ik ben Zigy en ik ben een Trekker, een Xenite [of Bard] en een Slayerette) (192). All of these words are slang terms used in fan communities of specific TV series to identify themselves and their fellow fans. The preface to the book properly introduces Ziggy: "Some people watch birds; others write steamy stories about existing characters from movies and television series. That other is me" (De een kijkt naar vogels, de ander schrijft smeulende verhalen met al bestaande karakters uit films en televisieseries. Die ander ben ik) (1). Ziggy is passionate about television series and loves writing fan fiction; when she introduces herself, it is as a writer of fan fiction.

[3.3] The novel integrates fan fiction, especially femmeslash. Although slash has been a thriving genre in fan communities since at least the 1970s, femmeslash gained popularity fairly late when series with strong female leads, such as Xena and Gabrielle in Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), gained a large fan base (Ross 2008). Slash features male characters and is mostly written by heterosexual women. In contrast, femmeslash deals with female characters and is often written by lesbians. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Xena: Warrior Princess is one of Ziggy's favorite series. Her other fandoms, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003) and Star Trek: Voyager, are also among the more popular ones in femmeslash communities; they are still extensively discussed and written about even today. Ziggy, then, is a television viewer who enjoys interpreting mainstream texts as gay and writing her own stories about this. This kind of resistant reading, in which readers read a text against dominant cultural beliefs or, arguably, against the text itself, is an important source of joy in fan cultures (Fetterley 1978). Some scholars, such as Alexander Doty (2000), have understood this to be a type of queer reading that is also partly given shape by the desires of the fan herself.

[3.4] Maak me blij also highlights these reading practices by showing Ziggy's interpretations of television series. She closely rewatches her favorite shows, then reproduces or subverts these motives in her queer fan fiction. The reading practices of fans and the pairings that they support cannot be understood in isolation from the queer discourses in fan communities that function as interpretive frameworks.

Moreover, the relations between these characters, and their potential for a more intimate relationship, are often inherent in the text itself. This makes their resistant dimension debatable. Gwenllian Jones (2002) has argued that rather than being actually subversive, slash fiction picks up subtext and motives from mainstream series

and should always be understood in this light. The novel also illustrates this point: Ziggy tries to explain subtext to outsiders as hints that are already there within the text. What fan fiction mediates, and whether this is a dominant or oppositional reading, is thus up for discussion.

[3.5] The plot of Maak me blij is similar to the type of plots produced in fan cultures;

the novel itself evokes femmeslash. As Jenkins (1992) notes, a typical slash (or, I would argue, femmeslash) story is set up according to the following steps: an initial relationship in which the characters are not together but are interested in one another;

a dystopic stage in which they cannot deal with their emotions; a confession of love to one another; and finally a utopia where they are together. The slash/femmeslash plot exaggerates the template of the genre of romance, in which the female character first dislikes a male character, goes through an unsettling time with him, and then experiences a change in her feelings. She learns to understand the hero, and eventually, the relationship becomes intimate (Radway 1984). Maak me blij echoes these romantic motives by depicting two characters who find each other, go through a rough patch, and eventually repair their relationship and end up together. Still, the plot elements in slash, femmeslash, and romance are not extraordinary and can be found as much in heterosexual fan fiction as in gay and lesbian stories.

4. Mediation of lesbian literature

[4.1] As a work of modern lesbian fiction, Maak me blij is an interesting case study.

Lesbian writing is as old as Sappho, but it only became a recognized publishing category in the 1970s. Bonnie Zimmerman identifies the genre as texts that have a

"central, not marginal, lesbian main character, one who understands herself to be a lesbian" and include sexual passion between women (1990, 15). Studies on the topic remain few and often focus on the AngloAmerican landscape, with some wellknown works—notably Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Radcliffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928)—receiving the bulk of the attention. Lesbian fiction discusses the problems of gender and intimacy among women, and Maak me blij is no exception.

[4.2] Although some novels may seem prototypically lesbian or queer, defining a text as lesbian fiction has become increasingly problematic. Early studies try to identify lesbian elements in a text as sexual tension between women; postmodern studies reject this essentialism by supposing that lesbianism is a reflection of fluid sexuality—a practice rather than a fixed identity. As a result, lesbian analyses could also be applied to heteronormative texts; such analyses are less dependent on sexual activity and more on emotion (Farwell 1996, 5). Identifying such moments of female intimacy as queer is difficult because they depend on the reader's interpretation. The practice of fans who identify queer subtext corresponds to that of queer readers, a tension that

Alexander Doty (2000) points out when he reflects on his reading process as a queer fan. As he explains, in queer readings, certain marginal textual features become "the organizational pivot of narrative meaning construction" (80). A text, then, may have a lesbian potential that its readers seek to explore. This textual openness is what makes defining a lesbian genre difficult. Still, I want to point out some themes in the representation of lesbian romance that resonate in Maak me blij.

[4.3] First, the atmosphere of lesbian fiction can be contrasted to that of other romance stories. Across various media, lesbian texts have been identified as being more depressing than other romantic stories and gay fiction (Zimmerman 1990;

Farwell 1996). Although femmeslash is often seen as having similar structures to its (male) slash counterpart, which results in a utopian rather than dystopian ending, this cannot be said of mainstream lesbian writings. Often, lesbians are depicted as uncomfortable with their sexuality and unhappy or depressed as a result. Lesbian novels tell of young lovers who break up, repress their sexuality, or marry men.

Palmer (1993) identifies these depressing tropes in current lesbian fiction but describes them as related to a still largely homophobic sociopolitical climate. Even though Ziggy and Adisa break up, Maak me blij has a more positive, even ironic tone that differs from Palmer's sketches and differs from the dominant character motives in slash. In part, the romantic plotline emphasizes reconciliation rather than emotional confusion. The emotional motives in the novel often relate to circumstance and arise from miscommunication and, later, the death Ziggy's mother.

[4.4] Second, unlike much lesbian fiction, Maak me blij portrays lesbians in the gay community but is not about finding one's place in this community. In much original and fan fiction, lesbian characters discover their queer feelings and have to learn to cope with them. Lesbian fiction is often about one's first experiences with samesex love. Most lesbian novels of the 1970s and early 1980s, including texts in Dutch literary landscape, are comingout novels shaped as bildungsromans—topics innately tied to feminism and the identity politics of the era. Lesbian fiction was a feminist hub and a space for lesbians to identify their desires (Meijer 1978, 1988). In the 1980s, when lesbian identity was more solidified, the genre moved away from the theme of individual struggles for sexual identity and started to portray the lesbian and feminist community in ways that reflected the shaping of such communities in society. Still, finding one's place in such a community and accepting one's sexual feelings for the same sex still plays a major role in much contemporary lesbian fiction. By contrast, Maak me blij discusses lesbian communities, both online and offline, but has a main character who already knows her way around them.

[4.5] Third, the story introduces two lesbian main characters comfortable with their lesbian sexuality and their identity as women. Adisa and Ziggy are no butchfemme

couple. Problems of gender, transgender, and bisexuality are hardly mentioned, although in the past such topics were often blended with the imagery of lesbian couples (Palmer 1993). The novel portrays traditional lesbian communities, such as lesbian bars or the Cultuur en Ontspanningscentrum (Centre for Culture and Leisure, a Dutch foundation for the integration of lesbians and gays into society), as static.

There, women are primarily linked by their samesex preferences, although they also relate to each other through, for instance, popular culture. However, the online fan communities that Ziggy participates in are more diverse and allow for different social ties. The novel includes genderneutral usernames and email addresses: Ziggy, for example, is halfklingon@hotmail.com. Indeed, in fan communities, all kinds of people, no matter their gender or sexuality, write and read queer fiction (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 2007).

[4.6] Fourth, the novel does not reproduce the motherdaughter imagery typical of lesbian literature. Much of that has to do with the fact that Ziggy and her mother have a good relationship that refers to fan fiction and media texts. As Palmer (1993) points out, lesbian fiction often features questionable motherdaughter relationships. In particular, the idea of a Freudian preOedipal phase affected lesbian fiction written in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The concept is a variation of Freud's Oedipus complex (Freud [1899] 2009), in which a child develops its relationship with its father and (in Freud's later writings) its mother (Freud [1905] 1991). In his reworking of the concept, Lacan (1989) explains it as a period in the early development of a child when the child has no language or clear gender identity. A disturbance in this formative period leads to perversion (Evans 1996). Feminist psychoanalytic theory relates this to female intimacy or lesbianism as a displacement of the motherdaughter relationship (Whitford 1991; Gartrell 2000). Lesbian literature reflects on this cultural discourse.

The relationship between mother and daughter is often either too distant or too close, and thus emotionally scarring.

[4.7] By portraying a close and loving motherdaughter relationship, Maak me blij criticizes this discourse. Ziggy's mother always supports her daughter, does not disapprove of her sexuality, and motivates her writing of fan fiction. She shows a genuine interest in her daughter's life, and despite her illness, she never complains about her own circumstances. It is because of the illness that Ziggy and her mother are close. "If we'd lived in a Star Trek world, we could've transported her to the toilet, I call out. If she'd lived in the Star Trek world, she might not have been ill, she calls out. Then we would probably not have watched Star Trek together. And the Bold" (Als we in een Star Trek–wereld hadden geleefd, hadden we haar naar het toilet kunnen teleporteren, roep ik dan. Als zij in de Star Trek–wereld had geleefd, was ze niet ziek geweest, roept zij dan. Dan zouden we waarschijnlijk niet samen naar Star Trek kijken. En de Bold) (25). Although the relationship between Ziggy and her mother

seems sound and is based on shared interests as well as family ties, it is also partly reversed: Ziggy now takes care of her mother, thus becoming a mother figure.

[4.8] The text hints that the family circumstances were not always positive, but this is never fully explained. The mother character is mostly portrayed as a sick person.

She is referred to as "mom"; her name and history are never mentioned, nor is Ziggy's father. It is within the void of the text, then, that the reader gets the impression that Ziggy might have struggled in the past, and that it is only through fiction that mother and daughter can bond at all. In this silence, the novel addresses the drawback of fan communities in which fans use characters as a way of speaking to each other while ignoring other facts of life. Fiction becomes Ziggy's way of escaping the disease that her mother faces.

5. Original half-Klingon character

[5.1] The blending of original and fan fiction also resides in Maak me blij's portrayal of the fan writer. The identity of the fan writer can be understood to be a performative role by itself, an identity that is constructed online rather than one that coincides with an offline identity (Busse 2006). In Maak me blij, the division between the offline and online self does not sit easily because the character always relates herself to fiction and actively envisions the fan community that she engages with. Her focalization as a firstperson narrator is deeply informed by media texts. In a narrow sense, Ziggy refers to, and quotes from, popular texts. These texts vary from lines from internationalized texts, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charlie's Angels (1976–81), to local ones, such as references to Dutch TV hosts. These references both support the theme of the novel that deals with fan communities and develop the main character. Ziggy understands many events by comparing them to fiction. She describes Adisa's behavior through references: her witty remarks as "a Bart Simpson voice with a Jack Nicholson laugh" (63), her appearance as "clearly a vampire" (49), and her eating shellfish as Star Trek: Voyager's Janeway making first contact with a species (123).

[5.2] Ziggy's own persona is also established in close relation to science fiction texts

—more specifically, to alien races—that ground her in fiction as much as in real life.

Her name, Ziggy, is an allusion to David Bowie's rock star persona from outer space, Ziggy Stardust, from his 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which is also acknowledged in the novel when a character remarks this. Ziggy identifies with Klingons, a violent, fictional race from the Star Trek canon. Her email address, halfklingon@hotmail.com, hints at this, as do the stories she writes, which often feature her own main character, who is half Klingon and half

human. Through this character, she immerses herself in both the Star Trek universe and the real world.

[5.3] Importantly, Ziggy narrates her most intense emotions, like anger or passion, through her halfKlingon persona, often as embedded fan fiction. These inner scenarios can only be understood when one compares them to the popular content that they are derived from. Klingons symbolize intense emotions and violence in the Star Trek universe. The race seems primitive because its people lack selfcontrol and immediately act on lust and aggression. However, the halfKlingon persona is not only Ziggy's fictional counterpart but is also evoked by Ziggy's language and behavior:

" 'qaStaHvlS wa'ram loS SaD Hugh SljaH qetbogh loD.' It feels great to shout in Klingon. The pronunciation might not be entirely correct, but…" (Het voelt heerlijk om het Klingon eruit te schreeuwen. De uitspraak is misschien niet helemaal correct, maar…) (169). Whenever Ziggy curses, she opts for the Klingon term p'tahk, "pig,"

rather than cursing in Dutch; her halfKlingon persona narrates her most intense emotions. The novel thus actively uses Star Trek imagery and texts through which Ziggy makes sense of events.

[5.4] Femmeslash motives are also integrated within the narration to describe Ziggy's love life. Ziggy captures the relationship between her and Adisa as one between a halfKlingon woman and the Borg queen—a motive that is carried out further than their email addresses and fan fiction. The Borg are a technologically enhanced, rational people that form communities via telepathy. The Borg's destructive nature and their colonial invasion of space are some of the main threads in Star Trek: Voyager. The metaphor of destruction is further played out when Ziggy meets Adisa and compares her to a vampire, and when Ziggy's mother, when first meeting Adisa, notes that "there is a dark cloud above her" (Er hangt een donkere wolk boven haar) (60). Later in the novel, Ziggy blames Adisa for their breakup and perceives Adisa as literally selfdestructive through her drug use.

[5.5] However, it is not just any Borg that Adisa is compared to, but the Borg queen.

This makes her more special than Ziggy's previous lovers and highlights her extraordinary features. Adisa is one of a kind. Moreover, the Borg provide a metaphor for Adisa's sexuality: they are cold and asexual, like Star Trek: Voyager's Seven of Nine, and, like Adisa, have a lot to learn about love and emotions. In opposition to this is the halfKlingon, halfhuman character, like Star Trek: Voyager's B'Elanna Torres, associated with Ziggy (although, strikingly, the character of Torres is not mentioned in the novel). This character is very emotional, which results in strong sexuality but also aggression, expressed as anger or longlasting grudges. The text thus links the personalities of these two characters with their Star Trek counterparts.

[5.6] These science fiction motives and alien races are not only referred to but are also embedded within the novel as fan text. One example of this is a fictionalized erotic scene between Ziggy and Helen, a straight woman whom she meets in Greece.

The scene is written in a different writing style and is set in italic type to differentiate it from the text proper. In it, Ziggy describes the story of two female characters from the Star Trek universe. One belongs to the telepathic Betazoid race, and the other is Ziggy's halfKlingon character, which symbolizes Ziggy herself. Through this analogy, Ziggy describes her love affair with Helen and the erotic tension between them. The beginning of the scene illustrates this well: "Hasty, as if it's urgent. That's how we kiss each other. Like any moment something can happen. Something that can disrupt it. I like it that she is smaller than me. I'm used to genetically modified tall girls that make me seem small despite my mixed blood as a halfKlingon" (Haastig, alsof het urgent is. Zo kussen we elkaar. Alsof er ieder moment iets kan gebeuren. Iet kan het verstoren. Ik vind het leuk dat ze iets kleiner is dan ik. Ik ben gewend aan die genetisch gemanipuleerde lange meiden waar ik in het niet bij val met mijn gemengde bloed als halfKlingon) (138). The fantasy is shattered when Helen blocks Ziggy's advances: "'Ziggy?' 'Yes?' My hands stop. She steps back and breaths deeply"

("Ziggy?" "Ja?" Mijn handen stoppen. Zij stapt van me weg en ademt diep) (139). The narration then resumes a normal style in which Helen explains that she does not want to sleep with Ziggy.

[5.7] This embedded text is a fascinating example of how Maak me blij reworks both the motives and aesthetic conventions of femmeslash. Ziggy's original halfKlingon character becomes a placeholder for events that unravel in reality rather than in Ziggy's imagination. The fragment illustrates Ziggy's characterization as a fan author whose active imagination and passion for fictive texts fictionalize daily situations.

Ziggy's fan behavior shapes her sexuality. Femmeslash is not discussed as a separate, online affair but as related to facetoface, offline spaces where the fan actively mediates these reallife discourses.

[5.8] The influence of media texts, particularly alien imagery as presented by Star Trek: Voyager, positions the fan as an outsider with her own views of the world.

Although Maak me blij seems to celebrate fandom at first, it also reinforced the idea that fandom is a deviant, escapist activity. The novel pays much attention to fandom as a space in which the fan can contextualize a text in accordance with her own life and preferences, but the novel also critiques this activity. Ziggy, as half Klingon, partly fits into society while her other half relies on her imagination. Ziggy's daydreams and fan practices, which often penetrate into her own life, also contribute to the idea that she is somehow exotic. Like Ziggy's mediation of her relationship with her mother, which depends on fiction as a way of softening a harsh reality, the comparison with aliens suggests that the fan does not entirely belong in this world.

6. Conclusion

[6.1] As an account of lesbianism and of fandom, Maak me blij is an insightful work to analyze. This highly intermedial novel relates to popular culture on a number of levels. Maak me blij's integration of femmeslash, lesbian fiction, and science fiction shows that intermediality fruitfully permits textual meaning to be created even as it provides a lens through which to read the fan text. It does not suffice to look at what fan fiction borrows from a source text. Instead, the broader landscape in which a text is produced and consumed should also be considered. Intermediality allows genre comparisons to be made and (textual) cultural influences to be assessed.

[6.2] In its references to and echoes of various different genres, Maak me blij sheds new light on fandom and lesbianism. Via its prominent themes, such as the motherdaughter relationship and alienation, it narrates fandom as a personal, affective endeavor and as something that is exotic and distant—a form of imaginative play that permits connection. The primary relationships in the novel between Ziggy and her mother and between Ziggy and Adisa, constantly flow between media texts that help them perform and voice their feelings and care for one another. Giphart stages female intimacy as a platform of fantasy that is partly mediated through fictional scenarios.

Ultimately the novel shows that modern fandom is both deeply personal and deeply estranging.

7. Notes

1. Page references to Karin Giphart's Maak me blij (2005) are indicated parenthetically in text. The translations of the original Dutch text are mine.

2. WAO refers to Dutch legislation that provides financial and legal benefits to ill or

disabled people.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Theory

Queer as Folk and the trouble with slash

Kyra Hunting

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States

[0.1] Abstract—The Showtime TV series Queer as Folk (2000–2005) brought samesex relationships and sex scenes to primetime television, putting the stuff of slash up on the small screen. Despite incorporating many slash tropes into the canonical text, Queer as Folk troubles many of the traditional assumptions about how fan fiction and slash operate, particularly the association of slash with subversion. The intertextual relationship between canonically queer texts and their attendant fandoms requires new frameworks for exploring traditional fan fiction subgenres such as slash. When the canonical text itself is queer, gestures and genres that have generally been considered subversive can in fact be more conservative than the canonical text itself. When the political stakes of a canonical series are clear and explicitly progressive, the intertextual relationship between canon and fandom can be particularly important and uniquely problematic, as this case study of Queer as Folk demonstrates in its assessment of the complexities that arise when the canon itself is queer.

[0.2] Keywords—Fan fiction; Queer as Folk USA; Queer theory; TV

Hunting, Kyra. 2012. " Queer as Folk and the Trouble with Slash." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0415.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In a discussion of the final episode of the Showtime TV series Queer as Folk (2000–

2005) on the Television Without Pity boards, fan writerPTL (2005) talks about his disappointment that one of the program's central couples did not end up together (http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/index.php?showtopic=3129326&st=1050) (note 1).

However, he adds that he liked that the marriage was called off and "appreciated the show acknowledging its trend towards its recently acquired homohegemony," describing "the marriage and monogamy anvils" that had proliferated in its final season. The fan, who identifies himself as a 16yearold gay man living in Texas suburbia, here unwittingly articulates what has emerged as the central tension within Queer as Folk fandom: an emotional desire for the series to provide a traditional "happily ever after" for one of its most popular couples that is often in tension with the queerer, less traditional politics frequently articulated in the program itself.

Although some fans specifically engage with this tension, the dominant trend in fan fiction has been to favor the "happily ever after" over the messy, sometimes unsatisfying queer politics of the Queer as Folk canon.

[1.2] Stories featuring samesex romantic and sexual relationships written within fan fiction communities, a genre known as slash, has long been considered subversive, a reflection of the fact that only recently has it been plausible for an original source text to itself be explicitly, perhaps even politically, queer. Slash foregrounds homoerotic subtext. However, as the images

available on television screens shift, the politics of samesex fan fiction become more complex.

Although most fan fiction writers still favor what writerPTL describes as "RossandRacheltogetheratallcosts" in their stories about Queer as Folk, some fans are beginning to specifically question the politics of these stories and how they are understood as part of fan, and more specifically slash, history. To the extent that many of the fans who critique these fan community norms are selfidentified as LGB individuals while many, although certainly not all, of the writers who uphold these norms are heterosexual women, the debate inevitably intersects with a variety of complex power relationships, not least of which is the power that scholars have to define the terms used to describe fan writing and to shape how the relationship between a canonical text and the fanon (that is, fancreated canon) produced from it are discussed. As programs like Queer as Folk, Glee (2009–present), and Exes and Ohs (2006–9) begin to profoundly shift the available queer canon, it is important for scholars of fandom to begin to explore how this affects the sociopolitical dimensions that emerge in relationship to it.

[1.3] The prolific Queer as Folk fan writer Xie, who selfidentifies as a lesbian, wrote in response to a post on male slash, "I can't stand the terms 'slash' and 'femme slash'" because

"slash has always been fiction about noncanonically queer characters being turned lesbian or gay in fan fiction" and adds that "when writers include it in their WARNINGS? it makes me want to kill" (2010). Her impassioned argument for the inapplicability of the term slash to canonical samesex pairings is a powerful indicator of how significantly both available canon and the status of slash and fan fiction have changed. In the early 1990s, Henry Jenkins found that the selfconsciousness surrounding slash was so extensive that when he ordered a slash zine, the vendors were so surprised to have a male reader that they sent a letter "assuring [him] that

[he] can receive a refund if [he was] offended" (1992, 197). At about the same time Camille BaconSmith found that slash fiction was usually relegated to its own zines and that many writers involved with slash "wanted to avoid showing the work outside of the community"

(1992, 212). Two decades later, slash is only a few mouse clicks away, available to everyone with an Internet connection, and is such a mainstream part of fan fiction that even archives like FanFiction.net no longer separate it out as a distinct category.

[1.4] As Xie notes in her comments, slash is increasingly becoming a term that fan authors selectively choose to use in categories and warnings. As a contested term debated and interrogated by fans and scholars alike, the political dimension of slash becomes increasingly important. However, slash and the term's political implications are affected not only by changing norms in fan culture, but also by changes in LGBT representation in the media. Xie and many of her fellow fans argue that samesex erotic representations in fan fiction need not necessarily be slash, preferring to retain the term for noncanonical samesex representations.

The problematizing of the language used to discuss samesex depictions in fan fiction points to a larger shift in the assumptions that can be made about these depictions. As depictions of samesex relationships and erotics move from slash zines to television screens, the intertextual relationship between fan fictions and their source texts needs to be reconsidered to account for canonically queer media texts. We can no longer assume that a story depicting two men in love tells a story that a fan cannot find on screen. Now the story may be retelling a scene a fan caught on network TV before the nightly news. Rather than reflecting simply an issue of the

language used to discuss fan works, this shift affects the potential meanings of stories fans write about two characters of the same sex.

[1.5] Historically, fan scholars have not shied away from the idea that fan products can have sociopolitical dimensions. Henry Jenkins embraces this potential in his formative work on fandom Textual Poachers (1992). Susanne Jung (2004) articulates the potential political intentions of fans in a selfreflective essay that recounts her own experience as a fan writer.

She explores how fan work can be a communal critique of the binaries and hegemonies of gender and sexual norms. Work written in the tradition of Textual Poachers has often presumed a subversive or resistant tenor to fan works (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 18). In recent years scholars have nuanced (Driscoll 2006; Woledge 2006) and even questioned (Åstrom 2010;

Scodari 2003) claims of subversiveness and resistance as a presumed attribute of fan fiction.

[1.6] In light of this scholarship, we can certainly say that the form and content of fan fiction may be subversive or political, but it also may not be. Case studies like Berit Åstrom's of male pregnancy (mpreg) Supernatural (2005–present) fan fiction demonstrate that fan fiction can even be conventional, noting that "what may at first seem like resistance may in the end reinforce heteronormative structures" (2010, ¶1.2). My study builds on this important claim to explore how seemingly subversive fan fiction that depicts samesex couplings can reinforce heteronormativity. This becomes particularly important in cases where the fan fiction is written about explicitly political entertainment products. Television programs and films with narratives about LGBT individuals and samesex relationships at their center are often political in their dealing with a controversial subject with sociopolitical implications. The writers and producers of these works often explicitly claim that their products have progressive goals.

[1.7] The creative products made from politically charged canonical story lines, characters, and relationships cannot be neutral, regardless of the intentions of fan writers and artists. As a result, when analyzing fan works written about texts with canonical samesex pairings, it is important to consider how these pairings are specifically used by fan texts. Further, in cases where the canonical work has explicitly progressive political intentions, it is profitable to analyze how fans' creative products support the canon's political goals and where the fans alter them.

This is particularly true when fan works take the canon's text and politics in more conservative directions. Åstrom describes "an impulse within academia to valorize the slash author as a resistive force, a force that challenges both the commercial culture of big corporations, and the patriarchal, heteronormative structure of romantic/erotic relationships as expressed in a popular television series" (2010, ¶1.3). This impulse has brought about tremendously valuable work exploring the subversive political value of fan works. Although the impulse to valorize has rightly been challenged, including by Åstrom herself, insufficient work has been done exploring this impulses' mirror image: the way that fan works can function as a heteronormative conservative force on queer political commercial products.

[1.8] To explore the dynamic between queer canon and a potentially heteronormative fanon, I look at fan fiction about the popular US television series Queer as Folk. In this case study, I demonstrate the necessity of dealing with the canonical text's political claims and narratives when dealing with fan fiction written about media texts with samesex representations.

Politically loaded source texts require a different approach to interrogating the intertextual

relationship between the canonical source text and the fanon created around it, one that accounts for the shift in subversive potential when traditional slash narratives and techniques are applied to texts whose main characters are already queer—and potentially queerer than many of their rearticulations in fans' creative products.

2. Canon and fanon: The importance of intertextuality to the study of fan fiction

[2.1] Julia Kristeva observes that "any text is the absorption and transformation of another"

(1980, 66). This process of absorption and transformation is laid bare in the workings of fan fiction texts: their relationship to the primary media source text is made explicit in the conventions of the form. Further, fan fiction is inherently dialogic, using Bakhtin's (1986) variation on the concept. Most fan fiction scholars acknowledge and discuss the ways that fan fiction is intertextual. Some fan works may spend little time looking at the canonical texts, but others attend to the specific attributes of the canons that they write about. Building on this, we can interrogate the specific kinds of ideological transformations that take place in the intertextual move from canon to fanon.

[2.2] Many early works on fandom (by which I mean the fan communities that develop around a media text) emphasized the subversive aspects of slash (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 20), tracing how a canonically patriarchal or heteronormative text is made resistant in fan works.

This approach became common enough that some works explored the subversive aspects of the fan fiction without detailing the canon's own ideology. Later work has tempered this celebration of subversion by noting the ways that the romantic aspects of the genre can smuggle heteronormative narratives into what is often thought of as a queered writing and reading space (Åstrom 2010; Flegel and Roth 2010; Gwenllian Jones 2002; Tosenberger 2008). Åstrom notes that "slash may…rewrite dominant scripts and subvert heteronormative tropes, but it should not be assumed that the genre automatically produces resisting narratives" (2010, ¶1.3).

[2.3] However, few scholars go beyond this acknowledgment that slash is not necessarily resistant to fully consider the ways that fan fiction can transform canonical texts in conservative ways—although this may be because many fandoms are created around programs that are not particularly progressive or subversive in their narrative content. In other words, while scholars have successfully sought to destabilize assumptions of subversiveness on the part of fan works, little work has been done that details the way progressive or subversive media narratives are conservatively reimagined by fan writings. Nor has scholarship applied fan fiction themes and theoretical frameworks to canonical texts that are not only homoerotic but also selfconsciously queer (note 2).

[2.4] A careful investigation of the intertextual conversation between a queer canonical text and its fandom permits an extended consideration of the political implications of fan fiction.

These canonical texts remove the originary act of subversion, making ostensibly straight or undefined characters explicitly gay. Here I attend to the ways our assumptions about homoerotic fan fiction and the genres associated with slash can become problematic in the context of a queer text. At its core, this case study inverts Catherine Tosenberger's statement that "in a heteronormative culture, any depiction of queerness, by definition resists cultural

norms" by claiming that not only are "not all source texts…created equally heteronormative"

(2008, ¶1.3), but also that all depictions of homoerotic pairings in fan fiction are not equally queer.

3. Case study: Queer as Folk

[3.1] In selecting a case study for this project, several issues came into play: the prevalence and availability of the fan fiction, the relationship of the source text's producers to the text's fans, and the particularities of the source text itself. Queer as Folk fandom quickly emerged as the most reasonable choice. In addition to a large number of Queer as Folk–specific fan fiction archives, this fandom had the largest number of fan stories about an explicitly queer text on general sites like FanFiction.net. The issues that I identify here could just as easily apply to any of the increasing number of media forms that prominently feature LGB characters. While these findings best apply to programs that substantially center on LGB characters like The L Word (2004–9), Exes and Ohs, and Noah's Arc (2005–6), or programs that explicitly politicize the narratives around their LGB characters, like Glee. However, it can also apply to any text that provides images of canonical LGB sex and/or romance, like Grey's Anatomy (2005–present) or Modern Family (2009–present). However, the issues I raise are not as applicable to the decades of (often spotty) LGB representation in the United States, which dates to 1963. In the years between the first appearance of a gay character on The Eleventh Hour (1962–64) to the highprofile coming out of Ellen DeGeneres in 1997, most LGB depictions focused on marginal rather than main characters—often characters who appeared for only one or two episodes. Even when LGB characters were front and center in the late 1990s in such TV programs as Ellen (1994–98) and Will and Grace (1998–2006), the traditional norm of not showing LGB characters in lengthy relationships, and certainly not in sexual situations, was more or less maintained; some analysts have even argued that Will and Grace was an intensively heteronormative text (Battles and HiltonMorrow 2002). It is only in the later seasons of these two series, long after Queer as Folk's US premiere, that Will and Grace began to tackle relationships among gay men, even superficially. Given the significance of both relationships and sex to fan writing, the fact that the canon of Queer as Folk embraced these elements explicitly lent itself well both to this case study and to the outpouring of fannish interest that is evidenced by its higher profile in most fan writing communities than similar work at the time. Most importantly, the canonical text itself is heavily invested in issues such as the distinction between samesex attraction and queerness, the problems of heteronormativity, and the political context of samesex relationships—

concerns inconsistently addressed in fan communities (Jenkins 1992, 226). As depictions of LGB

relationships continue to grow on television in both queer and heteronormative ways, the politicized relationship between canon and fanon, as well as the acute difference between writing about samesex canonical couples and slash, becomes increasingly relevant to the media landscape and the scholarship about it.

[3.2] Key to both Queer as Folk's canonical context and my argument is the distinction between homosexuality and queerness. The former focuses primarily on people who primarily desire and engage in sexual activity with those of the same sex. This desire may take forms associated with traditional monogamous heterosexuality. Termed homonormativity by Lisa Duggan (2004), these forms privilege monogamy, reproductivity, and mainstream culture. This

is exemplified in the public sphere by figures like Andrew Sullivan (2004), who advocates for traditional values, monogamous marriage, and child rearing in the gay community. Queerness, on the other hand, questions not only heterosexual norms but also many of the norms associated with it, including monogamy, traditional sex, and an emphasis on marriage and reproductivity. Lee Edelman in No Future (2004), Michael Warner in The Trouble with Normal (1999), and Judith Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place (2005) are key examples of queer theorists whose work looks at how heteronormative structures can be destabilized. Richard Fantina and Calvin Thomas's Straight Writ Queer (2006) explores how queerness may even apply to heterosexuals when their behavior or identities resist heteronormativity.

[3.3] It is important to note both the difference between gayness and queerness, and the difference between heterosexuality and heteronormativity. I use heterosexuality to refer primarily to heterosexual desire and to people who identify as heterosexuals. In and of itself, heterosexuality is a politically neutral term. Heteronormativity, on the other hand, as used by Michael Warner, refers to the cultural and institutional systems that make heterosexuality

"seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged" (1999, 548).

For example, it is heteronormativity that leads most people to assume that a person they just met is heterosexual unless otherwise informed. However, heteronormativity goes beyond just the issue of sexual practices; it also refers to the set of values, privileges, and life stages associated with heterosexuality, such as monogamy, marriage, and child rearing with biological parents. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) argue that "heteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life: nationality, the state, and the law;

commerce; medicine; and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance and other protected spaces of culture" (554–55). It is therefore embedded not just in cultural values, but also in forms of expression and storytelling. Queer as Folk, as a text, regularly engages with how gayness and queerness may be at odds within the LGBT

community; its narratives explore how heteronormativity may be in play even in progay contexts. Arguably, this focus on queerness as it exists in tension with gayness and heteronormativity is what distinguishes Queer as Folk from the two American programs that preceded it as television programs with LGB main characters, Will and Grace and Ellen. How this tension plays out in works written by fans about the series provides a good perspective on how heteronormativity may function in creative works.

