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transitions My dissertation, which I've been posting here in installments since mid-2007, is finally finished! You can download the finished project here, if you're interested.

With that, there will be no further public content at this LJ. If you'd still like to keep up with my professional life, you can follow jlr_blog

Many thanks to my readers!

6 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/4/. Queer Economies The conclusion to the saga of OurChart.com illustrates once again the vulnerability of fan communities when they rely on corporately controlled infrastructure, confirming the importance of efforts like the OTW's to advocate for the autonomy of fan labor. The site shut down abruptly in January 2009, vaporizing the contributions and connections created by its active network of users. In Chaiken's farewell blog entry, which gave one week's notice of the closure, she wrote that "Showtime is not only OurChart's parent but one of Our Community's greatest champions... that's why in our final season of The L Word, we've decided to combine forces and host OurChart on sho.com" (Gannon). This explanation was disingenuous, since hosting OurChart on Sho.com meant, in reality, that all the collectively generated content of the social network "chart" disappeared [Figure 13], and Sho.com now simply offered authorized tie-in content with token gestures of interactivity, such as "Q&A [with Chaiken]... behind-the-scenes podcasts... video specials... message boards... swag" and an "official" wiki. In a feeble attempt to continue a social media strategy, the star feature of Sho.com's OurChart page was a text box that allowed fans to post questions for Chaiken directly to an unmoderated twitter account, perhaps an inadvisable move since it was immediately inundated with exclamations of outrage by OurChart.com members [Figure 14]. Their outcry was in vain, however; public information about why the site folded was slim, but it seems likely that, with The L Word entering its final season, the promotional value of OurChart.com was largely exhausted, and Showtime thus eliminated its funding (as in the case of FanLib's archive, it wasn't feasible for such an expensive venture to become self-supporting). The lesson for new media marketers is that, while fan communities encompass a wealth of productive labor, very little of this labor can be monetized directly. Only this profitable surplus is of interest to corporations, but it is subjective and collective desires in excess of this expropriation that sustain the dynamic productivity of fandom. Autonomy is thus vital to the very processes of valorization that the industry is increasingly eager to exploit. The lesson for fans is that, if we depend on proprietary platforms like OurChart.com, our creativity and community will remain at risk until we fully conform to capitalist dictates.

Chaiken's styling of "Our Community" as effectively her trademark points to an issue raised frequently in discussions of OurChart: the status of this "our." The Wall Street Journal speculated that the "stigma of slash" may be one factor that "has made some mainstream authors and TV networks wary of... looking for ways to capitalize on fan fiction and its large audience" (Jurgensen). In this context, the relationship of queer fan production to media convergence is embroiled in double binds: would "we" prefer to end up marginalized or assimilated, unpaid or commercialized, subculture or target market? One well-founded fear that animates endeavors like the Organization for Transformative Works is that the "mainstreaming" of fan fiction may privilege and aggrandize heteronormative practices that are palatable to the industry while driving fandom's queerer traditions further underground. But The L Word is a test case for the opposite concern: what if the same-sex romances that populate slash are commodifiable after all? As I've explored, the program deploys normative tactics across its textual and metatextual worlds in order to adapt lesbian identities to the ideological, demographic, and economic demands of corporate profit models. I would argue, however, that the fan labor The L Word attempts to reify as brand-name lesbianism is nonetheless queer labor. This is not to say that fanworks are necessarily queer in content -- even slash stories often express the same conservative conventions that tend to be represented on television. My claim is that we could conceptualize the labor of subjectification and desire, in form, as queer labor. This libidinal labor is pivotal to the entertainment industry since, as immaterial commodities, mass media products require their audiences to work to valorize them. In addition to the stakes of defining the "our" that echoes through market discourses, then, we might ask whose interests "we" agitate for from a Marxist perspective. Late capitalism's labor relations are far more enmeshed with gender and sexuality than Marxism has typically acknowledged, and it is vital that we reincorporate these dimensions into our analyses of work in the era of convergence.

My study of the The L Word's onscreen and online mobilization of present-day working conditions is an exemplar of the trend toward commodifying queer labor, but it is not only in instances of gay media or gay fandom that we must consider this issue. Convergence as a whole is characterized by queer dynamics in its epistemologies (Chapter II), technologies (Chapter III), and economies, and fan production accentuates the inherent contradictions and instabilities of this capitalist system. If the value of media properties is produced by the immaterial labor of their consumers, in what sense do corporations own them? If today's social factory relies on autonomous networks of communicative subjects, how can corporations expropriate their work? Fandom is scrambling to find its own answers to these questions, and despite the fact that fan labor is fundamentally integrated with capitalism, it is crucial to maintain some degree of disaffiliation between fan communities and commercial institutions. Queer female fan practices embody an opportunity to galvanize antagonism within the industrial transformations in progress, and understanding, engaging, and defending the autonomy of these collectives will contribute to everyone's freedom to labor queerly.

7 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/3/C The Archive of Our Own The cover of the "fanisode" 'zine features a photograph of The L Word's cast posed around a bed frame on a deserted beach, draped in satiny, revealing garments, and staring vacantly out at their assumed audience. We could take this image as a metaphorical portrait of the network's vision of fan community: a neatly assembled, perfectly groomed, politically isolated demographic frozen in their consumer rictus. In its online promotions, The L Word constantly reasserts its own simulacral portrayals as the coordinates of fan labor, demonstrating the limits of its gestures toward participatory engagement. Perhaps because of this insistent homology between purportedly lesbian diegetic, production, and audience worlds, The L Word fandom has a very different orientation from the two femslash fandoms discussed in previous chapters. While the program's viewers have been vocal in their celebrations, commentaries, and critiques, this productive expression seems to reverberate primarily within the closed circuit of Chaiken's authority, addressed hierarchically upward to its corporate pantheon. But as my other case studies have explored, media fandom manifests alternative aspirations to queer female community that more concertedly oppose schemes like the "official social network," which aim to corral desiring subjects in a virtual factory as immaterial workers. FanLib's gambit to harness creators' labor in a commercial archive foregrounded certain underlying constraints of online fandom, namely its reliance on websites and infrastructure controlled by corporations and on the tacit sanction of media conglomerates. As a response, a watershed post by Astolat called for "An Archive of One's Own" that could materialize fandom's values of autonomy, openness, collectivity and gifting in a platform owned and run by fans {http://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html}. Her manifesto catalyzed a grassroots campaign to lay the groundwork for this project, headquartered in the LiveJournal community "fanarchive" (later renamed "otw_news"). This insurgency coalesced because it had become essential for the community to react not only to FanLib, but to more widespread pressures on fandom's labor relations prompted by the industrial innovations of convergence. Companies' escalating interest in exploiting productive subjectivities has met with resistance, that is, not necessarily to capitalism as a totality, but certainly to its unilateral imposition of new working conditions.

The consensus among fans active in the archive venture was that protecting their community's traditions of self-valorization would require a cultural and legal scaffold as well as a technological one. Barely a month after Astolat's provocation, a board of directors convened to plan the launch of a non-profit, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) {http://transformativeworks.org}, to advocate for the interests of fan producers. The OTW adopted a multi-pronged approach, wherein several distinct projects run by volunteer committees synergistically intervene in fandom's shift toward the mainstream, supporting established practices and representing them to outsiders. In addition to the archive itself, these projects comprise a wiki to chronicle subcultural lore {http://fanlore.org}, other efforts in historical preservation that include a partnership with Special Collections at the University of Iowa, a legal support network, and an academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures (I served on the editorial team for its inaugural year). The organizing and unifying figure for these various stratagems is "legitimacy," as the opening of the OTW's mission statement pronounces: "We envision a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity" {http://transformativeworks.org/about/believe}. Legitimacy is an overdetermined ambition that permeates the undertaking on all levels, from the OTW's tactical emphasis on the legally defensible notion of transformation to its own bureaucratic structure, which furnishes the anarchic vastness of fandom with a reassuringly centralized facade. Alexis Lothian further observes that legitimacy motivates the OTW's resolute affirmation of the anticommercial model of fandom, noting that the organization "tries to protect fan communities by insisting that these are subcultural groupings constituted in support of capital... [and for] all its demonization of the for-profit fan archive sites, OTW is keen to point out how the fanworks they archive will continue to aid in others' profit" (Lothian). She is referring to passages from the Frequently Asked Questions, which states (under "Legal > Does the OTW support the commercialization of fanfic?") that the OTW aims "first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy.... These fans create vibrant and active communities around the work they are celebrating, tend to spend heaps of money on the original work and associated merchandise, and encourage others to buy also. They are not competing with the original creator's work and if anything help to promote it" {http://transformativeworks.org/faq}. These assurances are strategically savvy on the part of a small-scale operation opposing corporate giants, but they demonstrate that the OTW's sphere of action is limited by its given economic conditions, and while it may confront many important injustices, capitalism is not among them.

