Looking for (Lesbian) Love: Social Media Subtext Readings of Rizzoli and Isles
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Presentation from IR16, the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Using Fiske’s (1989) semiotic supermarket metaphor, I examine how Twitter users mix and match moments from Rizzoli and Isles to create a coherent lesbian subtext. To do so, I use tweets containing the portmanteau hashtag #Rizzles or the related tag #Gayzzoli posted during two different episodes of the show. Live tweeting affords us an opportunity to eavesdrop on viewers’ listening activities and provides data useful for testing theories about reading/viewing and participation. I demonstrate the utility of analyzing live tweeting and provide examples of how live tweeters publicly read resistant subtexts.
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Looking for (Lesbian) Love: Social Media Subtext Readings of Rizzoli and Isles
- 1. Looking for (Lesbian) Love: Social Media Subtext Readings of Rizzoli and Isles Libby Hemphill, PhD Illinois Institute of Technology libby.hemphill@iit.edu @libbyh
- 16. why not just another femslash?
- 20. social media for social change
- 22. semiotics and identity work
- 23. future research
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Thanks for coming. I’m excited to be here at my first AOIR conference. The last couple of days have made it clear this is a great group of people for me to hear from and learn from, and I’m looking forward to talking to you about this project about lesbian subtext readings of Rizzoli and Isles.
- I started this project just trying to see whether Fiske’s semiotic supermarket notion made sense now that we have data about how audiences read TV shows in real time. He argued that by “listening more or less attentively to different voices” within the show, viewers (or readers) are able to assemble their own texts. He used examples from Hart to Hart to illustrate how this could be possible. I mention this because Hart to Hart was also about a murder-solving duo, and it's been reimagined with gay male characters a couple of times since. So it’s only natural that I would use a queer reading of a crime show to test his theory. Anyway, I wondered whether there was data within these live tweet streams to test Fiske’s theory. Could we find evidence of polysemic readings? Could we see users locating their identity in the margins of mainstream media? We know from the many studies of fan fiction that fans do actually selectively attend to various voices in a show, at least later while they’re actively making sense of those voices by recasting them in their own creative works of prose or video. Fan studies has taken fan fiction writers and vidders and convention-goers pretty seriously, but it has mostly ignored or dismissed fans who enact their fandom without creating.
- Rizzoli and Isles is a buddy cop drama on TNT. It airs during the summer and is the one of the most popular original shows TNT has ever had. It’s based on the series of crime novels written by Tess Gerritsen. The main characters - Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles - are straight, white women who work as a homicide detective and a medical examiner in Boston and are best friends. Or so the texts would have you believe.
- A small community of viewers have embraced a different reading of the characters in which Jane and Maura are a romantic couple. The lesbian subtext reading is popular enough to occasionally trend on Twitter during the show and to warrant a dedicated recap on AfterEllen, a pop culture site that covers lesbian/bi and queer pop culture and recaps many lesbian and bi story lines in other shows. The Twitter hashtags #gayzzoli and #rizzles preceded the subtext recaps - fans clamored for subtext recaps from AfterEllen shortly after the show started in July 2010. I’ll show you a couple of short clips from Season 4’s first episode and then we’ll talk about how #rizzles and #gayzzoli fans reacted.
- Virtually no tweets about the “A” plot appear in this tweet stream - except for a couple “who dunnit” guesses. These viewers instead comment on the relationship between the characters, compare it to stereotypes about lesbian relationships and (straight) marriages. They are revealing in the tweets what about the show “reads” gay and marking these particular moments as evidence or resources for the lesbian subtext reading. At other moments in the show, viewers focus on the physical contact between the characters and have even created an acronym - TGTGT - for “totally gratuitous, totally gay touching” to refer to certain physical interactions. In this scene, though Jane touches Maura, TGTGT tweets don’t appear. Instead, they comment on them working out and bickering. Even though physical contact was an available resource for the subtext in this scene, it’s not one viewers marshaled for their reading.
