Happy grading season to all you academics, and happy pre-holidays to all you students and surfers who have stumbled across my blog in your internet wanderings!
I’ll be spending a good chunk of my holiday collaborating with Chris Hanson to develop a digital “draft” of a submission to a “book” project that emerged out of Database | Narrative | Archive: An International Symposium on Nonlinear Digital Storytelling. I’m really excited about it, both because I get to co-author the project with a good friend and brilliant scholar, but also because the project will be constructed in Scalar. Scalar was developed at USC, through the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, and I am looking forward to exploring the platform and thinking through the form and function of multimodal scholarship.
The question our contribution will respond to is:
How might scholars explore interactive and digital technologies as forms of ‘procedural scholarship’?
My immediate gut response to this prompt, which you can explore in more detail in the CFP, was to consider how we might adapt the central principles and qualities of transmedia storytelling to discuss and develop instances of transmedia scholarship. As our own work begins to travel across media platforms, I think further contemplation of Henry Jenkins’ post on Transmedia Education is warranted, in which Jenkins applies the seven “core principles” detailed below to learning environments.
I can think of plenty of wonderful scholars who are attempting to work these properties into their pedagogy, but are we actively attempting to embody them with our scholarship? Outside of the seven principles Jenkins outlines here, are you thinking about building migratory cues into your scholarship? What does collective intelligence look like in this model? Are the transmedia “extensions” of our own work serving a similar promotional function as the majority of industrial transmedia extensions?
I’m hoping to use Scalar as a platform to grapple with the potentialities and limitations of transmediated scholarly arguments and research. While many have (rightly) championed transmedia storytelling models for being participatory, non-linear, and co-creative enterprises, my own work on industrial transmedia entertainment argues that these models ultimately tend to reify and reward conventional modes of engagement and exploration. Through a consideration of how these “core principles” might be adapted to conceptualize multimodal scholarship, I hope to examine how theories of transmedia storytelling might broadly help scholars envision their work traversing various media, platforms, and audiences.
So, here’s where you come in. If you’re an academic, or know an academic, who is either actively creating transmedia scholarship, or attempting to work in some of the principles of transmedia storytelling into their own work or pedagogy, please contact me at suzannelynscott@gmail.com or leave a comment below. Alternately, if you are a transmedia scholar and/or have opinions on what transmedia scholarship might look like, the potentialities or limitations (for example, what happens when we ask those “reading” our work to become hunters and gatherers?), I’d also like to hear your thoughts. I’d really love for this project to include some conversations/images/videos with other scholars (or students, for that matter), so consider this a first attempt to exhibit collective intelligence at work.
I’ve also just set up a new twitter account @acatransmedia, and will be using #transmediascholarship to document the project. Not sure yet what function this twitter “extension” might serve, but please follow if you’re interested.
Thanks in advance for your contributions, or for passing this along to someone who might be interested!
It is safe to say I am a Muppet fan. Case in point, I had the honor of being the first to get married at the Jim Henson Company (which, it should be noted, was originally Charlie Chaplin’s studio, so I’m going to guess we were also the first couple to play Rock Band in Chaplin’s screening room).
My bedtime used to be determined by The Muppet Show. One of my last weekends living in New York before I graduated from NYU was spent sitting in a theater watching The Muppets Take Manhattan. I may or may not have cried about leaving the city and the gang of friends I’d made. I even repurposed my longstanding fixation with The Dark Crystal into a terrible term paper in grad school. I vaguely remember it having something to do with religion, or Reaganism. Mostly, it was an excuse to re-watch the movie and debate Skeksis’ ritual disrobing practices. The Muppets are a media property that has accompanied every stage of my life, culminating in the warm nostalgic glow of The Muppets this weekend that I’m still basking in.
Needless to say, I was excited when I first heard that Jason Segel was rebooting the franchise. Most, including myself, took comfort in the fact that the franchise was in the hands of an unabashed fan. I’ve recently been exploring the “fanboy auteur” as an emerging authorial archetype in my own work, and Segel is a perfect example of how a fanboy auteur’s liminal identity can be effectively deployed to reach out to existing fan bases and mitigate the claims of commercial opportunism these reboots usually provoke. There’s a great paper to be written about how Segel has paratextually mobilized his identity as a Muppet fan from the announcement of the project through its promotion. If my own response is any indication, Segel’s sincerity and affect was key promotional tool, because he so perfectly echoes the ethos of The Muppets.
I saw The Muppets last night, at the very theater that serves as the Muppet Theater in the film (meta alert!), the Disney owned and operated El Capitan. The fact that the Muppets themselves are now also Disney owned and operated is something that the film brushes up against repeatedly, all the while assuring the audience that the Muppets won’t be sullied by their new corporate context, particularly with a fan at the helm. When the Muppets solicit money, we’re assured they’re doing so to (somewhat paradoxically) save themselves from being forced to “sell out.”
All of this said, what was far more interesting to me was the way that the film frames fandom. SPOILERS follow, so please refrain from reading until you see the film, which is delightful and deserves to be appreciated. If you’ve already seen the film, read on for some initial thoughts on what it means to construct the newest “Muppet” as a Muppet fan.
Walter, the most recent addition to the Muppet family, a picture of fannish consumption
A few months ago, I tore through Ernest Cline’s geektacular novel Ready Player One. I highly recommend it, both because it is wonderfully inventive while still being winkingly evocative of Snow Crash, and because I think it trounces Little Brotheras a piece of fiction that deftly engages issues of free culture, surveillance, and virtual identities.