As the OTW was taking shape amidst a ferment of agitated fans, its commitment to legitimation was not uncontroversial, and its stance on media fandom's gender politics was likewise contentious. The FAQ ambivalently pledges that "OTW values all fans, and the contributions made by fans of all genders. As the Organization grew out of a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture, we also specifically value that history of women's involvement, and the practices of fandom shaped by women's work" (under "Organization for Transformative Works > Why do the values and mission statements focus on female fans?"). This unique female-centric alignment was discordant with promises of "maximum inclusiveness" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos}, and predictably, it generated "wank," which Lothian defines as "online drama, arguments, and deeply silly conflicts that get out of control." She maintains that the slang term's more familiar connotation remains in play, though, because fandom's truculent wanking is enmeshed with its "sexualized exchange of explicit fiction among women that... not only resembles but often constitutes a kind of ephemeral sexual contact." The most notable aspect of the OTW's legitimation project is that, while it may willingly apply standards given by the law and the market to fan production, it refuses to concede to sexual normativity, insisting on the contrary that its archive and other endeavors provide a reliable and permissive venue for the full range of perversions exhibited in fan fiction. The Archive of Our Own (AO3) itself (which launched in October 2008 and reached open beta in November 2009) offers optional warnings that include "rape/non-con" and "underage" plus a myriad of user-driven tags such as "BDSM... crossdressing... incest... sex pollen... [and] tentacles" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq#content_faq}. In response to incidents like omnibus site http://fanfiction.net's decision to stop hosting explicit stories in 2002 and LiveJournal's 2007 deletion of numerous journals and communities in Harry Potter fandom in a kiddie porn purge {http://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough}, the AO3 vows to safeguard all fic without "illegal or inappropriate content" and never to remove it for "offensiveness" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos#content}. Thus, as Lothian implies, the archive's most vulnerable content (sexually graphic works) and its context (a collective of women) harmonize to constitute a queer female labor formation.

The Archive of Our Own realizes a very different "our" from the homogeneous community represented by OurChart, but both configurations intersect with a feminist attention to professionalization. The archive's open source software platform was coded from scratch by a predominantly female volunteer team, many of whom had no prior programming experience. The undertaking was therefore an opportunity for women to be mentored in skills with high value in the digital economy, much as the "You Write It!" contest positioned the unpaid labor of fan fiction as training for a writing career. Between its infrastructure and its content, the AO3 exhibits the abundance of productive work that sustains fan communities. But in contrast to FanLib and Showtime's outlook, which is formulated to monetize fan labor within a corporate framework, the AO3 acknowledges its implication in late capitalism while nonetheless insisting on the value of amateurism and autonomy. A "chart" of its network structure would reveal intimate ties between women articulated through creative and often erotic production. I contend that this system is queer, but in an admittedly amorphous sense that resists capture in a reified demographic like OurChart's commodity lesbianism. The AO3's refusal of certain capitalist dictates may seem like a nominal gesture, but it is precisely this divergence between some of the interests of fans and some of the interests of industry that generates antagonism. In this case, it is an antagonism on behalf of queer desires, and this vantage constitutes a demand that workers determine their own working conditions for the labor of subjectivity and sexuality. Even while arguing that the gift economy is integral to the capitalist economy, Terranova asserts that "free labour... is not necessarily exploited labour" (91); in its stand against exploitation, the Organization for Transformative works embodies a vital struggle within media convergence.

7 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/2/C Friends Plus The implementation of the "chart" on OurChart.com materializes the many contradictions and insufficiencies that delineate The L Word's ideology of commodity lesbianism. Much like the program itself, the website must find an equilibrium between appealing to its niche fan base and to mainstream users and companies. But where the TV series titillates to attract straight male viewers, OurChart.com takes an opposing tack: desexualizing its lesbian orientation in order to render it as a palatable assortment of consumer positions encompassing popular culture, chic style, and liberal politics. With unusual coyness for an L Word tie-in, the venture is billed as a "site where women can connect" ("About Us"), thus sidestepping queer sex by emphasizing an assumed gender stability that erases male and transgender fans. In keeping with the franchise's signature circularity, season 5 episodes recapitulated criticisms similar to these, commenting self-referentially on the development of the existing OurChart.com. In the season premiere, Alice (now an executive of the fictional OurChart just as actress Leisha Hailey is a partner in the actual site) films an installment of her video podcast "Alice in Lesbo Land." Her interview with Phyllis Kroll (Cybill Shepherd), a middle-aged woman who has recently come out, is an occasion for a didactic review of some of the lesbian buzzwords ("stone butch," "vanilla," "trannies") that comprise the social network's lingua franca. However Max, who is behind the camera, questions the status of this common idiom, arguing with Alice about the eponymous "our" in relation to his transgender identity:
Alice: I feel like we're getting a little off-topic here for OurChart.
Max: Why is it off-topic?
Alice: Well, I mean, OurChart is for lesbians.
Max: I thought OurChart is for everybody. It's OUR chart, doesn't that suggest it's inclusive?
When Max then posts about his gender transition on OurChart "to educate people" [Figure 7], he angers Alice as well as his fellow bloggers, who continue to insist that it's a "lesbian space." By presenting this fabricated outrage over the boundaries of "lesbian" as originating from users themselves, The L Word disavows it's own role in perpetuating and even constructing transgender exclusion while backhandedly reinforcing the impression that the site is for women only. And when Alice grudgingly concedes that Max can continue writing a featured blog, it appears as if OurChart simply offers a neutral forum where the lesbian community can negotiate existing tensions while mobilizing this fictional narrative to inoculate the real life OurChart.com against charges of discrimination.

Nowhere is the gap between OurChart.com's claims and its capabilities more stark than in the failure of its hyperbolic promise to tell you who has hooked up with who (which, according to the program's diegetic logic, has been the Chart's primary impetus all along). Ficera's intuitive skepticism about the database project seems to prefigure its technocultural limitations, and these deficits are compounded by a conflict between the sexual archive concept and the site's move to advance a desexed, advertising-friendly brand of lesbianism. In contrast to The L Word's onscreen graphics portraying an imaginary interface with an intimate network, "friend" connections on OurChart.com conveyed no more information than they would on a typical online social network (send anyone a request, whatever your relationship is, and they choose whether to approve it). In a small concession to the original idea, a second type of connection was added later, dubbed "friends plus." The site defined this modality in the vaguest possible terms, with no mandate that it involve a sexual liaison:
We've created friends plus for everyone who's more-than-just-a-friend: exes, one-night stands, long-term partners, and any other players in your own personal dyke drama. Ever been secretly in love with your best friend? Kept up an intense relationship with an ex? Found yourself in a group of girls who've all slept with each other? Been out with a girl but weren't sure you were on a date? So have we. All of these are your friends plus.
Now, there is a certain radical quality to this open-ended articulation of community, in that it doesn't privilege the expected forms of coupling over more ephemeral interpersonal bonds. But in the context of OurChart.com, this cloud of intimacy functions as a smokescreen for the site's singular interest in labeling identities: the production of commodity lesbianism at any of these nodes. Whatever axes of their relationships users might wish to chart, OurChart.com engineered its equivalence between lesbian network and internet network to operates far better ideologically than technologically. Unlike the navigable data visualizations that represent Alice's online Chart in the episodes, OurChart.com's Flash animation of its user-generated Chart could only display about fifty of one person's friends in isolation [Figure 8]. The notion of the Chart is a pivotal device in The L Word's framing discourses, but its instantiation in OurChart.com demonstrates that it acts as an alibi, an ideal of connection for the purpose of community building that masks the franchise's investment in assembling immaterial workers into a virtual factory.

