for the History of Consciousness Colloquium Series
University of California, Santa Cruz
Katie King
Women’s Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Highlander is the name of a tv show, and my own pleasure
in Highlander started with the principle actor Adrian Paul’s eroticized image.
I immediately (and apparently somewhat idiosyncratically) “recognized” it as
Gay (the image, not the story character Duncan McLeod, or the actor Adrian
Paul). It was in this “recognition” that I discovered my pleasure in the show.
As a lesbian I was surprised: this was really the first tv show since my
adolescence in which an eroticized male image seemed so powerfully attractive
to me (Spock, Illya Kuryakin and Sean Connery’s James Bond in the sixties thus
withstanding). Perhaps that’s why I assumed it was somehow Gay. Other signs
appeared to heighten my pleasure in what seemed to me to be a circulation of
gay meanings: first, the use of Paris’ Shakespeare and Company in the Rue de
l’Odéon as a location and story site--the bookstore run by lesbian lovers
Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in the twenties, but known on the show simply
as “the American bookstore.” Second was the powerful emotional engagement of
the show’s theme music, ”Princes of the Universe,” composed and performed by
Queen and sung by the late Freddy Mercury, who died of AIDS in November 1991
(around the time Highlander went into tv production).
It wasn’t that I assumed that there was a latent
homosexual subtext, a topic repeatedly raised on the internet newsgroup
alt.tv.highlander but usually treated with scorn by those fans; no, I assumed
it was something else. I puzzled over it. On impulse at the supermarket I
picked up a special issue of Entertainment Weekly (in fact I’d been looking for
any magazine articles on Highlander, but hadn’t found them yet). This
issue shouted on its cover “The
Gay ‘90s: Entertainment Comes Out of the Closet.” In the cover article by Jess
Cagle, “America Sees Shades of Gay,” I found words to describe the impression I
had received from the show: “...mutual inclusiveness--the give and take
back--of gay and straight audiences. Its sex appeal bids for the attention of all
sexual persuasions; so do its jokes, and the screen winks broadly in all
directions.” Or, “The most striking and omnipresent outgrowth of that awakening
has been in the mass marketing of erotic male images.” “...they’re all things
to all persuasions.” Or, “Not gay
per se but something. ‘It’s all become one bright pop blur....’” And finally,
“In short, this revolution is the only kind Hollywood can trust--one driven by
the marketplace....”
Entertainment Weekly’s politics differ markedly from the
cautionary story told by Rosemary Hennessy when she discusses “Queer visibility
in commodity culture”; she says, “...capitalism’s need for expanding markets
has in its own way promoted the integr
ation of art and life...the intensified integration of
cultural and commodity production under late capitalism by way of the rapid
flow of images and signs that saturate myriad everyday activities, continuously
working and reworking desires by inviting them to take the forms dictated by
the commodity market.... The aestheticization of daily life encourages the
pursuit of new tastes and sensations as pleasures in themselves while
concealing or backgrounding the labor that has gone into making them
possible.... We need a way of understanding [Queer] visibility that acknowledges
both the local situations in which sexuality is made intelligible as well as
the ties that bind knowledge and power to commodity production, consumption,
and exchange.”
For several years now I’ve been working to think about the
layers of locals (in the plural) and globals (in the plural) that dynamically
interconnect in what I call “Global Gay Formations and Local Homosexualities.” As
I’ve spent my sabbatical trying to conceptualize a book, I’ve wanted both
notions -- the idea of layers of locals and globals and the specific version
Global Gay Formations and Local Homosexualities -- to structure my
investigation of the materials I’ve been researching and writing about.
I work in a field I call Feminism and Writing
Technologies, which on the one hand looks at histories of various writing
technologies, for example, alphabet, movable type, index, pencil, typewriter,
xerox machine, computer, internet.
On the other hand Feminism and Writing Technologies examines the
ideologies that proliferate around the shifting terms “the oral” and “the
written.” In the course of researching my book on this subject I’ve been
examining the two great, indeed truly mythical moments in the scholarship on
writing technologies: the so-called Printing Revolution and the so-called Information
Revolution.The point of looking at each is to study these “layers of locals and
globals”; that is, rather than posit a binary local and global, or multiple
locals and a single global, I want to describe and understand the material
interactions among layers of plural locals and globals.
