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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2008 When Discourses Collide: Hegemony, Domestinormativity, and the Active Audience in Xena: Warrior Princess Brian H. Myers

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

WHEN DISCOURSES COLLIDE: HEGEMONY,

DOMESTINORMATIVITY, AND THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE IN XENA:

WARRIOR PRINCESS

BRIAN H. MYERS

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Brian H. Myers defended on March 26, 2008.

Leigh Edwards Professor Directing Thesis

Jennifer Proffitt Committee Member

Caroline Joan Picart Committee Member

Approved:

R.M. Berry, Chair, Department of English

Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii This thesis is dedicated to my parents, who may not always understand my obsessions but have always encouraged me to pursue them, and to Nanny and Grandpa, who I hope will look down on this with pride.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As is the case with any work of this size, more people went into it than can possibly be included on a title page. My first thanks, of course, must go to the members of my thesis committee, whose advice and comments frequently saved me from myself in both the writing of this thesis and in the grander realm of life. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers at Critical Studies in Media Communication, whose honest critiques of my first chapter helped to toughen not only my writing but also my academic skin. Much gratitude is also due to Dr. Lisa Henderson and my fellow seminarians at the 2007 Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute, who helped shaped my proposal and gave me the support and encouragement that I needed to put myself into this thesis. And, as always, I want to thank my friends Carla Thomas and Julia Smith, who were probably closer to me than any two people during this process and who always managed to pull me back from the brink of insanity with their grace and humor.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1. THE BUSINESS OF AMBIGUITY: HEGEMONY AND PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS...... 14

Producing and Distributing the Warrior Princess ...... 18 Globalizing the Warrior Princess ...... 21 Queering the Warrior Princess ...... 26

2. WHEN DISCOURSES COLLIDE: NEGOTIATING THE DOMESTINORMATIVE IN XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS...... 31

Queering “The Quest:” XWP and the Proliferation of Meaning...... 32 The Return of the Norm: XWP and the Domestinormative...... 38 The Bitter and Sweet of It: Generating Contradictions in XWP...... 43

3. TEXTUAL GROUNDING: HOW XENA HELPED RECONFIGURE THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE...... 47

A Very “Good” Thing for XWP? ...... 49 Send in the Fans: De-Centering Semiotic Authority in XWP ...... 59 Synergizing the Warrior Princess ...... 62

CONCLUSION ...... 68

REFERENCES ...... 72

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 80

v ABSTRACT

This thesis argues that corporate practices of hegemony produce oppositional discourses on gender and sexuality through its appropriation and incorporation of feminist and queer fan discourses into television programming such as Xena: Warrior Princess. As a result, Xena: Warrior Princess can be read as a political site of struggle over the meaning of gender and sexuality. The destabilizing potential of these oppositional fan interpretations and practices, though, is simultaneously enabled and delimited to varying degrees by its situation within mass media institutions. In order to make this argument, my thesis is divided into three general sections, the first of which argues that the producers of Xena incorporated elements into the text from a wide variety of communities, particularly queer communities, in order to increase audience shares and profits. The second section examines how hegemonic and subaltern modes of gender and sexuality were negotiated within the text of Xena by framing the series within poststructuralist feminist debates and broadly arguing that attempts to fix the sexed and gendered identities of Xena’s characters was undermined by the slippage of meaning enabled, but not totalized, by Xena’s production practices. My final section concludes with a reconfiguration of the “active audience” by focusing upon the feedback loop between production and consumption practices in Xena, which positioned fans as forces that attempt to fix and ground interpretations of Xena rather than radically opening them.

INTRODUCTION

Jeanette Winterson (2005) once wrote that, “Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision. Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition” (p. xiii). It is perhaps surprising, then, to admit that the “choice of subject” for my thesis project is Xena: Warrior Princess. As a gay man who came of age in the 1990s, there was very little television that I could see myself in growing up. Gay characters were practically non-existent on television (at least in the television that I was allowed to watch). Those that I did catch glimpses of were always over-feminized and over-ridiculed. They never ran around. They never fought. They never did the things that I imagined myself doing as I played outside with my brothers. Yet at the same time, I could not fully identify with other male characters on television either. They were always fiercely heterosexual and masculine. I was neither of those things. While I did like to climb trees and play at war and fighting, I also liked to play with dolls and at house. When I play fought with my brothers, I always wanted to perform flips and twirls like the female dancers and gymnasts that I loved to watch. Unlike other boys my age, I wanted to punch like a girl. Television in the early 90s, however, allowed for no such blurring. Violence and masculinity. Femininity and domesticity. These were separate worlds, never to meet in the television that I watched as an adolescent. Until Xena: Warrior Princess, that is. I began watching Xena when it first began airing in 1995. I was instantly addicted. By the time it completed its six-year run in 2001, I was watching each episode at least four times a week. Here was a character who was both hard and soft, masculine and feminine. Here was a character who unabashedly flipped and kicked, who was a woman and yet still physically active. I grew up in a world of boys who wrestled, fought, and tumbled. Because of my love of “feminine” things, I thought that this was a world that would be forever denied to me. Xena, though, showed me that it was possible to participate in this world, to be an insider, and yet still acknowledge my own outsider feelings as a gay man. Characters like Xena were the first indication for me that it was possible to blur gender categories, to flow between masculine and feminine identities, and find power in that movement. This generative contradiction between masculinity and femininity, violence and

domesticity, that structured my own sense of identity growing up is the reason why I chose Xena to be the subject of this thesis project. Because of this central contradiction, Xena is undoubtedly the most exasperating television program that I have ever watched. However, it is also the one program that I still regularly watch to this day, nearly seven years after it aired its final episode. I wanted to examine this contradiction in depth, to explore the historical and structural forces that lead to its development, and to share the feelings of empowerment and frustration that I received from watching this singular television program. I wanted to learn why more television shows were not like Xena, despite its success. But mostly, I simply wanted to understand why I love Xena. Along the journey to finish this thesis, I was often excited, annoyed, and surprised to discover the things that I uncovered about myself, about Xena, and about the relationship between discourses on gender and sexuality and mass media institutions. With any luck, that same conflicted sense of awe and aggravation will be translated into an academic thesis with as little loss of clarity and meaning possible. This thesis project, then, examines the impact of the blurring of the divisions between television production, text, and consumption on representations and configurations of gender and sexuality through a study of Xena: Warrior Princess (hereafter “XWP). Julie D’Acci has argued that critical analyses of television programs must move across the distinct yet overlapping spheres of production, text, consumption, and socio-historical context in order to adequately account for the complex and often contradictory processes of meaning-making that inform the cultural impact of television programs. However, scholarly critiques of XWP have typically limited themselves to an analysis of one of these spheres (usually text or consumption) in their discussion of XWP’s status as a feminist and queer text, either ignoring the overlapping of these spheres or only briefly acknowledging its effects. However, I argue that contemporary production and marketing strategies strategically blur these sites of meaning production through processes of appropriation and incorporation, or what Gramsci (1998) has labeled “hegemony.” This thesis project, then, rather than being centered upon one site of meaning production, attempts to account for these processes of hegemony by focusing upon the interpenetration of these sites and the effects that this has had upon XWP. This entails a thorough analysis of production, text, consumption, and socio-historical context. Due

to the admittedly ambitious nature of this topic, I will try to focus my discussion of XWP to how these hegemonic processes affect its representations and configurations of gender and sexuality, although one could conceivably apply this methodology to any identity category. My decision to limit my thesis to issues of gender and sexuality stems from my own personal investment in these issues as well as the fact that XWP, with its depiction of an empowered woman in a television genre traditionally dominated by hypermasculine men, conspicuously foregrounds and negotiates contemporary discourses on gender and sexuality. As a result, my thesis project is organized around several broad questions, such as: What strategies did the producers of XWP use to appeal to a wide variety of domestic and international audiences and markets? How did these strategies affect the representation of gender and sexuality in XWP? What strategies did the producers of XWP use to delimit its critique of dominant discourses on gender and sexuality? What were the characteristics of the relationship between the producers and fans of XWP? What strategies did fans use to negotiate the many meanings of XWP? Did these strategies reproduce dominant meanings of gender and sexuality, resist them, or somehow do both? These questions are by no means exhaustive, but they provide a good sense of the trajectory of this thesis project. This analysis of XWP has several far-reaching implications for a variety of fields, particularly television studies and feminist media studies. One of the most important issues at stake in my thesis project is the status of popular culture in academia. The study of popular culture has been greatly informed (and, I would argue, haunted) by the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In their influential study of the “culture industry,” Horkheimer and Adorno (2001) argued that the mass production of popular culture under capitalism has produced a homogenized culture whose purpose is to regularize and normalize the rhythms of capitalism. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, “mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself” (p. 1229). Thus, under Horkheimer and Adorno, popular culture becomes a tool of the bourgeoisie for masking, distorting, and concealing oppressive capitalist relations. This is in direct contrast to “high culture,” which Horkheimer and

Adorno position outside of the realm of commercialization and mass production because of its singularity. This allows high culture to critique capitalism by disrupting the automatic repetition and homogenization produced by the workday and reinforced by the culture industry. This view of popular culture as somehow inferior and hopelessly commercialized has been critiqued from a variety of perspectives, though. Pierre Bourdieu has famously argued that the distinction between high culture and low (popular) culture is a class distinction, and reflects and sustains class biases and privileges. Cultural populists such as John Fiske have also critiqued Horkheimer and Adorno for constructing popular culture audiences as passive consumers of bourgeoisie ideology, noting that “between 80 and 90 per cent of new products fail despite executive advertising” (as qtd. in Storey, 2006, p. 6), thus casting doubt upon Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that the consumption of popular culture is passive and automatic. However, this extreme cultural populist view has been largely discredited by academics as well for granting too much agency to audiences. Consequently, my analysis of XWP attempts to strike a balance between an extreme political economic viewpoint (as espoused by Horkheimer and Adorno) and the cultural populism of Fiske by adopting a view of popular culture as a site of political struggle between competing discourses that are in constant motion and negotiation. Thus, popular culture is not simply a site where (typically dominant) discourses are unproblematically reproduced and passively consumed by audiences, but is also an important site where these discourses are articulated and formed. This process necessarily involves an engagement with marginalized discourses. In other words, pop culture matters. As a result, popular culture studies, in the words of Hall (2001), “has to analyze certain things about the constitutive political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death” (p. 1908). Also at stake in my thesis project is the question of methodology in television studies. As stated previously, Julie D’Acci has argued that the best approaches to television programs account for a television program’s production, text, reception, and socio-historical context. However, as my analysis of XWP will demonstrate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a firm distinction between these sites of meaning-making as interactions between television producers and audiences are

facilitated and heightened by the emergence of new media, particularly the Internet. While each of these sites of meaning-making retain certain specificities, it is quickly becoming the case that they cannot be understood apart from one another. Consequently it is no longer preferable, but necessary to account for these enmeshed sites of meaning-making in critical studies of television programs. To this end, my project advocates an interdisciplinary approach to the study of television that combines a variety of methodologies from the fields of communication, semiotics, and cultural studies in order to more fully account for the diverse processes of meaning-making that inform any given television program. My thesis project also promises to have a significant impact upon the field of feminist and queer media studies. If popular culture (and by extension television) is a privileged site of political struggle over meaning, then television plays a significant role in not only representing, but producing ideologies on gender and sexuality that can have a material effect upon the lives of individuals. As such it becomes important to attend to the ways in which gender and sexuality are negotiated in popular television programs. XWP has come to earn a privileged position among other pop culture texts for its explicit engagement with feminist and queer discourses in circulation at the turn of the twenty- first century. At stake in this analysis, then, is XWP’s position as a paradigmatic feminist and queer text. In a recent article for Salon.com, Young (2005) has credited XWP for overtly engaging with feminism and queerness at a time when both were considered taboo. Other critics (most notably Joanne Morreale and Sherrie Inness) have argued that XWP is an exemplary postmodern text, citing its positive portrayal of strong, multi-faceted women and its refusal to define and delimit its main characters’ sexuality. These arguments, however, have focused solely upon the textual content of XWP. I argue that XWP’s feminism and queerness is significantly complicated if we examine both its situation within mass media structures and its reception by a wide variety of audiences. This is not to discredit XWP as a feminist and/or queer text. Rather, I argue for a more complex view of XWP’s feminism and queerness that sees its radical potential intertwined with conservative, systemic forces that are constantly trying to appropriate, resignify, and contain those meanings that threaten to destabilize dominant ideologies.

However, it is not only XWP’s status as a feminist and queer text that is at stake in my analysis. As Young (2005) has also mentioned, XWP was able to influence the programming decisions of other media producers. XWP, as has been admitted by everyone from Joss Whedon to Quentin Tarantino, opened the doors for a large variety of female action heroes in both television and film. These female characters ranged in complexity from the relatively shallow Sydney Fox (Tia Carrere) in the syndicated series Relic Hunter to the more complex Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) of Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and “the Bride” (Uma Thurman) of Tarantino’s Kill Bill series. XWP has not only influenced the portrayal of women on television and the availability of jobs open to female actresses, though, but the perception of feminism in the popular consciousness. In today’s society, Xena has come to signify any strong, active woman. It is no coincidence that Condoleezza Rice’s staff has referred to her as the “Warrior Princess.” Thus, my paper functions as a commentary on the status of feminism and queer politics in our contemporary moment, specifically its relationship to mass media structures such as television. Through my project, I intend to explore the ramifications (both liberating and constricting) of the incorporation of feminist and queer discourses into mass-produced cultural artifacts, which necessarily results in a transformation of these discourses. Another significant issue at stake in my discussion is the perception of the active audience in contemporary television criticism. Traditionally, active audience members (those audience members that critically engage with television texts) have been presented as a privileged site of resistance to the hegemonic discourses present in television texts. Scholars such as John Fiske and Henry Jenkins have argued that active audiences resist dominant meanings by appropriating television texts and producing their own meanings from these texts. However, one of the main arguments of my thesis is that the active audience is reconfigured during hegemony. The producers of XWP actively engaged with fan interpretations, often incorporating them into the text that ranged in subtlety from flirting with lesbian subtext to hiring a popular fan fiction writer to pen two episodes during XWP’s final season. This suggests that the notion of the active audience as a site of resistance must be reformulated in our contemporary moment, since television producers are actively encouraging and relying upon active audiences to help them shape the text. Therefore practices such as

fandom, which were once derided and relegated to the outskirts of proper audience consumption, are now becoming privileged by television producers. Why else would the producers of XWP actively engage with the lesbian subtext favored by “Xenites” (fans of Xena) when Robert Tapert, the executive producer of XWP, has admitted that the “really hard-core fans” represent “only a tenth of a rating point” (as qtd. in Rudnick, 2001, p. 3)? This suggests that, rather than simply resisting dominant discourses, practices such as fandom have a much more complex relationship to processes of production. In order to explore the research questions outlined above and tease out their ramifications, my thesis project will synthesize a variety of methodologies and employ several theoretic models. The central theoretic model with which my thesis project will engage is Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony,” which, although grounded in traditional Marxism, reformulates it in several significant ways. Traditional Marxist criticism, at its most basic level, insists that the relations between people and their economic structures have an impact upon their cultural formations. However, I wish to nuance this rather broad account of cultural formations by allying myself with political economists like Jhally (1998), who has argued that the line between economics and culture has disappeared in our contemporary moment. Whereas in Marx the cultural superstructure existed in order to rectify through ideology the social contradictions created by the economic base, Jhally has argued that current cultural artifacts are produced both for their ideological purposes (what he terms the “consciousness industry”) and their ability to generate profits (the “culture industry”). Thus, cultural artifacts like XWP do not simply reproduce hegemonic ideology, but generate profits through exchange like any other commodity. The consequence of this in a capitalist society, according to Jhally, is that “the system of exchange value (worth) subordinates use-value (meaning)” (p. 80). Thus the profitability of a television series outweighs its actual content. However, while for Jhally this results in a culture industry that produces homogenized and shallow entertainment products, I argue that the privileging of profitability over content has the potential to destabilize dominant ideology to a certain extent because it forces television programs to incorporate disparate values and meanings from a wide variety of audiences in order to attract advertisers and generate

profits. Consequently, power is secured in the television industry not through ideological domination, but through hegemony. Gramsci (1998) has argued that the supremacy of one social group over another manifests in two ways: through physical domination and through “intellectual and moral leadership” (p. 210). This latter aspect, which Gramsci calls “hegemony,” can only be achieved through the consent of the dominated to their domination and operates through a variety of social and economic structures. However, this reliance upon the consent of the dominated to secure hegemony “presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed” (Gramsci, 2008, p. 211). Thus, dominant ideology is never “pure,” but is instead informed and impacted by subaltern discourses, cultures, and values. At the same time, though, “such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for although hegemony is ethico-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive nucleus of economic activity” (Gramsci, 2008, p. 211). In other words, there are limits to the extent in which discourses are incorporated during process of television exportation, and that limit is determined by economics. Consequently the focus of my thesis is two-fold. On the one hand, it will examine the negotiation that occurs between hegemonic and subaltern discourses within XWP, and the gaps that this negotiation opens for spaces of resistance. On the other hand, it will also attempt to account for how these gaps are implicated in and problematized through capitalist economic relations that are necessarily premised upon the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Another key theoretic framework in which my thesis participates is poststructuralist feminist and queer theories of gender and sexuality. I argue that XWP, as a result of the economic push to attract both privileged and marginalized demographics (most notably middle-class, white, heterosexual women and middle- class, white lesbians), engages with a variety of masculinist and feminist positions in a way that lends itself to a poststructuralist textual reading. As Storey (2006) has explained, “Post-structuralists reject the idea of an underlying structure upon which meaning can rest secure and guaranteed. Meaning is always in process. What we call the ‘meaning’ of a text is only ever a momentary stop in a continuing flow of interpretations following interpretations” (p. 98). This is probably best exemplified by the