[3.4] Queer as Folk, which aired during a period of intense political debates about gay marriage and rights, regularly features episodes focused on issues touched on by queer theorists. Lee Edelman (2004) discusses the dangers of reproductive futurity; on Queer as Folk, Brian and Michael consider fatherhood "to piss off straight people" (episode 3.3) as well as to fulfill the maternal desires of their lesbian friends. Michael Warner (1999) and Andrew Sullivan (2004) debate the desirability of gay marriage for the gay community; on Queer as Folk, Brian and Michael have a fallingout over Michael's decision to get married, adopt, and settle down to a relatively homonormative life (episode 5.3). And while students and scholars were reading Samuel R. Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (2001), Brian and Justin struggled to find a place to have sex that did not force them to "stay home and fuck in [their] beds" like

"straight lawabiding citizens" (episode 3.11). The series regularly staged debates about what it

meant to be gay versus queer. As a result, Queer as Folk as a series was consistently explicitly political and progressive, making space for not only progay perspectives but also specifically queer voices, particularly through the character of Brian. Indeed, on the director's commentary of the season 1 DVD set, the series producers described Brian as "the voice of the show,"

valorizing his specifically queer perspective. The fact that Brian's voice is a white, male, uppermiddleclass one is far from irrelevant, making the voice of the program just as hegemonic in terms of issues of race and gender, and Queer as Folk is quite legitimately subject to critique on the grounds that it reifies these particular norms of LGB representation just as significantly as more heteronormative forms of LGB representation like Will and Grace and Modern Family do.

However, I have bracketed this issue within this particular analysis because it is sex and sexuality, rather than race or class, that has been the traditional distinguishing factor in the discussion of slash and because the observations I make here apply just as effectively to more racially diverse programs like Noah's Arc and The L Word.

[3.5] The queer and subversive political orientation of the canonical text makes the content of the fiction written about its political tone more complicated and leads to tensions surrounding fiction and its articulations of queerness, gayness, and heteronormativity. I track and analyze this dynamic in order to better understand how queerness is retained in fan fiction or, more frequently, how the often queer canonical text is looked at in fan works through a heteronormative lens. It would not necessarily be notable for a Twilight (2005–12) fan fiction story to focus on marriage and children, although of course it would still be heteronormative.

Nor would I say that a Pokémon (1996–2004) fan fiction story must have some political content. There is nothing universally preferable about a queeroriented fan fiction compared with one that is not or a politically tinged fiction compared with one that is more neutral.

However, this dynamic is changed by an originally queer or political canonical text. Critical analysis of fan fiction about a canonical text that articulates a subordinated cultural viewpoint requires an analytic lens that accounts for the way it may rewrite the canon in a way that assimilates it to a more dominant cultural viewpoint. Fan fiction of this kind does in fact have a political dimension, no matter how naturalized those viewpoints may appear to be. It is through representation that cultural engines of ideology like heteronormativity function, and thus these transformations require analysis that recognizes the power relations and political implications that are at play.

[3.6] A clarification needs to be made here about the difference between the individual fan writer versus the sum of fan works and their major trends as objects of scholarly analysis. Of course I am not attempting to censor or direct the writing of individual fans, who write for a variety of reasons, many of them personal and idiosyncratic. Nor does fan fiction inherently have or need to take a political stance. The issue I am concerned with here is the cumulative impact of fan texts in terms of heteronormative versus homonormative representation. Fan fiction texts are often circulated on a large scale and thus are often read by fans en masse.

Many readers will engage with several different stories and fan authors in a single sitting. Like any form of representation, it is not a single instance but rather the repeated image or idea that has the greatest impact. Thus I focus not on individual fan fiction stories but on trends across fictions written within fan communities centered on Queer as Folk. I have identified these trends by reading about 50 fan fictions by many different authors whose work is publicly posted at a

number of archives. I attempted to ensure diversity by selecting fictions from general archives (FanFiction.net), programspecific archives (Across the Pond at http://www.qaffic.com), and

even shipperspecific archives (the nowdefunct BJFic.net). I also made an effort to sample fictions from writers who identified themselves as gay or lesbian as well as those who identified themselves as heterosexual.

4. The slash lexicon on screen

[4.1] Queer as Folk was the first major American television series to regularly include many of

the key elements associated with slash fiction in its canonical onscreen presentation (note 3).

Although Will and Grace preceded Queer as Folk as a series focused on gay characters, it is resoundingly nonerotic in its onscreen presentation. Queer as Folk, in contrast, includes quite a bit of onscreen sensuality: it shows eroticized samesex sex in every episode for five seasons.

Previous work on fan fiction, even work that argues that the samesex relationship is present in the text's subtext, frames explicit erotic depiction as the thing always imported into the fan metatext by fan fiction. BaconSmith observed that "sex, as defined within the canon of the episodic television series, is an intrusion into the world of work and male companionship"

(1992, 103). This remains true for many canonical texts, which relegate both straight and gay sex to symbolism and insinuation. Queer as Folk is one of a very few programs that foregrounds explicit sex scenes with a frequency and complexity of purpose that is consistent with its depiction in fanwritten slash. The first episode of the series starts with the sentence, "The first thing you have to know is it's all about sex." The rest of the pilot is spent proving this thesis.

Sex scenes are deployed to indicate emotional bonding, to move forward narrative goals, and to provide sex for sex's sake (known in the fan world as PWP—porn without plot). Scholars have differentiated erotic fan fiction from pornography on the basis of the role sex plays in these texts: establishing intimacy between characters, serving narrative functions, and expressing elements of the characters' personalities. For example, Jenkins explains that "characterization is not suspended during sex but rather sex becomes a vehicle by which character emerges in particularly sharp detail" (1992, 197), and Kristina Busse explains that "explicit sexual descriptions in slash resonate on some level as metaphors for close friendship and intimacy between the slashed protagonists" (2006, 212). These remarks, written over a decade apart, illustrate the ways that scholars of fan fiction have differentiated porn from slash erotica because of the role that explicit sex in these stories plays in conveying information about characters and their relationships.

[4.2] Queer as Folk deploys a number of its sex scenes for similar purposes. Often small changes in characterization or relationships are conveyed first in a sex scene, and as a result, the fanproduced creative works surrounding the show express a similarly subtle understanding of sexual gestures and can react strongly to them. For example, after episode 2.14 aired, in which Justin (the more feminized character of the show's most popular pairing) tops Brian, the fan boards erupted in a discussion that amounted to an intense analysis of a few seconds' worth of air time. Did he or didn't he? Why did it happen? What did it mean? Years after the episode

aired, forums like "For the Brian/Justin Fans" on TV.com (http://www.tv.com/shows/queeras

folkamerican/forums/forthebrianjustinfans2332805539/) continue to parse the exact

dynamics of this moment—and most of these fans are not part of the fan fiction community.

Their continuing obsession with this moment indicates the extent to which the show places an emphasis not simply on the act of sex, but on the details of that act in relation to the narrative.

The complex dynamics of forms of sexual intimacy—topping and bottoming, public sex in the context of romantic relationship—are explored within the fan fiction community, but this exploration takes place in relationship to a canon that has already placed value on these kinds of interactions. For example, Burkesl17's undated fan fiction "Disarmed" focuses on the unusual instances where Justin tops Brian, his embarrassment about this becoming public, and how he comes to accept this as part of accepting a more intimate, vulnerable relationship with Justin.

This narrative evokes and refers to the single brief instance in the series where it appears that Justin does canonically top Brian—a moment that fan reaction has clearly considered to be significant to the characters' relationship—and extrapolates complex character development from it.

[4.3] The series canonically addresses many of the conventions associated with slash fan fiction. Jenkins draws attention to the firsttime story as a "dominant subgenre of slash fan writing" for the slash community (1992, 212), and the pilot of Queer as Folk similarly evokes the firsttime story by introducing one of the show's most lasting pairings, Justin and Brian, through Justin losing his virginity (episode 1.1). The hurtcomfort story (Jenkins 1992, 178;

BaconSmith 1992, 53), common in fan fiction in general and not specific to slash, focuses on one character gaining greater intimacy with another character while caring for him or her after an injury or a difficult time. This particular theme occurs repeatedly in Queer as Folk canon—

when Justin is violently bashed, when Ted gets out of rehab, when Brian gets cancer. In both Queer as Folk and fan fiction, sex is sometimes presented explicitly as a necessary form of comfort. Resuming sex after a lengthy hiatus is used in the series explicitly as a form of healing, as when Justin is unwilling to be touched after being bashed (episode 2.2) and when Brian struggles after cancer surgery to deal with the loss of a testicle (episode 4.9). Even marginal subgenres of fan fiction are evoked by a brief scene or joking exchange in the show's canon: spank fic can be tied to episode 2.13, in which Brian jokingly spanks Justin while having dinner, and mpreg can be tied to episode 3.3, in which Ben and Michael talk about Ben's desire to have a child and Michael jokes about carrying it for them. Although these scenes do not have the central narrative importance of the kind afforded by hurtcomfort or firsttime fan fiction, they indicate a potential for a broader range of exchange between the canonfan intertext.

[4.4] Although this set of themes and images associated with the canonical text certainly expands the number of ways that a writer in the Queer as Folk fandom can draw on elements common to fan fiction, particularly slash, and remain within canon, I do not intend to imply that the narrative of Queer as Folk ultimately is consistent with fan fiction, slash or otherwise.

Instead, it is in the ways that the series deviates from these conventions that highlight the tension between queerness and heteronormativity that pervades this intertextual relationship.

5. The conservative impulse in rewriting canon

[5.1] Returning to the firsttime narrative, we can see the importance of the specifics of canon coming into play. Of the firsttime slash narrative, Jenkins explains, "If the characters have been causal [ sic] about their previous sexual experiences, moving from one female lover to

another, the discovery of the ideal male lover forecloses further promiscuity" (1992, 222). With this in mind, a reasonable reading of Queer as Folk could define Brian and Justin as one another's "ideal male lover" in both canon and fanon, but the discovery of this pairing certainly does not foreclose further promiscuity, assuming that we accept the traditional definition of promiscuity as having many sexual partners. In the source text, this firsttime sexual experience does not result in immediate love and commitment. Rather, the show struggles for several episodes over what this sexual encounter meant, if anything, and spends several seasons exploring what kind of commitment the parties involved might choose to establish.

Ultimately, commitment still does not foreclose promiscuity; instead, it incorporates nonmonogamy into the kinds of sexuality that increase intimacy for the pairing.

[5.2] Fan fiction works written about Queer as Folk do not usually embrace this version of nonmonogamous commitment. Instead, they reject the canonical narrative that the characters have chosen and develop their own rules for a relationship that privileges monogamy and traditional romance. This is the first of many areas in which fan fiction works tend to be more

normative and traditional than the canon they transform (note 4). There are two primary

approaches to exclusivity in Queer as Folk fan fiction. One stays reasonably close to the canon and primarily deals with the couple's multiple sex partners by ignoring them but not claiming exclusivity. Occasionally fiction in this vein will directly address a sexual encounter with another partner. However, this type generally focuses on instances in the canon where the specific extrarelational sex has negative connotations and generally casts these stories in terms of jealousy or pain. While not explicitly denying the sexually nonexclusive nature of the relationship in the canon, this strand of fan story minimizes or pathologizes nonexclusive sex, emphasizing a more exclusive version of the romantic pairing (note 5). One fan fiction writer, Vamphile, jokes about this noncanonical turn in her undated story "A Rainy Saturday Afternoon," in which Brian and Justin read fan fiction about themselves and mock it mercilessly, particularly the kind of noncanonical sentimentality that I am detailing here. This story particularly engages with the fan writer's tendency to privilege monogamy, discussing a story in which Justin is crying because Brian had sex with someone else. When Brian asks Justin why he is supposed to be crying in the fic, he replies, "Because stupid people think everyone wants to be hetero" and that they "can't believe we'd be happy fucking other people" (Vamphile, n.d.).

This unusual fan fic demonstrates that some of the fandom in fact recognizes, and even critiques, the incongruity between part of the canon and significant trends within fan fiction. The second approach generally does foreclose the possibility of promiscuity in a way that the canon does not. Sometimes these are AU (alternative universe) stories in which the characters are recast in entirely different situations, and thus they need not adhere to canon. In other cases, these stories follow the canon's narrative and situation but write the main characters, most often Brian, in a way that emphasizes a more traditional monogamous romantic love (note 6).

[5.3] This variation of fiction is more likely to use discourse related to families and use romantic language (the characters may call each other pet names like "baby" or "sweetie"), and is not always accepted within the fandom. It is not unusual for an otherwise canonconsistent story to be marked in the summary or warnings with "OOC Brian" (out of character Brian), which most often indicates a hyperromantic sentimentality inconsistent with the canonical characterization. This variation of fan fiction almost always inscribes monogamy onto the

characters. What is extremely rare in fiction created by fan writers is work that reflects the source text's tendency to use sex with individuals beyond the primary pairing to convey the same kind of narrative and intimacy that canon and fanon attribute to sex within the pairing.

[5.4] In "Intimatopia: Genre Intersections between Slash and the Mainstream," Elizabeth Woledge finds that "many slash writers feel that existing selfconsciously gay fiction does not represent intimacy at all; instead, it denies intimacy through its depiction of casual sex" (2006, 103). In response to this perceived lack, much fan fiction puts a premium on depicting intimacy through sex—but it often, although certainly not exclusively, does so by assuming monogamous sex. Queer as Folk instead demonstrates both the pleasures available in sex for sex's sake and the myriad ways that nonmonogamous sex can breed intimacy (note 7). The series includes the

couple picking out tricks together, topping others side by side, or receiving oral sex while they are kissing each other or locking eyes. Within canon, these scenes are used as significantly as exclusive sex between the couple to convey intimacy and narrative information; one such scenario is used to signal that the couple is likely to get back together after a breakup.

However, these scenes do not receive the careful treatment more exclusive sex scenes do among fan writers; rather, they tend to be erased, creating a disjuncture between canon and fan texts as fans rewrite the original text in more heteronormative ways.

[5.5] In an essay examining love and heterosexuality without women, Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth observe that "dealing with homosexuality does not necessarily signal a break from heteronormative narrative of romance and partnership" (2010, ¶1.4). They share with Åstrom (2010, ¶4.4) concerns about the ways the use of the romance genre can result in heteronormative or conventional narrative arcs. They are by no means alone in their recognition of ways in which heteronormativity is written into stories about samesex couples. What this previous work has not addressed, however, are the political consequences of this move, particularly when it is made in relationship to a text that struggles to insist on varying ways of conducting a romantic and sexual life. Fan readers and writers seem to be particularly concerned about an OOC tone for the character of Brian. This may be because he is the character who most strongly upholds the distinction between gay and queer. Whenever a character begins to participate in or request markers of a heteronormative romance narrative in the text—buying flowers, becoming monogamous, adopting—Brian evokes the specter of heterosexuality. In arguments with Justin, he often resorts to the defense that they are not straight or that they are not like their parents, and thus Brian insists on establishing their own rules. The canonical source text consistently struggles to find a balance between including more traditional versions of relationships and families—versions that numerically dominate the series

—and resisting falling into the same trap that much slash does in showing "male/male monogamous love as the same as men's sexual, romantic, and marital relationships with women" (Flegel and Roth 2010, ¶4.2) or equating monogamy with love.

6. Tensions within the fandom

[6.1] This struggle, and the way that it is often negotiated around Brian and Justin's relationship, produces a tension in the fan fiction written about the series. In the majority of the approximately 50 fan stories I read for this study, fans impose a romance narrative, and

sometimes its heteronormative trappings, onto their stories, regardless of the pairing they focus on. This push toward a more traditional romantic narrative than the distinctly nontraditional romantic narrative provided in the Brian/Justin canon story arc is generally accepted among fans. How far from the canonical characterizations of these characters a writer can go is a much more hotly contested issue. Although some fans embrace hyperromantic portrayals of the characters without labeling them as OOC, other fan writers choose to place an OOC warning on texts that attribute even a small amount of sentimentality to Brian's character, even if this sentimentality is within a range reasonable for the canon. Often this is simply an expression of the diversity within a fandom. Some fans enjoy writing texts that are entirely within canon and even specialize in stories that fill gaps. Other fans enjoy writing AUs that radically rewrite the characters' situation; crossover stories with Queer as Folk UK are particularly popular. However, the particularities of the source text lead to very different ideological results for the stories written closer along the continuum to traditional romance. We can see these issues play out in several ways; three significant spaces are het fiction, post513 fiction (that is, fics written after the series finale, episode 5.13), and the contested genre of mpreg.

[6.2] Interestingly, although the issue of heteronormativity is not often addressed specifically

—though it is reflected on by the show's significant number of lesbian fans, some of whom question their attraction to a male/male pairing—fan writers appear to be very sensitive to the portrayal of oppositesex sex (and I avoid the term heterosexual here because most male/female pairings in the fanon do not stem from or result in heterosexuality). Despite the presence of a few straight pairings and three male/female sex scenes in the canon, very little het fiction is written in the fandom. Although noncanonical samesex pairings are reasonably common in the fandom, fan writers often approach canonical oppositesex pairings with caution.

The canon has multiple references to occasions when Brian and Lindsay had sex in college, as well as a few other oppositesex pairings. This pairing is occasionally written in fan fiction, but stories centering on it are extremely cautious in their depiction of an oppositesex pairing.

[6.3] DeviKalika's fan fiction story "After All" (2009) takes up the Brian/Lindsay pairing for a brief story. DeviKalika begins the story with quotes from the first episode of the series that reference the characters' sexual past, thus situating the pairing in relationship to canon.

However, after establishing this oppositesex pairing through a series of romantic and sexual scenes, it is dissolved by establishing Brian as unquestionably gay. The final lines of the story are then used to reinforce the greater authenticity of the show's ultimate pairings: Lindsay/Melanie and Brian/Justin. Rather than lingering on the possibility of Lindsay and Brian as a couple, even though the series plays with this history, the story instead passes through this canonical reference in order to ultimately reify the canon's pairings as inevitable. The selfcensorship evidenced in the scarcity and careful treatment of oppositesex pairings in Queer as Folk fan fiction is one area of creative fan production where we can see a successful undermining of compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity. Arguably by dismissing and containing alternative oppositesex pairings in favor of canonical samesex pairings, these writers uphold the norms of the canonical text's romantic pairings and the fandom's norms of samesex erotics, which evoke the traditions of slash. The fact that oppositesex pairings are treated fundamentally more carefully in the fanon and canon is telling. By depicting oppositesex pairings in careful, limited ways, these fan writers are not only upholding the norms of the

canon and its fan writers, but are also shutting down the fluidity of queerness, evidenced in the canon particularly in the character of Lindsay, in favor of a more rigid gayness. At the same time, these writers consider oppositesex relationships as volatile, as something that must be treated cautiously and carefully framed. This may uphold the norms of particular fan communities, but it does so by destabilizing the norms of the culture at large. Oppositesex attraction becomes the thing that is repressed, that must be explained away. This is an inversion of the "gay for Spock" trope and fundamentally makes both readers and writers aware that heterosexual desire is not the automatic default.

[6.4] Fiction set after the series finale evidences even greater tension within the fandom.

Jenkins identifies part of the motivation behind fan fiction that expands the series time line as a response to situations where "series stop abruptly or conclude unsatisfactorily" (1992, 167).

Most fan fiction writers seem to have found the ending of Queer as Folk unsatisfactory. In its final episodes, the series seemed to be steadily moving toward Brian and Justin getting married

—a direction fan fiction had been moving in since the first season. At the last moment, this narrative is derailed by having the couple lovingly agree to go their separate ways for their mutual benefit. This was not the ending many fans wanted; many discussion boards called for a Queer as Folk movie to provide the traditional romantic ending of a marriage that the series intentionally denied them. This lack of contentment has resulted in a large amount of fiction written to provide a more satisfactory ending to the series. The ways this ending is provided tellingly represent tensions within the fan community. Post513 stories tend to fall into three major categories. One prioritizes the Brian/Michael relationship, which is neither canonical nor strictly noncanonical, and I do not address this category further. Two variations prioritize the Brian/Justin relationship; I explore these further below.

[6.5] Post513 stories tend along three major fault lines. There are two variations that prioritize the Brian/Justin relationship and one that prioritizes the Brian/Michael relationship, something that is neither canonical nor strictly noncanonical. Those stories centered on the Brian/Justin relationship follow two major trajectories that are similar to the divide evidenced in the ways fan fiction deals with the lack of monogamy in their relationship. Although both variations end with the couple together, they differ in terms of how traditionally romantic or heteronormative the relationship is when reworked in fiction. The first major device is to simply deny the ending entirely and write fiction in which the marriage goes forward as planned, and the couple begins a fairytale life together. Consistent with this approach are stories in which the couple realize their "mistake" immediately and quickly get back together. Both of these variations explicitly reject the intention of the canon and insist on a heteronormative romantic ending. The second direction taken by fans writing post513 fiction is more consistent with canon but still pushes the characters toward romantic closure. This variation, exemplified by Xie's Only Time (2007) series, gets the couple back together, but only through a lengthy and complicated process of secret visits, sex, hesitation, and angst that follows the patterns of the various breakups and reunification of the couple in the actual series. These fictions generally end in the same place as the other variation—with Brian and Justin together—but they usually do so with greater complications and with a cynical, tongueincheek tone consistent with the characters in the series, rather than the romantic comedy tone that characterizes the former

version. The latter version may or may not have a wedding as part of the reunification and is far less likely to feature children prominently.

[6.6] Almost all post513 stories written by fans who favor the Brian/Justin relationship get the couple back together. There is a logic to this choice that is consistent with the source text;

the series certainly establishes a clear foundation for love between the couple. I don't want to imply that emphasizing this relationship as something that could reoccur in the future is inherently heteronormative, or even inconsistent with canon. The final episode of the canon does not foreclose this possibility. Rather, it carefully forecloses nothing.

[6.7] As a result of the series' refusal of a clear resolution, a fan fiction with any variation of an ending for the couple that moves toward closure would be inconsistent with the canon's own ending. How canonical or legitimate it is to reunite the couple is beside the point. Instead, what must be examined is how closure is achieved, and the extent to which the relationship is restored by either a traditional heteronormative wedding or by the much more complicated and volatile variation evidenced in series like Xie's. These differences illustrate the difficulty fandom has in resolving some fans' desires for a traditional romantic ending and a desire to be consistent with canon, even when rejecting the canon's ending. The fact that most fan writers choose an ending that is more heteronormative than the canon's ending demonstrates the extent to which fans can produce work that is more normative than the canon they write within.

Further, the canon's refusal of closure is in itself queer (Roof 1996), so any final resolution, however complex, moves the narrative in a more heteronormative direction.

[6.8] How traditional (often translated into domestic) the fiction skews is something that many fans are aware of; this is explicitly rejected by segments of the fandom. Some fan writers are invested in how canonical their versions of the characters are at the expense of the traditional, overt romance favored in other areas of the fandom. One 2007 thread on FanForum explicitly requests fiction without the word baby in Brian and Justin stories, expressing a distaste for stories that have Brian using traditional romantic pet names (baby, angel) that he would not have used in the canon. Although to some extent this may just be an issue of staying in canon, which provides its own set of pet names, the thrust of the stories that are included and excluded by this formulation seems to move away from fiction that adheres to scenes of idealized romance. The title of fan writer Tinkerbell's Web site, No Domestic Shit, similarly emphasizes a move away from the more traditionally domestic versions of the romantic pairing.

To get across the point that this particular collection of fiction is intended to be explicit and nontraditional (and in a play on her name), Tinkerbell redirects individuals not old enough to read it to Disney's Web site. The tone cultivated by these fan writers sets them in opposition to members of the fan fiction community who write the couple, in Brian's words, to be like "your parents"—in a traditional love story. It is more than just a matter of being in or out of canon;

the nature of the canon that these stories use makes these decisions vital in relation to how heteronormative the series' explicitly queer pairings are written. This tension extends beyond the fandom, reflecting a larger concern about the articulation of heteronormativity via a queer text.

[6.9] The most extreme example of the writing of heteronormativity into the source text, and perhaps the most problematic, is the mpreg story. Constance Penley discovered male

pregnancy stories in the Kirk/Spock community; she describes them as an "extreme retooling of the male body" (1997, 131). Penley sees a lot of subversive potential in this narrative, particularly as achieved through technological marvels in the fiction she studies. Åstrom's study of male pregnancy in Supernatural fandom is more cautious; she extensively considers the ways that male pregnancy stories can bring with them "femalegendered features" and can lead to "quite heteronormative stories" (2010, ¶5.1, ¶1.1). Åstrom ultimately concludes that "the theme of male pregnancy has the potential to produce narratives that challenge our notions of gender, identity, sexual, and social practices, as well as parenthood" (¶7.1). This conclusion highlights a particularly complicated issue for studies of fan fiction that mpreg themes in Queer as Folk fandom throw into sharp relief. A text can subvert gender norms, particularly the norms of masculinities, while at the same time reinforcing traditional heteronormative narratives. A reasonable argument could even be made for mpregs being gender queer in their fundamental form without necessarily functioning as queer in contrast to heteronormativity. As Edelman has demonstrated, heteronormative culture has made the ability to reproduce and the prioritization of children an unquestioned good. The rhetoric throughout heteronormative culture, particularly conservative religious rhetoric, associates sex and marriage with the ultimate (if not sole) goal of reproductivity. Indeed, homosexual sex and relationships have historically been denigrated or classified as deviant precisely because they cannot produce children. Queer theorists like Edelman have rejected this prioritization of reproductivity and child rearing as an unquestioned good, although certainly many individual gays and lesbians choose to parent. As a result, while from a feminist point of view placing pregnancy on a male body is subversive, inscribing natural (often accidental) reproductivity onto homosexual sex works to assimilate the queer characters and their sex acts into the traditional heteronormative goals of sex and into what Edelman calls a culture of reproductive futurism.

[6.10] Unlike many fantasy or science fiction–based fictions that use technological or alien interventions to permit pregnancy, Queer as Folk mpregs usually follow traditional story arcs.

One character, usually Justin, gets pregnant naturally because of a broken or forgotten condom.

The character is usually surprised (although not as surprised as he should be, considering his biology), confirms the pregnancy with a traditional pregnancy test, and then usually comes to be happy with the pregnancy. The pregnancy often directly follows or precedes a wedding between Brian and Justin, who choose to happily raise the child together, although there are some tragic variants of this where Justin sneaks away to have the baby in secret. The pregnancy often becomes part of an intensely heteronormative version of a love story. Indeed, pregnancy and marriage are so strongly linked that in the final season of the series, when Brian and Justin decide to get married, the character of Debbie remarks that Brian "must have knocked up" Justin (episode 5.12). Like any subgenre of fan fiction, mpregs in the Queer as Folk fan community are not universally heteronormative. Xie cowrote an mpreg parody,

"Assbaby!Jesus: A Brian/Justin Christmas Story" (2006), that skewers both the biblical nativity story and the more naturalized versions of the mpreg story. This story, written with a group of other fan fiction writers (Alicesprings, Happier_bunny, and Vamphile), doubles as a critique of the mpreg convention: it is itself an mpreg, but one that subverts rather than reinscribes normative cultural scripts. However, the majority of mpregs I surveyed follow the more common pattern of heteronorming the characters and situation. One typical example is "A Beautiful Mistake" (2011) by WhatIMustWrite, in which Justin gets pregnant as a result of a

condom failure the first time he has sex with Brian. When Justin tells him, Brian instantly wants to help with the baby, although he does not initially want a relationship. As the story unfolds, the writer uses many scenes word for word from the early episodes of the series but reinterprets them through the lens of the pregnancy. As a result, Jennifer goes to the art show in part to see the father of her grandchild, Justin is kicked out partially because he was knocked up, and Brian invites Justin to move in largely because he is pregnant. Even Brian's growing feelings for Justin are entangled with their march toward partnership and parenthood. This story is particularly problematic from a political perspective by making the homophobic response of Justin's father, Justin's pursuit of Brian, and Brian's opening his life to Justin all the result of a teen pregnancy. By incorporating chunks of the series word for word, the story takes queer content and reimagines it through the lens of traditional reproductive futurity. The effect of many of these fictions is to strip away all of the particularities of Brian and Justin as a gay couple, until a not just heteronormative but a nearly heterosexual couple remains. This is a particularly powerful heteronormative gesture because it removes many of the specificities of queer experience written into the show and rewrites the motivations of the characters in line with a heteronormative life arc. Where the canon depicts an undefined relationship based on sexual desire, friendship, and growing affection in the first season, stories like these place the characters back in the traditional heteronormative narrative of sex leading to reproduction and the formation of a traditional nuclear family.

[6.11] Taken together, the trends in fan fiction I have laid out indicate a strong shift toward heteronormativity as many fans reimagine the canon. Berlant and Warner (1998) identify some of the key values central to heteronormative culture, including coupling, private intimacy, and the formation of nuclear families. Queer as Folk's canon creates spaces for these forms of heteronormativity for their gay and lesbian characters, but it also debates whether these values should be privileged in the gay community. The series regularly pushes back against the automatic prioritization of these values through individual characters, particularly Brian and Justin. Fan writers often restore these values as central in their own stories about these characters, privileging coupling and monogamy, tending to downplay spaces of public sex (like the baths that are featured in the series), and reinstating the nuclear family through an emphasis on eventual marriage and parenthood, even to the point of writing normative reproductivity into the samesex relationship. Scholars like Berlant and Warner have ably demonstrated that heteronormativity is woven into the fabric of our society. The images that are produced in the culture, the values that are privileged, and the laws that are written regularly reinforce heteronormative values. Early slash was celebrated as subversive because it represented one of a only a few representational spaces that questioned heteronormativity. As LGBT and queer voices and perspectives have gained visibility, a small but increasing number of images that question heteronormativity have become more publicly available; yet heteronormative values remain the norm, even in depictions of LGBT individuals. Given this fact, it remains important that the pervasiveness of heteronormativity as the privileged values and life choices in our culture is explored and critiqued. When heteronormativity is articulated in liberal, progay spaces and uses queer cultural products, its functioning becomes more complex. For scholars who seek to understand the reach of heteronormativity in our culture and how its influence exists outside of homophobia, understanding what fan writers—who are largely heterosexual women—do with samesex media characters and whether they represent

them as queer or as heteronormal ("just like everyone else") is key to understanding fan fiction's representational power. For the fan scholar, the challenges represented by originally queer characters in their fan translations present new opportunities to explore different dimensions of how fan creativity (often unintentionally) engages with political and ideological issues.

7. Subverting subversion: Why canon matters

[7.1] Academic articles written about slash largely acknowledge that not all slash is subversive. Many seem to agree with the general sentiment expressed by Jenkins: "Not all of slash is politically conscious; not all of slash is progressive; not all of slash is feminist; yet one cannot totally ignore the progressive potential of the exchange" (1992, 227). Although I agree with Jenkins, my study of the case of Queer as Folk fandom has led me to believe that it is not enough to acknowledge that fan fiction and slash are not necessarily subversive. We cannot ignore the conservative potential of the exchange between canon and fanon. This is particularly imperative in cases where canonical texts have their own political goals. The ways that fan fiction can actively work to reinscribe normative or traditional values onto works that struggle with or resist these values are important sites of analysis.

[7.2] Some texts written in the Queer as Folk fandom work hard to retain the subversive sentiments of the canon and succeed in writing samesex erotica that is queer and rooted in the social and political situations of the characters. However, a great deal of work done in the fandom subverts the subversion of the regular text, reinscribing heteronormative language, story arcs, and behavior onto a couple that resists them in the source text's canon. This is not to say that this kind of fan writing is not legitimate as a form of individual expression. It is not my goal to declare some work in fandom as legitimate and other work as illegitimate or to reinstate "the teacher's red pen" that Jenkins warns us against (1992, 25). In fannish contexts, canon is not inherently more authoritative than the work of the fandom; nor is it better, if such a general term could be applied. Heteronormative stories are valuable within the fan community; they may even be subversive in other ways. To ask whether these fan fiction works are right or wrong or better or worse would be to fall into a dangerous trap.

[7.3] Yet it is not only appropriate but crucial to question the extent to which these fan texts import heteronormative structures into a queer text. These transformative texts need to be considered from queer politicized perspectives, particularly by those who still treat fan fiction as ultimately, if not unproblematically, resistive. "Resistive of what?" is the question we might ask.

A text, like a male pregnancy narrative, may be resistive on one level (resisting gender norms) while being extremely conservative on another (reinscribing heteronormative life arcs).

Rewriting the macho Starsky and Hutch as a happily married couple may very well be an act of resistance, but marrying off Brian and Justin can just as easily serve a disciplining function on a queer source text. The extent to which it is heternormativity, rather than gender norms or compulsory heterosexuality, that is so often preserved allows us to investigate the impact that this ideology has on our culture even in progay, reasonably progressive fan communities.