In other words, I’m not corresponding global to the
universal and local to the particular, or at least not always; but imagine (as
much as I can) that layers of globals describe dynamic material movements, and
layers of locals describe dynamic material investments, although even this
formulation is a little too stable to exactly name those structural dynamics
I’m trying to focus on. In the phrase I used before, “Global Gay Formations and
Local Homosexualities,” consider the term “Gay,” generally understood as the
historically specific U.S. slang term from the 1970s, now often materially
internationalized, traveling globally via gay politics and gay tourism. Now,
consider the term “homosexualities,” historically the attempt at a universal (but uneasily, is it only male?);
in my use pluralized, deliberately highlighting, situating and resituating the
horizon of the medicalized-legalized discourses of the late nineteenth century.
Thinking of them this way, within layers of locals and globals, both terms are
now seen as politicized technologies for materially producing people (the kind
of thing that Donna Haraway has called “an apparatus of bodily production.”)
As a series of maps and territories, locals and globals shift,
as perspective shifts, as what counts as territory, and then what counts as map
shift. For example, synchronically Global Gay Formations and Local
Homosexualities describes this historical moment’s comminglings between, say,
an international Gay Liberation movement (and movements) traveling globally,
and culturally specific, regionally activated local behaviors and groupings
appropriating and reusing or refusing these words, these images; all
overordered by historically defracting objects of knowledge, never transparent,
always themselves historically situated, but also traveling, shifting their
meanings, but without being able to leave their histories and projects
completely. The density of this moment within multiple histories is palpable in
another way as well, for Global Gay Formations can also describe diachronically
the investments of contemporary gay folk in creating transhistorical
continuities, across time and cultures, to produce objects like “the
homosexual,” but within and accountable to very local, indeed culturally quite
narrow, political meanings and strategies--themselves ephemeral, and soon to be
replaced with other objects of knowledge, with other centers producing objects
of knowledge, those perhaps also transhistorical or perhaps global by some
other conceptual apparatus.
As I decided to write my book on Feminism and Writing
Technologies, and decided to include two “case studies” (for lack of a better
term), one on the printing revolution and one on the information revolution, I
wanted to make sure several threads of concern would be knotted together in
each. For the work on the printing revolution--which I’ll be talking about for
the Center for Cultural Studies, on May 22nd, at noon at the Cowell Conference
Room--I’m looking at Quaker women’s writings on women’s public speech, in a new
colonial/national formation “Britain,” in the 1640s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. This
takes place around the time of the English Revolution and the Commonwealth and
their political-religious upheavals, and during the twenty year de facto
loosening of controls on printing, that is guild and state control, access to
printing apparatus, shifts in which ideologies are censored, and in a complex
writing technological ecology, highly gendered and classed. Contemporary feminist
scholars have investments in these materials and this period, questioning what
relations Quakers had to any possible proto-proletarian revolutions of this
moment, what positions women had in terms of power and leadership as well as
speakers, writers, printers and prophets in the periods before Quakerism
becomes a bounded sect, and questioning the meanings of the traveling in pairs
Quaker women pursued, to the American colonies, throughout Europe and to
farther places such as Malta and Turkey. Some U.S., British and European,
Australian and New Zealand feminist and lesbian scholars have contended that
Foucauldian periodizations of homosexual identity are inadequate to account for
these Quaker women traveling in pairs.
The complementary study is the one on the Information
Revolution, or perhaps better, the Tele-Information Revolution and it is now
centered around this tv show Highlander, which I’ll be discussing today. Highlander
is itself a complicated lens onto global and national tv and tv technologies,
new arrangements of multinational capital and new European identities,
interpenetrated forms of vision and writing on the World Wide Web and the
internet and in film, tv, video and print media, structured in layers of what
Morley and Robins [David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: global
media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries] call “global media,
electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries.” Feminist and media scholars
have investments in both the politics of global tv production and also in
women’s involvements in media fandoms and in the domestication of tv and video,
computer and satellite technologies. I’m also interested in the circulation of
eroticized images with queer valences that can considered by looking at Highlander’s
capitalization of the multi-ethnic multi-sexual images of Adrian Paul and
Freddy Mercury. [To get you started I’ll pass about some images of Adrian Paul:
fan art and photos; and a little book about Queen with pictures of Freddy
Mercury in his various and very different selves.]