work of Jacques Derrida, who argues that meaning is produced through process of difference and deferral, which he has labeled differánce. For Derrida, signifiers do not refer to signifieds, but instead to other signifiers in an endless chain of signification. In other words, a given word never ultimately means one thing (a signified). It is only the signifier’s location in a discursive context that provides a temporary stop to the endless play of signifiers and the illusion that meaning is “fixed.” However, this fixing of meaning is never complete, since traces of the signifier’s meaning in other contexts haunt it. Language, then, is deeply implicated in networks of power as certain meanings are privileged above others and made to appear “natural” while others are abjected and hidden. Consequently, one of the insights of poststructuralism, according to Weedon (2001), is that “language becomes an important site of political struggle” (p. 175), as can be seen when poststructuralist thought is applied to feminism. Instead of a structure that governs and fixes meaning, Weedon instead has argued that language is best conceived of as a “discursive field” which consists of “competing ways of giving meaning to the world and of organizing social institutions and processes” (p. 179). For Weedon, this explains how social power is exercised and shows how social relations can be transformed. In feminist terms, then, poststructuralism frames the oppression of women as a result of certain constructions of female subjectivity (i.e. women as nurturing, passive, and weak) being privileged above others. This arbitrary construction of female subjectivity is then made to appear natural through forms of power that produces this knowledge of women as “true.” One of the ways to resist patriarchal oppression, then, is to reveal the constructed and arbitrary “nature” of traditional discourses on women and femininity. This, in turn, opens up the category of gender, which has significant implications for constructions of sexuality as well. Butler (2001) has famously argued that “the disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain” (p. 2496). In other words, the categories of gender and sexuality are inextricably linked. Poststructuralist feminist and queer thought, then, differ from other strands of feminism through its insistence that the categories of gender and sexuality are contingent, constructed, and thus open to destabilization and resignification in different

contexts. I argue that XWP participates in this poststructuralist critique of gender and sexuality through a very specific strategy: the deferral of meaning to audiences. XWP produces a multiplicity of ways to “read” the gender and sexuality of its main characters, Xena (Lucy Lawless) and Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor). However, rather than ultimately resolving this proliferation of interpretations by hierarchizing them, XWP instead treats gender and sexuality as floating signifiers that rely upon individual audience consumption and interpretation to become fixed. XWP can literally mean whatever audiences want it to mean. XWP, then, participates in poststructuralist feminist and queer thought not by denouncing dominant discourses or privileging subaltern discourses, but by arguing that all are equally constructed and dependent upon their insertion within a specific discourse to gain meaning. As a result of my thesis’s emphasis upon the relationship between production, text, and consumption, though, I will also explore how XWP’s engagement with poststructuralist feminist and queer thought is problematized by its relationship with hegemonic economic institutions. The final theoretic model with which my thesis will actively engage is the concept of the “active audience.” As mentioned previously, active audiences have been constructed by scholars such as John Fiske and Henry Jenkins as being privileged sites of resistance to hegemony. As such active audiences, particularly those individuals who participate in “fandom,” are still controversial subjects. Fandom has been typically denigrated by both academia and the dominant culture because it has been defined “primarily through relations of consumption and spectatorship rather than production or participation” (Jenkins and Tulloch, 1995, p. 4). The image of the “rabid fan” still has a significant amount of cultural currency within our society, mainly due to the efforts of the media to portray fans as aberrant, unsocial, and infantile. However, recent scholarship has begun to take a different attitude towards fandom. Rather than denigrating it, fandom has instead become constructed as “emblematic examples of audience resistance, of the appropriation and rearticulation of programme materials, of ‘poaching’” (Jenkins and Tulloch, 1995, p. 4). The reason for this is because of the type of people generally attracted to fandoms. As Fiske (1992) has explained, because of its focus upon popular mass media objects rather than the traditional cultural objects of the dominant class, fandom is “associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated

formations of the people, particularly with those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race” (p. 30). My thesis project attempts to build upon this conception of fandom, through my discussion of XWP’s fandom and its relationship to processes of hegemony. Due to hegemony’s reliance upon processes of negotiation and incorporation, the relationship between fandom and television producers has become a feedback loop as fans produce certain interpretations of XWP through a variety of methods, most notably fan fiction, which are in turn resignified and incorporated into the text by producers in order to attract fans, which results in even more fan interpretations to be appropriated by producers. Thus, while fans do have a degree of agency when it comes to deciding how they are going to interpret and use XWP, this agency is enabled and potentially delimited by relations of hegemony. Thus, a primary focus of my thesis is on how hegemony reconfigures the notion of the active audience and resistance in our contemporary moment. To that end, I argue that corporate practices of hegemony produce oppositional discourses on gender and sexuality through its appropriation and incorporation of feminist and queer fan discourses into television programming such as XWP. As a result, XWP can be read as a political site of struggle over the meaning of gender and sexuality. The destabilizing potential of these oppositional fan interpretations and practices, though, is simultaneously delimited to varying degrees by its situation within mass media. This is not to discount oppositional readings such as the ones generated by XWP fans. As Hebdige (2001) has noted, “the symbiosis in which ideology and social order, production and reproduction, are linked is…neither fixed nor guaranteed. It can be prised open. The consensus can be fractured, challenged, over-ruled, and resistance to the groups in dominance cannot always be lightly dismissed or automatically incorporated” (p. 2456). I want to suggest, though, that oppositional readings are never simply and only oppositional, but are engaged in a constant feedback loop with dominant discourses, and thus have the potential to disrupt or reinscribe dominant ideologies depending on how they are used. To prove this argument, I will examine and interrogate the production, text, and consumption of XWP over the course of three different chapters. Of course it must be noted that the distinction between these three areas is merely for analytic purposes,

since there is considerable overlap and blurring between these three sites of meaning- making. My first chapter is an institutional analysis of the production, marketing, and distribution of XWP. This chapter argues that the producers of XWP appropriated and incorporated elements from a wide variety of audiences, both dominant and subaltern, in order to appeal to these audiences and increase the program’s attractiveness to advertisers. This strategy results in the development of a feedback loop between the producers of XWP and its audiences, particularly lesbian audiences. The second section of my thesis will examine the impact of this feedback loop on the text of XWP through a poststructuralist textual analysis of its representations of gender and sexuality. By claiming that XWP can mean whatever audiences want it to mean, the producers deferred the production of meaning to audiences, transforming them from passive consumers to active producers of the “meaning” of XWP. This blurring of the lines between production and consumption highlights the constructed nature of meaning, language, and gender in XWP, thereby revealing gaps in dominant ideology. The producers of XWP, however, attempted to delimit the potentially radical consequences of this feminist and queer critique of gender and sexuality by appropriating and commodifying certain fan interpretations through the manipulation of subtext and the resituation of these critiques within a domestinormative framework. The third and final chapter of my thesis will examine the impact of this feedback loop on the fan culture surrounding XWP, particularly the development of XWP fan fiction. Contrary to previous readings of fan fiction, which framed fan fiction production as examples of “textual poaching” that create gaps in the primary media text, I argue that XWP fan fiction did precisely the opposite. Since production practices consciously manipulated the text of XWP to create gaps in meaning, fans of XWP were not as concerned with opening spaces within the text for their own personal interpretations. Rather, they were more concerned with fixing and delimiting the text of the series, often in ways that reinscribed heteronormative modes of sexuality. This cultural project of XWP fandom, however, was undermined by the efforts of the producers, who attempted to de-center their authority over the text’s meaning by establishing an equivalence between all readings of XWP. This struggle between producers and audiences, though, is fundamentally informed and enabled by profit motivations, and hence potentially contained by capitalism. However, the attempts by producers to win the consent of

dominant and subaltern groups opens limited spaces for audience agency and resistance as the text’s negotiation of discourses on gender and sexuality allows for the emergence of discourses that destabilize hegemonic authority. In other words, I want this thesis to highlight both the ways in which XWP reproduces dominant discourses and the multitude of ways in which XWP (often despite itself) encourages and empowers audiences to resist these hegemonic forces. The fan/academic in me will be satisfied by nothing less.

CHAPTER ONE THE BUSINESS OF AMBIGUITY: HEGEMONY AND PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS Xena’s singularity and the trends that it helped to initiate and legitimize did not go unnoticed by the surrounding culture. Writing for the New York Times in 2000, columnist Jennifer Steinhauer noted that, “This year’s heroines of prime time and the big screen are muscular and trained in the martial arts, and they have no compunctions about slapping, immolating and kickboxing their way through life” (p. 5). This marks a dramatic break from previous female heroines, such as Wonder Woman, who often seemed resistant to the idea of compromising their femininity by engaging in aggressive acts of violence and shaping their bodies in traditionally masculine ways. The mass media heroines at the turn of the twenty-first century were not afraid to get their hands dirty (so to speak), participating in and enjoying physically violent acts, challenging traditional constructions of femininity along the way. The majority of scholarship upon Xena: Warrior Princess (hereafter referred to as XWP) has focused upon this subversive element. However, what is left unexplored by these analyses is a problem posed within Steinhauer’s (2000) article, namely the question of why “many entertainment executives and popular cultural experts think it’s about time” (p. 5) for these representations to proliferate. It is this gap in XWP scholarship that this chapter seeks to fill by analyzing the historically specific institutional and structural systems that enabled and informed XWP’s depiction of a physically violent, sexually ambiguous woman at a time when feminist and queer subjectivities were still largely marginalized. In order to understand this rupture with past representations of women, this chapter contends that current television production and marketing strategies attempt to win audiences through hegemony, or the appropriation and incorporation of a variety of discourses (both dominant and marginal) into a text. In the case of XWP, this production strategy both produced and delimited potentially destabilizing discourses on gender, sexuality, and the nation through its attempts to cultivate a global aesthetics and its appropriation of feminist and queer fan discourses.

This institutional analysis is grounded in the basic Marxist tenet that the relations between people and their economic structures have an impact upon their cultural formations. As discussed in the introduction, however, I wish to nuance this rather broad account of cultural formations, though, by engaging with political economists and cultural critics like Sut Jhally who argue that the line between economics and culture has disappeared in our contemporary moment. Thus, cultural artifacts like XWP do not simply reproduce dominant ideology, but generate profits through exchange like any other commodity. The consequence of this in a capitalist society, according to Jhally (1989), is that “the system of exchange value (worth) subordinates use-value (meaning)” (p. 80). Thus the profitability of a television series is privileged above its actual content. However, while for Jhally this results in a culture industry that produces homogenized and shallow entertainment products, I wish to ally myself with cultural critics such as John Storey in arguing that the privileging of profitability over content has the potential to destabilize dominant ideology to a certain extent because it forces television production programs to incorporate disparate values and meanings from a wide variety of audiences in order to attract advertisers and generate profits. As Storey (2006) has contended, “the individual capitalist’s search for surplus value can often be at the expense of the general ideological needs of the system of the whole” (p. 167). Following this framework, power is secured in the television industry not through ideological domination, but through what Antonio Gramsci has labeled “hegemony,” which argues that, in order to secure its dominance over subaltern classes, the dominant class incorporates subaltern discourses into their own ideology. Thus, dominant ideology is never “pure,” but is in a state of constant negotiation with other, minoritized discourses. Consequently the focus of this chapter is upon how the gaps in dominant ideology that are created through the negotiation between a variety of discourses in XWP are implicated in and problematized by capitalist economic relations that seek to only grant audiences agency through consumption. At stake in such an analysis is XWP’s position as a feminist and queer text. Shortly after its premiere in 1995, XWP began to attract a great deal of attention from both the media and academia for its positioning of a strong, empowered woman as the protagonist of an action-adventure television series, a genre typically framed as “masculine.” It is not reductive to say that nearly all of the scholarly analyses of XWP

have focused upon this generative contradiction and its implications for discourses on gender and sexuality. While XWP was not the first action-adventure program to feature a female lead (nor the last), a scholarly consensus seems to have formed that XWP remains singular because of the specific strategies used by its producers to appeal to a variety of different audiences. These strategies enabled XWP to be read in a variety of ways for a variety of different projects, both progressive and reactionary. For example, Morreale (1998) has argued that XWP is an empowering feminist text because of its overt engagement with practices of feminist camp, which emphasizes exaggeration, parody, and masquerade in order to undermine discourses that frame femininity as natural. Futrell (2003), though, has argued that XWP is an empowering feminist text not because it undermines traditional discourses on femininity, but because of its valorization of typically feminine concerns such as relationships and the domestic sphere. Magoulick (2006) and others, though, have criticized XWP’s version of feminism, particularly for its reliance upon violence and its failure to challenge traditional concepts of feminine beauty. Helford (2000) perhaps best summarizes the field of XWP scholarship by noting that, “Ultimately, what is most important here is that each critic seems so assured with the Xena she constructs. Surely all of television is available for contrasting readings, and the diversity of perspectives even among critics who share some feminist orientation clearly reveals that X:WP is an excellent example of a polysemic text” (p. 138). Thus, rather than attempting to argue that one position is preferable to another, I instead will begin from the premise that a variety of progressive discourses (including but, as will be seen in my discussion of XWP’s global distribution, not limited to feminist and queer discourses) were mobilized in the text of XWP, along with more reactionary discourses. This is a result of the producers’ unique approach to their own cultural product. Rather than insisting upon their cultural authority over XWP’s meaning, the producers of the program instead insisted that audiences can make whatever meanings they desired from the text. Producer Liz Friedman perhaps best exemplifies this approach in her insistence that XWP “is not our [the producers’] show, it’s the audience’s show. If the fans want to read Xena that way [i.e., as a lesbian], great” (as qtd. in Boese, 1998, L97). This chapter, then, analyzes the structural and institutional forces that enabled XWP to be promoted as a radically polysemic text.

This analysis of XWP will be accomplished by steadily progressing through a variety of institutional systems that, in part, informed XWP’s content. First XWP’s production and ownership history will be briefly outlined, thereby providing a sense of XWP’s situation within larger media structures. From there, XWP’s position within global media markets and how its content was altered in order to make it more attractive for global media markets will be examined. This chapter will conclude by examining how feminist and queer subjectivities were incorporated into the text of XWP due to the pressure from advertisers to attract as broad an audience as possible. Producing and Distributing the Warrior Princess XWP went on the air as a first-run syndicated television series on September 4, 1995 in 94% of domestic markets. As such, XWP was not sold to a television network (such as NBC or CBS), but was instead sold and distributed to individual (and typically independent) television stations. Attendant with syndication are specific benefits, as well as specific drawbacks. The most significant benefit of syndication is that it allows television series that are deemed “too risky” for network television to be broadcast. Network series are broadcast across a television network’s affiliates and owned and operated stations, which span the entire country. Consequently, network executives demand that their television series be able to appeal to the broadest audience demographic possible. From the network perspective, a series is a failure if it draws large audiences in markets like New York or Los Angeles, but fails to interest viewers in other markets. As such, network series must typically be more conservative and less unique than their brethren in other television media (such as cable or syndication) so that they may theoretically attract a larger audience (Blumler, 1990). In contrast to network distribution, first-run syndication allows for a show to bypass network distribution and be sold directly to television stations. As such, producers of syndicated series do not have to be as concerned with attracting audiences across the country (although this is certainly a goal of syndicators), but can instead match the content of a series to the demographic to which the series is most likely to appeal. First-run syndicated television series are in turn attractive to independent television stations because they are less costly to air than original programming yet still allow them to establish a strong identity in their respective markets. While this gives producers more freedom to experiment with controversial

subject matter (as XWP did), the downside to syndication is that producers and distributors are not guaranteed the level of audience penetration that network series are. This can potentially handicap a series’ ability to generate profits since syndicated television series are still dependent upon advertisers for income. In XWP’s case, this dependence upon advertising was further heightened by its acceptance of barter syndication, a process whereby an advertiser purchases in advance some of the commercial spots available in a syndicated program, regardless of where it is shown. However, advertisers are only interested in supporting those series that are able to attract large audiences derived from certain demographics. Thus, a syndicated television series must still prove popular with a large audience (as XWP did) so that it may be sold to as many stations across the country as possible (Blumler, 1990). As such, it can be argued that XWP was allowed to present controversial material, such as empowering portrayals of women and queer individuals, because it was not submitted to the rigorous demands of network broadcasting. However, the number and types of boundaries that XWP was able to cross were still constrained by television’s reliance upon advertising revenue and audience shares for funding, which required XWP’s producers to tailor its content to hegemonic forces in order to be distributed by as many television stations as possible. The methods in which XWP was distributed and marketed shifted, though, depending on who owned the rights to distribute XWP at any given moment. XWP’s ownership history during its initial run is a complex web, situated as it was during an active period of corporate media mergers and consolidation. XWP was produced by Renaissance Pictures, which was owned by Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi, a pair of film-makers who had built a reputation for producing low-budget, tongue-in-cheek horror films such as the popular Evil Dead series. During XWP’s first two years (1995-1997), it was distributed by MCA Television Group, which was in turn owned by Seagram Corp. During the majority of XWP’s first two years, MCA TV’s chairman was Greg Meidel (Meidel was hired in January 1996 in the middle of XWP’s first season). The success of first-run syndicated series like XWP and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (XWP’s parent series) convinced Meidel of the benefits of developing more first-run syndicated series that could be distributed both domestically and internationally (Stanley, 1996).