[7.4] As I have demonstrated, the contexts that can be provided by a specifically queer source text like Queer as Folk can radically change the effect of fan fiction that uses traditional tropes

from the genres of slash and romance. If we ignore the impact of the growth of explicitly queer texts and characters in media and the fandoms that surround them, we may ignore important ways to reconceive the attributes of fan fiction genres. Failing to do so may result in ignoring the ways that the assumptions we make about fan fiction and its genres reinforce heteronormativity.

[7.5] On her fan page, Brian and Justin Love, Xie exclaims, "And in our fandom it's CANON!,"

rejoicing in the idea that it is possible for samesex erotica and romance to be written in a fandom where both the sexualities and the actual sex is canonical. For a writer like Xie, who only works with samesex canonical pairings, this exclamation indicates an opening of creative possibilities and an important step against the queer invisibility that Ika Willis laments when she notes "the lack of a sustaining fictional world within which queer desire can be recognized and read by the characters themselves" (2006, 160). However, I too want to exclaim that in this fandom it's canon! and insist on considering how our language, our assumptions about resistance, and our approach to genre categories must expand to accommodate these fictional worlds where queer desire is canonical, even central, to interrogate the ways that subversion, conservativeness, and valences of desire are contextually and intertextually situated. Adjusting our assumptions about subversion in fan fiction is necessary to account for changing media representations of homosexuality. Doing so will allow scholars of fan fiction and queer representation alike to account for the ways that fan fiction can be regressive and conservative as well as resistant—as both a site of queer reading potential and a site for the reinscription and reinforcement of heteronormativity.

8. Acknowledgments

[8.1] I would like to thank Jonathan Gray and Ashley Hinck for their invaluable advice and contributions.

9. Notes

1. The Showtime Queer as Folk is also known as Queer as Folk USA, to distinguish it from the originary British series known as Queer as Folk UK, which aired for two seasons in 1999–2000.

2. In this case I am using Alexander Doty's definition of queer as something that is nonstraight

or nonnormatively straight (2000, 129–31) and taking it in a slightly different direction by indicating an oppositional or troubled relationship with heteronormativity.

3. I am not claiming that the writers for Queer as Folk thought of these elements as slash or derived them from slash, but rather that for a variety of reasons, including shared cultural references, the same elements appear in both contexts.

4. I have avoided the term heteronormative here because monogamy is valued by many in the LGBT community and is rejected by many heterosexuals.

5. Although it is true that in its final three episodes the series allows for a more exclusive

canonical pairing, exclusivity in fan fiction was a consistent feature from the beginning.

6. In these works of fan fiction, monogamy may gain privilege for many reasons, particularly to

prove romantic love, to support the raising of a family, and to gain access to unprotected sex—

something that the series forecloses as a reason for and product of monogamy through Brian's insistence that Justin ought "never let anyone fuck [him] without a condom" (episode 2.7) and through having one of the series' key monogamous pairings include an HIVpositive partner.

7. This most frequently is used in the depiction of Brian and Justin's relationship, although the

device of a threesome was also used to reignite the relationship between two lesbian characters, Melanie and Lindsay.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Praxis

"But this is my story and this is how I wanted to write it": Author's notes as a fannish claim to power in fan fiction writing

Alexandra Herzog

University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

[0.1] Abstract— Issues of power have always been an important factor in fan fiction writing. The publishers of the source texts were long regarded as a dominant force, with fans conventionally relegated to the status of an audience largely deprived of authority, even when they produced fan fiction and thus challenged the sovereignty of interpretation original authors often preferred to keep for themselves. This essay argues that author's notes as a part of fannish paratext are an essential means of supporting the fan authors'

claim to power by providing these writers with an explicit space to make their voices heard. They allow fans to express their interpretation of different models of authorship and give them the opportunity to assume a variety of author roles. Thus negotiating between a belief in the significance of the individual author, Barthes's death of the author, and newer collaborative forms of writing, fans constitute themselves as an authoritative body in regard to rights of interpreting text or writing fan fiction. Focusing on their own identity as writers, on the fannish community, and on their text and its position in the larger archive of the fandom, fans reconceptualize themselves as powerful producers, whose agency becomes obvious in the vast body of their texts. Author's notes, I claim, are thus crucial in fans assuming and exerting control and authority.

[0.2] Keywords— Author roles; Fan fiction; Negotiation of power Herzog, Alexandra. 2012. "'But this is my story and this is how I wanted to write it': Author's Notes as a Fannish Claim to Power in Fan Fiction Writing." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0406.

1. Introduction

[1.1] "But this is my story and this is how I wanted to write it," Caazzie declares in her Author's Notes (A/Ns) at the beginning of her fan fiction story "Life Is Complicated" (2010).

Deliberately constituting herself as a powerful fan author, she asserts her authority in writing "my story" how "I wanted" it to be, thus positioning herself in opposition to the television network that produces her fan fiction's source text of Supernatural (2005–).

Providing a salient example of fannish agency to counter the power of a traditionally hegemonic media industry (note 1), Caazzie emphasizes her story's legitimacy as a valuable contribution to the television text it is based on by using the paratextual space A/Ns provide to make her voice heard.

[1.2] Caazzie's comments demonstrate that paratext, which Gérard Genette defined as text specifically set "between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned

toward the world's discourse about the text)" (1997, 2), has assumed an important role in the presentation of a fan fiction story to the reader: it occupies the liminal space between audience and fictional universe, and thus initiates the reading experience. Nearly every fan text is accompanied by basic categories of paratext such as story title, writer's name, or summary to supply initial information; additionally, the genre has developed a rich variety of forms not included in Genette's extensive 1997 study of nonfannish paratext. Disclaimers, ratings, and pairings—to only name the most popular paratextual categories other than A/Ns

—provide to the writers an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with their readers, initiating communication by offering information, prompts for interaction, or comments on their story.

Present in any fandom and any community, A/Ns have become popular paratextual thresholds that readers cross before entering the fictional universe of a fan text: they constitute a space that fans like Caazzie employ to convey their understanding of the role of the author in all its fannish interpretations, focusing on the agency entailed by inhabiting these different models of authorship.

[1.3] To demonstrate her fannish agency, therefore, Caazzie not only emphasizes her own individual interpretation in her A/Ns, but her words also evidence her clear sense and awareness of the power negotiations that have pervaded and shaped the fan community for decades: addressed to the story's readers, the paratextual comments habitual in large sections of fan fiction negotiate audience expectations and provide the writer with the opportunity to reach out to her community. Apart from confirming the genre's inherent dialogicity and the importance of a multiplicity of voices coming together in fan fiction, Caazzie asserts her own interpretive position and authorial voice by sharing "my story": she directs her readers along her own characterizations and emotional and narrative journeys, and thus exemplifies that A/Ns often fulfill nearly opposing functions. In addition to imbuing the fandom's community with power and reflecting the needs and desires of the story's audience, they also constitute the fan writer's authority over the characters, the story, and her own narrative. Negotiating this seeming contradiction and obvious tension in the fannish understanding of the role of the author, different types of A/Ns allow fans to assume a variety of author roles that they use to assert their status as firmly empowered transformers of the source text. Oscillating between intensely collaborative and firmly prescriptive, models of authorship as expressed in A/Ns therefore fulfill a specific function in fannish empowerment and constitute a major factor in fans exerting their agency, that is, in exerting both their "power… to do something in relation to the text" and their "power over some group or entity" (Ross 2008, 72; note 2). Addressed to the original producers and their own audience alike, Caazzie's and other fans' comments consequentially allow them to wield power over the source text, its creators, their fan text, and its readers.

[1.4] Based on the function of A/Ns as the "fan writer's direct communications with the audience" (Black 2008a, 28), I claim that A/Ns serve as specific paratextual instances that provide to fans a designated space where they can overtly lay claim to their power as producers. Despite their largely conventional and generic nature, A/Ns nevertheless feature a variety of testaments of fannish agency and authority in regard to both the original authors and fan readers alike. These different claims to agency, I argue, find their

expression in distinctly distinguishable types of A/Ns that reflect the tension between empowerment as fan writers and disempowerment of their audience, and thus emphasize different aspects of fannish agency. Reflecting each fan's unique approach to negotiating authority with the original producers and their readers, A/Ns thus become an important vehicle for fans to voice how they conceptualize the role of the author for themselves and for their community. With their overt claims to authority focusing on the individual fan writer, the fan fiction story, the fannish audience, and the original creators, these fans do not conform to oftenprevalent constructions of the fan as the weak and vulnerable Other (see, for example, Jenkins 1992). Instead, I maintain that A/Ns are essential in fans' selfempowerment as they utilize them to imbue themselves with a high degree of authority and agency by inscribing their distinctly fannish conceptions of the author into a space that is solely theirs to fill and thus dominate.

[1.5] Expanding Rebecca W. Black's findings about the purposes of A/Ns in the framework of studying the shaping of identity and interaction of individual nonnative speakers of English with their readers (2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b), and Susan Ashley Wright's passing mention of how they can be employed in creating a distinct dichotomy between older/more experienced fan writers and younger/less experienced ones (2009, v, 110, 119), I argue that A/Ns are ultimately about authority and control—both in asserting a position of fannish power in regard to the creators of the source text and in demonstrating the influence of the writer on the reading processes of their audience. Owing a debt to Gérard Genette's extensive study of paratexts (1997), I am thus concerned with the essential importance of A/Ns in fannish negotiations of ownership and agency within the community and—

symbolically—with the media industry, discussing distinct subtypes of paratextual comments that express the different approaches fans employ in constructing their role as fan author to ensure that their voices are heard.

2. The conception of A/Ns: A space for tensions and negotiations

[2.1] Just as most fannish paratext is part of the story header, A/Ns are usually set at the beginning of a fan fiction story or a chapter as introductory remarks to the audience. They deal with a basically infinite range of topics, from the writer's first cat's name (Disasterriffic Kaz 2012) to information about the story's prequels (Wynefred 2012). Often, A/Ns also appear at the chapter's or the entire work's end, directly addressing readers after they have finished the story; only very rarely are A/Ns inserted into the story proper. Providing a distinct space in which fans can articulate what issues they feel need to be negotiated, A/Ns allow fan authors to shape their individual and communal identity, and thus constitute an integral part of a fan fiction story's paratext: they liberate fan authors from adhering to any constraints in content, which other forms of paratext discussed below impose, and therefore offer a vital insight into their selfunderstanding as fan writers. Addressing the original author, their readers, and their community, fans employ A/Ns as a space of empowerment, all the while acknowledging their mere symbolic ownership of the published source text—the metatext—by disclaimers.

[2.2] Although I strictly limit myself to studying paratext that is deliberately labeled

"Author's Notes," it is nevertheless important to contextualize A/Ns and thus note that they are accompanied by disclaimers, summaries, or other kinds of fannish commenting in almost every story header. Fan fiction has developed a wealth of different paratextual forms that serve particular functions in framing the text, and are as such essentially significant in constituting the text for its readers (see Allen 2000, 103). With a number of options for the fan writer to choose from in revealing information—including title, author, rating, central pairing(s), warnings, and a range of others—the length and level of detail of fannish headers varies to a large extent. Very often, however, several categories of paratext are included—

sometimes because an archive requires them or because a fan's community expects them

according to their conventions (note 3). By its specific focus, each different type of paratext

is crucial in addressing the audience, and is thus imbued with a certain degree of power, as fan battles of recent years have demonstrated. Almost all paratextual forms have seen their fair share of conflict and have consequently changed, with examples testifying to the contested nature of how power is delineated abounding. Disclaimers, for instance, were devised to ensure a certain kind of protection against legal complaints; but nowadays, they have frequently become a simple formula that is often made fun of by more or less openly acknowledging that the fans do not own the metatext according to copyright and trademark restrictions: "Guess who doesn't own this? That's right, me, but I am working on kidnapping myself a pair of Winchesters," writes PissedOffEskimo (2007), specifically not mentioning Supernatural's network, The CW, or its creator, Eric Kripke, whose intellectual property she transforms by her fan fiction. Similarly, conflicts have reshaped warnings, which inform readers about possibly disturbing content such as violence or sexual practices described in the story: they commonly used to form a type of paratext separate from A/Ns, but after fan debates that centered on the offensiveness of the word "warning" itself—that is, the possible affront to the readers, which subsuming anyone's potential preferences under the label

"warning" might entail—has led to avoiding the term by including its content in the category of A/Ns in some LiveJournal or Dreamwidth communities.

[2.3] In addition, tensions and layers of conflict also have a firm presence within the category of A/Ns itself and need to be kept in mind when studying them: intensely debated by fans, these controversies constitute the background for evaluating A/Ns in regard to their specific value in conveying fannish agency. The archive of FanFiction.net in particular—

excerpts from which I work with—has seen disagreements and discussions over A/Ns in recent years. Fans have argued whether they constitute chapters and thus can be uploaded without new story content (which the editorial board prohibits in its guidelines); how they distract from reading, especially when inserted into the story proper; and what is their appropriate length (see, for example, DamnBlackHeart's 2010 post at a forum titled

"Annoying Author's Notes"). Moreover, debates about content have resurfaced, with fans divided over whether A/Ns should be "short and to the point" (AhmoseInarus 2010) or

"longwinded" (BonesBird 2010).

[2.4] These intense battles waged about A/Ns testify to their essential importance for the fannish community, which is supported by their very positioning at the beginning or the end

of a story: the majority of them strikingly frame the text, providing a distinct entryway for the reader and enacting a "chief function" which is " to ensure that the text is read properly"

(Genette 1997, 197; original emphasis). Extending Genette's claim, I argue that fans not only use their A/Ns to enforce on their audience that very preBarthesian concept of the author as the creator of "proper" meaning, but also assume several authorial positions in their paratext that include but are not limited to the "AuthorGod" (Barthes 1977, 146): on the one hand, they emphasize their fannish agency by both declaring the tyranny of the original author ended and displaying the collaborative ethos of the community that collectively creates fan fiction; on the other hand, they display their own version of authorial tyranny by trying to dictate to the readers how " the text is read properly" (Genette 1997, 197; original emphasis). Choosing to express their own understanding of the role of the author in their A/Ns, fans therefore distinctly use them to negotiate these widely different models of authorship—each of which becomes a source of fannish power as evidenced by different types of A/Ns.

[2.5] Oscillating between these roles, A/Ns thus open up a field of discussion about the approach to the figure of the author in fan fiction writing. Varying fannish interpretations provide a more nuanced perspective than simply recognizing the genre of fan fiction as the ultimate manifestation of Barthes's "birth of the reader…at the cost of the death of the Author" (1977, 148). With Barthes, the figure of the original author lost its central position as the provider of a single theological meaning and was replaced by the "plurality of voices of the readers, who establish a plurality of meaning" (Booth 2010, 50). The empowerment of the reader has been seen to find its expression in producing fan fiction, in actively creating and articulating the "plurality of meaning" that deconstructs the power of the author. "Unimpressed by institutional authority and expertise," says Jenkins in his 1992

Textual Poachers, "fans assert their own right to form interpretations, to offer evaluations"

(18): each fannish text newly declares the author dead and thus confirms the inherent relevance of Barthes's ideas to the genre.

[2.6] Fan fiction's indebtedness to this change in thinking about the status of the author that occurred after Barthes's and Foucault's seminal essays of the late 1960s, which relegated the author to a mere "functional principle" (Foucault 1979, 159), becomes apparent in A/Ns that expressly disavow the authorial rights of the metatext's creators: ideas of "fixing all" (ShadowPast620 2011). The original producers did wrong, or "rewriting Season 6 [of Supernatural] in a way that I think will be interesting" (ourlastsummr 2011) feature prominently in many fans' paratext and confirm the continuous significance a Barthesian deconstruction of the "AuthorGod" (1977, 146) has within fan fiction. These writers' comments refer to the genre's most fundamental assumption of the empowered audience, expressing its agency by dismissing established hierarchies that value the original text and its creator disproportionally.

[2.7] Nevertheless, A/Ns do not exclusively mirror this postmodern and poststructuralist conception of the irrelevance of the original author's intent (see Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954) and the subsequent empowerment of the reader—and, by extension, of the fan fiction

writer. Despite an ongoing prevalence of Barthes's ideas in literary studies and in scholarship on fan fiction in particular, fannish authors frequently voice an approach to the figure of the author that promotes its enduring tyranny over any audience and readers'

imagination (see Bennett 2005, 16–17): they attempt to actively direct the story's audience into a certain, premeditated reader position and thus to curtail the very sort of interpretive and agentive practice they themselves are engaged in while writing fan fiction. Their A/Ns reflect the residues of an older, very prevalent notion of a Western "apotheosis of authorship" (Jaszi and Woodmansee 1994, 3) that attributes an immense power and authority to the author and conversely leaves little agency to the reader (see Bennett 2005, 50–68; Jaszi and Woodmansee 1994). Authoritatively, these fans disclaim for their audience the right to challenge their interpretations the same way their own stories challenge the authority of the metatext. "If you don't agree with this story, then fine. Don't review," warns

Dark Satirist (2010), effectively cutting off any criticism from the audience (note 4).

[2.8] Despite this intense individualism, many paratextual comments nevertheless evidence the extent to which collaboration between different fans features in the creation of stories. A/Ns that refer to the various voices that all had a share in the writing process allow the authors to construct themselves as members of a powerful community of fans, whose conventions they adhere to and whose feedback and opinions they ask for. "So much credit"

(Dean's evil little hunter 2008) is given to other writers and readers, signifying the importance collaborative authorship and shared authority has assumed for fandom. Naming the individuals that provided "so much help" emphasizes the creative community behind the production of stories and stands in opposition to the Romantic ideal of the "rare genius"

(Clerc 2003, 124).

[2.9] Caught within these contradictory conceptions of the author role, A/Ns therefore articulate and communicate to the audience the range of subject positions fan writers assume, providing them with the opportunity to negotiate these different approaches in a space where they are free to make their own individual voices heard. As my research shows, these differences in understanding their role as authors—as interpreters of the metatext and the fan text—have led to notably diverse types of paratextual comment, emphasizing the wide range of approaches fans take to establish themselves as powerful fan writers, as members of a legitimate interpretive community, and as producers in their own right.

[2.10] Further developing Black's study of the importance of A/Ns in teenage fan fiction writing by nonnative speakers of English, I expanded the objects of study from her small number of up to three authors (2008a). From an initial sample of about 2,000 stories in the fandoms of Supernatural, Twilight, and Star Wars on FanFiction.net from the last six years (note 5), I singled out 250 different fans who not only used A/Ns but whose comments could

be read as strong testaments of their idea of the distribution of power and authority in fan fiction writing instead of containing mere notes on story prequels or sequels, references to future developments in further chapters, and so on. When I examined these preselected authors' notes for recurrent themes, it quickly became evident that it was not only these 250 writers who used their A/Ns to declare their fannish agency; instead, they obviously

employed and drew on established patterns that required no further explanation within the framework of the fan community. Even though I did not confine my research to one single fandom, as is common in research on fan fiction, and instead transcended the boundaries of specific fandoms and media types of metatexts, distinct types of A/Ns emerged across these fandoms that express the power of the fan writer, the disavowal of the rights of the metatext's creator, and the collaboration within the communities.

[2.11] My sample of fan authors thus signaled in their comments larger trends in how fans actually achieve this demonstration of fannish agency beyond individual preferences or fandom specifics, and instead evidenced the generic nature of their line of argumentation.

Analyzing and categorizing these writers' A/Ns in terms of thematic topics—how the individual fan author views his or her authorial position and engages in a dialogue with his or her audience and the original producers by voicing, for instance, dissatisfaction with the metatext or the extent to which other fans had a share in producing a story—provided a muchneeded extension of Black's work: A/Ns serve further functions beyond shaping the interaction between fan writer and fannish audience on the basis of often highly personal

"contracts" that negotiate, for example, reasons for writing fan fiction or world views (2008a, 66–71). Based on my research, I thus claim that all these paratextual comments share one important common characteristic in constituting the authority of the fan fiction they frame. In addition, the specific issues addressed in A/Ns have led me to distinguish a number of different types of A/Ns that each contributes to fans' efforts to establish themselves as powerful writers—irrespective of whether they use this framework to engage in communal writing, declare the original author dead, or resurrect the author in attributing themselves with an authorial grab for authority.

3. A transactional space: The inherent power of A/Ns

[3.1] With fans discussing these important issues of agency in A/Ns, I thus maintain that all the different subtypes of A/Ns identified in my research share a common function as sites of empowerment, of identitybuilding and communitybuilding. Regardless of their specific content, each A/N serves as a manifestation of fannish authority in providing a framework for writers to address their audience and thus negotiate between individual approaches and communally held beliefs before their readers enter into the fictional universe of their stories.

Utilizing Genette's ideas, I argue that A/Ns in their very existence as an integral part of the story's extensive paratext "ensure the text's presence in the world" (1997, 1) by enabling the fan fiction's transition from its author to its audience: A/Ns function as thresholds readers need to cross before encountering the fan text. They not only occupy the liminal space between "text and offtext" (Genette 1997, 2) but also constitute a decidedly transactional space that mirrors the very mindset that gave birth to the genre of fan fiction

—that is, the transfer of power from the original producers to the fan authors. This idea common to all stories is therefore as such inherent in all A/Ns: the fan author moves to take the metatext away from the original producers, claims it as his or her own, appropriates it in the form of the fan fiction story, and simultaneously turns it over to the readers. The

instances of power—Who possesses it? Whom does it belong to in the first place?—are thus negotiated by the initial act of opening up the metatexts for interpretation by its fan fiction–

producing audience, and find their expression in A/Ns that give voice to the community's fundamental disavowal of the metatexts' creators' authorial rights.

[3.2] Explicitly demonstrating these transactional moves, in which power is easily transferred from the producers to the fan authors and their community, fsquiggles introduces her Twilight story "Bella with a Secret" (2011) by announcing, "So someone on my blog asked me to write Twilight how I thought the plot and stuff should have been written. So hereee [ sic] goes." Not even including the producers in her claim of authority over both her own story and the metatext of Twilight, she focuses on how the community has reached out to her and requested her expert opinion on how she as an individual would have done Twilight differently if she had been the books' original author Stephenie Meyer.

Here, fssquiggles presents herself as a member of a larger community that sees no problem in affirming its ownership and agency over multimilliondollar franchise original texts, but instead asserts its authority in claiming to write a story as it "should" have been written.

Meyer's text is thus quickly relegated to a reference work that one might consult for character names and general ideas instead of being considered a bible that needs to be treated with reverence and awe and would conventionally represent the only valid text. Even more openly disregarding of the original authors is PissedOffEskimo, who describes her approach to writing Supernatural fan fiction by saying, "There's what Kripke wrote, there's what the boys say, then there's what I hear" (2007). Acknowledging the show's creator Eric Kripke and the aired television text, she nevertheless transfers the interpretational sovereignty from the creator and traditional media outlet to herself as a fan writer, ascending to a position of power and legitimizing her interpretation of the metatext by focusing on her individual reception and dismissing any residues of the original producers'

intents (note 6).

[3.3] Thus shifting priorities from the metatext and its producers to the fan text and its community, fannish paratext goes beyond ensuring a "better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading of it" (Genette 1997, 2) by communicating "what I hear," that is, a fan author's own interpretation, to the readers. Moreover, A/Ns—in a seeming contradiction

—actually confirm the whole genre's existence by the fundamental disempowering of the metatext's producers: all A/Ns are based on the very basic fannish premise that a community of readers assumes the power to devalue the metatext in disavowing the trueness/correctness of the original author's "plot and stuff." Writing fan fiction because of their "immense disappointment" (Ao Redd 2009) with the text they consider themselves fans of thus reaffirms Barthes's elimination of the central figure of the author. "We, the fans," writes hazel3017 in her profile at FanFiction.net, "make our own version of our favourite characters, and twist and bend them to our will" (2004), which constitutes her community as the ruleproviding and dominant body in the relationship between audience and producers, echoing USAmerican constructions of democracy that give power to the previously disenfranchised. The agency and authority "we, the fans" inscribe into A/Ns that explicitly focus on deauthorizing the metatext therefore negate, or at least modify, Genette's

absolutist statement that "the paratextual element is always subordinate to 'its' text" (1997, 12). In giving space to the fans expressing their most fundamental beliefs about their fannish activities—that there is the "freedom" (paperbkryter 2010) to write what you want and to create a "New World" (amazinginvisiblegirl 2008) different from the metatext—any type of A/N either implicitly or explicitly dismisses the central position of the original authors in culture (see Barthes 1977). Through this distinct emphasis on fannish agency, A/Ns thus convey fan fiction's basic principle of transforming the metatext into a Barthesian "writerly"

text that revokes the "pitiless divorce…between the producer of the text and its user" (2000, 4)—or, rather, A/Ns testify to the genre's complete reconceptualization of static, "readerly"

original texts into Fiske's "insufficient," or "producerly" texts (1992, 42) that invite fans to participate in the creation of meaning through their gaps.

[3.4] In addition to providing fans with this transactional space, A/Ns permit vital insights into how the writers and their communities negotiate issues of contested authority, often disclosing contradictions between different practices fans engage in. Fannish paratext articulates no single unified, allencompassing understanding of authority other than that explicit or implicit transfer of power I illustrated. Instead, A/Ns can be classified into a number of subcategories, with each emphasizing a different aspect of how fans approach and interpret their status as producers of authoritative fan text. In the following, I identify four larger groups of A/Ns that emphasize the person of the fan author, the fan text, the fannish community, and the formative role the writer assumes in the reception of the fan fiction by its readers. Choosing to introduce a story by a certain type of A/N, fans therefore indicate the author role they assume and inhabit for that particular fan fiction, which also opens up the room for tensions between various interpretive practices at work within the genre.

4. Subcategories of A/Ns: A reflection of fans and their

understanding of the role of the author

[4.1] Allowing fans to express the specific model of authorship they approached a story with, diverse types of A/Ns have emerged over the decades. In my research that comprises Fanfiction.net texts from Supernatural, Twilight, and Star Wars, three fandoms whose metatexts stem from different media, trends have become apparent in the ways fans articulate their claims: it remains important to note that these trends definitely transcend fandom boundaries, and are not restricted to one or two of the communities. The ways fans express their agency seem to be rather pervasive, crossing from fandom to fandom instead of remaining confined to one or two subsets of the fan community, which speaks to the significance this issue of expressing power has assumed for the writers. Introducing her Star Wars story "I Miss You Daddy" (2011), FrostedPurpleIrises91, for example, employs widely recurrent patterns in her A/Ns, which are here given in their entirety to demonstrate my line of argumentation:

[4.2] It's an established fact that Grievous does have a family but virtually nothing has been said about them in the canon universe. That always bugged me

and so I decided to take matters into my own hands. This little oneshot is about one of Grievous' youngest children and how she misses him while he is fighting in the Clone Wars. I wrote this as if a 5yr old would say and describe everything in this work. This was interesting to write to say the least… Please R&R and give any comments/critiques/thoughts about this. Enjoy! :D.

[4.3] Concluding with a call to her audience, FrostedPurpleIrises91 provides a longstanding dissatisfaction with the metatext as a reason for writing fan fiction, easily assumes the role of a producer, and explains her writing technique—thus directing her readers'

reception: she discloses her approach to the role of the fan author in her introductory A/N, giving ample evidence of her agency as a fan fiction writer. In the following, I will go on to quote extensively from examples taken from all three fandoms to demonstrate the omnipresence of these powerful A/Ns rather than limiting myself to a specific metatext for elaborating on a distinct type of A/Ns.

[4.4] First, one large group of A/Ns indicative of the persistent prevalence of the author—

and thus contradicting Barthes's fundamental assumption—is geared toward bringing the individual fan writer to the fore. In these A/Ns, the writers claim a distinct individual identity for themselves as the producers of the story, whose very self is portrayed as an essential means of creating both text and meaning. Remarking that the following fan fiction is "similar to what I've had happen" (RunWithJacobBlack 2011) or giving the audience a "a bit about me" (QuixoticQuest 2009) biographical section eliminates the traditional idea about fans as a large anonymous mass and even elevates the fan writer to a status similar to that of the original producers, whose biographies are often emphasized in interviews or other publications. By either disclosing the quasiautobiographical content of the fan fiction or generally focusing on the person writing the story—be it their sex, age, ethnicity, or notes about how the story came to be and was approached (note 7)—the individual fans empower

themselves, reinforcing ideas about the centrality of the person of the author by stressing the importance of the self and the validity of their ideas and stories. In spite of using pseudonyms, fan authors thus voluntarily leave the anonymity of the Internet and constitute themselves as legitimate writers, whose opinions and life story matter, even when their production of text does not earn them any money—which, according to some fans'

statements, even provides them with superior freedom and liberty (see paperbkryter 2010).

[4.5] Infusing paratext with a sense of self and individualism is thus proof of the agency of these fans: fan fiction writing as a whole is a communal and dialogic effort, with numerous fans and stories having a share in producing the fan text, but there would not be a "we, the fans" without an "I created this" (PheeNyx1244 2010). A/Ns on FanFiction.net in particular, as Paul Booth claims by distinguishing spaces that keep a writer's words strictly separated from their reviews from Web sites that mesh them together, are "always the product of one particular author" (2010, 45–46). They are as such predominantly fit to emphasize the productive agency of one individual, which leads to A/Ns being caught between two interpretations at variance with each other: they constitute the space where fans can negotiate the idea of the empowered writer, who disavows the authorial rights of

the original producer, but who also simultaneously asks the audience to consider the importance of the person of the fan author for the process of reading.

[4.6] This very process of negotiation becomes obvious in a second major category of A/Ns, ones that focus both on the individual fan and on a general disregard for the metatext and its creators. Not only are these comments used by the fan writers to emphasize their

"difference from [their] predecessors" (Eliot 1975, 38) and their fellow fans but, in addition, they underline the fan authors' interpretive agency by ascribing particular value to an individual's approach to writing fan fiction. Their own ideas, their understanding of the metatext, and their interpretation of and position within the fannish textual archive (see Derecho 2006 for theorizing fan fiction as an "archontic" genre) are shown to be of essential concern for the fan authors; but so is the fan text itself, and its relation to the metatext and to other fans' texts originating from their shared fictional universe. In their paratextual comments, fans give detailed descriptions of instances where their story tries to improve on the metatext, where it closes gaps in the original story line, or where it diverges from it. In short, these comments are used to show where the fan author places the fan fiction in the textual archive of the fandom; and while emphasizing the ideas of an individual, these A/Ns nevertheless testify to fans collectively disregarding the conventionally uncontested dominance of the metatext, which here merely serves to provide ideas and a general frame of reference. Even though disclaimers time and again evidence the legal nonownership of metatext by fans and the consequential imbalance of power, A/Ns still give fan writers the chance to express a desired utopian status of a reversal of this situation and thus reflect a decidedly poststructuralist and postmodern stance that dismisses the authority of the original author as an "ideological product" (Foucault 1979, 159). Dissolving hierarchies and emphasizing the equal standing of all texts, fans locate their stories in relation to both types of text, fanwritten or not: smalld1171, for instance, in a Supernatural story, provides a

"short little blurb about Dean's thoughts at the end of [episode] 6x11" (2010), whereas IzzyandDesRoxSox expands on "my wonderful friend Alice's…fic 'Behind Closed Doors'"

(2011) in Star Wars fandom.

[4.7] As becomes obvious in these excerpts that stress a Barthesian disempowerment of the metatext, fan authors consider not only the published text but also their fellow fans'

stories to be equally important: in addition to writing fan fiction that is immediately tied to the metatext, fans frequently use another fan's text as a source for their own productions.

This postmodern dissolution of hierarchies that followed the "Death of the Author" (Barthes 1977, 142–48) becomes particularly apparent when fan writers use their A/Ns to elaborate on their reasons for creating a story. Here, they explain the textual relationships between their fan text and the metatext, underlining their own fan fiction's singular value: often, a perceived lack in the metatext, for example, is stated as motivation for writing fan fiction that expands on originally aired or published instances of text, declaring these "insufficient"

(Fiske 1992, 42). "Season 6? In my opinion? Suckage. MAJOR suckage" is Hatteress's explanation for writing her "Coda to [episode] 6.10" to cope with the "massive trauma ep 10

caused" her (2010). Emphasizing the importance of Supernatural's metatext as the origin of her "massive trauma"—and thus acknowledging its power over her emotional state—she

nevertheless dismisses it just as easily, substituting for it a text of her own that serves to expand both her and her readers' textual archive. As Hatteress's A/Ns show, a negotiation of authority is achieved by awarding the story the same affective influence as the metatext through the fan author's elevation of its status to a legitimate alternative to the metatext: inscribed with value by her paratextual comment, her own text has the power to help her cope. The collective fannish archive consequently decenters the original author and his creation in fannish attention and awareness, evidencing the redistribution of authority that Barthes observed in declaring the author dead.