But despite my enjoyment, I was also hyperaware as I read that Ready Player One is yet another prime example of the curious dual address that texts have cultivated as fan/geek culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream. This dual address simultaneously presumes that consumers are conversant in geek culture references, while hyperconsciously couching those references in archetypes/stereotypes, or otherwise easily decoded framing devices. Ready Player One might be viewed as a more populist literary descendant of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a text that also encourages a fannish decoding of its many references. Henry Jenkins has playfully used Diaz’s novel as a geek litmus test, listing the novel’s pop culture references from A:
…to Z:
As this alphabetical bookending suggests, the gap between “normative” fannish interests (e.g. sports) and “excessive” fan subculture (e.g. a scifi/fantasy film in which James Bond wears a red diaper and suspenders with thigh-high boots…hey, it’s the future…) is an ever shrinking one. Just ask geek culture sage Patton Oswalt.
I’d argue that this trend towards geek culture intertextuality/referentiality differs from simple postmodern pastiche, in that it is centrally preoccupied with recuperation of the fanboy into hegemonic masculinity by framing him as an action and/or romantic hero. The Big Bang Theory features a (perhaps unintentional) dual address that bifurcates the audience into those who laugh at the shows’ nerd collective, and those conversant enough in geeky jargon and fannish references to laugh with them. The show’s approach to casting guest stars is a perfect example of this, with Firefly/The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Summer Glau, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s/twitter demigod Wil Wheaton, Marvel Comics’ icon Stan Lee (quoth my Mom “Who is that old man?”), Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, and astrophysicist and Nobel laureate George Smoot, all appearing as themselves. These guest “stars” would appear to serve a counterintuitive (or at least an atypical) function, rewarding those conversant in nerd/geek/fan culture and potentially alienating, rather than drawing in, those in the mass audience who aren’t “in” on the reference or joke.
BSG's Katee Sackhoff and ST's George Takei as Howard's sexual subconscious on BBT
Heather Hendershot has argued that The Big Bang Theory’s latent misogyny, the fact that the show views women “strictly as sex objects,” routinely undercuts its representational potential and eradicates all points of identification for female viewers. Astutely noting that The Big Bang Theory must be understood as a mass show framed as a niche show, and not the reverse, Hendershot frames the show’s effort to “have its cake and eat it too,” as persistently short-changing fangirl viewers or pointedly ignoring them. Questioning why CBS “pretended to target a geek demographic, when it was really looking for lads all along,” Hendershot exposes who this recent wave of “nerd-friendly” programming is really targeting, but fails to fully explore how interchangeable these “geek” and “lad” demographics have become. Vitally, Hendershot’s analysis does raise the question of who is being excluded from the “geek demographic” these nichestream texts target. Penny, the primary “sex object” within Hendershot’s critique, is constantly perplexed by the fannish references the show spouts, and might provide a point of identification for a mass audience more inclined to laugh at, rather than with, the male characters discussions of fannish minutiae. I would agree with Hendershot that The Big Bang Theory’s representational framework leaves little room for female viewers, much less fangirls, to situate themselves, though this appears to be changing in the most recent seasons.
Which brings us to Ready Player One…fair warning, there are some (mild) SPOILERS ahead…
No blogging for me for the past couple of months, as I’ve been teaching my freshman core course on Fandom and Participatory Culture at Occidental College, and generally getting settled in my new corner of #alt-ac in the Center for Digital Learning + Research. I’ve returned with some interesting tales from that class’ first assignment, and to shamelessly promote my contribution to the Acafandom and Beyond series that’s currently running on Henry Jenkins’ blog (our conversation is continued here). In a nice moment of blogging synchronicity, both have encouraged me to think about transparency when it comes to how we (and our students) mobilize our fan identities in our scholarly work.
For the first assignment in my class, I asked my students to record a short, auteoethnographic audio file documenting their first fandom, and how that “fandom” was embodied and performed. I required them to manipulate their audio file in Audacity, in part to maintain their anonymity on our course blog and encourage them to speak candidly, but also to have them consider if a fannish identity is still something to hide, or be ashamed of, in our contemporary participatory culture. My students’ autoethnographies are archived here, and I’d strongly encourage you to go check a few of them out. I think they’re really fascinating, both in terms of form and content (e.g. a student sounding like Andre the Giant while discussing a love of The Spice Girls). The second part of the assignment was a written reflection on their audio file, through an address of the continued relevance (or not) of Joli Jensen’s 1992 essay “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.”
I created this assignment with a number of goals in mind:
To get a better sense of if/how my students self-identify as fans
To see how they negotiated, contextualized, and performed those identities
To get the class thinking about the culturally and socially constructed lines between “normal” and “excessive” fandom, how they’re maintained or dismantled, and the (often gendered) power dynamics that underpin those distinctions
The written responses were incredibly revealing about evolving understandings of (un)acceptable fan identities. Many grounded their fan identity in their families, framing media texts as something they coalesced around with parents or siblings to deepen (or in some cases, establish) those relationships. Some noted that they played down their fannish affect for a particular property in their authoethnography. Conversely, others exaggerated their fan identity. In both cases, the knowledge that their peers would be consuming their autoethnography impacted its content. As a lifelong tomboy who spent her first few weeks at NYU channelling Cordelia on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hey, it was 1997…I sort of considered it identity cosplay), I completely understand the flexible moment that the first few weeks of college represent, and concerns about codifying one’s identity when people are scrambling to make new friends and suss each other out. What I had hoped would be a confessional assignment in many cases became an implicit commentary on how we perform our taste for others, and how we deploy our fan identities as a way of sculpting and reinforcing our identities more broadly.