Because, despite OurChart.com's heavy reliance on professional content to impose a consistent tone, its users did work. The site's social network was in fact a lively one, with plenty of conversations, opinions, relationships, and no doubt hookups being forged beyond its "celesbian" encounters. The fan fiction thread numbered among many active forum topics [Figure 9] -- while the offerings in The L Word fic are strikingly sparse in the usual venues for Law & Order: SVU or Battlestar Galactica femslash (LiveJournal and standalone archives, for example; note that there are around 200 stories for The L Word vs. thousands for the other programs at {http://fanfiction.net/tv}), in this case creativity seemed to thrive under the auspices of the official brand. We could speculate that this idiosyncratic pattern was elicited by the ostensible correspondence between the aspirations, culture, and sexuality of the viewers, characters, and producers of the series as "authentic" lesbians, and enhanced by the latters' inviting attitude toward fans. While it is becoming more common for entertainment companies to celebrate fan fiction in principle, it still rarely garners direct acknowledgement or sponsorship due to its potential interference with brand integrity and control. Because Showtime outsourced much of the labor of OurChart.com to an autonomous, emergent community, the network could not guarantee that the subjectivities and discourses circulating within its social network factory would conform to its intentions and interests. Certainly, Max's fictional invasion of this "lesbian space" raises the possibility that OurChart's construction of a static, homonormative lesbian identity along gender lines might be challenged. But if any such challenges occurred under the banner (and literally, the logo) of The L Word, could these unruly connections offer any significant disruption to the expropriation of users' labor? Much like the reflexive incorporation of fans' objections into the program itself, any unexpected, creative, critical, or even outright rebellious moments that erupted on OurChart.com play into the impression that the site was an authentic reflection of and platform for lesbian community. In an era of real subsumption, simply by following the edict to "be subjects" -- to desire, communicate, and invest immaterial commodities with meaning -- fans are performing lesbianism as labor in accordance with The L Word's teachings. The crucial fault line in this capitalist monolith, however, is that OurChart.com does not capture the whole of this labor and its value: subjectivity is productive in excess of what a corporate framework can rationalize. In the next section, I will locate the tensions and antagonisms that this excess can generate within fandom's queer economy

7 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/4/Z End Matter I have three more sections of Chatper IV / Labor of Love to post over the next few days, but I'm going to go ahead and put this up now. This will conclude the online portion of my dissertation. I'll make a final entry with information about the complete manuscript by the end of the year.

/ Illustrations

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8 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/2/B The Official Social Network Much of the existing academic work on The L Word's fan intensities might be fruitfully informed by this theoretical perspective, and this project is informed in turn by my colleagues' analyses. Amy Villarejo evokes the excess value enumerated above when she proposes that we "imagine TV as a site of transcoding, where that commodity that is our collective attention is bought and sold (this is, after all, what ratings measure, and what advertisers and networks trade), but where we as spectators also are not entirely equivalent to that commodity" (389). Villarejo reiterates that, in an era when "capital has been invested at an affective level... [the] labor of the production, circulation, and manipulation of affect... becomes crucial" (391). Because this affective juncture has oriented marketing to minority desires, she asserts that "queer studies needs rigorous economic analysis and intervention into audience research... that can redress the so-called 'research' undertaken by market studies and polling groups who benefit from overemphasizing the riches of the gay market" (396). The L Word is a prime example of these tactics of homonormative commodification, and Villarajo writes that the program "is a melodrama for a digital age... [with an] overt sense of a network or set of ties among strangers [that] comes in an early drawing Alice makes of the web that emerges from Shane’s sexual life" (398) -- that is, the Chart. Through this trope, "characters' movement between home and work, family and friends, invokes some of the material of lesbian life that has been central to lesbians' political aims, only to defuse that material or transcode it into this loosely-defined sense of 'connection' that is the series' most apt figure" (399). In other words, the Chart is among the gestures enabling the market logic that renders lesbian identity as commodity rather than political affinity. For Villarejo, the transition to digital television is a key element in this emerging configuration but, by the same token, "digital television, with its expanded spectrum and hundreds of offerings, has already taught us, I want to argue, how to juggle multiple realities, divergent stories, and not just at the level of what is on television" (402). Thus, convergence furnishes a set of conditions that facilitate capitalist expropriation of a "gay market," but these same conditions provide the ground for queer disruptions of this trend.

Michele Aaron also references today's media transformations when she observes that, in the case of The L Word, "the actual airing of the show becomes just one way in which it is experienced, or bought into, by a queer audience" (66). She therefore suggests an "extraterrestrial avenue" for queer TV studies that takes as its object "this queer community and discourse generated by but existing beyond the analogue... forged via other media (satellite, cable, the internet) and... linked to the television programme from which it originates, [while] it also operates independently of it" (66). This provisional independence could be associated with the ways that "visual pleasure... engages our desire for, or to be, on-screen characters counter to our 'normal' sexual orientation" (70), and Aaron advises that, following psychoanalytic film theory, "television must be reconsidered, therefore, for its potential influence on subject formation" (71) if we are to understand the significance of "extraterrestrial" formations. M. Catherine Jonet and Laura Anh Williams likewise urge us toward more complex models of reception, offering a counterpoint to the many scathing criticisms of The L Word's imposition of normative identities. In their view, "The L Word is a 'restive' text" (153): due to its "conflicting impetuses of representational insufficiency and recuperation... [its] representation of lesbians and queer women will always be insufficient. It will never achieve the 'truth,' authenticity, or even the 'inside glimpse'" (155). Rather than regarding the program's relentless claims to authenticity as an unyielding ideological tactic, that is, Jonet and Williams imply that their inevitable failure opens onto an ambivalent terrain that is fertile for queer readings. These articles thus advance a precarious understanding of The L Word's commodified viewer and an optimistic outlook on the possibilities of queer engagement.

Candace Moore has worked specifically on The L Word screening parties (plus OurChart.com's "virtual" version) as "peripheral sites of production, where queer female consumers become incorporated into the production process (through audience surveillance and interaction) and where lines between private/public, producer/consumer, and insider/outsider are blurred" (126). She notes once again "the unquantifiable nature of television consumption and fandom... [g]iven OnDemand, DVRs, TV-on-DVD, online viewing technologies, as well as group screenings" (127) and suggests that one motivation behind OurChart.com, like Nielsen's social network, is covert market research. While "queer female cyber-identities are 'charted' (i.e. organized) on the site, and thus made ever more accessible to Viacom, the conglomerate that owns Showtime Networks, as a market demographic," it is equally true that identity is not so easily rationalized, since here "anyone can declare him- or herself a 'lesbian,' or indeed a 'friend of'" (134). So if Moore is realistic about the retrenchment of capitalist logics animating The L Word's show of involvement with its fan community, she concludes that the program is nonetheless "dependent upon fan identification, recognition, and at least partial belief in the notions of identity and community which the show founds itself upon and also 'works on'... [and thus] is also predicated on the fan culture it has promulgated" (136). This negotiation between fan communities and the media industry is endemic to late capitalism, and given that both sides have their share of power in this milieu, the outcome of mediations between capital and fan laborers is far from a foregone conclusion.

