Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 13

Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Three): The Great British Bake Off

Lauren Levitt and Elaine Venter

Lauren:

Hi, Elaine. To start off, can you tell me a little bit about how you started watching The Great British Bake Off (GBBO), or The Great British Baking Show in the U.S.?

 

Elaine:

Hi Lauren. Excited to be working with you on this discussion.

I actually started watching GBBO on social media in 2015. I had made several friends from the UK on Tumblr through connected TV fandoms, and many of them were posting GIF sets and clips of the show. In particular, my attention was really captured by a post consisting of a set of three GIFs showing a baker making the most amusing facial expressions as she questions whether her royal icing tastes like bubblegum.

               

Once I was able to get my hands on the full episode, which was not yet airing in the US (and we’ll leave it at that!), I became a fan, and quickly caught up to previous seasons (or series in UK), which does include the first two series that did not air in the US at all. 

The music, the charming and pun-tastic hosts, Mel and Sue, baking queen Mary Berry as a judge with celebrity chef Paul Hollywood, the almost too polite and amateur bakers that seemed so relatable, the lack of overproduced drama and cutthroat competition I had come to associate with American baking shows, and, of course, the bakes—all had me hooked! That started my obsession with GBBO.

 

Lauren:

I started watching GBBO after it was recommended to me by my close friend and fellow scholar Ayanna Dozier, who said that she watched the entire thing, even though it wasn’t the sort of show she is usually into, because the production values were so high. I was immediately hooked because of how soothing the program is. It was the perfect program to help me relax while I was staying home during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had soon watched every season on Netflix!

 

Elaine:

I am curious whether you not only picked up watching GBBO during the pandemic, but also baking like so many others as well? Or was baking something you were already doing?

 

Lauren:

It’s funny you should ask that. Baking is something that I have enjoyed doing since I was in college. There is something about it that is very relaxing to me. As long as you follow the directions exactly, everything should turn out correctly, at least theoretically! Perhaps this is one of the reasons I found GBBO so soothing. However, I try to avoid gluten and sugar for health reasons, so I no longer do a lot of baking at home. I did make sweets for some of my partners over the pandemic, including a pineapple upside down cake which was definitely GBBO influenced.

Over the pandemic I had more time to focus on my physical and mental health, though. To a great extent, this meant working less, but I also started exercising and cooking more. Whereas before I was eating a lot of salads and prepared foods, during the pandemic I tried to make at least one homemade meal a week for myself. 

 

Elaine:

I bought Val Stone’s first cookbook, which she self-published with a lot of fan fundraising, and baked a few of her bakes there. It’s amazing to see how the show itself has increased representation and awareness of other kinds of baking, including gluten-free, dairy-free, and even keto at one point!

However, like you, I did bake before too. Although, while I did grow up in a baking household, that doesn’t mean I was very good at it! I completely understand what you mean about steps, but for some reason if my mother isn’t with me, my bakes never come out just like hers or quite right.

 

 

Lauren:

I too was impressed by the amount of gluten-free baking on the show, which is clearly of interest to me.

 Can you tell me about your academic interest in GBBO?

 

Elaine:

My academic pursuits revolved around my frustration at lack of timely access when I was connected with fans in the UK through social media, that influenced me to pursue a deeper, more thorough investigation on geoblocking, the blocking of access to media content online based on geographic location. While the show did air in the US, I got into it during a season that was not yet airing here, and would not for several months, compared to the now only three day wait between UK Channel 4 and Netflix US air dates. The delay window affected the seasons available to US fans let alone PBS only picking up the show at its actual third series, leaving the real first and second only having aired in the UK.

The entire situation seemed rather paradoxical to me with general wide openness of social media connections, but the closed digital portals of media content from official sources. Since middle school, I learned about globalization from many American teachers who talked about the wonders of globalization and the increased connection of shared languages, cultures, economies, and technologies, especially in the modern era of digital networks afforded to us by the Internet.

Worse, the official GBBO social media channels were and still are open to any who follow them and episodes were added to BBC’s iPlayer, now Channel 4’s website, but the channels are based on UK air dates and streaming is restricted due to copyright, which is fair. After all, the show was designed by and for British audiences. Who knew the show, and, in addition, British baking, would end up becoming such a global phenomenon?

Large online fandom communities have amassed because of GBBO, but they are there for more than just commenting on their favorite bakers or moments. Many fans are even baking along with the show, sharing recipes with one another, some learning to bake for the first time while others learning to hone years of home baking. They are learning about one another through shared bakes. Aura Sampson started her own bake-along Facebook group for US fans in September 2019 and now operates her own baking blog, Little House Big Alaska, where she “is on a mission to teach modern family oriented women how to make old-fashioned foods new again.” Her Facebook group has over 9,500 members. Groups go beyond bake-alongs and share bakes part of their cultures, religions, etc. This is one of MANY groups out there. 

For me, access to the show became about more than just accessing a piece of media that I felt was calming, but about accessing media that was fostering shared learning and community that while centered around food is about so much more than just food.

For example, between series 1 and 5 (in US, series 3 would be our season 1), GBBO featured historical segments on bakes from the theme of the episode (biscuit week, bread week, etc.), and would typically add to the technical or showstopper themed bakes. These segments included historical context and analysis from food historians and other professors and were educational moments that gave a deeper appreciation of food, but also an understanding of what shaped these foods, which in turn have shaped our societies, and shaped us. These educational segments reveal the sociopolitical and cultural connections to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, and the people who make and consume the food. These segments inspired an interest in further researching these connections, launching several discussions with friends and even complete strangers online about cultural practices centralizing around food, leading to insights on politics of a place and time.

I wonder, Lauren, in your own watching of the show in its later seasons, what are your observations on the historical and socio-political contextualization of the bakes?

 

Lauren:

I remember the show having some historical segments, and I definitely watched the ones about Cambridge pudding and about the stroopwafel. However, I don’t remember these segments being very common. I think this might be related to what you were just saying about differential access in different countries. As I mentioned previously, I watched GBBO on U.S. Netflix, and not all the seasons are available there.

 

Elaine:

I remember the stroopwafel segment and that interesting and surprising divide in the fandom, as alluded to in the stroopwafel story. What did you make of some fans who seemed quite annoyed about food history being employed in a show? Do you think this shows a difference in those fans who watched the show on BBC One versus when the show moved to commercialized Channel 4? The show’s run time has been cut ever since it moved to Channel 4 and includes advertisements now.

 

Lauren:

To be honest, I did not realize that the return of the historical segment had been controversial until I was looking for a clip to include in this conversation. Unlike you, I watched the show very much in isolation from fan communities. I did know that the show moved to Channel 4 after it was canceled by the BBC, but since I watched the series on Netflix, I did not notice the addition of advertisements. I do, however, recall some discussion online about why the BBC canceled GBBO despite its immense popularity, with some commentators plausibly claiming that this has to do with a devaluation of feminine interests such as baking.

 

Elaine:

You mention a fascinating point on its move from BBC to Channel 4. I was wondering if you can expand on that and why you think that might have been the case?

I find it especially intriguing as my research indicates Love Productions was more interested in more money and advertising once the license for GBBO went up for bid again as a key reason BBC lost GBBO.

The show had become increasingly popular with a key demographic, millennials (I will admit to not having checked statistics on gender, however). As David Sillito writes in their 2016 BBC article, “Who would have dared say 10 years ago that the way to reach ‘Millennials’ was baking?” Many have argued that the show has been responsible for a baking revolution not only in the UK, but in several countries, including the US.

Looking to take advantage of that growing millennial market, Channel 4 was jumping at the chance to buy up the GBBO license from Love Productions once the license was up for sale again. BBC offered £15 million to renew their license, but Channel 4 offered over £10 million more. Love Productions decided to move the show to Channel 4, offering them even more opportunities in advertising, which Love Productions could not get while their show was airing on BBC. Netflix only bought the online streaming license to air GBBO in certain markets, including the US.

Many doubted the show would succeed after its move, especially after original hosts, Mel and Sue, and judge Mary Berry left with BBC’s loss of the license, but over 6 years later, the show seems to still be going quite strong.

 

Lauren:

As you mentioned, GBBO moved to Channel 4 because the BBC would not pay what Love Productions asked for, even though it was Britain’s most watched show. The BBC will typically only pay £300,000 for factual programming like GBBO, but they offered Love Productions £15 million for 30 hours of programming, which was £10 million less than what they wanted. However, in 2015 the BBC had agreed to pay £60 million a year to keep the Premier League’s Match of the Day. Some fans understandably speculated that the BBC’s emphasis on sports, especially football (soccer in the U.S.), is because watching sports is a conventionally masculine pastime.

 

Elaine:

Certainly, more conventionally masculine, indeed, and I can see the argument of BBC prioritizing the masculine-orientated sports show over baking, a conventionally female pastime. GBBO was only on the air for 6 years at that point compared to Match of the Day (MOTD), which had been a staple of BBC programming since the 1960s.

Taking into consideration that a lot has changed since 2016, this has inspired me to check on more current data between the two, if you’ll indulge me. 

Despite a rocky start, Channel 4 ratings for GBBO continue to grow with finales, especially continuing to break Channel 4 records, while ratings for Match of the Day (MOTD) seem to be dropping to the point that some wonder if this isn’t the death of the sports clip show itself.

The ratings data tables from Equity Release Supermarket visually represents how while MOTD may have seemed more of a sure bet with its seemingly similar and higher ratings than GBBO for years, GBBO continues to grow on Channel 4. One can argue the high ratings in 2016 was in part that it was the last finale on BBC before the show shifted to Channel 4 and there was more fanfare. However, GBBO started quite strong on Channel 4, and despite a dip in 2018, continues to grow in ratings and overall beats out MOTD in viewership. Even with the dips seen in 2021 viewing across the board as viewers return to work, GBBO is still projected to grow. However, Equity Release questions whether the ratings drop from 2020 for MOTD are because of the effects of Covid on live sporting events, the lifeblood of MOTD, or if we can expect declined viewership in its future.

And, according to YouGov data, GBBO ranks as 24th in their “The Most Popular Contemporary Tv Programmes (Q1 2022)” list, whereas MOTD ranks 79th. Their data shows GBBO is popular with 66% of women vs 38% of men, while MOTD ranks popular with 50% men and 30% women. However, the age range distinction is interesting between the two as well with GBBO popular with 55% of Millennials, 51% of Gen X, and 51% of Baby Boomers, but MOTD ranks popular with only 43% millennials, 39% of Gen X, and 41% of Baby Boomers.

I wonder if the BBC isn’t perhaps regretting their decision now in not putting more trust in a baking show to not only compete, but eventually out rate one of the longest running sports clip shows, not putting more trust in its audience, especially its female audience.

Lauren:

That’s a good question.

On a different note, can you tell me more about your personal relationship to GBBO?

Elaine:

Personally, GBBO helped me consider the much deeper implications of sociocultural politics that shaped the foods I enjoy, the complex and even controversial origins of how certain influences shaped the foods I took for granted, the culture I identify as (South African American), and even the relationships between myself and others. I believe this is just one of the reasons this show is resonating with so many viewers, not only increasingly in the UK to the point it’s beating out the likes of MOTD now, but across the globe.

Beyond being a comforting show about baking, it inspired me to research the origins of the South African foods I grew up with and took for granted. A former Commonwealth country, South Africa has a history of colonialism from several countries, dominant forces including the Dutch and the British, and slavery that definitely had an effect on the foods that shape the country to this day. The Dutch colonists imported slaves to the Cape from many regions, including from their conquests in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and more. Through watching the show and participating in the fandom, I gained a much deeper understanding of the complex history involving the popular and culturally significant and unique Cape Malay Curry, for example. A dish my mother ate while pregnant with me, which she attests must be why I love curries so much.

Lauren:

There are a couple of points you have raised over the course of the conversation that I would like to pick up on. First, I too noticed the lack of competition and frequent cooperation among bakers on GBBO, despite the competitive game doc format. I have previously written about the similarities and differences between documentary and reality TV, specifically Paris Is Burning and RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I found that RuPaul’s Drag Race is able to address serious socio-political issues despite its competitive game doc format.

The lack of competition on GBBO is in direct contrast to other American cooking shows from around the same time such as Cutthroat Kitchen, which highlighted competition and agonism. It seemed that the lack of competition on GBBO, combined with elements of mise-en-scene such as the pastel sets and transition shots of animals in the English countryside, were an explicit attempt to represent a quintessentially British politeness. It was interesting to me that the show was branding British identity in this way for both national and global audiences, despite the rise of democratic backsliding in the UK linked to far-right, xenophobic, nationalist politics as exemplified by Great Britain’s exit from the European Union.

 

On a related note, you also mentioned both globalization and colonialism. Another aspect of GBBO that struck me was the way that it was cast to represent the diversity of multicultural Britain. This included contestants from former British colonies, as well as other immigrants to the United Kingdom. The show was also cast to include contestants from a variety of different British regions in each season. Contestants’ recipes often reflected their ethnic and or regional background. Again, this contrasts with the current backlash against multiculturalism and immigration in the UK as apparent in Brexit.

 

Elaine:

I will have to read your previous work on documentary and reality TV.

I think your response on the show’s representation of the quintessentially British politeness in juxtaposition to the reality outside the show of the democratic backsliding and events that led to Brexit very important and poignant.

 It also brings up important questions about identity:

1)  What does it mean to be British?

2)  What is British food?

3)  Who gets to decide?

My research on GBBO’s popularity, especially from 2019 and 2020 – the timeline roughly underscoring increased political upheaval in UK and US and the pandemic – brings up several articles making reference to the show being a safe haven from politics. One GBBO Facebook group I am a part of strictly prohibits the discussion of politics as part of membership even.

However, online, many of the bakers have been the victims of tremendous online bullying, some of it quite political. Series 6 (that’s season 3 in US) winner, Nadiya Hussain, a first-generation British Bangladeshi and Muslim woman, was told to “go home” while she was competing on the show on Twitter, and the target of terrible racist abuse online when she used apple in a Cornish pastry recipe in her own show Nadiya’s British Food Adventure. Hussain has defended herself on social media against several trolls:

 

Lauren:

It’s interesting that the show has been framed as “a safe haven from politics,” since apoliticism implicitly supports the status quo. I would say that the show is more an expression of cosmopolitan tolerance

Elaine:

Connected to the above on immigrants and cultural recipes and bakes on GBBO and on global appeal of the show, we’ve seen American bakes make their way into the tent. There have been bakes featuring peanut butter as flavor, brownies, chewie and soft cookies, and donuts. Yes, while some of these do not originate in America, they have become quintessentially American, and, yet not one American calling Britain home yet has been on GBBO. We’ve even seen American celebrities on the charity version, The Great Celebrity Bake Off for SU2C (Stand Up 2 Cancer), but no American expats in Britain on GBBO itself. Do you think GBBO may ever feature an American contestant?

 

Lauren:

I can’t say for sure, but if I am correct that the show is trying to evoke a quintessential Britishness, then it is unlikely that there will be an American expat on the show anytime soon. The US population in the UK is fairly low because of prohibitive bilateral immigration restrictions between the two countries. You basically have to be a key skills worker to get a work visa in either country as a citizen of the other.

 

Elaine:

Well, Lauren, a most insightful discussion on GBBO. I have enjoyed digging deeper into the show from both our personal and academic interests, the way the show has not only entertained but how it connects fans in communities learning about baking and even different cultures, motivations leading to GBBO’s move from BBC to Channel 4, and the representation of a quintessential Britishness.

Looking forward to seeing what changes the next series brings us. Happy baking. 

Lauren Levitt is a postdoctoral fellow in Communication at Tulane University, where she is working on a collaborative research project about the impact of COVID-19 on creative industries in New Orleans and Tel Aviv. She is also working on a book project about sex workers’ networks of care.

Elaine Venter is an assistant professor of mass communication at Colorado Mesa University teaching a wide variety of classes including introduction to media, social media, design for mass comm, and advanced media theory. Her research interests are focused on media access, media industries, the internet, video games and esports, and representation in media. She is a mediocre baker and esports gamer.

Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Two): Digital Media and Food

Brienna Fleming and Ioana Misc

What is your project about?

 

Brie:  My project looks at the ways a popular YouTube cooking show, Binging with Babish, helps foster a digital food literacy, but this show is just one example of the myriad ways we can examine the growing genre of YouTube cooking channels and shows as a collection of recipes or as a digital cookbook. In English Studies, and in my field of Rhetoric and Composition, it’s becoming commonplace to foreground social justice issues through the texts we read and the papers we have students compose, and food discourse is being used more than ever to present the histories of marginalized people. Take Steven Alvarez’s course, on what he calls “Taco Literacy.” In his 2017 Composition Studies article,  Alvarez discusses how he uses this Mexican heritage food can help unveil the Mexican immigration experience, racism, appropriation, and appreciation of Mexican culture and foodways. Food Studies, a discipline unto itself, asks us to consider the ways foodways are related to people and history, to intimate and personal facets of life, race and sexuality, religion, and the place we call home. In addition to the integration of popular food and culture into the composition classroom, we’re seeing an increasing need for multiliteracies, specifically a digital one. Most people in and outside academe embody a basic digital literacy, if it only emerged through social media use.  So what does Binging with Babish, food, and digital literacy have to do with the civic imagination?

 

“If Looks Could Kale” Burger Inspired by Bob’s Burgers https://www.bingingwithbabish.com/#top  

 

If the heart of civic imagination is to allow for the presence of an alternative, then I see a digital food literacy as a current, emerging literacy that can help audiences experience food through a perspective that’s not their own.  Just as taco literacy invites students to study Mexican history and heritage, so too can we assume that people learn from engaging with digital (social media) content.  In a highly polarized pandemic world, it’s easy to come up against perspectives that mirror our own, so to be a just, informed person we must be reminded to look beyond the scope of what we’re comfortable with. This matters in the real world and in higher education. Scholars still have much to do in regards to the uncovering and integration of marginalized histories and voices, as well as the sources from which these things come. Digital texts, especially those stemming from social media or personal profiles, challenge the use of traditional, print-based texts. And the food-based content they contain can be used as a teaching tool offering the users/audience an understanding of the relationship between food and personhood.

 

Ioana: I couldn’t agree more with your final claim that “scholars still have much to do in regards to the uncovering and integration of marginalized histories and voices, as well as the sources from which these things come.” This is valid for artists or technologists too.

 

While advocating for the expansion of inclusive and collaborative methodologies, my current research explores the mechanism in which gastronomy can be intertwined meaningfully with other “disciplines” (artistic, scientific, spiritual, technological) in order to awaken our imaginative senses: civic, social, creative. 

 

An exquisite example can be found in teamLab Borderless, a highly advanced digital interactive museum in Tokyo, Japan. Among many pioneering installations, En Tea House, in particular, stood out to me for combining the sacred tea ritual with a responsive video mapping technique into a holistic journey that enchants multi-layered forms of imagination. As the teacup was emptied by each visitor, the responsive video mapping juxtaposed a choreography of flower petals that adjusts its intensity in a proportionate manner. This journey activated a sensorial tech-culinary path and a sensorial imagination. I used to call it “immersive food” as it was at the crossroads between carefully curated nutritive ingredients and highly advanced digital extensions. You are not only accessing the specific food or drink, but rather the poetic story of it. You step out from material reality in order to enter into an augmented world. The artists signing the installation teleport you into a dimension that blends food and art seamlessly. Where does food end and where does art begin? We seem to assist to the emergence of a new “species” that I tend to call food-tainment, previously nicknamed by the media as “eatertainment”. 

 

Still from teamlab Borderless, En Tea House, Tokyo, Japan 

The roots of these hybrid experiences can be found in a different movement called culinary cinema, however in that realm food was the extension of cinema, while in this case food is extended by interactive cinema. In the current evolutive context, the question I am asking is: can we perceive immersive food as an elevated form of imagination or as a form of trading our own imagination for an external authored visual experience? How can we relate to food as art or to art as food? Under what circumstances the convergence of the two could bring added value to our human experiences? Is the culinary experience intensified or rather it decreases its importance, while joined by interactive mechanics? On a personal level, I felt elevated by the experience. It seemed an intersectionality of history (tea rituals preserved from the ancient times) and futurism (interactive and responsive tech that enchants and surprises). It clearly remained a memorable experience, most probably taking into account also the novelty factor.