According to Lowry (1998), it is Meidel’s success in the arena of first-run syndication that would eventually be seen as his legacy as MCA TV’s chairman. Therefore, during its first two seasons, XWP was distributed by a company whose corporate agenda was favorable to its promotion. Unsurprisingly, it is during these years that XWP achieved its highest ratings, peaking in February 1997 with the episode, “A Necessary Evil,” which earned a Nielsen rating of 7.8. This made XWP the highest rated syndicated action drama in the United States, beating perennial favorites such as Baywatch. However, in the years following 1997, the corporate ownership of XWP shifted dramatically. In 1997, MCA TV was folded into Seagram’s Universal Television, which was then renamed Universal Television Enterprise. Meidel continued on as chairman. In 1998, though, Universal Television Enterprise was sold to Barry Diller and was renamed Studios USA (Universal Television Enterprise also included USA Networks, the cable channel that bought the initial rights to rebroadcast old episodes of XWP and Hercules). As Higgins (1998) has explained, Diller’s corporate goals differed significantly from Meidel’s. While Meidel was focused more upon distribution, syndication, and global markets, Diller’s primary goal was to restructure USA Networks and Studios USA into a vertically integrated TV company with success in both production and distribution. This reorientation of Studios USA also necessitated a reorganization of its executive structure since, according to Diller, “You have to get down on the ground to get the architecture the way you want it to be” (as cited in Higgins, 1998, p. 10). This resulted in the high profile departure of several key executives (from XWP’s perspective), such as Meidel and Kay Koplovitz, one of the few female TV chairpersons at the time. Due to Diller’s determination to reorganize Studios USA into a vertically integrated television company focused upon distributing its own original programming, XWP lost the favorable position that it held during Meidel’s tenure as chairman since it was only distributed by Studios USA. As a result, XWP was not as aggressively promoted as it was during Meidel’s tenure. Unsurprisingly, this loss of promotion and visibility contributed to XWP’s decline in ratings, which fell from the mid-to-upper 6s in its second season to the low-to-mid 3s in its final season (2000-2001). This loss of executive attention, however, also benefited the production of XWP in significant ways since it allowed the program to include more controversial material than it would have

been able to under more rigorous supervision. Series star Lucy Lawless notes the double-edged nature of this situation in a DVD audio commentary for the sixth season episode “When Fates Collide,” claiming that the producers of XWP were able to “get away” with what they did was because “nobody was watching. …Everybody who had started the show at the studio was gone and everybody else wasn’t paying attention. They were trying to get their own new shows up and running and that’s why we…they stole our slot.” XWP was further crippled by the shrinking number of independent broadcast stations able to schedule it during weekday nights (or “primetime”). XWP was heavily dependent upon independent broadcast stations that had the freedom to schedule XWP in favorable time-slots, most notably primetime. Primetime audiences are heavily sought after by advertisers. As such, during its early seasons XWP was often scheduled during primetime by these broadcast stations and was able to attract primetime audiences, garnering significant advertiser attention in the process. This, in turn, encouraged XWP’s producers and distributors to allocate a “primetime” budget to XWP (roughly $1 million per episode). This primetime budget helped XWP maintain the high production values necessary to compete with other, more well-funded network series. However, as Ault (2000) has noted, the increasing concentration of broadcast stations soon made it difficult to justify XWP’s primetime budget. In the late 1990s, independent broadcast stations that had previously relied upon syndicated series like XWP to fill their evening schedules were being purchased by the emerging UPN and WB networks. As a result, the programming of their primetime slots was being determined according to the dictates of the WB and UPN. XWP, then, saw the number of television stations willing to broadcast it during the primetime dwindle, meaning that it could no longer attract the kinds of audiences sought after by advertisers. According to Ault (2000), XWP’s primetime budget could then no longer be justified since XWP was not being shown in the primetime. As a result, Studios USA announced the cancellation of XWP during the 2000-2001 season. It ran for 134 episodes, lasting six seasons. Globalizing the Warrior Princess However, the fact that XWP lasted for six seasons is remarkable, particularly in the unpredictable domestic television market where the vast majority of fictional

programs do not last for a single season. One of the key reasons for XWP’s longevity was its success in international markets. XWP was broadcast in more than 60 countries by a variety of media corporations. Historically the only way for a television program to generate a profit for its production and distribution companies was during second-run syndication, the process whereby episodes of a television series, after its initial network airings, are sold to a television or cable station for a specified duration of time. In order to generate enough demand for the reruns of a television series, though, it must first demonstrate that is able to attract large audiences over an extended period of time. Although there is no predetermined limit for how long a television series must be aired before it can profitably be sold into syndication, the “magic number” is typically 65 episodes, or approximately three seasons. This is a rare occurrence in television since the vast majority of television series are never aired for more than one season (Rice, 2005). Recently, though, production and distribution companies have begun targeting simultaneously both the domestic market and international market for their first-run programs. This allows a production and/or distribution company to begin generating profits from a television series during its initial run (a previously unheard of occurrence). In other words, production and distribution companies can reap the benefits of syndication without having to produce three years worth of episodes. Television series like Baywatch and XWP pioneered this method. As Lowry (1997) has noted, “the appetite for such programming has helped keep series alive that would have died otherwise” (p. 1). Therefore, XWP’s strong performance in international markets justified its airing for six seasons despite the fact that its domestic ratings were not remarkably strong. This increased importance of the international market for domestic television series has profound implications for how conceptions of national and cultural identity are constructed, for Americans as well as the foreign consumers of American television programs, because now television programs must be adaptable to different local and national contexts in order to be sold and generate profits for its producers and distributors. One of the key places to begin examining the international marketing of XWP is at television trade shows such as NATPE, where international buyers and sellers converge. According to Bielby and Harrington (2004), the interactions between

participants at television trade shows are not solely shaped by business models, but also by the “non-routine actions of and relationships among key individuals” that shape the production, distribution, and reception of global cultural products such as XWP (p. 76). Consequently, one cannot only discuss the business aspects of the international television market, but also how the executives at television trade shows understand and frame television programs. This process directly informs how a television series is marketed and, ultimately, whether it is aired in international markets. As such, an important question to examine is how XWP was marketed at television trade shows and how it was understood by television executives. One obvious factor that contributed to XWP’s marketability in the international television industry was its distribution by Universal Television International, one of the largest television exporters in the world. Havens (2003) has noted that the challenges of the international market, specifically the difference between regional, national, and local cultures, makes it difficult for television executives to decide which imported series will perform well in their respective markets. Without any clear criteria to determine the success of a television series in different local contexts, Havens contends that a “distributor’s track record in international sales often stands in for such criteria, creating expectations that new series may perform similarly well” (p. 27). Thus XWP’s distribution by Universal International Television informed the decision-making of international television executives by linking XWP with Universal’s previous successes in the international market. Havens (2003) and Bielby, and Harrington (2004) have also noted the significant role that genre played in determining whether or not XWP would be successful in international markets. Bielby and Harrington have contended that “genre is central to the challenge of successful marketing of cultural products across borders, and it is reflected in different ways in how programs are characterized in brochures and demonstration tapes, as well as the kinds of information marshaled for buyers abroad” (p. 79). This is clearly evidenced by the promotional material for XWP, which firmly situated it within the action-adventure television genre. For example, the narrator of a promotional video for XWP shown at the 1998 NATPE convention proudly proclaims XWP to be “syndication’s reigning champion of action-adventure” (NATPE Educational Foundation, 1998). The action-adventure genre holds a privileged place within the

market for exported American television. Grove (1997) has even claimed that “conventional wisdom dictates that only action-packed syndicate fare like ‘Xena’ and ‘Hercules’ can lure audiences abroad” (p. 1). The dominance of this genre can be attributed to certain characteristics of the genre itself. For one, action sequences of television programs like XWP are typically expensive to produce (as can be seen in XWP’s own primetime budget). These higher production values typically attract larger audiences, which in turn makes the programs more attractive to advertisers. As a result, it is more cost-efficient for many foreign broadcasters to buy the rights to air an American action program than it is to develop their own original, local programming with the same production values. According to former CBS Broadcast International president Rainer Siek, “You can see the money that Americans are putting in the shows on screen. That’s something a lot of the smaller markets can’t afford” (as qtd. in Lowry, 1997, p. 1). Action-adventure programs are also less costly to translate into foreign markets since they typically have less dialogue and thus do not require as much dubbing or subtitling as other programs do. A brief example from XWP will demonstrate the attractiveness of this for international buyers. The highest rated episode of XWP during its first domestic run was “A Necessary Evil,” which featured Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle enlisting the aid of their nemesis Callisto (Hudson Leik) to defeat the evil goddess Velasca (Melinda Clarke) and save not only their own lives but also the Amazon Nation. This episode alone featured six action sequences lasting between 1 and 8 minutes long each. These action sequences ranged in complexity from a comparatively simple sword fight to a complicated sequence involving all four actresses fighting on a bridge suspended over a lava flow. The total running time of the episode is approximately 44 minutes. Of these 44 minutes, 17 minutes were devoted to costly action sequences. In other words, a little less than a third of the episode is devoted to action sequences that are costly for foreign television producers to produce themselves but that can be broadcast largely unchanged in a variety of international markets. Consequently, by firmly situating XWP within the action-adventure genre, the producers of XWP were able to capitalize upon the assumption within the culture world of the television trade show that action-adventure programs perform better in international markets than other genres.

Yet XWP did not only benefit in the international market from its situation as an action-adventure series distributed by the juggernaut Universal International Television. XWP also consciously cultivated a “foreign” aesthetic by incorporating several elements of foreign cultures into its text. Perhaps the most salient example of this is the location of XWP’s production and the effects that this had upon its visual style. XWP was shot on location throughout New Zealand, a factor that conferred significant advantages upon the series in the international market. As Fowler (2002) has explained, “New Zealand’s greatest film asset is its topography, ranging from lush pastures to harsh mountains, much unblemished by development (p. B1). This great variety of scenery enabled Xena to simulate a wealth of environments, from Japan to Ireland, over the course of its six seasons without ever leaving New Zealand. This in turn dramatically increased the production value of the series without the high prices usually associated with this increase. “We wanted our characters to travel around the world,” says co- executive producer Eric Gruendemann, “but we couldn’t afford to travel around the world” (as cited in Fowler, 2002, p. B1). By shooting in New Zealand, XWP did not need to. Another example of XWP’s foreign aesthetic is its appropriation of elements from Hong Kong action cinema. Robert Tapert, one of the creators and executive producers of XWP, has openly acknowledged the influence of foreign cinema, particularly Hong Kong cinema, on both XWP’s aesthetic and on the creation of Xena herself. At a 1998 NATPE panel discussion, Tapert explicitly credits Hong Kong films such as The Bride With White Hair and Swordsman 2 and 3 with allowing him to find “the key into what [XWP] would be to make it different from Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels and to give it a new spin,” that new spin ultimately being Xena’s dark past as a murderous warlord. Several episodes of XWP and its parent series Hercules also featured extended homages to classic Hong Kong action films. Fans of XWP have extensively detailed these references to Hong Kong films, the most famous being a scene from the Hercules episode entitled “The Gauntlet” (which aired during the first season of Hercules, before Xena was spun off into her own series). In this scene, Xena is forced to walk a gauntlet of soldiers after refusing to kill a baby. The scene is an almost shot- for-shot recreation of a similar scene in The Bride With White Hair, particularly the culmination of the scene where Xena rises dramatically from the ground after being

beaten mercilessly in the gauntlet. This cross-cultural flow between the American and Asian film and television industries as well as the increasing dependence upon international markets has had a significant impact upon how cultural products construct conceptions such as nation and identity. Klein (2004) has argued that “the globalization of audiences has had a denationalizing effect on the US film industry; while Hollywood’s blockbusters proclaim their Americanness on the surface, their style and content has been so tailored to the world market that their cultural identity…must be seen as more multinational than national” (p. 363). As XWP demonstrates, the same can be said of the television industry. Yet while XWP was committed to a diverse, multinational aesthetic that resonated with a variety of international markets, the producers of XWP have asserted that the primary reason why it was so successful in the international market was because it was able to transcend national differences and speak to universal human characteristics. Lawless attributes the international success of XWP to the ability of the producers, writers, and actors to “bring stories with heart. And whether people know it or not, the fact that they feel something when they watch our goofy show keeps people coming back for more. And, um, like I said the same things that make a Frenchman feel make a Turkish person feel make a – it’s huge in the Philippines. That’s what matters” (NATPE Educational Foundation, 1998). Butt and Wohlmut (2006) agree, contending that it is Xena’s (and XWP’s) ability to “project a coherent identity, despite her multifaceted nature (‘many skills’) and the many levels on which her character can be interpreted” that allows her to resonate with a variety of audiences (p. 84). Thus XWP appealed to multiple audiences by blending multiple national, regional, and cultural aesthetics in a way that did not undermine but reinforces conceptions of a coherent identity. In other word, XWP’s success relied upon its ability to mean many different things to many different people. This ambiguity of meaning did not work through processes of vagueness, though. Rather, it operated through a mélange of specific, yet disparate cultural aesthetics and themes. It is difficult, then, to assert XWP supports specific national or cultural ideologies since it does not want to risk alienating one local market in favor of another, for to do so would cost Xena’s production and distribution companies money. McChesney (1999) has argued that “the global media system is better understood as one that advances

corporate and commercial interests and values and denigrates or ignores that which cannot be incorporated into its mission” (p. 4). This formulation differs from the traditional critique of media globalization, which focuses upon the dominance of specifically American ideals in the global marketplace of ideals. In McChesney’s formulation the ideology being sold to foreign markets is not specifically American, otherwise it could not be sold to a variety of countries so successfully. Instead, the ideologies being sold are instead commercial ideologies. Consequently, what can be seen as potentially progressive elements of XWP (such as its global aesthetic) are not opposed to conservative projects, namely capitalism, but are fundamentally enabled and informed by them. Queering the Warrior Princess The production of progressive content as a by-product of capitalist forces can also be seen in XWP’s relationship to the feminist and queer movements of the late 90s. One of the reasons why XWP was able to remain on the air for as long as it did was because of its ability to attract a broad audience containing a diverse mixture of men and women with a variety of class, ethnic, and sexual backgrounds. In his article, “Xenaphilia,” Flaherty (1997) has noted that, “What separates Xena from its cult predecessors is its ability to reach a variety of rabid audience segments on totally different levels” (p. 1). However, what Flaherty fails to mention is that the necessity to attract “a variety of rabid audience segments” is premised upon a ratings system that privileges the young male audience. This young (18-32) male audience is a key demographic for advertisers since it is argued that they have the highest amount of disposable income to spend on advertiser’s products (Meehan, 2002). It also has been argued that the young male audience prefers action and female spectacle, revealing that the emphasis placed upon these two elements in XWP is not only to attract a global audience, but also to attract the domestic young male audience (Stein, 1999). As Meehan (2002) has contended, however, this privileging of the young male audience is actually premised upon contradictory sexist assumptions about gender. In her article, “Gendering the Commodity Audience,” Meehan has contended that ratings do not actually reflect the number and kinds of people who watch a given television show at a given time, but are actually formulated to exclude those who simply “listen” to a program from consumers who will be influenced by advertising (p. 213). Because of

this valuing of consumers, Meehan (2002) has noted that men soon came to be favored above women in audience shares, since it was assumed that they had more money than women (p. 217). However, it is here that Meehan has noted a contradiction. While it is true that, when ratings were first instituted, men on average did make significantly more than women, gender norms of the time also constructed women as spenders of the money that men earned. Thus, if one were to follow this logic, women should have been the privileged demographic in television ratings since they are the ones actually spending/consuming advertiser’s products. This privileging of the young male consumer is also further weakened by the mass entrance of middle-class women into the workforce during the 1970s, a phenomenon that can be partly attributed to the second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s. This has given women access to incomes (almost) comparable to their male counterparts while also giving them more control over their incomes. Presumably, then, young women should be as valuable a demographic as the young male demographic. This is not the case according to Meehan (2002), though, who has argued that “noneconomic assumptions undergird beliefs about what sorts of people ought to be the audience and that those assumptions follow familiar patterns of discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, social status, sexual orientation, and age” (p. 217). This is not to say that women (particularly white, middle-class, young women) are not valued by advertisers. As stated previously, female audiences are becoming increasingly attractive to advertisers due to their growing wages and autonomy. However this privileging of male audiences above female audiences among advertisers results in the production of content that is geared primarily towards male viewers, with female viewers given secondary considerations, thereby reinforcing a gendered hierarchy of audiences. Thus the decision to produce XWP, which prominently features a female action hero, is the result of an economic drive to attract female audiences without alienating the core young male demographic. Xena may have agency within the television series, but this agency is only granted within a context that still leaves her appealing to men. From this perspective, XWP in informed by the negotiation between conceptions of feminism in the late 1990s and the capitalist drive to expand to new markets. As a result, while XWP does open a space for feminist critiques of patriarchy and capitalism (since the two institutions are neither coherent nor continuous), these

critiques are potentially delimited by the conservative media institutions that enable them. However, the feminist movement is not the only progressive political project that has been co-opted by media corporations in an attempt to increase profits by targeting multiple demographics attractive to advertisers. Becker (1998) has noted that the mid- nineties witnessed an explosion of gay and lesbian characters on television. XWP participated in this trend, receiving an enormous amount of publicity throughout its run due to its popularity among lesbians who read the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle as romantic rather than platonic. While this interpretation originated among fans, it was eventually appropriated by the writers and producers of XWP and incorporated into the series proper as “subtext.” The lesbian subtext of the series often consisted of ambiguous references and gestures that relied upon the audience to determine their ultimate meaning. The most popular example of this technique is the first “kiss” (out of a total of three) between Xena and Gabrielle, which occurred when Xena was trapped in the body of a man during a second season episode entitled “The Quest.” Due to this context, it is unclear whether the kiss with Gabrielle was initiated by Xena or the man whose body Xena was sharing at the time (an ambiguity that will be further discussed in the following chapter). The question that arises, of course, is why would the producers of XWP risk alienating their more conservative audiences (such as the coveted young male audience and the middle and upper classes) by incorporating elements of lesbianism into their text? The answer, of course, lies in money. According to Miller (1992), the lesbian and gay demographic is becoming increasingly attractive to advertisers due to studies that estimate the average yearly income for a gay household is well above the national average (approximately $50,000 in 1992). More recently, the GL Census reported that 32 percent of gay male households and 17 percent of gay female households have annual incomes in excess of $100,000 (Hoag, 2003). It is important to note, though, that these studies are often biased towards lesbians and gays who enjoy above-average incomes, educations, and cultural tastes due to their reliance upon self- identification as the common method of categorization. Fejes (2002) has insisted that “these individuals are more likely to enjoy a greater sense of persona, professional, and economic security and are thus more willing to be open about their sexual orientation”