[4.8] This high status of the fan text, however, is made even more obvious when A/Ns testify to its potential of completely dismissing any cultural delineations in authority between the metatext and the fanproduced stories. As shown in the abovementioned example by IzzyandDesRoxSox, fans consider their fellow authors' stories fully legitimate additions to the textual archive of the fandom, writing fan fiction that is based on another fan's creation that may only be loosely tied to the metatext. Whole fannish 'verses (i.e., elaborate fictional universes) are thus created through multiple stories originating from fan text, generating a manylayered and multivoiced archive that presents vivid evidence for the dissolution of hierarchies in fan fiction. The original creators are dismissed, their text stripped of its traditional authority, and both instances are substituted by the mass of fans collectively producing the textual archive, which becomes the sole basis for its further expansions. "A fanfic for a fanfic" (bellaBBblack 2011) is thus a common occurrence: A/Ns like this not only reinforce the loss of power the metatext's producers are exposed to but also emphatically testify to the collaboration and heteroglossia that is acknowledged and actively promoted within the community—often via A/Ns.

[4.9] Newer models of dialogic, collaborative authorship that involve a "dispersal…of…

authority" (Bennett 2005, 101) among the wider fan community seem therefore to be just as prevalent as Barthesian or older models that focus on the genius of the individual author.

In addition to the multiple layers of 'verses and the intense dialogue between writers and reviewers visible at FanFiction.net, LiveJournal, or any other fan fiction hosting Web site, a third category of A/Ns illustrates that the fandom audience is an important factor in how fan writers demonstrate their collective power by addressing the readers directly and explicitly.

These comments always focus immediately on the story's audience and often invite their response and collaboration, since in the genre of fan fiction the conventional dichotomy of writer and reader has been suspended. Michel de Certeau's declaration that readers are "far from being writers" (1984, 174) has long proven invalid, and the community's claim to power is rooted in the fact that producers are no longer physically and conceptually removed from their audience. "Readers and writers overlap," writes Anik LaChev (2005, 88); in other words, the very same people simultaneously inhabit different roles in interpreting the metatext's archive, signifying a grassroots display of the dissolution of conventionally established hierarchies.

[4.10] Against this backdrop of an integrated writer/reader identity—and evidenced by the multiple layers of text a story is based on—the genre of fan fiction therefore defines itself by

intense cooperation within the community. Consequently, it is not in the least surprising to detect a high degree of community interaction in A/Ns: through them, writers reach out to their audience and vice versa, understanding fan fiction to be a dialogic genre based on the integration of a vast variety of fannish voices. Although this multivoiced nature is often highlighted in the very same comments that focus on the writer's own authorial self, this coexistence does not negate the significance of the community involved in writing, but instead discloses the different author roles power originates from. By fans working together and discussing their ideas and interpretations, a highly heteroglossic archive emerges, in which both readers' and writers' voices count. Collaboration on fan fiction is thus highly valued, which fans acknowledge in their A/Ns by appreciating their fellow writers'/readers'

"ideas and opinions" (HappyKitty95 2010; story was originally posted at FanFiction.net, but is no longer available). Moreover, the positive reception of feedback by the authors imbues the story's audience with producers' power (note 8)—an obvious confirmation of the

distribution of authority from one writer to the whole fandom that confirms a Barthesian focus on the multiplicity of the reader's voices.

[4.11] In addition, this dispersal of power among a multiplicity of interactants provides to the community a degree of muchneeded cohesion. Declaring the collaboration of a number of people in the creation of a work of a fan fiction, fans not only appear as a loosely connected fan base but also demonstrate to themselves—and in certain cases, to original authors, producers, or the industry—the existence of a rather tightly knit group that possesses, proves, and exerts agency (note 9). Frequently used as a space for interfannish communication, A/Ns easily attest to the essential importance of facilitating and engaging in community interaction. The audience becomes an immediate focus point: not only is the reader addressed through ubiquitous "thank you" remarks (see, for example, historylover 2010) for past reviews, betareading, or providing ideas; additionally, the authors very frequently provoke a more specific kind of interaction in that they directly ask for feedback or suggestions for further chapters, or generally invite their audience to discuss the texts or the metatext with them. Evidencing the heteroglossic set up of fan fiction, "tell me what you think" (chattgirl4 2009) is a common request. With these prompts taken seriously by the readers, lively online conversations consequently enable and ensure community cohesion—a prerequisite for fandom's capacity to function as a serious counteragent to the producers, because fans cease to see themselves as the stereotypical lone Other and reconceptualize themselves as part of a vast, multivoiced, and powerful community.

[4.12] While this collaborative approach to fan fiction writing seemingly contradicts the importance of the "AuthorGod" (Barthes 1977, 146), the "divine" individual genius, it needs to be acknowledged that both models of authorship exist in the genre. Although A/Ns celebrate the death of the author in manifold instances, with the community assuming its former power by engaging in interpretive practices that reascribe its authority to the fans and their own productions, an earlier approach to the role of the author can still be traced in a fourth group of A/Ns, whose wording appears to resurrect the Romantic ideal of the "Great Creator" (Kazimierczak 2010). These comments attribute a high degree of significance to the story's writers, who intend to play a formative role in the reception of their text (Black

2008a, 105; note 10). Not only do fan writers insist on their biographies as a valuable

background for reading, or underline their individual contributions to the textual archive, they furthermore empower themselves by specifically influencing their audience's approach to their stories: they explain in detail how they want their texts to be read, including in their A/Ns specific instructions, or "Other Things You [the reader] Need to Know" (beyondthetwilight 2010). In short, the authors grant themselves the authority to provide lines of interpretation for their audience that they fiercely refuse to accept from the metatext and its producers.

[4.13] In an "apotheosis of authorship" (Jaszi and Woodmansee 1994, 3), fan writers thus use their paratextual comments to demonstrate the power they have over their own story, its readers, and the metatext. Their A/Ns are meant to influence—or even manipulate—the reading processes of their audience, ranging from anticipating the feelings the story is supposed to evoke—"This is heartbreaking" (carryonmywaywardson 2011; original emphasis)—to describing their conception of the characters—for instance, Supernatural's

"Sam Winchester, lover of Dean, patricide, desperado" (frostygossamer 2011). Inscribing their interpretations in their A/Ns, the fan writers' own approach is meant to shape their fan fiction and its contribution to the textual archive profusely and profoundly. They emphasize their authority as authors to direct their audience with these quasiinstructions, while the very act of writing fan fiction makes it just as obvious that they refuse to give the original writers the same power over their own metatext. Thus establishing a kind of double standard by utilizing A/Ns to provide themselves with rights they simultaneously deny producers, fans portray themselves as empowered gatekeepers of their text and their

interpretation of the metatext (note 11). Far from challenging the genre's dialogic setup,

however, I have found that this fannish insistence on a specific reader position consequently complements other sources and expressions of agency. Finding their own stance, both writers and readers draw strength from these very tensions between models of authorship.

5. Interpreting the author in A/Ns: Fandom asserts its power

[5.1] "I'm here to reveal the true story of Twilight to you," Annabel Fate Juliet Gaisras (2011) declared, demonstrating that for her—just as for hundreds of thousands of other fan writers—the struggle for authority between producers and fans has long been decided and power does indeed lie with the latter: the fannish consensus is that "in the world of fan fiction we're free to explore a whole plethora of possibilities" (NongPradu 2010), and A/Ns give vivid evidence of the different sources fans' agency stems from. Paratextual comments confirm the fannish power to "reveal the true story" of the metatext in writing fan fiction—in engaging in an interpretive practice that dissolves the authority of the original producer and redistributes it to the community. Furthermore, A/Ns distinctly include all members of the fandom by addressing and appealing to "you"–that is, the stories' readers and coproducers, who are assigned a decisive significance in the collaboration that takes place whenever fans get together and discuss the metatext, the canon, the fanon, or a single story. On top of acknowledging these numerous voices that provide "so much help" (Mad Server 2011), A/Ns

provide to the "I," the individual writers, the space to assert their power and agency by both voicing their own take on the metatext and by guiding their audience's reading processes.

[5.2] Negotiating, therefore, between a variety of available interpretations of the author, this form of paratext functions as an instance of tremendous significance in the construction of the fannish self: directed at an implicit nonfannish audience on the one hand, it allows the writers to claim power regardless of producers' ideas, possible copyright constraints, or conventional conceptions of who interpretational sovereignty belongs to; on the other hand, A/Ns directed at the fannish audience also allow the authors to draw a considerable measure of authority from attempting to direct their readers in their reception of their own story, while simultaneously using the opportunity of A/Ns to express their collective power acquired through collaboration within their communities.

[5.3] With A/Ns giving voice to these conflicting interpretations of the author role, I conclude that these fannish comments provide individual writers with power and control over both the metatext and their own fan fiction by enabling them to construct themselves in multiple ways. As a site for the writers to negotiate between their text and communal expectations, A/Ns prepare the ground for interpreting and reading the stories by guiding the focus of the audience, while giving space to fan writers to elaborate on their own conception of "poaching" (Jenkins 1992) from the metatext. In an essential way, it is this paratext that serves to liberate the fan text from the voice of the original producers and replace it with the fannish voice: with A/Ns, I posit, the community has carved a space out for itself where it dominates discourse by distinctly accentuating and empowering the individual fans and their community. These comments give fan authors the chance to demonstrate their power by publishing stories that are the interpretations of individuals, but which are nevertheless firmly grounded in communally held beliefs about metatext, fan text, and fan fiction in general.

[5.4] Inherently important to the genre as an instrument to explicitly deemphasize the role of the metatext—in particular of its producers—A/Ns are therefore utilized to invest fan authors with their own agency and ownership by creating a means for fans to play with models of authorship, both stressing and dismissing roles as suited to their needs.

Considering A/Ns as deliberate attempts to emphasize the fannish position in the relationship of producers and audience, I therefore claim that fans employ them in all their possible modes to ultimately establish their authority and control until, as Heart Torn Out says, "One day, the fangirls and I will storm Eric Kripke's house and make him give the rights to us" (2010). This fannish utopia of the ultimate concession of power is unlikely to be realized; however, it has become apparent that "we, the fans" are no longer disenfranchised, but use paratext to conceptualize ourselves in multiple ways as powerful authors.

6. Notes

1. Overthrowing traditionally accepted views of the media industry and the original authors

as hegemonic instances that solely exert power and authority over the texts they distribute is one of the initial premises that launched fan studies. Henry Jenkins' seminal work Textual Poachers (1992) was written to show that fans are indeed "resistant readers" and not

"simply an outgrowth of the marketing efforts" (2008, 3.3). To rework this assumption and position fans as an active audience was the goal of firstwave fan studies in the early 1990s (see BaconSmith 1992; Penley 1992), and media studies scholars have long been concerned with eliminating the popular understanding of fans as powerless consumers.

Prejudices about fans, however, still persist in mainstream media, where they are often stereotypically presented as the Other (such as hysterical teenage female fans of the Twilight books and movies; see Carr 2008; Pinkowitz 2011). Outside an academic context, the "death of the author" (Barthes 1977, 142–48) seems to be taking place only now, with the industry starting to realize that audiences are not merely readers or viewers, but instead participate in the production of meaning (see Jenkins 1992 and 2006 for describing the framework of a "participatory culture"; see Ross 2008 for a description of TV networks'

strategies of inviting viewers to participate).

2. In this essay, I use the terms power and agency as largely interchangeable, since my argument—and thus my conception of agency—foregrounds not only an idea of "power as the opportunity to do something in relation to the text" (Ross 2008, 72) but also an idea of

"power over some group or entity" (Ross 2008, 72). The belief in the power of the fan as a transformer of the metatext has informed scholarship on fan fiction, which emphasizes the fans' agency and authorship expressed in the act of writing stories (see, for example, Jenkins 1992, Busse 2005)—although their direct voicing in A/Ns has not been studied so far. According to this idea of "power as an opportunity to do something," fannish power and authority constitute themselves largely in the fans' ability to transform the metatext, to use it for their own purposes—in other words, to demonstrate their agency by producing text.

Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the issue of power in the latter meaning of exerting "power over" someone is becoming increasingly important in fan fiction, with fans not only recognizing their importance as consumers to buy merchandise but also their influence with the metatext's creators (witness the attention fans enjoy from the producers of Supernatural). Consequentially, both of these conceptions are coded in A/Ns as statements of fannish power.

3. The Library of Moria that houses The Lord of the Rings slash stories, for example, not only requires an extensive amount of paratext but also prescribes "a real summary" and using their rating system, among numerous other obligations (2002). The LiveJournal community merlinrpf, on the other hand, demands no header besides a disclaimer, but its roughly 2,000

members nevertheless introduce their stories with title, author, pairing, warnings, summary, and so on.

4. While Dark Satirist attempts to disempower her readers by making her reluctance to

engage in discussions about her story obvious, most fan authors instead position themselves firmly as members of their community, asking for feedback, thanking their readers for

suggestions, and encouraging criticism both of content and writing—often with a direct call for help, if the audience feels it is needed. Nevertheless, those very same writers who engage in collaborative writing still use their A/Ns to suggest certain reading positions by describing their own conception of characters, story lines, or settings in their paratext, which once more testifies to the tensions at work within the genre.

5. I chose the fandoms of Supernatural, Star Wars, and Twilight because they are among the most popular ones on FanFiction.net, with a large number of writers active in them on a daily basis. In addition, FanFiction.net offers the advantage of an openly accessible archive that is immensely wellknown and has few limitations for authors to register, giving me the chance to include diverse voices in my research (which was fostered by not selecting them according to any background information such as sex, nationality, or age). While most excerpts are from the years 2010 and 2011, I restricted myself to the last six years so as to not give undue representation to Star Wars ( Supernatural started airing in September 2005;

the first book of the Twilight series was published in October 2005).

6. Even though my essay focuses on how fans legitimize their own interpretations of the

metatext by assuming different subject positions, I do not want to disclaim the power the original authors and the published text still hold over some parts of fan communities.

Discussions about the meaning of the metatext abound, with fans focusing on minute details to declare that their ideas, preferred pairing, or love of certain characters is the most valid.

Angua, in a 2006 essay entitled "If the Author Is Dead, Who's Updating Her Website?" at the Harry Potter fan Web site The Leaky Cauldron, argues extensively for the importance of J. K.

Rowling's authority in interpreting her books, even while acknowledging that "the less J. K.

Rowling says about her own intentions, the more freedom fans have in their own fan fiction, theories, and other imaginative interactions with the books."

7. The frequency of A/Ns containing the words I, me, my/mine is overwhelming. Not only have I found few instances of fans not using them in their paratext, but they generally present a contrast to they, them, their/s used as references to the original creators.

8. And, of course, in turn fan authors thus imbue themselves with power, which again

testifies to the various models of authorship at work in fandom: if they express the importance and their acceptance of their audience's interpretations of their story, the writers simultaneously empower themselves as they create valued interpretations of the metatext—

which they are an audience of.

9. Sharon Marie Ross, for example, reports a number of cases where fannish efforts led to

TV networks picking up discontinued shows (e.g., The WB's Roswell in 2000), their success depending entirely on the communities created through Internet interaction (2008, 233–35).

10. In her case study of Nanako, a native speaker of Mandarin, Rebecca W. Black exemplified how the community of readers/reviewers responded to Nanako's use of A/Ns.

With the fan author detailing her desired approach to her stories, her audience replied

accordingly, commenting on specific nonAmerican content, praising her grasp of English, and so on (2008a, 80–115; 2007, 121–32).

11. A similar case is described by Leora Hadas, who studied guidelines of fan fiction archives, concluding that by fan writers' adherence to these rules "the owners of the archive are granted a position of gatekeeping that is denied the owners of the copyright" (2009, 6.5).

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Praxis

Lip dubbing on YouTube: Participatory culture and cultural

globalization

Mark C. Lashley

University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States

[0.1] Abstract— In the phenomenon of lip dubbing online, music fans throughout the world mime along with their favorite (usually Western) pop songs, and distribute videos of the performances to web video sites like YouTube. Two popular examples of the form are examined: China's Back Dorm Boys, and Moymoy Palaboy, from the Philippines. The dozens of videos produced by each group speak to issues of cultural imperialism and globalization, as well as broader concerns about participatory culture within the YouTube space.

[0.2] Keyword— Cultural imperialism

Lashley, Mark C. 2012. "Lip Dubbing on YouTube: Participatory Culture and Cultural Globalization." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0408.

1. Introduction

[1.1] As YouTube, the world's largest online video hosting service, has expanded and developed since its inception in 2005, it has taken on the character of a massive global media platform. It is a readily accessible site for all forms of usercreated video coming from all corners of the globe. As such, it exists as a sphere for many types of identity practice, as scholars have begun to discuss (see Strangelove 2010 and Burgess and Green 2009, for example). This paper attempts to situate the YouTube user and video creator as a transnational figure through an exploration of participatory culture and media usage, along with a critique of cultural imperialism, a theory that has attempted to define the media landscape as a contested cultural space in which Western culture prevails over all.

[1.2] I examine two pairs of "lip dub" artists: the Back Dorm Boys, from China, and Moymoy Palaboy, from the Philippines. Each of these artists creates music videos soundtracked by popular songs to which the users performatively lip sync along, using humor as the dominant form of representation. Both artists have made a name for themselves through their videos, rising to some degree of fame in their native countries. While lip synching has been the subject of some scholarship (Sutton 2009),

it has been mostly technical in nature, failing to account for issues of identity that arise within these visual texts. I contend that the lip dub provides a unique form of identity practice, characterizing the kind of participatory cultural creation the YouTube template brings about.

[1.3] The work of both Axel Bruns (2008) and Henry Jenkins (2006) can be useful in conceptualizing how a cultural performance like this (and a performance space like YouTube) might operate. Jenkins's work on convergence underlines the ways in which changing media forms influence how individuals are able to use cultural spaces, while Bruns's concept of "produsage" (producer and user, existing within the same body) complements Jenkins by placing participatory culture on the level of the individual.

[1.4] The global level of participatory culture is largely underserved in the literature.

YouTube is rife with content from all over the world, and that content is largely unregulated. Consequently, users like the Back Dorm Boys and Moymoy Palaboy can be (and have been) viewed millions of times by other users throughout the world. To study these cases of international YouTube personalities, we can couple general theoretical assumptions about participatory culture with the critique of cultural imperialism set forth by John Tomlinson (1991), whose noble attempt to tame the body of scholarship on global culture arrived at the notion of "cultural globalization."

Each of these theoretical arrangements will be discussed at length below.

[1.5] A few questions arise: What do we make of the Western music and aesthetics chosen by these citizens of China and the Philippines? How does this cultural reappropriation inform our understanding of contemporary media usage? And, more generally, what does the lip dub as a form of participatory culture (and YouTube as a means of distribution) mean in a global context? I will attempt to demonstrate how theory on fandom and convergence culture offers us a language with which to discuss these kinds of performances—that what is at play is more complex than simple East

West binaries, and that ideas of cultural appropriation are both nuanced and fluid.

What is at work is something far more nuanced than Western culture's dominance over East.

2. Cultural imperialism

[2.1] As stated above, to examine the international role of the YouTube user, I will draw from two bodies of literature: that of YouTube and participatory culture generally, and the contentious arena of the cultural imperialism thesis. First, I examine cultural imperialism as perhaps outdated in light of new and open forms of expression, and as possibly poorly formulated (and reductionist) from the start.

[2.2] The term "cultural imperialism" has both the benefit and drawback of having no formal definition. It is usually taken to mean a sense that culture and cultural products from a dominant culture are more or less imposed on less culturally powerful nations or populations; it is typically understood that the West exerts cultural dominance on

"the rest." However, cultural imperialism is far more slippery to define than all that, as Tomlinson (1991) suggests in his seminal work on the subject. Further, the concept has been oriented in terms of what Tomlinson calls the "cultural imperialism thesis,"

which, to his mind, still unsettlingly plays at definition and falsely claims to represent a coherent body of thought. For Tomlinson, cultural imperialism is a concept negotiated through discourse (he invokes Foucault to drive this point home), which exists as a metaphor for colonialism. Still, regardless of his efforts, something like a definition emerges, in terms of "ways to talk about cultural imperialism." One of the most interesting ways to conceptualize the thesis is as "media imperialism," which he describes at length:

[2.3] Media imperialism, then, as I understand it, is a particular way of discussing cultural imperialism. It is not simply a name for the study of the media in developing countries or of the international market in

communications. It involves all of the complex political issues—and indeed, the political commitments—entailed in the notion of cultural domination…

The main cluster of issues arising out of the discourse of media imperialism has to do with the way in which domination is said to occur. (22)

[2.4] While Tomlinson describes both Marxist and neoliberal strands of media imperialism, he falls most often to discussing the Marxist incarnation, which forefronts domination and the exercise of power. The means of domination he emphasizes are, for example, cultural goods like American television programs being distributed in the Third World, infiltrating and quashing indigenous cultures in a way that mirrors the conquering of indigenous lands. While this view may be conceptually problematic, it points to the way Tomlinson views the discourse of cultural imperialism. However, it is also useful to look at one of the other ways Tomlinson has introduced to study this process: "cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality." This conceptualization is also helpful because it addresses how culture becomes identified with the nationstate or region. This dovetails with Gellner's (1983) central thesis of culture being the main tool with which the nation is built, an observation that is at once facile and nearly impossible to dispute. Tomlinson's other ways of discussing cultural imperialism are

"cultural imperialism as a critique of global capitalism" and "cultural imperialism as a critique of modernity," which need not be discussed at length here.

[2.5] By the end of Tomlinson's tome, he has arrived at a sharpened critique of cultural imperialism:

[2.6] These protests are often formulated in an inappropriate language of domination, a language of cultural imposition which draws its imagery from the age of high imperialism and colonialism… Now, though these practices need to be remembered as part of the process by which the West placed itself in a position of global dominance, they are clearly not the most useful way of thinking about presentday cultural imperialism. What dogs the critique of cultural imperialism is the problem of explaining how a cultural practice can be imposed in a context which is no longer actually coercive. By thinking of cultural imperialism as the spread of modernity, these problems are avoided. For what is involved in this spread is a process, not of cultural imposition, but of cultural loss. (173)

[2.7] It is key here that Tomlinson has situated the discussion away from a model of imposition into a model of cultural loss; this will resonate with the YouTube analyses that follow. In a later essay, Tomlinson (1997) further develops the critique, questioning the concept's relation to globalization and reemphasizing the shifty nature of viewing the concept in terms of dominance. To encompass his theory, he argues for the term "cultural globalization," which, while not dismissing the power relations inherent in cultural exchange, eliminates the false notion of Western dominance in culture. Cultural globalization is a fitting moniker under which to discuss how global participatory culture operates.

3. Participatory culture and the new global user

[3.1] Early in its existence, YouTube was frequently seen as a site for users to engage with already dominant media forms like television (Lotz 2007 engages with YouTube as simply a form of television), but recognition of the platform as a cultural game changer has since become widespread. Strangelove (2010) envisions YouTube almost as something akin to the home movie, a form that has been present since consumer video cameras became widespread in the mid20th century. However, he accounts for the social dimensions of the space, and the implications of YouTube as an almost universally accessible video source in a more thorough way than others have.

For Strangelove, YouTube is a site where the ordinary is king, and where sharing is paramount.

[3.2] One of the most notable attempts to corral YouTube into a conceptual frame comes from Burgess and Green (2009), who note that YouTube itself is an unstable force of culture, undergoing constant changes in form and complicated by being both a topdown and bottomup distribution platform (meaning it caters both to original cultural products as well as reappropriated forms from other media). The pair wrestle also with the discourse around YouTube, whose legitimacy as a host of media content

has often been challenged. Perhaps most interestingly, Burgess and Green put an interesting spin on the YouTube user, whether that user represents a major media outlet or produces content individually from his own home: "All contributors of content to YouTube are potential participants in a common space; one that supports a diverse range of uses and motivations, but that has a coherent cultural logic—what we refer to as the YouTubeness of YouTube" (57).

[3.3] Henry Jenkins (2009), writing in the same tome, tempers this sense of commonality a bit, noting that while the YouTube space does value amateur content, the space is not conceived as a meritocracy, and the perspectives of the minority have the effect of being hidden among the mass. This is but one effect of a broader trend Jenkins notes: the great takeaway from YouTube is that its altering of the means of cultural reception is far more significant than any changes it reflects in production style. Were YouTube not to exist, the ease of video production engendered by new technologies would simply manifest itself in other ways.

[3.4] All the same, issues of both production and reception are significant to what Jenkins (2006) calls sites of convergence (of which YouTube is undoubtedly one), where "consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content" (3). In this dispersal, media forms never truly disappear, but the technologies we use to access them constantly change. The ways in which users adapt to those changes are what is truly important. Further, these changes exist from the topdown and from the bottomup (production and reception).

And, most important to Jenkins, technological changes (along with changes in media economics and systems of capital that go along with them) allow for a greater sense of participation and collectivity, whether this is the ability to easily distribute video content or to build knowledge communities that benefit all.

[3.5] As such, Jenkins positions his convergence theory as a counterpoint to what he cattily calls "critical pessimism":

[3.6] Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation,

"propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass destruction." Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the

complexity of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. (248)

[3.7] Witness how, like Tomlinson, Jenkins is reacting against a view that emphasizes domination. Theories of domination have the tendency to dismiss cultural practices and cultural creations like the ones discussed below.

[3.8] Jenkins's critical utopianism dovetails nicely with the work of Bruns (2008), who covers similar participatory terrain, conceptualizing new media forms as meritocracies, and resting on notions of collective intelligence. In Bruns's view, open media are truly democratic, allowing the most appealing products to win out. Bruns operates at the level of the user, offering a handy portmanteau—the "produser"

(producer plus user)—to embody a new kind of subject that could come into existence only in the contemporary era. To wit: "The distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance… Users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role—they have become a new hybrid, produser" (2, emphasis in original).

[3.9] Those "produsers" who engage in the practice of media like YouTube are directly involved in all aspects of the cycle of media use, able to create content if they choose, and able to actively make decisions about what media they consume, how and when they consume it, and what kinds of feedback they wish to provide. The site of production is decentralized, and as a consequence, modes of reception are diverse.

Taken with Jenkins, this model provides a highly instructive means with which to define the YouTube user.

[3.10] Similar terrain is covered by Bauman (2005), who defines "liquid life," the seamless movement between production and use that characterizes contemporary media practice. Other scholars, like Deuze (2008) have taken these notions of participatory culture into the realm of political economy, analyzing what the changing dynamics of media mean for work, interrogating Bauman and Jenkins for failing to emphasize issues of user labor.

[3.11] Perhaps, though, it is most useful for this discussion to allow Jenkins (2006, 257) to have the final word: "The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but by writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media."

[3.12] For Jenkins, this optimistic view of cultural production is embodied by the way culture is embraced and resisted, taken and remade. Enter the lip dub, a form of cultural reappropriation par excellence.

4. The global fan

[4.1] A final note is necessary at this point. This new style of user behavior (modding, amending, recirculating) should be viewed within the existing discussion on fandom, which reverberates in discussions on both cultural globalization and participatory culture. Each of these texts is the product of a particular kind of global fan practice, namely the adaptation and reincorporation of (predominantly) Western musical styles. Harrington and Bielby (2007) make an opening volley into a conceptualization of what they recognize as "global fan culture," finding that term problematic. As they see it, the study of the global fan is in crisis, with some debate as to whether such a phenomenon even exists. This worry resonates, as little theoretical work has gone towards conceptualizing this specific type of fan/user (one who interacts with media products in the sphere of cultural globalization). Regardless of fandom's role in cultural globalization, Jenkins (2007) himself has argued that the role of the fan should not be underestimated when dealing with issues of new media, community, and convergence. Here we turn to the Back Dorm Boys and Moymoy Palaboy, exemplars of fandom, produsage, and cultural globalization.

5. Chinese Backstreet Boys/Back Dorm Boys

[5.1] The first video by the Back Dorm Boys (or as they have often been called, the

"Chinese Backstreet Boys") was posted to YouTube in 2006, when the site itself was in relative infancy. In fact, these two Chinese art students, Wei Wei and Huang Yi Xin, posted their first comedic lip dub video to a different Internet site in March of 2005.

Through a translator, Wei Wei told an American interviewer about the duo's beginnings and inspiration:

[5.2] We made our first BDB video in March, 2005. We just felt it was very funny and we actually got the inspiration from a funny video abroad. We post the video to the local internet network of college. Other students liked it very much, and then they helped us to spread it out… My friend

recommended that video to me. After watching it, we felt it really funny. But that video only lasts for around 10 seconds. We began to wonder what it could be if we completed a whole song.

(http://www.projectgoodluck.com/blog/2006/08/backdormboys

interview.php)

Video 1. "I Want It That Way" by ewo.

[5.3] The song they eventually chose was "I Want It That Way," a 1990s pop hit by American boy band Backstreet Boys. In its most popular incarnation on YouTube, the video created by the Back Dorm Boys has over 13 million views. Since it is hosted elsewhere on YouTube, as well as on countless other videosharing sites, we can presume it has been viewed countless more times than that. In it, the two students (Huang Yi Xin on screen left and Wei Wei on screen right) emotively lip sync along with the song, trading off lead and background vocals. They sit in front of a desktop computer, presumably filming the performance on a webcam. The picture quality is quite grainy and out of focus, common to webcam technologies of the mid 2000s. The two boys' faces take up most of the frame during the entirety of the video, but aside from Wei Wei and Huang Yi Xin we can make out a few other significant details.

Primarily, the setting of the video is undoubtedly a college dorm room. In between the two singers, we can make out the back of a male figure diligently working at a desk.

Above him is a bookshelf containing books and a number of other indistinguishable items. We see light coming in from the left side of the screen where a window is likely placed. This positioning of two desks across from one another is quite typical of the dorm room space. These are clearly two students having some fun in their free time.

The shot composition was discussed briefly by Wei Wei in the interview referenced above:

[5.4] Art school training really helps us a lot in making videos. It prepares us with art basis and sculpture aesthetics so that we can pay a lot of attention to the composition of pictures, vision effect and light contrast in our videos. Besides, we got training of creativity and advertising in art

school. It prompts us to make new creations in each video so that it can impress more people.

[5.5] Also of interest, and completely inescapable, is what the two singers are wearing. Both Huang Yi Xin and Wei Wei don Houston Rockets basketball jerseys with black tshirts underneath. Wei Wei wears a white headband to complete the look of athletic attire. While we don't see the name on either jersey, Wei Wei's is clearly emblazoned with the number 11, the jersey number of Rockets center and Chinese sporting hero Yao Ming, the most notable (and one of the only) player of Chinese origin in the NBA. Here we see the influence of global culture, and the influence of both Chinese and American cultural signifiers within the Back Dorm Boys' production.

[5.6] The pair lip sync to the entire 4minute song, working between what appear to be choreographed dance moves (swaying side to side or back and forth in unison or opposition) and improvisation (some bouncing and hand gestures toward the camera).

As one might expect when translating sounds from a foreign tongue, there are some peculiarities with the lip sync. Sometimes the two trade off singing in midline, sometimes there are gaps where no lip synching occurs at all, and often lip movements do not directly translate to the sounds a native English speaker would expect to hear. Still, the performances of the two singers suggest they understand the original song's context on at least a basic level. Synching the lyrics "You are my fire/my one desire" during the song's stripped down middle eighth, Wei Wei points to the camera and clenches his hands to his heart while dancing, signifying his knowledge of the work as a plaintive love song, and exercising it as such, even though he may not know what every word means.

[5.7] At the end we see credits (written in Chinese) along with some outtakes, suggesting this performance was tried multiple times to achieve the best possible result. This is a work by a pair of produsers who were clearly aware and pitching toward an audience of peers, as Wei Wei's interview answer suggests (at least passingly considering what cultural signifiers to use in their production, and considering who might receive their content). Spurred on by the success of this video, the Back Dorm Boys have performed many other lip dubs, a few of which I will detail here.

Video 2. "As Long As You Love Me" by duncanmeister.

[5.8] Another Backstreet Boys hit, the Back Dorm Boys tackled a lip dub of "As Long As You Love Me" shortly after "I Want It That Way." The premise and setup is the same: Huang Yi Xin on the left, Wei Wei on the right, the same basic camera position, the third student working hard at his computer (or perhaps playing a game?) in the background. This time, the pair wear matching red Adidas track jackets, another Western cultural artifact, instead of their basketball jerseys. "As Long As You Love Me"

is a song of similar tempo, but allows for more lyrical breathing room. The duo begin over the song's first few bars looking pensively at the camera, Huang Yi Xin scratching his nose, and Wei Wei seemingly in deep thought.

[5.9] When the first lead vocal kicks in, Huang Yi Xin launches himself toward the camera to belt it out, a funny cockeyed smile on his face, ironic considering the line is

"My loneliness has always been a friend of mine." The pair trade verse lines, each doing the same kinds of interesting, overthetop facial contortions. This is a hammier performance, played even more for comedy than the one before. The performers, always selfaware, appear to be less playing with the material than directly commenting on its ridiculousness. "As Long As You Love Me" is a funnier exercise in the creators' talents, mugging for the camera, mocking the source material and themselves. The same notions of cultural translation (the slightlyoff lip movements) persist, but this appears to be the Back Dorm Boys poising themselves for a mass audience through their technological savvy and their love and knowledge of Western pop music. It is a far clearer work of parody than their first attempt, and a far sharper one.

Video 3. "Da Da Da" by VampLuver28.