 

Another intriguing example can be found in high end experimental restaurants such as The Alchemist, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, which claims to propose to its visitors elevated forms of “holistic cuisine”. The founders even launched in 2018 an expanded manifesto in this regard. 

 

Still from The Alchemist Facebook page, Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Quoting one of the lead initiators, Danish Chef Rasmus Munk, the experiences “stimulate and interact with all five senses and the intellect by exploring elements from theatre, art, science and technology”. 

 

Although the level of innovation is high, the level of accessibility is low, as the restaurant’s rates often exceed ordinary incomes. Still, the process is revealing, encouraging us to look at food from another angle and this process alone can be replicated by anyone in the world with basic means. Munk adds a dimension that I find evocative, claiming that “the fundamental recipe of the restaurant menu has changed very little in the last 100 years - it basically works according to the same script everythere. When I started investigating how theatre can enrich gastronomy, it dawned on me how similar the dramaturgy of a restaurant meal is to that of the theatre.” Taking this idea further, we may as well ask: how can storytelling structures of theatre/cinema/VR change when inspired by food rituals?

 

Other restaurants such as RAW from Taipei, Taiwan, led by chef Andre Chiang aimed to create experiences blending food and virtual reality, while adding most recently to the menu a rarity of our days: “edible NFTs”. For them, the kitchen itself is “a place for creativity, a place to dream. Dream to be brave [...] If this is a dream, please don’t wake me up.” (George Calombaris). 

The team launched eight NFTs, each inspired by a food principle curated by Chiang: Unique, Pure, Texture, Memory, Salt, South, Artisan, Terroir. These tags alone are a booster for civic imagination. The collectors of the NFTs would be then invited to join a private dinner. This process involving high end gastronomy, technology and sustainability is a proposing not only a new take on enjoying event-dishes, but also a new take on community formation. The idea of encouraging collective dinners for passionate strangers with similar interests may lead to creative conversations and bonds.

 

NFT Collectors invited at RAW, https://www.tatlerasia.com/dining/journeys/nft-we-are-what-we-eat-2021-en 

 

However, it is not just technology the one that may turn food rituals into spectacular shows. In countries like Peru, molecular gastronomy, a blend of culinary craft and chemistry is perceived close to a national brand, being found in almost all local restaurants. 

 

All these combinatory practices of food, philosophy, chemistry, virtual reality, film or theatre seem to prototype a new aura of contemporary food, one that blends spectacular-ness, creativity and civic imagination. In short lines, the curated intersectionality of food and other fields of life involving arts, tech, sciences or spirituality can lead to more than a food ritual, to a one-of-a-kind experience that prologues our body, mind and spirit in unprecedented manners.

How does food inspire or stifle an inclusive imagination? How can we encourage ways to involve food in civic imagination and debates on justice?

Ioana: To my mind, food is inclusive by design, however its imaginative layers might vary heavily and the question is indeed - how to preserve those and how to debate them? How can we archive the philosophies or rituals of food? And how to do it in innovative manners? How to preserve more perspectives on the same food ritual at once? 

I would recall an example where (fictionalized) food culture and virtual reality are combined into an unique installation. The Doghouse emerged as a VR experience directed by Danish VR artist Johan Knattrup Jensen and produced by Mads Damsbo. The installation was designed for five persons at a time, each with his/her own VR headset, however seating at the same impeccably arranged dinner table. The story portrayed a tense, Danish family dinner seen from more angles. Each explorer could choose a character and imply his/her perspective in order to reveal the story. In other words, the explorers are allowed to inhabit the perspective of the mother, the father or the children invited for dinner (one at a time). At the end of the experience, a dialogue between all participants invited them to negotiate the story that has happened by combining all of their individual angles into a narrative that would feel coherent. Methodologically, the project felt groundbreaking in 2015 when it was launched for capturing multiple perspectives on the very same topic: a troubled family dinner. I experienced it in Tel Aviv, during The Steamer Salon (a VR program) and back then I was affiliated with the role of the mother, rooted in the story as an alcoholic woman. In VR there were numerous toasts, while in reality as well there were corresponding glasses and this flow of dimensions (from real to digital, from digital to real) allowed me to inhabit the story more profoundly than any conventional VR piece. Not the food itself, but the objects surrounding food, the forks, glasses, knives became context markers or even characters narrating the story for us further. Traces of fiction in reality and traces of reality in fiction. To me, this project tapped into a highly important topic: decoding reality and its emotional, gastronomic, social aspects from multiple angles. Once we understand more perspectives, we come closer to a form of collective justice. And this is equally valid for civic imagination. Once we collect more perspectives, we may negotiate a more meaningful societal model.

 

 

The Doghouse VR installation still, courtesy of Makropol, the production team

How can we inspire our shared imagination as we prepare meals, serve dishes and eat what we made? How does food connect with our memories and aspirations?

Brie:  All of this sounds so interesting! I’m drawn to one of the first things you write, “how can we preserve and debate” notions on the inclusiveness of food? In some ways, I think this idea bridges our ideas and research together, especially because in this moment we’re both talking about “artifical” food experiences (that is to say, digital and virtual). I also find it compelling that The Doghouse offers users a chance to experience a tense and fraught family dinner with a VR experience in that it offers people a chance to experience a role and a meal from a perspective that’s not their own. While I agree with you that food is inclusive and so telling of our familial rituals and heritage, I am also of the mindset that in the real world food plays a role in a social hierarchy that isn’t so inclusive (e.g. food deserts and insecurity at large).

To me, it’s impossible for food not to connect us with our past and our memories. The trouble is without our family food literacy being passed down, where might we gather information on foodways like or unlike our own? I first noticed that YouTube and all of its popular cooking channels could be used as teaching tools when I was watching an episode of Frank Pinello’s The Pizza Show about San Marzano tomatoes. In the 3:34 minute video, Pinello takes us to Italy to meet a bunch of canning  nonna’s; “masters,” according to him. I soon realized short YouTube videos such as Binging with Babish or The Pizza Show would be innovative and approachable texts in the composition classroom:  students can analyze visual rhetoric or they can learn something a little deeper about a can of tomatoes they see in the market. Listening to Pinello interview those old Italian women confirmed the notion that heritage foodways are dying. Perhaps this is true of our own,  but either way I think we can start taking a closer look at the educational benefits of social media food content. And the interesting thing about the connectivity of social media is that even if our own food stories have gaps, we can turn towards social media and alternative cooking shows to learn something new.

Ioana: I love the way you highlight the educational benefits of social media food content and the way you emphasize the importance of digital archival especially when it comes to “saving” dishes or practices that are almost extinct. The web can be indeed seen as an expandable gastronomic library, although a very messy one. So one question for the future is how can we index food and food content in a meaningful manner? Can food be truly “indexed” in compelling manners or can it be solely experienced?

Danish chef Ramus Munk proposed a creative take on portraying food. In his gastronomic practice, he promotes what I call “painting mimicry”, depicting ingredients as comestible creative tools.

A gastronomic dish from The Alchemist restaurant, courtesy of The Alchemist Facebook page 

 

While coming back to the core of the question, I believe food is in many ways a display of imagination in itself, similarly to a painting or sculpture. It is just then we don’t place it in a museum, but rather in spaces that we have tagged as conventional or “non-artistic” per se. To my mind, this angle on food shall invite us to rethink our spaces as well as holistic playgrounds.

How can the media and popular culture support food and civic imagination?  What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? How to reckon with the history and heritage of the food we fuse?

Brie:  Right now, I think there is an upsurge of social media food content and because cooking shows and the desire to learn about food history or follow recipes is increasing in visibility, so too are the dark undercurrents of racial and gendered issues. Whereas the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) exists in the real world to protect the rights of food, hospitality, and agriculture workers in the United States, nothing like that exists to mitigate racial or gender problems in digital food-spaces. But, people are opening their eyes to inequity in online realms more and more. We see this with “mathematician and food antagonist” Joe Rosenthal’s Instagram handle who most recently is taking a swing at Bon Appetit’s chef star, Brad Leone, for spreading misinformation that could make his audience ill. Furthermore, this isn’t the first time Bon Appetit has come under fire; within the last couple of years, 14 former employees have accused the publication of a racist, sexist, and toxic work environment. 

Ioana: Following this note, how could we make the ethics of food more transparent, rather than the aesthetics? This is perhaps a challenge that our century already deals with in direct and sometimes over-pressing manners.

Brie:  Yes! That’s at the heart of what I’m getting at: making the ethics of food transparent. And while it’s interesting and helpful that social media, virtual, and digital spaces can continue to be used as teaching tools, with a closer examination we can also unveil the unequal power dynamics in the food industry, whether it’s “real life” or “online.” 

What has the pandemic taught us about food and framing the imagination? What examples and approaches need to be documented at this moment in time?

Brie:  I think that COVID sparked a lot of connections for people from online food-based social media communities. Arguably, many include a lot of women therefore such online communities are dubbed as feminist and are being analzued and writtin about more in higher education. I’m a member of a private Facebook group with more than 200 members dedicated to helping others “connect with others through baking”. It’s inclusive, too. It encourages failure and adaptation and acknowledges problems with availability or what some might have access to. On Instagram, there’s Christina Tosi’s group and hashtag “bakeclub” that’s been written about, too, and the group actually paused when Tosi was called out for being culturally insensitive during the summer of 2020 when the Black Lives Matter Movement took off and xcelerated. The pandemic leveled the ground, so to speak, making us confront inequity in the world. And that extends to food. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed Alexis Nikole aka “theblackforager” on Instagram. Her videos are short and sweet and pack an educational punch that doesn’t avoid the racist or colonial subjectivations of certain foods and native plants. 

Ioana: I believe on one hand it reignated intricate food rituals, it replaced “fast food” with “slow food”, it turned food into a playground. I feel citizens have become what I call “play-zens”, people taking time to contemplate and rebalance life, to have a ludic look on topics that previously felt over-ordinary. However, on the other hand, it brought more automation and technologization in the food industry, which is not necessarily ideal in the long term. Back in 2017, IDFA DocLab displayed a project called Eat | Tech | Kitchen, where the creators designed a chatbot to develop recipes of the future, based on the input of the spectators. Emerging tech-restaurants started to program AI mechanics to assemble food bowls. Although the novelty factor is high for all these experimentations, I personally advocate for the importance of preserving and prioritizing human-crafted food. 

How can we cook with civic imagination? What are the “recipes” that could guide us?

Ioana: I believe recipes could include not only comestible ingredients, but also expanded ingredients able to activate all of our senses. Music, visuals, the setting of a certain food are able to trigger more layers of civic imagination. Sometimes even an ordinary dish could become spectacular if placed in a creative context. I believe any recipe could potentially be a premise for civic imagination as long as the participants are open to expand on it creatively, socially, philosophically. 

Brie: I love that you’re helping me to consider other elements of a meal that “activate our senses”, such as dinner music and the place-settings. It also has me thinking about the ways we can better understand food and class issues based on how other’s access food, prepare it, and set the table. 

How do we want cooking practices to look like in the future?

Ioana: I believe cooking practices can be expanded ethically (by making sure we respect food sustainability and empower local producers), aesthetically (by combining cooking practices with artistic, technological practices) and spiritually (by taking the time to respect the rituals of cooking).

Brie:  And I think some social media handles, like the blackforager (Alexis Nikole), for example, get right to the root of this in how she uses her platform to educate about local, Appalachian plants, their history, and how to safely and ethically harvest.

Are there any similarities and/or differences between your projects? What are some additional points that you think should be explored in the future?

 

Ioana: At a first glance, we both focus on expanding food culture and we both dive into digital media as a way of archival (Brie) or creative stimulus (myself). While Brie is focussing on including marginal voices into food culture, which is highly needed from my perspective, being what I call an “ethical expansion”, I tend to advocate for including (when fitted) more artistic, technological, spiritual practices into food culture, and this is perhaps more of a “sensorial or aesthetic expansion”. Overall, I feel our approaches combined form a holistic approach towards expanding food culture in more accessible, but also more creative and innovative manners. There are numerous questions launched in our dialogue that, if taken further, could perhaps prototype new food rituals and new food-centered educational playgrounds. So, among the leading questions I will take with me as a post-dialogue “food for thought” are - what would a school of ethical and aesthetic food culture look like? How can we expand food practices creatively and qualitatively, without altering the core? How can we decode food as a means to express imagination? 

 Brie:  I think that Ioana articulates a conneciton between our research and ideas well. Food is sensory, and its creation (cooking) is an artistic process. The “chef” is valued and perceived as an artist and outside of what I’m looking at on YouTube and Instgram is a rich, digital world of documentaries and food-related series that are dedicated to carving out a “holistic approach towards expanding food culture in a more accessible, but creative manner.” 

 

 

References:

Alvarez, Steven. “Taco Literacy: Public Advocacy and Mexican Food in the U.S. Nuevo South.” Composition Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp. 151–66, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26402788.

 

Beardsley, Ashley M. “‘You Are a Bright Light in These Crazy Times”:  The Rhetorical Strategies of #BakeClub that Counter Pandemic Isolation and Systemic Racism. Popular Culture Studies Journal vol. 10, issue 1, 2022, pp. 219-236.

 

 

Fleitz, Elizabeth Jean. The Multimodal Kitchem:  Cookbooks as Women;s Rhetorical Practice. 2009. Bowling Green State University, dissertation. 

 

Harris, Margot, Palmer Haasch, and Rachel E. Greenspan. “A new podcast is exploring the reckoning that happened at Bon Appetit. Here’s how the publication ended up in how water, Insider, 9 Feb. 2021, https://www.insider.com/bon-apptit-ti....

Rae, A. (2020). Faq. Binging with Babish. https://www.bingingwithbabish.com/faqs. 

Alchemist, Manifesto (2018), https://www.dropbox.com/s/jp4c4xzkoyel6t4/Holistic%20Cuisine%20Manifest.pdf?dl=0 

Teamlab Borderless (2022), https://borderless.teamlab.art/ 

Eat | Tech| Kitchen (2017)https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/612ac86c-3a86-4f2f-bb72-a79f444898c6/eat-tech-kitchen 

Calombaris, George, RAW website (2021) https://www.raw.com.tw/?fbclid=IwAR1RL8Esuz4uG61XRNb4YK_doiXbGPXHwjc9PB-8NUHQFJBXsqQPODexBfs 

Brienna Fleming is a PhD candidate writing her prospectus and studying Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Before her PhD, she taught first-year writing and literature in eastern Oregon and Wyoming. She holds a BA in English-Literature with a minor in Women’s Studies from Penn State, and two Master’s of Arts (English-Literature and American Studies) from the University of Wyoming. Informed by feminist and queer theory, her research and writing focuses on foodways, social media, identity and communities, American literature, and the cowboy. 

Ioana Mischie is a Romanian-born transmedia artist (screenwriter/director) and transmedia futurist, multi-awarded for film, VR and innovative concepts. Fulbright Grantee Alumna of USC School of Cinematic Arts (collaborating with the Civic Imagination Lab / Mixed Reality Lab / JoVRnalism / Worldbuilding Lab), and Alumna of UNATC, advanced the transmedia storytelling field as part of her doctoral study thesis completed with Summa Cum Laude. Her cinematic projects as writer/director have traveled to more than 250 festivals worldwide (Palm Springs ISFF, Hamptons IFF, Thessaloniki IFF), were developed in top-notch international programs (Berlinale Talents – Script Station, Sundance Workshop – Capalbio, Cannes International Screenwriters Pavilion) and awarded by innovation-driven platforms (The Webby Awards, F8, Golden Drum, SXSW Hackathon, Stereopsia, D&AD). She has created groundbreaking franchises such as Tangible Utopias or Government of Children, empowering children to see themselves as leaders and to redesign their society. Her most recent immersive experience, Human Violins received the first European Meta award thanks to Women in Immersive Technologies and the Immersive Creators Catalyst program. TEDxBoldandBrilliant speaker, member of Women in Film and Television LA, she teaches wholeheartedly at UNATC and UBB as a PhD lecturer. Co-Founder of Storyscapes, leading Noe-Fi Studios (a neuro-VR start-up) and Omniversity (educational VR). Envisioning the world as a neo-creative playground, she deeply believes that storytellers are “the architects of the future” (Buckminster Fuller).

Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part One): Intercultural Food

The Civic Imagination Project team spent a lot of time during the pandemic thinking about food (and making food) from our own pods and considering the ways that communities get forged, identities get defined, around what we eat and what food we share with others. Out of those discussions has come a special issue of the cultural studies journal, Lateral, focused on “Feeding the Civic Imagination” still in process and scheduled to release in the months ahead. To celebrate and extend the rich mix of formal academic essays there, we invited some of the would-be contributors to participate in a series of dialogues at the intersection of their research. I am going to share these rich and thoughtful conversations over the next three installments. These conversations were overseen by Do Own “Donna” Kim, who was recently award a doctorate in communication from the University of Southern California and accepted a job at the University of Illinois - Chicago. Sangita Shresthova, my longtime research collaborator, has also taken the lead here. The rest of the editorial team consists of Essence Wilson, Isabel Delano, Khaliah Reed, Becky Pham, Javier Rivera, Steven Proudfoot, Amanda Lee, Molly Frizzell, Paulina Lanz

Elaine Almeida and Lisa Silvestri

SILVESTRI: Hi Elaine! I am excited to talk food, justice, and civic culture with you! Maybe we could start with a little “definition of terms.” I roll my eyes at my own suggestion because it sounds very academic of me to say and perhaps indicates that I'm in the process of reading seminar papers..! 

I guess it makes sense to start with what makes this conversation series unique: FOOD! For me, “food” is a medium of sorts. But I realize that it can also be artifact, ritual, and/or practice. How do you understand food?

ALMEIDA: 

First, I have to say as an avid lover of food, what an honor it is to be able to study and be with it in our scholarship! I’ve come to thoroughly enjoy studying and thinking through food for many reasons— like you said, food can be a site of ritual and practice, and what’s more, food elicits deep ties to memory and our psychic lives. Food invokes memory through its visceral employment of the sensorium, creating neural pathways not just related to taste, but to texture, smell, sight and sound of food. So there’s something to be said about food’s role in building our memories and imaginaries of the world.

But more so, I think through food particularly through the lens of Rachel Slocum’s food justice, where she understands that food is a benign but charged site for construction of race and ethnic relations. Food is a cultural contact zone where we have the opportunity to not just experience another culture through sight and sound, but literally process it through our body—the food stays with us, is, for a moment, us. It is a site where one can really undertake an embodied understanding of the ways a people create, imbibe and nourish themselves through the world around them. It, however, often a site of othering; not ritual or practice, but the literal devourment of our imagined ideas of how others can make us more whole, more full. Instead of using food to understand and imagine others, food, and particularly “ethnic” food in the United States serves as a place where people can imagine more about themselves as cosmopolitan, “adventurous” subjects without ever having to make true connection with the purveyors and creators of their food. This is what Slocum means by food being a benign but charged space. If everytime we taste a meal it elicits a memory of us devouring the other, how do we imagine ethical, people-centered relationships to food, particularly for marginalized groups in America who are visually underrepresented, but are readily represented in the takeaway menus and trendy cafes? 

And you know, in my project (jeez sorry to ramble!) I take this question to examine how Thai Americans are represented in food journalism in our contemporary era. Thai food is a popular takeaway option and “fusion” food in the United States, but Thai Americans are a generally small minority group in the United States and are not often represented across various media— including, as I soon found out, even in journalism about Thai food. Articles about Thai recipes and restaurants were centered on how Thai food might attract American readers and never centered Thai Americans. Mark Padoongpat, author of Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America, argues “Thai food acted primarily as a site for the construction of Thai Americans as an exotic racialized foriegn other through taste and other human senses besides sight.” And so again, and again, I come back to this idea of how can we imagine people-centered relationships to food that move from devouring to nourishing each other?