(p. 202). Moreover, media producers (specifically owners of major gay and lesbian magazines) have perpetuated this stereotype of lesbians and gays as cultured, intelligent, and consumer-oriented in order to make the market even more appealing to advertisers. However, Miller (1992) has pointed out that conservative values still prevent many corporations from actively targeting the gay community. As a result, the lesbian and gay market is targeted primarily through subtextual clues such as the ones used in XWP. This, of course, results in a problematic co-optation of the queer movement by corporations that delimits the effectiveness of its political project while still providing them the illusion that they are being treated equally in society. Fejes (2002) has contended that “while these marketing studies do not present a realistic or representative portrayal of the lesbian/gay community, what they have done…is present a picture of the lesbian and gay community that has become very much part of the political discourse about that community” (p. 204). Thus, the methods used to target gays and lesbians in the media renders a significant amount of queer subjectivities invisible by privileging only a small subset of queers – affluent hyper-consumers (i.e., those most open to assimilation by capitalism). This is extremely problematic for queer liberation movements. As Becker (1998) has argued, “the conflation of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community with a specific quality audience of gays and lesbians moves the entire debate to the realm of consumption, disregards all notions of wider sexual oppression, and threatens to fracture the gay community along axes of class, gender, race, and sexual identity even more than it currently is” (7). This critique of queer visibility in the media may be extended to the representation of lesbianism in XWP due to its status as a television series produced and distributed by companies whose primary goal is the accumulation of profit. Lesbianism was only allowed into XWP so far as it is able to attract an audience that was willing to buy advertised products. Consequently, XWP participated in an institutional strategy that constructed queer communities as privileged consumers (and only privileged consumers), thus potentially limiting their agency by reducing it to the field of consumption. However, to say that XWP participated in an institutional strategy that sought to construct queer communities as (only) privileged consumers does not mean that this was the only effect of this strategy. As Becker (1998) implies, the mid-nineties were

also a transitional period for how advertising and television executives targeted queer communities, a period when queer communities were still in the process of being formed as a viable demographic. This transitional period is reflected in XWP’s usage of subtext to attract queer communities, which differed significantly from the overt representative strategies used by television producers in later “queer” programs (for example, Ellen or Queer as Folk). As Hamming (2001) has argued, this reliance upon subtext potentially opens up the field of sexuality in subversive (and unintentional) ways by drawing attention to the constructed nature of identity. In the chapter that follows, I intend to trace these effects within the text of XWP and their implication for a politics of identity. However, as this chapter has demonstrated, these effects do not exist outside of structural and institutional forces, but are fundamentally enabled by them, in ways that seek to support and reproduce these forces. While these forces do not totalize the effects of the hegemonic negotiation of dominant and subaltern discourses within XWP, they do problematize their subversive potential by grounding them within a mass media system whose ultimate goal is not the destabilization of oppressive discourses on gender, sexuality, and the nation but the accumulation of profit. While I do want to note and celebrate the empowering aspects of XWP’s engagement with feminist and queer discourses, I also want to complicate these celebratory aspects with an awareness that they are potentially overshadowed by the mass media institutions that produced them and (as will be seen more concretely in later chapters) threatened to undermine them.

CHAPTER TWO WHEN DISCOURSES COLLIDE: NEGOTIATING THE DOMESTINORMATIVE IN XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS In an article in Entertainment Weekly entitled “Xenaphilia,” Liz Friedman, a producer for XWP, proclaimed, “I don’t have any interest in saying [Xena and Gabrielle] are heterosexuals. That’s just bullshit, and no fun, either” (as qtd. in Flaherty, 2007, p. 2). By refusing to confirm the sexualities of Xena and Gabrielle, Friedman avoided potentially alienating different segments of Xena’s audience by arguing that the text is radically open to various interpretations, a strategy that has significant consequences for discourses on gender and sexuality. What these consequences are and how they are negotiated within the text of XWP are the primary questions that this chapter seeks to address. As we have seen in the previous chapter, dominant ideology is never pure, but is instead informed and impacted by subaltern discourses, cultures, and values. This is particularly evident in XWP, which attempted to attract lesbian and gay audiences by explicitly engaging with queer themes while still marketing itself to other, more conservative audiences. As a result of this negotiation between dominant and subaltern discourses, the text of XWP can be read as a political site of struggle between different audiences over the meanings attached to gender and sexuality. Consequently, this chapter will pay equal attention to the radical potential for feminist and queer political projects offered by XWP as well as the tactics used by the producers to delimit this radical potential by appropriating fan interpretations (namely the lesbian subtext of the series) and resignifying them for more conservative audiences. In broad terms this chapter argues that by marketing XWP as a radically open text (so as not to alienate any audience), the producers deferred the production of meaning to audiences, transforming them from passive consumers to active producers of XWP. This blurring of the lines between production and consumption highlights the constructed nature of meaning, language, and gender in XWP. The producers of XWP, however, attempted to delimit the potentially radical consequences of this feminist and queer critique of gender and sexuality by appropriating and commodifying certain fan interpretations. This can be seen in the manipulation of lesbian subtext and the restituation of these critiques within what Franke (2004) has called a “domestinormative” (as opposed to a heteronormative) framework, which provisionally grants homosexual

couples the same status as heterosexual couples provided they reproduce traditional forms of family and kinship (i.e. monogamous, caring relationships). This attempt to delimit XWP’s critique of dominant discourses on gender and sexuality, though, is problematized by the haunting presence/absence of violence that constantly threatens to (and frequently does) erupt within the narrative, resulting in what I term a generative contradiction between violence and domesticity that disrupts efforts to domesticate Xena. In order to prove this argument, I will focus upon two specific instances of lesbian subtext within the series and discuss how the differences between these two engagements with lesbianism offer vastly different possibilities for queer political projects. Queering “The Quest:” XWP and the Proliferation of Meaning XWP has always had a problematic relationship with contemporary discourses on gender and sexuality due to its placement of a female character at the center of a traditionally male dominated television genre, the action-adventure series. The character of Xena does not conform to the dominant model of women as fragile, emotional, or submissive, a model that sociologist R.W. Connell has termed “emphasized femininity.” As Kimmel (2000) has explained, emphasized femininity is “held up as a model against which [women] are expected to measure [themselves]” (11). This model, in turn, is constructed as natural, the result of the biological disposition of women. As such, it historically has been used to justify the subordination of women within American society. By not conforming to this model, though, the character of Xena threatens to reveal emphasized femininity as constructed and contingent, thus denying it access to any claims of originality or naturalness. Within the text of XWP, then, a tension arises as the producers attempt to balance Xena’s presentation as a physically imposing woman who is capable of overpowering any man with the television’s industry’s demands to attract the lucrative adult male demographic that may feel threatened by Xena’s explicit challenge to hegemonic discourses on gender. One obvious strategy employed to diffuse this tension is the exploitation of Lucy Lawless’s physical beauty, thus making her attractive to heterosexual men even when she is beating them up. Yet another, more subtle strategy employed by the producers of XWP is the overemphasis upon Xena’s exceptional status within the narrative. XWP goes to great lengths to establish the

differences between traditional femininity and the figure of the violent female. The most obvious example of this is the episode “Remember Nothing,” which allows Xena to experience a world in which she did not become a violent warrior, a reward from the Fates that can be taken away if Xena sheds a drop of blood in this new reality. The alternate-Xena is coded as almost excessively feminine. Her clothing, which consists of a lightly-colored blouse and a floor-length skirt, is far-removed from her traditional warrior costume, and codes her as reserved and virginal. Violence, then, is associated with both masculinity and sexuality, for by refusing to participate in violence Xena is coded as both traditionally feminine and virginal. This association between sexuality and violence is emblematic of a constant sliding between violence and sex within the text. The text also attempts to counter-balance Xena’s participation in masculine acts of violence by having her motivations and ethical modality remain distinctly feminine. Her initial motivation to “take up the sword” was to protect her homeland and, by extension, her family and friends. This motivation to protect her relationships undergirds much of her violent acts. For example, in XWP’s first episode, “Sins of the Past,” Xena buries her armor and weapons in an attempt to symbolically bury her violent past. This attempt, though, is frustrated when she sees a group of thugs attacking Gabrielle and the women of her village. Consequently, Xena is forced to assume a violent subject position during key points of the narrative in order to protect others. This parallels Gilligan’s (1993) famous description of the distinctly feminine “ethics of care,” which helped to popularly legitimize traditional feminine discourses linking women to “relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another” (p. 30). As Goodman (2004) has noted, however, “the idea of ‘care’ here simply repeats old stereotypes where women’s labor is considered moral and so outside a public world saturated in systems of money, capital, and power” (p. 33). Thus Xena oscillates between masculine acts of aggression and feminine ethical motivations, which figures Xena as a locus of contradiction that blurs the distinction between dominant and subaltern discourses on masculinity and femininity. Why, though, is Xena able to assume this subject position, rather than all women? The answer lies within Xena’s own personal experiences of violence. Threaded throughout

the narrative is a constant linkage between violence committed against Xena and Xena’s own use of violence. This is best seen in “The Gauntlet.” In this episode, Xena is forced to walk a gauntlet for her refusal to kill women and children, resulting in her brutal beating at the hands of her army. When Xena later kills the new leader of her army, the same music that played during the gauntlet scene can be heard once again, establishing a causal linkage between the two. Xena’s personal experiences of violence, then, function to legitimate her current violent subject position. This legitimation is further fixed in the episode “Destiny,” when Xena’s friend/mentor M’Lila notes, “Since you know evil, were evil, you can fight evil.” Consequently Xena, by functioning as a protector of women, does not blur the distinctions between traditional conceptions of gender by functioning as a locus of masculine and feminine contradictions, but instead polices these boundaries by protecting women from the one event that is repeatedly figured as the catalyst for the formation of violent women: violence and abuse. This reading of Xena is most apparent during the previously mentioned “Remember Nothing.” As we have seen, the plot of this episode hinges upon Xena’s transference to an alternate-reality, one in which she never became a warrior. She is only allowed to live in this idealized reality, though, as long as she refuses to participate in violence. The catalyst for Xena’s return to violence is Gabrielle, who is enslaved, abused, and ultimately resorts to killing, a line that the idealistic Gabrielle of Xena’s true reality would never cross. Thus, Xena sacrifices her ideal reality in order to prevent Gabrielle from being abused and, by extension, from becoming a violent female warrior like herself. This allows XWP to preserve the binary opposition between Xena and Gabrielle that structures much of the narrative energy of the first three seasons. Whereas Xena is represented as stoic, reserved, and masculine within the narrative, Gabrielle is a talkative, emotional, and hyper-feminine woman in constant need of protection. However, “The Quest” challenges this strategy of policing gender boundaries through its depiction of the aftermath of Xena’s death (which occured in the previous episode, “Destiny”). In other words, the center (Xena) around which gender representations had been previously organized drops out. This causes not only a proliferation of genders to erupt, but also a proliferation of sexualities. Butler (2001) has famously argued that “the disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of

the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain” (p. 2496). Consequently, the destabilization of gender identities that results from Xena’s absence within the narrative also destabilizes constructions of sexuality. This can be seen especially as characters move across identity categories in an attempt to fill the narrative space left by Xena. The most salient examples of this are the characters of Gabrielle and Autolycus (Bruce Campbell), who become surrogate sites of identification for the audience in Xena’s absence. “The Quest” quickly establishes this deterritorialization of identity and gender during the episode’s opening teaser when Gabrielle is approached by a group of thugs who wish to steal Xena’s coffin. This scene operates on two levels. On one level, it plays upon the trope of the “damsel in distress” by reversing it, having Gabrielle physically overpower the thugs. On another level, though, this scene problematizes the binary opposition between Xena and Gabrielle as established in previous episodes, thereby compromising Xena’s role as policer of gender boundaries, by presenting Gabrielle as a physically powerful woman as well. While in previous episodes Xena would normally be called upon to protect Gabrielle from a group of thugs, “The Quest” shows that Gabrielle is capable of physically defending herself. This destabilization of traditional gender roles is extended to masculinity as well. Towards the end of the fight, Iolaus (a character from XWP’s parent series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, played by Michael Hurst) enters to “rescue” Gabrielle. This rescuing, however, proves unnecessary. Iolaus instead moves to comfort Gabrielle, who is mourning the death of Xena. Rather than serving as a masculine protector, then, Iolaus instead functions as a caregiver (a traditionally feminine role). The episode further undermines Gabrielle’s “feminine” physical vulnerability by positioning her in a role of authority as Queen of the Amazons, a role that she is only allowed to take in Xena’s absence. In other words, identity and gender are dependent upon the context within which they are situated. Consequently, they “are always open to challenge and redefinition with shifts in [their] discursive context” (Weedon, 2001, p. 176), a situation that is reflected through Gabrielle’s progressive masculinization throughout “The Quest.” Meanwhile, while Gabrielle is masculinized in one strand of the narrative of “The Quest,” the character of Autolycus, the self-styled “King of Thieves,” is feminized in a parallel strand. Autolycus’ plot centers upon his possession by Xena’s spirit, who tries

to use Autolycus to steal her body back from the Amazons (where Gabrielle is preparing to have it cremated) and ultimately resurrect her. This possession by a female spirit challenges Autolycus’ status as a man, an effect emphasized in an early scene when Autolycus looks in a barrel of water only to find Xena reflected back at him. The narrative is only able to accomplish this gender bending, though, by establishing Autolycus’ masculinity as always already problematic. Autolycus’ distinguishing characteristics are his “bluster and bravado” (as described by Xena at the end of “The Quest”) and his obsession with maintaining his identity as the hyper-masculine King of Thieves. His role as the King of Thieves, however, is coded as a performance through Autolycus’ exaggeration of traditional “manliness” as well as the gaps that open up between his performance of the cool, disinterested thief and his obvious concern for the safety of Xena and Gabrielle. Thus, Autolycus’ gender is able to be problematized by his possession by a female ghost only because his identity has already been represented as unstable and performative. This destabilization of gender and sexuality opens the space for one of the most popular scenes in XWP. The scene in question involves Gabrielle (somehow) meeting with Xena (whose spirit is still technically in Autolycus’ body) on a spiritual plane, where Xena is able to convince Gabrielle that she is not dead. The scene uses a traditional shot-reverse shot technique to emphasize the intimacy between Xena and Gabrielle. However, sexual tension is created in the scene through the progressive tightening of the frame as the actors move closer together. This sexual tension culminates in a mid- shot of Xena leaning in to kiss Gabrielle as the music rises to a crescendo. Before Xena actually connects with Gabrielle, though, the camera abruptly cuts back to “reality,” where we see Autolycus kissing Gabrielle, leaving the audience to question who is kissing whom. On the one hand once the camera transitions back to “reality,” Autolycus appears surprised and confused to be kissing Gabrielle, lending textual support to the interpretation that it was Xena kissing Gabrielle (thus validating the popular fan claim that Xena and Gabrielle are a lesbian couple). Conversely, though, Xena also punches Autolycus (with his own fist) when it is revealed that Autolycus’ hand is on Gabrielle’s butt, leading the audience to believe that maybe it was Autolycus kissing Gabrielle after all. This self-conscious production of multiple significations allows for queer interpretations to emerge. It is important to note at this point, though,

that a “queer” interpretation does not necessarily mean a “lesbian” interpretation. As Sedgwick (1993) has contended persuasively, queer instead refers to “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signifiy monolithically” (p. 8). Fuss (1991) has argued along similar lines, noting that queer identities imaginatively enact “sexual redefinitions, reborderizations, and rearticulations” (p. 7). Thus the queer aspects of XWP do not assert themselves through a lesbian reading of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship. Rather, they are located in the undecidability of that relationship. This narrative and literal gap between Xena leaning in to kiss Gabrielle and Autolycus kissing Gabrielle allows the producers of Xena to satisfy multiple segments of its audience by deferring the ultimate signification of the kiss to the individual audience member. The individual audience member, in turn, is encouraged to form his or her own interpretation of the characters’ genders and sexualities through the narrative’s refusal to resolve the kiss’s meaning. Despite the fact that “The Quest” ends with the resurrection of Xena and a presumed return to normalcy (Gabrielle returns to being the vulnerable sidekick, Autolycus exits the series), the narrative gap of the kiss haunts and undercuts this easy resolution. Thus, the production of multiple meanings to satisfy different audience members highlights the constructed nature of meaning, language, and gender since any conclusion that a member of the audience would come to must either exclude pieces of textual evidence to the contrary or draw upon extra-textual evidence to resolve the contradictions produced by the text. Just when we think we have discovered the authentic sexual identity of Xena and Gabrielle, we are confronted with the realization that we have instead produced it, giving lie to the heteronormative concept of a natural, original sexual identity. Rather than being fixed by the narrative, then, gender and sexuality are instead floating signifiers that rely upon individual audience consumption and interpretation to become fixed. Consequently, the audience moves from passive consumers of ideologies of gender and identity to active producers of these ideologies. “The Quest,” then, critiques traditional gender roles not by denouncing hegemonic discourses or privileging subaltern discourses, but by arguing that all are equally constructed and dependent upon their insertion within a specific discourse to gain meaning.