HL (the acronym used by internet fans for the show) is not
(strictly) a U.S. tv product. It premiered in September 1992. Although in its
first season it had some U.S. backing, currently it is a bicontinental joint
venture between Canadian Filmline International (Highlander) Inc. and French
Gaumont Télévision. Telefilm Canada, an agency of the Canadian federal
government started in 1967 to invest in and promote the Canadian tv and film
industries, has credit for “participation” with Filmline International. Gaumont
has been circulating its history as the oldest film company in the world since
its 1995 100th anniversary. Gaumont’s television production only began in 1991
but now accounts for a fifth of its business. HL is not its only tv product but
it is its principle one. The show is shot on location half the season in
Vancouver, Canada and half the season in Paris, France. Highlander: the [TV]
Series has to be distinguished from the three Highlander films (the first two
of which were U.S. ventures, and the last of which was a joint Canada/French
coproduction with U.K. assistance), and from the cartoon series (which is a
Gaumont product). HL is syndicated, shown in the U.S. (and received by some
Canadian viewers) on local tv stations as they’ve bought it and locally decide
on scheduling, on the three superstations WGN, WOR and TBS, and on the cable
network USA.
In our tv market in Santa Cruz past episodes are shown at
least twice a day on cable network USA, at 5pm and at midnight, and current
broadcast episodes are shown twice a week, on KOFY, Channel 20, during prime
time, 8pm on Mondays and Saturdays. Twice each morning the cartoon is shown,
once on Fox’s KTXL, Channel 40 and again on KOFY, the Warner Brothers
affiliate. HL is distributed in the U.S. market by Rysher Entertainment
(acquired in 1993 by Cox
Broadcasting Corporation, whose corporate sibling Cox Communication has large
fingers in the U.S. cable market). HL’s penetration of our tv market is pretty
thorough, but such saturation is not the norm in most tv markets in the U.S.
and Canada. In most markets in the U.S. HL is shown by network affiliates
during non-networked off-hours. For example, when I was without cable in Irvine
earlier this year, HL’s only broadcast was at 11:30pm on Friday nights. When I
attended the Highlander national fan convention last October in Denver, one
Canadian fan told me she set her alarm to wake up at 1am to watch the show,
which she also taped, despite the fact that she had to go to work early the
next morning, and despite the fact she often fell asleep in the middle of the
program. HL received the dubious distinction from the Center for Media and
Public Affairs of being among the ten most violent shows on television in 1993.
(Of these ten shows, six were independently produced and syndicated, and four
were science fiction.) This may be one among several reasons why HL tends to be
shown after 11pm in many affiliates across the U.S.
Adrian Paul, the principle actor, is British and Italian,
speaks English, French, German and Italian, and now lives in Los Angeles when
he’s not on location elsewhere. U.S. actors do appear on HL, but their number
(and thus the proportion of production expense) is limited by international
coproduction agreements intended to promote national culture industries against
the entertainment hegemony of the U.S. There is no question that the U.S. is a
principle market for HL, however Canadian executive producers Peter S. Davis
and William Panzer emphasize its European audiences as well, especially in
Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and internet fans also watch it in
Australia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia, while
convention and list fans report seeing it in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Greece. In
these places it is usually shown via satellite, either directly or indirectly
through a feed to a local broadcast station. For example, in Britain HL is
shown on Sky 1, Rupert Murdoch’s tv satellite, while in France it has been seen
on TF1 and M6, each of which gave production assistance to the show during its
second season. Both are commercial channels, although throughout Europe tv
distribution is still largely through state controlled television, but this has
been changing during and since the 80s. M6 was the first commercial tv channel
to broadcast in France. HL is part of this so-called “democratization of
European television” both putative and real. Rete-Italia has also given
production assistance to HL; both Rete and Italia are part of the Silvio
Berlusconi Italian media empire, currently embroiled in political and financial
scandal.
To capture the mixture of gender-coded genres that I think
HL blends, I might call it a bringing together of a so-called “male” martial
arts genre and a so-called “female” historical romance genre in what some tv
theorists have called a “recombinant subgenre.” When I first got interested in
HL and asked my friends what they knew about it, a couple of male friends--one
gay, one straight-- told me dismissively that it was for “pimply-faced 14 year
old boys.” The magazine Sci-Fi TV Fall Preview names the people watching HL as
“the desirable demographic of women between the ages of 18 and 49, in addition
to a dedicated fan base who religiously follow both the theatrical film series
and the TV show.” To see how HL is marketed for the predominantly female
romance market I’ll pass around the interview by Lynda Ryan with Adrian Paul in
Romantic Times; note the accompanying ad for season one of HL on videocassette.