SILVESTRI: I like that- “from devouring to nourishing.” I also hear what you are saying about food being a “cultural contact zone” but also a potentially dangerous site for Othering. It’s that idea of a little knowledge has the potential to produce a lot of (wilful) ignorance. The work you describe reminds me a little of the comic, Nigel Ng and his podcast “Rice to Meet You” where among other things he problematizes (in a funny way) this kind of teflon cosmopolitanism you describe; Where a hunger for exotic/forieng/other is satiated through safe/controlled exposure but nothing actually *sticks* in a meaningful way.  

ALMEIDA: No, totally, you exactly understand this difference between devourment and nourishment, this radical ability to create using our relationships and food as a vehicle! 

SILVESTRI: I guess the food story I have for you is more about absence; the problem of not having food as a point of contact. If food is a useful point of entry (even if problematic), what about cultures with no shelf space in our pantry? How do they exist in our civic imagination? 

The case study I am working with involves a partnership between US Veterans and Afghan farmers. First, a little background: In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan’s export of raisins accounted for 60 percent of the world market. So for a time you might think, “Ah Afghanistan, yes I’ve had their dried fruit.” But after decades of war in that country (first with the Soviet Invasion then with the U.S.), they have been cut off from global trade. Instead rhetorical associations with terrorism dominate American ideas about Afghanistan. 

Case study research from 2004 includes an interview with a raisin trader named Mazar who said: “We don’t have any government and they don’t care about the raisin business. The custom and excise authorities are serious about their own benefits and are not serious about trade. They collect duty from us, and that’s all.” The farmer’s remarks speak to an inability to participate in and subsequent exclusion from the global community. To that I would add, without Afghanistan's identity represented through food commodities, it is much easier to ignore, forget, and Other the people of Afghanistan in the civic imaginary. 

ALMEIDA: You know, when we talk about civic imagination so many examples are visual and auditory, and I think what both of our stories show is that a robust imagination, one that can really help us articulate alternative paths forward, needs to encompass numerous senses and be a full bodied imagining. Right? Because our stories seem to have opposite problems that are leading to the same absence—Afghan people are represented in mass media but not in intimate cultural spaces such as food and spices, while Thai food and spices are present throughout the US, but Thai people are missing from the public eye. With both, we have an unfinished idea of who either people group authentically are. To imagine ethical, caring relationships for public good, we have to imagine the robustness of life in unmediated ways. Food allows us to physically come in contact with items and artifacts meaningful to different ways of life. And isn’t the crux of this that part of the work of the civic imagination is to debate and work through narratives, hopes and fears, but again, both of our projects are centered on people groups who are both widely understood through only one narrative and lens.

For Thai Americans, the easy “so what” is representation, right? That people should know that Thai Americans are a robust ethnic group in the United States.  But more than that, how can imagining Thai Americans and Thai people help us to understand the history and implications of US-Thai relationships—where Thai subjects/objects are always sites for others pleasure (be it the Thai tourism industry, sex industry or even again, Thai food,)— and actively create equitable, ethical relationships? And I wonder for you, what does access to Afghan food products help us to reach or reimagine? (Which wow, not a large question at all!) 

SILVESTRI: Ha! That’s great- the bigger the questions, the better the conversation! I like what you said “food allows us to physically come in contact with items and artifacts meaningful to different ways of life.” That’s the heart of it. And the sensory nature of food- you are right- is paramount to its role in imagination. I am sure we all have a taste, smell, or texture that transports us in time and space, even back to our own childhood. But of course that transportation or I should say imagination hinges on familiarity. When the food or spice is unfamiliar- foreign- Other- it is more difficult to imagine. 

The rest of the story about Afghanistan picks back up during the U.S. war in that country when a soldier who knew just a little Dari (the local language) worked with an Afghan saffron farmer to get his spice to market. The farmer’s request implied an interest in transporting his spice locally, but three Army Veterans had bigger ideas. Now, Rumi Spice as it is called, sources crocus flowers from local Afghan farms and employs hundreds of women in the cultural tradition of hand-harvesting the flowers’ delicate stigmas (the source of saffron). It’s so cool. And now- from the one farmer’s request–Rumi Spice sells Afghan saffron (and wild black cumin too) in American stores like Whole Foods and those Blue Apron boxes that people become obsessed with during the pandemic! How cool is that? I think the thing that blew me away when I learned this story is not only the imagination, but also the courage and faith it took to do something like this. It’s one thing to imagine but it is another to execute. Imagination, though, has to come first.

ALMEIDA: Yes! And I think what food helps us to add to our civic imagination is methods of imagining and transforming. A lot of the time, our imagination can be pretty ocularcentric—we need to “visualize” or “picture” the things we want. I fall into this trap a lot. And because we’ve started with “visualizing” and “picturing” solutions, we operate in a way to match: we fight for representation, to be seen, we fight for exposure, for visibility. And this is such a limited way to bring about justice. To be clear it is an important way, but not the only way. Because then we get caught upkeeping the artifact of the image we’ve created, and not on the processes of life. Joan Tronto, the care ethicist, reminds us that care is not simply a thing or a collection of things to uphold, but a continual collaborative practice we cultivate in ourselves and others to strengthen democracy. 

And to circle back to my opening little thought, what food brings to care, imagination, justice is those methods of practice. If we’ll all indulge my craziness for a second, here’s a recipe for Khao mok gai, a Thai saffron chicken dish: https://hot-thai-kitchen.com/kao-mok-gai/ 

One, super delicious, but two, what do we see happening in this recipe? We understand that there are numerous pieces happening together, but at slightly different times, that will come together in the end to make the dish. The chicken has to marinate for at least two hours, and that is only after you’ve used a mortar and pestle to make the marinade. Meanwhile, for the dipping sauce, you just have to bring the ingredients together and blend, easy-peesy. The rice has to be sauteed on a high heat and then fluff over a low heat. It has to go through the different heats and from the wok to the pot to get to the fluffy tasty place it needs to be. And right, this isn’t the whole recipe, but what we see is that to come together to make this dish, one that brings comfort and nourishment, numerous rates and style of change need to take place all dependent on not only the ingredients, but how each product simmers, or marinates or cooks into our new dish. 

And notably, while I use this food example, I want to be super mindful about multicultural examples that have used food—the “melting pot” or the “stew” or “salad bar” of America. While those food examples were useful for promoting a specific style of colorblind multiculturalism in the US, that’s not what I am interested in. This Thai saffron chicken dish is coming out yellow; the  rice, chicken and spices are all being transformed before us, not just made visible next to each other. 

And cooking takes time. It is something we have to do more or less everyday to sustain our bodies, unless someone else does it for us, and then their labor has helped alleviate mine. There are questions of sourcing and presentation and all of these things are directly applicable to how social change takes place on micro and macro scales. We always talk about how “sweet” things can be, but how can we imagine how savory and spicy justice will be on our tongues? For me, this is the exciting potential of food and why our communication and stories about food are not just trivial fluff pieces, but really cue us in on processes of change.

SILVESTRI: You are so fun to talk to. I love how you engage metaphors to guide your thinking (and I’m thankful for the recipe!). I had the same thought about the problems associated with “melting pot” multiculturalism and a concern that my own talking about the civic imaginary slipped into the white imaginary as I spoke about the importance of exposure (“Exposure to whom?” my better angels asked). And as dissatisfied as I am with mere exposure, I wonder if we could briefly celebrate exposure as a step on the justice continuum. I am thinking of the dreaded “ethnic aisle” in every American supermarket. 

As you know, most of my scholarship is about war in some capacity. And war, like it or not, brings a lot of societal change. The typical focus is on how war advances communication technologies, but it’s also worth recognizing what war has done to our supermarkets. When US troops returned from Vietnam, for example, they had a hankering for South Vietnamese food. American supermarkets expanded their “specialty aisles,” which consisted mostly of Italian food products at the time (thanks to WWII), to include other items like rice vermicelli or glass noodles. Now our supermarket “ethnic” aisles consist of a nonsensical smattering of other “foreign” food products. Meanwhile Italian products have made their way out of the “ethnic aisle.” Olive oil can now be found with other cooking oils.. 

So I guess what I am thinking about as we apply cooking metaphors is to what extent is exposure a flash in the pan form of justice that would do well to stew for a while? I liked your line about care being a “continual collaborative practice” because it made me think about adaptation. My favorite part of cooking is the artfulness of adaptation. I am terrible about following recipes. I never have all the ingredients. I am a vegetarian. I like spicy things. I add. I eliminate. I taste. I adapt.  And as I do, the food becomes an expression of who I am. So when I go to the “ethnic aisle” to buy plantain chips I am not looking for something exotic. I am looking for  “my chips.” And when they slide across the checkout counter and the cashier says “huh, I’ve never seen these before '' and I say “they’re good with hummus,” I feel like something important is happening. I am tapping into the civic imagination. In that moment, the cashier and I glimpse ourselves as “part of a larger democratic culture.”

Almeida: Your art of adaptation that in the process brings others with you—wow! I love that so much. We’ve talked about so much in this piece— a plethora of big ideas that intersect our lives and our work—and again and again, what I take away from you is this stubborn optimism that engaging the civic imagination with others through food, through stories, that this has the potential to disrupt in ways many take for granted. You make me want to return to my work with new senses!

Lisa Silvestri is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. Her writing showcases creative ways people exert agency in even the most stringent circumstances. One of her areas of focus is the way social media links communication to connection, which helps produce and sustain individual and collective identities. Her book Friended at the Front won the 2016 James W. Carey Media Research Award for pioneering cultural approaches to the study of social media. In 2017 she received a major grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her community-based initiative, Telling War, which helped surface and inspire Veteran voices through a variety of story forms. She has written, lectured for, and had her research featured in several popular outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The South by Southwest Festival, and The 92nd Street Y.

 

Elaine Almeida is a Mass Communication doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with minors in Gender and Women’s Studies and Transdisciplinary Visual Cultures. She is a qualitative scholar interested in how minoritarian storytellers utilize care to transform digital spaces. Previously she attended the University of Texas at Austin for both a B.S. and M.A. in Advertising. She further explores her interests through her role as a freelance digital artist.

The Trans* Fantasy in Harry Langdon’s The Chaser

In the fall, I taught a seminar on American film Comedy with a particular focus on comic performance and slapstick. I included a range of lesser known figures but I also wanted to represent the big Four silent comedians — Keaton Lloyd, Chaplin, and Langdon. Langdon is often an afterthought these day since modern audiences often find it difficult to appreciate his slow-reaction style alongside the fast rough and tumble of his contemporaries. I ended up selecting The Chaser, one of the films where Langdon directed himself, pushing past the slander that Frank Capra fostered in The Name Above the Title that Langdon lost his way once he rejected Capra’s shaping role. This turned out to be one of the more popular films from the class with students intrigued by its difference from other silent comedy and especially its bold play with gender identity, which has to be seen to be believed. One MA student, Sabrina Sonner wrote an essay on the film as a Trans fantasy which suggests why Langdon may be especially meaningful to the generation coming of age right now.

The Trans* Fantasy in Harry Langdon’s The Chaser

by Sabrina Sonner

Introduction

Watching Harry Langdon in The Chaser, I am transfixed by his hat. Throughout the film, he appears as a philanderer in a night club, a guilty husband in court, a wife in the kitchen, a illicit fugitive, a uniformed captain, and a ghost-like apparition. He falls off a cliff in a runaway vehicle, lays eggs, kisses the iceman, and is nearly driven to suicide. And, throughout it all, the hat remains. 

This consistent signifier of his identity stays with him throughout the film, which takes the basic premise of The Husband (played by Harry Langdon) accused of infidelity and court ordered to “take his wife’s place in the kitchen, or serve six months in jail.”[1] He dons a dress and performs his wife’s role, while The Wife (played by Gladys McConnell) takes on her husband’s role. Left at home, Langdon must deal with unwanted advances from the iceman and bill collector. As a result, he tries and fails to kill himself, writing a note that states he is leaving because “no woman knows what it is to go without pants.”[2] At the golf club with his hyper-masculine friend, he rediscovers a masculine uniform, and through a series of mishaps returns home covered in white flour. Though his mother-in-law flees, his wife returns to his arms, and the same intertitle that opened the film closes it, proclaiming “In the beginning, God created man in his own image and likeness. A little later on, he created woman.”[3]

While it may be one of Langdon’s less discussed films, I believe The Chaser opens up unique spaces surrounding gender and identity through interweaving Langdon’s innocent star persona with the potential of comedy to disrupt societal expectations. Within the history of clowns and silent comedians, there exists a power to break away from normative societal values.[4] We see this idea in Langdon’s disruption of gender in the film, as his comedic identity remains consistent while his gender presentation wildly fluctuates. Additionally, the slapstick nature of the film opens up ideas around the body and what it is allowed to do. Though made to dress a certain way, Langdon is still able to freely use his body in the world in a way enviable to a trans* body. In the way Langdon is clothed and in his undamageable slapstick body, a trans* fantasy emerges. What if I could wear a dress and be seen as a woman? Or wear a suit and be seen as a man? The film highlights the absurdity of the world responding to a single gendered indicator so strongly, but also opens up a freeing daydream that asks, “What would happen if we could be seen this way?” Langdon’s body never bruises, breaks, or tears – it behaves how he wants it to. With mine, I consider thousands of dollars of surgery to get it to behave as I wish. In this conflux of gender non-conformity, traditionally gendered clothing, Langdon’s consistent star persona, and a freely controlled slapstick body, The Chaser creates a fantastical trans* space. 

In my journey through discovering my identity, I have understood it as the way one sees oneself internally, the way this is reflected to the world externally, and most importantly the way one searches to find a happy combination of the two. To that extent, this essay is structured in those three parts, pulling on theorists such as Jack Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, Louise Peacock, James Agee, and Muriel Andrin to connect ideas between comedy and queerness. 

 

Langdon’s Consistent Star Persona and the Queerness of Childhood

Throughout The Chaser, Langdon is depicted with an unwavering consistency through his identifiable comedic persona, including his blank face, childlike innocence, and, of course, that hat. Regardless of his attire in the film, the way in which he comedically responds to situations and the recognizability of his star persona shines through. This sense of his baby-faced naivete is detailed by James Agee is his essay on silent film comedy: 

“Like Chaplin, Langdon wore a coat which buttoned on his wishbone and swung out wide below, but the effect was very different: he seemed like an outsized baby who had begun to outgrow his clothes. The crown of his hat was rounded and the brim was turned up all around, like a little boy’s hat, and he looked as if he wore diapers under his pants. His walk was that of a child which has just gotten sure on its feet, and his body and hands fitted that age. His face was kept pale to show off, with the simplicity of a nursery-school drawing, the bright, ignorant, gentle eyes and the little twirling mouth…. He was a virtuoso of hesitations and of delicately indecisive motions, and he was particularly fine in a high wind, rounding a corner with a kind of skittering toddle, both hands nursing his hatbrim.”[5]

 

In The Chaser, we see this childlikeness in the consistency of his reactions, where he responds with a great deal of perplexity to the absurdity of the situations that he finds himself in, especially gendered rituals. Throughout the film, he seems unable to fully grasp any gendered roles assigned to him, both feminine and masculine. For instance, the charge he faces during the film is that of being an unfaithful or unruly husband. However, looking at the film’s depiction of this behavior, Langdon hardly seems the type. He goes to this club to eat peanuts and watch. Though slightly voyeuristic, this depiction is relatively tame in comparison to the way a philandering womanizer could appear. When he finishes in the club, he then dons a masculine uniform, which fails him in his goals of appearing the idealized husband. He fairs no better when he performs the wife’s role. In his dress, he seems uncomprehending of feminine ideas, such as the cooking behaviors he is asked to take on as well as understanding of reproduction, albeit that of chickens and eggs. When he returns to his masculine attire, he counters the hyper-masculinity of his friend while golfing. Within these scenarios, which are rife with gendered expectations, Langdon always fails to measure up, or even understand exactly what he’s being measured up to. 

Langdon’s child-like lack of understanding of gendered norms creates a parallel with Jack Halberstam’s writings on the queerness of childhood. When writing of childhood and its depictions in cinema, Halberstam writes: 

“There is nothing natural in the end about gender as it emerges from childhood; the hetero scripts that are forced on children have nothing to do with nature and everything to do with violent enforcements of hetero-reproductive domesticity. These enforcements, even when they can accommodate some degree of bodily difference, direct children toward regular understandings of the body in time and space. But the weird set of experiences that we call childhood stands outside adult logics of time and space. The time of the child, then, like the time of the queer, is always already over and still to come.[“6]

 

Though Langdon is not a literal child, his childlike nature evokes this queerness. He acts as a receptacle that the world places meaning on. As he attempts to sort through it, he appears as if he’s a child completely unaware of what is expected of him and encountering gendered expectations for the first time. In both his masculinized uniform and feminized wife’s attire, he seems out of place, like a child playing dress-up. Langdon’s character operates in a different logic from the rest of the world and, due to his specific star persona, encapsulates this childlike logic and queer aspect of the time of childhood. 

To illustrate the innocence and consistency of Langdon’s comedic persona in a specific example, throughout The Chaser, Langdon has this consistent deadpan reaction, where he faces the camera and blinks a couple times, uncomprehending the absurdity of the comedic bit that just happened. We see this throughout the film as a constant presence, whether he is reacting to a woman falling into his arms when he wears his masculine uniform, the iceman kissing him when he dons a dress, or when he lays an egg. Alongside his ever-constant hat is a solidified comedic identity that refuses to adapt to ever-changing gendered expectations. In Langdon’s confusion regarding the gendered expectations, and the consistency of his identity beneath it all, there is space within the film to question alongside Langdon exactly how valuable these societal expectations are. 

Additionally, I would argue that there’s a queerness to Langdon’s body as a slapstick body. His star persona adheres to ideas that Muriel Andrin considers writing of an unbreakable slapstick form:

“These are “bodies without organs,” immune to fragmentation or, when they do suffer fragmentation, insensitive to trauma. They remain whole no matter what the threat, displaying not a permanent moral integrity like melodramatic characters, but a lasting physical integrity… The slapstick world is a perfect place for instant healing.”[7]

 

There are many ways in this world that the trans* body can find itself under threat or in need of healing, whether it is due to growing rates of violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people,[8] or trans* bodies themselves being voluntarily surgically modified to better fit one’s gender expression. The idea of the resilient slapstick body appears in The Chaser in a sequence near the end of the film, where Langdon hides in the trunk of a car that topples off a cliff and crashes through multiple billboards into his kitchen without troubling Langdon one bit. In a more serious and subtle way, the scene in which he fails to kill himself in several ways can be read as the trans*, slapstick body resisting its own demise and providing a protection that the individual needs despite their momentary wants. 

Altogether, the confused, youthful quality of Langdon’s star persona connects his performance to a queer period of childhood, and the slapstick nature of this comedic body opens spaces for a specifically trans* imagination of the carefree, freedom of physical expression. The internal reflection of identity within Langdon’s star role in this film establishes a consistency and queerness to his self that clashes with the way society views him throughout the film. 