As a corollary, though, Kelly Kessler emphasizes that capital is rapidly adapting its strategies of containment to optimize the burgeoning gay media market. "As corporations take control of fansites through pimped-out network/studio/label-sponsored sites," she writes, "an increased level of policing of fan art/fiction/chat/use of images or texts seems to work to limit types of fan activity.... Increased visibility seems to be exchanged for complicity in a vision most conducive to the studios'/labels'/corporations' own economic or ideological goals" (Kessler). This trend was very much in evidence at OurChart.com, where "Showtime took a site once more focused on individual fan postings on random topics [official and unofficial message boards] and molded it to one that foregrounds characteristics seen [as] desirable by dominant culture, the economic imperatives of the culture industry, and the very characteristics of the show critiqued by fans." Corralling the fandom within a corporate framework entailed, in particular, that "the network-sponsored site erase[d] the butch, the bi, the trans, the working class, the Midwestern or rural, all in favor of creating a largely idealized and perhaps marketable (to both men and women) image of lesbianism." Once again, however, these problematic dynamics did not necessarily go unchallenged. Humorist Kim Ficera raises one obvious objection to OurChart's attempt to commodify intimate networks as so much market data. When it was introduced onscreen, she recalls, "we saw ourselves in the Chart," but in addition to the thrill of recognition "we were reminded of exactly how incestuous our sexual behaviours are" (112). The Chart is haunting in its insinuation that "our exes -- four, five or sixty times removed -- aren't really removed at all, but rather re-posited [sic] into a familiar lesbian landscape... [because] one thing the lesbian world isn't is Large" (112-113). "Uncomfortable sexual connections are made every day -- that's life," Ficera opines -- "But we really don't need to keep a record of them" (114). This acknowledgement, however oblique, of the contentious power relations of archives indicates that queer subjectivities cannot simply be translated into online databases without resistance. There are certainly losses when an "official social network" is superimposed onto a fan community, but there is also lossiness: noise and tension that belie doomsday scenarios of total subsumption by capital. I hope that my case study of The L Word's fan-driven internet promotions extends these analyses of their contingent and ambivalent character by offering a theoretical scaffold for the labor negotiations in progress.

8 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/3/A Antagonism The emerging struggles of late capitalism, including fans' negotiations over compensation and ownership in the context of convergence, bear little resemblance to the class struggles of traditional Marxism. For what was once a revolutionary theory, the disintegration of any effective framework for mass resistance has been conspicuous, and today Marx's predictions that capitalism would inevitably collapse under the strain of its own contradictions ring hollow. Autonomist Marxism relocates resistance in the constitutive autonomy of the immaterial laborer, who works within collective networks and through subjective communication that cannot be fully rationalized or contained. We might envisage fan communities, for instance, in Negri's assurance that "during the course of capitalist development, there have always existed gaps -- partially in the sphere of circulation -- which are independent of direct capitalist control. In these gaps, certain use-values have been defined, and sometimes, communities which are rooted in such values have come into existence" (98). Today, workers' "antagonism which has never ceased to exist" (84) gathers new intensity "by virtue of the socialized worker's independence" and "capacity to reappropriate control of the labour process" (85). Moulier's introduction to Negri's book summarizes the fundamental doctrine of Autonomism, which harmonizes with other post-structuralist formulations of resistance from within: "On a theoretical level operaismo affirms the internal and structural limits of capitalism's capacity for integration. For operaismo in fact, the working class must certainly be within capital, but above all against it, otherwise capital could no longer function. Therefore the unilateral domination of capitalist control can never obtain. Subversion and revolution constitute a permanent possibility which lies at the very heart of the system" (25). This viewpoint is conceptually seductive, but suffers some of the same difficulties as Marx's original hypothesis, in that it seems to assume subversion as an automatic function of immaterial labor, with little attention to the specific praxis that might constitute cohesive antagonism as opposed to reincorporation. In his analysis of Lazzarato, Antonio Toscano suggests that the reconstitution of the idea of a general intellect "is in a sense an attempt to prolong the autonomist belief in the priority of productive or constructive resistance over its capture by the mechanisms of power and its reproduction, a way of thinking cooperation as prior to and relatively independent from capitalist self-valorization... it might be worth pausing to question the almost unbridled optimism of this thesis" (79). In answer to this provocation, I pause here to scrutinize the Autonomist concept of antagonism more closely.

I turn to Jason Read for the most trenchant and measured synthesis of this position, which effectively mediates between the optimistic and pessimistic poles of the Marxist continuum. Read opens with an acknowledgement that, today, "it is more and more clear that world is made and transformed by the immense productive powers of labor, which produce not only the wealth of objects but also the knowledge, affects, and desires that constitute the lived world, and yet capital's domination of the productive power seems to me more and more entrenched" (15). His book is an attempt to puzzle out this apparent contradiction between intensifying "subjectification" and "subjection," that is, "between the total subjection of sociality and subjectivity to capital and the concomitant development of a subjective and social power irreducible to abstract labor" (119). Read argues that we should understand the antagonism intrinsic to this contradiction not as a by-product of capitalist domination, but as the very productive force driving capitalist development toward real subsumption, as Marx chronicled in his account in Capital of the proletarian struggle to shorten the length of the working day. Following Marx, Read theorizes that "the technological and social transformations of the capitalist mode of production are neither the pure product of capitalism nor of resistance to capitalism but rather are formed by the antagonistic interplay of the competing strategies: capitalist strategies to expand surplus value and the workers' strategies to expand needs and desires" (111). He thus posits the coextensivity of expanding techniques of both domination and resistance as a defining characteristic of the capitalist system.

Our contemporary circumstances are no different, and "subjection too produces, or at least makes possible, its own resistances... The subjection/subjectification of living labor does not resolve the basic antagonism of living labor but, rather, displaces it" (144). Late capitalism brings an amplification of this dynamic, however, because "as real subsumption penetrates all social relations, it increasingly puts to work forms of social knowledge that it neither owns nor directly controls" (133). Building on the Autonomist assessment of today's configuration of immaterial laborers in the social factory, Read observes that, "in continually stressing the active participation of living labor and of cooperative networks" (149), industry "produces fixed capital not as machinery but in the subjectivity of the worker... [which] exists and is produced outside of the temporal and spatial control of the capitalist" (130). In other words, as subjection under capitalism escalates, so too does the capacity of subjectification to subvert and exceed its limits. Read's analysis doesn't solve the crisis of advanced Marxism by offering a coherent revolutionary program: his instantiation of resistance remains rather abstract. But we must acknowledge that his teleology is different from Marx's -- at issue is not the overthrow of capitalism, but collective interventions in its evolution that wrest control of greater degrees of freedom, creativity, and justice. By continuing to pry open the cracks in capitalism's containment of labor power, we can pressure capitalism to innovate toward increasing accommodation of autonomous subjectivities. The concept of antagonism frames laborers, including fans, as a collectivity whose desires are not commensurate with those of a corporate system, and this alone is a crucial corrective to the prevailing understanding of convergence culture.