The Return of the Norm: XWP and the Domestinormative However, this strategic opening of gaps within the narrative to allow for the possibility of radical fan interpretations did not persist throughout the series. Boese (1998) has charted the trajectory of the producers of XWP’s attitude towards the lesbian subtext of the series, who first denied it, then actively “played it up,” then argued that the series has “transcended” subtext and labels. While this desire to “transcend labeling” is in line with radical queer discourses, Boese (1998) has remained skeptical of the producers’ motives, noting the possibility that their distancing themselves from the generation of subtext perhaps has less to do with an adherence to radical projects than a fear of a conservative backlash. Consequently I want to suggest that, as the series progressed, XWP attempted to formulate a compromise between queer discourses and the threat that these discourses posed to dominant ideologies. Ironically, this involved making the lesbian aspects of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship more visible. The most overt expression of lesbianism in the history of the program occurred in the sixth season episode “Return of the Valkyrie” (2000), the third in a trilogy of episodes (called “The Ring trilogy” by fans) retelling the stories of Beowulf, Sleeping Beauty, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle with Xena and Gabrielle as the central characters. As the episode opens, Xena has lost her memory and Gabrielle lies in a magic-induced slumber. Haunted by traces of her memories of her relationship with Gabrielle, Xena embarks on a journey to recover her lost memories. The episode culminates in a restaging of the Sleeping Beauty myth. Upon finding Gabrielle, Xena kisses her, restoring her lost memories and awakening Gabrielle in one fell swoop. Rather than quickly cutting away from the kiss between Xena and Gabrielle as in “The Quest,” the camera instead frames the kiss in an extreme close-up. This coupled with the repeated references to Xena and Gabrielle as “soul mates” (a literal truth, as revealed in the fourth season episode “Between the Lines”) throughout the Ring trilogy firmly situates Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship as romantic in nature. The subtext became text. This increase in lesbian visibility, however, comes at a certain price. Despite the overt expression of lesbianism and the resignification of a popular heteronormative myth, the subversive potential of the kiss between Xena and Gabrielle in “Return of the Valkyrie” is delimited in several significant ways. Whereas in “The Quest” the genders of both Gabrielle and Autolycus were destabilized in order to open a space for the “kiss”

between Xena and Gabrielle to emerge, in “Return of the Valkyrie” the femininity of Xena and Gabrielle is fixed and emphasized. For the majority of the episode, Xena has amnesia. This is used within the narrative to justify her adoption of a more traditionally feminine persona. Rather than the physically empowered and assertive character to which audiences are accustomed, the Xena of “Return of the Valkyrie” is instead submissive, timid, and hyper-emotional. The first act of the episode even goes so far as to show her getting married to an abusive king! This emphasis upon Xena’s femininity is further extended to her styling and costuming. Her make-up is more apparent and traditionally feminine, accentuating her cheeks and eyes, while her traditional warrior costume has been discarded in favor of a floor length dress with an elaborately decorated, low-cut golden bodice. Gabrielle’s femininity is also emphasized within the narrative. Throughout the episode, she is asleep in the middle of a ring of fire, waiting for her soul mate (i.e. Xena) to awaken her. In other words, Gabrielle occupies the position of the passive object of others’ desires, a position that is further underscored by the armies of men who try to cross the ring of fire to awaken her (and are killed for their troubles). Gabrielle, too, is styled differently than at any other time in the series. Whereas in the final two and a half seasons of XWP Gabrielle’s hair and costuming were styled to make her appear more masculine and warrior-like, in “Return of the Valkyrie” she is given much longer hair and a floor-length skirt similar to the one worn by Xena. This emphasis upon Xena and Gabrielle’s femininity within “Return of the Valkyrie” allows the narrative to delimit the radical potential of their kiss to open discourses on sexuality. According to Kimmell (2000), women are traditionally seen as “most open and disclosing” of their emotions in their relationships (p. 208). In other words, women are traditionally associated with ideas of intimacy and domesticity. Whereas “The Quest” allows for the blurring of gender boundaries and the proliferation of sexualities to erupt, “Return of the Valkyrie” firmly situates Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship within traditional forms of domesticity and kinship by overdetermining their femininity. This emphasis upon traditional relationship forms is underscored during the montage accompanying their kiss, where Xena claims that Gabrielle is her “best friend” and “family.”

This emphasis upon a romantic lesbian relationship between Xena and Gabrielle coincided with a decrease in the number of heterosexual entanglements that the duo engaged in. The first two seasons of XWP frequently featured male suitors who attempted to win the affections of both Xena and Gabrielle. These included Marcus (Bobby Hosea), Xena’s lover in the first season episodes “The Path Not Taken” and “Mortal Beloved,” and Perdicus (Scott Garrison), Gabrielle’s childhood paramour and eventual husband (“The Return of Callisto”). While these male lovers frequently met with untimely and often violent ends (for example, Marcus dies by taking an arrow meant for Xena while Perdicus is murdered by Xena’s archenemy Callisto), they also opened up the field of possibilities in regard to Xena and Gabrielle’s sexuality, allowing audiences to read Xena and Gabrielle’s sexuality in a variety of ways. It is this opening of this field of interpretation that I specifically mark as “queer.” It is also this queer possibility that was subsequently denied in the later seasons of Xena through the narrowing of the field of interpretation to a domestic, romantic lesbian relationship. While later seasons did attempt to introduce male paramours (most notably Ares and Joxer), they were soon quickly dismissed (as in the case of Joxer) or used as a foil to highlight the privileged, authentic status of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship (as in the case of Ares). Other Xena scholars have generally regarded this situation of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship within domestic terms as positive. For example, Futrell (2003) has argued that XWP reformulates the Western model of the hero by presenting a female warrior whose sense of ethics is informed primarily by concerns for relationships and the domestic sphere. According to Futrell, this allows XWP to critique models of imperialism. Kennedy (2003) has concurred, contending that “XWP offers a realist concept of love as the embodiment of concrete relationships between women, their friends, and their families. This vision of love, the show suggests, possesses the power to redeem us from the violence of myth and history” (p. 52). While I agree that there are certainly empowering aspects of XWP’s valorization of domesticity and the resultant increase in lesbian visibility, I also want to suggest that this emphasis upon the domestic within later episodes of the series engages in a normalizing process that renders other queer subjectivities invisible.

I argue that later seasons of XWP, as evidenced by episodes like “Return of the Valkyrie,” participate in a politics of queer visibility that, in the words of Franke (2004), “privileges privatized and domesticated rights and legal liabilities, while rendering less viable projects that advance nonnormative notions of kinship, intimacy, and sexuality” (p. 1414). In order to render the lesbian relationship between Xena and Gabrielle more palatable to conservative heterosexual audiences, and hence more visible, this relationship was increasingly defined and delimited according to heteronormative terms. As Berlant and Warner (1998) have argued, heteronormativity is not a “simple monoculture.” Rather, “hegemonies are nothing if not elastic alliances, involving dispersed and contradictory strategies for self-maintenance and reproduction” (p. 553). XWP, then, attempts to preserve heteronormativity by “extending the heterosexual life narrative” (Berlant and Warner, 1998, p. 557) to homosexual couples. In practical terms, this meant narrowing the expression of lesbianism in XWP to the forms and structures articulated by heteronormative institutions, namely to “domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form” (Berlant and Warner, 1998, p. 557). The conflict between situation of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship within a domestinormative framework during later seasons and XWP’s earlier, more ambiguous stance towards their sexual identities resonates with developments in queer culture and politics during the mid-to-late 1990s. According to Bernstein (2002), the 1990s was a singularly divisive time period for the Lesbian and Gay movement, as political and cultural activists were torn between “challenging culture by deconstructing categories of identity based on gender and sexual orientation” and efforts “to win political victories by reifying identity categories and denying any challenge to dominant cultural norms” (p. 561). In order to earn concrete legal rights for lesbian and gay citizens, political activists have often participated in a politics of similarity by drawing analogies between homosexuals and heterosexuals, claiming that the denial of rights to the former was unjustified due to their similarity to the latter. However, this strategy was not without its problems. Warner (2000) has criticized this strategy within gay and lesbian political activism, contending that the official gay movement is more “enthralled by respectability” than in “broadening its campaign against sexual stigma beyond sexual orientation” (p. 24-25). Ironically, this results in a participation in a politics of exclusion as much as in a politics of recognition as certain representations of queer individuals (namely those

most easily assimilated into heteronormative institutions) are privileged while other, more “deviant” queer individuals are systematically ignored and/or forgotten. While Bernstein (2002) has also argued that the “official” LGBT movement balances these exclusionary tactics with the deconstructive cultural projects described above, in recent years these aspects of the LGBT movement have been de-emphasized. Franke (2004) has noticed this trend in the gay rights movement, lamenting, “why have the gaining of rights and the politics of recognition been substituted for earlier political goals in the gay community that were committed to making viable a range of sexual and kin affiliations other than those that are narrowly domestinormative,” particularly in the wake of the 2004 Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision that legalized sodomy practices provided that they occur within a narrowly defined private “domestic” space (p. 1419). I argue that a similar cultural logic is at work within XWP, as its earlier representations of radically indeterminate genders and sexualities (as evidenced by “The Quest”) is ultimately exchanged for more visible, yet also more exclusionary representations of lesbianism. For Berlant and Warner (1998), this privileging of the domestic has overt class ramifications as well, since the domestic sphere is typically constructed as “a promised haven that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political and economic lives” and “consoles them for the damaged humanity of mass society” (p. 553). In other words, only a privileged segment of the queer population has access to the refuge of the domestic sphere. It is not surprising, then, that XWP began to gradually situate the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle within domestinormative terms, since the audiences with which this representation would most resonate are more than likely the types of audiences most valued by advertisers. The consequences of this are troubling for gay politics, for as Becker (1998) has noted, “the gay men and lesbians who can’t afford the magazines or don’t identity with the images of gay life presented in them are increasingly excluded from the mainstream’s understanding of what it means to be gay or lesbian in the nineties” (p. 6). The relationship between hegemonic processes and representations of gender and sexuality, then, are simultaneously liberating and problematic. As we have seen, the negotiation between dominant and subaltern discourses on gender and sexuality that is characteristic of hegemony initially enabled XWP to present a radically

indeterminate and queer perspective on gender and sexuality. However, the liberatory possibilities of these hegemonic negotiations are always threatened by a collapse into what Gramsci (1998) has termed a “compromise equilibrium.” In the case of XWP, its attempts to negotiate competing discourses on gender and sexuality eventually congealed into a domestinormative discourse that recognizes and authorizes a lesbian reading of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship, but only if that relationship conforms to relationship models established by exclusionary heteronormative institutions. Thus, by engaging in these hegemonic cultural and economic processes, XWP simultaneously participated in and helped to produce a domestinormative compromise equilibrium that informed contemporary understandings of queer communities. While I do not want to discount the significant benefits that such a compromise offers to queer communities today (such as the extension of certain rights and privileges to previously excluded minorities), I also fear that such a move threatens to simply substitute one exclusionary normative definition of gender and sexuality with another. The Bitter and Sweet of It: Generating Contradictions in XWP Yet, if XWP attempts to delimit the disruptive potential of its engagement with queer themes by framing it within domestinormative terms, it is important to note that this project is never entirely successful. One of the primary methods used to regulate the character of Xena is through the establishment of a binary opposition between her present self and her past self within the narrative of the program. The primary characterization of Xena is as a just warrior seeking redemption for her past as an evil warlord. Over the course of the series, entire episodes have been devoted to chronicling her evil past actions, often through the use of flashbacks. These past actions have ranged in severity from attacking surrounding villages to protect her homeland (“Destiny”) to the full-scale destruction of entire nations (“Adventures in the Sin Trade”). In other words, “evil” Xena can best be understood as the binary opposite of the present Xena. Whereas the Xena of the present within the narrative is calm, collected, and in control of her violent actions, evil Xena is thoroughly undomesticated. The undomesticated nature of Xena is also extended to sexuality, as one of the primary ways of signifying evil Xena’s non-normativity is through her engagement with non- traditional, non-domestic forms of sex. Evil Xena frequently manipulates the men around her through sex (see, for example, “The Rheingold,” the first episode in the Ring

Trilogy). She also engages in public sex (“The Debt”) and in anal sex (“Adventures in the Sin Trade”). These potentially disruptive representations of sexuality are delimited by the text in a variety of ways. For one, they are all done with men. Evil Xena is typically constructed as fiercely heterosexual. Interestingly enough, in the moments when evil Xena can be read as engaging in lesbian activities, these interactions are overcoded as domesticating and potentially redemptive. The entire premise of “The Debt” is based upon evil Xena’s encounter with the character of Lao Ma (Jacqueline Kim), a Chinese concubine (and, within the narrative of the series, the founder of Daoism). The text of the episode hints at the possibility of Lao Ma’s being a lesbian (as evidenced by her infamous “I don’t eat meat” line and a kiss she shares with Xena) while also emphasizing the redemptive influences that she has over evil Xena. In fact, the eponymous debt of the episode is formed through evil Xena’s refusal to allow herself to be redeemed through the actions of Lao Ma, which ultimately leads to the death of Lao Ma. This establishes a problematic trend in XWP, as the more visible lesbianism and homosexuality becomes in the text, the more domesticated the sexual interaction becomes. Conversely, the more deviant the sexual interaction, the more it is fixed as heterosexual. Another way this disruption of domestic sex is delimited is by coding it as evil and contrasting it with the “good” relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. This is most clearly seen in the coda of the Ring Trilogy. The first episode in the trilogy, “The Rheingold,” details how evil Xena’s lust for power threw the Norse lands into chaos and confusion, while the final two episodes are concerned with Xena’s attempts to right her past wrongs in the present. Having accomplished this, the trilogy concludes with a former victim of Xena’s asking, “What magic has made Xena into such a noble creature that she would give up the power of the Rheingold?” Xena responds, “It wasn’t magic,” before turning to look at Gabrielle, whose face is framed in a close-up, smiling. Again, what is a stake in this normalizing project is not the preservation of heterosexuality, but rather the maintenance of the domestic. However, this binary opposition between good Xena and evil Xena is undermined through the haunting absence and eruption of evil Xena in the present of the narrative. One of the primary methods used to generate drama within the narrative of XWP is to

show Xena’s efforts to break free of her warlord habits. During moments of extreme stress or emotional turmoil, though, Xena often reverts to her evil habits. For example, in “The Price” Xena briefly reverts to her warlord persona in order to defend an Athenian outpost against a group of barbarians while in “Ties That Bind,” she insanely commands an army to “take the village” after discovering that the village has executed her father for his past crimes against them. As can be expected, the eruptions of evil Xena in the present often greatly disrupt the domesticated relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. The most salient example of this occurs in the episode, “The Bitter Suite.” Following the death of her son at the hands of Gabrielle’s daughter, Xena is driven mad with grief and blames Gabrielle. At the urging of her former mentor, Ares (Kevin Smith), Xena exacts vengeance on Gabrielle by brutally dragging her behind her horse for what seems like miles, leaving Gabrielle bloodied and bruised. This is only the most explicit example of Xena’s abuse of Gabrielle, though. Other less extreme examples can be found with surprising regularity throughout the entire series, whether it is Xena punching Gabrielle (“The Reckoning”) to Xena splitting Gabrielle’s head open with her chakram (“Motherhood”). While good Xena always triumphs over her dark side (usually through the redemptive power of her love for Gabrielle), that she so frequently engages in violence constantly threatens to undercut and disrupt this subordination of violence to domesticity, as evidenced by Xena’s frequent physical abuse of Gabrielle. Thus Xena’s dark side is a constant, haunting presence in the text of XWP, always threatening to disrupt the domestic bond between Xena and Gabrielle. I do not want to suggest, though, that the violence committed by Xena (especially the violence against Gabrielle) is something to be celebrated or emulated. Rather, I want to argue that this blurring of the boundaries between “good” Xena and “evil” Xena opens up spaces within the narrative for a critique of the domestinormative framing of the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle by revealing its contingent and constructed nature. Violence always threatens to invade and contradict Xena and Gabrielle’s comfortably domestic relationship, thus marking domesticity as both fragile and permeable, making it anything but stable and secure. I term this a generative contradiction, then, because it potentially enables audiences to imagine relationship structures that are not narrowly confined within the domestic sphere.