 

Society, Gender, and The Clown Outside It All

While Langdon’s identity remains constant in the visibility of his comedic star persona to the audience, society takes gendered cues from his clothing and behavior and focuses on them to an absurd degree. Additionally, his role as a clown in the film places Langdon as a figure outside of societal boundaries to whom failure is central.  Louise Peacock writes of the clown as “an outsider and a truthteller” who can comment on the societies in which they live.[9] Peacock additionally writes of the way failure is a part of clowning: 

“Failure or ‘incompetence’ is a staple ingredient of clown performance… Clowns demonstrate their inability to complete whatever exploit they have begun. In doing so they speak to the inner vulnerability of the audience whose members are often bound by societal conventions which value success over failure.”[10]

The failures of Langdon within the film largely relate to his inability to adhere to gendered roles, such as his initial failings at masculinity that bring about the film’s inciting incident and his subsequent failures to perform his wife’s duties in the kitchen. In doing so, he highlights the constructed nature of the assignment of these duties based on gender. He places himself outside of the gendered expectations of society in a literal way in the opening scene, where he appears a dance club just to watch the activities. And in the comedic bits of the film, his inability to perform either masculinity or femininity allows the audience to consider the facades of those structures. In watching him actively try to learn and fail at these activities he’s been given based on his gender assignment, there is a trans* understanding of the failure to perform at the roles of the gender one is assigned at birth, as well as the complexity of learning the rituals of one’s own gender. 

The failings of the clown echo Jack Halberstam’s considerations of failure and queerness, solidifying Langdon’s placement in the film as a queer, comedic outsider. In Halberstam’s writings on queerness and failure, Halberstam writes: 

“The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of successes and failure with which we currently live. Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend on “trying and trying again.”[11]

 

In applying Halberstam’s ideas around failure to the film, we can find joyous resistance in the way that Langdon fails at the tasks placed before him in the film. His placid reactions to his failures allow us to safely fantasize about the possibilities that open up before us if we too embrace this logic of failure. 

            Further considering the way the world interacts with Langdon by way of his encounters with the bill collector and iceman, we can apply ideas surrounding the technologies of gender from Teresa de Lauretis to the film. Within her essay “The Technology of Gender,” de Lauretis establishes gender as a construction that is inseparably connects gender, work, class, and race, writing, “social representation of gender affects its subjective construction and that, vice versa, the subjective representation of gender – or self-representation – affects its social construction.”[12] Given the complexity with which de Lauretis breaks down the social construction of gender, there is an absurdity to the simplicity to the way gender operates within the film when it comes to passing as a gender within the film. As soon as Langdon changes his clothes, the outside world chooses to see him as a woman. By changing one factor of his appearance, Langdon completely alters the way the world views his gender. In contrast, however, we still see Langdon as himself due to his aforementioned star persona, challenging the notion that gender operates this discretely. While the behavior of the men towards Langdon is largely disrespectful, leering at and nonconsensually kissing him, there is also a small space within these interactions to read an absurd form of respect. They see someone placing a feminine indicator on themself, and despite the obviously visible Harry Langdon beneath it, they choose to treat the individual as the presentation he puts forth into the world. Returning to de Lauretis’ theories, the film itself also operates as a technology that can expand and challenge notions of gender and, through this representation, hope to affect its societal construction. 

            The simplicity of the direct correlation between Langdon’s changing outfits and the way the world genders him opens up a fantasy that, while absurd, evokes a trans* desire to live within a world that could operate in the way that the world of The Chaser does. In Scott Balzerack’s writing on queered masculinity in Hollywood comedians, he brings up the way that “as a gendered subject, the male comedian rearranges (or, at times, rejects) heteronormative protocols.”[13]Viewing Langdon as a gendered subject within the film, he distorts and evades masculinity and femininity as much as he can, playing within a space that allows him to transform in an almost enviable way. 

 

Unifying Gendered Identity Through a Familiar Spectator

Between the tensions of Langdon’s constant identity to the audience and his shifting gender presentation to the world, one might wonder if the film offers a point of resolution of these external and internal identities. By its closing shot, the film leaves us with an image of Langdon remaining in his dress and hat and reuniting with his wife, who has returned to her more traditionally feminine clothes. Looking back at the role played by Gladys McConnell as The Wife in the film provides the answers and resolution we seek. 

At the start of the film, McConnell is seen talking nonstop over the phone at her silent husband, and it is her desire to divorce him that brings about the gender-swapping court order. While nothing in this order explicitly mentions her, in the following scenes we see her partially switch roles with her husband – she wears a blazer and tie with a skirt as an incomplete transference into his role. In this outfit, there are suggestions at her failures at femininity when she finds her husband’s suicide note and, believing him dead, sobs until her make-up runs to a heightened extent. While Langdon’s arc throughout the film depicts him failing at femininity in a skirt, McConnell fails at the same ideas of gender while dressed oppositely. In addition, despite the change in roles, she still sees him as her husband, referring to him as such with her friends later in the film. This contrasts with the starkly shifted view of Langdon’s gender by the iceman and bill collector. The film gives her the power to see his identity through the façade of his clothing. When Langdon returns to the house covered in flour, his mother-in-law runs out in fear of a ghost while McConnell, after a temporary fright, recognizes and embraces her husband. 

Within this ending moment, some of the more nuanced ideas of gender within the film come together. After having both the husband and wife change their gendered attires, reuniting them when the wife has changed back but the husband remains the same gives a sense of ambiguity around the return to gendered roles within the film. While there is a normative reading of this ending that reunites the heterosexual couple with each person in their place, the actual execution of it has two femininely clothed individuals reuniting. With McConnell recognizing her husband beneath it all, there is an acknowledgement of his identity separate from his presentation. In the space with his wife, Langdon can be seen for who he is, regardless of how he presents. The film closes on a final shot of Langdon with his usual puzzled reaction to his wife returning to him, albeit with a couple of smiles tossed in. Coupled with the closing title reminding us of God creating man in his image and creating woman later on, there is a hint at the queer, homosocial world predating woman, as well as a challenge to the audience in if these binary viewpoints still hold up after watching a film that so comedically unpacks the artificiality of their construction. 

 

Conclusion

By applying a trans* perspective to The Chaser, we can see the way that the film negotiates ideas gender, considering where it is performative, intrinsic, and a part of one’s identity. While there are complex structures around gender in society, there is something delightfully freeing about the space created by the film. In the comedic failures and childlike incomprehension of Langdon, there emerges a queerness in the film that is only heightened by its preoccupation with gender. There isn’t one specific trans* identity explored within the film, but a variety of resonances that makes an umbrella term more appropriate than a specific notion. For instance, in viewing a fantasy of wearing a dress and being seen as a woman, there’s a trans-feminine fantasy. In the idea that he remains a man beneath his clothing regardless of how everyone views him, we see the opposite in the way of a trans-masculine fantasy. And in his positioning throughout the film that remains as neither successfully the uniformed studly husband nor the submissive wife, but finding peace in his final image of a ghost-like version of himself, there’s a non-binary desire of finding a space separate from any of these rituals. Altogether, the film provides evokes a sense of trans* desire through the absurdity with which its gendered rituals exist, the connection between queerness and comedic failure, and the queerness that Langdon’s childlike persona. 

 

 

 Sabrina Sonner is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California’s Cinema and Media Studies Masters program. Their work focuses on queer studies, interactive media, and media that supports live communal forms of play. They have previously been featured at USC’s First Forum conference in 2021, where they examined late stage capitalism through a playfully destructive reimagining of the board game Monopoly. Outside of academia, Sabrina works professionally in new play development for theatre. 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Agee, James. “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Life, 1949. https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/11/17/comedys-greatest-era-james-agee/

Andrin, Muriel. “Back to the ‘Slap’: Slapstick’s Hyperbolic Gesture and The Rhetoric of Violence,” Slapstick Comedy (AFI Film Readers). Routledge, 2009.

Balzerack, Scott. “Someone Like Me for a Member.” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013.

The Chaser. Harry Langdon. Harry Langdon Corporation. First National Pictures. 1928. 

De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. “The Technology of Gender.” Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1-30. 

“Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2021.” Human Rights Campaign. 2021. https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2021

Halberstam, Jack. “Becoming Trans*.” Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland: University of California Press, 45-62. 2017.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press Books. 2011. 

Peacock, Louise, “Clowns and Clown Play,” in Peta Tait and Katie Lavers (eds.), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2016. 

 

 

 

[1] The Chaser. Harry Langdon. Harry Langdon Corporation. First National Pictures. 1928.

[2] The Chaser

[3] The Chaser

[4] Peacock, Louise, “Clowns and Clown Play,” in Peta Tait and Katie Lavers (eds.), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2016. 90.

[5] Agee, James. “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Life, 1949.

[6] Halberstam, Jack. “Becoming Trans*.” Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland: University of California Press, 61. 2017.

[7] Andrin, Muriel. “Back to the ‘Slap’: Slapstick’s Hyperbolic Gesture and The Rhetoric of Violence,” Slapstick Comedy (AFI Film Readers). Routledge, 2009. 232

[8] “Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2021.” Human Rights Campaign. 2021. https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-v...

[9] Peacock, 88.

[10] Peacock, 86.

[11] Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press Books. 2011. 2-3.

[12] De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. “The Technology of Gender.” Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 8-9. 

[13] Balzerack, Scott. “Someone Like Me for a Member.” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013. 4

Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Hyo Jen Lee (South Korea) and Kirsten Pike (Qatar) (Part Two)

illustrator/SF writer Park Moon Young.

Response to Kirsten Pike's response

(by Hyo Jin Kim)

Dear Kirsten and everyone,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response.

You raised several interesting issues: Korean feminist SF (what the government's scientific discourse is in terms of reaching the public, especially women and girls; how Korean feminist SF expresses Korean sentiment and experiences; what common themes/characteristics of Korean feminist SF are; similarities vs. differences of Korean feminist SF and Western SF; male participants in feminist book clubs), Doctor Who fandom and comparisons with the Scully effect, and the response for the 13th Doctor, Jodie Whittaker.

First, I want to start with some good news and changes in terms of the science culture in South Korea. Since my dissertation, the Korean government and science communicators and experts have reached out to the public for science culture. ‘The Science & Culture Consultative Group’ was established last month, April 2022. This group will work mainly on several missions, such as spreading scientific and cultural activities, designing scientific projects, installing collaborative platforms for developing scientific culture, providing research/suggestions for scientific culture and its policies, filming and producing scientific images and broadcastings, holding academic conferences and seminars, and completing other voluntary scientific and cultural activities. As this group supports and encourages voluntary scientific and cultural activities, it may include some SF fandom activities. I am excited about the group and looking forward to their actions. This group will be the bridge between the public (hopefully include SF fans) and the government in terms of science culture. The government’s efforts in science culture have been accomplished through KOFAC and WISET. The Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity (KOFAC) leads science culture and develops policies as a quasi-governmental and non-profit organization under the Ministry of Science and ICT. In addition, the Korea Foundation for Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology (WISET) is a public institution funded by the government to encourage girls and women in the STEAM (A stands for Art) fields. According to WISET, the gender gap in natural science and engineering has decreased by 1.0% and 10.2%.

Korean SF and especially Korean feminist SF may step ahead of the government's science discourse. Korean feminist SF encourages readers to experience the future and even the current status quo, such as sexist oppression, discrimination, climate change and facing and living with non-human species, including aliens, AI, etc. Korean feminist SF has become more popular with the public since the 2010s. Statistics from the online bookstore ‘Aladin’ show the growth of female readers in their 20s to 40s, as I mentioned in my opening statement. With the reboot of feminism, new young female SF writers such as Cho-Yeop Kim and Se-Rang Chung and their work have become popular with the public. Cho-Yeop Kim won the 43rd Korea Artist Prize with her If We Cannot Move at the Speed of Light (Hubble, 2019) and the 11th Young Writer's Award with her following works. Se-Rang Chung's work School Nurse Ahn Eunyoung (Minumsa, 2015) aired on Netflix's original series in 2020. Media industries also showed interest and started making cinematic dramas such as 'SF8', eight directors with eight original Korean SFs in AI, AR, robot, game, fantasy, horror, supernatural, etc. Now Korean readers and audiences have more chances to meet Korean SF through books and media. The entrance barrier of SF has become lower and easier than before for the public.

As I mentioned in the opening statement, book club participants strongly tied with Korean feminist SF compared to Western SF. One reason might be the Korean storytelling. Participants and the public readers read Korean names, places, and even world views in Korean. They are used to reading characters' Western words and Western world views, making them feel distant from the genre. However, young SF Korean writers' works depict Korean characters (even many Korean female characters, single, married, young, and old) with Korean names, places, and cultures, allowing readers to feel comfortable with Korean SF. Korean feminist SF is mainly concerned with society's various issues and presents many diverse voices of Korean culture. For example, South Korea's constitutional court ordered the law banning abortion must be revised by the end of 2020. It's been 66 years since abortion became illegal. At the end of 2020, several SF writers joined the #abolition of abortion campaign by writing and sharing short SF stories. Korean SF writers openly associate their work with social issues. Korean feminist SF reflects current social issues and lets readers consider what-if situations. Therefore, Korean feminist SF book club participants engage strongly with Korean feminist SF.

Kirsten asked about Korean feminist SF's common themes or characteristics, and I'm working on analyzing and researching as same theme of a book project this year. Fandom research and the sub-genre of feminist SF are rare and getting to start in South Korea. So far, I've seen in Korean feminist SF themes of disability, gender issues, various types of violence toward women and others, stereotypes of women and others, prejudice against women and others, posthuman, patriarchy etc. Analyzing common themes and characteristics of Korean feminist SF is in progress. As a Korean feminist SF reader, I’ve got the impression that every single voice seems to matter to Korean SF writers. Korean feminist SF and Western feminist SF have in common that feminist issues meet the SF genre. Feminist SF writers are actively involved with social issues and let readers find solutions through their imaginations. The difference between Korean feminist SF and Western SF is how feminist issues reflect Korean society. As famous Western feminist SF books have been translated into Korean, readers feel Western feminist SF to be learned rather than empathetic. Every culture deals with different feministic issues. This is why Korean readers get more comfortable and engage tightly with Korean feminist SF. Kirsten wondered if there were male participants in the feminist SF book club. There were no male participants in the "Meet without meeting; 500 days' journey of reading feminist sf" club, but there were some male participants in other feminist SF book clubs I participated. Those male participants had entirely different attitudes toward feministic issues. They joined the book club because they wanted to learn more and understand feministic issues through the book and discussion.

Kirsten asked the Doctor Who fandom about the Scully effect, however, I could not find any academic research in South Korea. SF fandom studies in South Korea are few. In the part of my dissertation, some Whovians learn and understand complicated physics terms through Doctor Who. In my dissertation, I suggested SF fandom as a part of science communication. Scully effect on The X-File seems to follow a similar path, approaching SF fandom as the part of science communication in popular culture. Therefore, finding Scully effect of The X-Files or any other SF in South Korea will be fascinating and could be a good research project for WISET. I was able to find a news article about the fandom of The X-Files. How I remembered The X-Files is unique and different from these days’ SF fandom because of the dubbed version. Kirsten mentioned watching the dubbed version of The X-Files, and there was a massive fanbase surrounding dubbing actors in the '90s PC era in South Korea. There were several fan communities for the dubbing actors and main characters, Mulder and Scully. Still, many fans remember Mulder and Scully as the dubbed version of the voices. One news article shows that The X-Files returned in 2016, and the dubbing actors as Mulder and Scully got the information from the fans and celebrated together. The dubbing actors were as famous and vital as the original actors of Korean The X-Files’ fans. In the '90s in South Korea, I and Korean people were familiar with dubbed versions of television programs such asMacGyver, The X-Files, and other foreign films and television programs. The dubbed actors were top-rated as well. I remember MacGyver's Korean dubbing actor's voice. I was shocked when I heard the actual voice of MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson). It didn't sound right to me. I am sure this kind of experience is common for people who grew up in the '90s. The popularity and fandom of dubbed versions of films and television programs may differ. Focusing on the differences may present how international fans deal with original characters' voices vs. dubbing actors' voices in a different context. At the same time, the '90s PC era is significant to SF fandom studies in South Korea. That period began with SF fandom, translating Western SFs, and creating Korean SFs. Some current famous SF writers/critics have been actively involved with the '90s PC era since. Several Korean SF scholars consider the '90s PC era a significant time for Korean SF fandom, and research is in progress.

As Kirsten asked about the response of the 13th Doctor, the Jodie Whittaker of Korean Whovians, I would say this might be another good start for the future Doctor Who fandom studies. I was pretty excited about Jodie Whittaker being the 13th Doctor because The Doctor's gender has never been revealed on the show. Though I had to dig deeper for the research, glancing over several Doctor Who online fan communities' comments seem negative responses. As some fans welcomed the female Doctor, they were disappointed with her performance and storytelling. I don't think this is about Jodie Whittaker's performance but fans' frustrations with accepting the female Doctor. The program has run for more than 60 years. Old and even new Whovians are already too familiar with male Doctors. It might take some time to adjust to new perspectives, such as gender or race issues, on the Doctor.

It was an excellent opportunity to learn about Qatar girls’ Disney princess fandom and discuss dubbed versions of films and television programs. It’s been fun to be part of this Global fandom Jamboree Conversation. Always exciting to meet a friendly but inspiring colleague. Thanks again to Kirsten for the thoughtful feedbacks, and hope everyone also enjoyed our conversations.

Part 2: Second Response to Hyo Jin Kim

(by Kirsten Pike)

 

Thanks so much for your thoughtful reflections, HJ! You’ve raised a lot of excellent points and questions for me to think about. I offer below a few initial thoughts.

 

With regard to Arab girls creating their own princess-themed media and cultural productions … I, too, was intrigued by this discovery.  It immediately brought to mind Henry Jenkins’s pioneering research on female fans of Star Trek, who—in writing new stories about beloved characters—remade popular texts “in their own image, forcing them to respond to their needs and to gratify their desires.”[1] Broadly speaking, the participants in my study tended to create princess-themed narratives that opened up possibilities of greater freedom and independence for girls. And their creations spanned a variety of forms, including songs, videos, games, short stories, photos, and theatrical plays. In a story written as part of a fourth-grade school project, for instance, one participant reimagined Belle from Beauty and the Beast (1991) as a beast, thereby defying customary ideas about how a Disney princess should look and act. Another participant wrote, produced, and starred in a princess-themed play at her high school, which she described as “an Arab version of Cinderella.” However, unlike Disney’s Cinderella (1950), her story challenged gendered conventions in that the heroine—despite being pursued by a prince—opted not to marry so that she could live a more independent existence.[2]

 

While it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise combination of factors that fostered the girls’ creative (and in some cases, feminist) sensibilities, it’s clear that some participants were encouraged to explore their gendered interests in school-related assignments and activities prior to college. And given that all the girls I interviewed were former students at Northwestern University in Qatar—an American university with staff, faculty, and students from around the world—I think it’s safe to say that they were already interested in and receptive to diverse viewpoints, with childhood influences also surely coming from their family and friends as well as media and other educational/cultural institutions. Indeed, many of the girls I interviewed cited Sheikha Moza, the chairperson of Qatar Foundation (and mother of the current Emir), as a major role model, especially given that her educational initiatives helped international universities come to Qatar, thus paving the way for more young women to earn college degrees here.[3]

 

The question of how dubbing informs reception within specific cultural contexts is an interesting one, especially when audiences grow up consuming an eclectic mix of local and global media. In the case of the girls I interviewed, all were fluent in English and Arabic, and they moved easily between Western and Middle Eastern media. Regarding language preferences in Disney media, a few patterns emerged in my findings. First, watching Disney films in English was the preferred mode for girls in my initial study, with ten out of 14 (71%) stating that the original films were their favorite. Some noted that Disney’s English-language releases were the most “authentic” and therefore adored, while others commented that because meaning can be lost in translation, they preferred watching the originals. Four girls in the study (29%) said that they favored the Egyptian-dubbed versions of Disney films because the dialogue, jokes, and/or cultural references were funnier.[4] Interestingly, when eight of the original 14 participants later answered questions about Jeem TV’s local adaptations of Disney films and TV shows (which, beginning in 2013, were dubbed into classical Arabic and edited to be more culturally appropriate for Arab youth), none reported a fondness for these versions. Even though the girls appreciated some of Jeem’s gender-productive editing strategies, including its tendency to eliminate derogatory comments about women and to replace comments about a female character’s looks with remarks about her intelligence, they felt that classical Arabic sounded “too formal” and/or “too serious,” which made them feel distanced from these texts. Ultimately, this discovery highlights the challenges faced by indigenous media producers who strive to create culturally relevant content for local audiences, while also navigating children’s desires for popular global fare.[5]

 

It was interesting to read your comments about the circulation of Disney content in Korea, including how most parents and young people prefer subtitled rather than Korean-dubbed Disney films because they can help viewers learn English. A few of the girls in my initial study reported that they learned to speak English by watching Disney films and TV shows too. Still, I agree that locally dubbed versions of popular media can have important benefits. One participant in my second study seemed to feel similarly when she suggested that watching Disney programming in classical Arabic on Jeem TV might sharpen Arabic language proficiency among local youth, which some adults fear is in decline because of the country’s rapid globalization over the past fifteen years. However, given the distancing effect described above, perhaps local youth (especially those from the Arab Gulf) would be more receptive to Jeem’s adaptations if they were dubbed in the local khaliji dialect as opposed classical Arabic.