At this point it may seem warranted to investigate another axis of antagonism that is often absent from studies of fan production, namely queer theories of political action. I view sexuality as integral to the femslash fandoms that I'm concerned with in this project, and admittedly, the aspiration to preserve such queer subcultures in the midst of transformations in our media economies animates my inquiry. Many scholars have analyzed the homonormativity at work in constituting the ideal gay (as opposed to queer) consumer for neoliberal capitalism, most notably Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, and mounting a critique of The L Word on this front is a worthy endeavor. Within a framework that claims subjectivity and collectivity as productive for capitalism, however, I am not convinced that queerness is the sine qua non of resistance, despite my own emphasis on the potential of open erotic fan communities. On the side of skepticism, Rosemary Hennessy conducts a trenchant indictment of a trend she calls "avant-garde queer theory," exemplified by such thinkers as Michael Warner, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, and David Halperin (54). In Profit and Pleasure, she positions this nexus as part of the intellectual heritage of a "pervasive ideological mandate to disconnect sexuality from capitalist production" (37) that has plagued Marxist thought since Engels's "historical inability to understand the role of domestic labor in capitalist production" (41) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This blind spot was exacerbated by psychoanalytic attempts to materialize sexuality, beginning with Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, who ultimately "contend that sexuality originates in innate instinctual drives... [so it] remains in fundamental ways outside the social order" (42). After "a short-lived but vital willingness to make use of Marxism as a critical framework to link sexual oppression to global capitalism" (45-46) on the part of the Gay Left in the 1970's was frustrated by "the intractable refusal of many of the existing socialist groups to meaningfully address sexuality" (49), the rise of cultural studies meant that the "retreat from Marxism and alternative rush to Foucauldian materialism virtually dominated the analysis of sexuality" (49). This paved the way for the maturation of queer theory in the 1990's which, following the early prominence of a "textual approach to identity as signification" (53), came of age with a turn to cultural materialism, most significantly by the "avant-garde" theorists listed above.

Hennessey makes a crucial distinction between these resolutely post-marxist cultural materialists and Marxist historical materialists: the former, while they may discuss capitalism and class relations, are finally "founding their conceptions of materiality only in symbolic processes [which] means that social struggle, or what they call antagonism, is anchored only in the sign" (61). This school of thought unfairly rejects the Marxist approach as necessarily totalizing, when in fact "historical materialism understands social life to be historically and materially produced through relations of labor... [but not] without the ways of making sense, normative practices (culture-ideology), and the laws (state organization) that are part of the material production of social life" (59). The danger of the cultural materialist orientation, according to Hennessy, is that its political program will amount to "a left sexual politics" that focuses on "civil rights within capitalism" (67). A case in point is that the "porous, gender-flexible, and playful subjects" celebrated by avant-garde queer theory are easily adapted to "postindustrial economies [that] increasingly require a high-tech systems management consciousness that knows that identity, like knowledge, is performative" (68). Given that "since the late nineteenth century the growth of consumer culture has depended on the formation and continual retooling of a desiring subject" (69), desire does not stand outside capitalism and ground resistance in and of itself. Instead of a politics of perversions, performance and polysemy, Hennessey calls for "a ruthless interruption of the often less visible relations of labor that have made use of dominant as well as counter-hegemonic sexual identities" (68). On this basis, I will set aside, for the purposes of this chapter, queer theory's analyses of how particular normative subjectivities (including heterosexuality and homosexuality) are constructed by capitalism in opposition to queer counterpublics, and ask rather how queer forms of desire sustain the economy of immaterial labor while also exceeding its bounds.

Kevin Floyd's work suggests one avenue for situating this virtual excess within the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism, while proposing (more magnanimously than Hennessy) a potential detente between Marxism and queer theory -- despite noting, once again, that the former has been notoriously insensate to issues of sexuality. While their theory is deeply involved with subjectivity and the economic role of reproductive labor, the Autonomists have hardly been an exception in this regard, despite interventions in the 1970s by important but largely peripheral Italian feminist Marxists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. In his book The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Floyd argues that we could read recent developments in queer theory, characterized by intersectionality and a refusal to particularize and compartmentalize sexuality from other dimensions of cultural experience, as converging with Marxism on the basis of a shared concern with social totality. He posits that today, "the ever more complex internal differentiation of capitalist social relations, in particular a reification of sexual desire" (197) has paradoxically set the stage for new forms of "queer worldmaking," or, "the production of historically and socially situated, bounded totalities of queer praxis inherently critical of the ultimately global horizon of neoliberalized capital" (199). Floyd observes that political economists (including Harvey) describe capitalism as a system constantly troping toward crisis due to its "constant tendency to undermine the very institutional preconditions that ensure the prospects for additional accumulation" (34). Given this "fundamental social volatility that capital's objective contradictions consistently produce... socially broad, historically conditioned strategies [are] necessary to keep crisis at bay" (34). While Fordism, he claims, was "highly dependent on the corporate and governmental construction of a certain kind of social stability... the breakup of Fordism... makes accumulation increasingly dependent on social instability" (195). This instability can furnish the conditions of possibility for "socially subordinate, historically conditioned publics defined by critical practices and knowledges inseparable from the labor of sustaining these publics" (208). However, Floyd also sees in this transition a worrying "dispersal of a queer population... as part of a more general strategy of population dispersal, a strategy that has among its objectives neutralizing the forms of collective praxis of which such populations are capable, privatizing collectivity itself out of existence" (204). Now, Autonomist Marxism would assert precisely the opposite, emphasizing that late capitalism's labor regime requires communicative networks and autonomous collective action. Without necessarily embracing this optimism, queer Marxisms would benefit from an engagement with Autonomism's sophisticated account of subjectivity's intimate relation to capitalism, particularly its framing of antagonism as constitutive of this relation. Like queer desires, antagonism is situated inside the horizon of capitalism, and I propose that queer desires can in fact be an aspect of antagonism.

8 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/3/. Archive Wars: FanLib vs. OTW In contrast to the relatively harmonious deployment of OurChart.com as a user-generated, fan-driven, for-profit corporate promotion, new media marketing company FanLib's dramatic descent into infamy stands as an object lesson in unsuccessful exploitation of fan labor. Beginning in 2003, the start-up licensed custom software for running online fan writing contests to entertainment concerns including HarperCollins Publishers and Showtime. In addition to these commissioned projects, FanLib launched a commercial fan fiction archive in 2007, offering its industry partners the opportunity for "integrated customized marketing... capitalizing on existing communities around media" (Nicole). To build interest in the site, the company issued flattering invitations to visible influencers and prolific writers in fandom, but as the people they courted started investigating the business behind the emails, the sense that it was instigated by outsiders and motivated by profit quickly raised hackles. Henry Jenkins summarized the facts that emerged in this grassroots probe, which sent FanLib's image and credibility among their target users into a downward spiral:
FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel [sic] for all legal actions... all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives... [who] talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream"... they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced... [and finally] the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing... (source)
While FanLib was blundering its appeal to the established fan community, this community was organizing to publicize its objections, reassert its values, and advocate for its interests. On LiveJournal, a group called "Life Without Fanlib" was soon set up to track the issue and host a firestorm of discussion. According to FanLib's behind-the-scenes promotional materials, they promised to "Produce consumer-generated media that is ready for the marketplace. The result: More value for marketers, more manageability for producers" (McNamara). The company found that it was not as effortless to commodify, monetize, and manage this surplus labor as they had speculated.

To FanLib, the vast commons of freely exchanged fanworks perhaps appeared as if it simply lacked a businessperson with the savvy to privatize it. But in fact, creative fandom has a rich tradition of conceptualizing its labor in ways that reject financial profit as a criteria for value (although I must emphasize again that this does not place it in outright opposition to capitalism). For this reason, fan production is often understood as a women's "gift economy" or, in the words of Karen Hellekson, a "gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts... that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male)... to permit performance of gendered, alternative, queered identity" (116). This stance is practical as well as principled, because "at the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation" (114). Abigail De Kosnik has advocated against this position, writing that since "FanLib will not be the last attempt to commodify fan fiction" (119), fans risk "waiting too long to decide to profit from their innovative art form, and allowing an interloper to package the genre in its first commercially viable format" (120) -- or even worse, "fan fiction may not be monetized at all... [and] only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain" (124). The two sides of this debate seem to claim, respectively, that creative fandom is threatened by capitalist procedures like payment or that it is threatened by NOT accommodating these procedures. I would counter that, in either scenario, fans work and profit from their work in some way (remember that the wage no longer defines productive labor), and the crucial question is not whether this work is financially compensated but whether the conditions of this labor are free and fair. In this view, all options would ideally be open to fan communities as they negotiate norms for a changing media ecology, and it is problematic if the industry precludes in advance either the preservation of a gift economy or the extraction of income (futures that are not mutually exclusive within the diversity of fan formations). Because these negotiations are currently in process, Marxist analysis is critical to mediating today's struggles over fan labor.