Reading Will Brooker’s provocation in our Acafandom conversation, I couldn’t help but think about my students, and their responses to the autoethnography assignment, specifically what prompts us “shut up.” I am a huge fan of Will and his work, but as I noted in my response I was put off by some of his remarks, in particular what I felt was an (implicitly gendered) dismissal of the “baby talk and sleepover squealing” quality of some fannish jargon that makes frequently its way into our work (squee, squick, et. al.).
In retrospect, my kneejerk response says a great deal about both my fannish and scholarly identities. The response itself (which admittedly struck a much larger nerve surrounding the trend towards heralding fanboyish pursuits while devaluing fangirls or, worse yet, remarginalizing them within fan studies as we shift our focus to industrially sanctioned fan practices) was a defensive reflex, but it’s always felt a little performative to me. As I noted in my response to Will, writing a chapter of my dissertation on Twilight anti-fandom forced me to confront my own biases about certain segments of fan culture that I don’t approve of as viable representatives. I get Will’s point. I don’t like being lumped in with the “squealers,” and I distance myself from them even as I defend them. This is equally rooted in my fan identity (which has always occupied something of a conflicted position between the “fanboy” and “fangirl” camps, as they’re broadly defined), and my scholarly identity (which remains preoccupied with retaining the feminist underpinnings of the first wave of fan studies, and championing female consumers and scholars, even as we engage with fans’ new positions of power within convergence culture).
Not unlike my students, I’m still establishing my professional identity, and perhaps that has led to a heightened awareness of how I frame and present that identity. My choice to focus on the job market in my provocation about acafandom was, in part, a response to the fact that many of the scholars who have called for the discontinuation of the term (or those, like Will, who make the personal and completely understandable decision to “shut up” about it) tend to be more established scholars. Louisa Stein eloquently captured most of my feelings on the significance of the term “aca-fan” on her blog, but within my current work at Occidental’s Center for Digital Learning + Research, I see new evidence every single day that this isn’t just a debate within a small corner of media studies over the continued relevance of a term, but one facet of a much broader debate about the growing hybridity and interdisciplinarity that academia now demands.
I’d be curious to hear from others teaching courses on fan studies, media audiences, and/or social media if you’re asking your students to do similar self-reflections. And, if you broach the topic of acafandom, how do you frame that identity (how it shapes your approach to pedagogy, or your own scholarship, or in terms of framing the articles they read in class)?
Keeping to my proposed schedule of SDCC 2011 recaps clearly fell into the “epic fail” category. Best laid plans, a gal’s gotta work/eat/finally watch Game of Thrones, etc. etc. I will eventually roll out those posts as promised, but moving on to something more pressing for today…
It’s been a pretty exciting week for the diversification of geek culture icons. Twitter has been (justifiably) all a-twitter with the news that the new Ultimate Spider-Man is a half-African American, half-Latino teen by the name of Miles Morales. Most have celebrated writer Brian Michael Bendis’ decision (with an assist from the “Donald Glover for Spider-Man” campaign), while the Glenn Becks of the world reacted pretty much how everyone expected they would (with a mixture of racism, homophobia, and open disdain for comics and their readership). I’m beyond thrilled that people are writing thoughtful and thought-provoking posts this week about race, comics, and the significance of this:
…but I’m not writing about it, at least not today. Today I want to briefly respond to this:
Above is the winner (by popular facebook vote) of Bioware’s heavily critiqued “beauty pageant” to select a representative “FemShep” for Mass Effect 3‘s marketing campaign. Full disclosure: I didn’t cast a vote, and I’m mostly coming to this story late by sifting through the online commentary/fallout from the contest. I did wait on line for a couple of hours at Comic-Con so that Luke could get some demo time with Mass Effect 3. Luke walked out filled with excitement about the narrative snippets he’d gleaned from playing (something about Krogan reproductive rights), and I walked out asking whether or not players could choose to experience the demo as FemShep. I think…and someone please correct me if I’m wrong…that gender selection wasn’t an option for the demo when customizing your Shepard before gameplay, and all players used the default avatar in the demo.
The word “default” is what’s telling here, and why people are so invested in the representation of FemShep. Not only has the male Shepard been the default centerpiece of Bioware’s marketing campaign, and serves as the in-game default for players, I would venture a guess that the image of the “default” gamer Bioware is marketing to is male. So, not only did the promise of marketing materials featuring FemShep acknowledge female gamers in a way the industry rarely does, they also implicitly promised to market FemShep in a way that didn’t pander or play down to girl gamers.
To give you a sense of the other contenders for the public face of the female Shepard:
For the record, I'd pick the one with the appropriate military buzzcut.
I had a paradoxical gut response to the outcry over the selection of the blonde “FemShep5” (who, it should be noted, won by a landslide):
I understand why people (especially female gamers who love this franchise) are angry. I’m not exactly thrilled that they felt compelled to put this to a popular vote, creating a stunt out of what should have been a commonsense decision to finally reflect in their promotions that this is (for many) the story of a woman, and I’m not thrilled that the most conventionally attractive/feminine option won in a landslide.
Though it wasn’t surprising, I was (as always) instinctively taken aback and a little disappointed by the instantaneous conflation of “blonde” and “bimbo.” Penny Arcade took on this issue in their comic yesterday, and critiques of the vote have routinely reinforced this age-old connection between signifier/signified.
Bioware’s Mass Effect franchise has routinely been held up by students in my video game studies classes as a progressive example of gender neutral gaming. They point to the customizable Lieutenant Commander Shepard as a sign that we’re finally moving beyond “girls’ games” and “boys’ games” to be given simply good games, with compelling narratives, and a protagonist designed for a wide range of players to identify with. Moreover, a protagonist they’re encouraged to collaboratively design to help facilitate that identification. If I had to venture a guess, the bulk of my students and the bulk of those who choose to play Mass Effect with a female avatar don’t think about the character as “FemShep.” She’s just Shepard, full stop. And that, in and of itself, is heartening.