 

Although my research on Disney fandom in Qatar has so far focused on Arab girls, I agree that it would be fascinating to explore the views of Disney fans living here who come from various racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. While my chapter “Princess Culture in Qatar” (2015) included an analysis of girls’ responses to portrayals of Middle Eastern characters in Aladdin (1992), it would be interesting for a future study to examine girls’ ideas about representations of race and ethnicity (and their intersections with other markers of identity) across a broader body of Disney princess films, including some of the more recent releases, such as Frozen (2013), Moana (2016), and Frozen II (2019). When I conducted my initial interviews with Arab girls in 2013, a couple of participants talked about how much they admired the more unconventional Disney princesses, including Mulan from Mulan (1998) and Merida from Brave (2012). I would love to find out if, how, and to what extent this interest in non-traditional princesses has evolved with some of Disney’s contemporary releases. And I’d love to learn more about the reception of Disney princess media in South Korea too. 

 

I’m so glad to have had this opportunity to discuss examples of youthful female fandom in Korea and Qatar with you, HJ, as well as to participate in this broader Global Fandom Jamboree. I look forward to seeing how the insights shared via these cross-cultural exchanges over the past few months will continue to evolve and inform our scholarship (and fandom) as time moves forward!

 

Notes

 

[1] Jenkins (III), Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1988): 103.

 

[2] Pike, Kirsten. “Princess Culture in Qatar: Exploring Princess Media Narratives in the Lives of Arab Female Youth.” In Princess Cultures: Mediating Girls’ Imaginations and Identities, eds. Miriam Forman-Brunell and Rebecca C. Hains, 139-160. New York: Peter Lang, 2015: 154-155.

 

[3] Arab girls who grow up in Qatar are often encouraged by their families to stay close to home after graduating from high school; Arab males, however, often attend university abroad.

 

[4] Pike, “Princess Culture in Qatar,” 146.

 

[5] Pike, Kirsten. “Disney in Doha: Arab Girls Negotiate Global and Local Versions of Disney Media.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018): 72-90.

 

A Pedagogical Response to the Aurora Shootings: 10 Critical Questions about Fictional Representations of Violence

The horrifying and tragic news of the shooting in Aurora, Colorado this weekend requires some degree of reflection on our parts. As someone who found himself very much involved in the national debates surrounding the Columbine Shootings in the late 1990s, there is a terrible sense of deja vu: we all know all too well the twists and turns the national debate will take and the dangers of what happens when "moral panic" spins hopelessly out of control.

I was deeply moved this weekend by a video blog produced by a young woman -- Lauren Bird -- from the Harry Potter Alliance who has so many thoughtful things to say about the social value of popular entertainment, the shared ritual of the midnight movie, and the dangers of pathologizing our desire to participate in the culture. (But, of course, the national AMC chain has already announced that they are banning the wearing of any costumes into their theaters, as if the problem with the shooter in this case was that he was a "crazy fan" who showed up in costume.)

Today, I wanted to share some pedagogical materials which I developed through the New Media Literacies Project in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, where, once again, anxieties about popular culture substituted for serious reflections on the many root causes of violence in American culture.

First, I wanted to share a passage from a statement about violence I wrote for teachers, which expresses something I was unable to meaningfully communicate via Twitter in an online exchange yesterday:

Why is violence so persistent in our popular culture? Because violence has been persistent across storytelling media of all kinds. A thorough account of violence in media would include: fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, oral epics such as Homer's Iliad, the staged violence of Shakespeare's plays, paintings of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and stained glass window representations of saints being pumped full of arrows, or, for that matter, talk show conversations about the causes of school shootings. Violence is fundamental to these various media because aggression and conflict are core aspects of human experience. We need our art to provide some moral order, to help us sort through our feelings, to provoke us to move beyond easy answers and to ask hard questions.

Our current framing of media violence assumes that it most often attracts us, that it inspires imitation, whereas throughout much of human history, representations of violence were seen as morally instructive, as making it less likely that we are going to transgress against various social prohibitions. When we read the lives of saints, for example, we are invited to identify with the one suffering the violence and not the one committing it. Violence was thought to provoke empathy, which was good for the soul. Violence was thought to make moral lessons more memorable.

Moral reformers rarely take aim at mundane and banal representations of violence, though formulaic violence is pervasive in our culture. Almost always, they go after works that are acclaimed elsewhere as art--the works of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, say--precisely because these works manage to get under their skin. For some of us, this provocation gets us thinking more deeply about the moral consequences of violence, whereas others condemn the works themselves, unable to process the idea that such a work might provoke us to reflect about the violence that it represents. The study of literature offers a remarkable opportunity to engage young people in conversations about such issues, expanding the range of stories about violence which they encounter, introducing them to works that encourage reflection about the human consequences of revenge and aggression, and broadening the range of meanings they attach to such representations.

In order to encourage such reflections in the classroom, I developed a set of basic questions we should ask about any representation of violence. There are persistent references throughout this to Moby-Dick because it was part of a teacher's strategy guide for Moby-Dick. Our book on this larger project, Reading in a Participatory Culture , is coming out from Teacher's College Press later this year. I was struck re-reading this today that I had already written here about the role of violence in the Batman saga, though this came out prior to the Dark Knight films by Christopher Nolan.

TEN CRITICAL QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE



1. What basic conflicts are being enacted through the violence?

Literary critics have long identified the core conflicts that shape much of the world's literature: Human vs. Human, Human vs. Nature, Human vs. Self, and sometimes Human vs. Machine. Such conflicts spark drama. Moby-Dick can be understood as including all three conflicts: the conflict between Ahab and Starbuck embodies deeper divisions within the ship's crew over the captain's decision to place his own personal goals above their collective well being or above the business of whaling; the conflict between Ahab and Moby Dick may be understood as a human being throwing himself full force against the natural world; Ahab struggles with his own better nature and Starbuck searches his soul trying to figure out how to respond to his conflicting duties. Any of these conflicts can erupt in violence--directly against other people, against the natural world, or against ourselves.

You might ask your students to identify which of these forms of conflict are most visible in contemporary video games, on television, or in the cinema and why some forms of conflict appear more often in these media than others. For example, video game designers have historically found it difficult to depict characters' internalized conflict (human vs. self), in part because contest or combat are central building blocks of most games.

2. Do the characters make conscious choices to engage in acts of violence? How do they try, through language or action, to explain and justify those choices?

In the real world, an act of violence may erupt in a split second: one moment, people we care about are alive; the next, they are dead. The violence may be random: there is no real reason why these victims were singled out over others; they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet, works of fiction often focus our attention on moments when characters make decisions, often based on aspects of their personalities which they little recognize or control, and those choices may have repercussions that echo across the work as a whole.

So, the act that took Ahab's leg may have been totally random, and we see several examples throughout the novel where a split-second decision may cause a character to be wounded or killed. We might compare Ahab's amputation with the events that lead to Pip being thrown from the boat, left adrift, and ultimately driven insane, or to the unnamed man who falls from the ship's mast and drowns. By contrast, the novel invites us to consider the choices Ahab makes at each step and how the other characters respond to those choices. Melville shows us many points where the ship could turn back and avoid its fate. He spells out what the characters are thinking and why they make the decisions they do.

The events could take a different shape, though the shape of a plot can give depicted events a sense of inevitability. Some forms of tragedy, for example, rely on the notion that characters are unable to escape their fates, no matter what choices they make, or that the final acts of violence and destruction flow logically from some "tragic flaw." In trying to make sense of a fictional representation of violence, you want to encourage your student to seek out moments where the characters make choices that ultimately lead towards acts of aggression or destruction. Often, authors provide those characters with rationalizations for their choices, offering some clues through their words, thoughts, or actions about why they do what they do.

At such moments, the work also often offers us alternatives to violence, other choices the characters could have made, though such choices may remain implicit rather than being explicitly stated. Different works and different genres may see these alternatives to violence as more or less plausible, attractive, or rational. So, if you are being chased by a mad man waving a chain saw in a horror film, engaging him in a conversation may not be a rational, plausible, or attractive alternative. Genre fiction constructs contexts where the protagonist has no choice but to resort to violence, though what separates heroes from villains may be their relative comfort in deploying violence to serve their own interests. In many American movies, the hero is reluctant to turn towards violence, seeing it as a last resort. By contrast, the villain may deploy violence in situations where she has other alternatives, suggesting cruelty or indifference.

In dealing with violence in video games, then, you may want to ask what options are available to the player for dealing with a certain situation. In some games, there may be no options other than violence, and the game itself may spend very little time offering the character a rationalization for such actions. It is fight or flight, kill or be killed. Many games are simply digital versions of the classic shooting galleries: the game space is designed as an arena where players can shoot it out with other players or with computer-controlled characters. In other games, there may be options that allow the protagonist to avoid violence, but they may not be emotionally satisfying; they may put the player at a significant disadvantage; they may be hard to execute. So, helping students to interpret the options available to characters in a literary fiction may help them to reflect more

consciously on the more limited choices available to them as gamers.



3. What are the consequences of the violence depicted in the work?

Many popular stories don't pay sufficient attention to the consequences of violence. Rambo may slaughter hundreds and yet, much as in a video game, the bodies simply disappear. We get no sense of the human costs involved in combat on such a scale. Many medieval epics consisted primarily of hack and slash battle sequences; yet, periodically, the action would stop, and the bard would enumerate the names of the dead on both sides, acknowledging that these warriors paid a price even if their actions help to establish the nation state or restore order to the kingdom. Gonzala Frasca has argued that video games inherently trivialize violence because they operate in a world where the player can simply reboot and start over if their character dies.

In contrast, westerns follow a basic formula: the protagonist (most often male) would resort to violence to battle other aggressive forces that threaten his community; his heroic actions would restore justice and order, but the hero could not live within the order he had helped to create and would be forced to ride off into the sunset at the end of the story. Susan Sontag has written about "the Imagination of Disaster," suggesting that films about apocalyptic events often create a rough moral order in which characters are rewarded or punished based on the values they display under extreme circumstances.

Moby-Dick can be said to have its own mechanisms for punishing violence: Ahab's search for vengeance at all costs means that he and his crew must pay the ultimate price.



4. What power relationships, real or symbolic, does the violence suggest?

In many cases, storytellers deploy violence as a means of embodying power. We should not be surprised by this tendency given the way sociologists have characterized rape as the deployment of male power against women or lynching as the enactment of white power against blacks. Historically, wars have been seen as a way of resolving conflicts between nations through the exercise of power, while trial by combat was a means of deploying power to resolve individual conflicts and disagreements.

Media representations of violence can give viewers a seductive sense of empowerment as they watch characters who are hopelessly out-numbered triumph or they watch segments of the population who seem disempowered in the real world deploy violence to right past wrongs. Some have argued that young people play violent video games, in part, as a means of compensating for a sense of disempowerment they may feel at school.

Conversely, stories may encourage our sense of outrage when we see powerful groups or individuals abusing their power, whether in the form of bullies degrading their victims or nations suppressing their citizens. This abuse of power by powerful forces may prepare us for some counter-balancing exercise of power, setting up the basic moral oppositions upon which a story depends.

As you teach students to think critically about representations of violence, a key challenge will be to identify the different forms of power at play within the narrative and to map the relations between them. Which characters are in the most powerful positions and what are their sources of power? Which characters are abusing their power? What sources of power are ascribed to characters who might initially seem powerless, and to what degree is violence depicted as a means of empowerment?



5. How graphic is the depiction of violence?

One of the limits of the study on violence in American cartoons released by the American Academy of Pediatrics is that it counts "violent acts" without considering differing degrees of stylization. In fact, children at a pretty young age--certainly by the time they reach elementary school--are capable of making at least crude distinctions between more or less realistic representations of violence. They can be fooled by media which offers ambiguous cues, but they generally read media that seems realistic very differently from media that seems cartoonish or larger than life. For that reason, they are often more emotionally disturbed by documentaries that depict predators and prey, war, or crime, than they are by the hyperbolic representations we most often are talking about when we

refer to media violence.

While most of us have very limited vocabularies for discussing these different degrees of explicitness, such implicit distinctions shape the ways we respond to representations of violence within fictions. We each know what we can tolerate and tend to avoid modes of representation we find too intense or disturbing. Most ratings systems distinguish between cartoonish and realistic forms of violence. We need to guard against the assumption, however, that the more graphic forms of violence are necessarily "sick" or inappropriate. More stylized forms can make it much easier to ignore the gravity of real world violence through a process of sanitization. In some cases, more graphic depictions of violence

shatter that complacency and can force us to confront the human costs of violence.

Literary critics have long made a distinction between showing and telling. We might extend this distinction to think about media representations of violence. An artist may ask us to directly confront the act of violence, or she may ask us to deal with its repercussions, having a character describe an event which occurred before the opening of the narrative or which took place off stage. Some very famous examples of media violence--such as the torture sequences in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction --pull the camera away at the moments of peak intensity, counting on the viewer's imagination to fill in what happens, often based on cues from the soundtrack, or in the case of Pulp Fiction , the splattering of blood from off-camera. Again, we need to get students to focus on the creative choices made by the storytellers and artists in their construction of these episodes, choices especially about what to show and what not to show.



6. What function does the violence serve in the narrative?

Critics often complain about "gratuitous violence." The phrase has been used so often that we can lose touch with what it means. According to the dictionary, "gratuitous" means "being without apparent reason, cause, or justification." So, before we can decide if an element in a fictional work is gratuitous, we have to look more closely at why it is present (its motivation) and what purposes it serves (its function).

Keep in mind that we are not talking here about why the character performs the violent act but rather why the artist includes it in the work. An artwork might depict senseless killings, as occur at certain moments in No Country for Old Men where the killer is slaughtering people seemingly at random. This doesn't necessarily mean that the violence is "gratuitous" since in this case, the violence sets the action of the story into motion, and the work is very interested in how other characters react to the threat posed by this senseless violence. There is artistic motivation for including the violence, even if the directors, the Coen Brothers, are uninterested in the killer's psychological motives.

An element in a work of fiction may be motivated on several different levels: it may be motivated realistically, in the sense that a story about contemporary urban street gangs might be expected to depict violence as part of their real world experience; it might be motivated generically, in the sense that people going to see a horror movie expect to see a certain amount of gore and bloody mayhem; it may be motivated thematically, in the sense that an act of violence may force characters to take the measure of their own values and ethical commitments; it may be motivated symbolically, in the sense that a character dreams about performing violence and those dreams offer us a window into his or her thinking process. In each case, the violence has a different motivation, even though the actions depicted may be relatively similar.

By the same token, we might ask what functions an act of violence plays in the work. One way to answer that question is to imagine how the work would be different if this element were not included. Would the story have the same shape? Would the characters behave in the same way? Would the work have the same emotional impact? Some acts of violence motivate the actions of the story; some bring about a resolution in the core conflict; still others mark particular steps in the trajectory of the plot; and in some rare cases, the violent acts may indeed be gratuitous, in that their exclusion would change little or nothing in our experience of the work

But keep in mind that the violence which disturbs us the most on first viewing is not necessarily gratuitous and is often violence which has ramifications throughout the rest of the story. Describing a scene as "gratuitous" is easy, especially when it shortcuts the process of engaging more critically with the structure and messages of the work in question. For example, the film Basketball Diaries became the focus of controversy following the Columbine shootings primarily because of a single scene in which the protagonist wears a long black coat and imagines shooting up a school. Those discussing the sequence failed to explain that it was a dream sequence, not an action performed by the film's protagonist, and that it is part of a larger story which explores how a young man overcame his rage, his addictions, and his antisocial impulses to become a poet. Without the representation of his aggression, the power of the story of redemption would be weakened, whereas the scene removed from context seemed to endorse the antisocial values the work itself rejects.



7. What perspective(s) does the work offer us towards the character engaging in violence?

Media theorists have spent a great deal of time trying to determine what we mean when we say we identify with a character in a fictional work. At the most basic level, it means we recognize the character; we distinguish the fictional figure from others depicted in the same work. From there, we may mean that the work devotes a great deal of time and space to depicting the actions of this particular character. Typically, the more time we spend with a character, the more likely we are to see the world from her point of view. Yet, this is not always the case. We may be asked to observe and judge characters, especially if their actions and the values they embody fall outside of the stated perspective of the work. We may grow close to a character only to be pushed away again when the character takes an action we find reprehensible and unjustifiable.

There is a distinction to be drawn here between the structuring of narrative point of view and the structuring of moral judgments on the character. Part of what helps us to negotiate between the two is the degree to which we are given access to the thoughts and feelings of the character (and in the case of an audio-visual work, the degree to which we see the world from his or her optical point of view).

Consider, for example, the use of first person camera in a work like Jaws where scenes are sometimes shot from the perspective of the shark as it swims through the water approaching its human prey. At such moments, we feel fear and dread for the human victims, not sympathy for the sharks. Filmmakers quickly learned to manipulate this first person camera, sometimes duplicating the same camera movement, tricking us into thinking the monster is approaching, and then, demonstrating this to be a false alarm.

So, it is possible to follow characters but not get inside their head, and it is possible to have access to characters' thoughts and still not share their moral perspective.

And indeed, all of these relationships may shift in the course of reading a book as we may feel the character's actions are justified up until a certain point and then cross an implicit line where they become monstrous. Homer shares Ulysses's point of view throughout much of the Odyssey, but we still are inclined to pull back from him at a certain point as he brings bloody vengeance upon Penelope's suitors in the final moments of the epic.

Wyn Kelley identifies a similar pattern in Moby-Dick where we are invited to experience what whaling would be like from the point of view of the whale, and in the process, we are encouraged to reflect on the bloody brutality of slaughtering an innocent animal, stripping the meat off its bones, and boiling its flesh to create oil. Here, a break in the following pattern gives us an opportunity to reassess how we feel about the characters with whom we have up until that point been closely aligned. We might think about a common device in television melodrama where we've seen a scene of conflict between two characters who believe they are alone and then at the end, the camera pulls back to show the reaction of a previously undisclosed third-party figure who has been watching or overhearing the action. Such moments invite us to reassess what we've just seen from another vantage point.

In video games, the category of "first person shooters" has been especially controversial with critics concerned about the implications of players taking on the optical point of view of a character performing acts of violence; often, critics argue, the player doesn't just watch a violent act but is actively encouraged to participate. Gamers will sometimes refer to their characters in the third person ("he") and sometimes in the first person ("I"), pronoun slippages that suggest some confusions brought about by the intense identification players sometimes feel towards their avatars.

Yet, even here, we need to be careful to distinguish between following pattern, optical point of view, and moral attitude. In games, we typically remain attached to a single character whom we control, and thus we have a very strong following pattern. In first person shooters, we see the action through the optical point of view of that character, though we may feel no less connected to the characters we control in a third person game (where we see the full body of the character from an external perspective). The Second Person video game confounds our normal expectations about optical point of view, inviting us to see the action from an unfamiliar perspective, and thus it may shake up our typical ways of making sense of the action.

