MS 190: Authorship is the course website for the Fall 2006 Media Studies senior seminar at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
on homosexual mash-ups
Submitted by maitriagain on 9 November 2006 - 8:30pm.
i remember my first introduction to youtube was when i was abroad in france, and i found an article online talking about how the trailer for brokeback mountain was being reappropriated with many other films - and how the resulting videos ranged in success. there was one for point break, heat, and many others, including brokeback to the future (probably my favorite). this article mentioned how carefully viewers must have been to know these films, to be able to lift and recontruct a new meaning to some charged "homosocial" scenes between two men. and seeing the closer + star trek mashup, i was wondering about the motivation behind it. i feel like there are some intersections to be found, thinking in terms of vito russo's celluloid closet, and how there was a homosexual subtext in many films under the hays code - and that still continues in modern films. the representations of male buddies/companions still seems to be something that can't be explored fully on screen, so it's interesting to see how these heterosexual friendships are parodied into suggesting homosexual relations on youtube. who is the creator of things like this? what is her/his purpose? for some reason, i have this hunch that it's a teenage boy who's doing it for shits and giggles, but then i wonder who the target audience is? beyond the immediate group of friends said author is sharing these works with, on youtube it opens up accessibility, and then a major paper (i think it was the nyt) reports on it... i wonder what this new message is. i noticed the comments on youtube for the star trek video were mostly focused on how this was funny - but also creepy. and in class, we all laughed to see the funny new way that back to the future was presented to us -- but what is really being said in cases like this?, i oan't help but wonder. and how come the ones i am familiar with usually involved suggesting male homosexual undertones made overt?
food for thought, i guess.
»
- maitriagain's blog
- Login to post comments
Fanfic and Slash...the quick and dirty version
There's a much larger fandom called fanfic, which involves the subset "slash". Facfic, means "fan fiction" and it's fictional stories written within the world and often using the characters created by a published author. Slash, is a pornographic subset of fanfic, the name comes from the tagging system which goes "Kirk/Spock".
While Harry Potter is probably one of the most fanficed texts today, it ranges as far afield as Bible fanfic and has its origins in Star Trek fanfic that was often a text version of that video remix, except for better developed. The reasons are pretty obvious. While video remixing requires using (at least mostly) original footage, which limits you to what was contained in the original media, in fanfic you can write whatever you want.
I have to say, I sincerely doubt your theory that these are mostly produced by 14 year old boys. I don't think they have the skills or the attention span and making anything that homoerotic would open them up to being ridiculed as a fag among their friend group. Prof. Fitzpatrick mentioned that most of the original Star Trek fanfic was written by women (it is presumed that most of them were straight) and one of the theories on why they did was to disrupt the patriarchal power invested in Capt. Kirk and Spock. Also maybe they just picked up on the homosocial underpinning of Kirk and Spock's relationship and thought it was hot.
As for the audience, I don't know about the video remixes, but fanfic sites have a broad and varied audience (as evidenced by the prescence of Trek slash, Potter slash, and Bible fanfic all in one place). While the writters and readers may be predominantly female, I wouldn't count on it.
As for why the subjects are mostly homosexual male pairings, it could be the "disrupting patriarchal hegemonies" theory mentioned in class (which I don't like because it's use of suggested homosexual relationships as a means of disempowering patriarchally empowered men is disempowering to the gay community in what I think are obvious ways) or it could just be that a survey of fiction and SciFi will demonstrate that the vast majority of characters and especially well developed main characters are men (think about Lord of the Rings, which has plenty of fanfic written about it, by the way).
I know something about fanfic as a few of my friends are fanfic writters and avid consumers, and I have, through association been exposed to a fair amount of fanfic (of the mostly Potter variety) myself, so feel free to ask me questions about the genre.