Copyright by Charlotte Elizabeth Howell 2011 The Thesis Committee for Charlotte Elizabeth Howell Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: Prophets in the Margins: Fantastic, Feminist Religion in Contemporary American Telefantasy APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Mary Celeste Kearney Michael Kackman Prophets in the Margins: Fantastic, Feminist Religion in Contemporary American Telefantasy by Charlotte Elizabeth Howell, B.A. Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Abstract Prophets in the Margins: Fantastic, Feminist Religion in Contemporary American Telefantasy Charlotte Elizabeth Howell, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Mary Celeste Kearney In this thesis, I will examine the connected representations of religion and gender in the context of contemporary American telefantasy (a term for science fiction, fantasy, and horror television genres) programs that include characters who experience fantastic visions that can be explained as originating from either divine or medically materialist origins. The fantastic mode, facilitated by telefantasy’s non-verisimilitudinous genre, presents these visions in a liminal space in which religious and gender representations can potentially subvert or challenge patriarchal and hegemonic representational norms. I analyze Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi 2003-2009), Eli Stone (ABC 2008-2009), and Wonderfalls (FOX 2004) for their formal presentation of visions, representations of visionary characters, and the religious representations that form the context for the visions and visionaries. I focus on visionary characters that are directly implicated by the television text as being potential prophets: Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica, Eli Stone on Eli Stone, and Jaye Tyler on Wonderfalls. Though each visionary iv character explores the possibility of subverting patriarchal religious norms, Roslin, Baltar, and Stone’s prophetic roles ultimately privilege patriarchal readings of their narratives, but Jaye, by avoiding the language-symbol systems of traditional religions, maintains the fantastic liminal space and thus the potential for subversion, even if it is only a possibility in the narrative. This thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarship of religious representations in fictional television, with a special emphasis on telefantasy. v Table of Contents Introduction .........................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Visions ..................................................................................24 Chapter Two: The Visionaries............................................................................54 Chapter Three: The Religions.............................................................................95 Conclusion.......................................................................................................125 Bibliography ....................................................................................................134 vi Introduction Seers, psychics, and visionaries are staples of telefantasy, a broad television genre including science-fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction (Johnson 2). They provide plot motivation and a vague sense of higher calling to support the action of the hero or heroine, even when the seer is the hero. Most programs that host such visionary characters accept the visions’ veracity by building plot and characterization via the diegetic truth of the characters’ ability to see supernaturally. Telefantasy shows with psychics, like Medium (NBC 2005-2009, CBS 2009-2011), The Ghost Whisperer (CBS 2005-2010), and Angel (WB 1999-2004), operate on the assumption of the truth of the vision and plots move forward based on the seer’s messages. Studies about this televisual phenomenon—particularly the propensity for this character type to be female—notably include Karin Beeler’s Seers, Witches, and Psychics On Screen. However, little research addresses the more complex perspective on visionary characters that only a few telefantasy shows include: fantastic visionaries whose “truth of the vision” is always in question. It is this fantastic mode of visionary representation that I argue opens space for complex and contradictory discourses about religion and gender and their intersections and interrelations on television. I examine both religion and gender as identity markers being negotiated through their television representations in the fantastic. 1 On Eli Stone (ABC 2008-2009), Wonderfalls (FOX 2004), and Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi 2003-2009), prophetic characters exist in the ambivalent tension of the fantastic mode.1 Literary theorist Tsvetan Todorov originally theorized the fantastic as a genre. He explains the fantastic through analogy: The person who experiences the [fantastic] event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. [. .] The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. (Todorov 136) I classify the fantastic as a mode of storytelling in which that period of uncertainty—the hesitancy the subject experiencing the fantastic event engages with before either they or the narrative they exist in decides the explanation—can create a liminal space of possibility. In this space, the fantastic event becomes imbued with potential. In my project, the fantastic event is the prophetic vision, and the hesitancy is created through questions of its origin: religious or scientific, divine or medical. In the fantastic mode the potential for either explanation is equal, allowing for all the possibilities of both. Faith and doubt exist simultaneously. This equal potential for the origins of the vision allows for the liminal space of what feminist Teresa de Lauretis calls the “space-off,” in which feminist work can be done. The “‘space-off’ [refers to . .] spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the 1 I did not include Joan of Arcadia (CBS 2003-2005), a show that featured a young woman who saw visions of God because her visions were not positioned in a fantastic hesitancy with a medical materialist option and were assumed to be divine and not pathological. 2 chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati” (25). The “space-off” of the fantastic is liminal, but it maintains the possibility of movement out of the fantastic and into one explanation or the other. Operating in the liminality of the fantastic, the visionaries’ betwixt-and-between position perhaps allows for greater flexibility and power over the rigid categories of the “either/or” options: either religion or science, either masculine or feminine, either gay or straight. In “and/or” constructions seemingly contradictory notions coexists with equal validity while acknowledging the eventual movement out of the fantastic that will force the choice between options. What happens when the fantastic mode’s liminal space creates the potential for “and/or” constructions that subvert such binaries? The main research questions I will consider are: How can the use of the fantastic mode in contemporary telefantasy programs provide a viable feminist alternative for accessing and representing religion (especially through vision)? What form does the fantastic allow for gender and sexuality representations? How does the fantastic interact with non-normative representations of gender in telefantasy? How are those representations impacted by the shows’ religious frameworks, and how do they influence traditional notions of religion? To answer these questions, I will consider contemporary American telefantasy programs featuring at least one character with religiously-framed fantastic visions who challenges patriarchal gender norms. For this study, the programs are Battlestar Galactica, Eli Stone, and Wonderfalls. All three programs share telefantasy’s foundational generic characteristic: they displace verisimilitude so that the narrative world created within the show is not beholden 3 to conventions of naturalism or realism that correspond with norms of socio-cultural verisimilitude. Their non-verisimilitudinous genre facilitates allegorical and ambiguous readings in relation to real-world topics and issues. Battlestar Galactica follows the human survivors of a multi-planet (the Colonies) nuclear decimation and the cylons, humanoid cyborgs who perpetrated the attack, as they search through space for a prophesized homeworld: Earth. The human-cylon war is ongoing throughout the series as the human fleet and cylons chase each other and try to survive and thrive in space; the underlying quest is for peace. The two visionary characters who share the potential of being the salvation for the humans and/or cylons are Laura Roslin, cancer-ridden President of (human) Colonies, and Gaius Baltar, the scientific genius who unknowingly gave the cylons the access needed to attack the Colonies. Eli Stone initially appears more verisimilitudinous, but enters