Those who have spent time watching players play and interviewing them about their game experiences find that in fact, identification works in complex ways, since the player is almost always thinking tactically about the choices that will allow her to beat the game. Winning often involves stepping outside a simple emotional or moral connection with an individual character. Players are encouraged to think of the game as a system, not unlike taking a more omniscient perspective in reading a work of fiction, even as other aspects of the game's formal structure may encourage them to feel a close alignment with a

particular character whose actions are shaped by their own decisions.

Game designer Will Wright (The Sims, Sim City) has argued that games may have a unique ability to make players experience guilt for the choices their characters have made in the course of the action. When we watch a film or read a novel, we always reserve the ability to pull back from a character we may otherwise admire and express anger over choices he or she has made or to direct that anger towards the author who is reflecting a world view we find repugnant. Yet, in a game, because players are making choices, however limited the options provided by the designer, they feel some degree of culpability. And a game designer has the ability to force them to reflect back on those choices and thus to have an experience of guilt.

8. What roles (aggressor, victim, other) does the protagonist play in the depiction of violence?

Many of the media texts which have been most controversial are works which bring the viewer into the head of the aggressor--from the gangster films of the 1930s through contemporary films like Natural Born Killers and American Psycho, television series like Dexter and The Sopranos, and games like Grand Theft Auto. All of these works are accused of glamorizing crime.

As we've already discussed, we need to distinguish between following pattern, optical and psychological point of view, and moral alignment. Many of these works bring us closer to such figures precisely so that we can feel a greater sense of horror over their anti-social behavior. Consider, for example, Sweeney Todd, which depicts a murderous barber and his partner, a baker, who turns the bodies of his victims into meat pies she sells to her customers. We read the story from their perspective and we are even encouraged to laugh at their painful and heartless puns about the potential value of different people as sources for human meat. Yet, our strong identification with these characters allows us to feel greater horror and sorrow over the final consequences of their actions.

At the other end of spectrum, literary scholar James Cain describes how a whole genre of literary works arose in the Middle Ages around representations of saints as victims:

"The persecutions of early Christians gave rise to an extraordinary collection of tales commemorating the supernatural endurance of victims who willingly suffered heinous atrocities and ultimately gave their lives bearing witness to their faith. From accounts of the stoning of the first martyr, St. Stephen, to the broiling of St. Lawrence on an open grill, the strapping of St. Catherine to a mechanical wheel of torture, the gouging-out of St. Lucy's eyeballs, the slitting-open of St. Cecilia's throat, the slicing-off of St. Agatha's breasts, the feeding of St. Perpetua and St. Felicitas to the lions, the piercing of St. Sebastian with a barrage of arrows--the graphic brutality undoubtedly exceeds even the most violent images in media today.... The strong emotional responses these images conjured up in their observers were deliberately designed to produce lasting impressions in people's memories and imaginations, to enable further reflection."

Far from being corrupting, representations of violence are seen as a source of moral instruction, in part because of our enormous sense of empathy for the saints' ability to endure suffering.

Most American popular culture negotiates between the two extremes. In the case of superheroes, for example, their origin stories often include moments of victimization and loss, as when young Bruce Wayne watches his mother and father get killed before deciding to devote his life to battling crime as the Batman, or when Peter Parker learns that "with great power comes great responsibility" the hard way when his lack of responsibility results in the death of his beloved uncle. In the world of the superheroes, the villains are also often victims of acts of violence, as when the Joker's face (and psyche) are scarred by being pushed into a vat of acid. The superhero genre tends to suggest that we have a choice how we respond to trauma and loss. For some, we emerge stronger and more ethically committed, while for others, we are devastated and bitter, turning towards anti-social actions and self-destruction.

A work like David Cronenberg's A History of Violence is particularly complex, since we learn more and more about the character's past as we move more deeply into the narrative and since the protagonist moves from bystander to victim and then reverses things, taking his battle to the gangsters, and along the way, becomes increasingly sadistic in his use of violence. Cronenberg wants to have the viewer rethinking and reassessing the meaning of violence in almost every scene of the film.

The filmmaker Jean Renoir famously said "every character has his reason." His point was that if we shift point of view, we can read the aggressor as victim or vice versa. Few people see themselves as cruel; most find ways to justify and rationalize acts of even the rawest aggression. And a literary work may invite us to see the same action from several different perspectives, shifting our identifications and empathy in the process. So, for example, the moment when we see the hunt from the whale's point of view reverses the lens, seeing Flask and his crew as the aggressors and the whale as the victim, a perspective we don't get in the rest of the novel.

Even when the artist doesn't fill in these other perspectives, critics and spectators can step back from a scene, put themselves in the heads of the various characters, and imagine what the world might look like from their point of view. Consider the novel and stage play, Wicked, which rereads The Wizard of Oz from the vantage point of the Wicked Witch and portrays Dorothy as a mean spirited trespasser who has murdered the witch's sister.

9. What moral frame (pro-social, antisocial, ambiguous) does the work place around the depicted violence?

Some fictions focus on violence as the performance of duty. The police, for example, are authorized to use certain sanctioned forms of violence in the pursuit of criminals and in the name of maintaining law and order. Some of these--for example, the television series The Shield--find great drama in exploring cops who "cross the line," seeing brutality or unnecessary use of force as a symptom of a police force no longer accountable to its public.

Similarly, much fiction centers on themes of war, with works either endorsing or criticizing military actions as forms of violence in the service of the state and of the public. There is a long tradition of national epics, going back to classical times, which depict the struggles to establish or defend the nation with violence often linked to patriotic themes and values. In the American tradition, this function was once performed by the western, which depicts the process by which "savagery" gave way to "civilization," though more recent westerns have sometimes explored the slaughter of the Indians from a more critical perspective as a form of racial cleansing.

So, even within genres that depict the use of force in pro-social or patriotic terms, there are opportunities for raising questions about the nature and value of violence as a tool for bringing about order and stability.

On the other hand, many stories depict violence as anti-social, focusing on criminals, gangsters, or terrorists, who operate outside the law and in opposition to the state or the community. The cultural critic Robert Warshow discusses the very different representations of "men with guns" found in the western, the gangster film, and the war movie, suggesting that all three genres have strong moral codes which explain when it is justifiable to use force and depicting what happens to characters who transgress those norms. The westerner can not live in the community he has helped to create through his use of force; the gangster (see Scarface for example) frequently is destroyed by the violence he has abused to meet his personal desires and ambitions; and the hero returns home at the end of the war, albeit often psychologically transformed by the violence he has experienced.

Just as fictions that seem to depict the pro-social use of violence may contain critiques of the abuse of power by the police or the horrors of war, fictions which depict the anti-social use of violence may include strong critiques of the gangster lifestyle. Robin Woods has famously summed up the basic formula of the horror films as "normality is threatened by monstrosity." In such a formula, there are three important terms to consider--what constitutes normality, what constitutes the monstrous, and what relationship is being posited between the two. Some horror films are highly moralistic, seeking to destroy anything which falls outside of narrow norms; others use the monster as the means of criticizing and questioning the limits of normality.

In many works, there is a core ambiguity about the nature of the violence being depicted. We may be asked to identify with several characters who have different moral codes and thus who see their actions in different terms. Our judgments may shift in the course of the narrative. The characters may understand their actions as pro-social even as the author invites us to read them as antisocial. Or the work may be saying that there's no simple distinction to be drawn between different forms of violence: it's all equally destructive. We might even imagine a truly nihilistic work in which all violence is justified. It isn't that we want students to fit works into simple either/or categories here. Rather, asking this question can force them towards a more complex understanding of the moral judgments the work is making--as opposed to simply those being made by the characters--about the value of the violence to society.



10. What tone does the work take towards the represented violence?

We've already seen the importance of distinguishing between the forms of violence being depicted in a work and the position the work takes on those actions. We've seen that identification with a protagonist is fragile and shifting across a work, so that we may sometimes feel a strong emotional bond with a character for much of the story and yet still feel estranged from her when the author reveals some darker side of her personality.

A work may depict the pro-social use of violence and either endorse or criticize the Establishment being depicted. A work may depict anti-social forms of violence in ways which are conservative in their perspective on those groups who use force outside legal contexts. Or a work may depict forms of violence that are hard to classify in those terms and thus invite readers to struggle with that ambiguity.

Similarly, we need to consider the range of different emotional responses a work may evoke through its use of violent images. Some fictions about violence, such as the action sequences in an Indiana Jones movie, may thrill us with exciting, larger than life heroics. Some, such as Saving Private Ryan or Glory, may appeal to our sense of national pride towards the brave men who gave their lives defending their country. Some, such as the scene in Old Yeller where the boy is forced to shoot his dog, may generate enormous empathy as we feel sorry for the characters who are forced to deploy or suffer violence against their will. Some, such as depictions of human suffering around the world, may seek to shock us into greater social consciousness and civic action. Some, such as slapstick comedy, may encourage us to laugh at highly stylized depictions of physical aggression. And still others, such as Saw or Nightmare on Elm Street, may provoke a sense of horror or disgust as we put ourselves through a series of intense emotional shocks in the name of entertainment.

We can not understand what representations of violence mean, then, without paying attention to issues of tone, and part of teaching close reading skills is helping students identify the subtle markings in a text which indicate the tone the author is taking towards the depicted events. Popular texts tend to create broadly recognizable and easily legible signs of tone, though many of the works of filmmakers like Tarantino or Scorsese generate controversy because they adopt a much more complex and multivalent tone than we expect from other texts in the same genre. We might compare Tarantino or Scorsese to certain writers--William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor come to mind--who also seek complicated or contradictory emotional reactions to grotesque and violent elements in their narratives.

Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action

Over the past few blog posts, I have been sharing updates on some of the work being done by my Civic Paths research group at USC -- first, the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism, and second, Arely Zimmerman's white paper exploring the ways undocumented youth and their supporters mobilized through and around new media in support of the DREAM act. But, as I have noted, this work fits within a larger initiative launched by the MacArthur Foundation -- a research hub on Youth and Participatory Politics, headed by Political Science Professor Joe Kahne from Mills College, and involving a multidisciplinary mix of researchers who are combining a range of different approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, to better understand how young people are using new media as a resource for political participation.

A few weeks ago, Kahn and another Political Scientist, University of Chicago's Cathy Cohen, released an important report representing the first phases of this research -- Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action. Here's a rich and provocative interview with its primary authors, thanks to MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning team.

The white paper does two things which are really important for people seeking to better understand the interplay of new media and citizen participation -- first, it offers a new conceptual framing for thinking about what our research network is calling "participatory politics" and second, it shares the findings of the team's first large scale survey which seeks to capture the current state of youth, new media, and civic participation, recorded just after the Midterm Elections and prior to the current presidential campaign season.

Here's a key passage of the report which seeks to explain our core concept and what we think it will add to the existing understandings of the political lives of American youth:

The Youth and Participatory Politics study defines participatory politics as interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern. Importantly, these acts are not guided by deference to elites or formal institutions. Examples of participatory political acts include starting a new political group online, writing and disseminating a blog post about a political issue, forwarding a funny political video to one's social network, or participating in a poetry slam.

Participatory political acts can:

␣ reach large audiences and mobilize net- works, often online, on behalf of a cause;

␣ help shape agendas through dialogue with, and provide feedback to, political leaders (on- and offline); and

␣ enable participants to exert greater agency through the circulation or forwarding of political information (e.g., links) as well as through the production of original content, such as a blog or letter to the editor.

Four factors make participatory politics especially important to those thinking about the future of American politics.

1. Participatory politics allow individuals to operate with greater independence in the political realm, circumventing traditional gatekeepers of information and influence, such as newspaper editors, political parties, and interest groups.

2. Participatory politics often facilitate a renegotiation of political power and control with the traditional political entities that are now searching for ways to engage participants. Witness how newspapers and cable television stations now try to facilitate a controlled engagement with their audience through the use of social media.

3. Participatory politics as practiced online provide for greater creativity and voice, as participants produce original content using video, images, and text.

4. Participatory politics afford individuals the capability to reach a sizable audience and mobilize others through their social networks in an easy and inexpensive

manner.

This definition emerges from three years of intense discussions amongst the participating researchers, as well as consultations with leading scholars and activists, all of whom are thinking deeply about media change and its political consequences. It think it is safe to say that this reconceptualization would not have emerged anywhere except in the radically multidisciplinary space which Kahne and the MacArthur Foundation have helped to establish. We bring ideas from our own disciplines into conversation with those from profoundly different frames of reference, and in the process, we have begun to map a space which is inadequately covered by any given field.

In the case of media and cultural studies, the report comes as we are seeing sharper distinctions being drawn between different forms of cultural and political participation, where-as on the Political Science side, it emerges from ongoing discussions about the shifting nature of politics as a human activity, especially the shift of focus towards nongovernmental forms of political action.

The report shifts the focus from "Twitter Revolutions," which place the emphasis on new forms of networked technologies, and onto specific sets of political and cultural practices, which deploy those tools in relation to older media technologies, to help redefine the dynamics of political debate and mobilization.

A second key point to make has to do with the relationship between participatory politics and more established and institutionalized forms of politics, a question to which Kahne and Cohen addressed in the interview that accompanies the report's release:

Participatory politics can allow for greater creativity and voice, but voice may not necessarily lead to influence. What sort of shift must occur in order for these practices to become influential?

Kahne: We have thought about this a lot, and it's something we as a field need to learn more about. There is no doubt that practices that amplify the voice of young people are a significant thing, especially given the marginal status that so many young people have in relation to mainstream institutions. Those institutions are places where young people generally don't have significant voice. Participatory politics can give them that voice. At the same time, it's key to realize that if youth are circulating ideas among their networks without understanding how to move from voice to influence, they may well not achieve the goals they value. In our work with youth organizations, digital platforms, and youth themselves, we have to find ways to help youth connect to institutions act strategically to have influence and to put pressure on the places - whether corporate or governmental - to prompt the change youth want to see occur.

Cohen: Participatory politics is never meant to displace a focus on institutional politics. We might think of it as a supplemental domain where young people can take part in a dialogue about the issues that matter, think about strategies of mobilization, and do some of that mobilizing collectively online. That said, we have to always recognize that there is important power that exists largely offline. The Occupy movement is a classic example of both participatory politics and offline institutional politics coming together to not only amplify voice but also provide influence and power -- even temporarily -- for a group of primarily young people around class and equality issues.

This new framework for thinking about "Participatory Politics" helps us to make sense of some of the significant findings of the national survey. I can hit on only a few key insights here (read the report for more):

Large proportions of young people across racial and ethnic groups have access to the Internet and use online social media regularly to stay connected to their family and friends and pursue interests and hobbies.

Contrary to the traditional notion of a technological digital divide, the YPP study finds young people across racial and ethnic groups are connected online. Overwhelmingly, white (96 percent), black (94 percent), Latino (96 percent) and Asian-American (98 percent) youth report having access to a computer that connects to the Internet. A majority or near majority of white (51 percent), black (57 percent), Latino (49 percent), and Asian American (52 percent) youth report sending messages, sharing status updates and links, or chatting online daily.

Youth are very involved in friendship-driven and interest-driven activities online.

78 percent send messages, share status updates, or chat online on a weekly basis.

58 percent share links or forward information through social networks at least once a week....

I was delighted to see this last question, dealing with the practices around what I call Spreadable Media, included in the survey, since events like Kony 2012 have established that acts of circulation can be an important part of how young people are participating in political debates.

Over-all, 64 percent engage in at least one interest-driven activity in a given week, and 32 percent engage in three or more interest driven activities a week.

Participatory Politics are an important dimension of politics.

41 percent of young people have engaged in at least one act of participatory politics, while 44 percent participate in other acts of politics.

Specifically, 43 percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino and 36 percent of Asian-American youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months.

Participatory politics are an addition to an individual's engagement rather than an alternative to other political activities:



Youth who engaged in at least one act of participatory politics were almost twice as likely

to report voting in 2010 as those who did not.

A large proportion--37 percent of all young people--engages in both participatory

and institutional politics.

Among young people who engage in participatory policies, 90 percent of them either vote or engage in institutional politics.

Participatory politics are equitably distributed across different racial and ethnic groups:

The difference in voting in 2008 between the group with the highest rate of turnout according to the U.S. Census Bureau--black youth (52%)-- and the group with the lowest rate of turnout-- Latino youth (27%)--is 25 percentage points.

These findings challenge many key stereotypes which shape dominant discourses around youth, new media, and political participation, suggesting that:

participatory politics and culture are not simply activities involving white suburban middle class youth but they are widespread across all ethnic groups, and indeed, the group most likely to engage with the broadest range of such practices are African-Americans

new media politics does not come at the expense of more traditional forms of political participation but rather is more likely to amplify patterns of voter-participation

participatory culture and politics seems to be an important equalizer of opportunities for engagement in the political process.


One other conclusion seems important for readers who are invested in media literacy: According to the survey, 84 percent of youth indicate that, given their reliance on online sources for news and information, "would benefit from learning more about how to tell if news and information you find online is trustworthy." So, contrary to the stereotype that young people are indifferent to the credibility of the information they access online, many of them are seeking support from adult educators to help them acquire skills at more meaningfully parsing what should be trusted.

Educators and policy makers alike will benefit from looking more deeply at the rich data and insights found in this report. I am sure to be drawing more on this report through upcoming blog posts around these topics.

For those who want to learn more about the report, I've embedded here the video of a recent chat session featuring Kahne, Cohen, and others, talking about the report with Howard Rheingold through the MacArthur Foundation's Connected Learning Seminar series.

Joe Kahne is the John and Martha Davidson Professor of Education at Mills College. His research focuses on ways school practices and new media influence youth civic and political development.

Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the founder of the Black Youth Project and author of The Boundaries of Blackness and Democracy Remixed. Her research focuses on political engagement by marginal communities.

Documenting DREAMS: New Media, Undocumented Youth and the Immigrant Rights Movement

Civic Paths is a team of graduate students, faculty, post-docs, and staff researchers within the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, who are seeking to better understand the role of new media tools and practices in shaping the political socialization and mobilization of American youth. The faculty leads on the research team are myself and my Journalism colleague, Kierstin Thorson while Sangita Shreshtova is the Research Director.

The team is linked to a larger research hub on Youth and Participatory Politics, headed by Mills College Political Science Professor Joe Kahne and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Our team's contribution consists of developing a series of ethnographic case studies of innovative networks which have proven effective at encouraging youth to become political activists. Next time, I will be sharing some quantitative research recently released by Kahne, Cathy Cohen, and other members of the YPP network.

Civic Paths recently released the first of the white papers which over the next two years will start to emerge from our research: this one written by our Post-Doc Arely M. Zimmerman and dealing with the groups of undocumented youth who have been trying to rally behind the DREAM Act. The report was released the same week that President Barack Obama announced a major shift in the country's immigration policy that reflected in many ways the success of these DREAM activists in reframing the public's perception of the experience of being undocumented and in calling out the fact that the Obama administration had deported more people in its first three years in office than George W. Bush had in his two terms as president.

Zimmerman's white paper takes us behind the scenes, identifying the tactics which had led to this political victory and sharing the stories shared with her by the participants in her study.

Zimmerman's research was the focus of an earlier blog post, describing a program we hosted at USC where young immigrant rights activists talked about their use of new media to mobilize supporters.

You can find the full report on the DREAM Activists online at the Youth and Participatory Politics homepage. But, to give you a taste of the report, I wanted to share two excerpts here today. The first comes from the introduction to Zimmerman's report:

On October 12, 2011, five undocumented youth wearing graduation caps staged a sit-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in downtown Los Angeles to urge the Obama administration to stop deporting undocumented youths. The sit-in launched the national E.N.D. (Education Not Deportation) Our Pain campaign, comprised of a network of immigrant youth organizations and allies demanding an immediate moratorium on deporting youth eligible for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. This proposed legislation would grant conditional legal status to those brought to the United States under age 16 if they attend college or join the military.