(My thanks to Chrys Sparks, U.C.S.C alum, my dedicated fellow Highlander fan
and research assistant, for finding this interview.) To see how HL is marketed
for Science Fiction fans see the program description in Cinescape’s 1995
Science Fiction Television Yearbook, which I’ll also pass around.
Each time you watch HL you enter the episode in this, now,
the fourth season, through an opening montage of narrative, images and music:
[show video clip; 2 mins. long] This opening montage has been different in each
of the four seasons; this fourth season opening develops the most coherent
narrative, obviously intended to orient new viewers encountering HL for the
first time.
For contrast I’ll now show you a Queen music video that is
constructed from clips from the first Highlander movie sutured together with
stage performance by Queen. The guy with the moustache is Freddy Mercury, and I
think this video has a somewhat clearer homoerotic valence, because of Freddy
Mercury’s own sexualized presentation, the campy elements of Queen’s performance,
and the interactions between Mercury and Christopher Lambert, who starred in
all three HL movies. (You’ll notice moments of Sean Connery as well.) [show
Queen video; 3.5 mins. long]
===
Princes Of The Universe by stevanhogg
===
===
Princes Of The Universe by stevanhogg
===
Highlander is about immortals (immies, as fans and list
members call them)--immortals like Duncan MacLeod and his young friend
Richie--and their interactions with mortals. If killed, immortals come back to
life, that is unless they have been beheaded, which does kill them permanently!
Immortals engage in ritual combat with swords to behead each other. The first
movie ends with the Gathering: the time when all immortals are drawn together
to fight, until only two are left: it is a fight between Good and Evil, and the
winner gets the Prize. In the first movie the Prize is control over the Earth
and one’s heart’s desire: Christopher Lambert’s character Conner MacLeod’s
desire is to be mortal, and so he becomes at the end of the film. The tv series
(according to the producers) takes place in an alternate universe in which the Gathering
has only just begun. The opening sequence from the beginning of the first tv
season emphasizes the millenialism of the Gathering, but as the series has
continued the Gathering has receded in series importance.
The two most important elements of any HL ep (episode in
list shorthand) are the flashbacks (there are several in each ep) and the sword
fight / s (one or more). The flashbacks are often costume and period pieces,
usually fragments of an alternate storyline, a kind of historical romance that parallels or explains the
contemporary storyline. Usually flashbacks are fragments from Duncan’s memories
or experiences. Over the series the flashbacks have changed a bit and now
sometimes show the experiences of another immortal, especially if the immortal
is older than Duncan’s 400 years. Flashbacks contain sword fights and sometimes
beheadings just as the contemporary storyline does. The episode’s final sword
fight usually ends in a beheading and the resulting Quickening, the transfer of
energy from the beheaded immortal to the one victor. The phrase, “In the end
there can be only one,” is often invoked, ritually, or even humorously, by
either the immortal who will be victorious (usually Duncan) or by the one who
will be beheaded.
Occasionally however, there is no beheading, either the
victor refuses to kill or the loser manages to flee or the two strike some
uneasy bargain. In this case there is no Quickening. What a Quickening actually
is, is endlessly debated and ruminated over by list and newsgroup fans.
Visually it varies, and Adrian Paul has said (in his Q & A, Question and
Answer session, at TG2, The Gathering Two, the 1995 Denver fan convention) that
he attempts to make each one individual, reflective of the personality of the
immortal beheaded as his or her energy is transferred. Visually the Quickening
uses spectacular light effects, and shows the immortal receiving it in a state
mingling triumph, pain, ecstasy, and struggles for control. Some fans liken it
to orgasm, some work to differentiate it and downplay any erotic significance,
but there is no question that it literally embodies the climax of the episode’s
plot structure. One of the greatest Quickenings occured at the end of the 3rd
season, during which the entire Eiffel Tower became a giant resonating rod
arcing electricity throughout Paris, blowing out tv sets and lights everywhere.