The default Shepards
That said, the controversy over the blonde Shepard, and the vote, is understandable. For years, the Mass Effect marketing campaign has been built around the default male avatar, so it immediately prompts the question: why wasn’t the default female avatar sufficient for this marketing push? Why, when the female Shepard is finally being actively promoted, does she need a series of redesigns to fall in line with more conventional beauty standards? And finally, what does this mean for the Mass Effect movie in development, and the scant hope of actual genderblind and colorblind casting policies?
Rawles over at The Border House puts it succinctly in their post on the subject:
Commander Shepard does not need to be a rugged-yet-handsome-but-banal white guy. Bioware has just now taken tiny steps away from the rugged-yet-handsome-but-banal white guy being the single, enduring image of Commander Shepard that they show to the world at large. It seems almost perverse, in light of that, to go charging right back towards that when it comes to something as high profile as a feature film that will introduce Mass Effect to millions of new people.
Right now I’m less concerned about the inevitable movie adaptation (call me cynical, but I think we’re probably stuck with a rugged-yet-handsome-but-banal white guy), and more concerned about the marketing strategy for Mass Effect 3.
I’m hoping it’s this (with the fate of the world resting in HER hands):
And not this…
We only have to look back to the recent “Your mom hates this” campaign for Dead Space 2 to see that, particularly when it comes to the “masculine” genres of science fiction and horror, women continue to be framed as interlopers (at best) and prissy neophytes (at worst). It’s easy for the video game industry to ghettoize women as “casual” gamers, or claim they’re catering to them by making a pink Nintendo DS, but I hope that Bioware does the smart, rather than the easy thing here. FemShep is a blonde beauty, there’s not much to be done about that at this point (and speaking as a blonde, I feel compelled to note that this doesn’t necessarily preclude her from kicking ass). How Bioware deploys her, and if those representations echo the franchise’s claim to promote a protagonist that defies gender typing, remains to be seen.
Stay tuned…and for now, we can all go back to being excited about Spidey.
I’m clearly not sticking to the SDCC posting schedule I set out earlier in the week, but I’ve been spending the last few days reading recaps of the #ohyousexygeek panel, and getting into some good back-and-forth conversations on twitter (with some of the panelists themselves, no less). I used the word “disappointing” to characterize the panel itself, but the blog posts, twitter exchanges, and heated debates in comment threads that have emerged out of that panel are anything but. Divisive at times, maybe, but not disappointing.
So, before we move on, a quick blogroll for those who’d like to read further on this:
Also, Jennifer de Guzman has been great about collecting responses, blog posts, and apologetic letters from G4 here.
Since I’ve fallen behind on recaps, my better half Luke Pebler is stepping in today as guest blogger to offer his perspective on some of the issues of authenticity raised in the #ohyousexygeek panel (which we attended together, and have been discussing ever since).
*****
Like Suzanne, I was a bit disappointed with the #ohyousexygeek panel at Comic-Con. Basically, the feminist bloggers were seated too far from the fashion models, and consequently no one got their hackles up enough to make it fun. And it must have been doubly frustrating for the ladies to have their debate framed most succinctly and effectively by famous, penis-having audience member Seth Green. Seth’s point was that the Sexy Grrl Geek Debate is actually part of a larger debate about fan authenticity in general, and I couldn’t agree more.
Sorry, ladies, but you’re not the only nerds whose culture has been hijacked by comely, vapid caricatures.
I have many fond memories of watching the TechTV cable network in the early 2000s. Its content was so unadornedly nerdy, its hosts so charmingly schlubby, that I paradoxically found it thrilling. These people look and talk like my friends and me. Who let themon TV? As a rural teenager, it gave me the first whiff of geek euphoria that would one day explode my brain when I finally attended my first convention (Star Wars Celebration IV in LA, 2007). But even at that naïve young age, I was looking over my shoulder. I thought: This is a mistake. This is too good to be true.
And so it was. In the span of just a year or two, Comcast-backed goons killed and ate my favorite network. G4 ostensibly merged with TechTV in early 2004, but by Feb 2005 G4 had already dropped “TechTV” from its name and expelled nearly all its people and programming. All operations in TechTV’s original Bay-area home were shuttered, and anyone who wouldn’t relocate to LA was canned. The only vestige of TechTV remaining at modern G4 is, unsurprisingly, the show that anticipated its shrill, slick aesthetic.
This tragic assimilation can be summed up perfectly by the metamorphosis of TechTV’s flagship talk show, “The Screen Savers,” to its spiritual G4 successor “Attack of the Show.” Compare this:
to this:
G4 is exactly what you’d expect TechTV to have been in the first place, if you’re an appropriately cynical adult: Hollywood-polished “personalities” contorting themselves into our niche because they couldn’t land that Axe Bodyspray commercial gig and they gotta pay the rent somehow. (It’s telling that even TechTV’s original resident frat broheim, Kevin Rose, proved too endowed with genuine talent and integrity to stay at G4, bailing out of AOTS after barely a year. Also, funny story how they replaced him!)
Looking back, TechTV was an anachronism and perhaps never meant to last. The internet is almost certainly a better way for tech geeks, gadget freaks, and video gamers to get their news and punditry, and many TechTV alumni have re-coalesced into great new-mediaentities. Leo LaPorte et al remain as adorable as ever, and are presumably still making a living. Given this, maybe I shouldn’t be bothered by the sort of knuckledragger that would still watch television to get his tech/game news. Live and let live, as Seth Green suggests.