The action took place on a busy Wednesday morning when most Angelenos were at work and most students were in school. Fearing a low turnout, Dream Team Los Angeles, a local youth-led community group, and their allies used social media to send links of a live broadcast of the action from a free video-streaming site. While 300 people attended, over 4,000 users watched online as the youth entered ICE headquarters and demanded a hearing with officials. The attendees and online audience looked on as handcuffs were placed on the youth. Immediately after the arrests, users were able to make donations and petition for the arrestees' release through another website.

The E.N.D. campaign's direct action is an example of a strategy to amplify youth voices in the immigrant rights movement by combining traditional community organizing

with new media strategies. One of the arrestees and leader of one of the DREAM advocacy groups in Los Angeles acknowledges that a mixed media strategy is key for reaching diverse participants:

You have to be able to use Facebook and Twitter, but you have to be intentional about it, and strategic. At the same time, you have to also utilize traditional media outlets because our 'tios' and 'tias' are not using social networking. They are still watching Univision and the nightly news. So you have to engage in both.

DREAM Activism is an exemplar case of youth capitalizing on new media affordances to recruit, mobilize, and sustain broad-based youth political participation. While initial organizing in 2001 focused on states with high immigrant populations such as California, Illinois, and New York, undocumented youth and student organizations are now active at the national level with chapters in 25 states. The California Dream Network, a network of undocumented youth organizations, boasts chapters on over 30 college campuses. Student and youth organizers credit both their rapid growth and public outreach to the power of new media. Prerna Lal, co-founder of DreamActivist.org, a media-centered youth organization, states in an online video, "New media has indeed taken a small group of undocumented students to new heights and fueled a movement that was stagnant."

Immigrant youth's participation in the DREAM movement provides an opportunity to examine the intersection of new media and grassroots youth-led social movements in the context of a politically disenfranchised and legally vulnerable community. Drawing from field research, event observations, media content analysis, and 25 semi-structured interviews with DREAM activists residing in California, Illinois, Georgia, and Texas, this report examines the role of new media in mobilizing undocumented youth's participation in the movement.

Only three of the youth I interviewed were U.S. citizens. While Mexico was the primary country of origin, some of the youth came from Colombia, Nigeria, El Salvador, Poland, and Chile. All but three of the youth were enrolled in an institution of higher learning or had completed their bachelor's degree at the time of the interviewee. The semi-structured interviews allowed me to reconstruct the history of Dream Activism and account for existing organizational networks through youth's narration of events, stories of participation, and the re-telling of their experiences as members of Dream activist organizations. On an individual level, the interview protocol was directed at capturing youth's stories of involvement, the contextual factors and supports that sustained their civic participation, and their use of new media platforms and practices. Additionally, I probed how their participation in the Dream movement had shaped their experiences of inequality and identity, feelings of membership and belonging, and conceptions of citizenship.

As the effects of new media on political participation continue to be sharply

debated, this case study suggests that youth's online and political participation are

mutually reinforcing. Despite the barriers they face because of their legal and socio-

economic status, undocumented youth activists in this study are highly engaged online as bloggers, documentarians, artists, or social media activists. The positive correlation

between levels of civic engagement and online participation is due to several factors.

Online communities have served as spaces to develop associational bonds, forge social

networks, and amass forms of social capital that are particularly useful given the legal

and political vulnerability of face to face activism. Online communities have also

increased youth's sense of political efficacy by offering spaces for collective identification and shared memory. The sophisticated use of new media by undocumented youth has enabled youth to negotiate, resist, and respond to their political and socio- economic marginalization. Through new media, undocumented youth have uplifted the voices, experiences, and stories of an often-ignored segment of the immigrant population in the United States. Simultaneously, these activists have brought attention to the youth voice within the social justice community more broadly....

The second selection from the white paper comes from the conclusion and focuses more directly on the personal trajectories of the DREAM activists that Zimmerman interviewed for the project. She deals honestly with the challenges these undocumented youth confront, both in preserving personal dignity in their everyday interactions and in finding ways to access the digital media which is so vital to their efforts. This passage gives us a snap shot of how people are living with and working around the digital divide and the participation gap and the ways these inequalities of access are tied to larger social, political, and economic inequalities. Their stories help us to understand how current immigration policies are squandering the potential of a generation of young Americans who seek to make a contribution with their lives but who are often blocked from doing so as a consequence of the political stalemate which surrounds efforts to change the process for acquiring citizenship:

During the research on this MAPP case study, I met many individuals who defied the presumption of civically and politically disengaged youth. Like Jose, who used Facebook to confront the social isolation he felt by posting photos of his drawings online, these youth have used new media tools to overcome rather than succumb to barriers to their political participation. Sammy, an aspiring filmmaker, did not have the means to buy a camera with HD capabilities, but produced a short documentary on the plights of undocumented students. El Random Hero was an avid blogger and yet did not have a computer at home. He accessed the internet through public libraries. The stories of these youth provide a glimpse into the positive impact that new media can have on the ability of youth to become civically and politically engaged.

Through this research, I also met disaffected undocumented youth who were less engaged both in their schools, communities, and empowering forms of digital social networks. Though these youth had access to new media, they had not used this access to empower themselves and engage politically. Anna, a high school student, felt that

Facebook was a detriment at times even, pulling her into a web of high school "drama" causing her to deactivate her account. Anna was graduating high school that summer and hadn't any idea of what she would do next. Would she be destined to work in a low- skilled job for minimum wage?

These varied DREAMer youth experiences show the range of outcomes that are possible. For those individuals that experienced positive outcomes in their civic, political and digital lives, it seems to be a result of access to new media combined with a range of other contextual supports. One important contextual support is institutional, namely the college campus. Most of the youth in this study who were politically engaged are also college graduates or on the way to obtaining a degree. Of course, there are exceptions. El Random Hero, for instance, has not been able to afford to attend community college. But for the most part, DREAMers seem to become more involved once they're enrolled in an educational institution. Students like Agustin, who had been exposed early on to Chicano or Ethnic studies, had a framework to understand their struggles in relation to historical patterns, increasing their sense of belonging and group pride. Several youth in this study started their activism by joining a college campus group. Others found each other online. Some later become active in community-based organizations or national coalitions, but they generally began when a peer or a mentor introduced them to a student support group for undocumented students. This happened both online and face-to-face.

While much research needs to be done in this regard, this study suggests that new

media do provide extended opportunities for political advocacy and social engagement

for undocumented youth. DREAMers find each other online. They strengthen their sense

of community through collective storytelling. They mobilize for action using social media. They use their online media savvy in combination with more traditional social movement tactics. The youth use new media to make the DREAM movement personal, networked and visible. What remains a question is whether the degree of empowerment and the sustainability of youth's political participation in this movement relates directly to institutional supports and contextual capital. If so, how can we strengthen these to create powerful avenues for broader youth participation in politics and the public sphere?

While community groups like Dream Team Coalition of Los Angeles or the United We Dream national network are youth-driven, these groups have also successfully drawn on resources and support from more traditional allies in the advocacy and nonprofit sectors. These contextual supports may enhance DREAMer youth's new media affordances towards more sustained political action. For example, in the Los Angeles area, community-based organizations such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) and UCLA's Labor Center have been at the forefront of undocumented youth organizing. These centers provide both formal and informal supports such as mentorship, scholarship, organizing and leadership development, along with access to the broader social justice community. In 2011, the Labor Center sponsored an event called "Dream Summer", which provided 60 undocumented youth with paid internships and a trip to Washington DC. Such programs help sustain youth's political activism and involvement by providing a means of both emotional and financial support and motivation.

In California, especially in cities like Los Angeles, the immigrant rights community has well-established organizations with a long trajectory of facing an uphill battle to organize and sustain their political involvement. While new media and online social networks are a way to counter social and political isolation, DREAMer youth may benefit by seeking out the support of institutions that can help sustain their activism. Kendra and Jenny, for instance, found it hard to plug into the social justice community in their hometowns in Texas and Illinois, respectively. Because immigrant rights are often framed as a Latino issue, most organizations cater to Spanish speaking, newly arrived immigrants. Kendra and Jenny were not Latin American and were not Spanish speakers. The lack of ethnic ties made it more difficult for them to participate in local organizing activities, so they turned to the Internet. Kendra was more successful than Jenny at connecting to a social network of undocumented students, but she also was pulled further into the immigrant rights struggle when she visited Washington, D.C. for a collective action. Joining others in a solidarity march on Capitol Hill was a catalyst in her political activism.

Clearly, there is still more research that needs to be done in understanding why some undocumented youth become politically and socially empowered, while others, to put it in their words, remain "in the shadows." Further analysis of this research will begin to answer these questions as well. Still, it is already clear that new media placed in the hands of DREAMer youth, inspired by a collective vision and supported by the community, has created a powerful movement for social change.

Civic Paths is very proud of the timely and ground-breaking work which Zimmerman has done on this case study, and we hope you will take the time to check out her full report.

Future Civic Paths white papers will deal with the network of fan activists around the Harry Potter Alliance, the Nerdfighters, and Imagine Better; the activities and institutions supporting the Students for Liberty movement; and the politicization of Moslem-American youth in the wake of 9/11.

Up, Up and Away!: The Power and Potential of Fan Activism

As I continue to catch up on events which occurred while I was out of the country, I want to direct my readers to the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on "fan activism" which I co-edited with Sangita Shreshtova and the members of our Civic Paths research team. The initial call for papers appeared on this blog several years ago and thanks to your help, we were able to pull together an exceptional range of articles, representing many different forms of fan activism from around the world. The issue is now online and has already started to generate a fair amount of attention, but I wanted to make sure my regular blog readers had a chance to see what we produced. As you will see, many of my talks across Europe drew on this material, and our team is continuing to do work around this topic with the goal of producing a book length study of new forms of cultural activism in the not-too-distant future.

Below, I share the introduction to the special issue I wrote with Shreshtova. It should give you some sense of the range of materials we have assembled here. You are strongly encouraged to go to the online journal itself to read any or all of the essays described here.



Up, Up and Away! The Power and Potential of Fan Activism

by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shreshtova

[Fandom] is built on psychological mechanisms that are relevant to political involvement: these are concerned with the realm of fantasy and imagination on the one hand, and with emotional processes on the other...The remaining question then becomes whether and how politics can borrow from the elements of popular culture that produce these intense audience investments, so that citizenship becomes entertaining.

--Liesbeth van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen

Scratch an activist and you're apt to find a fan. It's no mystery why: fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our "real" lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to imagine alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism.

--Steven Duncombe, "Imagining No-Place"

In 2011, American political leaders and activists were surprisingly concerned with an 80-plus-year-old popular culture icon: Superman. When presidential candidate Rick Perry was asked by a 9-year-old child during a campaign stop which superhero he would want to be, the tough-talking Texan chose the man from Krypton, because "Superman came to save the United States!" (Well 2011). At almost that same moment, conservative commentators were up in arms because in an alternative universe DC comics story, Superman denounced his American citizenship to embrace a more global perspective: "I'm tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy. 'Truth, Justice, and the American way!'--It's not enough any more." Right-wing rage was expressed by one FoxNews.com reader: "This is absolutely sickening. We are now down to destroying all American Icons. How are we going to survive as a Nation?" (Appelo 2011). Such responses suggest a widespread recognition that popular mythologies may provide the frames through which the public makes sense of its national identity.

Meanwhile, immigrant rights activists were questioning when Superman ever became an American citizen or whether he even possessed a green card, given that he entered the country without permission and, we must presume, without documentation, a refugee from a society in turmoil who has sought to hide his origins and identity from outside scrutiny ever since.

Hari Kondabolu, a South Asian comedian, recorded a video entitled "Superman as Immigrant Rights Activist," distributed through Colorlines , asking why no one ever tried to deport Superman for "stealing jobs" and suggesting that other immigrants might wear glasses, like Clark Kent does, to mask their identities. Photographer Dulce Pinzon produced a powerful set of images depicting a range of (mostly Marvel) superheroes performing the jobs often done by undocumented workers. As Thomas Andrae (1987; see also Engle 1987) has noted, at the time of his origins in the late Depression era, Superman adopted an explicitly political stance ("the champion of the oppressed") rather than the more vaguely civic orientation of subsequent decades. As Matt Yockey demonstrates in regard to Wonder Woman in this issue, superheroes have long functioned as mythological figures or rhetorical devices for debates around identity politics. Even DC Comics has described Superman as "the ultimate immigrant" (Perry 2011).

Arely Zimmerman (forthcoming), a postdoc with the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (part of USC's Civic Paths Project), interviewed 25 undocumented youth activists involved in the campaign to pass the Dream Act. She was struck by how often superheroes cropped up in her exchanges. One respondent described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like "finding other X-Men." Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself "proud" and "undocumented" had parallels to the parallels to the experience of Spider-Man, who had removed his mask on national television during Marvel's Civil Wars story line. A graphic created for an online recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth volunteers might aspire to become.

On the one hand, we might read these various deployments of the superheroes as illustrating the trends Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) describes: groups promoting social change are tapping the affective and imaginative properties of popular culture to inspire a more intense connection with their supporters. In this issue, Jonathan Gray shows similar appropriations of images from Star Wars and a range of other popular media franchises during labor rights protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Gray argues that such images (which have also been widely associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement) proliferate because popular culture, especially blockbuster franchises, constitutes a common reference point (shared between fans and more casual consumers) within an otherwise diverse and fragmented coalition of protestors and observers. Gray stresses the morale and community-building work performed through the remixing of popular culture for those gathered in an icy Wisconsin winter to express their support for collective bargaining. Zimmerman (forthcoming) also suggests that the Dream activists' use of pop culture references might be understood as part of a larger strategy to signal their assimilation into American culture. Given how much contemporary speech of all kinds is full of snarky pop culture references, it is not surprising that such references are also reshaping our political rhetoric, especially as campaigns seek to speak to young people who have famously felt excluded from traditional campaigns and have often been turned off by inside-the-beltway language. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to Washington!

Yet as the epigraph from Duncombe (this issue) suggests, such popular culture references also reflect the lived experiences of activists who also are fans, whether understood in the casual sense of someone who feels a strong emotional connection to a particular narrative or in the more active sense of someone who has participated in a fan community or engaged in transformative practices. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s deployed biblical allusions because part of what they shared were meaningful experiences within black church congregations. Zimmerman's Dream activists referenced superheroes because reading and discussing comics was part of their everyday lives as young people, because these references helped them think through their struggles, because they offer such vivid embodiments of heroic conflicts and deep commitments. Unlike Perry, who had only a faint recollection of Superman's mythology and acknowledged that he was no longer actively reading comics, these allusions to superhero comics were apt rather than opportunistic, grounded in a deep appreciation of who these characters are and how their stories have evolved over time. That is, they show the kinds of mastery we associate with fans. Here, we see what Duncombe describes as the fan within the activist.

However, we can push the idea of fan activism one step farther: by now, the capacity of fan communities to quickly mobilize in reaction to a casting decision or a threat of cancellation has been well established, going back to the now-legendary letter-writing campaign in the 1960s that kept Star Trek on the air. Fan groups have also had a long history of lending their support to the favorite causes of popular performers and producers, or more generally working in support of charity. Some slash fans, for example, have been motivated to march in gay rights parades, raise money for AIDS research and awareness, or, more recently, work in support of marriage equality. Fans have rallied to challenge attempts to regulate the Internet, restrict their deployment of intellectual property, or censor their content. For example, in this issue, Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski trace the responses of Japanese otaku, involved in the creation of dôjinshi (underground comics), to metropolitan Tokyo ordinance Bill 156, which they perceived as an attempt to curtain their artistic freedom.

More recent efforts (such as Racebending, the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, the Nerdfighters) deploy these same strategies and tactics to support campaigns for social justice and human rights, inspiring their supporters to move from engagement within participatory culture to involvement in political life. Fan activism of the kinds we've known about for years models many effective approaches for using social media to create awareness and mobilize supporters--tactics now being adopted by even traditional charities and activist organizations as they adapt to a networked society.

All of this suggests the urgent need for scholars to explore more fully the many different potential relationships between fandom and political life, since fan studies as a research paradigm has something vital to contribute to larger considerations of the relationship between participatory culture and civic engagement. Fan studies has long depicted fandom as a site of ideological and cultural resistance to the heteronormative and patriarchal values often shaping mass media. Such work is and remains highly valuable as we seek to understand the place of fandom in contemporary culture, but our focus here pushes beyond abstract notions of cultural resistance to focus on specific ways that fan culture has affected debates around law and public policy. Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts.

Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement.



Political participation and fan activism

This issue's two editors are part of the Civic Paths Project research group, housed in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California. This group has partnered with the Spencer and MacArthur foundations to try to document new forms of political participation that are affecting the lives of young people. Our work is part of a larger research network that is trying to develop a model for understanding what is being called participatory politics. Through our internal discussions, we had begun to identify the concept of fan activism as central to addressing larger questions about what might motivate young people, who are often described as apathetic, to join civic and political organizations. We had located a core body of scholarship, such as the work of van Zoonen (2005), which examined how the playful, affective, and fantasy aspects of fandom were starting to inform political discourse, or the work of Earl and Kimport (2009), which discussed fan online campaigns as part of a larger exploration of what networked politics might look like, or the work of Daniel Dayan (2005), which debated the similarities and differences between audiences and publics. We had already identified some powerful examples of how fan-based groups had helped support civic learning and had developed resources and practices that could quickly mobilize supporters behind emergencies, charities, or human rights campaigns.

We knew that there must be many more examples out there. Still, after we released the call for papers, we were blown away by the range of submissions we received from all over the world, describing other examples of fan activism in practice, debating why calls for fan participation sometimes yield spectacular results and other times fall flat, contesting the borders of fan activism, speculating about its contributions to the public sphere, and making important distinctions between top-down celebrity-run models and bottom-up participatory ones. As you will see, this issue is overflowing with cutting-edge work that takes fans seriously as political agents and that draws on a range of different theories of citizenship and democracy to explain what happens when fans act as citizens. Examples here encompass a wide variety of fandoms--Harry Potter, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Colbert Report, comic books, pop music, and Bollywood.



Essays in this issue

The Civic Paths team is well represented here, with a cluster of three essays offering multiple and complimentary frames for discussing fan activism, and two other contributors (Ritesh Mehta and Alex Leavitt) are active group members. Taking a deep dive into the existing literature around cultural and political participation, Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova provide an overview of core debates surrounding fan activism, including the diverse forms that participation may take, the tension between resistance and participation as competing models, the value of affect and content worlds, and the criteria by which we might measure such campaigns' success and sustainability. They argue that the study of fan activists may make a significant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about citizenship and political engagement.

Henry Jenkins maps the history of fan-based activism, providing a context for understanding the Harry Potter Alliance, perhaps the most highly visible of the new generation of fan activist groups. Jenkins defines fan activism as "forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture" (¶1.8). By exploring the concept of "cultural acupuncture," a phrase coined by HPA's founder, Andrew Slack, Jenkins explores how fannish borrowings from J. K. Rowling's fictions inspire and inform the group's diverse interventions (from an initial focus on human rights and genocide in Darfur to more recent campaigns pushing Warner Bros. to tie their chocolate contracts to fair trade principles).

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama share some of the results of Civic Path's extensive fieldwork, interviewing young participants from the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children, the latter a San Diego-based human rights organization that deploys various forms of participatory culture to motivate high school and college students to become more aware of how Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has kidnapped and conscripted child soldiers. Tracing the trajectories by which these young people become more deeply involved in these efforts, the authors suggest the importance of shared media experiences, rich content worlds, and a desire to help in changing how young people see themselves as political agents. From an initial focus on fan activism, the Civic Paths project has expanded the scope of its research to consider the participatory culture practices associated with Dream Act activism, the efforts of college-aged libertarians, the work of the Nerd Fighters and Imagine Better, and the political and cultural activities of Muslim American youth, each offering models for understanding the cultural and political factors affecting the lives of contemporary American young people.