In this regard, we can take a cue from Lilithilien, who posted "Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom" in "Life Without FanLib." She asserts that, according to Marx,
capitalism deprives our work from being the expression of our creativity and self-realization... This is what FanLib wants to do with fan-created stories... The only use they have for stories (their "value proposition," as they keep saying) is as products to be utilized and commodified. In this effort, we are merely workers in their fanfic factory. This is pure and simple fetishization -- the rewards FanLib offers are a stand in for what we (or at least some of us) really want: good stories to read, a receptive audience for what we write, and a place where our creativity and uniqueness is valued. (source)
For Lilithilien, that is, there is more at stake in the expropriation of fan labor than whether or not fans are the ones reaping the profits. She urges us to consider what may be lost if fanworks are reified as commodities and the value of fan communities is mystified so that it appears to be commercial rather than social. Before fans either reject or embrace capitalism's terms for participation in the media economy, then, we should assess our structural position within this system as workers. FanLib's emphasis on "mainstreaming" fan fiction evokes the multiple axes of domination that constrain working conditions, and the normative assumptions of the "mainstream" seemed to persist unmarked in the company's willful ignorance of their repugnance to many fans. These assumptions include equivalences between market price and value, between value and public recognition, and between recognition and hierarchical authority, and as Hellekson suggests, they are entangled with patriarchal and heteronormative coordinates of gender and sexuality. One of FanLib's ads vividly illustrates the clash with the feminist and queer ethos that delineates the fan fiction subculture in question: the "Pink Guy/Blue Dude" image [Figure 12], which figured "Life without Fan Fiction" as a skinny, nerdy boy and "Fan Fiction at FanLib.com" as a muscular, shirtless man, implied that FanLib's corporate model masculinizes an activity that is otherwise markedly effeminate. This offended a predominantly female community that nurtures alternative and perverse expressions of gender and sexuality, raising ire at the insinuation that FanLib's macho brand of commodification is the only legitimate way to envision fanfic. Fandom's response was to form, through grassroots mobilization online, a non-profit organization with the mission of protecting the self-valorization of this anticommercial, egalitarian commons (a project I will explore in section C/3). As for FanLib, their archive was shut down in prelude to a buyout by Disney in 2008 (Ali), no doubt rendering them a success in their terms whether or not the site was able to recoup its 3 million in venture capital, which seems unlikely (Cygnet). In order to untangle the competing conceptions of fan labor embodied in FanLib and The L Word's promotions versus a subcultural gift economy, I will now turn to Marxist theories of the antagonism between workers and capital.

8 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/2/A The Social Factory Marx already recognized that advancements in information technologies are integral to the expansion of capitalism, writing in The Communist Manifesto that it is "by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, [AND] by the immensely facilitated means of communication" that the capitalist economy "draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization" (59) -- but today this role is escalating. In The Condition of Post-Modernity, one of the key texts delineating the transition to late capitalism, David Harvey observes that, in prelude, "the progress of Fordism internationally... relied heavily upon new-found capacities to gather, evaluate, and disseminate information" (137). What is novel under post-Fordism is that information has progressed from being an important by-product of production systems to a product in its own right, with its own markets and its own producers and consumers. As Joseph Stigliz puts it, "knowledge itself becomes a key commodity, to be produced and sold to the highest bidder" (159). The amplification of concern and controversy over intellectual property controls is one instance of the effects of this decisive shift. Beyond the exchange of informational commodities, however, communication furnishes the platform for subjectivity, which is now an equally vital axis of economic value. According to Harvey, the late capitalist manufacturing regime of "flexible accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption side, therefore, by a much greater attention to quick-changing fashions and the mobilization of the artiﬁces of need inducement and cultural transformation that this implies" (156). When affective connotations of lifestyle and identity become the key selling point, that is, an immaterial aura of desire becomes the key product. Under these conditions, social communication, or "control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagation of popular taste and culture[,] have likewise become vital weapons in the competitive struggle" (160). Consider, for example, the rise of expansive and multimodal marketing strategies including branding, product placement, transmedia, and the overarching corporate consolidation of entertainment (the other meaning of "media convergence") -- evidence that investment in communicative infrastructure and management is essential to maximizing the value of subjectivity as immaterial labor.

Intersecting with these assessments of present-day industry by political economists, social theorists have articulated the notion of an information economy. Hardt and Negri christen this new milieu "Empire," defining its topography as "a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes" (319-20). The network model is simultaneously metaphorical and literal: relations of power in Empire behave like computerized communications systems, and they also are in large part implanted in the deployment of network technologies. In this "information economy" of "deterritorialized production" and "immaterial labor," the methods of production, the commodities produced, and the subjectivities of the producer-consumers become increasingly intertwined. Ultimately, since "the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations" (293), "the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities... needs, social relations, bodies, and minds -- which is to say, they produce producers" (232). Manuel Castells also blends the figurative and material aspects of networks when he pronounces "a new form of society": this "network society" is "characterized by... the flexibility and instability of work, and the individualization of labor[, and by] a culture of real virtuality constructed by a pervasive, interconnected, and diversified media system" (1). Castells' thesis is that, in the network society, "The new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation... The sites of this power are people's minds... This is why identities are so important, and ultimately, so powerful" (424-25). That is, as the network becomes the dominant organizational form across all cultural registers, the immaterial dimensions of discourse, spectacle, and subjectivity come to occupy a position of unprecedented privilege in the economic landscape. Thus capacities for communication, in terms of both human "software" and technological hardware, scaffold late capitalism's regime of value.

For their part, Autonomists have theorized this conjuncture by refining Marx's concept of real subsumption to provide a diagnosis of our current circumstances. Building on their work and on his own re-readings of Marx's texts, Jason Read explains that the continuum from formal to real subsumption encapsulates the evolution of capitalism. Formal subsumption is characterized by "the imposition of the wage on preexisting social and technological structures" (10), in other words, by layering capitalism's structural abstractions, including money as a universal exchange and the mystification that workers must sell their labor power, over given material cultures. At some point, however, the limit of the surplus value that can be extracted by simply extending labor is reached (for example, the length of the workday can be increased only so many hours), and capitalism must begin to reshape the constraints of work in order to render the available labor time more productive. In the course of this process, capitalism permeates and appropriates more and more domains of life, such that "what is originally outside of capital, the social and technical conditions of labor, becomes internalized" (114). This amounts to "a transformation... of the knowledges, desires, and practices constitutive of social relations" (113), and we can say that today, with the incorporation of subjectivity itself into capitalist production, we have fully arrived at the state of real subsumption. In Negri's classic Autonomist text, The Politics of Subversion, he maintains that the transition to real subsumption entails a qualitative shift in the organization of work, writing that "the movement from capital's subjection of society to the active prefiguration of society by capital involves, within it, the constitution of an increasingly high and intense degree of productive cooperation... At this point, in order to exist, individual labour needs to be inserted into the framework of social labour [and] collectivity is a necessary condition for work" (82). Because labor relations grow in complexity and scope until they are coextensive with the entirety of social relations, real subsumption hinges on the emergence of collective communications networks.