But I can’t help it. Every time I happen past the two-story G4 Comic-Con compound, with its slimy air of velvet-rope starfuckery and its halo of howling Halo fans (whipped into a frenzy by PR flaks), it always gets my hackles up. Because I can feel it creeping up on us all. What I will call “douchegeek hegemony.”
It drives me nuts that these guys are now who laypeople picture when they think of a “gamer.” Honestly? I preferred this guy. Jimmy Teenager doesn’t have the luxury that I had, to like computers and then watch a cable show about computers that is literally just two dudes taking apart a computer. He sees all those people screaming behind Kevin Pereira, and maybe he doesn’t stop to think that the crowd’s been manipulated. He just thinks “If I’m a videogamer (which I am), and I want to be popular (which everyone does), this schtick seems to be working for that guy!” This is douchegeek hegemony.
And it doesn’t apply just to G4, frighteningly. I suggest we vet our icons carefully in all media. The conscription of geek culture by filmic douchebags gives us things like Michael Bay Transformers movies which, when they make $400M, begin to breed, and meanwhile Terry Gilliam still can’t scrape together the money to finish La Mancha. Douchegeek hegemony.
I understand that it’s sometimes hard to police your own subculture, especially amid the head rush of actually being catered to by mass media for the first time. Men, especially, seem gleefully willing to overlook problematic underlying implications whenever boobies or swag are flashed in front of them. But the honeymoon should be over by this point, ten years on. It’s time to put down the controller and push back.
I won’t tell you to make use of the glut of great game/nerd journalism that’s all over the web, because I’m sure you already do. But you gotta stop watching G4, and you really have to stop swarming their booth just because some hired babe waves you over. Go cheer in front of Penny Arcade‘s booth instead. Call Chris Gore what he is: reprehensible. Sweet Jesus, STOP GOING TO TRANSFORMERS MOVIES.
(And hey, Chris Hardwick? It’s time to cut the G4 ties, buddy. You’re beyond them.)
No matter how loud the techno, or awesome the free sticker, or big the fake breasts/enthusiasm, ask yourself: shouldn’t the internet and the mainstreaming of geek culture bring us a broader definition of what “cool” can be, for both women and men? Or are we just gonna let the same boring, good-looking people we loathed in high school define our norms again? I’m a better person for having watched TechTV, and I pray the geek youth of today are smart enough to see through G4’s pandering and go find their own Screen Savers.
Luke Pebler works professionally as a television editor while pursuing passion projects in film, online media and speculative fiction. His credits as a writer/director include the award-winning sci-fi short film The Professor’s Daughter and the web series The Last Hand.
Whew. I know I promised to post this yesterday, but as you can see it got a bit…epic. Bear with me gang, I’ll get to the “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel, but first a little context:
Having devoted an entire chapter of my dissertation to the “Twilight ruined Comic-Con” protests that occurred in 2009, I have spent a good deal of time thinking about SDCC as a gendered space, analyzing how gendered tensions are manifested in that space, and considering how the popular press reinforces a (false) conception of comic-con as an inherently masculine space. In this chapter, and in various conference presentations I’ve since given on “Twihate” generally, I spend some time analyzing the implications of an illustrated sidebar from a July 25, 2008 Entertainment Weekly article that attempted to humorously outline SDCC’s consistent “Faces in the Crowd.”
The majority of the “usual suspects” here are (perhaps unsurprisingly) men, from the “Campers,” who “arrive at the convention ballrooms each morning, burrow in, and remain in their seats all day as panel after panel parades in front of them,” to the “Family Man,” an aging fan who hasn’t yet realized that “fandom isn’t genetic.” Female SDCC attendees, meanwhile, can apparently be divided into two camps: “Princess Nakeds” (defined as a “young woman wearing nothing more than skillfully placed electrical tape”) and “Dr. Girlfriends” (defined as “friends/lover/wives of the Con faithful who have no interest in the convention but attend solely to show their support”).
Admittedly, all of the SDCC attendee archetypes outlined above perpetuate crude stereotypes about fans generally, and mock male and female fans equally. What makes these two “fangirl” representations especially problematic for me is not the fact that they trade in old pathologies, but that they offer no real point of identification for most female SDCC attendees. The “Princess Nakeds” are constructed as sexualized spectacles rather than fans, offering themselves up for the implied male gaze of SDCC attendees. As discussed at length in the “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel, many fangirls choose to cosplay in sexually explicit garb and claim that choice as empowering, but the fact that the “Princess Naked” is here constructed as a separate category from the “LARPer” is telling. Even if we assume that the term “Princess Naked” is a reference to the disproportionate number of “Slave Leias” that tend to populate events like SDCC (as the accompanying caricature would suggest), the description divorces the archetype from cosplay and LARPing traditions and makes it difficult to read this (by definition, sexualized) display as a form of fan production. Wearing her costume of “strategically placed electrical tape” (what character is this supposed to be?!?), the “Princess Naked” under this definition isn’t attempting to embody a specific character, she is simply offering herself up as a sexualized object for the fanboy gaze. She is, in the parlance of the panel in question, simply “pandering.”
The “Dr. Girlfriend” archetype is, in some sense, far more troubling to me than the implicit alignment of the “Princess Naked” with the sexually objectified “booth babe.” As I’m sure you’re all well aware, “Dr. Girlfriend” is a reference to a character on the cult Cartoon Network Adult Swim series The Venture Bros. (2003-present). Costumed in the retro style of Jacqueline Kennedy, and voiced by the male co-writer of the show, Doc Hammer, the clash between her hyperfeminine aesthetic and decidedly masculine aural presence has made Dr. Girlfriend one of the show’s most popular characters, and a favorite character for fangirls to cosplay.
