Queer Fandom: The Performance of Local Versus Networked TV Exhibition

• In Event: Dissenting Audiences: Networked Pedagogies of Race, Gender, and Labor in Digital Media

Abstract

What is queer reception? Through Open TV (beta), a Chicago-based platform for television by queer, trans, cis-women and artists of color, I explore how intersectional fans interpret and share pilots and series made by artists from their communities. This talk compares two cycles of programming and contrasts local (Chicago) and networked (social media) exhibition. The first ran from March 2015 and August 2016 and saw the premiere of six series and four pilots across genres and identities. These programs were screened in galleries, community- and artist-run spaces in neighborhoods across Chicago and subsequently published on four social media platforms, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The second cycle ran from January through August 2017, and by contrast, screened primarily in large centrally located institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Chicago Cultural Center, before going on five platforms, adding Tumblr. I argue local screenings of quare pilots revalues TV exhibition as pedagogical and historically situated, particularly showing the value for communities, artists and organizations of artists’ embodied and live performance (live-streaming or in physical space) and their interacting with audience. Networked exhibition contributes qualitatively to our understanding of how queer TV fans react vernacularly, but quantitative data provided by corporate social media platforms is limited by their lack of transparency about changes in algorithms and features and by the relative simplicity or lack of attention to the contours of race, gender, and sexuality.

Open TV (beta) marshals the experimentation necessary to produce art works and exhibit them to communities to re-scale story production toward artists and communities and away from legacy distributors. Open TV borrows from legacy television its methods for organizing development but adapts them for the flexibility of networked distribution and scale of independent production. The platform distributes indie pilots, original series (premiering on our platform, or “first run”) and syndicated series (re-publishing series or “second run”) by queer, transgender, cis-women and artists of color. I aim to focus on valuing artists and their communities: artists are not given notes beyond those necessary to complete projects at small scale; artists retain intellectual property; distribution agreements are non-exclusive; and financing strategies are shaped by artist and project. Queer networked development focuses production and exhibition on (1) cultural specificity and artistic sincerity while retaining queer theory’s embrace of disidentification from heteronormativity through performance and gesture, (2) television as a national forum, and (3) the productive capacities of failure. It offers a way to see value in television representation through an empirical understanding of sincerity in production and exhibition, foregrounding the perspectives of creators and their relationship to community as opposed to corporations’ focus on branded authenticity. Queer exhibition marshals underrepresented cultural performance to develop diverse community and to critique how legacy distributors value reception across online and offline spaces.

Author

• Aymar Jean Christian, Northwestern University