In "Women, Star Trek, and
the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Coppa takes up the role of
medium theorist, analyzing fan video construction as an act of media criticism driven by feminist goals. Focusing her attention on the vids of the early Star Trek fandom, Coppa identifies the
ways in which Star Trek made way for
vidding through its metatextual and textual relationships with gender before
moving on to a discussion of the significance of the communal, female-run vidding process.
After noting a real-world example
of Star Trek's treatment of women
(Majel Barrett's demoted status as the "First Lady" of Star Trek, if no longer one of the
stars), Coppa moves on to discuss the textual politics surrounding Spock's
replacement of Number One as the series' scientifically-driven second-in-command
figure of identification for minority viewers. While her goal is not to analyze
Star Trek as a feminist text in and
of itself, Coppa provides enough context on the characters and relationships of
the series to support her argument that Spock has many characteristics that
female viewers find relatable. Guided by contrasting forces of technical
expertise and logic (textually apparent) and concealed emotionality and desire
(more easily overlooked, but a hot topic among discerning fans), Spock
struggles to balance competing aspects of his identity just as female fans
attempt to negotiate their status as individuals with geeky interests
traditionally coded as "masculine" as well as as women with emotional
and romantic desires. In the writers' removal of Number One from the narrative,
fans were robbed of a character-rich and complex figure of identification – and
this injustice against female subjectivity is certainly not the only one in the Star Trek universe. Coppa then goes
on to discuss the labor-intensity and creativity of the process of fanvid creation, stressing the significance of feminine repurposing of technology for the purpose
of "poaching" from their beloved texts in order to create content better
suited to feminine interests.
I agree with Coppa's argument
that fanvidding is a highly reconstructive form of fannish "poaching"
meant to ultimately yield greater satisfaction from the Star Trek universe than the source text alone can provide. Even more
so than fanfiction and fanart, fanvidding is a highly technical and
labor-intensive process which closely resembles the act of editing footage for the
original series itself; thus the act of reusing existing footage for a more pleasing
output helps female fans quite literally take the role of the director – a role
which is rarely occupied by women even today. In the case of the
meta-oriented fanvid "Pressure," Coppa comments that women were
"both… filmmakers and the stars," setting up female identification
figures for other fans while also controlling the action from behind the scenes
– a plurality of women that is rare in mainstream visual media even today. In
this way, vidders take on the role of Nurse Chapel – emotional and desirous – and the Enterprise – omniscient and technical
– in order to craft their own content for themselves and their peers, negotiating
a position of feminist geekdom that is not shafted to one side or the other,
but comfortably "both sides now." While far from idyllic - women are still forced to recreate their own niche, legally ambiguous texts from the scraps of mainstream media - it is a constructive and community-driven process that yields a satisfying output.
In her article, Francesca Coppa explains that vidding developed as a skillful critique of popular visual media, engaging gender and “issues of female representation, displacement, and marginalization” (Coppa 10). As demonstrated in “Pressure”, a vid produced by Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, vidding is a technically arduous, time-consuming process that enables women to re-contextualize popular media texts. This restructuring produces more satisfying representations of female identity, experiences, and interests–creating a feminine voice in a science fiction sphere dominated by men. While vid productions are legally ambiguous and only attract a small, niche audience, they successfully criticize and re-imagine science fiction.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, a niche of feminist video game critics and developers has developed that seeks to identify and improve upon the negative tropes against women that are rampant in the video game industry. These activists and independent game developers enter into the technical and skilled world of video gaming, an industry that is most associated with teenage boys and men, and creating new works that reflect feminine subjectivity. Through video critiques of common stereotypes in her Feminist Frequency YouTube series, Anita Sarkeesian, has worked to enlighten viewers of sexism in video games. Similarly, indie game developers, such as Zoe Quinn and others involved in The Fine Young Capitalists collective, have created games that explore female and other marginalized perspectives. For example, Depression Quest, a game produced by Quinn, allows players to simulate the experience of living with depression. As such, these women (and sympathetic men) have been working to broaden perspectives within video gaming, opening up the industry to more relegated constituencies.
Unfortunately, this transformation has received much backlash within online gamer communities, resulting in the #gamergate controversies. In response to their work, both Sarkeesian and Quinn have been subject to intense opposition–culminating in trolling, hacking, and death threats. This online aggression reflects the opposition to change held by a subset of gamers, but nonetheless, “there actually has been a movement in video games to tell more dynamic and positive stories featuring women, LGBT characters, racial minorities and other nontraditional demographics” (Jilani). Thus, just as “vidding is a form of collaborative critical thinking” responding to the disempowerment of women in popular science fiction, women and men keenly aware of inequalities have used technical productions to transform video gaming (Coppa 22).
See Zaid Jilani article on #gamergate: http://www.salon.com/2014/09/08/i_want_a_straight_white_male_gaming_convention_how_a_culture_war_exploded_in_the_video_gaming_world/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow