From Battlestar Galactica to BSG Studies?

Boston.
There's a whole panel on Battlestar Galactica here at MiT5 - how could I resist? Melanie E. S. Kohnen is the first speaker, presenting on Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination of Contemporary American History. She begins by noting the connections between the BSG story of a surprise attack on the twelve colonies, and the 9/11 attacks (although strictly speaking, in a full analogy, it would have been only the people within the Twin Towers who had survived). Different from the black-and-white positioning of the U.S. adminstration, however, the question of who is on which side is problematised strongly within BSG; it is almost impossible to determine who is human and who is Cylon in the BSG story. Melanie now describes the BSG scenario after settlement on New Caprica, where humans under Cylon rule are caught between collaboration and resistance (through suicide bombings and other oppositional actions) - this is personified in the opposition between Baltar and Roslin in the show.

Such portrayals break down simple binary oppositions, simple 'us vs. them' descriptions of political struggle. They can be seen as a direct commentary on the "War on Terror", of course, and also speak to other current themes within American politics. Side-stories within the BSG text address issues around civil liberties, the rights of prisoners of war, and the legitimacy of torture; the prominence of 'outdated', non-networked technology in the show also connects to present-day fears around the role of networks both as tools of oppositional organisations and as tools of warfare itself.

Sarah Toton is next, speaking on Reimagining Fan Culture: The Long Journey of Battlestar Galactica. She focusses on the online presence(s) of Battlestar Galactica, and here especially the BSG wiki, which exemplifies the reworking and remixing of BSG content by fans for fans. Indeed, Sarah credits fans with keeping the series alive after the initial television show was cancelled after only 17 episodes. BSG Websites are in essence analogous to the handful of ships which made up the Galactica fleet - a last remnant of community on the search for new horizons. The new version of BSG which was eventually produced also divided this community, however, as it was seen as an outside threat on the existing fan community. Some fans, in fact, called for a boycott of the new series; fans worried about their place in the new series and produced extremely negative commentary on the initial few episodes of the new series. And yet, the new show did become a success, especially after approval in the critical press - a new generation of fans flowed into the existing community.

Additionally, fans began to remix the new series in order to bring it into line more directly with their view of how the show should work. The Battlestar Wiki is one of the most exciting spaces in this context, but interestingly, in its strongly male contributorship it is also highly non-representative of the new BSG, which has a comparatively large number of female fans; this may be due to continuing wider gender divides in general online use, as well as especially also in the use of advanced technologies such as wikis. This also means that some important themes in the wiki remain left out so far - including, for example, any coverage of potential homosexual relationships within the BSG world. Creative interpretation of the BSG text in this environment still has some way to go...

Anne Kustritz is up next, presenting on Ownership and Desire: Fans' and Producers' Manipulation of Fictional Love Triangles. She begins by taking a detour to the Star Wars universe, where there was a strong fan call for introducing a female Boba Fett character, and the community of Lost fans where there is a collaborative but also competitive effort of fans to uncover the mysteries embedded in the text. Focus on such puzzles in the text ignores other potential fan uses of the text, which may be more interested simply in the stories of individual characters rather than the underlying mystery; this, however, is why there are increasing gender-crossing trends in many television genres, as it provides a wider range of motivations for continued fandom.

The new BSG provides such alternative motivations through its strong focus also on romantic triangles amongst its characters. Fans take this even further by introducing other romantic possibilities not sanctioned by the official text, and the rich range of characters in the new show provided ample opportunity for such imaginings; this was complicated, however, by a canonisation of some key relationships between characters, but also by a soap opera-like continuous recombination of emotional attachments. Such layered structures also run the risk of continually offending committed viewers by privileging or terminating the wrong relationships, however.

Julie Levin Russo is the last speaker, on Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies. She notes the reliance of television on mass culture's ability to reproduce itself, which both provides ground for cultural expression and for the ensnarement of audiences in the continuous change of familiar texts. Like the cylon/human baby produced in the show, then, cult television is 'the shape of things to come' - television's offspring is most successful when it combines both professional production and fan culture, and indeed the BSG Website offers a number of opportunities for fans to become involved in content production (through participation in blogs and submitting user-created fan media, for example).

Such active reinterpretation by fans rescues the narrative orphans of the BSG storyline, offering for example an opportunity for the identification of queer desire buried within the show. This is particularly prevalent in the creation of fan videos for BSG, many of which are shared on the iMeem site; many of these are created by female fans, and they differ markedly from the fan video content shared through the official Galactica Website, where the stock clips available for remixing consist largely of explosions and space battles, rather than any of the more interpersonal aspects of the show.

At the same time, in the show itself, systems of heteronormative containment are also in operation, when any form of sexual 'deviation' is associated with alien, cylon sexuality. These are undermined by fan intervention, however, as fan produsage of additional materials fills in the blanks left open by the source text.

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