Consequently, despite its efforts to fix the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle within a domestinormative framework, thereby dampening its critique of hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality, XWP instead presents a representation of gender and sexuality that is radically indeterminate. This indeterminacy creates spaces for audience agency within the text, allowing individuals to decide for themselves how to best understand the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. It is crucial to note, however, that this agency does not exist outside of the economic forces governing XWP’s production, distribution, and marketing. Rather, the hegemonic strategies employed by XWP’s producers to attract a wide variety of audiences encouraged and created these gaps within the text through their insistence that the text can mean whatever audiences want it to mean. Ultimately, then, XWP’s specific deployment of hegemonic strategies reveals that economic forces may inform and create audiences, but they do not completely dominate their textual agency. As Berlant and Warner (1998) have noted, the elastic alliances of hegemony create contradictions within texts, allowing audiences a limited agency to enter into a text and resignify its meaning to suit their own interests. While these meanings may be ignored by the primary text, they still haunt any effort to read the text as unified and continuous. Thus, hegemonic practices do not simply reproduce dominant ideologies on gender and sexuality, but also open spaces within texts where these ideologies can be challenged and, possibly, overturned. Though the fandom that erupted around XWP more often than not reinscribed these dominant ideologies (as we shall see in the next chapter), the text of XWP resists such an easy anchoring in the domestinormative.

CHAPTER 3 TEXTUAL GROUNDING: HOW XENA HELPED RECONFIGURE THE “ACTIVE AUDIENCE” Until recently, fandom has been defamed by both academia and mass culture because it has been defined “primarily through relations of consumption and spectatorship rather than production or participation” (Jenkins and Tulloch 1995, p. 4). The image of the rabid fan still has a significant amount of cultural currency in our contemporary moment, mainly due to the efforts of the media to portray fans as aberrant, unsocial, and infantile. However, recent scholarship has taken a more sophisticated approach to the study of fandom, frequently framing fans as exemplary resistant readers rather than the passive consumers of textual ideology. Chief among this scholarship has been the work of Henry Jenkins, whose framing of fans as “textual poachers” of mass media materials has informed much of the field of fandom studies. In his study of Star Trek fandom, Jenkins (2006a), drawing upon the work of Michel de Certeau, has argued that fandom serves an important cultural and political function in contemporary society. According to Jenkins, “Fandom is a vehicle for marginalized sub- cultural groups (women, the young, gays, and so on) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; fandom is a way of appropriating mass media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into popular culture” (p. 40). In other words, fandom enables marginalized individuals to form a social network that enables them to articulate their own needs and desires within the space of a mass culture that frequently ignores or denigrates them. By “poaching,” or appropriating and resignifying mass media materials to suit their own needs or desires, fans potentially disrupt the hegemonic authority of mass media producers and the dominant ideologies that mass media texts may reproduce. For Jenkins, one of the primary activities that fans engage in to open spaces for these cultural concerns is the writing/reading of fan fiction. Fan fiction allows fans to appropriate characters, settings, themes, and genres from a mass culture product (such as XWP), and rewrite them “to make [them] more responsive to their needs, to make [them] a better producer of personal meanings and pleasures” (Jenkins 2006a., p. 40).

This framing of fan fiction as “textual poaching” and thus inherently disruptive to media hegemonies has been the theoretical foundation for many scholarly studies of fan fiction. For example, Derecho (2006) has argued that fan fiction as a whole is a resistant practice because “it is the means by which women [the majority of fan fiction writers are female] write against the media corporations whose products they consume by augmenting or sometimes replacing the canonical versions of media texts with their own texts” (p. 71-72), even if these texts reinscribe dominant discourses on gender and sexuality. As Jenkins (2006a) has noted, though, this model of fandom activity must be modified in our contemporary moment in order to account for the blurring of the boundaries between activities of consumption and activities of (official) production brought about by the emergence of new media and forms of communication (particularly the Internet). As I have shown in previous chapters, XWP in particular consciously engaged in marketing strategies and production practices that conspicuously blurred the lines between consumption and production through the creation of a radically open text that resists totalization by any one reading. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to examine and analyze the effects of this creation of a self-consciously open text upon the fandom of XWP. I argue that this event marks a significant shift and reversal in the relationship between production practices and fandom activities as it has been traditionally understood. Rather than prying open spaces within the text (as previous fandoms have done), XWP fandom was more preoccupied in filling in these gaps with their own interpretations. This process necessarily involved delimiting the semiotic potential of XWP, oftentimes producing readings and fictions that reinscribed, rather than challenged, dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. This can be seen in the work of popular fan fiction writer Melissa Good, who was ultimately hired by the producers of XWP to write two episodes of the series during its sixth and final season. While I argue that the hiring of Melissa Good simultaneously authorized fan meanings and interpretations in unprecedented ways and limited these meanings to a domestinormative trajectory, the final sections of this chapter is devoted to examining how the textual strategies of XWP’s producers undercut this project through their attempt to de-center semiotic authority and establish an equivocation between all ways of reading XWP. This project, however, is itself

potentially problematized by the producers’ refusal to de-center their economic authority over the text. A Very “Good” Thing for XWP? In his most recent study of fan culture, “Interactive Audiences?: The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans,” Jenkins (2006b) has attempted to account for recent changes in the relationship between producers and consumers by noting that media advertisers now take for granted that audiences are critical, discerning, and active (as opposed to previous images of audiences as passive consumers). As a result, mass media products were forced to become much more flexible to the demands of audiences and fans, which required an increased level of interaction between producers and consumers. The popularization of the Internet (beginning in the early 1990s with the introduction of America Online) facilitated this heightened level of interaction between producers and consumers since traditional barriers to interaction (such as, for example, space and time) were either significantly reduced or altogether obliterated. This popularization of the Internet also greatly impacted the development of fan communities. No longer confined to networking through the mail or at fan conventions, fans could now produce and distribute their products and meanings faster and more widely than at any previous point. It also allowed for the development of what Jenkins (2006b) has referred to as the “collective intelligence” of the fan community. Following the work of Pierre Levy, Jenkins defines collective intelligence as “knowledge available to all members of a community,” which “expands a community’s productive capacity because it frees individual members from the limitations of their memory and enables the group to act upon a broader range of expertise” (p. 139). The popularization of the Internet not only lead to the development of the “collective intelligence” of fandom communities, but also expanded these communities by increasing access to them for both consumers and producers. In other words, mass media consumers now had greater opportunities to communicate with other consumers and distribute their personal meanings and uses of mass media texts, while producers now had greater access to these meanings and uses. Consequently, fan activities that were typically classified as existing in the margins of “normal” consumption practices began to gradually move from “cult status toward the cultural mainstream” (Jenkins 2006, p. 142). For Jenkins, this fundamentally alters the relationship between producers and consumers (as well as

between individual consumers) because “this collective exchange of knowledge cannot be fully contained by previous sources of power…that depended on maintaining tight control over the flow of information” (p. 140). One of the first fandoms to actively take advantage of the potential of the Internet to redefine the relationship between production and consumption was XWP fandom. As Boese (1998) has noted in her study of XWP fandom:

The Internet facilitates the speed at which news can be spread in the form of dramatized fantasy themes. It creates a potential for one-to-one contact with members of TPTB [“The Powers That Be,” i.e. the producers of XWP] far better than conventional postal mail. Indeed, one of the most recurrent and mythologized themes in the Xenaverse is the story of how a small online community of Hardcore Nutball fans changed the direction of a television program in some risky, divergent, and non-mainstream directions” (L80a).

As we have seen, the producers of XWP responded to the threat posed by the emergence of the Internet to traditional means of maintaining semiotic control of a text not by tightening their control over meaning, but instead by insisting that the text belongs to the audience to make of it what they will. This seemingly open relationship between fans and producers of XWP culminated in the hiring of a popular fan fiction writer, Melissa Good (known online by her screenname “Merwolf”) to write two episodes of XWP during its sixth and final season. On one level, this action served to earn back the goodwill of fans, who had heavily criticized the series’ fifth season for its perceived drop in quality and odd characterizations of Xena and Gabrielle. In an interview with fan website Whoosh.org, Robert Tapert (2001), the creator and executive producer of XWP, claimed, “Nobody was thinking. Nobody loved the show” during the fifth season (para. 66), which resulted in several substandard episodes. In order to correct this, Tapert went into the fandom to find a writer who did love the show. What he found was Melissa Good. As Tapert explains, “I’ll tell you why I like working with Missy Good: she loves Xena and Gabrielle. That’s invaluable to me” (para. 103). However, this does little to help explain why Melissa Good was chosen, out of all of the “bards” (writers of XWP fan fiction) on the Internet, to write for the series proper. The decision to privilege Good’s fan fiction above all others was also largely informed by the way in which Good framed Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship. Good’s fan fiction,

by following patterns associated with the romance genre, acknowledges a homoerotic relationship between Xena and Gabrielle that also conforms to traditional, heteronormative constructions of relationships by presenting Xena and Gabrielle as excessively domestic. Throughout the course of Good’s fan fiction, Xena and Gabrielle acknowledge their romantic feelings for one another, marry, settle down in Xena’s hometown of Amphipolis, and have a child (a narrative that closely parallels heteronormative life narratives). This, in turn, resolves what I have previously described as the generative contradiction between violence and domesticity that disrupts the heteronormative tendencies of the primary text of XWP. Thus, in addition to authorizing fan productions and activities, I want to suggest that the hiring of Melissa Good during the sixth season of XWP also potentially delimited the range of interpretations available to fans. As discussed in the previous chapter, as XWP developed, Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship was progressively situated within a domestinormative framework, thus reducing its threat to heteronormative forms of gender and sexuality. The hiring of Melissa Good participates in this trajectory since her fan fiction was able to present a version of Xena and Gabrielle that was explicitly homoerotic and explicitly domestic in a way that was denied to the official program due to the demands of both the television market (which prevented producers from overtly engaging with controversial subject matter) and the action-adventure genre (which denied Xena and Gabrielle access to a stable domestic sphere). Consequently I want to suggest that the producers of XWP were able to simultaneously acknowledge fan activities and distance the program from those fan readings that did not easily conform to a narrow domestinormative trajectory through their hiring of Melissa Good. In order to explore how this was accomplished, it is necessary to begin with Good’s fan fiction. Good’s most sustained engagement with XWP fan fiction is the series of 16 stories, ranging in length from 100 to over 500 pages, that make up her “A Journey of Soulmates” series. These stories were initially inspired by the events of the second season episode “The Quest” (particularly the kiss between Xena and Gabrielle discussed in the previous chapter) and begin shortly after the events of “The Quest.” The novels that make of “A Journey of Soulmates” were initially meant to exist in the margins of the primary textual universe of XWP. The early novels of the series frequently reference, expand upon, and respond to the events of the series. However,

following Good’s dissatisfaction with the events of the third and fourth seasons, her fan fiction begins to diverge significantly from the main program’s narratives. Rather than embarking upon a quest for spiritual enlightenment that eventually lead to their crucifixion (the broad narrative trajectory of the fourth season of XWP), Good’s Xena and Gabrielle instead start a family in Xena’s hometown of Amphipolis. By explicitly representing Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship in homoerotic terms, Good’s fan fiction can be read as participating in the “slash” genre of fan fiction. Slash fiction is typically understood as the unorthodox romantic pairing of two male characters from a television series, the most famous example being Kirk/Spock fan fiction in Star Trek fandom (the title “slash” stems from the punctuation mark used to connect the characters). In a typical slash narrative, the homosocial bond between two male characters is transformed into a homoerotic bond. The emphasis in slash fiction, however, is typically upon the emotional aspects of the characters’ relationship with one another. One of the primary sources of tension in slash fiction results from the male characters’ struggles to negotiate this desire for intimacy with masculine discourses that frame men as independent and emotionally detached. Slash fiction is typically written by heterosexual women for an audience comprised mainly of other heterosexual women. This odd phenomenon has lead many scholars, chief among them Joanna Russ, to argue that slash fiction does not comment upon male homosexuality (as one would presume from the unorthodox pairing of male characters) so much as it enacts a version of female sexuality upon male bodies. Bacon-Smith (1992) has both expanded and critiqued this argument, contending that the pairing of male characters in slash fiction allows heterosexual female fans to understand male sexuality (rather than female sexuality) and imagine a type of relationship that disrupts “the very institution of hierarchical power that constructs men as individuals, not as parts of a whole” (p. 249). In either of these cases, though, slash fiction is generally understood to have more to say about heterosexuality than about homosexuality. As Woledge (2006) has noted, slash fiction “is simply not about modern homosexual identities, and thus, although it often depicts homosexual acts, it retains distance from homosexual politics” (p. 103). XWP slash fiction, though, challenges this characterization of slash fiction for two broad reasons: XWP slash fiction pairs women (rather than men) and XWP slash fiction

is predominantly written by lesbian women. Thus the complicated processes of identification for which other scholars have attempted to account are seemingly resolved in XWP slash fiction. XWP slash fiction is written predominantly by self- identified lesbians for a largely lesbian audience. Thus, it is impossible to conclude that XWP slash fiction is not about modern homosexual identities, nor does it retain a distance from homosexual politics. As I will show, the slash fiction of Good actively participates in a kind of homosexual identity politics that sought to legitimize homosexual relationships by likening them to dominant heteronormative forms of relationships (namely the monogamous dyad that justifies a division of labor) which I have previously described as domestinormative. Despite this significant difference, though, Good’s fan fiction is more similar to traditional slash fiction than it is dissimilar. Like in traditional slash fiction, Good’s “A Journey of Soulmates” is centered upon the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, rather than the adventures that they take part in. This resituates the characters of XWP from an action-adventure genre into the more traditionally feminine genre of the romance. Good’s fiction is not unique in this. Wilder (1998) has noted that “the relationship [between Xena and Gabrielle] is the foundation and primary source of inspiration for the writers of fan fiction” in the Xenaverse (para. 28). Unlike other, more sexually explicit bards in the Xenaverse, though, Good chose to de-emphasize the overtly sexual aspects of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship, instead overemphasizing the emotional bond (routinely referred to as a “joining of their souls”) that holds them together. Good makes this abundantly clear in the extra-textual disclaimers that accompany her stories. For example, in addition to the typical disclaimer stating that the characters are the property of MCA-Universal and Renaissance Pictures (so as to avoid litigation), Good’s disclaimer for her novel “The Longest Night” also proclaims that the story “is about two women in love with each other and we’re not pretending any of this best friend/sister/mother/daughter stuff. Nothing is graphic, we stick to PG-13.” This emphasis upon the emotional intimacy of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship is reiterated continuously throughout the entire series, as is especially apparent in Good’s description of Xena and Gabrielle’s “first time” in her novel “At a Distance.” Rather than explaining the act in pornographic detail, Good instead describes the scene from the perspective of Gabrielle, an unsurprising move since Good consistently characterizes

Gabrielle as the more conventionally feminine and emotionally vulnerable partner in the relationship:

Gabrielle let instinct take over, and an innate sense, which she realized, in a fuzzy sort of way, must be part of whatever it was that linked them together, because there were things she now just knew. And that was a good thing, because there was no awkwardness between them, as both had sort of expected, and it was very comfortable, and very intense, and then got more so.