[5.10] Perhaps the silliest Back Dorm Boys performance is their lip dub of the (already silly) pop hit "Da Da Da." The German song has very few lyrics, and this barebones composition allows the Back Dorm Boys some freer interpretation in their performance. This time Huang Yi Xin and Wei Wei wear matching Pepsisponsored China football jerseys (note again the embodiment of East and West within the same figure), but their relative positions are the same. Huang Yi Xin begins the video standing, with Wei Wei seated. As the ticktock rhythm of the song's percussion kicks in, the pair begin to alternate position in a strange simulacrum of a pop and lock breakdance move. They alternate performing one repeated German lyric, and move in opposition up and down, back and forth, and around the room, to the clicking meter of the song. As the title line, "da da da," is sung, Wei Wei crouches in and out of screen right, while Huang Yi Xin cycles his arms through the air in a swimming motion in the background (the third student even gets up and leaves about halfway through). At one point Huang Yi Xin plays with a soccer ball held into frame by a third person. The video required perhaps the most elaborate choreography of any of the duo's videos, providing a commentary on the song through dance rather than through simulated vocal performance.

[5.11] The Back Dorm Boys have performed in 20 to 30 videos and only a small number of them have been surveyed here. The basic premise and structure are nearly always the same, and some videos have proven much more popular (if assessed in terms of view count) than others. The pair have parlayed their Internet celebrity into offline fame, lip dubbing Backstreet Boys songs live on Chinese television and performing in Motorola commercials; they have made videos promoting Pepsi, celebrating Christmas, and covering countless Western pop songs both classic and

contemporary. While their most popular international videos are parodies of Western artists, they have also performed lip dubs of a number of Chinese pop songs. They present a complicated case in the discussion of global culture and user production.

Additionally, their performances lend themselves to discussions of gender and sexuality (as with their sendup of Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j80YDDfiaT4]) that have not been discussed at length here. What is most notable is that the Back Dorm Boys have inspired a lip dub culture that is so pervasive that any casual viewer of YouTube would be unlikely to miss it. Those who have followed in their wake include Filipino duo Moymoy Palaboy, discussed below.

6. Moymoy Palaboy

[6.1] Moymoy Palaboy, a pair of Filipino brothers who go by the handles Moymoy and Roadfill, have become popular for a series of comedic lip dub videos, but have also achieved mainstream success as comics and singers, appearing on television comedies and signing a recording contract in their native country. Their first video, a lip dub of

*NSYNC's "Dirty Pop," was recorded via cell phone camera by Moymoy and uploaded to YouTube in February of 2007. In later videos, Moymoy appears with his brother, whom he convinced to join him in his comedic endeavor

(http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/entertainment/entertainment/view/20080709

147434/MoymoyPalaboysuperstar).

Video 4. "Dirty Pop" (2007) by moymoypalaboy.

[6.2] "Dirty Pop" was filmed by Roadfill but features only Moymoy on camera. Unlike the work of the Back Dorm Boys, Moymoy's videos have been, from the start, far more

technically sophisticated, suggesting a more advanced level of produsage. Shooting on cell phone camera rather than webcam allows for more portability and use of locations, and "Dirty Pop" makes heavy use of editing to create a more fluid narrative structure.

Still, the lip dub is fairly basic in form. Most shots of Moymoy are done in closeup, and he lip syncs along with the song's lead vocal, earnestly looking into the camera (wideeyed) while he performs outlandish dance moves with his hands and upper body. The video's two main shots are of Moymoy in indistinct backgrounds. In one he is filmed straight on wearing a black shirt, while in the other, the camera is held at a Dutch angle about shoulder high, shooting Moymoy shirtless. During the shirtless shots, Moymoy chooses more sexually provocative dance moves, and appears to be mugging more for the camera. The video also features some rudimentary intertitles: during the choruses, a bright blue screen with "Dirty Pop!" in comic book lettering intermittently appears. The notion of "dirty" is played with quite clearly in shots of Moymoy's (presumably) dirty laundry hanging on a line (followed by a suggestive full body shot of a shirtless Moymoy removing the clothing from the line). Unlike the Back Dorm Boys, Moymoy is an English speaker, with a full understanding of the nuances of the words he pretends to sing.

[6.3] The second half of the video continues the sexual theme. After mimicking the line "Man, I'm tired of singing," the video cuts to a full shot of Moymoy dancing in a kitchen, shirtless with a pair of black jeans and a garish belt buckle. The shot is color manipulated, beginning in a greentinted sepia tone, and cycling through other colors, from yellow to red. We return from the dancing to one of the master shots (the black shirted one), with Moymoy's crotch front and center in the frame; as the vocal part of the song kicks back in, he relaxes into his normal singing pose. The video ends with a digital rendering of Moymoy's face on the cover of a newspaper, suggesting the impending stardom he strived to receive. This opening foray of Moymoy's plays with issues of celebrity, technological savvy, and the blending of cultures, condensed into a shortform pop parody.

Video 5. "Wannabe" (2007) by moymoypalaboy.

[6.4] After the "Dirty Pop" video, Roadfill began appearing in videos alongside his brother. An early (and very popular) piece was the duo's lip synched version of the Spice Girls' hit "Wannabe" (2007). At almost 15 million views, "Wannabe" is perhaps the most iconic of Moymoy Palaboy's works to date. For all the relatively sophisticated construction of "Dirty Pop," "Wannabe" would not feel terribly out of place in the Back Dorm Boys canon. Roadfill, with a long shock of brown hair and a "Jag USA" Tshirt, appears screen left, with Moymoy on screen right in a white tank top. The pair mimic the giggling intro of the Spice Girls single, before the music kicks in with the vocal (mimed by Roadfill) of "I'll tell you what I want," silently screamed toward the camera.

The two cycle through each line, mirroring the construction of the original song, and incorporate a series of stereotypically feminine dance moves. "Wannabe" rests a great deal of its humor on the inherent shock value of male actors appropriating the voices and mannerisms of female singers.

[6.5] Moymoy Palaboy's official YouTube channel

(http://www.youtube.com/user/moymoypalaboy) contains dozens of videos, many of

them lip dubs falling into the motif of either "Dirty Pop" (constructed through editing and the use of multiple locations and narratives) or "Wannabe" (single location comedic songanddance routine). They have also branched out into live music (where the pair sing for themselves), comic sketches, and other types of content, displaying the kind of versatility that has landed them on television and in the recording studio.

Their page is even emblazoned with a CocaCola advertisement featuring the two brothers, culled from a broader campaign they starred in for the soft drink. Moymoy Palaboy have taken the simple concept of the lip dub and, through a command of

YouTube's means of production and presentation, used it to propel themselves to superstardom in their homeland.

7. Discussion and conclusions

[7.1] It is clear that both Moymoy Palaboy and the Back Dorm Boys, for all of their similarities and differences, are both operating within a sphere of participatory culture, the kind that would not have been possible before the advent of YouTube or something similar. We should consider the lip dub—the cultural form that both pairs ascribe—first as a form of global culture. As Harrington and Bielby (2007) have contested the notion of the "global fan" (or at least suggested the concept is in need of some coherent theoretical foundation), we can look at Moymoy Palaboy and the Back Dorm Boys instead as global actors operating within a specific cultural apparatus. The position of these artists as fans is incredibly significant, however. Some form of cultural reinscription operates within many kinds of YouTube texts, but these lip dub artists present cases in which this reinscription operates when performers are dealing clearly with cultures that are foreign and different than their own. It is significant not only that these artists choose to parody popular music, but also that, as Filipino and Chinese citizens, respectively, they choose to parody Western cultural objects. In the minds of these performers, most of the chosen songs are clearly part of a foreign culture, but these songs are beloved along with, but not in place of, local cultural products (witness the Back Dorm Boys' use of both Chinese and Western popular music). Other than the music itself, we also see additional Western cultural products on display, no less embedded in the text: there are the Houston Rockets jerseys (USA), Adidas track suits (Germany), Coke, Pepsi, Motorola, etc. It is worth considering that these performers may not consider these products in terms of East

West, but of whatever strikes their fancy—a testament to a global culture. Further, the iconography of CocaCola and Pepsi are present because of the artists' commercial relationships with those companies, clear evidence of global economy at play just as the apparatus of fame engages the performers.

[7.2] Perhaps in illustrating this it is best to speak the language of Tomlinson (1991) and to address this textual critique to potential issues of cultural imperialism. The media imperialism paradigm that Tomlinson offers (as a way of discussing cultural imperialism generally) is not necessarily as it appears at first glance. Neither Moymoy Palaboy's nor the Back Dorm Boys' videos offer immediate, concrete evidence of forms of domination. Certainly, most of the cultural products present in these texts are Western (mostly American) creations that have been reappropriated by citizens of the Eastern world. These are forms that are taken up by these produsers with a clear fondness for their entertainment value. Tomlinson provides us a middle passage between dominance and acceptance (stemming from the neoliberal theory of cultural

imperialism) that he calls cultural coercion—cultural products do not exercise dominance but are nonetheless offered to (and taken up by) heavily suggestible populations. In some form, this kind of cultural coercion is likely at work. However, the presence of both indigenous and Western cultural products within these videos suggests that such coercion is an incredibly nuanced process, such that, though some form of Western cultural dominance may affect what cultural choices are present to a given population, there is a sense of agency among these produsers in terms of when and how to deploy Western cultural signifiers.

[7.3] Tomlinson, writing years before mass opportunity for recycling and reappropriating culture even existed, resituated this debate in terms of cultural globalization. While there is power embedded within the cultural product, the issue is not always one of dominance or coercion; this perspective is far more flexible and far less deterministic than that of others who speak the language of imperialism. The texts created by Moymoy Palaboy and the Back Dorm Boys embody many forms of culture, and these produsers are citizens of an increasingly denationalized world. For the Back Dorm Boys, we see the influence of native language on the interpretation of the songs (less so for Moymoy Palaboy, who are English speakers). Because of the nearuniversal structure of popular music, except for a few hiccups along the way, Back Dorm Boys are able to capture the cadence of song lyrics and the emotional underpinning of the music. This is evidence of the global nature of popular music as a form. The way in which this brand of Western culture operates in places like China and the Philippines represents a change in the way culture is read and processed. Here we see resonance with Jenkins, as the culture of convergence has, to some degree, influenced the ways in which transnational cultural traffic might be understood.

[7.4] We might recall Jenkins's (2006, 257) contention that "The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but by writing over it." In the cases of Moymoy Palaboy and the Back Dorm Boys, we see users who take cultural products (popular songs they are presumably fond of) and reinscribe them on a new platform, embedded in a different physical body. We see also, in a nutshell, how produsage operates: Moymoy Palaboy and the Back Dorm Boys are consumers of these popular songs, and producers of original cultural works that reference those songs.

[7.5] The participatory culture model framed in large part by Jenkins and Bruns is clearly in effect here. I would suggest that, in addition to the clear presence of produsage, a sense of convergence is at play, stemming from the ready accessibility of technology and an awareness among users of the modes of reception their videos undergo. In interviews, the members of the Back Dorm Boys have pointed to their art school training as aiding in their videos' lighting and composition.

(http://www.projectgoodluck.com/blog/2006/08/backdormboysinterview.php)

However, their video content does not appear very sophisticated (or at least, far less sophisticated than some of Moymoy Palaboy's work). Their process is enabled most significantly by the ready availability of the computer and webcam, the two chief technologies that make their cultural production possible. This is true, to some extent, in the case of Moymoy Palaboy, but (as evidenced in "Dirty Pop," for example) some of their creations require much more significant material technologies, like better cameras and editing software to achieve certain angles and special effects. Still, these technologies are likely commercial (meaning not professional) in nature. The affordable nature of such material is key to the media landscape that enables a phenomenon like produsage to exist.

[7.6] In light of these issues of participatory culture, the notion of fandom and reappropriation arises again as a concern. It is clear that both the Back Dorm Boys and Moymoy Palaboy are taking in, recycling, and in quite subtle ways (contrary to the outlandishness of their performances) making comments about the merits of certain cultural products. I would argue, certainly, that these artists are using this music (most of which is almost annoyingly pervasive throughout much of the world) for the purposes of parody. It may not be incredibly sophisticated parody, and there are certainly problems with its presentation, like the offensive gender representations that persist in a number of both artists' videos. However, it is clear in the work of both the Back Dorm Boys and Moymoy Palaboy that while there is a fondness for this music, there is a clear awareness that it is not to be taken terribly seriously. The music chosen is "pop" in perhaps its purest sense: 3 to 4minute, factoryproduced, sugarsweetened earworms by huge artists like Jessica Simpson, Backstreet Boys, and the Spice Girls. The parodies of the songs lie in the recognition of their popularity, an homage to their songcraft, and a sendup of their selfseriousness. Moreover, the reworking of the cultural text that Jenkins (2006) describes at least in these cases also plays out by "feeding it back into the mainstream media" (257), as both artists have achieved a level of fame in their own right, undergoing a process we might call

"mainstreaming." The cultural text is reflexive, open to interpretation, and prone to reappropriation.

[7.7] In closing, I will make note of a few points that could influence further research. First, cultural utopianism offers a way of examining culture that places emphasis on the role of the media user or produser, examining what can be done with culture, rather than what influence culture has on the individual. This does not disavow critique of how the user remakes or interprets cultural products; this analysis of Moymoy Palaboy and the Back Dorm Boys has hinted at some problematic issues that are worth further probing elsewhere. Second, it is worth noting how, perhaps beginning with the Back Dorm Boys, the lip dub has exploded as a cultural form. I

have attempted to discuss it in relation to participatory culture and the form of cultural reappropriation that it represents. However, it is worth investigating its ongoing use as a particular cultural form (particularly from a perspective more equipped to discuss linguistics and language barriers), and the meaning of that in terms of fandom and participatory practice. There is no doubt that both the Back Dorm Boys and Moymoy Palaboy have offered gateways into new uses of culture. They embody the model of the produser: avid consumers taking and remaking culture on a global level.

8. Works cited

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Deuze, Mark. 2007. Media Work. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Harrington, C. Lee and Denice D. Bielby. 2007. "Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies."

In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 179–97. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2007. "Afterword: The Future of Fandom." In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sandvoss, and C.

Lee Harrington, 357–64. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2009. "What Happened Before YouTube." In YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, edited by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, 109–25.

Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Lotz, Amanda D. 2007. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. New York: New York University Press.

Strangelove, Michael. 2010. Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sutton, Paul. 2009. "Lip Sync: Performative Placebos in the Digital Age." In Drama Education With Digital Technology, edited by John Carroll, Michael Anderson, and David Cameron, 38–51. London: Continuum.

Tomlinson, John. 1991. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tomlinson, John. 1997. "Cultural Globalization and Cultural Imperialism." In International Communication and Globalization, edited by Ali Mohammadi, 170–90.

London: Sage.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Praxis

Performing self, performing character: Exploring gender

performativity in online role-playing games

Heather Osborne

University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

[0.1] Abstract— Online narrative (fictionbased) roleplaying games and massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) provide a ludic structure in which role players enact the gender and sexuality of their avatars. To investigate how role players perceive and perform their avatars' gender and sexuality in online games, I invited role players from MMORPGs and narrative RPGs to participate in an online survey. This study examines how the online game environment mediates players'

selfexpression and their acceptance of minority identities. Qualitative analysis of the data collected suggests that players who demonstrate empathy with and examination of their avatars' genders and sexualities, and who experience a sense of belonging within the game structure, are able to form positive interpersonal relationships that allow them to accept others' expressed identities.

[0.2] Keywords— Avatar; Identity; Massively multiplayer online roleplaying game;

MMORPG; Narrative roleplaying game; Sexuality; Survey

Osborne, Heather. 2012. "Performing Self, Performing Character: Exploring Gender Performativity in Online RolePlaying Games." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0411.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Online roleplaying gamers perform characters in fantastic, invented, or realist settings, combine narrative with game play, and negotiate their experiences among different social frameworks. Some game types, such as narrative roleplaying games, rely on the players' mutual suspension of disbelief to define the extent of the shared world. Others, such as massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, provide elaborate world building through computer software. Yet in both cases, players'

engagement and participation define the reality of the game space.

[1.2] Online identities are informed by offline performances, and therefore online game spaces provide stages for performed selves. Within the game structure, players can choose to either reinscribe or rewrite cultural narratives around gender expression. Tynes (2010, 225) asserts that roleplaying offers participants the opportunity to "experiment by adopting personas different from themselves, ones that

they perhaps have coveted or even feared in life." Players may perform characters with a different gender identities or sexual orientations than they themselves identify with offline, and they may subvert gender norms by exploring alternatives to binary gender.

[1.3] Gender and sexuality influence the creation of both the players' online selfpresentations and their ingame characters. As Corneliussen (2008) notes, "Gender is always present in World of Warcraft and it always makes a difference…The visual gender representations clearly build on an idea of gender as difference" (75). Further, the players' gameframe characters and onlineframe selves are not constrained by the players' physical bodies. Crossgendered play underlines the performativity inherent in "natural" gender roles. Such parodies, in Butlerian terms, "[deprive]

hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities" (Butler 2004a, 112). Constructed gender in RPGs provides evidence of the constructed nature of all gender.

[1.4] To investigate how online role players perform gender and sexuality in the online and game frames, I conducted a qualitative survey of narrative RPG and MMORPG players. My analysis focused on three questions: first, what is the role of the game frame for players? Second, how are sexuality and gender performed in the game frame? And finally, what is the effect of the online and game frames on the player's offline, primary framework? My study uses Erving Goffman's frame analysis (1974) and Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity (1990) to explore the significance and expression of both players' and characters' gender and sexuality in online roleplaying games.

2. Game types

[2.1] An extensive variety of RPGs has been developed since the 1970s (Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler 2006). Some are conducted face to face, some require a single participant, and others require computermediated communication ranging from simple text interfaces to elaborate systems. My study investigates online games involving two or more players who interact in a game space via characters that they embody through roleplaying, with a focus on how players perform their own and their characters' gender and sexuality. The games I chose offered persistent pseudonymity, invited the use of character templates, involved storytelling, and included gender and sexuality.

[2.2] Story, game, and roleplay intersect within the online frame in MMORPGs and in narrative RPGs. MMORPGs include World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004–present) and EverQuest (Sony, 1999–present), which are "specifically designed to offer hundreds of

hours of highly interactive gameplay and for the development of characters' identities"

(Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler 2006, 6). In an ethnography of EverQuest, Chee, Vieta, and Smith (2006) found that to create a visual representation, players faced a

"laborious but often pleasurable task of going through numerous windows to choose the looks and attributes of a character" (155). Avatar archetypes that allow variations and player input but ultimately conform to an existing structure are an instantiation of Butler's assertion that "gender may be 'chosen' only from within the parameters of culturally available terms which always preexist the subject" (Salih 2004b, 22). In MMORPGs, these parameters are set within the game programming.

[2.3] Players often band together in guilds or raiding parties to combine their characters' strengths. Communication occurs via instant messaging or voiceover chat, which may take place at several levels of privacy (Chappell et al. 2006). Though players can engage with the game individually, guilds often progress as a group through the game's many quests. Costikyan (2010) observes that MMORPGs do not offer a single, progressive storyline; however, players' individual and guildlevel storytelling takes the programmed world as a starting point, not a fixed path. Players construct their characters' narratives on the scaffold of the preprogrammed worlds.

Thus, MMORPG players partake of interactive roleplaying, online game play, and narrative advancement.

[2.4] Narrative RPGs are text based, and their players must improvise written responses in the course of play. Players "describe what their fantasy personas say and do in the various situations encountered and how they respond to the myriad of ongoing consequences that result from those actions" (Waskul 2006, 24). The narrative RPG players I study utilize social networking sites that allow commentbased responses. Narrative RPGs may partake of the transgressive elements of fan fiction "in the way they depict action—as centrally located around issues of emotion and trust and sex…to access a greater dimension of feeling" (BaconSmith 2000, 113).

Sensuality among characters can appear as a storytelling element. Experienced players gain skill in telling stories and in exploring otherwise neglected facets of the characters they portray.

[2.5] Narrative RPGs must be distinguished from MUDs, or multiuser dungeons (or dimensions). An extensive body of research on MUDs discusses character creation and player immersion (Isabella 2007; Mortensen 2002). Both MUDs and narrative RPGs are text based, with players reading and writing the actions of the characters they embody. However, MUDs' worlds are restricted to computerprogrammed environments. Mortensen (2002) notes that "to be able to make sense of playing in a MUD, it is necessary to master the commands in the game"; these commands result in

character actions or speech. Characters created in MUDs are often an original amalgamation of traits invented by the players.

[2.6] Narrative RPGs do not require specific software, commands, or computergenerated environments. They consist of players writing description or dialogue. The worlds are limited only by players' understandings of the shared fictional world. In many narrative RPGs, players embody fictional characters chosen from popular media such as movies, television, and books. Narrative RPG players make choices for their characters on the basis of how the characters have been presented in their original canons. For these players, according to Stein (2006, 247), "both the source text and culturally shared codes of genre provide structures and limitations." The players'

performances shape how each character develops and which aspects of each character are emphasized.

[2.7] Narrative RPGs may be large, multiplayer games, or they may be limited to two or three players. Campfuckudie (2005–present), a multiplayer game originally based on LiveJournal and later migrated to Dreamwidth, is typical of the multiplayer game (note 1). Players perform characters from many different media canons who meet and interact in the game's setting, a summer camp inspired by the Bmovie genre. Players initiate narratives by describing their characters' actions in LiveJournal or Dreamwidth posts. Other players respond in threaded comments with their own characters'

dialogue and actions, which advance the events of a given scenario. Over time, characters form relationships as they explore the mysteries and dangers of the camp together. An example of a smaller, twoperson game on LiveJournal is Cuddy's House (200710), in which the characters Lisa Cuddy and Greg House from House M.D.

establish a romantic relationship. This game branches from the television series while maintaining the world and characters established in canon. The players write action, dialogue, and internal monologue, resulting in a narrative that resembles fan fiction with two POV characters. Unlike fan fiction, however, the game is not intended to reach a conclusion. Each comment thread continues until a given scenario is played out and then leads chronologically to the next. In both examples, players stay in character while participating in the game's main community, reserving outofcharacter (OOC) discussion for affiliated OOC communities or private chats. Players base their characters' personalities, including their gender and sexuality, on the media canon they seek to emulate through roleplaying.

[2.8] Identity construction in roleplaying games is a contentious area of research.

Ethnography, often combined with survey research, has been used to assess players'

levels of involvement and identification with characters and other players (Mortensen 2009; Taylor 2006; Chee, Vieta, and Smith 2006; Isabella 2007; Rybas and Gajjala 2007). Taylor (2006, 19, 54–55) remarks that the social reality within the game frame

is interwoven with our offline social reality. Klastrup (2009) asserts that game environments possess a quality of "worldness," that is, properties that define unique game worlds socially and technically. Players gain a sense of emotional reality tied to roleplaying games as "worldness" creates a sense of inclusion and reverberates as strong and affective memories. Despite the social aspect of roleplaying games, characters' identities are not equally important to all players. Players' strategies differ according to game type, group affiliation, and purpose of play. Taylor (2006, 71–73) compares power gamers and roleplay gamers. Power gamers are dedicated to leveling up and increasing the ludic efficiency of their characters, whereas roleplay gamers are dedicated to the narrative scope of the virtual world. Identity construction has different significance for the two kinds of players.

[2.9] Gender and sexuality influence the creation of both the players' online selfpresentations and their ingame characters. This does not mean that crossgender or crosssexuality play is intended to be transgressive. Many players cite ludic reasons to choose a crossgender avatar, as when straight men report choosing to play female characters because they have greater agility than male characters, or because female characters are more attractive to watch during play (Kennedy 2002). Nor is sexuality within the game frame a simple matter. As an example, Sundén (2009) proposes that players' queer sexuality in an LGBTfriendly guild both is and is not transgressive within the game space. While the players' queerness implicitly subverts the implied (straight, male) player, within an LGBTfriendly guild queer players regain a sense of identity and belonging that minimizes the transgression of their queer play. However, since players' gameframe characters and onlineframe selves are not constrained by the players' physical bodies, the genders and sexualities that they embody are representations that have been constructed for the game and online frames.

[2.10] This is an issue of ongoing debate in game studies research. For example, Nephew (2006) suggests that breaking cultural norms through crossgender play can discomfit players, leading to anxiety that results in exaggerated, parodic portrayals (134). By contrast, MacCallumStewart (2009) argues that as the proportion of female players in gaming communities increases, women are seen as a desirable demographic by game developers and are less often targeted with "pink" games. Crossgender playing has become a normal and normalized choice. Gaming preferences outweigh the importance of crossgender play; rather than being aberrant or subversive, crossgender play occurs for ludic reasons (MacCallumStewart 2008, 37), rendering it "safe, heterosexual, and emancipating."

[2.11] However, MacCallumStewart (2009, 232) also states that "there is a growing postmodern relationship between avatar and player which uses playful versions of gender to subvert the sexualisation of the female avatar." Despite its normalization,

gender play still occurs; players interpret and create gender as they interact within the game frame. Some players "very strongly identify with their characters as roleplayed identities; characters that they create and that have backstories exterior to gameplay"

(MacCallumStewart 2008, 36). This is not true of all players; however, players who particularly enjoy roleplaying are more likely to be mindful of how they represent all a character's traits, including gender and sexuality.

[2.12] In this paper, I contend that crossgendered play underlines the performativity inherent in "natural" gender roles (Butler 1990). Within the game structure, players can choose to either reinscribe or rewrite cultural narratives around gender expression. Following Kennedy (2002), I believe that the game is a liminal space that allows transgression of social and cultural norms. As games become increasingly representational and experiential, the game avatars provide opportunities to subvert gender norms by exploring alternative identities.

[2.13] Online RPG players form communities that cannot be said to differ from offline communities in any sense save the material. Chee, Vieta, and Smith (2006) argue that since online environments are "intimately intertwined with the greater lifeworld of gamers," players undertake the same methods of community building in the online and game frames as they do in their primary frames (160). In MMORPGs and narrative RPGs, players form relationships, interact via characters, and roleplay for both ludic and narrative purposes. The online and game frames, "where gender is being constructed, represented, and negotiated in ways not totally different from hegemonic Western discourses of gender," are appropriate spaces in which to investigate how gender is constituted and performed (Corneliussen 2008, 65). I will show how roleplaying, which often subverts gender norms, is a queering practice. Players negotiate and subvert their readings of digital media as texts and their readings of the texts as story, as virtual environments, and as RPGs.

3. Methodology

[3.1] I collected primary data by conducting an online survey of MMORPG and narrative RPG players. With approval from the Committee on Research Ethics at the University of Liverpool, the survey was made available online for a twomonth period (May#8211;June 2010), using resources available from the University of Liverpool's

Computing Services Department (http://survey.liv.ac.uk). Participation was invited via

a blog post (http://heatherosborne.speculativefiction.ca). Participants were required to be over 18, be fluent in written English, and have experience with MMORPGs or narrative RPGs. All responses were confidential and anonymous. Participants were informed they could withdraw from participation at any time by choosing not to submit the questionnaire. Completion and submission of the questionnaire was considered

evidence of informed consent. Once submitted, participants' responses were automatically emailed to me.

[3.2] The survey instrument consisted of 25 openended questions in seven sections.

The sections focus on demographics, including selfreported gender identification and sexuality; participants' experience with roleplaying games; their reasons for playing roleplaying games and the benefits they gain from doing so; the connection of roleplaying games with gender, with sexuality, and with relationships; and respondents'

further thoughts (see appendix). I developed the survey with support from the Committee on Research Ethics at the University of Liverpool. Questions were open ended to encourage participants to selfdisclose, and participants were encouraged to relate personal anecdotes.

[3.3] Because I gathered responses in the most convenient way (especially through snowball sampling), my data do not support statistical inference and are not generalizable to the larger population (Fricker 2008, 205). While I elaborate on the numerical breakdown of the responses, it is important to note that none of these results can be considered statistically significant, nor can they be quantitatively assessed in a meaningful way. My intention in conducting a qualitative analysis is to highlight tendencies or areas of interest that can be examined in the future.

Continuing research with larger sample sizes would help to uncover the extent to which online games are more, less, or equally attractive to different groups of players (for example, female/male, queer/straight, trans/cis). If, as my findings here suggest, role players seek safe spaces within games, marginalized groups may be better represented in RPG communities than elsewhere. My analysis must be seen as exploratory and preliminary, yet its relevance is evident from the ways in which it diverges from the current secondary literature, as I will show in my discussion. The data I collected can be viewed as an authentic portrayal of certain individual experiences within the roleplaying subculture. Future research might consider refining my questionnaire to a more generalizable instrument.

4. Results

[4.1] 86 responses to the survey were submitted. Of them, nine were submitted with no questions answered, and 19 bore answers to the demographics questions but no further information. I considered these 28 responses nonresponse errors and disregarded them. Another 15 respondents misidentified the purpose of the study and responded despite identifying as tabletop, LARP, MUD, or console gamers. Responses that did not discuss online MMORPGs or narrative RPGs were also eliminated as due to measurement error. The remaining 43 responses were analyzed using a close reading technique.

[4.2] Of the 43 respondents who identified as MMORPG or narrative RPG players, 14

were narrative RPG players, 23 were MMORPG players, and six played both types of games. Several respondents named other game types as well. If respondents identified one of the two investigated game types, their survey responses were included in the analysis.

[4.3] The youngest respondents were 20; the oldest was 53. The age distribution was bimodal, with the highest frequency of respondents at 23 and 26 years of age.

The mean age of respondents was 30.16 years. Nearly half (49%) of respondents fell in the 23–27 age bracket, with several older outliers influencing the mean. Because of ethical constraints, no gamers under 18 could be surveyed; therefore, younger gamers who might be prevalent in the population are not represented in the sample. Narrative RPG players tended to be younger, whereas MMORPG players tended to be present in all age brackets.

[4.4] Gender was selfreported, which allowed respondents to offer personal details.

24 respondents identified as female and 14 identified as male. The remaining five respondents identified as genderqueer or transgendered, with two indicating a preferred gender identity: R009 identified as "genderqueer, slanted female," and R037

identified as "transgender FTM" (note 2). Two others identified simply as genderqueer and one as transgender. Consolidating cisgendered females, transgender females, and genderqueer females as "femaleidentified," and cisgendered males, transgender males, and genderqueer males as "maleidentified," 58% of respondents identified as female, 35% identified as male, and 7% chose not to specify a binary gender identity.

While the MMORPG players among the respondents were equally likely to be male or female, narrative RPG players tended to be female.

[4.5] Sexuality was selfreported to allow nuanced selfidentifications. Respondents selfidentified in five categories: asexual (n = 5), heterosexual (n = 17), bisexual (n =

9), homosexual (n = 7), and pansexual (n = 5). When asexual individuals indicated a romantic preference, asexuality was still coded as the primary characteristic of the individual's sexuality. For instance, R037 identified as "asexual, biromantic," and this was coded as asexual. Several respondents indicated that while they considered themselves bisexual, they had not had relationships with both genders (or perhaps either). R015 stated, "I'm pretty green when it comes to relationships. In theory I like both men and women. but in practice…I've yet to have intercourse with anyone."

Finally, some individuals identified as polyamorous; however, in all instances, polyamory was referenced in addition to an identification as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, and it was considered as a secondary identification. Because of the small sample size, no inferences can be drawn about the relationship between respondents' selfidentified sexuality and preferred game type.

5. Discussion

[5.1] I identified three general themes in the survey data. Survey respondents demonstrated empathy for identities other than their own; negotiated safe spaces within the online and game frames; and achieved a sense of belonging through roleplay. RPG players use the game and online frames to situate their performativity, as individuals and as members of a community.

[5.2] Roleplaying is linked to empathy, since the "ability to put oneself in another's shoes, to understand how they think and to anticipate how they will act, [fits] a definition of gaming itself, with fantasy roles replacing real roles" (Mello 2006, 189).

Role players model their characters' emotions and reactions as well as those of other players and characters. Nephew (2006) finds that "roleplaying skill is an important part of social cognition, communication, and interaction, and reflects an underlying empathy" in the role player (121). Interacting with another character rewards a player's investment and encourages reciprocity. Empathetic role players respect other identities, discover new parts of themselves, and respect alternative decisionmaking processes.

[5.3] Empathy is not universal, nor is it consistently employed. Players might empathize with their own characters (taking care to ensure their realism and internal life), with other characters (by engaging with them in the fantasy frame), or with other players (through mutualism and group support). However, empathy might extend only to one's character or only to one's group, with outgroup characters or players being subject to degradation or disdain. For instance, empathy for others would be counterproductive in EverQuest on playerversusplayer servers, but it is an important tool on playerversusenvironment servers, where players' cooperation increases their chance of success. Insofar as RPGs encourage players to interact in order to succeed, they represent social spaces in which empathy can be used as a powerful tool to increase engagement.

[5.4] Players performing characters with gender identities different than their own may empathize with those alternative identities. Players present themselves online as male, female, other, or unspecified, and the characters they embody have the same or a greater range of choices. Players performing alternative identities may not intend to engage in transgressive acts; however, such play with boundaries and identities is itself transgressive. Players may play crossgender characters for several reasons, including "reasons of interest, to experiment playing a different gendered character for fun, and to prevent unsolicited male approaches" (Hussain and Griffiths 2009, 747).