Entertainment Weekly’s description of “Dr. Girlfriends” as unwilling attendees, tagging along after their boyfriends or husbands (the presumed “real” attendee), coupled with a caricature of a horrified-looking woman being forced to carry poster tubes and bags of merchandise, goes beyond simply failing to represent female fans. The characterization of the “Dr. Girlfriend” subtly implies that no woman could possibly enjoy an experience at SDCC…unless, of course, she’s a “Princess Naked” exhibitionist. Ultimately, both the “Princess Naked” and the “Dr. Girlfriend” archetypes are rooted in a binary view of female sexuality, the former hypersexualized and the latter heteronormatively coupled. In both cases, importantly, female attendees are constructed through and defined by their male cohort’s gaze and companionship. They are safely contained.
I do find it amusing that it looks like that sand person is managing this car wash
The “Oh, you Sexy Geek!” panel at SDCC 2011 this past Thursday was designed to take on the “Princess Naked” effect, and speak back to the accusations of “pandering” the so-called “fake fangirls” who wear these sexualized costumes (or post geek-themed pinups online, etc.) endure. The panelists ranged from notablefemalegeekeratibloggers and video parodists, to former Buffy big bads and reality television stars. The lone academic presence on the panel was Jennifer Stuller, author of the recent book Ink Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology. At one point, Stuller joked that she was assured she wouldn’t be the only “humorless feminist” on the panel, but in general my issue wasn’t the lack of second wave feminism (I don’t expect/assume everyone to embody those values, or constantly parrot them if they do), or even the problematic/third-wave feminist definition of “empowerment” through beauty culture that seemed to hang over the panel. No, my main issue was that this devolved into a postfeminist panel, in which feminism was invoked and then discarded as no longer necessary (or too “old fashioned,” or some form of buzzkillery we need to “get over”). I don’t think that was the intention, but the rhetoric pointed towards those values more often than not. In fannish terms, it all got a bit…Mary Sue.
The “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel was, in a word, disappointing. I appreciate its presence, and credit it for setting out some ambitious conversational goals, but the bulk of the panel was weighed down with play-nice platitudes (“Who are we to judge a girl who chooses to cosplay in a skimpy outfit?”/“Everyone should feel sexy!”) and (genuinely) witty commentary at the expense of any real debate. Many have already railed against the girl-power brand of “feminism” being touted at the panel, and apparently Bonnie Burton was openly accused of being a “bad feminist” by several disgruntled attendees. I don’t agree with the accusation, and I definitely don’t agree with the tactic. Better to discuss the feminisms that have always circulated around girl geek culture than to begin internally creating the same sort of hierarchies that girl geek culture has battled for decades.
Many have also justifiably expressed their disgust for Chris Gore’s “contributions” to the panel. I’m hoping to cajole Luke Pebler into guest blogging something about the G4ification of geek culture/comic-con down the line, so I’ll save a few choice words on the appearance of Chris Gore midway through the “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel for that comment thread. If you’re looking to see what got everyone so riled up, Jennifer de Guzman and Feminist Fatale have recaps of the panel and Gore’s presence up that you should check out. Suffice it to say that rolling into a panel that purports to empower female fans, and smarmily opening with “I would stick my penis in every single one of these ladies” is, at worst, Exhibit A of why some women continue to feel objectified and marginalized within geek culture. At best, it was a severely lame to pander to the fanboys in the room. Funny, how that sort of pandering never seems to get the same sort of scrutiny that this did:
The “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel was at capacity, so if/when it makes a return to SDCC in 2012, here’s what I’d be interested to see/hear:
– A more focused conversation, to avoid getting mired in generalities. Focus on one “pandering” controversy, or one costume, and really dig in. Take a position and argue it, propose change, something to make this a bit more concrete and constructive.
– Encourage a richer twitter backchannel…clearly there were many in the audience who felt strongly about these issues. Announce the hashtag up front!
– Less about sexy costumes, more about the politics of DIY vs. BIY (buy-it-yourself) costuming at the con (sexy or otherwise…I’m still waiting for some badass woman to actually weld her own gold bikini).
– More from Bonnie Burton on crafting as a fan practice. Taking a glance at her twitter feed, many a fanboy are out there seem amped to make Chewbacca finger puppets and AT-AT planters. I think most would assume that crafting falls squarely into the realm of “women’s work,” so the success of her Star Wars Craft book with fanboys and fangirls alike could open up a nice gender neutral space in this discussion.
– More from Katrina Hill on gender/genre bias (or presumptions surrounding gender and genre). I am a complete gore hound, horror buff, so hearing the Action Chick’s thoughts on, say, the animosity directed towards Twilight’s presence at SDCC would have been fascinating, especially considering all the complaints that Twihards only attend SDCC to ogle and sexually objectify the male stars.
– Get another academic on the panel. This is in no way a dig at Stuller, who made some great interjections about the need for media literacy and outreach (hear hear!), but it would be useful to also have someone who is studying the gendered mainstreaming of fan/geek culture, fanboy/fangirl identities, or the evolution of SDCC as a space on the panel. Better yet, get someone doing work on postfeminism in the media to contextualize some of these debates.
– More from the nerdybird, author of the blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics,” as so much of the conversation seemed to hinge on a Jessica Rabbit “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn this way” defensive strategy. Or, get a comic book creator/artist on the panel (or someone designing and drawing these costumes we’re discussing). At the top of my personal wish list would be Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. I’d love to hear them talk about their commentary on female superhero costuming via the character of Starlight in The Boys.