Good’s insistence upon Gabrielle’s intuitive, almost psychic knowledge of Xena is consistent with the depictions of sex and intimacy that occur in other slash fan fictions. Thus, rather than being a vehicle for titillation, sex in slash fiction (particularly Good’s fan fiction) is instead “used to enhance the intimacy that the story puts in place” (Woledge 2006, p. 105), reinscribing hegemonic feminine and heteronormative discourses that insist upon the connection between sex and love. This insistence upon describing Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship as explicitly romantic (rather than merely physical), as well as her depiction of “PG-13” versions of sexual contact, helps to explain why Good was chosen to write for the series proper. Her focus upon intimacy and romance is less threatening to heternormative constructions of relationships than other, more explicit XWP fan fictions available on the Internet. Good’s focus upon intimacy and emotional closeness, however, does so at the expense of the television program’s emphasis upon the violent aspects of Xena’s personality. Part of the narrative energy of “A Journey of Soulmates” lies in Xena’s quest not to rid the world of evil, but to become emotionally open and intimate with Gabrielle. Good accomplishes this recuperation of Xena for a romantic narrative by causally linking her taciturn and violent disposition to a psychological need to protect herself from emotional harm and betrayal, thus characterizing Xena in a manner similar to those used by romance authors to characterize the male heroes of their narratives. Gabrielle and her devotion to Xena, then, functions as a vehicle to break down the psychological barriers to intimacy that Xena has constructed, as evidenced by the following passage from Good’s “Bound:”

She [Xena] abandoned herself for a time, just absorbing the warmth and love that Gabrielle offered with her voice and reassuring touch, soaking it in and letting it

dissolve the dark walls that had suddenly closed in on her. After a bit, she took a deep breath, and leaned back against the pillow, giving the bard a half grin, that was immediately reflected back at her. “Thanks.” Xena said, with quiet affection.

This rewriting of Xena’s violent personality is nowhere more apparent than in Good’s rewriting of the events of “The Bitter Suite,” which featured the infamous “Gabdrag” discussed in the previous chapter. As I argued in the previous chapter, the Gabdrag of “The Bitter Suite” blurs the distinction between violence and domesticity in a way that disrupts XWP’s attempts to unproblematically frame Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship along domestinormative terms. In “Darkness Falls,” her response to the events of “The Bitter Suite,” Good outright rejects the episode, rewriting its events in order to downplay the marked violence of the scene and recuperate the character of Xena for a more properly romantic narrative. This marks a significant departure from her previous rewritings of the television series. Rather than rejecting events from the series, Good had heretofore simply expanded upon them, often by providing insight into Xena and Gabrielle’s thought processes that had remained ambiguous in the television series. In “Darkness Falls,” however, Xena takes Gabrielle to a cave in order to discuss and work through the events of the Rift of the third season rather than dragging Gabrielle behind her horse for what seems like miles before they are both magically transported to the world of Illusia. The only similarity between the two events is that, in the heat of an argument, Xena lashes out and punches Gabrielle. In contrast to the Xena of the television series who triumphantly lifts Gabrielle above her head while screaming, “Vengeance,” Good’s Xena is instantly devastated by her violent actions: “It shattered something, somewhere deep inside her. She’d stopped moving forward, and started backing up, until her shoulders hit granite, and just stood there, hurting.” The scene in question ends not with the musical intervention of the television program, but with Gabrielle cradling Xena in her arms, emphasizing the strength of their connection to overcome their pain and loss. While many fans were deeply disturbed by the events of “The Bitter Suite” because it problematically frames Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship as abusive, and no doubt preferred Good’s rewriting of events to deny this reading, I contend that Good’s reading is problematic on symbolic level. While I do not want to put myself in the untenable position of arguing in favor of abusive and violent relationships, I do want to

suggest (as I did in the previous chapter) that the conflation of violence and domesticity in XWP can serve a productive purpose since it allows readers to imagine relationships in a way that disrupts exclusionary domestinormative narratives. In other words, the blurring between violence and domesticity in XWP produces queer possibilities. It is this queer potential that Good’s fan fiction denies over the course of her “A Journey of Soulmates” series by resolving the generative tension between violence and domesticity that permeated XWP, de-emphasizing the violent aspects of Xena and overemphasizing the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. Xena and Gabrielle marry one another in no less than three different ceremonies over the course of Good’s fan fiction series (in “Bound,” “The Longest Night,” and “Festival”) and also magically conceive a child through the force of their bond. This culminates in Xena “retiring” before the birth of their daughter, claiming that, “’I don’t want this child to know the Destroyer of Nations, Gabrielle.’ She dropped her head and exhaled wearily. ‘I know I can’t ever leave that behind, but just for a little while, I’d like to try’” (Circle of Life 5). Previous scholarship on the relationship between romance and slash fiction has argued that this focus upon intimacy and relationships in slash opens spaces for a vision of relationships and romance that are premised upon equality for women, and are thus potentially more radical than more explicit and “deviant” slash stories. Woledge (2006) has argued that such slash fiction can be read “as a reaction against the often pervasive ideological assumption that sex rather than intimacy is the driving force of interpersonal attraction” (p. 111). Gwenllian Jones (2006) has articulated a similar argument about Good’s fiction in particular, contending that her unabashedly romantic narratives “are more deserving of the term ‘resistant’ than is slash, since slash tends to construct erotic interludes that do not substantially alter the fantastical constructions and lifestyles of characters” (p. 89). However, I argue that when placed in the larger historical context of the discourses surrounding queer identity and rights during the turn of the twenty-first century (as discussed in the previous chapter), Good’s fan fiction becomes more ideologically problematic. By resituating the characters of Xena and Gabrielle within the romance genre, Good imposes a domestinormative framework upon the characters that denies access to the proliferation of ways to read Xena and Gabrielle that are made available by the official text’s insistence upon ambiguity. This

perhaps echoes a more pervasive problem of the romance genre in general. Radway (1984) has famously argued that the romance:

functions as a symbolic display and explanation of a process commonly experienced by many women. At the same time, because the ideal romance symbolically represents real female needs within the story and then depicts their successful satisfaction, it ratifies or confirms the inevitability and desirability of the entire institutional structure within which those needs are created and addressed (p. 138).

While Radway’s critique refers to heterosexual commercial romance novels in the 1980s, Good’s fiction reveals that this critique can be extended to include XWP slash fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century. By superimposing a romantic narrative upon XWP and having that narrative succeed, Good ratifies and confirms the desirability of the domestinorm and its grounding within heteronormative discourses on gender and sexuality. Radway (1984), though, has also argued that the romance potentially undermines patriarchy (and, by extension, heteronormativity) through its status as “a utopian wish-fulfillment fantasy” that contrasts with the everyday experience of dissatisfaction that women feel under the status quo (p. 151). Thus, one could argue that Good’s fan fiction also undermines domestinormative projects in a similar way. However, I argue that this potential is “lost in translation,” so to speak, by the efforts of the producers of XWP, who acknowledged and authorized the domestinormative aspects of Good’s fan fiction by hiring her to write two episodes of the series, “Coming Home” and “Legacy.” Of these two episodes, “Legacy” is more relevant to my discussion. As the sixth season premiere, “Coming Home” was more concerned with the task of tying up loose ends from the previous season and setting the tone for the upcoming season. Thus Good had to more conspicuously conform her style to the house style of XWP than she did in “Legacy.” “Legacy,” of course, is not without its compromises. It does not contain the overt domesticized lesbianism of Good’s fan fiction. However, there are certain aspects of the episode that directly recall Good’s fan fiction. The most salient example of this is the central dilemma of the episode, which has Xena subverting the utilitarian “greater good” in order to save Gabrielle’s life, thus conflicting with her previous assertions within the series that nothing can come before

the greater good. In “Legacy,” Xena rescues Gabrielle from a tribe of North African nomads by diverting a legion of Roman soldiers towards the nomads, thus potentially endangering numerous people to save her partner. When Gabrielle questions Xena’s actions, Xena firmly declares that “in everyone’s life, there’s something that goes beyond the greater good. That’s what you are in my life. I wasn’t about to let you die out there if there was something I could do about it.” This resonates with similar statements that Xena and Gabrielle make to one another throughout Good’s fan fiction. For example, in “Dark Comes the Morning,” Gabrielle thinks to herself that, “she was all for the greater good, but not when it so directly threatened her beloved soulmate.” Only an audience familiar with Good’s fiction would notice this connection, and thus understand the romantic underpinnings that haunt Xena’s assertion in “Legacy.” Thus, it could be argued that the producers relied upon the fan audience’s knowledge of Good’s fan fiction to subtextually imply that Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship was romantic in nature. In other words, the producers simultaneously acknowledged the lesbian subtext of the series that was so popular with fans while also delimiting it, rendering it as domestinormative in nature. Romance is the subtext. The potential of the romance to critique heternormative institutions as described by Radway, then, is buried under additional layers of subtext. In this way, I argue that the producers (whether consciously or unconsciously) manipulated how XWP was haunted by fan interpretations and subtext through the hiring of Good, ensuring that the subtext of the series followed a more comfortable, domestinormative trajectory. This insistence upon framing Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship within domestinormative terms would not be so ideologically problematic, though, if this was only one reading among many available to fans in the Xenaverse. However, reading XWP as a romance is almost undoubtedly the normative paradigm of Xenaverse fan fiction. Jenkins (2006a) has noted that the rampant textual poaching that fan fiction engages in exists alongside fandom codes regulating fan fiction as well. These codes ironically serve to justify the textual poaching of fan fiction by authorizing the fan’s interpretation above more dominant, “official” meanings. Jenkins describes in detail the ways in which Star Trek fans characterize themselves not as “rogue readers” but as the guardians of a textual meaning that is constantly being threatened by the commercial interests of the show’s corporate owners (p. 55). According to Jenkins, “the fans

perceive themselves as rescuing the show from its producers who have manhandled its characters and then allowed it to die” (p. 55). Thus, textual authority is not determined by legalistic notions of propriety and ownership within fan communities, but by fidelity to a specific textual meaning that is determined by the consensus of the fan community. Within the Xenaverse, the “moral economy” of fandom encourages the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle to be read as a romantic one. This reading is so pervasive within the fandom that it is humorously referred to as the “Lunacy Effect,” referencing a popular fan fiction reviewer (Lunacy) who, as Boese (1998) has noted, “does not like to review stories where Xena and Gabrielle get together with anyone but each other” (N93). While Boese also has noted that this rule is “loosely enforced,” it has enough cultural capital within the Xenaverse that some bards feel frustrated by the Lunacy effect, “especially those who would like to allow Xena and Gabrielle to branch out and take other lovers” (N93). Send in the Fans: De-centering Semiotic Authority in XWP As we have seen, then, the domestinormative demands of the romance genre dominates the fan fiction of the Xenaverse, a reading that the producers of XWP authorized and potentially reinforced through the hiring of popular fan fiction writer Melissa Good. In this section, though, I want to suggest a way that the producers also potentially undermined this cultural project by directly engaging with questions of fandom and reading within the television text of XWP. In previous chapters, I argued that the text of XWP, due to the proliferation of contradictions within the text (itself the result of a larger, systemic drive for profits in television), resisted being totalized by any one reading. This allowed producers of XWP to argue that the series belonged to the audience to make of it what they wanted. In order to achieve this, the producers of the series actively sought to relinquish their cultural authority over the meaning of XWP (but not, it must be noted, over its production), by incorporating into the text of the television program proper the idea that the televised adventures of Xena, Gabrielle, and other characters were simply one possible way to read and interpret the characters, thus inviting and encouraging fans to make their own meanings. This can be seen in the way in which the producers of XWP attempted to displace the television series from the center of the fandom that erupted around it. Derecho (2006), following Derrida, has argued that fandom and fan fiction can be

viewed as “archontic literature” in order to frame the proliferation of texts and interpretations that surrounds a cult text like XWP in a way that does not devalue or subordinate these interpretations to a primary text. As Derecho explains, “archontic texts are not delimited properties with definite borders that can be transgressed. So all texts that build on a previously existing text on a previously existing text are not lesser than the source text, and they do not violate the boundaries of the source text; rather, they only add to that text’s archive, becoming a part of the archive and expanding it” (p. 65). However, while this perspective does attempt to describe the relationship between fandom and source text in a non-hierarchical way, it also has the potential to collapse back into conventional notions of hierarchy and ownership through its reliance upon the concept of a “source text.” The idea of a “source text” is haunted by ideas of originality and authoritativeness, which potentially privileges it above the archontic fandom that surrounds it. The producers of XWP, however, deny this potential collapse into hierarchy by consciously displacing their “source text” from the center of its archive and insisting that the television series was inspired by another, more original source text (the fictitious “Xena Scrolls”). By deferring notions of originality and authenticity to the fictitious “Xena Scrolls,” the producers frame the television series as archontic literature and desabilize their own cultural claims to textual authority, as well as the claims of any reading that seeks to totalize the series. This framing of XWP as archontic literature is emphasized in a series of episodes, the majority of which explicitly engage with conceptions of fandom and the fandom culture that arose around XWP. The first example of this is the second season clip episode entitled “The Xena Scrolls,” which focuses upon Melinda (Mel) Pappas (Lucy Lawless) and Janice Covington (Renee O’Connor), two descendents of Xena and Gabrielle living in the 1940s who discover a set of ancient scrolls detailing the adventures of Xena. As a clip episode, “The Xena Scrolls” was produced as a way for the producers of XWP to scale back production costs by recycling segments from previous episodes of the series as flashbacks. In “The Xena Scrolls,” these flashbacks are re-contextualized as fragments from the Xena Scrolls being read by Mel and Janice. This re-contextualization highlights the contingency of the series proper, and opens a space for a proliferation of readings to be articulated and authorized. As Janice proclaims, the Xena Scrolls have “the power to turn myth into history, history into myth.”

The most obvious example of this is in the re-contextualization of Xena and Gabrielle. As discussed in the previous chapter, the early seasons of XWP were structured around a binary oppositions between Xena (the hyper-masculine warrior), and Gabrielle (the hyper-feminine bard). In “The Xena Scrolls,” however, part of the pleasure derived from the episode comes the reversal of these roles by the actresses. Renee O’Connor plays a whip-swinging, cigar-chomping archaeologist (an obvious homage to Indiana Jones), while Lucy Lawless plays a hyper-feminine Southern belle-cum-translator in constant need of rescuing. This, in turn, encourages audiences to read the characters of Xena and Gabrielle in a way that significantly differs from previous viewings, highlighting the contingent and constructed nature of any reading. This framing of certain aspects of XWP as contingent and constructed is further extended to encompass the entire series. The closing scene of “The Xena Scrolls” jumps forward to 1995, where Ted Raimi (the actor who plays the character of Joxer and brother to executive producer Sam Raimi), pitches the idea of a television series based upon the recently recovered Xena Scrolls to Robert Tapert (as himself). Tapert eagerly says, “Tell me more about this Xena,” before the episode closes with the same montage used during the title credit sequence, a narrative quirk implying that the series itself is an interpretation of the ancient Xena Scrolls. Oddly enough, this fictitious genealogy is extra-textually reinforced by the producers of the series. For example, in numerous commentaries and interviews recorded for the DVD release of the series, head writer R.J. Stewart and producer Eric Greundemann make frequent and bizarrely deadpan references to their roles as mere interpreters of the Xena Scrolls (typically as a way to distance themselves from the more controversial elements of the series). In other words, the producers self-reflexively challenge their own authority and open spaces within the text that encourage contradictory readings by foregrounding the subjective and contingent nature of all reading and interpretation. The television series XWP is marked as just one way to read the Xena Scrolls, displacing it from the center of its own archive and allowing for a proliferation of interpretations by both fans and producers to be legitimized. This strategy problematizes the efforts by producers to delimit the disruptive quality of queer interpretations, which have the potential to resignify the series in ways that challenge dominant discourses on gender and sexuality. This ambivalent attitude

towards its own fandom is highlighted in the sixth season clip episode, “Send in the Clones,” which centers upon the efforts of three fans to clone Xena and Gabrielle in the twenty-first century. On one level, the episode openly mocks fans by representing them within the episode as deluded and infantile. The fans in “Send in the Clones” frequently bicker and argue over insignificant details of the series (such as whether or not Xena kept her boots on during a campfire scene from a particular episode), as well as how to properly interpret the “special relationship” between Xena and Gabrielle. This is a typical strategy of cult television producers in our current moment. Johnson (2007) has noted a similar trend in other cult television programs, particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer. According to Johnson, “the television text [of Buffy] itself has been mobilized to narratively construct ‘acceptable’ fan activity – bolstering extra-textual legal measure by building critique of unruly fans directly into the text that supports unauthorized discursive activity” (p. 295). However, as is often the case for XWP, “Send in the Clones” both actively participates in this strategy while simultaneously resisting it in significant ways. Once the clones of Xena and Gabrielle are awakened, the fans attempt to restore their memories by having them watch clips from XWP. The clones of Xena and Gabrielle (positioned as the authentic Xena and Gabrielle) are confused, outraged, and excited by the series (a fairly common reaction to XWP, in my experience). Gabrielle, in particular, seems angry at the writing of the episode, remarking that “it’s not exactly Euripides.” This scorn shifts to anger as she yells that the producers “have taken liberties with my scrolls,” a transgression that is further emphasized when Xena flatly declares a certain even “didn’t happen like that” while watching an episode. If fans are punished within the narrative for being “unruly readers,” then, “Send in the Clones” also makes it perfectly clear that the producers themselves are just as guilty of (mis)appropriating Xena and Gabrielle. In my reading, this undercuts the critique of fandom in “Send in the Clones,” instituting an equivalence between fan readings and more “official” productions. Synergizing the Warrior Princess On one level, the strategies employed by the producers of XWP to attract and satisfy the fans of the series destabilizes notions of ownership and authority with respect to intellectual properties. In other words, by framing their own text as an interpretation of an older (non-existent) text, the producers relinquish their cultural authority and dominance over the meaning of the text. Consequently, XWP could be