- Here we see subtext readers commenting on the characters’ gender identities and on their own attractions to the characters. These tweets code Maura as “butch” because of her mechanical knowledge - she can help Frankie fix his motorcycle. For these readers, this is a bit of a shift in their butch coding because they usually apply the butch label to Jane and use her pant suits and stereotypically-male job as evidence of her butch-ness. Through studying live tweeting like this, we are able to not only see support for Fiske’s theory of a semiotic supermarket but to see which products viewers select.
- But what makes this lesbian subtext reading different from slash or femslash? A few things. These readings are not derivative works like slash or femslash fiction. They are not new stories and are not copyrightable works in their own right. Some researchers argue that slash developed because there weren't interesting main female characters [Pugh, Rubio-Hernandez]. A sort of "shippers gonna ship” explanation about working with whatever material is available. But here we have two female leads, so it’s not really a missing material problem. Most notably for me, though, is that the readers of this subtext are usually queer women, and they’re reading their own, not just different, sexual identities on the characters. Jenkins argued that slash wasn't really about sex but rather about masculinity and male identity. Something similar is going on here - these subtext readings, even when they include TGTGT, don't often mention sex. Rather, they talk about the behaviors that mark the characters as lesbian and comment on how the characters enact that sexual identity through their interactions.
- These readers do identity work for lesbians and queer women generally through this public, collaborative, subtext reading, and likely for themselves as they play with the markers and rules about what constitutes a lesbian and a lesbian relationship. In the tweets I mentioned, they marked inappropriate behaviors (calling your girlfriend fat) and highlighted behaviors common in dominant narratives about straight married couples (bickering).
- These tweets say, “you shouldn't do that,” effectively policing what’s acceptable behavior for lesbians in relationships.
- Then, “lesbians can act married too,” affirms the validity of lesbian relationships by pointing out their similarities to dominant, acceptable straight marriages. Meanwhile, by doing these readings publicly, the tweeters are arguing for a place for lesbian romance in primetime [Meripunzel femslashers]. And it’s this socio-political implication that connects this project to my other work.
- Broadly, I’m interested in how users marshall social media in service of social change, and I’m naturally drawn to fans because many of their behaviors, like these subtext readings, do cultural commentary and social change work at the same time.
- These live tweets, when paired with the text, provide what are essentially semiotic supermarket receipts. We can see what items users select to create their texts and subtexts, and in doing so publicly, see how they use resistant readings to advance broader political agendas. We have evidence of the semiotics of identity work involved in constructing “lesbian”.
- Take questions if time is low, keep going if not.
- As is often the case in my social media work, reading data to answer one question - in this case to get more detail about viewers’ semiotic selections - leads to more questions. Here are some things I noticed in this data that I’ll be working on soon.
- What’s going on between the #rizzles fans and the show’s production team? Here’s one of the official promo shots for the fourth season, which these clips are from. The producers, writers, and actors on the show acknowledge the lesbian subtext reading publicly - probably most notably when Sasha Alexander suggested they rename the show Rizzoli on Isles during an appearance on Conan. When does this turn into gay baiting? Is the subtext enough? TKTKTK
- The presence of the #BooRadleyVanCullen hashtag in some of the #gayzzoli tweets indicates overlap between the viewership of Pretty Little Liars which airs on ABC Family right before Rizzoli and Isles and R&I. One of the 4 lead characters PLL, Emily Fields, is an out lesbian, and PLL has a dedicated lesbian fandom that uses the hashtag #BooRadleyVanCullen to talk about PLL. That hashtag, like #rizzles and #gayzzoli tag requires additional insider knowledge to find the conversation in the first place. #BooRadleyVanCullen was proposed by the PLL recapper as a way to talk about another character on the show who had elements of Boo Radley (from To Kill a Mockingbird) and Edward Cullen (from Twilight). The nickname and eventual hashtag was first used in the recap of the 6th episode of the 1st season in back in 2010. So I’m curious about how the lesbian subtext readings of these shows differ - some fans read a lesbian subtext between Emily and her straight friends, for instance. What about the relationships are fans using to create that reading? What does that tell us about how fans use social media to do their own sexual identity work? What roles do the community of #BooRadleyVanCullen and #rizzles tag users play in that identity work?