Respondents generally described their crossgender character choices in terms of empathy. For instance, when creating a character, "I usually start with a class [of

character, e.g., thief or warrior], and then ask, 'why this class? what motivated them to become a whatever?'" (R009). One respondent describes the benefit of roleplaying as "learning to think like someone else" (R014). Players stress that they make decisions in character. R020 said, "Once I have the backstory/personality basis of a character decided, it is just a matter of thinking how a character would respond in a given situation." Players demonstrating empathy treat other characters as real in the game frame, insofar as their actions might affect others; many players enjoy games as escapism while still demonstrating empathy.

[5.5] Empathy extends to understanding the social roles of different genders. Players performing genders other than their own enhance their characterization with knowledge of social role expectations. "When I play a male character, I try to keep in mind how guys I know [in real life] act and think," R022 states. "I keep in mind how sexual stereotypes would affect those characters, but since I'm not a gender essentialist, I don't put too much thought into making them male." The player includes her awareness of sanctioned gender performances in the character's backstory. R031

uses a similar technique when playing a character with a different sexual orientation than the character has in canon:

[5.6] Many of the character's core personality qualities remain the same, but his or her outlook or worldview, actions, other ideas, etc. are portrayed in a way I believe would "fit" this version of the character. I create these backstories/worldviews/etc. by talking with people that share the character's orientation, or my RPG partner, or by examining possibilities alone.

[5.7] Players consider the impact of socialization as well as backstory on a character, and, using empathy, they perform the character with reference to sanctioned masculinities and femininities.

[5.8] Respondents generally downplayed the effect of portraying gender on themselves or on their characters. For instance, R049 disavowed the importance of gendered portrayals by stating, "I have multiple characters, both male and female, and I play the characters the same no matter what the gender." Yet as Butler argues, if "one's body is a situation, a field of cultural possibilities both received and reinterpreted, then both gender and sex seem to be thoroughly cultural affairs" (Butler 2004b, 29). When players gender their characters, they are acting within the cultural discourse of gender. This is clear for R030, who said of her game with a female roleplaying partner, "We're both heterosexual, but I am female and play male." In effect, two heterosexual femaleidentified players are absorbed in a game that emphasizes the heterosexual relationship between a male and a female character. Boundaries in the complicated relationship among characters and players are difficult to define. Does the game narrative typify a heterosexual relationship, although both players identify

as female? Can the erotically charged writing of two women be termed homosocial or even homosexual, or does it represent incharacter actions by a heterosexual couple?

Simplification to a single possibility mistakes the nature of the relationship:

[5.9] There is a complicated connection between offline and online personalities that allows many to believe that, at times, the offline and online become one and allows, at times, for them to be disconnected. The reverse mistake would be an all too simple connection between identity and avatar, where it is assumed the identity will finally come out and consume the avatar. (Montfort 2010, 144)

[5.10] Neither possibility demonstrates the true complexity in a roleplaying relationship. The intertwined relationships accentuate the performativity in, and empathy among, all the frames, whether or not the players insist on a sharp distinction between themselves and their characters.

[5.11] Playing in character requires players to examine their characters' motivations and social pressures, which can be extended to the player's own sense of self. The affiliation between players and characters is always in the process of embodiment.

Butler (2004a) argues that the body is "a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities to which we thought we were confined are not written in stone" (29). Players examine the process of becoming their characters; some players gain insight from selfexamination as well. R034 describes her experience:

[5.12] If you find the right partner to play off of, you can learn a lot about yourself, how you relate to the world, what your fears and irrational worries are, and how to deal with them. […] You can learn a lot about your partner, and can maybe challenge them into exploring their own hopes and fears through the roleplay narrative.

[5.13] As players enact characters' choices, they may begin to see how they, too, are affected by repetitive, performed choices. As Nephew (2006) contends, "by allowing play in regard to identity, roleplaying games encourage players to reflexively exhibit a knowledge of self" (121). Respondents demonstrate this selfreflexivity, as when R054

stated, "I usually have some idealized me in mind, some version of myself that has become an expert in a field I either won't or can't choose." Players explore their own potential, as well as their personality traits, by empathizing with an idealized version of themselves. Thus, empathy becomes the basis for selfactualization as they envision idealized actions and responses.

[5.14] Players distinguish among their own problemsolving techniques and those employed by their characters. R024 expresses this distinction by saying, "It's kind of nice to consider actions and problems from a different point of view, trying to stay in character, pretending to do things you can't or wouldn't ever do in real life." Many respondents distinguished between their characters' actions and their own responses to a situation. Empathy mediates the dislocation when the character makes decisions very different from the player's:

[5.15] I try her shoes on for size and try to understand what she's feeling and thinking. I become her. Many times while reading a tag [a comment continuing the narrative] and writing one in response, I have felt what she does, getting angry, or smiling, and so forth. Sometimes she's me deeply uncomfortable because what she's doing/thinking goes against the grain of what *I'd* do, if I were in her situation. She takes me out of my comfort zone! (R013)

[5.16] Many survey respondents prized the ability to play in character, and they linked empathizing with a character with empathizing more deeply with themselves or with other players. Players can become highly invested in the changes they observe in themselves and others as a result of heightened empathy during game play.

[5.17] The fantastic settings of many RPGs provide a measure of safety to role players. Safety is crucial to learning outcomes. The game frame offers a venue for exploration and innovation, but further, "by playing out cultural taboos players are imbued with a sense of power and control over their lives that they may feel is lacking in reality" (Nephew 2006, 127). These taboos may be associated with the violence and aggression in MMORPGs or with the sexual taboos that are explored in many narrative RPGs. In the safe space of a virtual environment, protected by pseudonymity and characterization, players can express themselves authentically through the mediating strategy of fiction.

[5.18] When players feel safe, they are more likely to challenge and explore cultural taboos. Roleplaying, together with the distance provided by the game frame, "allows me to express parts of myself in a safe setting that I would not otherwise get to explore" (R069). In the game frame, players can express fantasies that are associated with their kinks. Kink is a broad and fluid range of practices and desires that may or may not include BDSM, fetishes, or sexualized scenarios, often defined in opposition to

"vanilla" sex (Sundén 2009). For some respondents, this freedom to explore is due to the vicarious nature of roleplaying: "Since I identify as asexual and I have no interest in having sex, role playing becomes a way to experience sexuality vicariously" (R037).

Players may take risks in their selfpresentation because they feel that their involvement is safely hidden behind their characters' performativity.

[5.19] The game frame masks players' actions from the consequences of those actions in their primary framework. Nephew (2006) writes, "In a roleplaying game, the player's unconscious desires are allowed to become manifest in the role taken, since the persona of the character allows the player a disguise behind which to hide"

(122). The player wears the character like a mask, which provides the sense of safety necessary to express what Goffman (1974) calls the player's truer self. He writes, "In so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves…this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be" (52). Some respondents referenced the mask metaphor:

[5.20] I have difficulty writing female characters, as I feel they would reveal more of myself, without the extra masking layer of a different sex/gender to distract people from the fact that, in all of my characters, I am essentially playing versions of myself, with different character traits or downplayed, depending on the character. To play a woman in sexual

relationships with other women would be taking away most of my masks.

(R033)

[5.21] Playing a male character allows R033 to conceal the exploration of her sexuality. She identifies as "selectively sexual, currently in a sexual relationship with a woman," and yet the fictional pursuit of homosexual relationships feels too revealing without the mask of the male character. She elaborates: "I roleplay in order to explore personas and actions that I am not allowed to comfortably explore in 'real life,' or that would place myself or others in danger were I to explore them." For R033, roleplaying offers the distance and comfort that allows her to express her sexuality authentically.

[5.22] Nevertheless, gender policing occurs among players, perhaps because of the ease with which cultural norms can be subverted online. As Jordan (1999) explains,

"identity has ambiguous effects on hierarchy online. It certainly dislocates the forms of hierarchy that commonly operate offline but it does not offer the radical possibility of eliminating hierarchies altogether" (81). Gender does not disappear from the online frame; its very ambiguity serves to increase its importance, and therefore the importance of determining the "truth" of players' identities. Gender policing becomes a tool through which heterocentrist norms are reinscribed (Butler 1999, 362).

[5.23] In RPG settings, women may present as male to avoid unwanted sexual advances, and men may present as female to gain advantages they perceive both female characters and female players accruing, such as clemency and gifts. Therefore, Internet users, especially those presenting as women, are often asked to prove their gender status. When the gender of an Internet user's persistent pseudonymous identity is found to be different than that of their offline identity, the user may be attacked for being deceptive (Joinson 2003, 100). Gender policing marks the clash

between performing alternative gender identities online and the hegemonic discourse of heterocentrism.

[5.24] Respondents provided many examples of gender policing in RPGs. R023, who identifies as genderqueer, describes hir experiences: "I've seen and heard numerous examples of players getting talked down to, derided, excluded from organizations and activities, offered ingame goods and services, and shown favouritism based on presenting as female. Most players seem to assume that other players are male until proven otherwise." Both male and female players may engage in gender policing.

"Some [female players] like to hold themselves up as being better than other women, either because they like boy stuff, which is clearly superior to silly girly things. Others will attack any woman who objects to the poor treatment in a RPG. They want validation from male gamers and don't care who they have to step on in order to get it" (R022). Nor is policing solely used to reinforce gender identities;

nonheteronormative sexualities are also targeted. R059 states, "Gay men […] are frequently bashed. I've been kicked off more than one team if I ask team mates to not use words like 'gay' as curses."

[5.25] Players take care to protect themselves and their identities from others to avoid gender policing. R009 said, "When I play in pick up groups I mute my microphone. I don't want strangers hearing my voice, because what happens is that no one will listen to me when I'm telling them how to handle a strategy, and I'll get whispers asking why i'm not in the [group] with my boyfriend." When the group is more firmly established and a level of trust has been achieved, players are more able to express themselves authentically. R059 shares R009's caution with pickp groups, but notes that groups with established bonds or commonalities offer a greater sense of safety: "I must be careful on pickup groups they can be very negative toward gay men. I most commonly group with other gay men whom I have allied with there in I am most free." When players feel safe, they are more likely to branch out from normative performances:

[5.26] Early on in my roleplaying experience, there was an unspoken expectation among the people I was playing with that players would play characters who were the same as their perceived gender. When I (nonop, closeted trans and perceived female) chose otherwise, it [caused] a bit of a stir. It took them a while to adjust to the fact that my heterosexual male character might flirt with a female character and that this shouldn't be awkward. (R037)

[5.27] Although the relationships that R037 chose to pursue were heterosexual, other players who perceived him as female interpreted his performance as nonnormative. Though they were not aware of R037's identity as a transgendered

individual, they nevertheless employed gender policing tactics that would confine him to female identification, thus erasing his identity as an FTM person. Gender policing in RPGs may have consequences for players' offline gender presentation as well. As Salih (2004a) points out, "people who fail to 'do' their gender correctly, or who do it in ways which accentuate its genealogy and construction, are punished by cultures and laws which have a vested interest in maintaining a stable distinction between…

homosexual and heterosexual, masculine and feminine" (93). R037's demonstration of the constructedness of gender was initially met with resistance and awkwardness, but eventually broadened the possible genders performed in the context of his game.

Without a sense of safety, players cannot express themselves authentically.

[5.28] The most important aspect of roleplaying for survey respondents was that it met their need for belonging. Respondents spoke of meaningful relationships they had formed in RPGs, of feeling attachment to virtual communities, and of finding acceptance among and intimacy with trusted members of their games. Chappell et al.

(2006) found that MMORPGs players' friendships are "emotionally resonant," and that players "get emotional support, information, stimulation, attention and energy from others" (213). Players most often continue playing RPGs for social reasons.

[5.29] Respondents named the people they played with as a crucial factor in their enjoyment. "A benefit I highly value is the sense of belonging you get—almost immediately—from engaging in play with another person" (R031). Relationships among players ranged from "casual acquaintanceship" (R014), to "platonic friendship, sometimes with a familial closeness" (R023), through romantic relationships (R022

and R013). The significance of players' relationships in the game frame varied, but all respondents mentioned the importance of having some knowledge of, and communication with, their fellow players. Joining a guild or raid, or collaborating on a narrative RPG, established a sense of belonging.

[5.30] Acceptance was most important to players performing an authentic self in the online or game frames, potentially compensating for offline isolation. Butler (2004a) notes how crucial acceptance can be for marginalized people; speaking of transgendered individuals, she says, "I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom the very issue of survival is most urgent" (29). The possibility of connecting with likeminded others, of finding a place in which their identity is not maligned or erased, can act as a lifeline for some people.

Furthermore, "for someone with a hopedfor possible self that receives some validation online, it is possible that this bolsters their attempts to achieve the possible self offline too" (Joinson 2003, 124). With the possibility of acceptance, players can build bonds of trust and safe spaces for revealing an authentic self. Acceptance of a

character's gender or sexuality in the game frame can lead to acceptance of the player's identity. Belonging can lay the foundation for future selfdisclosures.

[5.31] Some games, however, are not open to explorations of sexuality. R017 states,

"I can create characters to explore my sexuality, but usually people I play with aren't really interested in dealing with complex romantic issues. The games I play aren't focused on that kind of thing." Nevertheless, for R068, roleplaying authentically is important as a way of encouraging the players in his MMORPG to accept his identity:

"Once in a blue moon I'll get pushback for being 'too gay' or 'too fetishy' but I don't believe I should be a minority [in] a straight man's world. Rather I'm an equal partner in all humanity's world and folks need to accept that there's other sexualities at large besides heterosexuals." When acceptance and trust is present among players, however, much deeper explorations may be welcome. This is the case for R034, who says that "if you find the right role play partner, a person you know well and trust, you can use your character as an avatar to explore things that you may not have had the opportunity to explore in real life." Shared interests and experiences provide one level of belonging; with acceptance, belonging can deepen to a more personal level, which many respondents found rewarding.

[5.32] As belonging and acceptance increase, a feeling of intimacy may arise among players. This may be attributable to the fact that "within an interaction, one person's intimacies tend to be reciprocated in terms of level and type by the communication partner" (Joinson 2005, 27). These selfdisclosures may heighten feelings of intimacy between players because their communication is mediated by the Internet, and because of this, the inhibitions of facetoface communication are lessened (Joinson 2003, 142). Intimacy online may be further enhanced by role players' maintenance of relationships among their characters. As players switch among frames, emotions present between characters may be projected between players as well.

[5.33] Players may develop relationships outside the game frame, but many choose not to pursue this possibility. Investigating World of Warcraft, MacCallumStewart and Parsler (2008) discovered that the potential for increased intimacy discouraged roleplaying:

[5.34] Many successfully roleplayed acts concern the gradual growth of relationships, culminating in weddings, breakups, or even virtual "births."…

Furthermore, the graphic descriptions that often form part of cybersex discourage players from experiencing more balanced roleplay. (237)

[5.35] Whereas some gamers see ingame relationships as valid and rewarding, their connection with sexuality and intimacy disinclines other gamers from roleplaying. If

trust, belonging, and acceptance are not present, then intimacy risks fallout from a soured relationship. This is borne out by survey respondents:

[5.36] I keep RP friendships on a different level than normal friendships, since Real Life and In Character can often mess up, leading to unpleasant results. (R010)

[5.37] I feel that makebelieve romantic feelings have too high a tendency to get mixed up with real ones and would rather avoid such situations online.

(R040)

[5.38] However, for others, increased intimacy was an advantage of roleplaying.

Closeness was "the best thing I could've dreamed for" (R013). While playing sexuality does not require intimacy, often the two are correlated, since sexual situations are

"usually very revealing—both in regards to the other character, as in regards to the other player" (R034). Intimacy results in "honest, rewarding relationships" (R033).

Some players enjoy the opportunity to experience intimacy without physical sexuality.

For R037, who identifies as asexual, "My body, which doesn't desire sex, can continue being its virginal self, while my brain, which likes both men and women (and other sexes, too) can engage in safe, pseudosexual [activities] without setting up false expectations." Intellectual, emotional, and occasionally sexual closeness fosters intimacy in online venues. Intimacy can exist at the level of friendship, family, or romance, as a possible repercussion of belonging and acceptance.

[5.39] However, intimacy is not the only outcome of belonging. Becoming a member of an MMORPG or a narrative RPG subculture means joining a community. For experienced Internet users, social and community involvement are a consequence of extended play (Joinson 2003, 117). Players maintain longdistance friendships or form new ones through online communities. Playing RPGs is "an activity that I can do to spend time with friends who I am close to but who live too far away for other sorts of activities" (R020). Players extend support to other community members and feel valued for their contributions to group efforts. At its core, roleplaying has the goal of

"blending the right amount of fantasy with realism to create a moving character, and working together with others who have done the same to create a moving story"

(R051). Players become part of the roleplaying community in order to embrace a role and interact with others who are as engaged in the game frame as they are themselves.

6. Conclusion

[6.1] Roleplaying games have an importance that transcends their value as entertainment. Players are motivated to form interpersonal relationships by the sense

of belonging, community, and intimacy that may arise when players feel they are in a safe, trusting, and accepting space. Exploring the ramifications of these relationships, either mediated by characters or simply in the online frame, can have beneficial outcomes for players who demonstrate empathy and selfreflexivity. While many role players enjoy the escapism and entertainment offered by RPGs, others use them as tools to deepen relationships and explore selfunderstanding and selfexpression.

[6.2] Yet respondents treat roleplaying with caution because of the very power it can wield in their lives. The online frame allows players to easily, and perhaps illadvisedly, disregard their primary frameworks. Players' engagement with the RPG and their rapid movement among the offline, online, and fantasy frames make RPGs a powerful medium, since emotions can cross such fluid boundaries. Players take the trouble to distinguish between themselves and their characters in order to maintain control over the entanglements that roleplaying encourages.

[6.3] Online world building becomes significant when players interpret events through the same frameworks. The game frame structures players' experiences by providing ludic and narrative incentives to continue playing, and the fantasy frame of the shared social world rewards players' performances of their characters. Performing alternative gender and sexual identities in RPGs proved satisfying for many respondents. For some, the richness of roleplaying lies in exploring characters'

personalities and backstories, including their gender and sexuality. For others, performing characters mediated their explorations of their own gender identities and sexualities. This intertextual, negotiated reading frames roleplaying as a queering, transformative practice.

[6.4] RPGs are important to players' interpersonal relationships and their selfexamination in more than just the ludic and narrative contexts, and yet they are dependent on both. The most significant aspect of RPGs that I discovered was their tendency to increase players' empathy and acceptance of alternative identities. RPGs offer players the opportunity to experience, explore, and perform genders and sexualities different from those they personally identify with. Combined with players'

efforts to play in character, a player's empathy for a character's situation can encourage the player to understand and accept different identities. While not all RPGs have this effect, and not all players seek it, nevertheless its importance cannot be understated. Future research might consider how players are affected outside the online and game frames, that is, how gamespecific empathy might impact realworld outcomes, an idea my survey only begins to consider. Roleplaying games provide a means for connection and acceptance among players that, at their most powerful, may extend into players' offline lives.

7. Appendix: Survey

[7.1] The survey questions are reproduced below, with their division into Web pages indicated. The front page consisted of the informed consent form, which detailed the aims of the project and the risks and potential outcomes of the survey, and which asked respondents' permission to publish their responses. The seven pages of the survey followed.

Page 1: Personal Details

1. What is your offline age?

2. What is your offline gender identity? (e.g., female, male, transgender, other) 3. What is your offline sexual orientation? (e.g., asexual, homosexual, heterosexual, other)

Page 2: RPG experience

4. Which aspects of a roleplaying game are the most important for you?

5. What type(s) of roleplaying games are you involved in?

6. How dedicated would you say you are to roleplaying in general?

7. How dedicated would you say you are to your favorite game?

Page 3: General RPG involvement

8. Why do you roleplay?

9. What is the most important aspect of a roleplaying game for you?

10. What is the greatest benefit you receive from roleplaying?

11. How do you create and play a character?

Page 4: RPGs and Gender

12. Are the majority of the players in your favorite game female, male, other, or don't know?

13. Are the majority of the characters in your favorite game female, male, other, or don't know?

14. Do you feel that players are treated the same, or differently, based on the gender they present themselves as? Can you give examples?

15. Do you feel that characters are treated the same, or differently, based on the gender they present themselves as? Can you give examples?

16. If your character's gender is different from your own, how do you portray that within the game?

Page 5: RPGs and Sexuality

17. Do you feel free to express your sexuality through your RPG characters?

18. Do you consider the effect of your character's sexuality when interacting with other characters?

19. Is the sexuality portrayed by your character different from your own sexuality?

(e.g., a different sexual orientation, a different manner of expressing sexuality, or different fantasies)

20. If not, what other aspects of your character are the focus of your game?

21. If your character's sexuality is different from your own, how do you portray that within the game?

22. Do you feel you can express aspects of your own sexuality through your character?

Page 6: RPGs and Relationships

23. Describe the relationships that have developed between your character and other characters in the game.

24. Do you speak with other players outside and/or about the game setting?

25. If so, describe the relationships that have developed between yourself and other players.

Page 7: Further Thoughts

26. Please include any further thoughts about your involvement in and experience with roleplaying games.

8. Acknowledgments

[8.1] An early version of this work was presented at the 32nd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2011. My thanks to Andy Sawyer for his guidance and comments, and to Dr. Sioban Chapman for her assistance and advice. All data collection processes and procedures were approved by the Committee on Research Ethics at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.

9. Notes

1. Permission to cite Campfuckudie and Cuddy's House was obtained from each game's moderators.

2. All direct quotations from survey data retain original spelling, punctuation, and

grammar, except where I have indicated an elision or clarified slang expressions within square brackets, or adjusted initial capitalization to fit context.

10. Works cited

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Butler, Judith. 1999. "From Interiority to Gender Performatives." In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto, 361–68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Butler, Judith. 2004a. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2004b. "Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault (1987)." In The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler, 23–39.

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Kennedy, Helen. 2002. "Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis." Game Studies 2 (2): n.p.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Symposium

Queer bandom: A research journey in eight parts

D. Wilson

[0.1] Abstract— The story starts like this: you're a graduate student, you want to show that bandom is important, that bandom is new. You start out wanting to demonstrate a new way of experiencing community, you want to map and detail the space where that community lives.

[0.2] Keywords— Concerts; Ethnography; Fan community

Wilson, D. 2012. "Queer Bandom: A Research Journey in Eight Parts."

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0426.

[0.2] Q: wht does belivers never die mean to you?

[0.3] A: it splits the word "fan" in half. some come out and have a good time. appreciate your music. mosh. sweat. drink. sing along. go to multiple shows. buy merch. get autographs. but the other side of the split are legends. some take part in the art. some make the words come to life when you look them in the eye. some you know will keep walking with you till the end and maybe beyond. some get that this is a journey that will have highs and lows and dont get off the ride.

—pete wentz

1. The beginning

[1.1] we don't write fiction.

—pete wentz

[1.2] So the story goes something like this.

[1.3] You're a graduate student, doing an interdisciplinary master's degree in environmental studies focused on queer space. You decide that the thing you want to investigate is the space you've always inhabited, a space you're familiar and comfortable with. You want to understand how (and if) queer space links to current planning concepts with regards to community and spatial practice. You've also read and written fan fic for almost 15 years; it is a part of your life and you define yourself in no small measure by the fan activity you participate in. Your selfidentification is

wrapped up with the changing nature of sexuality as it's (often) understood and portrayed in slash fan fiction. Fandom has been and continues to be one of the most important spaces to allow you to understand your own sexuality. It has been the way you constructed yourself and your understanding of the community you inhabit.

[1.4] So you decide that this neighborhood is what you want to study, decide to try and illustrate your understandings of how online space and online culture has influenced and impacted your life and the lives of the people you know. You pick bandom, a fandom surrounding certain bands, because it's popular and active right now. You aren't as active as you'd like to be, but you have years of knowledge and contacts and friends and experience to draw from. You go into your research design naively assuming you're prepared for the experience of researching the online neighborhood you call home. As you begin to interview people, you realize how hard it will be to tell the story of this space, the story of its sexuality and its engagement. You know these people, you know this fandom, and you're protective of it. You struggle to understand what of your space you're putting on show and what you're choosing to keep hidden—and moreover, how to make that decision ethically and rationally, staying true to your intentions as well as your participants and yourself.

[1.5] You go to concerts in Las Vegas, Detroit, Buffalo, and Chicago, on two different tours and with three different bands. You love the music. You go to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, L.A., to meet with participants and to feel the cities where other people live. You go to a club one night where Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz is the DJ. You get drunk in the club with your girlfriend, and don't wonder about the engagement of your own bodies as you're dancing and how it relates to the theoretical model of anything.

You don't wonder about the queer performance you and your girlfriend put on together for the audience of the club, how you may be putting yourself on display in a strange role reversal. You dance.

[1.6] The story goes something like this. You thought this research would be a positive way to explore postmodern understandings of sexuality by those who engage with queer texts online. You hoped that this understanding would give you an understanding of how online space—understood by many as no more than a fantasy space—interacts with and relates directly to people's engagement with physical space.

You thought that using your own experiences to inform this study would be a safe way to find common ground with your participants. You thought it was a good idea to push yourself to do these things, to experience these different things, to try and understand how your space relates to other fans'. How you create it, how you shape it, how it shapes you.

[1.7] You didn't think you'd have problems with your own engagement in examining bandom and queer space. You didn't know you'd become a character in your own

head. You didn't think it would be difficult to write about yourself as fictional, because as a member of fandom you've spent a great part of your life writing fictions that overlapped with your reality. You thought it wouldn't be difficult to take that process and apply it to the fandom itself, and still find an answer in the research.

[1.8] You find out that the story goes something like: you write your own fiction.

2. Judith Halberstam

[2.1] It's weird—bandslash is the first fandom where I feel like the canon is happening on the internet simultaneously with the fandom.

—KM

[2.2] In a bookstore in Philadelphia you start a discussion on Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Your friend says that for her, Edelman focuses too much on reproductive drive, that what he describes doesn't feel like her reading of time, that the politics of reproductive drives and futurism is set in opposition to her "queer" timeline. You compare it to Judith Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place, which explores a similar reading of "time" as the present. Her breakdown of queer time as oppositional to family time is interesting, but something's off. Sitting on a bench, afternoon sun shining through the trees—the two of you try to come up with another reading for the immediacy that you both feel, but don't intrinsically ascribe to either a queer future haunted by death, drugs, or rejection of family life. Halberstam is describing a postmodern queer wayoflife for (partly) political ends. You're sitting on a bench and feeling nothing about tomorrow, nothing about yesterday, sitting in today and that's it. You carve out a piece of queer time for yourselves.

[2.3] There's something to be said for this concept of queer time and its immediacy, whatever the causes underneath the sensation. You think it over, you flip the sensation over in your mind. True, a queer temporal sensation is linked to an alternative family model in your head. You do not want children. You're happiest wondering what's going to happen next week, not next year. However, you think this stems from more than just an opposition to the reproductive drive or a repositioning of oneself within the larger societal understandings of time. The communications technology that's becoming ubiquitous has allowed nearinstantaneous access to a lot of things that previously were situated clearly in the past, by the time you heard about them. Even as you discuss Halberstam in Philadelphia, you continually check Twitter, your blogs, your email. You're happiest when the answer to "what does the future hold" includes another concert, another festival, another space of immediacy and

connection, and beyond that, nothing but possibility—an answer in next week, not next year. And the more you travel for your research, the more possibilities open.

[2.4] You can feel that immediacy in the bandom culture. You get to live in it there.

There is no way to write something about bandom, or even to write a story in bandom, that doesn't feel irrelevant within a shorter time period than any fan fic writer has ever been used to before. Instantaneous news of and access to the bands is continually available. You and your friend sit on a sunny bench, and feel connected to bands and fans both, in that moment in time. You saw eight cities and almost a dozen concerts.

Day, day, day, hour, day, on and on, you claim a queer concept of time—defined not by the "death drive" as Edelman describes, but rather by new methods of communication. Bandom moves, all on the road, staring at miles of highway.

3. The fantasy of the past

[3.1] You, yourself, get written into the evolving narrative of bandom, as a participant.

—KW

[3.2] So you stay on the road. You travel the country and follow the bands and interview other fans and friends along the way. You start to realize that you spent weeks thinking bandom lives in a fantasy that's safe because it's already happened.

You assumed that once you had described this space, it would be safe to move on. You thought that things are written, etched down, and the past does not change. But this genre of art doesn't allow for timelessness. It doesn't allow for history as much as it doesn't allow for future, and you started out thinking you could treat it differently even though a part of you knew better.

[3.3] In Boston you visit a museum that tries to represent history, to represent the past. It has a lot of beautiful pieces of art, in a beautiful building, but none of the pieces are arranged in order. There is no linear timeline of pieces, and no tags or plaques on the wall to explain what anything is. You think maybe bandom is the best example of a 21stcentury museum, because everything is collected with no timeline—

dates are elusive and everything can be (and is) changed, and thus the past is rewritten. You can renarrate your own history by changing the text of your visit.

[3.4] This functions on an individual level to allow you to rewrite history. You can delete your existence, or pieces of it, and not only do you begin to forget what it was you were, other people do too. Michel de Certeau says "narrated history creates a fictional space" (1984, 79), that memory is altered by its recall and the new circumstances surrounding that recall. Sitting on a bus, you have the ability to go back

into years of email and remind yourself of who you are, were, what you shared or kept to yourself, how you presented yourself to others. These recollections can be reshaped by what you are now, allowing you to reshape your memories constantly through the process of remembrance.

[3.5] Memory on the internet functions much as oral history did. It is mutable, changeable. The collective memory in fandom is, then, always subject to change, and with it, the space we live in.

4. Cyberspace is myth

[4.1] Q: What would you say makes up the boundaries of bandslash? Or any fandom in general?

[4.2] A: What do you mean by boundaries?

—H

[4.3] As you try to pull together pieces for your research, you constantly bump against this rewritten past, this oral history, this lack of future. In trying to rework your text into something that fits, you read Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth (Jahshan 2007). Jahshan theorizes that the "actual decentering of the subject" (5) in cyberspace is supposedly made possible because of new technologies, and cyberspace becomes a place to "enact the deconstructed self" (6). Jahshan's framework for the exploration of cyberspace, however, stays within the assumption that space online is a space purely of the mind, fantasy, postmodern, implied: that space online is the illusion from which we escape reality.

[4.4] This is how he settles this question of rewritten space, by relying on the assumption that it stays digital, stays elusive. For you, Jahshan's version of cyberspace—only ever a space of fantasy—remains insufficient. For you the online fantasy space overlaps, engages, changes and is changed by embodied space every day. Your cyberspace is not simply written, not just a chat window or a virtual space to play with identity; it's also in how your play with identity makes you feel about your body, how the chat window faces you when your friend picks you up from the airport.

It is present in the moment of your swallow; taken in, ingested, internalized, externalized, and important. In fact, that physicality is a fundamental difference of bandom: there are so many spaces where the fandom is manifested in physical, not just metaphorical, ways. Physical is as evident as metaphorical, virtual identity.

[4.5] All summer you sit on planes, trains, and automobiles, you feel people hug you, you feel the creak in your limbs as they protest the constant travel as you search for

something. You hear the music. You also project yourself, what you feel and taste and see, through the Internet, put it into words, put it into a story, for others to read and digest. Through words and voice, you try and bridge that gap between the airplane, and your memory of the airplane.

[4.6] You feel like you've been pushing your physical body to interact with cyberspace. This is where bandom lives for you, it isn't metaphorical or mythical or deconstructed. You could write about fictional characters for the rest of your life, but they'll never Twitter about an afterparty at the hotel where you're waiting for a ride.

That surreal constantmotion space is something that bandom gets that others don't, a physicality that you travel through.

5. The grab bag of cybermapping

[5.1] …what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[5.2] You find yourself trying to put structure on your travels, the people you met in bandom, the shows you went to, the cities you saw. As you go back and sift through your memories, however, you find yourself unable to make everything fit on a mental map. You find yourself having difficulty with dates, places, remembering instead pieces and moments. As you try to mentally prepare to describe your bandom community, you find that no logical structure fits; no mental map is adequate.

[5.3] If Twitter has changed your sense of time, making it a presentism rather than a futureism, then it is also changing your conceptual map as well. These days, you're slowly tagging your spaces, online and off, creating linguistic or semiotic connections that only gain meaning when they are used. You begin to understand that the wider effect of cyberspace on spatial stories is that it not only abandons linear time but also linear place. Clouding (a visual representation of tags) functions to remove the stable connections that hyperlinks used to possess, introducing an alternative to linear structure. A multiplicity of connections are implied at once, as embedded pieces of information, selfregulated into categories that overlap and have meaning only in their discrete searches.

[5.4] Twitter's #hashtags, for example, have become embedded within the understanding of communication. You can search for #falloutboy and get everyone's collective #falloutboy, available only in that moment of search. The space created is

nonhierarchical in that no one's usage is preferred, prioritized over any other—

unsorted, communal chaos. It can't be mapped or toured or repeated.