– More panelist diversity in general would have made for a richer conversation. Hell, bring in someone who has been working as a booth babe at SDCC for the past few years. We need only look to the EA “Sin to Win” controversy to see how this panel’s topic is part of a much larger marketing culture at work. Or, bring in a girl geek who has attended the con for over a decade to anecdotally discuss how the culture around it has changed. I’d like to hear their stories, and they are absolutely part of this debate.
– Actually dress up as buildings for the next panel (…I guess you had to be there for that one). As encouragement, check out this killer array of Tardis dresses!
I could go on, but I won’t, and before I close I want to be clear- I’ve got nothing against any of these women. I avidly read many of their blogs and their twitter feeds, and despite the fact that my “humorless feminist” hackles were raised repeatedly over the course of the panel, the questions of identity and authenticity that the panel consistently poked at are exceedingly complex and difficult to navigate. Authenticity debates within subculture, and studies of subculture, are nothing new. The gendering of “authenticity” and authority in those spheres also has a long history that is difficult to cram into a single panel.
Was I disappointed that it was Seth Green (interjecting from the audience), and not one of the panelists, who finally unleashed an impressively articulate tirade about what’s been gained and lost in the mainstreaming of geek culture, and the importance of being good fan culture ambassadors (“You can’t be pandering if you’re sincere”)? Absolutely. Was it depressing that no one on the panel seemed to be able to muster up an example of an empowered/empowering female character to cosplay that wasn’t at least a decade old (see: Wonder Woman, Buffy)? Terribly. But I completely respect these women for getting up on stage and having the conversation (or even for acknowledging that these conversations need to occur more frequently in spaces like SDCC). As far as criticisms of the panel go, I have plenty, but I’m less interested in hating and more in participating in an ongoing dialogue about these issues.
As for my version of sexy cosplay solidarity…
I defy you to find someone who is more of a sexy badass than Malory Archer/Jessica Walter.
So, if you were at the panel (or on the panel), I’d really like to hear your thoughts on what you were expecting, what you walked away with, and what you’d like to see future panels along these lines tackle. Debates about sexy cosplay, the feminisms of girl geek culture, etc. are also welcome, obviously.
This is the official kick off to my San Diego Comic-Con 2011 blogging theme week. The goal is to post at least 3 short reflection pieces, here’s the tentative schedule:
– Tuesday: Reactions to the “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel on gendered geek culture, authenticity, and accusations of pandering and “bad feminism” (which, as we all know, really means “bad second wave feminism”)
– Wednesday: Considering the webcomic Axe Cop as transformative work and play
– Thursday: Swag as a signifying practice (or, why the Conan O’Brien potholder is important)
In the meantime, some initial thoughts (filtered through minor adventures in cosplay), but first a list of things I missed. If you were at one of the following panels and would like to share insights/squees/commentary below in comments, that would be stellar! We’ll go by day:
-THURSDAY-
11:15am (Hall H): Twilight: Breaking Dawn panel (Rumor was Twihards didn’t fill the hall, which many smugly took as a sign that A. the phenomenon was waning, or B. that Twihards had been successfully bullied out of attending the Con.)
1:00pm (26AB): Panel on digital comics (I would just be curious to hear about strategies and debates re: the turn to digital comics)
5:00pm (32AB): Buffy and LGBT Comics Fandom panel (interested to see if there was any continued debate about Buffy’s sapphic dabbling here, in particular)
-FRIDAY-
10:30am (8): Locke & Key [failed] pilot screening (purely fannish interest here, as a reader of the comic)
2:00pm (26AB): Transmedia, Comics Form, and Contemporary Adaptations
6:00pm (25ABC): Girls Gone Genre
-SATURDAY-
11:30am (Hall H): Twixt with Francis Ford Coppola (twitter lit up with discussions of Coppola editing footage on his iPad during the panel, and multiple remarks about how Coppola’s approach would “revolutionize” distribution…would love to hear accounts or be passed along links to video of this)
2:15pm (Hall H): Knights of Badassdom (thoughts on the film’s representation of LARPers? I’m fannishly curious about this one)
5:30pm (26AB): Comics in the Classroom
-SUNDAY-
– 11:00am (7AB): Watchmen 25 Years Later
– The TV takeover of Hall H (Glee, SPN, Dr. Who)
– 2:30pm (26AB): The Culture of Comic-Con (DEVASTATED that I missed this)
…and, of course, would love to hear thoughts on other panels not listed above that you enjoyed, found interesting (professionally/academically or personally), trends in panels that you spotted, etc.
By way of introducing the themes that will undoubtedly run through my posts on Comic-Con 2011 this week, I present to you our Saturday costume (I’m saving tales of Archer cosplay for my Tuesday post):
Saturday (quasi) Cosplay: Rob and Don
Admittedly, a lazy rendition, but still evocative of their henchmen namesakes, from Frank Miller’s 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. There was a lengthy discussion about bald caps, but because we were tackling two costumes this year with limited time, we settled for this version, even though I would have loved to thrift hunt the 80s components to do a spot-on characterization:
Then again, I also dream of cutting my hair and dressing as Carrie Kelly/Robin some year...
For better or for worse, I saw this costume as something of a litmus test.