Autonomism has termed this late capitalist schema the "social factory." As Negri describes it, here "work abandons the [literal] factory in order to find, precisely in the social, a place adequate to the functions of concentrating productive activity and transforming it into value. The prerequisites of these processes are present in, and diffused throughout, society... [including] such infrastructures as communications networks" (89). This is to say that the present-day analogue of the Fordist factory's machines, which constitute fixed capital that needs living labor to animate it, is the matrix of technological and cultural assets that are activated by their collective users. Negri contends that, because communication is integral to economic labor, particularly the labor of subjectivity itself, late capitalism dictates that "every subject of this productive complex is caught up in overpowering cooperative networks" (77). So today's "socialized worker... is a producer, but not only a producer of value and surplus value; s/he is also the producer of the social cooperation necessary for work" (80), that is, a producer of the collective conditions of production as well as of products themselves. Autonomists understand labor power within this system in terms of Marx's concept of the "general intellect," amounting to knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, the burgeoning significance of which we now recognize as the information economy. Paulo Virno reconfigured this idea away from what Marx conceived of "as a scientific objectified capacity, as a system of machines" (65), arguing that "the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in... formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and 'linguistic games'.... thoughts and discourses which function as productive 'machines'" (106). Virno asserts that, in order for late capitalism to function, "it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction" (65), thus mandating that the workforce retain a degree of autonomy from objectification and rationalization. This notion of an "intellectuality of the masses," in Virno's words, is akin to what some thinkers today evangelize as "collective intelligence": the idea that a group of organisms can form a symbiosis that is more productive than the sum of their individual knowledge and labor power. From a Marxist perspective, "collective intelligence" is prescribed by the late capitalist economic network, an artifact of its subsumption of all spheres of sociality -- however, this does not imply that labor is always fully subservient to capitalist demands.

According to Virno, a consequence of the transition to the social factory is that, in contrast to the Fordist model which divided labor from leisure (when the worker might "read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations"), there is now no "threshold separating labor time from non-labor time... since the 'life of the mind' is included fully within the time-space of production, an essential homogeneity prevails" (103). Because a wage is now the only distinguishing factor, Virno suggests "it could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment" (103). Think of this in terms of fan production: setting aside the massive scale of the television industry, the activities of paid and unpaid creative workers are not functionally different. Fans research, write, film, edit, and discuss media stories, often with a high level of skill and dedication, while professionals assert their own fannish credibility by conveying the impression that they work for fun. As labor becomes increasingly nebulous and omnipresent, expanding to encompass all social and subjective activity, "the productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process... Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor" (Virno 103). This ecology generates challenges, in turn, for capitalist expropriation. As Negri puts it: "Value exists wherever social locations of working cooperation are to be found and wherever accumulated and hidden labour is extracted from the turgid depths of society. This value is not reducible to a common standard. Rather, it is excessive... [so] we must abandon the illusory notion of measurement" (91-92). The Nielsen company's measurement of television ratings, for example, has been pushed toward an assortment of experimental metrics that aim to capture the "excessive" value of subjectivity and collectivity. Among them is 2007's Hey! Nielsen, "a new online social community, with... features such as ratings (like Q Ratings), the ability to submit opinions and comments, to connect and to create a network of recommenders... Its goal is to get fans rating, reviewing and blogging about their favorite shows, movies and stars" (MacDermid). By creating a social networking website in an attempt to mine qualitative data in communicative form, Nielsen acknowledges the unruly, unquantifiable character of late capitalism's immaterial commodities. The reporter quotes Nielsen executive Peter Blackshaw, who says that "understanding passion is the next frontier of market research... we are paying very close attention to the root drivers and nuances around this level of emotion-charged consumer engagement." Because affective and subjective labor are now the foremost axes of value, Virno proposes that the culture industry occupies a privileged place in this regime:
[it] is an industry among others... [but] it also plays the role of industry of the means of production. Traditionally, the industry of the means of production is the industry that produces machinery and other instruments to be used in the most varied sectors of production. However, in a situation in which the means of production are not reducible to machines but consist of linguistic-cognitive competencies inseparable from living labor... [t]he culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then destined to function also as means of production (61)
Mass media and entertainment are effectively a machine shop for the social factory, furnishing the equipment for immaterial laborers within a communicative network. Autonomism's pivotal argument is that this labor, which is necessarily collective in organization and ubiquitous in scope, is not simply absorbed without resistance into the smooth space of capitalism, but rather negotiated through a process of struggle with capitalism's perpetually insufficient procedures.

8 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/1/. Charting The L Word An hour-long special created to air with the series finale of The L Word on Showtime pays tribute to the program's heritage and legacy. Here, producers and writers, cast members, minor celebrities, and an omniscient female narrator reflect on The L Word -- purportedly the culmination of years of media history, beginning with TV's first lesbian kiss on L.A. Law in 1991 -- as a force for social change. Although interviewees always return to this refrain about the program's positive influence on gay equality at the level of the personal (by speaking to isolated or underprivileged youth) and the political (by portraying national issues like the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy and the lack of rights for same-sex parents), the special also reviews some of The L Word's more controversial and problematic choices. Mixing contradictory narratives of inclusivity ("it's not about being gay, it's about being human," opines classical guitarist Sharon Isbin) and exclusivity (it's "a place of collective belonging" characterized by weekly viewing parties at lesbian homes and bars), it captures the dilemma of a niche show that must simultaneously appeal to a mainstream audience. Before The L Word, the fact that "lesbians on TV served more to titillate than to illustrate" was a common complaint; nonetheless we should respect The L Word because it "unapologetically went 'all the way'" in its sex scenes to ensure that "straight people watched." By staking its very premise on the commercial viability of this overlap between the interests of gay and straight viewers, The L Word's 2004 premiere heralded a moment when "lesbianism seemed poised for popularity." But according to the narrator, this alchemy did not come easily in the program's early seasons, as "its assumed audience felt most left behind. Many lesbians felt the show had failed to deliver on its central promise: to represent the community in an accurate way." The L Word's producers thus found themselves trapped between irreconcilable imperatives to be realistic and to be aspirational, to reflect lesbians authentically and to "break out of stereotypes" (with the latter leanings preferred due to the wider allure of glossy fantasy). One solution was to intervene in our cultural understanding of what constitutes "real" lesbianism. Amidst criticism that the program portrayed only rich, beautiful, feminine women with no "Birkenstocks and flannel" in sight, for example, costume designer Cynthia Summers took it upon herself to "challenge the way lesbians think they should be looking or need to be looking to be able to be identified as 'a lesbian.'" We must then concede that The L Word is "definitely representative of some lesbians" (Kate Clinton), facilitating Hilary Rosen's claim that critiques of the program's inauthenticity are inauthentic themselves, since they evidently come from "people who don't know that many lesbians." These tensions -- between normativity and sexuality, between lesbian and mainstream audiences, between realistic and positive representations, and between portraying and fabricating a community -- structured The L Word's achievements and limitations throughout its six-season run.

The farewell special -- with its melange of talking heads, staged interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, public appearances, news headlines, flashbacks, snapshots, and clips from the show -- also encapsulates The L Word's multiplying and intersecting layers of reality and fiction. It could neither execute nor escape the mandate to translate lesbian culture faithfully onto the small screen, but the program deployed its alternating declarations of either transparency or escapism strategically. This prevarication over The L Word's relationship to real life settled into a reliable circular logic: obviously the more deeply it penetrated into society the more representative it was, and obviously the more it represented current events the more deeply it had penetrated into society. Thus the creators' response to criticisms of its bland homogeneity (which was, in the words of writer/director Angela Robinson, "trying to represent an array of different types of lesbian representations") was rendered as a multicultural menu of bite-sized political references. The examples given in the special, which dedicates four minutes to celebrating butch characters Max, who is working class, and Tasha, who is black, typify The L Word's tendency to bundle minority identities while preserving the white femme consumer as the lesbian norm. Max, initially a woman named Moira who chooses to undergo a medical gender transition, starts out as a recognizable point of contact with the queer communities that exist in parallel to The L Word's West Hollywood fantasia. He is quickly assimilated into stable masculinity, however, and devolves into a caricature of testosterone-induced abusiveness and topical male pregnancy. Tasha, whose relationship with Alice triumphs over personal differences and professional conflicts with her military career, exhibits the program's signature approach to incorporating racial difference. As in the case of other black characters, including straight lead Kit and her bi-racial half-sister Bette, "a figure of racial authenticity" is periodically invoked "to ventriloquize racial transcendence" in order to "depoliticize[ an issue], stressing individualizing, privatized aspects" to support "the elision of 'community' by consumerism" (Osucha). The L Word's open acknowledgement of its commercial dictates, however, effectively inoculates it against such critiques: as entertainment (or so its alibi goes), the program's only option is to portray political realities by packaging identities as commodities.