read along the lines of what Douglas Rushkoff (1994) has called a “media virus.” According to Rushkoff, “commercial television activism means hiding subversive agendas in palatable candy shells” (p. 7). These subversive agendas are decoded by certain audiences and transmitted through the “datasphere,” or media networks (such as the online fandom communities devoted to XWP), affecting “the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another – even the way we perceive reality” (Rushkoff, p. 10). In other words, through their redeployment and recirculation of program materials, different audiences can “unlock” the subversive potential of television programs. While I do not wish to completely discount Rushkoff’s argument, I do want to end my discussion of XWP fandom by noting that the subversive potential of these “media viruses” is tempered (but not completely undermined) by the realization that media companies (such as the ones responsible for XWP’s production, distribution, and marketing) have greater access to and control of these media networks, and thus have a much greater influence upon the messages transmitted and circulated by television programs than the typical audience member. Thus, as this section will show, by attempting to reduce all production and consumption to the plane of reading, the producers mask the real political economic disparities between themselves and fans. This is especially relevant in our contemporary moment, where corporations are increasingly being driven to achieve synergy with their cultural products. In her book Why TV Is Not Our Fault, Meehan (2005) has argued that synergy is “a series of tactics employed by transindustrial media conglomerates to multiply revenue streams and decrease costs by creating and feeding internal markets, into which none may venture” (p. 89). This definition modifies the traditional notion of synergy as media cross- promotion by drawing attention to the way that, due to the transindustrial nature of media conglomerates, corporations can actually create demand for a product without ever making reference to an external audience. Instead, demand for the products of one media industry (for example, a certain film) may originate from another media market (for example, magazines). What Meehan (2005) has noted, however, is that due to the transindustrial nature of media conglomerates, now one conglomerate can own companies in most, if not all, media markets. While Jenkins (2006b) has argued that synergy “presumes a more active spectator who can and will follow these media

flows,” and consequently promotes “a sense of affiliation and immersion in fictional worlds” that could disrupt the media’s authority over meaning (p. 147), I argue that synergy could just as easily reinforce that authority. This is because the contemporary corporate practice of synergy grants the media increased access to and control of the datasphere that Rushkoff has argued is crucial to the transmission of subversive media viruses. Synergy, then, creates a self-reproducing corporate system that not only multiplies internal revenue streams, but in the case of XWP allowed producers to more concretely delimit the counter-hegemonic potential of the program’s treatment of gender and sexuality by reversioning, recycling, and redeploying their own interpretations through different media. Perhaps the most salient example of this can be seen in Studio USA’s repackaging of XWP. According to Meehan (2005), repackaging is the process whereby the content of a certain television series is reoriented for a different medium, such as DVDs or video games (p. 96). The action-adventure content of XWP made it an ideal product for repackaging since this content is easily translatable into a variety of lucrative media, such as toys, comic books, video games, and “original” novels based on the XWP brand. The most important repackaging of XWP, though, was its release on DVD. Studios USA did not repackage XWP into DVDs in-house, but instead contracted out to Anchor Bay Entertainment, which began releasing DVD box sets of XWP of individual seasons in 2003, two years after the program had ended. This repackaging of XWP had a variety of effects, both positive and negative. On the one hand, it allowed XWP to remain in circulation, thus increasing the ability of its subversive potential to affect different audiences. On the other hand, the DVD box sets of XWP featured audio and video commentaries on significant episodes by writers, directors, and actors, granting the producers of XWP more agency in determining how the program was to be interpreted and framed by audiences. In the vast majority of these commentaries, the lesbian elements of the program are either ignored or mocked by the writers, directors, and series stars who were clearly uncomfortable with discussing those elements. For example, the final episode of the series, “A Friend in Need II,” prominently features a kiss between Xena and Gabrielle. During the commentary on this scene for the season six DVD box set (2005), director and creator Rob Tapert jokingly sighs, “Alright, you girls [Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor] made

me shoot this. I didn’t want to,” while O’Connor laughs in the background. Lawless then yells, “Now kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her!,” in a disturbingly distorted voice, presumably in an attempt to imitate a rabid lesbian fan. While this did openly acknowledge the lesbian element of the series (something which the program itself never did), the commentary by Tapert, Lawless, and O’Connor also undercuts its subversive potential by rendering its as a joke, and thus not to be taken seriously. This is in keeping with XWP’s marketing-friendly ambiguity, allowing producers to simultaneously recognize and distance themselves from the subversive elements of the program. Recycling, or using an old product in the creation of a new product (Meehan, 2005), also allowed the producers of XWP to respond to the counter-hegemonic aspects of the program through their deployment of clip episodes. As discussed previously, the clip episodes of XWP have a certain subversive potential inherent to them since they re-contextualize segments of the series, highlighting the contingent and constructed nature of the meanings previously attached to them. However, this re- contextualization also frequently allowed the producers to respond to certain controversial aspects of the series and reframe them in a less disruptive manner. For example, certain episodes did recycle clips that were popular among fans for their references to the lesbian subtext of the series. Rather than recirculating the controversial aspects of these clips, though, the producers instead toned them down by situating them as jokes and punch lines. The fourth season clip episode, “Déjà Vu All Over Again” (1999), for instance, justifies its use of clips within the narrative by framing them as the memories of the present day reincarnations of Xena, Gabrielle, and their friend Joxer (Ted Raimi). One of these clips was the previously discussed kiss between Xena and Gabrielle from “The Quest.” After the clip plays, the camera cuts to the dumfounded expression of the reincarnated version of Gabrielle, who stutters, “That was, um, confusing,” while humorous music plays in the background. The reincarnated version of Xena responds, “Yeah, um, maybe I was the guy,” referencing the popular way to explain away the kiss of the clip as non-lesbian in nature. Once again, through the logic of synergy the producers of XWP were able to frame the potentially subversive sexual elements of the series as a frivolous joke that the audience should not take seriously.

However, it must be noted that the drive to achieve synergy does not always have to result in the containment of subversive potential. As we have seen, the securing of hegemony necessarily involves a negotiation between dominant and subordinate groups. This negotiation opens spaces within institutional and structural systems (such as corporate efforts to achieve synergy) for elements that contradict hegemonic authority. One only need look as far as the creation of XWP to witness the contradictory aspects of synergy. While XWP first went on the air in September 1995, this was not the first appearance of the character Xena, who had been a recurring character during the first season of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which aired in the spring of 1995. Hercules was originally packaged and aired as part of MCA TV’s “Action Pack” block of syndicated television series and movies along with the television series, Vanishing Son. However, Hercules’s success during its initial season demanded a reorganization of the Action Pack block (Tobenkin, 1995). As a result, MCA executives asked Renaissance Pictures to produce a spin-off featuring Xena, a synergistic process that Meehan (2005) has referred to as redeployment. This required a dramatic revisioning of the character of Xena, who had been initially presented as a conventional femme fatale that drove a wedge between Hercules and his best friend. The original storyline of Hercules’s first season was originally structured so that Xena would return in the final two episodes and ultimately be killed off. Obviously, this conflicted with MCA TV’s desire to capitalize upon the success of Hercules by redeploying Xena in her own television series. As a result, the writers of Hercules altered the series so that, rather than dying, Xena was instead redeemed and thus made suitable to become the star of her own action-adventure series. This necessitated transforming her from the femme fatale of her initial appearance into a warrior woman haunted by her dark past. In other words, synergy quite literally saved Xena’s life, and in the process created a complex female character that would unintentionally challenge traditional notions of gender and sexuality. As a result, it is problematic, if not impossible, to state that production practices necessarily reproduce dominant discourses on sexuality, just as it is equally impossible to state that fandom practices are necessarily resistant and oppositional. As this chapter has shown, in the case of XWP, the production and marketing strategies that the producers employed to attract audiences actually created gaps in the text that

radically challenged dominant discourses on gender and sexuality. This radical potential, in turn, was delimited to a certain extent by the actions of XWP’s fandom, which sought to firmly situate Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship as romantic in nature, thus reinscribing a domestinormative model of relationship that excludes the wide variety of ways to read Xena and Gabrielle offered by the television series. However, in stating this I do not want to make it seem as if the production practices behind XWP were entirely unproblematic. Despite their assertions that the text belonged to audiences to make of the text what they would, the producers of XWP just as often sought to delimit the potentially transgressive ways to read XWP in a variety of ways, from acknowledging (and thus privileging) the narrowly domestic fan fiction of Melissa Good to resignifying controversial clips in less disruptive ways. While all of these attempts to delimit the text of XWP ultimately failed due to the contingent and constructed nature of all reading and interpretation, this failure was perhaps lost on most viewers since the less disruptive interpretations of Xena were repeated and distributed far more efficiently and widely than any other interpretations. Consequently, the agency afforded to audiences and fans of XWP is a limited agency at best. Yes, they do have the opportunities to construct their own meanings and interpretations of the television series, meanings and interpretations that could potentially counter dominant discourses. But these meanings and interpretations are limited to the realm of personal consumption and pleasure, isolated and ignored by both fans and producers if they stray too far from accepted interpretations.

CONCLUSION Perhaps the greatest thing that can be said about Xena: Warrior Princess is that only one thing cannot be said of it. In order to provide an account of XWP one must say many things, things that often contradict and frustrate one another (and the people saying them). As we have seen, the institutional practices involved in the production, distribution, and marketing of XWP were deeply invested in conservative corporate practices that hold profit as their primary goal. This desire to maximize profits is immanent to processes such as syndication and synergy, which directly informed the creation of XWP. Profit maximization also undergirded XWP’s progressive global politics and its positive representations of marginal communities, particularly women and queers. These practices maintained an economic system that is premised upon the unequal distribution of power throughout the world. The producers, writers, directors, actors, and even fans of XWP also attempted to encourage and reinforce, in their own specific and limited ways, a reading of Xena and Gabrielle’s sexualities and relationships that reinscribed exclusionary domestinormative discourses which only privilege homosexual relationships to the extent that they conform to heteronormative relationship models. Yet, at the same time, the producers of XWP actively sought to de-center and undercut their own authority over the meaning of XWP, encouraging audiences to treat the text as their own to make of it what they will. This was reiterated not only in extra- textual interviews and DVD commentaries but also within the very narrative of the program itself. The desire to maximize profits by attracting as broad an audience as possible also enabled the producers to create a radically open text, one that frequently produced moments of ambiguity and excesses of meaning that can only be described as “queer.” This was done through their refusal to resolve what I have termed the generative contradiction between violence (and its association with masculinity) and domesticity (and its association with femininity). Consequently, XWP demonstrates that the institutional and structural forces that enabled its production, distribution, and marketing were not without significant contradictions and gaps. In order to secure hegemony, the producers of XWP had to negotiate with and incorporate oppositional discourses. This process of negotiation produced disruptions and contradictions at the level of the text that refused totalization by any one reading. While this process of

negotiation ultimately collapsed into a compromise equilibrium between dominant and subaltern discourses that encouraged a domestinormative reading of XWP, for a time XWP was able to encourage all audiences (regardless of gender and sexuality) to see themselves in the text, in the process subverting and questioning dominant modes of representation. There is perhaps no greater proof of XWP’s subversive potential than the fact that this marketing strategy has not been reproduced, despite its success. In her article “What We Owe Xena,” Young (2005) credits XWP with paving the way for the production of a variety of female-centered action-adventure television programs and films. In XWP’s wake, a slew of syndicated action-adventure series with female leads began appearing, from Relic Hunter to Renaissance Pictures’ own Cleopatra 2525. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has openly acknowledged his series’ debt to XWP’s success, while in film Quentin Tarantino has done interviews extolling XWP and even hired Lucy Lawless’s stunt double, Zoë Bell, to double Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, vols. 1 and 2. This programming trend persists to this day, with television programs like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which prominently features two physically empowered female leads) debuting in early 2008 on the Fox network and films like Resident Evil: Extinction (starring Mila Jovovich) turning a significant profit for Sony Pictures. Despite this, none of these programs consciously cultivated an ambiguous attitude towards issues like gender, sexuality, and the nation to the extent that XWP did. Programs such as Relic Hunter (syndicated, 1999-2002), Sheena (syndicated, 2000- 2002), Witchblade (TNT, 2001-2002) and others attempted to capitalize upon the global appeal of violent women yet avoid the problematic lesbian elements of XWP by foregoing female sidekicks, instead pairing their female leads with men. Those programs that did explicitly engage with queer themes, such as Buffy, went to great lengths to define and fix the sexuality of their characters. Audiences never questioned whether or not Buffy was a lesbian. Those characters that could be read as queer were often secondary characters, such as Buffy’s Willow and Tara. They were also firmly marked as lesbian and domestic. Even Renaissance Pictures attempted to distance itself from the controversial aspects of XWP’s marketing in its later programming. After the end of Hercules in 2000, Renaissance Pictures paired XWP with two half-hour

original programs, Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades. Like XWP, these two series featured expensive action sequences, exotic locations, and a tongue-in-cheek tone. Cleopatra and Jack also cast actors well-known to fans of Hercules and XWP. The eponymous character in Jack was played by Bruce Campbell, who had worked with Renaissance Pictures since the Evil Dead movies, while the three lead actresses of Cleopatra (Jennifer Sky, Gina Torres, and Victoria Pratt) had played popular recurring characters on both Hercules and XWP. Despite their obvious connection to XWP, though, both programs avoided the ambiguous queer elements that had made XWP so popular in the media. Jack’s heterosexuality was often overemphasized in a parody of the swaggering male hero while the three main characters of Cleopatra were firmly framed as voracious heterosexuals (who were often clad in skimpier costumes than either Xena or Gabrielle). Both programs also received dismal ratings and were panned by critics. The programs inspired by XWP, then, did not continue its tradition of presenting ambiguous and unstable representations of gender, sexuality, and the nation, but rather delimited these representations while trying to capitalize upon the lucrative combination of sex and violence that XWP had perfected. The aim of this thesis has been to excavate the specific historical institutional systems that enabled XWP to, in the words of Lawless, “get away with what it did.” Due to its situation in the mid-1990s, when global and queer audiences were only just beginning to be actively targeted by U.S. television producers and advertisers, XWP was able to present surprisingly progressive and counter-hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality. However, despite the success that it brought them, XWP’s specific engagement with controversial material obviously troubled its producers and other television executives, as can be seen in the DVD commentaries that mock or ignore XWP’s lesbian subtext or in their encouragement of a domestinormative reading of XWP through the hiring of Melissa Good. In my reading, then, XWP highlights both the radical potential afforded by hegemonic processes and how this potential is ultimately undercut by the end product of all processes of negotiation: compromise. The legacy of XWP until now has been a tragic one, as the radical and troubling aspects of the program were either ignored or contained by the system and people that produced them. My thesis project has sought to resist this pessimistic conclusion, however, by providing a way to read XWP as

radically queer and open, despite the attempts by both producers and fans to fix its meaning and close it to further negotiations. While I do not want to naively underestimate the power of the dominant readings of XWP as either “Baywatch B.C.” or narrowly domestinormative, I also want to highlight the ways in which XWP does offer audiences a way to make their own readings. These readings may never be more than personal acts of consumption, but it is a form of agency and empowerment nonetheless. In the end, all I want is to encourage both readers of XWP and XWP itself to never stop at one simple reading, but to battle on!

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Brian H. Myers is a Master’s student in the English Department at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, with a 4.0 G.P.A. He is expected to receive his M.A. in April, 2008. He also received his B.A. in English from Florida State in 2006 with an overall G.P.A. of 4.0. Upon receiving his M.A., he currently plans to move to the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, where he will continue his studies as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication. Brian’s research interests are in the fields of media and cultural studies, political economy, and feminist media studies. His current projects include “The Business of Ambiguity: Hegemony and Progressive Politics in Xena: Warrior Princess,” recently revised for Critical Studies in Media Communication, and “You’ll Never Hope to Grasp the Source of our Power: Hybridity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” forthcoming in Qualitative Inquiry. He has also presented papers at several conferences and symposiums, including “When Discourses Collide: Xena’s Queer Feminism” at the Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute (2007), “Chaucer and Fan Fiction?: Consumption as Production in The Legend of Good Women” at the FSU Humanities Graduate Student Colloquium (2007), “Camp Politics and the Superheroine: Irony, Exaggeration, and Artifice in Wonder Woman, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” at the Hawaii International Conference (2007), and “The Bitter and Sweet of It: Trauma, Violence, and Abuse in Xena: Warrior Princess” at the 31st Annual FSU Film and Literature Conference (2006). His primary honors and awards include being named a Florida State University Fellow (2006-2008), being named a Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute Seminarian (2007), being named both an FSU Honors All-Star and an Outstanding Senior Scholar (2005), and receiving an FSU Honors in the Major Thesis Grant for $1,000 (2005). He is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Eta Sigma National Honors Societies.