Can we assess transformativeness at all, or do we need to throw up our hands in despair? I believe that transformativeness can work as a fair use concept if we are willing to take remix seriously as the foundation of human culture. I will borrow here from Donna Haraway's important essay on cyborgs and feminism. lronically, I can't do justice to her concept here because I'm creating yet another hybrid by morphing it for my own purposes. Cyborgs mix the biological and technological, and in that, they are like artists. Most saliently, cyborgs are like digital artists: melding imagination with bits and megabytes. In fact, Haraway writes, "[w]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs," whether or not we notice how we've outsourced our memories to our Outlook calendars or any of the other ways in which human culture is machine culture.

Fan cultures wear their hybridity proudly, mixing commercial and noncommercial, dominant perspectives and subcultural critiques, constructing the new out of bits and pieces of the existing world. As Julie Levin Russo writes of fan videos, such fanworks "celebrate, critique, and de- or reconstruct mass media in what Anne Kustritz calls a 'genre commensurate form,' engaging the source via its own images (along with their webs of intertextual connotation) and visual language. In many cases, they render queer dimensions of these sources visible by telling stories of same-sex romance (known as 'slash') through sophisticated viewing and editing techniques. Whatever their explicit themes and narratives, they represent a queer form of reproduction that mates supposedly incompatible parents ('original' media source and 'original' creativity) to spawn hybrid offspring."

In a cyborg world, meaning is always changing, circulating, negotiating. The cyborg is built on contradictions, which she transmutes into complexities.This is a helpful metaphor because one challenge of defending women's fanworks before the law is to protect them from charges of over-investment, incoherence, or unintelligibility from outside.

I always use the word "articulation," though I don’t know whether the meaning I attribute to it is perfectly understood. In England, the term has a nice double meaning because "articulate" means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an "articulated" lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called "unity" of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary "belongingness." The "unity" which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. Let me put that the other way: the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position.