Ashley Hinck extends this special issue's consideration of the Harry Potter Alliance, drawing on core concepts from the literature of social movements and the public sphere. Focusing primarily on their campaign around Darfur, she argues that the HPA taps into the world of Hogwarts to construct what Hinck calls a "public engagement keystone," defined here as a "touchpoint, worldview, or philosophy that makes other people, actions, and institutions intelligible" (¶4.6). The fact that Harry Potter is so widely read, known, and loved not only by hard-core fans but by many who are not part of fandom makes it a useful resource for bridging the two, helping to revitalize public discourse around human rights concerns in Africa. Lili Wilkinson also explores the value of content worlds from popular culture in facilitating new kinds of political interactions, in this case through an application of Foucault's notion of heterotopia to understanding the links between John Green's young adult novel Paper Towns and his involvement in the Nerdfighters, an informal network of young people who use social media and video blogging to "reduce world suck." Though coming from different theoretical backgrounds, Kligler-Vilenchik et al., Hinck, and Wilkinson all converge around the importance of reimaging the world through shared fantasies.

Another central strand running through the discussion has to do with the differences between efforts of celebrities (authors such as John Green, pop stars such as Hong Kong's Ho Denise Wan See, cult television actors such as Gillian Anderson, filmmakers such as Kevin Smith, television show runners such as Joss Whedon, and comedians such as Stephen Colbert) to mobilize their fans around their pet causes and more grassroots efforts by fans to draw resources from popular culture to help fuel their own efforts at social change. A group like Nerdfighters straddles the line between the two--they are partially a response to the ongoing cultural productions of the brothers John and Hank Green (as Wilkinson suggests) but also a much more open-ended, participatory space, where anyone who wants to claim the nerdfighter identity can produce media and rally support behind his or her own ideas about what might constitute a better society. Lucy Bennett offers a critical review of the literature surrounding celebrity-based activism, exploring how such causes often take off because of the sense of intimacy the stars create with their following. Bethan Jones challenges a tradition of research that has tended to pathologize the parasocial relations between media fans and celebrities by describing the ways that X-Files cast member Gillian Anderson was able to inspire her fans to raise money for various charities. Tanya R. Cochran examines the efforts of Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Angel, Dollhouse) to use his blog to increase awareness about sexual violence against women. Cochran sees Whedon's promotion of feminism as consistent with the focus on strong female characters across his television series, reinforcing the themes that draw fans to his properties in the first place.

The idea that the personality of celebrities, as much as the themes of popular fictions, may shape what issues fan activists embrace (and in this case, which issues generate little or no response) is further explored in Tom Phillips's exploration of the failed attempt by Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma) at stimulating fans to write letters to Southwest Airlines when the filmmaker was removed from his flight because he was viewed as "too fat to fly." Although the incident sparked online conversations around "corporate practice, body image, and consumer rights" (¶0.1), Smith's fans were not able to cohere around a strategy for exerting pressure on the airline. Cheuk Yi Lin explores why a sexually ambiguous pop star in Hong Kong has offered fans new language and images to represent their own erotic identities, but her queer fans have not coalesced into institutional politics around the rights of sexual minorities. Any urge toward more overtly political responses are dampened both by the cultural traditions of Hong Kong and by the institutional structures surrounding the fandom.

Although the first wave of research has stressed the potentials for fan activism, such practices are still relatively rare, with most forms of fandom stopping at the level of creative expression and not translating into collective action. For this reason, studies such as those by Phillips and Lin, which help us to understand the constraints on fan activism, may prove as useful in the long term as those studies which document successful models for translating fan investments into social change. Further challenging a utopian view of fan activism, Sun Jung explores antifandom around the K-Pop star Tablo, showing how some fan discourse may incorporate intense nationalism and even racism, even as other groups actively and productively challenge these discourses.

Contributing to van Zoonen's notion of the entertained citizen, several articles engage the direct connection between the political sphere (as traditionally defined) and participatory cultures. Andreas Jungherr investigates the German federal elections in 2009, arguing that citizen use of new media platforms and practices challenges the candidates' top-down communication practices. Contrasting design and deployment of such strategies across the German political spectrum, Jungherr finds that the participatory possibilities of emerging political practices vary depending on ideology. Jungherr concludes that the more liberal German Social Democrats (SPD) were more successful in designing an online environment that supported grassroots participation than the German conservative party (CDU). In the United States, The Colbert Report, a satirical late-night television program featuring Stephen Colbert, a character who is a parody of conservative media personalities, further blurs the lines between politics and entertainment. Marcus Schulzke shows how the program encouraged audiences to remix content and otherwise manipulate the words and images of political figures in ways that foster critical media literacies. By now, the idea that young Americans are as apt to learn about the political system through such news-comedy programs as from traditional journalism has become commonplace, while the program producers have sought to link creative expression and political participation to what it means to be a fan of their shows.

The simultaneously transnational and local dimensions of fan activism are another strand that runs through this issue. With examples of fan activism that include South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Australia, and India, the essays in this issue expand the transnational dimensions of fan activism. These examples highlight some of the similarities between various instances and discussions of fan activism (including the role of communities and content worlds, catalyzing moments, and challenges to sustained mobilization), but we are also acutely sensitive to the local dimensions and specifications of these mobilizations. In sharp contrast to the United States, where we are constantly working to establish participatory culture links to the political sphere, Aswin Punathambekar aptly observes that the connection between participatory culture and politics is "not news to anyone in India." Punathambekar goes even further, observing that the struggle in India is to, in fact, demonstrate the "ordinariness of participatory culture." Complementing this observation, and using a public protest inspired by the a Bollywood film to demonstrate his argument, Ritesh Mehta proposes "flash activism" as a crucial element of India's civil society.

Kony 2012



The power and challenges of activism through fanlike engagement with content worlds came into sharp focus with Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign, an effort to increase public awareness of the human rights violations and genocide conducted by a Ugandan warlord. At the time of writing, the 30-minute Kony 2012 film released at 12 PM on March 5, 2012, has topped 76 million views on YouTube to become one of the most viewed and fastest-spreading videos in YouTube history. In The Daily Show's coverage of Kony 2012 on March 12, 2012, host Jon Stewart sets up the popularity of the film by saying, "This guy Kony is probably dropping some sick beats." The show cuts to an excerpt from Kony 2012 in which Jason Russell's voice describes the war crimes committed by the LRA set to images of what we gather are victims of those atrocities. We now cut back to a shocked Jon Stewart who goes on to exclaim, "So a thirty-minute video on child soldiers has gone viral--how popular can this thing be? I am sure it's not teenage girl sings song about day of the week hot." The show cuts to mainstream news media coverage of Kony 2012 focused on its extraordinary reach.

Given this almost overwhelming visibility, the film--and with it Invisible Children as an organization--was the subject of sharp debate. In the following days, IC's financials, their activities in Uganda, and their support of military action to "bring Joseph Kony to justice" were examined, debated, and critiqued ad nauseam in news media, through discussion forums, and on IC's own public Facebook page. The importance of these issues notwithstanding, these debates have by and large failed to recognize why the IC has been so incredibly spreadable (to borrow Henry Jenkins's term). Yes, the film is very well edited, and yes, its message, "make Kony famous," is compelling. But as Henry Jenkins (2012) points out, the success of the Kony 2012 YouTube campaign owes much to the fanlike support IC has built around its films over its past eight years of existence. In asking their supporters to reach out to a range of celebrities and policy makers who have a high level of visibility through social media, the organization also tapped into the desire of fans to see their favorites take a stand on issues that matter to them. With Kony 2012, IC activated this supporter base, which then willingly, strategically, and enthusiastically tweeted, posted, and then reposted the film to set its phenomenal spread in motion. They supported it with such fervor that they surpassed IC's goal of getting 500,000 views by the end of 2012 within a few hours.

IC and its supporters were caught off guard by the barrage of criticism levied at Kony 2012. Some, such as Ethan Zuckerman (2012), have suggested that the rapid spread of the video was a consequence of its simplification of complex political issues, wondering how online networks might be deployed to further complicate and nuance the frames that it proposes. As Civic Paths researcher Lana Swartz (2012) suggests, IC focused more on having their media be spreadable (widely circulated) rather than drillable (open to deeper investigation). For example, before Kony 2012, few IC supporters were encouraged to actively seek out more information about the Lord's Revolutionary Army, the militia that Kony heads. Instead, they were generally content with carefully replicating the accurate but somewhat simplistic narrative they received through IC's media. Fans of many media franchises have sought to drill deeper into their content worlds, trying to encapsulate everything that was known about what happened on the island in Lost or expanding the story line through fan fiction writing projects. In this way, fandom's search for hidden depths in seemingly simple texts offers an alternative model for how a group like IC might achieve the more nuanced framing Zuckerman sought and might give their rank-and-file members greater skills at parsing competing truth claims made about what is happening on the ground in Uganda.

In our call for submissions, we set out to understand how the imaginative practices supported by fandom, at times facilitated by digital media, may inform civic and political mobilization and how we may rethink our understanding of engagement in the civic and political spheres through the lens of fandom. The articles included in this issue not only exceed these objectives, but they also point to the extreme timeliness of this endeavor. From undocumented superheroes to humanitarian assistance in the name of Harry Potter, fandom clearly has a lot to teach us about activism in the age of social media and participatory culture.

5. Acknowledgments

Based at the University of Southern California, the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (MAPP) is part of Civic Paths Project. The project gratefully acknowledges support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) and the Spencer Foundation.

We thank the authors in this issue, whose original work makes TWC possible; the peer reviewers, who freely provide their time and expertise; the editorial team members, whose engagement with and solicitation of material is so valuable; and the production team members, who transform rough manuscripts into publishable documents.

The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in an editorial capacity: Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova (guest editors); Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Anne Kustritz, Patricia Nelson, and Suzanne Scott (Symposium); and Louisa Stein (Review).

The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in a production capacity: Rrain Prior (production editor); Beth Friedman, Shoshanna Green, and Mara Greengrass (copyeditors); Wendy Carr, Kristen Murphy, and sunusn (layout); and Kallista Angeloff, Amanda Georgeanne Michaels, Carmen Montopoli, and Vickie West (proofreaders).

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

TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 10: Katherine Chen, Bertha Chin, Matthew Costello, Ashley Hinck, Ian Hunter, Alex Jenkins, Jeffrey Jones, Rachael Joo, Deborah Kaplan, Flourish Klink, Michael Koulikov, Bingchun Meng, Christopher Moreman, Nele Noppe, Amy Shuman, Fred Turner, Emily Wills, and Ethan Zuckerman.

Note

1. These quotes are excerpted from interviews carried out by Arely Zimmerman for the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics Project between December 2010 and July 2011. Institutional review board approval was secured for this research.

Works cited

Andrae, Thomas. 1987. "From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of Superman," in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, edited by Donald Lazare. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Appelo, Tom. 2011. "Superman Renounces US Citizenship, as Warners, DC Comics Bids for Global Audiences." Hollywood Reporter, April 28.

Dayan, Daniel. 2005. "Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences and Publics." In Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, edited by Sonia Livingstone, 43-76. London: Intellect.

Earl, Jennifer, and Katrina Kimport. 2009. "Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online." Sociological Theory 27:220-43. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01346.x.

Engle, Gary. 1987. "What Makes Superman So Darned American?" In Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend, edited by Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle. Cleveland, OH: Octavia.

Jenkins, Henry. 2012. "Contextualizing #Kony2012: Invisible Children, Spreadable Media, and Transmedia Activism." Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 12. http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/conte....

Perry, Alexander. 2011. "The Immigrant Superman." Arte Y Vida Chicago, September 1.

Swartz, Lana. 2012. "Invisible Children: Transmedia, Storytelling, Mobilization." Working Paper, March 11.

van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Well, Dan. 2011. "Candidates' Favorite Super Hero: Superman Chosen by Four," Newsmax, December 29.

Zimmerman, Arely. Forthcoming. DREAM Case Project Report. Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Zuckerman, Ethan. 2012. "Unpacking Kony 2012." My Heart's in Accra, March 8.

Videos from Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

Sometimes it's easy, sometime's its hard.

We've had ongoing success in building a community around the Future of Entertainment Consortium's west coast event, Transmedia Hollywood, which is jointly produced each year through a collaboration between University of Southern California and University of California-Los Angeles (or as they would put it, University of California-Los Angeles and University of Southern California). But, this year's conference seemed to be under some kind of black cloud. We never have had so much difficulty lining up speakers, so much last minute shuffling of presenters. On top of that, the event will be known as the year without Henry, since I ended up in the hospital on the eve of the event, ended up missing most of the day as I fought my way through the bureaucracy to get released. And, then, we faced epic delays getting the videos out to the world.

Well, the videos are finally here and, despite the struggles, we are still very proud of what we were able to produce -- the speakers are, as always, lively and thought provoking, a rich mix of academics and folks from many different sectors of the entertainment industry, and the content remains timely, capturing some of the key transitions shaping the entertainment industry today and bringing an ever stronger transnational focus to the mix, as we are connecting more and more with folks creating transmedia content around the world.

With the growth of transmedia and creative industries/production studies focused classes at universities around the world, we hope these videos will prove to be important resources for use in the classroom or to assist researchers who would not otherwise have access to insider perspectives within the media industries.

Above all, enjoy! And if you find something interesting, help us spread the word.

Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

As transmedia models become more central to the ways that the entertainment industry operates, the result has been some dramatic shifts within production culture, shifts in the ways labor gets organized, in how productions get financed and distributed, in the relations between media industries, and in the locations from which creative decisions are being made.

This year's Transmedia, Hollywood examines the ways that transmedia approaches are forcing the media industry to reconsider old production logics and practices, paving the way for new kinds of creative output. Our hope is to capture these transitions by bringing together established players from mainstream media industries and independent producers trying new routes to the market. We also hope to bring a global perspective to the conversation, looking closely at the ways transmedia operates in a range of different creative economies and how these different imperatives result in different understandings of what transmedia can contribute to the storytelling process - for traditional Hollywood, the global media industries, and for all the independent media-makers who are taking up the challenge to reinvent traditional media-making for a "connected" audience of collaborators.

Many of Hollywood's entrenched business and creative practices remain deeply mired in the past, weighed down by rigid hierarchies, interlocking bureaucracies, and institutionalized gatekeepers (e.g. the corporate executives, agents, managers, and lawyers). In this volatile moment of crisis and opportunity, as Hollywood shifts from an analog to a digital industry, one which embraces collaboration, collectivity, and compelling uses of social media, a number of powerful independent voices have emerged. These include high-profile transmedia production companies such as Jeff Gomez's Starlight Runner Entertainment as well as less well-funded and well-staffed solo artists who are coming together virtually from various locations across the globe. What these top-down and bottom-up developments have in common is a desire to buck tradition and to help invent the future of entertainment. One of the issues we hope to address today is the social, cultural, and industrial impact of these new forms of international collaboration and mixtures of old and new work cultures.

Another topic is the future of independent film. Will creative commons replace copyright? Will crowdsourcing replace the antiquated foreign sales model? Will the guilds be able to protect the rights of digital laborers who work for peanuts? What about audiences who work for free? Given that most people today spend the bulk of their leisure time online, why aren't independent artists going online and connecting with their community before committing their hard-earned dollars on a speculative project designed for the smallest group of people imaginable - those that frequent art-house theaters?

Fearing obsolescence in the near future, many of Hollywood's traditional studios and networks are looking increasingly to outsiders - often from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue - to teach these old dogs some new tricks. Many current studio and network executives are overseeing in-house agencies, whose names - Sony Interactive Imageworks, NBC Digital, and Disney Interactive Media Group - are meant to describe their cutting-edge activities and differentiate themselves from Hollywood's old guard.

Creating media in the digital age is "nice work if you can get it," according to labor scholar Andrew Ross in a recent book of the same name. Frequently situated in park-like "campuses," many of these new, experimental companies and divisions are hiring large numbers of next generation workers, offering them attractive amenities ranging from coffee bars to well-prepared organic food to basketball courts. However, even though these perks help to humanize the workplace, several labor scholars (e.g. Andrew Ross, Mark Deuze, Rosalind Gill) see them as glittering distractions, obscuring a looming problem on the horizon - a new workforce of "temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants."

While the analog model still dominates in Hollywood, the digital hand-writing is on the wall; therefore, the labor guilds, lawyers, and agent/managers must intervene to find ways to restore the eroding power/leverage of creators. In addition, shouldn't the guilds be mindful of the new generation of digital laborers working inside these in-house agencies? What about the creative talent that emerges from Madison Avenue ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, makers of the Asylum 626 first-person horror experience for Doritos; or Grey's Advertising, makers of the Behind the Still collective campaign for Canon? Google has not only put the networks' 30-second ad to shame using Adword, but its Creative Labs has taken marketing to new aesthetic heights with its breathtaking Johnny Cash [collective] Project. Furthermore, Google's evocative Parisian Love campaign reminds us just how intimately intertwined our real and virtual lives have become.

Shouldn't Hollywood take note that many of its most powerful writers, directors, and producers are starting to embrace transmedia in direct and meaningful ways by inviting artists from the worlds of comic books, gaming, and web design to collaborate? These collaborations enhance the storytelling and aesthetic worlds tenfold, enriching "worlds" as diverse as The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cable's The Walking Dead. Hopefully, this conference will leave all of us with a broader understanding of what it means to be a media maker today - by revealing new and expansive ways for artists to collaborate with Hollywood media managers, audiences, advertisers, members of the tech culture, and with one another.

Once the dominant player in the content industry, Hollywood today is having to look as far away as Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue for collaborators in the 2.0 space.

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA

Panelists:

Nick Childs, Executive Creative Director, Fleishman Hillard

Jennifer Holt, co-Director, Media Industries Project, UCSB

Lee Hunter, Global Head of Marketing, YouTube

Jordan Levin, CEO, Generate

In countries with strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape. How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies?

Moderator: Laurie Baird, Strategic Consultant - Media and Entertainment at Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology.

Panelists:

Jesse Albert, Producer & Consultant in Film, Television, Digital Media, Live Events & Branded Content

Morgan Bouchet, Vice-President, Transmedia and Social Media, Content Division, Orange

Christy Dena, Director, Universe Creation 101

Sara DIamond, President, Ontario College of Art and Design University

Mauricio Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer, Co-founder of The Alchemists

A new generation of media makers are taking art out of the rarefied world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and putting it back in the hands of the masses, creating immersive, interactive, and collaborative works of transmedia entertainment, made for and by the people who enjoy it most.

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA.

Panelists:

Tara Tiger Brown, Freelance Interactive Producer/Product Manager

Mike Farah, President of Production, Funny Or DIe

Ted Hope, Producer/Partner/Founder, Double Hope Films

Sheila C. Murphy, Associate Professor, University of Michigan

By many accounts, the comics industry is failing. Yet, comics have never played a more central role in the entertainment industry, seeding more and more film and television franchises. What advantages does audience-tested content bring to other media? What do the producers owe to those die-hard fans as they translate comic book mythology to screen? And why have so many TV series expanded their narrative through graphic novels in recent years?

Moderator: Geoffrey Long, Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios.

Panelists:

Katherine Keller, Culture Vultures Editrix at Sequential Tart

Joe LeFavi, Quixotic Transmedia

Mike Richardson, President, Dark Horse Comics

Mark Verheiden, Writer (Falling Skies, Heroes)

Mary Vogt, Costume Designer (Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Men In Black)

For those of you who live on the East Coast, here's the latest news from Sam Ford, who is hard at work planning the next Futures of Entertainment conference:

We have just announced that FoE6 will be Friday, Nov. 9, and Saturday, Nov. 10, in the Wong Auditorium at MIT. Panels will tackle subjects such as the the ethics and politics of curation, corporate listening and empathy, "the shiny new object syndrome," new distribution models in a digital age, and rethinking copyright. We will also look specifically at innovations in storytelling and sports, in video games, in public media, and in civic media.

Information on the tentative schedule, as well as registration, is available here.