[5.5] You cannot exist in a described space without other people describing it too, collecting your glossolalia together. You think this might function on your memories and experiences as well: the emotive space of Patrick's voice in your car seamlessly integrating with the memory of walking down 52nd Street, sitting on the sidewalk outside MOMA, your sandals beside you as you feel the pavement of New York City beneath your feet. It's the same as reading a friend's words, hearing another's voice on the phone, sitting punchy and exhausted in the airport as you move between cities and places that have connections not through the flights that you take but the people and emotions you link them to, typing endlessly into the dark.

6. The queer spaces of bandom

[6.1] I'm totally overthinking this now, but it's the first time I've had a block where I feel like I should just probably not be writing this story: it's not that I can't or won't write it, it's that intellectually, I wonder if I shouldn't because I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. So this is my face :|||||||||||

—P

[6.2] So that becomes your description of space; not the words, but the space inbetween; the interaction you have with the words, the interaction between subject and subject. Your research becomes about moving through those spaces of intersection, crossing lines you can't articulate but feel all the same. You knew this fandom broke the fourth wall, saw it every day, and now you feel it too, in more than just you and the screen.

[6.3] At one point you fly out to stay with one of your interviewees, and the two of you sit on her couch. She tells you about her time in the fandom, and she tells you about her relationships with other fans, reveals her secrets, and you reveal yours in turn.

[6.4] Her stories are important to your understanding of fandom as queer space because they demonstrate another level of queer actions. Everyone you talk to gives you stories of breakups, stories of relationships and fears and emotions shared between varyingdegreesofqueer women that engage in bandom, and you give them yours in return. Through the sharing as well as the telling, they put a layer of queer space upon the fandom that extends beyond narrative, beyond desire. You are always careful of the balance between the space of conversation and the space of protection;

you try to engage the conversation itself because it keeps their secrets while giving the moment a place and voice.

[6.5] But more than once and without meaning to, you cross the boundary in your head in conversation, into a space that you find you want to keep private, to yourself.

7. The loss

[7.1] Real life does not follow narrative arcs…. So [the breakup] doesn't come at a narratively opportune time for them as a band/canon source. But it didn't come at a narratively opportune time for you (where you = the fan) either.

—K

[7.2] As you travel that summer, you find yourself on planes, trains, and automobiles; reconnecting with people you hadn't spoken to in years, traipsing back and forth through memories of friends and cities, making links to writing you did 10

years before, everything intersecting even as you moved faster and faster around the country. You start to wonder if there will ever come a good stopping point, if the research will ever end. You put yourself out there, pour yourself into it like a vessel, and wonder what comes next.

[7.3] You hear the news of Panic! At the Disco's breakup while sitting on a bus out of New York City. It's doubly upsetting to get this news among people that may understand intellectually but won't share that shock of abandonment, that sucker punch. They won't feel it like another Panic! fan might. You feel pain, because something died, even if it was insubstantial to other people. And you realize that in your head, Panic! only has a past now, not a present.

[7.4] You have to ask yourself: Would this have happened, would you be this cut up, if you hadn't started trying to write this project? You want to guess "no"; you wouldn't have been thinking about pop culture, putting your faith and your academic career on this, in them, in music. You wouldn't have traveled all over the country, wouldn't have gone to all the concerts, wouldn't have met and interviewed all the fans, wouldn't have visited the places the band members grew up. You would have stayed uninvested.

[7.5] You can't research as an observer. You are a fullfledged participant in this fandom, and trying to do this research changed that subjectivity. Their words and this music, this way of being, has imprinted on your skin, pulled you all over the continent.

You wouldn't have been this person without this story. Much as you wanted to ignore it, Panic!'s split altered you, attached your fandom space to a story that doesn't exist

in the present. Your present becomes a fandom past. The break becomes the thing that shows no matter how much you look to find the space you're looking for—look to find the words to show where you are, search for the right turn of phrase, the perfect narrative—you're researching a shifting landscape, and nothing will encompass it for any more than one moment in time and space and place.

[7.6] If you can rewrite your past, though, you can rewrite your present. So you decide to go to Los Angeles to try and find an ending.

8. The end?

[8.1] [The shows] are going to be good because I'm going with friends and I love my friends and I wouldn't have some of those friends or be seeing others if not for four boys who used to make great music with each other.

Panic at the Disco may not have been able to stay together for the kids, but at least we still have each other, right? Right.

—S

[8.2] You fly to Los Angeles, to try and see if bandom lives there now. Someone asks what it is you want to see and do, and you don't know, because you're not sure what in L.A. embodies bandom space—there's no bar or club like New York, like Chicago. No festivals. You don't have a script for this part of the journey, and you feel lost. Los Angeles has been described as a lot of things, and as you land at LAX you feel afraid that you'll never find what it is you're looking for.

[8.3] Your living history, your metatext, falls apart in its cohesive narrative. Writing real life only works as well as you can adapt to the plot elements that don't end up working out. You've come to Los Angeles and now you're not sure where to go, you're not sure how to end your story.

[8.4] The story starts like this: you're a graduate student, you want to show that bandom is important, that bandom is new. You start out wanting to demonstrate a new way of experiencing community, you want to map and detail the space where that community lives. The story continues through space and time, loss, people, shows, constant motion, and constant change. The story writes itself onto your body, heart, mind, spirit, and writes your life. This is the thing: the story doesn't end. You wanted to define the bounds of something that is constantly shifting for yourself and others.

The neighborhood bandom calls home shifts as you shift, as Pete Wentz shifts. It writes and rewrites itself, with no tight narrative arc, existing by writing and remembering.

[8.5] Perhaps the only map you've got is this: you'll always make the choice to get on the plane.

9. Work cited

Jahshan, Paul. 2007. Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth. New York: Peter Lang.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Symposium

How a Professionals slash writer disrupts readers' expectations Sharon Wheeler

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

[0.1] Abstract— Professionals fandom is a fertile ground for AU stories. At face value, Rhiannon's The Larton Chronicles is a pleasant, cozy AU that bears only a token resemblance to the show that inspired it. On closer examination, though, it disrupts a number of the themes that thread through The Professionals, including those of sexuality, race, and class.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan fiction; Gay; Larton; Secret police; Utopia Wheeler, Sharon. "How a Professionals Slash Writer Disrupts Readers' Expectations."

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0419.

1. From guns and girlfriends to Gloucestershire

[1.1] Many of us who are over 40 remember The Professionals (1977–1983), a 1970s primetime urban British cop show centered on a fictional lawenforcement agency called CI5, with macho leads, big guns, girlfriends of the week, and the obligatory car chases through the streets of London. It acquired a strong fannish following in the UK, the United States, and Australia, in the main because of its two appealing male leads, Bodie and Doyle. But who would guess that our two ostensibly straight heroes are really gay and living in domestic bliss in rural Gloucestershire? Or so say some of the slashers, fans who use the strong homosocial ties between these CI5 agents to extrapolate a sexual bond as well. A particular favorite of many Pros fans is The Larton Chronicles by Rhiannon, a series of five stories. This alternate universe (AU) series lifts the characters from their usual setting—the mean streets of London, where they are busy fighting terrorism—and shifts them to another time and place—a cottage in a remote Gloucestershire village, in which they live as a couple and are shown celebrating the millennium together. I explore how the series both inverts and subverts the issues of sexuality, class, and race that are touched on in the show, and it will look at Rhiannon's use of canon versus fanon and how she constructs a recognizable fannish shorthand.

2. Reading a text

[2.1] As they progress through a fannish text, fans are discerning and perceptive consumers. They will pick up on authorial shorthand that, to the nonfannish reader, would look like a throwaway reference. Fans also spend a great deal of time discussing the issue of canon versus fanon. Canon is what we see on the screen. Fanon is what enters fannish folklore as the truth. For example, it's canon that Doyle loans Bodie a pen and warns, "I shall want that pen back." Fanon is that he is tightfisted or stingy.

It's canon that Bodie was a mercenary in Africa. It's fanon that he's either gay as a result of living among so many rugged men, or was raped during his time there.

Sheenagh Pugh (2005, 26) says that fanon can become entrenched in fan fiction to the extent that it's often difficult to separate fanon from canon. Indeed, it's common to see new fans posting to discussion lists to ask whether a particular incident is canon or fanon.

[2.2] Fans, significantly, read a fan fiction text far differently from how they would read any other book. I am a crime fiction fan. I am used to seeing crime writers build their story's universe and develop their characters, and indeed I expect them to do so.

Such writers cannot assume I know anything about their book. A fan writer, though, can and does engage in a form of shorthand. Because of fans' knowledge of canon, we already have a considerable amount of information about our heroes. If a writer refers to the "greeneyed man" or "the smaller man" or "the curlyhaired man," we know she is alluding to Doyle. If she mentions the "exmerc" or "the bigger man" or "the darkhaired man," that's Bodie. Large chunks of the narrative world are painted in already, without the fan writer having to lift a finger.

[2.3] The Professionals is one of the shows for which novelized versions of fan fiction have been produced commercially, but with the characters' names changed and "the serial numbers filed off." The stories that comprise The Larton Chronicles appeared from the specialist slash publisher Wayward Books under the title The Larton Chronicles and the pseudonym James Anson (itself a fan injoke, as 3.2 "Backtrack"

includes a CI5 agent named Anson). Doyle and Bodie become Robert March and Michael Faulkner. The book otherwise differs little from the zine in which the stories first appeared, but as a defanned version it appears to be an amusing but rather bemusing injoke that doesn't quite survive the "search and replace" performed on the lead characters' names. A whole level of intertextuality is missing.

[2.4] A significant part of fans' reading of a text is that intertextuality. In Rhiannon's The Larton Chronicles, we get, for example, Doyle's chipped tooth, which is canon—

Martin Shaw, the actor who plays Doyle, does have a chipped tooth, and it is visible in the show, but which in the fan story is blamed on a shot left in a pheasant. Doyle also

attends an Oscar Wilde play, and fans will know that Shaw had a successful run in London's West End in Wilde's An Ideal Husband. So a seemingly minor scene in "Best of All Ways," the fifth Larton story, in which Doyle phones home from London takes on extra meaning for readers when they realize that Doyle has been watching the actor who plays him in the show—and also got a theater program signed for his friend Bunty. And this is why the professionally published version doesn't tell the full story.

On the surface, this is a scene of Doyle reporting back on a disappointing night out at the theater. But to fans, it's another injoke concerning the actors from the show.

3. Visiting other worlds: Larton and its place in the fandom

[3.1] Professionals fandom is a fertile ground for AU stories. Theories abound for why this is so. A common—and valid—one is that some of the fans, particularly those who remember the 1970s and 1980s, are politically uncomfortable with the secretpolice aspect of the original show and so feel much happier transporting our heroes elsewhere, whether to ancient Greece, other planets, or fantasy settings. By lifting Bodie and Doyle out of the straitjacketed government setting of the 1970s and 1980s, a slash writer can take them to other worlds where they are not obliged to deal with the repercussions of homosexuality in the canon setting: being gay would almost certainly have got our heroes sacked.

[3.2] The Larton Chronicles was written by Rhiannon, a UK fan. The novel comprises five short stories (the first four stories were published in a zine in 1995, then republished in 2004 with "Best of All Ways" added) set in an alternate universe in which Doyle is a policeman turned crime writer and Bodie is a horsemad Irish soldier, both living in a Gloucestershire village. Larton is a delightful and elaborate picaresque injoke, with assorted references to traditional descriptions of Merrie England. Readers take pleasure in the subversion of an urban cop show by the transfer of its heroes to bucolic bliss in a Cotswold village. Many fans agree that Rhiannon's stories, though they may seem to come out of left field, capture the characters more accurately than much casebased fiction. Doyle is tetchy and temperamental, and he wears his emotions close to the surface. Fans frequently point to the scene in the controversial episode 1.13 "Klansmen"—which was not aired on British TV during the original run in the 1970s because it addressed the sensitive subject of racism—where Doyle cries over the stabbed Bodie. This transfers to Larton as Doyle blowing his nose hard in moments of emotion. The Larton Bodie is an army officer with a childlike innocence and enjoyment of life, not unlike his portrayal in the show, where we see a former mercenary and soldier with an often flippant sense of humor.

[3.3] Larton, though, is more than a witty utopian subversion of the show. It contains several harderedged moments, as the tempestuous relationship between

Bodie and Doyle plays out over a number of years, with a supporting cast who on the whole seem unconcerned by the pair's private life. One could argue that in no way does the series address the issue of a soldier living in a homosexual relationship, or ask whether the inhabitants of a tiny village would be quite so liberal. But these concerns are not the writer's focus. Instead, this utopia is both wish fulfillment and, to a degree, a subversion of the homophobic civil service and military establishment of the time.

[3.4] Rhiannon's writing pokes gentle fun at the UK class system; Bodie's brotherinlaw has a title and a tumbledown stately home, populated by an eccentric and shambolic family. In the show, George Cowley, the head of CI5, demonstrates an urbane courtesy and ability to gladhand people from all walks of life, but this does not extend to allowing corruption to go unchecked in positions of power, as is seen in his pursuit of the crooked civil servant Dawson in 5.6 "Spy Probe" and his determination not to allow coverups on high in 1.8 "Everest Was Also Conquered" and 2.5 "In the Public Interest."

[3.5] The latter episode is a particularly revealing one, given the climate of the time, because in it Bodie and Doyle go undercover to unmask those responsible for attacks on a newly formed gay youth group (the culprits are revealed to be police heavies acting at the behest of an overzealous chief constable). A government minister says he wants "a city sewn up tight but safely…a city where hooligans are kept in check and suspicious characters are forced to move on. For God's sake, George, to most residents it sounds like Utopia!" Cowley's response is, "Aye…that's what they thought about Hitler's Germany!"

[3.6] In 1.3 "Old Dog with New Tricks," there is a passing reference to the fact that former soldier Bodie served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles—something he declines to discuss with Doyle. A fan will also think back to Doyle's tearfully calling Bodie a "halfIrish bastard" and pleading with him not to die in "Klansmen." So Rhiannon presents us with the irony of her Bodie's being a soldier in the army of the Republic of Ireland. But irony is gained through humor in "A Touch of Romance," the fourth Larton story, when Bodie is asked to give the bride away at a wedding at the Royal Military Chapel in London: "'I am not giving any bride away,' said Bodie in a dangerously calm voice. 'For one thing, remember, I wear a green uniform with Sons of the Fianna on my cap badge. I'll be lucky not to be arrested at the Guards Chapel door!'"

[3.7] He comes off worst in the subsequent exchange with his formidable sister Agnes, and eventually agrees to do it simply to annoy his brother Charles, who is in the British army.

[3.8] On the surface, The Larton Chronicles may evoke a particular stereotypical English setting seen in films, TV dramas, and even the Golden Age of Crime. We're familiar with the likes of Kind Hearts and Coronets (itself the subject of a fannish rewrite), Miss Marple, Lark Rise to Candleford, and Midsomer Murders. But in fact it is a highly unusual AU in a highly idiosyncratic setting, even in a fandom used to seeing Bodie and Doyle as elves, cats, and artists.

[3.9] Our heroes meet when Doyle, a policeman turned author, becomes fed up with the noise and violence of London and decides to move to the country. He buys a lodge house once belonging to the manor, and has some unfavorable preconceptions about the lord of the manor. This lord happens to be Bodie, a huntingmad soldier. As in The Professionals, early meetings between the pair don't go well. But Bodie, in despair over possible brain damage after he is wounded in the Middle East, attempts suicide.

Doyle foils the suicide attempt and stays by Bodie's side during his recovery. They then settle down in domestic bliss in a cottage complete with an Aga, a brand of kitchen stove much aspired to by wealthy country dwellers.

[3.10] Larton is an idiosyncratic invention, and it is perhaps significant that it was created nearly two decades ago by an older fan and is seen through the prism of a seemingly timeless rural setting and a highly individual take on the world of media fandom. Pros doesn't seem to lend itself to humorous stories, set as it is in the gritty world of urban terrorism. So the transfer of Bodie and Doyle to an English village where CI5 doesn't exist is very much an oddity in the fandom—you either get it or you don't. In fact, a glossary to explain many of the uniquely British expressions has thoughtfully been provided for what Rhiannon might call the terminally bewildered.

[3.11] Most of the action in the five stories of the series—"One Bright Morning,"

"Second Round," "In the Deep Midwinter," "A Touch of Romance," and "The Best of All Ways"—takes place in this English Brigadoon. It's the kind of setting that you can picture as a 1950s blackandwhite film, with Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim playing Bodie's sister, Agnes, and her husband, Jack. But it's also oddly timeless; the most significant clue we get to the series' chronological setting is in the final story, which is set around the millennium. And, on closer examination, we find that Larton is more than an affectionate rendering of a particular English way of life.

4. Reading Larton

[4.1] On the surface, Larton appears to be a nostalgic paean to a way of life that no longer exists; the fact the author provides a detailed glossary explaining a range of social and cultural references suggests a generation gap between her and her readers.

The thought of a rural idyll, with its gardens of roses and lavender (Doyle opens their

garden as part of the National Gardens Scheme), evokes images of the England the canonical George Cowley is so keen to protect. In his speech to new recruits in "Old Dog with New Tricks," he admits that the unpopularity that results from the organization's official brief to operate "by any means necessary" is "the price we have to pay to keep this island clean and smelling, even if ever so faintly, of roses and lavender."

[4.2] Nostalgia is a strong component of fandom and fan fiction, particularly when it comes to the TV shows we remember from our youth. This is evidenced by the success of shows such as Life on Mars where music, Curly Wurly chocolate bars, kipper ties, and real men produce a warm glow when seen through rosetinted specs. But the village we all dream of moving to when we win the lottery, as evidenced by O.

Yardley's Pros story "A Lovesome Thing," isn't the safe retreat we assume it to be.

There appear to be as many dangers in the countryside around Larton as on the mean streets policed by CI5.

[4.3] On the surface, Larton may appear to be a pastiche of a number of films and books where the lord and lady of the manor rule benevolently over their minions, the vicar preaches to packed pews, the village bobby patrols his insular empire on foot and knows everyone within it, and the fox hunt look ever so handsome in their red outfits.

[4.4] But Larton has a twist, as it hints strongly at the bleakness behind rural life in the UK. Rhiannon's rural idyll is no tourist trap; this is a working village, complete with rural poverty and bored youths who race cars down country lanes at breakneck speeds. And the story includes grimness in the form of Bodie's thwarted suicide bid, Doyle's serious riding accident, and Bodie's apparent death in a helicopter crash.

[4.5] Rhiannon's ability to create her own highly individual universe, peopled by a full supporting cast, allows her to develop the idea of the village inhabited by eccentrics into which two more, with an unconventional private life, fit in. Both Bodie and Doyle (and Rhiannon, for that matter) would have come of age in a country where homosexuality wasn't legalized until 1967. So the characters maintain a certain awareness of what others might think—particularly when it comes to the upstairsdownstairs class divide. In "In the Deep Midwinter," Bodie isn't happy when he discovers he'll be sleeping alone when he and Doyle are roped into attending Agnes's Christmas house party:

[4.6] Bodie turned outraged blue eyes on him. "Am I to understand I'm sleeping alone till New Year's Day?" he inquired.

[4.7] "Absolutely," said Doyle. "There are the feelings of your sister's servants to be considered, there are children in the house, and it serves you

right for mucking up my holiday."

[4.8] Not that this chaste setup lasts beyond the first night, when Doyle discovers that Jack and Agnes's stately home resembles the Arctic. This isn't merely a matter of

"don't ask, don't tell"; it's a matter of a really rather civilized utopia where you know your neighbor's business (Lizzie, the village gossip, displays a deep interest in Doyle's love life in "The Best of All Ways"), but actually, it doesn't matter what they do behind closed doors. The fact that these two men are living together in a homosexual relationship is entirely incidental most of the time.

[4.9] In this world, homophobia is a blot on the distant horizon, evidenced only by Bodie's pompous brother, Charles. "He's disgusted and won't be visiting," says Bodie in "One Bright Morning," after he and Doyle have set up house together.

[4.10] Like its American counterpart until recently, the Irish army apparently operates on the principle of "don't ask, don't tell"—Bodie comments that homosexuality doesn't happen in Ireland, In the fifth story in the sequence, "Best of All Worlds," there are several telling references to their relationship. Bodie attempts to excuse Doyle's bad behavior at a family wedding as due to his being upset because they can't legalize their union—civil partnerships did not become legal in the UK until 2004. And Doyle is seen sulking on Millennium Eve in "Best of All Worlds": "It's not fair, he thought resentfully, as all around them happy people embraced with enthusiasm, all Bodie and I can do is a chaste hug."

[4.11] Not, incidentally, that Bodie has any such qualms, as he grabs Doyle in a bear hug as fireworks go off around them. And our last sighting of the pair is as they walk home—the long way—hand in hand.

5. From the mean streets to Utopia

[5.1] At face value, The Larton Chronicles is a pleasant, cozy AU that bears only a token resemblance to the show that inspired it. On closer examination, though, it disrupts a number of the themes that thread through The Professionals, including those of sexuality, race, and class, using the lightest of light touches. The author's use of fan shorthand ensures that readers never lose sight of the show and of their favorite characters in the transition from the mean streets of London to a rural utopia.

6. Works cited

Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context.

Bridgend: Seren.

Rhiannon. 2004. The Larton Chronicles. Fan fiction. Gryphon Press.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Symposium

A history of RPGs: Made by fans; played by fans

Paul Mason

Aichi Gakuin University, Nisshin, Japan

[0.1] Abstract— I explore some aspects of the early history of tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) that are perhaps not well known among media scholars, and which offer an alternative take on the idea of fan activity.

[0.2] Keywords—Dungeons & Dragons; Fan object; Gaming; RPG

Mason, Paul. 2012. "A History of RPGs: Made by Fans; Played by Fans."

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0444.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In the second issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, Rebecca Bryant described how fans of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) had "actually begun to alter the game system against the wishes of its owners" (2009). Bryant's paper reported on rebellious behavior by consumers of D&D, but the use of the word begun implies that this was a new phenomenon. I will here explore some aspects of the early history of tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) that are perhaps not well known among media scholars, and which offer an alternative take on the idea of fan activity. Before tackling the general, however, I offer a specific instance to set the scene and contradict the word begun.

[1.2] In the 1970s, I played war games. I used toy soldiers and models to enact battles, with complex rules and dice determining how our strategies affected the games' outcomes. In 1978, I read The Lord of the Rings for the second time. In April of that year, in the magazine Battle for Wargamers, I read about a new form of war gaming that was becoming popular. It was called Dungeons & Dragons. The article explained how it was conducted; the description was sufficiently intriguing that I resolved to try it myself.

[1.3] However, I did not rush out and buy a copy. This was the age before the Internet made everything easy to order; and in any case, I was an impoverished schoolboy. What I did was to take my Middleearth war gaming rules, expand the

"hero combat" section with additional rules of my own, and start designing my own dungeon to play with my war gaming partner. The game took off. After a while, our group expanded and, as it happened, started using the D&D rules. I never bought them, though, and we later switched to Chivalry & Sorcery as well as games of our own devising.

[1.4] Is this an exceptional story? I argue here that it is not. Indeed, I would argue that it is a microcosm of the creation of roleplaying games themselves, and that subsequent commercial development has attempted to erase the fancreated origins of the activity.

2. Role-playing from war games

[2.1] Whatever they later became, roleplaying games started as war games (note

1). War games take many forms, ranging from the extreme abstraction of chess,

through the spectacle of Warhammer toy soldiers, to the detail of a military computer simulation, but their essential nature is conflict between opposing sides based on rules. In this sense, they are traditional games, little different from board games such as Monopoly or Risk. By the 1960s, war games were a minor hobby, often employing miniature figures to represent soldiers and military hardware, and model scenery for the battlefield.

[2.2] As with all hobbies, however, participants experimented with variations: different ways of conducting the games. One of these experiments during the 1960s involved multiple players, each identifying with an officer on the battlefield. An element of these games that was initially viewed as a failure proved to be one of the most popular. In a Napoleonic game where factions led by players tried to capture a town, "the game dissolved into apparent chaos, and the armies never did get to the town" (Schick 1991, 17). The players had been seduced by the possibilities of play—in a ludic, or informal, sense where it becomes its own goal (note 2)—rather than victory.

[2.3] It is possible to argue, as Schick does, that it was this moment—the abandonment of the zerosum contest—that roleplaying games in the Dungeons & Dragons mold began. At this point, players were already associated with individual characters, with individual goals, continuing across a number of games. The formative spark that produced RPGs occurred when players did things their own way, running counter to the expectations of the designer and transforming the experience to suit themselves.

[2.4] These ideas were soon applied to a fantasy medieval game, and from this emerged the concept of the dungeon, an underground labyrinth containing dangers and treasure. Although much disparaged by roleplaying fan writers from the late

1970s on, the dungeon was a key advance. It provided a limited environment—easily manageable by a single referee—in which the game could take place. The first edition of D&D, billed as Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, was released in 1974.

3. The game is published

[3.1] Despite Schick's argument, the publication of the first edition of D&D (1974) makes a convenient origin point for roleplaying games in the "third, narrow sense"

identified by Andrew Rilstone (1994). Yet the first edition of D&D did not contain the words roleplaying game. It was produced by a wargaming company and still viewed as a form of war gaming. War gamers continued to view roleplaying in these terms for many years, even after the popularity of war gaming was eclipsed by that of roleplaying.

[3.2] In those very early days, D&D was, like most war gaming material, essentially fan driven. Although it was commercially published, it was rather shoddily written and produced. It was also rather incomplete. Many of the early roleplaying fans were forced to be designers by the vagueness of the original rules. As fan Steve Darlington put it in 1998:

[3.3] The impenetrable rules forced players to invent their own rules and interpretations, and to begin thinking about rules systems and their design.

It was here that the future RPG designers were being born. Secondly, players were focusing not on the game itself, but the idea behind the game.

Though the rules were far from perfect, people recognised the potential of the new and incredible concept around which the game revolved. D&D is perhaps the first game that players purchased with the knowledge that at least half of the rules would have to be discarded or seriously altered.

[3.4] Lee Gold, editor of the seminal APA (amateur press association, a compilation fanzine from multiple authors) Alarums & Excursions since mid1975, confirmed the ambiguity surrounding the original D&D rules. In order to make it playable, it was necessary for gamers to decide how to fill in the many gaps in the rules. This led to problems when groups interacted. She explains how this situation led to the creation of her fanzine:

[3.5] Eventually as playing styles diverged in LA, San Francisco, and Boston, I decided to start an APA so we could share ideas and keep from becoming so divergent that we couldn't participate in games together, so I started A&E in mid1975. Early issues had articles by professionals like Dave Hargrave and Steve Perrin, Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus, Wes Ives and

Phil McGregor, as well as a couple of somewhat confused letters from E.

Gary Gygax (who couldn't quite figure out who was writing the zines he was commenting on and so misaddressed his own comments). But the bulk of the zines came (as they still do) from amateur roleplayers. Some writers loved a particular game system, some had house rules, some wrote about roleplaying in general. Some wrote fiction or poetry or songs, but most of the stories that appeared were writeups. (Gold, email interview, March 6, 2012)

[3.6] The professionals writing for A&E were clearly fans in the sense that they were acting from emotional investment in the activity, and part of a fan community to boot.

In this sense, until roleplaying companies became large enough to start employing business professionals, everyone was a fan. For all that Rilstone and other critics (myself included) railed against D&D author Gary Gygax, it is unquestionable that he was a fan. He was not only a war gamer, but also played D&D and contributed to fanzines.

[3.7] The relatively marginal nature of the hobby affected how material was published: "Because roleplaying games lost the interest of established game companies, and because major book publishers would never take a chance publishing something as unknown as roleplaying game books, the roleplayers themselves published their own games" (Mackay 2001, 16).

4. Fan designers

[4.1] In my own case, I contributed to fanzines from 1980 onward, started my own fanzine in 1983, and then got a job at Games Workshop, publisher of the British professional RPG magazine White Dwarf, in 1985. But even while I was working on White Dwarf, I was still involved, via a pseudonym, in the publication of my fanzine Imazine. After leaving Games Workshop, I went back to publishing Imazine and writing for other fanzines, including Alarums & Excursions.

[4.2] Although I have dabbled with commercially published games—particularly during the time I was working for a games company—most of the games I played during the 25 years I was an active gamer were the creation of fans: myself or those I was playing with. By creation, I include those games that were modified from commercial games, or produced by combining aspects of multiple games.

Nevertheless, a large proportion of them were original creations rather than modifications. I don't suggest that this was a typical situation, but it was not uncommon in the early days.

[4.3] In the 1980s, many active RPG fans believed they were the leading edge of roleplaying game design, arguing that commercial RPGs only emerged from ideas that had been developed and tried in fan work. This assertion is open to question, but is supported to some extent by the many games produced by designers who had already been actively involved in fandom. Over the course of the years following the publication of D&D, examples of fanmade rules and fanmade settings were published in fanzines, and the idea that this was a normal and natural component of being a roleplaying gamer was widespread. Many of these fan artifacts made their way into the commercial arena.

[4.4] D&D originated from fan activity, but its development continued to be nourished by fan activity. As an example of this process, Jonathan Tweet, a regular contributor to Alarums & Excursions, codesigned Ars Magica (his codesigner, Mark Rein·Hagen , went on to design White Wolf's World of Darkness games) before designing fan favorite Everway and then becoming one author of the third edition of D&D in 2000. Even at their commercial peak, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to describe the phenomenon of roleplaying games as fan created.

[4.5] Roleplaying games have moved in many directions since 1974. While many of the paths they have taken have been picked up commercially, in almost every case the original form was fan created, whether live action (Australian "freeforms," for example, as well as similar but different developments in the United States and United Kingdom), computer based (going back to Colossal Cave Adventure), or network based (the original MUDs).

5. Conclusion

[5.1] Every area of fandom involves fan activity: fan creation, fan transformation. A fan of Star Trek may express her fannish interest in the series in many ways, including but not limited to fan fiction, critical analyses, costuming, fan video, and even roleplaying games. Nevertheless, it would be hard to assert that Gene Roddenberry was a fan of Star Trek, much less that Desilu Productions was. Roleplaying games, however, emerged directly from fan activity itself, and no matter how publishers have attempted to erase the traces, this characteristic has always remained. The revolting fans noted by Bryant were not only doing the same thing I did in 1978 when I refused to buy D&D

(the only D&D rules I ever bought were the Ready Reference Sheets by a different publisher, Judges Guild), they were also doing the same thing as the Napoleonic war gamers whose "apparent chaos" created recreational roleplaying in the first place.

6. Notes

1. Very little of the early history of RPGs has been critically described. Schick (1991)

offers a general introduction, though being that of an industry insider, it must be approached with care. At the other extreme, outsider Fine (1983) wrote an influential scholarly text applying Goffman's frame analysis to the activity, including a reasonable summary of its origins. More analysis can be found in Rilstone (1994), Darlington (1998) and Mason (2004), though the latter focuses on the development of roleplaying game theory rather than history per se. Probably the most accessible explanation of how D&D itself came into being, however, is by indie gamer Ron Edwards (2003).

2. It is telling that the word play, used in the technical sense of machinery, refers to the extent to which parts do not fit together snugly; in other words, the extent to which they do not conform.

7. Informed consent methodology

All sources cited in this paper were public, with the exception of an email interview with Lee Gold. The interview was conducted with the prior agreement that it would be used and quoted in a paper. Gold specifically wrote "Please feel free to quote me" in her email and approved the use of quotations in context before submission.

8. Works cited

Bryant, Rebecca. 2009. " Dungeons & Dragons: The Gamers Are Revolting!"

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 2. doi:10.3983/twc.2009.0083.

Darlington, Steve. 1998. "A History of RolePlaying, Part I: One Small Step for a Wargamer…" Places to Go, People to Be, no. 1, February.

http://ptgptb.org/0001/history1.html.

Edwards, Ron. 2003. "A Hard Look at Dungeons & Dragons." The Forge, June 4.

http://www.indierpgs.com/articles/20/.

Fine, Gary Alan. 1983. Shared Fantasy: Roleplaying Games as Social Worlds.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gygax, E. Gary, and Dave Arneson. 1974. Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.

Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules.

Mackay, Daniel. 2001. The Fantasy RolePlaying Game: A New Performing Art.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Mason, Paul David. 2004. "In Search of the Self: A Survey of the First 25 Years of AngloAmerican RolePlaying Game Theory." In Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, 1–14. Helsinki: Solmukohta.

Rilstone, Andrew. 1994. "RolePlaying Games: An Overview." Inter*Action: The Journal of RolePlaying and Storytelling Systems 1: 10–15.

Schick, Lawrence. 1991. Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to RolePlaying Games.

Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Symposium

Blogging and blooks: Communal authorship in a contemporary

context

Staci Stutsman

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The motivations behind the evolution of the blog to book vary from economic aspirations to a need for further fame to editors seizing an opportunity of publishing an author with a readymade audience. I argue another motivation may be at work: blogging authors may view the switch into the less fluid medium of the print text as an attempt to reassert authorial control.

[0.2] Keywords— Barthes; Fulda; Interactivity; New media; Powell Stutsman, Staci. 2012. "Blogging and Blooks: Communal Authorship in a Contemporary Context." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0413.