Some fans love the Quickening, and love to comment on its endless elaborations,
others consider it “cheesy” or at least complain about particular versions in
particular eps. Personally I love the Quickening and enjoy attributing to it as
many Gay erotic meanings as possible. Such attributions, however, periodically
remade on alt.tv.highlander, are the occasion for a lot of virulent anti-gay
flaming, and for long-time newsreaders’ tired attempts to counter the
homophobia while generally also trying to dismiss any homoerotic readings. Few
long term newsreaders or list group members defend homoerotic readings of
Highlander.
Strangely enough for a contemporary “action-adventure” tv
program, the tone of HL tends to the elegiac, perhaps more like the tone of the
some of the great old Hollywood WW II battle movies. Some of the songs by Queen
sung by Freddy Mercury acquired a poignant subtext as Mercury became sicker and
sicker with AIDS, songs such as “Who Wants to Live Forever?” Even “Princes of the Universe” had
acquired this ironic sad edge by the time the tv series began, since Mercury
had already died. The album, “A Kind of Magic,” on which Queen performed all the
songs that had been commissioned by Australian former music video director
Russell Mulcahy for Highlander, his first feature film, “entered the U.K. chart
at Number One, and remained in the top five for thirteen consecutive weeks”;
while the title song had previously “reached number three in the U.K. and
number one in thirty-five other countries.”
This gives you an idea of the kind of global attention
Highlander had already received because of the Queen tie-in. Immortals are
surrounded by death: ritual combat ensures their own continual vulnerability,
and their attachments to mortals ensures their intimacy with mourning and loss,
the emotional center of most story lines. At the same time, and also in rather
a strange way, HL continually celebrates but doesn’t instantiate pacifism. This
is part of the defensive martial arts spirituality and alternative masculinity
that the show is built around, and indeed is the philosophical center of
principle actor Adrian Paul’s own life, or at least the media representations
of it. The protagonist Duncan’s most beloved immortal friend, Darius, was an
ancient Roman general who became a monk in order to practice pacifism; two
thousand years old, he is finally beheaded by mortals who have learned about
the Gathering and intend to keep the final combat from occurring. The actor who
played Darius, Werner Stocker, died of a cerebral tumor during the filming of
this climactic episode, and his absent presence is continually reinvoked by
both fans and production people, and he continues to appear in current episodes in flashback memories and footage.
*
* * *
So, HL fans tend largely to be white women in their 30s
and 40s with sprinklings of younger white men and a small number of women of
color. This was visually very clear at the HL fan convention in Denver in 1995.
[I’ll pass around the con program.]This tends to be the case with media fandoms
in general, especially of the most studied media fandom, the one surrounding
Star Trek. This is not the case with written science fiction fandoms and their
elaborated cultures over the last fifty-ish years. Those are dominated by white
male fans, and have a higher percentage of younger people. Both media fandoms
and SF fandoms are notoriously homophobic. On the other hand, both media
fandoms and SF fandoms celebrate themselves for tolerating and even loving
eccentric, unusual, even difficult people. High-visibility gay and lesbian SF
authors, such as African-American Samuel. R. Delany or European-American Joanna
Russ, have all at various times said that the SF fan world was a supportive one
in which to be a gay adolescent. Such paradoxes contribute to many analysts’
emphasis on a kind of free floating so-called “adolescent” sexuality in
fanworlds. So-called “adolescent” sexuality is the putative “answer” (to my
mind a very unsatisfying one) to many questions about sexual identities and
sexuality one might pose about fan cultures.
There’s every reason to think Highlander: The [TV] Series
creators did originally target young men as their desirable demographic, as
does the Paramount network UPN, or the cable Sci-Fi channel, indeed as do tv
syndicators in science fiction and fantasy shows in general. But apparently the
most successful such shows also have a secondary demographic that carries them
to the top of the syndicated ratings. It’s no accident, for example, that Star
Trek: Voyager has a woman captain, for the Star Trek franchise owners have
finally caught on to the lucrative potential of the media fan market. It
remains to be seen whether a woman captain will enable them to capture that
market. So what’s different about the HL fans is that the demographic of both
the tv audience and the fandom is predominately women in their 30s and 40s.
You may not have noticed this yet, but I am a woman in my
forties.