Although the special was created to commemorate The L Word's finale, it conspicuously foregoes any discussion of the final season, an incoherent fiasco that was reviled by fans and critics. Apparently conceived more as an extended promo for Chaiken's unsuccessful spin-off series (a prison drama called The Farm) than as a consistent conclusion to the characters' narratives, season 6 partially diverges from the program's soap operatic format to become a murder mystery. In the opening of the premiere, one character drowns under suspicious circumstances; after immediately flashing back several months, the remainder of the season consists of a string of storytelling contortions that provide everyone else with a motive for killing her. The final episode withholds the promised resolution to this whodunit, however, retreating instead into maudlin reminiscences, complete with a diegetic tribute video that mirrors the extra-diegetic tribute special. As the characters film, edit, and finally watch their teary farewells to lead couple Bette and Tina, The L Word waxes nostalgic about its own history, evoking in particular its history of self-reflexive gestures. These include Jenny's autobiographical memoir retelling the events of the program's early seasons, later adapted into a film production that furnished the primary motif for season 5, and season 2's subplot about a male roommate who was videotaping the women using hidden cameras, as if to comment on the line The L Word walks between documentary and soft porn. Such elements foreground the interdependence of media form and the program's claims to authenticity -- none more so than a series of webisodes, The Interrogation Tapes, that continued after the television finale. These online bonus features enticed once again with the answers that the episodes deferred, a tease involving even the contradictory codes that characterized the "tape" of each character's questioning by police: video noise that referenced gritty realism but appeared highly stylized, an evidentiary time counter that continued across cuts between multiple cameras and takes. And in place of criminal revelations, the extreme close-ups draw out histrionic confessions about past trauma and emotional relationships, making the characters under "interrogation" seem more akin to the special's interview subjects than to murder suspects. This jarring lurch between genres offers one last rendition of The L Word's structuring paradox: charged with representing both reality and melodrama, both truth and spectacle, what the program does best is leverage one to sell the other. In this section, I propose a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding how The L Word negotiates this terrain by putting authentic identities to work.

8 months on
{ julie levin russo }
IV/. Labor of Love As I have explored in the preceding chapters on Law & Order: SVU and Battlestar Galactica, new textual and technocultural formations are intensifying the stresses in today's media ecology. Among these stresses, managing the production of queer readings, desires and appropriations is a nexus of particular concern in the shift from broadcast's centralized and vertical model to the more distributed and horizontal configuration of digital distribution. The 2007 Writers Guild of America strike foregrounded the bottom line of such transactions for the entertainment industry: labor. This dispute between screenwriters and executives illuminated the present-day predicament of mass media, which is hard pressed to keep up with a proliferation of content and platforms while squeezing ever greater efficiency out of its creative workers. It is these conditions that have spurred not only the official exploitation of paid labor as expressed in the AMPTP's demands at the bargaining table, but also the industry's turn to a far more vast, dynamic, and affordable resource: the free labor of fans. Fan production has no doubt always held indirect economic value for corporations as a form of promotion and a stimulus to consumption but, until very recently, this phenomenon was rarely considered openly outside the science fiction niche. Now, as convergence puts pressure on television's obsolescing profit models, hit network shows like Lost (ABC, 2004-present) and its derivatives are adopting cult media's tactics for attracting a loyal and engaged audience -- in short, a fandom -- as marketing's next frontier. In addition to the presumptive value of active and insatiable consumers, the internet's characteristics as a decentralized, immediate, and continuous network make it practicable for the industry to exploit fan labor directly as "user-generated content." By contrast, it is now equally practicable for fans to exploit media commodities directly, as TV and movies, along with their multiplying complement of bonus features, can be downloaded at will to serve as the raw material for unauthorized creative work. Whereas earlier chapters evaluated this juncture in terms of its representations and technologies, I here examine its economic dimension: the emerging labor relations that will shape the future of television and of its queer subcultures.

My coupling of queer subjectivities and post-industrial capitalism is not arbitrary: as commodities themselves become increasingly immaterial, the affective labor of desire, identification, and meaning-making accrues greater economic value. Paraphrasing a 1999 Wired article that boldly proclaimed the death of the "Old Web," Tiziana Terranova suggests that, with "new ways to make the audience work... television and the web converge in the one thing they have in common: their reliance on audience/users as providers of... cultural labour" (95). This labor, which is the productive force behind media convergence, exemplifies the architecture of the larger "digital economy":
It is about specific forms of production (web design, multimedia production, digital services and so on), but it is also about forms of labour we do not immediately recognize as such... These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion... However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect. (79)
Such relatively autonomous and freely conducted labor schemes, fan production included, break down the distinction between waged work and leisure, but this does not place them outside of capitalist demands. In comparison to the sunny forecast for our much vaunted "participatory culture," this view of convergence as expropriation may seem pessimistic: fandom is more commonly celebrated as a "gift economy" or alternative system of exchange that circumvents or even resists capitalism. Terronova argues that this outlook on free labor effaces the reality of its functional integration into the post-industrial economy. Her position does not, however, reduce fans and other digital enthusiasts to unwitting dupes of capitalism, colluding with the incorporation of their authentic practices into a monolithic machine. Terranova emphasizes, by contrast, that "such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive" (94). Given this interdependence, the entertainment industry and its audiences each have collective bargaining power in their immaterial labor negotiations. Resistance exists within the flows of capitalism, and the political project is to boost the turbulence that exceeds its corporate channels.

These channels are fabricated from reactive discipline in the guise of copyright enforcement and ideologies that devalue fan labor, but also increasingly from proactive enticements toward modes of participation that enrich the brand. Outside of cult genres, one of the earliest forays into this terrain among television programs came from The L Word (Showtime, 2004-2009), the first American TV series to make lesbian romance its primary focus. In addition to thematizing issues of lesbian identity and representation onscreen, The L Word has innovated through online promotions that leverage its projected lesbian audience into an interactive fan community. At the intersection of lived subculture, virtual world, and marketing spectacle, the web-based tie-ins OurChart.com (a content portal and social networking site) and "You Write It!" (a platform for fan-written script contests) attempt to mobilize subjectivity as labor, exposing both the possibilities and the limits of such transmedia ventures. Showrunner Ilene Chaiken has spoken of the push to dismantle television's fourth wall in the era of convergence:
In the beginning I said -- and was given a very hard time for saying -- "I don't listen, I write what I want to write." But another way the world has changed since I started doing the show is that the internet has become a big part of our lives. Anybody who writes a TV show would be a fool not to interact with her audience. Our audience is particularly passionate and engaging, so I talk to them and I listen to them. I can't always do what they want to do, but there's an effect of hearing their voices and then deciding what stories to tell. (Wilkes)
Chaiken's growing willingness to listen and interact through the internet is more than a minor update to her job description. Implicit in her comments is the "L word" of her title: Lesbian as a commodity that is produced as much by the "voices" of a "passionate" audience as by the program's own portrayals. There is thus another "L word" here, the one from my title: Labor as an asset of audiences that the industry must now integrate. Both words are taboo in the orbit of television but, as rendered in the case of The L Word, both are central to key transformations in the mass media landscape. In this chapter, I analyze the role of lesbianism as labor in The L Word's commercial empire and, by extension, the role of subjectivity as labor in the emerging economy of convergence. My argument is that, while more and more of fan production is subsumed into a capitalist topology, these conditions correspondingly intensify the underlying antagonism between audiences and corporations. As Terranova puts it, the "desires [of capital and living labour] cease to coincide" when "capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these... processes of valorization" (84), and it is our task to counter that control by sustaining divergent values and desires within it.

8 months on
{ julie levin russo }

julie levin russo

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