1. Introduction

[1.1] While authors typically use an acknowledgments page to thank their family and friends, editors, and role models for their support, weight loss blogger and author Jennette Fulda uses her acknowledgments page to pay tribute to the readers of her popular blog, "Half of Me." Fulda's blog readers did more than just support her writing, though. They were a part of it. They interacted with her daily posts, they gave her immediate feedback, they brainstormed ideas for the book—they were a part of the writing process itself. Technological developments have resulted in the proliferation of a forum that thrives on collaborative contribution. This emphasis on communal writing grants readers a degree of authority over a text, and while this process raises readers to a position of power, the author's role becomes unclear. This ambiguity carries over even after authors move their writing out of the blogosphere. The presence of Fulda's blog readers gets woven throughout the entire memoir as a felt influence that grants authority to the blog reader, creates a literal representation of communal authorship, and, most significantly, potentially detracts from the author's power over the text.

Clearly, the influence of blog readers, both on Fulda's book and on other blogs that become books, cannot be ignored. In an increasingly digital world that is predicated on interactivity, it becomes important to analyze the status of authorship in our new contemporary context.

[1.2] The impact of blog readers problematizes the notion of authorship as the writing process transforms into an overtly collective experience. While anxieties related to authorial power are not usually mentioned by bloggers outright, they are seen in many of the actions bloggers choose to take. Recently, bloggers such as Julie Powell and Jennette Fulda have transformed the content of their blogs into books, or what the publishing industry has termed blooks. Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2005) and Jennette Fulda, author of HalfAssed (2008) both strategically manipulate their audiences to propel themselves to subsequent fame as established authors. Powell, who blogged about cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 2002, published a memoir about the experience 3 years later as well as a second memoir in 2009. Similarly, Jennette Fulda, who blogged about losing half her body weight through diet and exercise in 2005, published a memoir in 2008 and recently published a second memoir as well. The motivations behind the evolution of the blog to book vary from economic aspirations to a need for further fame to editors seizing an opportunity of publishing an author with a readymade audience. Joshua Kurlantzick (2004), a writer for the New York Times, speaks to this phenomenon. He claims that bloggers are attractive to publishers due to their readymade audience. Ian Mount, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, concurs. He writes, "Writers who turn their blogs into books have two advantages available to budding authors: an existing dedicated readership and a free platform to publicize their work" (Mount 2006, 1). While these are all possibilities, I argue another motivation may be at work: blogging authors may view the switch into the less fluid medium of the print text as an attempt to reassert authorial control.

2. The power of the audience

[2.1] The knowledge of an audience changes Powell and Fulda's blogs and books and challenges their authorship, which is reflected in how they censor themselves due to audience feedback. In her book, Powell admits, "I know, I didn't mention that I had my picture in Newsday. It's just an awkward thing to bring up. How does one broach the subject of being photographed cooking dinner in one's crappy Long Island City apartment, without sounding like a vain, pretentious jerk?" (2005, 231). Fulda's blog reflects similar censorship. She writes, "I had sometimes been scared to post entries about personal topics or controversial ideas" (2008, 169). Powell and Fulda's actions align with Rob Cover's assertions about audience participation in his 2006 article

"Audience Inter/active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control and Reconceiving Audience History." According to Cover, as the reader becomes increasingly present in online media such as weblogs, the knowledge of an audience affects an author's posts because real time readership consistently offers feedback, which further shapes the direction of the posts. He posits that audience awareness results in bloggers censoring

their posts, as is seen in Powell's and Fulda's confessions in their books. This move can result in a potential increase of the audience's authority over the direction of the blog and Powell's and Fulda's loss of power and authorship.

[2.2] While an audience potentially stifles posts, Cover also argues for the power of an audience to propel a narrative forward. For instance, the presence of a readership encourages Powell to cook and holds her accountable. She asserts throughout her memoir that her readers need her to post (2005, 82). Similarly, Fulda's readers encourage her to diet diligently, to lose weight, and to write about the experience. As she observes, "Now that I wasn't the only one watching my weight, I felt more responsibility to keep going" (2008, 161). She continues, "I tried to post at least three to four times a week so they'd keep coming back, which was difficult to manage while working full time and sticking to an exercise schedule" (168). The power of the audience to control the actual presence of a narrative, not just the direction of it, further complicates Powell's and Fulda's authorial status.

3. Authorial ambiguity

[3.1] Concerns surrounding authorial ambiguity call into question the very necessity of authorial attribution. According to Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author (1977), the act of imposing an author on a text limits and stifles its prospective meaning. A text consists of the compilation of multiple consciousnesses, stories, and cultures. Barthes notes that "a text's unity lies not in its origins but in its destination"

(1977, 148), and his argument lends legitimacy to the role of contemporary blog readers as coauthors. The voices of the readers and the compilation of consciousnesses grant true narrative legitimacy to the blog by Barthes's standards.

Fulda's posts and her readers' weight loss suggestions amalgamate to form one text that is representative of the numerous perspectives that Barthes recognizes.

[3.2] A new level of complicity arises as readers attain quasiauthorial control. When they respond to blog posts and offer advice and opinions, their readership becomes a public performance. Visible reader interaction not only influences a blogger, but becomes a part of the overall narrative. Readers' thoughts are no longer relayed in private letters to an author or editor. Instead, reader input is placed alongside an original post. This visible, highly public involvement creates a new joint artifact that grants legitimacy to readers' opinions and often accords their words with equivalent status to those of the bloggers themselves. Cover asserts that when a blogger posts online, "the author's name disappears as a plethora of anonymous sites, commentaries, knowledges and textualities emerge amidst an environment predicated on its interactivity and exchangeability" (2006, 146). If audience participation causes a

blogger's name and identity to diminish, then it becomes difficult to identify the true role of Powell or Fulda aside from that of forum moderators.

[3.3] The question then becomes not if authorship should be maintained, but whether or not it can be maintained. Barthes puts forth the premise that impersonal cultural and social forces impact an individual subject's ability to claim sole authorship to a work. An active audience results in the actualization of Barthes's ideas, for it creates a situation in which personal and visible cultural and social forces affect writing. The blogosphere creates a circumstance in which an author has personal access to the cultural and social forces that shape his or her work. If power over a text lies within the amalgamation of cultures, as Barthes insists, then the combination of the voices creates a hybrid authorship reflective of the social forces that Barthes claims restrict true authorship when absent. In light of this new configuration, it becomes unclear if authorship is awarded to the original blogger, to the readers who respond to the blog, or to the combination resulting from their interactions.

4. Authorial assertion

[4.1] For Powell and Fulda, to publish is to create a more static artifact that is written in the author's voice and is not subject to immediate comments or debate. Powell and Fulda claim power over their readers when they choose which comments to include and cast their readers as characters in the book. They now direct the route of their narratives through the creation of subordinate roles for their readers that acknowledge their assistance but deny them coauthorship.

[4.2] Powell's and Fulda's actions seem contradictory as they suppress the authorial presence of their readers while simultaneously including them in their narrative. Jakki Spicer proposes a possible motivation behind this endeavor in her essay "The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author: Autobiography and the Fantasy of the Individual" (2005).

Spicer explains the concept of communicable experience as an occurrence that "is not individually experienced, but is a part of a chain or flow of experience that migrates (and mutates) between experiencers" (2005, 394). Spicer argues that the individual is unimportant in terms of experience and narrative. Rather, narrative conversation and communal contribution comprise an effectively relayed story in a way that speaks to Barthes's contentions and evolves them. While Barthes celebrates the power of the reader over the author, Spicer posits that the power arises from the combination of the two. Powell's and Fulda's blog readers provided them with feedback, which is especially beneficial to a communicable experience. While the inclusion of the blog readers could potentially detract from their narrative authority, Powell and Fulda create stories based on communicable experience by referencing their readers'

thoughts and contributions. In doing so, they give their readers a voice, although it is one that they themselves control.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] Although the bloggers attempt to reclaim authorial control over their readers, they relinquish a significant amount of power to the editor and publisher, greater forces who now also have control over the book. The introduction of the voice of an editor now further skews the notion of authorship, with the potential to further usurp Powell and Fulda from their positions of power. Indeed, the shift from blog to book results in a new set of problems and issues for authors. The question still looms of whether a work needs authorial attribution and whether the attributed author can truly exist. The presence of an editor further confuses the attempt at a seamless compilation of voices and influences. Aside from these authorial difficulties, blooks face the vulnerability of negative blogging stereotypes and risk appearing less literary or academic than texts written by traditional authors. If theorists and scholars can look beyond this stigma, however, blooks can provide intriguing insights into the concept of communal authorship and the implications it has for the perception of singular authorial attribution.

6. Acknowledgments

[6.1] I thank Dr. Gwen Athene Tarbox and Dr. Jon Adams of Western Michigan University for their feedback and comments.

7. Works cited

Barthes, Roland. 1977. "The Death of the Author." In Image, Music, and Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 142–48. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cover, Rob. 2006. "Audience Inter/active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control and Reconceiving Audience History." New Media Society. 8 (1): 139–58.

doi:10.1177/1461444806059922.

Fulda, Jennette. 2008. HalfAssed: A WeightLoss Memoir. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.

Kurlantzick, Joshua. 2004. "A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books)." New York Times, December 15, E1.

Mount, Ian. 2006. "Blook; A New Genre—Books Based on Blogs—Gains Ground." Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2.

Powell, Julie. 2005. Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. New York: Back Bay Books.

Spicer, Jakki. 2005. "The Author Is Dead, Long Live the Author: Autobiography and the Fantasy of the Individual." Criticism. 47 (3): 387–403. doi:10.1353/crt.2007.0003.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Book review

Digital fandom: New media studies, by Paul Booth

Francesca Coppa

Muhlenberg Col ege, Al entown, Pennsylvania, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Paul Booth. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 2010, paperback, $38.95 (231p) ISBN 9781433110702.

[0.2] Keywords— Digital media; Fan studies; Game culture; Media studies Coppa, Francesca. 2012. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, by Paul Booth [book review]. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0450.

Paul Booth. Digital fandom: New media studies. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. $38.95 (231p) ISBN 978-1-4331-1070-2.

[1] Paul Booth's Digital Fandom: New Media Studies articulates some of the ways in which today's online fan culture necessitates a rethinking of many basic paradigms of media studies. Booth, author of the justpublished Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television (2012), sees media fandom and media studies as reflections of each other: both engage powerfully and articulately with mass media texts, influenced by previous thinking developed in interpretative communities. But whereas fandom has gone enthusiastically digital, media studies is trapped in many of the paradigms of old media (print, film, television). Booth consequently calls for a new media studies field that is truly "new media" studies: he imagines a discipline that could take new media (the blogs, wikis, and social networks that Booth describes as

"digital, interactive, updatable, and ubiquitous") both as its subject and its primary mode of engagement, much as fandom currently does. In this way, digital fandom is itself the subject of and the model for Booth's new media studies; in particular, digital fandom exemplifies a "philosophy of playfulness" in which all fan activities and creativities take place in the context of an online, everchanging, collaborative, and public game played with and in the media. Media scholars, Booth says provocatively, need to keep pace with these evolving fannish modes to be current both in their thinking and their scholarly practice.

[2] Many of Booth's most productive ideas come from gaming and game culture.

Centrally, Booth uses the metaphor of an ARG (alternate reality game)—"a game

played in the physical world that utilizes digital technology to help players solve and decipher clues and puzzles"—to describe contemporary fandom. Fandom, like an ARG, is composed of people who work together, online and offline, not only to interpret, create, and extend the mass media, but also to make the game itself. Mass media is not simply a game we play together; fandom itself, the name of that game, is a game we make together. So the primary creative activity of fandom is fandom, which is made collaboratively on and with new media tools, and never finished. Today more people than ever are engaged in the kind of ongoing, real/virtual creative and discursive activities characteristic of digital fandom.

[3] Booth's first chapter, "The ARG Metaphor," traces the implications of this metaphor; in particular, Booth uses gaming's focus on the collective to shift the object of fandom studies from individual fan activity to the community matrix. As Booth explains, previous works on fandom have considered the fannish community only in terms of the individual fan's contribution to it, whereas he asks, "What of the contribution of the community to the whole?" (22). As in ARGs, the nature of play in digital fandom is determined by many people working together; individual contributions are to some degree secondary. Similarly, Booth argues that ARGs and online fandom share what he calls a "DigiGratis" economy: a mashup of market and gift economies in which some things are freely given and others have to be paid for.

Booth points out that just as some ARGs are produced for marketing purposes, fandom publicizes particular television shows and films and encourages the purchase of DVDs, action figures, Tshirts, and other commercial and fanmade products.

[4] Possibly the most exciting arguments of Booth's book occur in the second chapter, "Digital Fandom between Work and Text," in which he argues for a longoverdue reconsideration of the very nature of the creative product, whether it be a professionally made or fanmade object. Booth first blurs the boundaries between pro and fan texts, arguing that in today's transmedia environment, "it is not just individual texts that hold meaning, but also vast intertextual networks of connected texts—some of which can be fan created" (34). Booth sees fan works as a type of "communal reimagining" of stories that represents an entirely new form of communication: one which doesn't fit Roland Barthes's definitions of either work (a tangible object) or text (a series of relationships between works). Rather, digital fandom produces (unfinished; networked) things between work and text, an example of which is a fan fiction story posted to a blog. Booth argues that an entry on such a blog is not composed of only the post, but of the entire page comprising post plus comments; it is an (unfinished, networked) thing whose writer "is ultimately a group" (43). Such a story is a form of writing that "not only includes but also actively seeks critique and input" (50); as such, it is an entirely new kind of communication. From this point of view, a fan fiction story does not represent a single fan's response to a fixed mass

media text, but rather is part of a larger intratextual work that invites its own set of (potentially unlimited) responses in the form of comments and other fan works.

[5] By seeing the fan fiction story on a blog as a collaboratively written and constantly changing document, Booth aims not only to decenter the idea of a fixed artwork but also, perhaps more importantly, think past the traditional production/consumption models that have historically characterized both media studies and market culture. As Tisha Turk and Joshua Jackson (2012, ¶1.3) remind us in "The Ecology of Vidding," which explicitly considers vidding fandom as an art making community, "while fan creators are audiences, they also have audiences." Booth similarly aims to explode the traditional production/consumption continuum that sees Hollywood professionals as producers and fans as consumers: first, because in the endlessly replicable digital world, things aren't consumed in the same way—that is, there is no scarcity; but second, because fans not only "produce content, but share, give, and develop content, and embrace the work of other fans" (43). So to see fan works as responses to mass media texts, or blog comments as responses to a fan fiction story, is to be locked into an outdated production/consumption, text/comment binary that does not take into account the online network of people who collaborate to create perpetually unfinished digital projects such as blogs and wikis. What fandom knows, and media studies may not yet know, Booth argues, is that a blog is not simply an online diary or a personal Web page; to blog is to decide to read, write, and revise collaboratively and in community, and we need new scholarship that sees creativity as cooperative rather than as statements and responses.

[6] In later chapters on fan blogs ("IntraTextuality and Battlestar Blogs"), wikis ("The Narrative Database and the Web Commons," "Narractivity and Spoilers") and roleplay ("Identity Roleplay on Myspace"), Booth gives sustained attention to these forms of digital fan activity and argues the insufficiency of contemporary media studies criticism for dealing with their complexities. For example, in "The Narrative Database and the Web Commons," Booth talks about how fans communally turn linear stories into databases of narrative material in the form of wikis. For Booth, the crowdsourced creation of a coherent Lostapedia entry on "Sawyer" out of the 121 broadcast episodes of Lost (2004–10) is a collaborative and transformative narrative activity that media studies doesn't yet have the tools to analyze. Digital Fandom is punctuated by Booth's pleas for new work in new media: "The Blog Needs New Scholarship" is the title of one such section; "The Database Needs New Scholarship" is another.

[7] Digital Fandom's emphasis on the productive fannish community firmly situates this book on a spectrum of recent acafannish work defining fandom either as a psychological reaction or as a form of community participation. As Turk and Johnson observe, scholars like Matt Hills and Cornel Sandvoss seem to be interested in the

psychology of individual fans, while those like Busse and Hellekson see fandom as an essentially collective entity (2012, ¶2.4). Booth's ideas in Digital Fandom seem closely related to those of Busse and Hellekson, in terms of both fan practice and media studies. Busse and Hellekson, in narrating how a fan's sad blog post might inspire a fan fiction story that inspires a comment that inspires a poem that inspires another short story, exactly illustrate the openended, groupauthored new media communications Booth describes in Digital Fandom; moreover, they also articulate a parallel between the creation of fan works and their own academic practice, noting that both are made through "constant manipulation, renegotiation, commenting, and revising, all done electronically, among a group of people" (2006, 6)—that is, through the fully digital network Booth wants to see come to define the practice of media studies.

[8] But Turk and Johnson, while situating their own work on this spectrum of critics, articulate what is to me an important caveat to the idea of fandom as collective. They note that while they share Busse and Hellekson's interest in the fannish community,

"We prefer the term collaborative, which implies individuals working together for a common purpose, to collective, which suggests an undifferentiated group, and we resist Busse and Hellekson's insistence on 'the ultimate erasure of a single author'"

(2012, ¶2.4). Turk and Johnson's essay on the vidding collective ends with a case study: Lamardeuse's "Something's Gotta Give," as seen in the context of its broader ecology; that is,

[9] The relationship of vid, vidder, and audience not only to fannish discussions of Hawaii Five0 but also to the other shows the fans have watched, the fan fiction they have read and written, the other vids they have watched and made, the reception histories of those stories and vids, the growing body of fan discussions of vidding practices and aesthetics—all the social and discursive systems within which the fans and the vid are situated.

(¶4.1)

[10] But Lamardeuse's status as an author within this ecology is preserved; in fact, Turk and Johnson argue that this is how authorship functions and has always functioned. Drawing from composition studies, they articulate a creative model that depicts authors working within socially constituted systems, because "creation doesn't happen in a vacuum" (¶1.4)—and never has.

[11] But Booth, like Busse and Hellekson before him, runs the danger of entirely losing the figure of individual artist in his celebration of the creativity of the community. Booth claims that "the writer of the blog is ultimately a group" (43), just as Busse and Hellekson previously argued that "the creator of meaning, the person we like to call the author, is not a single person but is rather a collective entity" (2006, 6).

And in truth, I think they're right, particularly in the mashedup, postmodern age that Tom Pettitt describes as the other side of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, though one could argue that creativity has always been collaborative, but that in more traditional critical models, those collaborators (editors; cowriters and performers; friends, lovers, and wives) are suppressed, derided, or dismissed. I also think that most fans would have no trouble at all locating fannish creativity in the collective, even as they try to apportion credit, however imperfectly, to movie directors, TV show creators, actors, beta readers, other fans whose work inspired them, and their own supporters and commenters equally; after all, it's fans who talk so easily of the fannish hive mind, who are suspicious of BNFs (big name fans), and know how hard it is to inspire fan works in a small fandom. Ideas don't come from inside.

[12] And yet the erasure of the figure of the author or artist can mean something different to women—and fandom, at least the parts that make transformative works like fan fiction, art, and vids, is still predominantly female. Women have struggled to have their creative work recognized as art (note 1) rather than as a craft like quilting

or sewing. I have written about how film editing used to be seen as a woman's skill akin to sewing (Coppa 2008, ¶4.10), and so I worry about the return to what could be seen as a craft model after a 75year interval in which editing was a profitable and maledominated profession that earned one both money and screen credit. Booth (who, to be fair, is a communications professor, not an arts professor) is excited about

fannish creativity but rarely namechecks individual fans (note 2). In fact, in his

Appendix of "Downloaded Blog Fan Fiction," he presents us only with a list of "Full Titles" and "Web Addresses" of the stories, with no author names in sight. (The screen names of "Blogs, Blog Authors, and Commenters" appear in a second table, consistent with Booth's idea that the the entire blog post is the work of art.) But I'm of two minds about the move to credit the fannish collective rather than the individual author, vidder, or artist just at the moment when remix has been recognized as our time's most exciting artistic practice, as well as a potentially marketable skill.

[13] My own aesthetic, fannish, and feminist theories tell me that Booth, Busse, and Hellekson are right, and we should be suspicious of individual authorship, both in terms of what it represents and of what (and who) it suppresses. So my concern about the erasure of the individual author is tactical rather than theoretical; I believe it to be true, but I'm not sure I trust the practical applications of that truth. So I hope, both as a fan and as a feminist, that we come to appreciate the value of the collective and that, as Booth suggests, digital fandom becomes the model of knowledge production and creative activity. But I also wouldn't mind seeing more credit go to specific writers, artists, editors, vidders, podficcers, and other individual creative workers of fandom.

Notes

1. See Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), cover text. "She didn't write it. She wrote it, but she shouldn't have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about… She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book! It's sci fi!)"

2. It may be worth noting that while fans aren't namechecked in Digital Fandom, scholars still are; we're not yet at the point of failing to credit academic workers with their ideas, even though those ideas are developed collaboratively and in a network, just as fan works are.

Works cited

Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. 2006. "Introduction: Work in Progress." In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 5–32. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Coppa, Francesca. 2008. "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0044.

Pettitt, Thomas. 2007. "Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis: ElizabethanAmerican Compatibilities." Paper presented at Media in Transition 5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age. Communications Forum, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, Cambridge, MA, April 27–29. http://web.mit.edu/comm

forum/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf.

Turk, Tisha, and Joshua Johnson. 2012. "Toward an Ecology of Vidding." In

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0326.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 11 (2012)

Book review

Legitimating television, by Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine Melanie E. S. Kohnen

New York University, New York, New York, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. New York: Routledge, 2011, paperback, $36.95 (232p) ISBN 9780415880268.

[0.2] Keywords— Class; Convergence; Fandom; Gender; Race; Reception studies;

Taste; Technology; Television history; TV

Kohnen, Melanie E. S. 2012. Legitimating Television, by Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine [book review]. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 11.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0454.

Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine. Legitimating television: Media convergence and cultural status. New York: Routledge, 2012. $36.95

(232p) ISBN 978-0415880268.

[1] In Legitimating Television, Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine explore the shifting perceptions of television as a medium during the convergence era. Newman and Levine focus on the increasing cultural legitimation of television and examine the implications of this legitimation. Through an analysis of television production, style, narrative, reception, technology, and scholarship, they reveal that appreciation of different forms of television has not equally increased. Rather, they argue, the elevation of socalled quality television depends on the denigration of other forms, which are supposedly of lower quality. In other words, while critics and scholars celebrate the narratively complex primetime drama and the singlecamera sitcom, many of them overlook or dismiss soap operas, teen television, and multicam sitcoms.

Likewise, Newman and Levine outline how press reports, technology reviews, and advertisements deem certain ways of watching television appropriate for the convergence era, including timeshifted viewing on HDTV sets, while disregarding other methods as behind the times, such as live viewing without circumvention of commercials. They argue that the elevation and denigration of certain genres, production styles, and technologies of reception correspond to and reaffirm existing hierarchies of taste. Through careful analysis, they demonstrate that convergence culture has not fundamentally changed the perception of television as a medium;

rather, cultural elites mobilize discourses of convergence culture to distinguish

"quality" television from the rest of TV, which these elites continue to associate with feminized, lowclass mass entertainment. While Legitimating Television does not primarily engage with fandom, Newman and Levine's insights into television, convergence, and cultural hierarchies are directly relevant to scholars interested in audience and fan practices. After all, convergence culture seems to have fostered a new respect for fandom—indeed, media producers seek out and enter into conversations with fans. Legitimating Television lays the groundwork and offers a methodology for a nuanced understanding of what one might call industryapproved quality fandom—a construction that depends on denigrating other, undesirable fan practices.

[2] Legitimating Television comprises eight chapters, each of which focuses on a specific site in which discourses of legitimation play out. The first two chapters provide a theoretical and historical foundation for understanding processes of legitimation in the convergence era. The next three chapters focus on production, style, and genre: chapter 3 analyzes the perception and celebration of showrunners as auteurs, chapter 4 analyzes the critical appreciation of the singlecamera sitcom, and chapter 5

historicizes the value placed on the narratively complex primetime drama. The following two chapters are devoted to unpacking the significance of television technology. Chapter 6 delineates the increasing popularity of flatscreen HDTV sets and their place in the home, and chapter 7 examines DVRs, DVDs, and mobile TV as technologies that seem to provide more agency to the viewer. The book concludes with a chapter on the contribution of television studies and scholars of television to the cultural legitimation of television. The broad array of topics covered in the book conveys how deeply embedded the logic of legitimation has become in contemporary culture: it touches how we perceive those who produce television, the kinds of stories television tells, how we watch these stories, where and by what means we consume television, and how scholars write about television.

[3] The first two chapters place current processes of legitimation in a theoretical and historical context. By tracing the discourse of legitimation throughout television history, Newman and Levine challenge the idea that convergenceera television constitutes a break with and a move beyond television's past. Moreover, this historical overview establishes one of the core themes of the book, namely that TV's cultural legitimation depends on identifying certain areas of television as not being like TV at all. Even in the early days of TV, critics sought to distinguish certain forms of programming from networkera TV, which was associated with lower class levels, feminization, and the mass media. Newman and Levine trace this "class versus mass"

rhetoric through the critical praise for 1950s anthology dramas, 1960s documentaries, and "relevant" programming in the 1970s to the lauding of the socalled quality drama

in the 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, critical and media industry discourses portray original programming on basic and premium cable as complex and cinematic.

Throughout, programs that appeared most unlike usual television fare were seen as most legitimate and relevant. Convergenceera discourses of legitimation draw on this rhetoric while at the same time distancing current programming from that of the past.

Newman and Levine highlight the role of fans in these processes of legitimation. For example, as mainstream media discussions began to elevate cult television programs such as Twin Peaks or The XFiles as different from and implicitly better than the rest of television, fans of these series also distinguished their appreciation of these series from that of the noncult TV fan or viewer. Newman and Levine thus make the important point that both fan and industry discourses contributed to the legitimation of television.

[4] The next three chapters focus on production and programming. Newman and Levine highlight three interrelated sites of legitimation: the showrunner, the singlecamera sitcom, and the primetime serial. A definite strength of these chapters is the authors' multifaceted approach, which considers production, promotion, and reception as interrelated factors in the process of legitimation. This approach allows them to demonstrate how supposedly new modes of production and programming

simultaneously draw on and reject television's past. The central example is the legitimation of the primetime serial as cinematic and complex programming. The celebration of the primetime drama in mainstream media criticism and industry discourses depends on the denigration of the genre that pioneered serialized storytelling, namely the soap opera. Despite the fact that the primetime drama has borrowed storytelling techniques from soaps throughout TV history, production and promotional discourses strive to separate the two genres. Newman and Levine highlight several textual and extratextual strategies that distance the primetime serial from soaps, including an emphasis on endings, a constraint on the degree of seriality, and a rejection of feminized, soapy subjects such as romance, family relationships, and heightened emotions. From Newman and Levine's point of view, these efforts to distinguish dramas from soaps are "fundamentally gendered ways of imagining and validating television narratives" with the aim of keeping feminine narratives "at the bottom of widely accepted hierarchies of value and taste" (99). Viewers who consume and enjoy this programming are also rejected or denigrated as a lowerquality audience. Overall, Newman and Levine's analysis of the primetime serial clearly demonstrates that legitimation comes with a price. Going one step beyond their analysis, one can see that the delegitimation of certain feminine narratives leads to a similar delegitimation of fan practices that center on romance and relationships—

practices that are often not hailed or celebrated by current media industry discourses, especially when they deviate from heterosexual or heteronormative perspectives.

[5] In the following two chapters, Newman and Levine move on to examine television technology's place in discourses of legitimation. Specifically, they examine the changing aesthetics of the television set and the impact of DVDs and DVRs on television viewing. For much of television's history, both the television set and the practice of viewing television were associated with the domestic sphere. The various shifts in television technologies during the convergence era aim to disentangle TV from the home and its feminine associations. As Newman and Levine outline, advertising of flatscreen HDTV sets emphasizes masculinity and affluence, rendering the television a desirable technological object. At the same time, digital technologies like DVRs and DVDs further facilitate the timeshifting that the VCR first made possible. The ability to overcome the broadcast schedule and avoid advertising becomes a defining characteristic of a "smart," upscale TV viewer who is in charge of his or her media experience. This smart TV viewer is opposed to a lowerclass, feminized viewer who cannot master new technologies to shape his or her TV experience and is stuck watching on a broadcast schedule. Considering that the examination of (female) fans as early adopters of new technologies has an important place in fan studies, Newman and Levine's argument about the industry's shifting conceptualization of the TV viewer adds another dimension to the discourse about fans and technology.

[6] In addition to discussing timeshifting, Newman and Levine introduce the idea of spaceshifting, watching television on mobile devices. By way of a careful reminder that TV has always also been watched outside of the home, they demonstrate that mobile viewing is not a revolutionary technological innovation, and its celebration is another strategy aimed at distancing convergenceera TV from its predecessors. Most importantly, advertising and media industry discourses paint mobile viewing as a way of escaping television's domestic confinement. At the conclusion of the two technologyoriented chapters, Newman and Levine observe that "television is thus legitimated not only by better content, whether considered as narrative representations or images or sounds, but also by better, more masculine, means of accessing that content" (152).

[7] Legitimating Television concludes with a chapter on TV scholarship as part of the process of legitimation. Newman and Levine concede that their own television consumption practices make them participants in television's legitimation. They use this insight as motivation for issuing the following call: "Television scholars can and should strive for awareness and transparency in the ways their tastes shape their practices, including their practices of teaching and scholarship" (154). They highlight several aspects of television scholarship that, in their opinion, reinforce processes of legitimation, including rhetoric that paints convergenceera TV as a golden age; an almost exclusive focus on the most legitimated programs, such as narratively complex primetime serials and singlecamera sitcoms; and acceptance of industry logic

without critical interrogation, which they find most prominent in studies of programming on HBO and other premium cable channels. In order to resist a reaffirmation of legitimation in scholarship, Newman and Levine advocate for "a culturalstudies influenced television studies, one that understands television and all popular culture as a site of struggle over taste and value" (154). Their analyses in the preceding chapters underline the necessity of such a multifaceted approach, lending urgency to their call to action.

[8] While there is no chapter dedicated exclusively to audiences and fan practices, Newman and Levine touch on fandom several times throughout the book. The most relevant chapters in this regard are chapter 3, "The Showrunner as Auteur"; chapter 7,

"Technologies of Agency"; and chapter 8, "Television Scholarship and/as Legitimation."

In their discussion of fan activities, Newman and Levine focus on how changes in technology and in the media industry led to a mainstreaming of fan practices. For example, the VCR enabled fans of the early cult TV series Twin Peaks to scrutinize the television text, and Usenet groups became gathering sites for fans. They argue that such scrutinizing and gathering became more widespread during the convergence era, when an active engagement with television became part of the smart viewer's identity.

In the discourse of legitimation, "the audience conceived as 'mass' during the network era is newly liberated by the cult television text, the object of intense fandom, which itself is in part a product of interactive new technologies" (144). Once again, they show that fandom does not always or necessarily exist in opposition to media industry goals, but rather plays a part in the convergenceera legitimation of television.

[9] An important but also slightly problematic insight arises out of Newman and Levine's discussion of the changing relationships between industry and audiences. The authors observe that networks and producers have started to court the cult TV fan as an ideal viewer. While Newman and Levine note that the elevation of the cult TV fan dismisses other, more casual viewers, they neglect to differentiate between different types of fans and their relationship to networks and producers. The media industry does not embrace all fans equally, after all. It is this gap in Newman and Levine's characterization of convergenceera audiences that opens up opportunities for further investigation by fan scholars. Following through on Newman and Levine's analysis and methodology leads to the insight that media industry discourses embrace a particular type of fan, namely a masculinized fan who debates matters such as narrative complexity and showrunners' creative visions in a passionate but intellectual way. This type of cult TV fan is elevated above the feminized fan—the stereotypical fangirl—

whose engagement is perceived to be more intensely emotional and devoted to practices that cannot be easily monetized. In other words, Newman and Levine's observations about the gendered hierarchies that shape convergenceera perceptions of production, programming, and technology also extend to ideas about proper and

improper fans. Socalled quality television finds its match in what we might call quality fandom. While quality fandom is lauded by industry insiders and critics, who might identify themselves as part of it, this praise rests on the dismissal of other fan practices. The rise of quality fandom and its implications for industryaudience relationships would be compelling subjects for fan scholars.

[10] Overall, Legitimating Television offers a crucial intervention in the popular and scholarly conception of television's increasing cultural significance. Its multifaceted approach and wide variety of examples render it relevant to a large number of scholarly projects. As a teaching tool, Newman and Levine's engaging and clear style make Legitimating Television suitable for both the graduate and undergraduate classroom, especially as a counterpoint to popular or scholarly sources that regard the increased cultural status of contemporary television in a more favorable light.

Document Outline

- Transformative Works and Cultures, No. 11 (September 15, 2012)

- Editorial

- TWC Editors, Authors and authorship

- Theory

Table of Contents

Transformative Works and Cultures, No. 11 (September 15, 2012)

Editorial

TWC Editors, Authors and authorship

Theory