Luke (aka Rob) and I attempted to strike a balance between the canonical (Watchmen and The Killing Joke aside, I find that most who have every picked up a comic or two have at least come into contact with Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns), and the obscure (Rob and Don appear in approximately 10 panels of the collected graphic novel, as the only named members of the mutant gang). Keeping the recurring debates about fannish authenticity, the shifting promotional space and demographics of comic-con, the perils of swag culture, and whether comics are adequately represented at the con in mind, here are the results of said litmus test, by the numbers…
– Number of signs of recognition/knowing snickers from attendees passing us on the floor Saturday: approx. 3-5
– Number of drinks comped at dinner: 2 (I choose to believe that this was due to our waiter being a Frank Miller fan, rather than incompetent. Either way, this one worked in our favor.)
– Number of conversations and pictures requested: 1
– Number of attendees who chased us down and frantically asked us which booth was giving out out glasses as swag: approx. 80-100
There’s one disheartening way to read these stats (kids these days, no sense of history, rabble rabble, the con’s turned its back on actual comics, the conspicuous consumption swag culture is ruining everything, etc.), but I’d prefer to tell you about the one guy who did recognize us, stopped us to ask for a picture, and chat.
He was late 40s/early 50s, wearing a Superman t-shirt. He actually used the phrase “lickin chegs” within the first minute of talking to us, which aside from being an excellent fannish reference to the comic, is impressive to just casually drop into a conversation. Here’s the best bit: the guy’s name was Don. His best friend growing up was named Rob. They were both huge fans of the comic and the characters.
Meeting a guy like Don is one of the many reasons I still love the experience of comic-con, despite my reservations and cynicism about particular industrial/promotional evolutions and gender-biased mutations the con has undergone over the past decade (which, I’m sure, will emerge in later posts). For a few minutes, I got to talk comics with a fan I’ve never met and I’ll likely never see again, got to hear a bit of his story, and felt the sort of immediate kinship that can exist in fannish spaces amongst strangers.
I’m currently in the process of translating my fandom/geek culture syllabus into a syllabus for one of Oxy’s freshman Core writing seminars this fall. This is a pretty fun prospect, because in addition to now being on a semester system (which allows me to bring back designated weeks on vidding and wizard rock that I had to drop for the quarter system at UCSC), my new position at the CDLR is actively encouraging (nay, insisting!) that I rethink what a “critical writing assignment” looks like.
As pitched to me, these core freshman writing seminars are centrally concerned with helping students learn how to craft a scholarly argument. Now, I get to think about all the different ways, and on all the different platforms, that “crafting” might occur. Added bonus that the class is on fandom and participatory culture, thereby presenting a truly symbiotic pedagogical exercise. How better to teach about the many ways in which fans craft arguments about, and speak back to, media texts than to ask my students to use some of those same forms to analyze and speak back to the issues and literature we will encounter in class?
I have typically included theory/praxis options for students for their final projects, which has led to some truly wonderful student-created vids, comic books, fanfic, and short films, but logistics, class sizes and other factors prohibited me from building these components directly into the syllabus. Now that I will have an abundance of resources and support encouraging me to do just that, and only 16 students, it’s a whole new quidditch match, as the kids say. (Okay, maybe not ALL the kids…)
To give you a sense of the weekly topics and readings...gee, I wonder when class meets...
For some excellent examples of the sort of course design and assignments I’m thinking about, see these excellent examples from courses taught by Julie Levin Russo and Melanie Kohnen.
Early thoughts on these assignments include:
– Autoethnographic video blogs discussing their fan identity/modes of participation
– Weekly, informal writing assignment to post to our course wordpress blog, currently being constructed
– Vid or fanfiction analysis (this would be a more conventional response paper…gotta throw a few in there)
– Some sort of visual essay (via tumblr? flickr? Have them create vids? Still beginning to think about this) coupled with a written analysis, most likely as a group project
And for the final project…
– Peer review of first essay drafts in google docs
– Multimodal presentations of their central argument in class
– Accompanied by a more standard term paper
I’m clearly just beginning to think about this, and so I pose question for both professors and students (or anyone else who wants to weigh in on the topic): What works? What doesn’t? What do we stand to gain or lose by retaining conventional academic writing assignments or moving towards digital or multimodal alternatives? Students, which digital tools do you think would be most useful to you in crafting alternative forms of argument? Would you prefer to submit work and get comments back by google doc or email, or is my lovely penmanship something all future students should experience on hard copies of their work?
All thoughts on this are greatly appreciated, and obviously as soon as the syllabus is locked in I’ll be posting it here.
Consider this a primer for the inevitable comic-con wrap-up(s) and reflections coming at the end of the month (I predict I will be addressing cosplay in some detail, as the 2 different couples costumes we are prepping pose an interesting geek litmus test). Full disclosure: I have been attending San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) for the past 5 years as a fan, not an academic. Though I did parlay my experience of the gendered Twihate protests at SDCC 2009 into a dissertation chapter and several conference presentations, and I frequently mull over the idea of working on the shifting promotional/fan space of SDCC as my next major (read: book) project, my attendance thus far and this year is attached more firmly to the “fan” half of my “acafan” identity. Case in point:
Though debating gains and losses of the “mainstreaming” and “industrial takeover” of SDCC has become something of a hobby for fans and bloggers, and lamenting the ballooning scope and capacity crowds is now a rite of passage, this year’s repeated registration fail seemed (at least to many on twitter) to be the death knell signaling that the “real” fans have been officially edged out by industry types and casual consumers. I finally, luckily, scored tickets from a friend with “professional” status, after spending a sum total of 10 hours on three different days trying to buy tickets through the system, and remarking somewhat melodramatically on twitter that seeing the registration confirmation page for would be like seeing the faces of the final five cylons.
All of this said, the recent release of the SDCC 2011 program suggests some significant shifts and new strategies, and I’ll be interested to see how they pan out, as both a fan and a media scholar:
Revenge of the Fans 