Florida State University Libraries 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 Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES WHEN DISCOURSES COLLIDE: HEGEMONY, DOMESTINORMATIVITY, AND THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE IN XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS By 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. vi 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 1 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,