Strangely enough marketers have noticed something else
quite interesting about media fandoms as well. In his article in Television
Quarterly, Michael Epstein points
out the three types of nonfiction books related to Star Trek that are
economically significant. These are the books in addition to the shelves of
fiction tie-ins. The nonfiction books are: first, books by or about
celebrities; second, reference books, like the manuals of the Enterprise; and
third, academic studies. Studying commodification is hardly innocent--among
scholars of popular culture and media fandoms going native is one of the least
of the tabooed possibilities. Participation in the extremes of commodity
culture is unavoidable and perhaps undesireable, to one’s study that is. My own
anxiety--about my relation to the powerful pleasures and terrors of commodity
culture, generally separated in agents, victims and effects, in Queer and other
valences, about my relation to HL fan culture in particular, to media fandoms
more generally, and to my own sexuality constructed within and across science
fiction histories and worlds-- this anxiety is very high. [I’ll pass around a
Highlander book tie-in and one of the first Star Trek academic studies.]
As I said before I was first moved to study HL by my
interests in Global Gay Formations and Local Homosexualities and how I imagined
that HL could exemplify some of these processes. I continued to study HL
because I also thought that the issues concerning women’s fandoms on the internet
was an appropriate topic for a book on feminism and writing technologies. I
thought of myself as a former Star Trek fan, a person with lots of friends who
were media fans of various sorts, a scholar who’d read and taught much material
on SF and SF fandoms; primarily a researcher. When I came to Santa Cruz for my
sabbatical I hooked up with my long time friend Chrys Sparks, who’d been
involved in several media fandoms over the years, who taught me how to buy
fanzines, that is, fan magazines with fan stories, and what to expect at cons,
or science fiction conventions. But I didn’t realize that I wasn’t yet actually
a fan of Highlander, however quite interesting I thought it was, until the
fateful week that Chrys and I received our first season of HL videos in the
mail and sat down to watch them. [These boxed things are them; and I’ll pass
around the Highlander merchandize catalog.]
I had read Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women:
Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Henry Jenkins’s Textual
Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and heard talks by
Constance Penley about Star Trek fan video-making, to name just three scholars
producing this literature. I’d rather chuckled over Camille Bacon-Smith’s
description of the initiation practices in one fan circle she’d attended: in
which new members were introduced to a particular media fandom by viewing
together in a group a marathon series of episodes. Back to back without
stopping, over the period of a week, Chrys and I watched at least three
hour-long episodes of Highlander a day. Somewhat zombie-like we focused totally
on them, staring right through the continual movements of children and
grandchildren between us and the huge Sony tv screen at Chrys’ house, and
excitedly and endlessly interrogated the episodes while fixing food afterwards
for adults and grandchildren and ourselves. We would have watched more episodes
each day, in fact it was hard to stop, but we couldn’t command the tv from
other family members beyond that. We watched the season in order, reading it
through individual story lines and over the arcs of connected stories.
After this experience I realized that it was only then
that I had actually become a fan: fanishness had taken over in the intensity of
concentration upon the visual images, in the production of endless verbal
commentaries and elaborations, within the bombardment by repetitive storylines
and their managed play of formal variation, in the midst of sociality and
friendship enacted and intensified. I could actually feel the physical effects
the repetition had on my body: after a while when “Princes of the Universe”
would start up my heart would beat faster and my breath would get shallow. I
had to examine compulsively every shot in the opening sequence for each and
every episode and would exclaim, in exactly the same way at exactly the same
moment every time, “THAT’S my favorite shot!” I thought “THIS is the way to see
television!” I felt I had never understood television before. But of course
this wasn’t actually broadcast television. There were no commercials to break
up complete absorption; I began to understand why fans insisted on taping tv,
and especially working to get rid of the commercials. This was why my Canadian
fan friend had stayed up late at night to watch HL as she was taping it. Both
Chrys and I were reading email on the Highlander electronic listserve we
belonged to, and other list members had just gotten their first season videos
as well. They recounted their own intensities, stories of staying up for three
days without sleeping to watch the episodes in order, or calling in sick from
work in order to stay home to see the tapes. Thus discussion on the list also
thickened and reinforced the video marathon experience, as list people articulated
their viewing practice and charted and mapped the first season episodes.
In her sociological study Video Playtime: the gendering of
a leisure technology, Ann Gray remarks that taping television shows has become
a new form of women’s family work to produce leisure activities. On the HL
list-serve women describe, rather along the way in their posts, the different
circumstances in which they view HL, but especially they recount failures to tape a broadcast showing:
by mistake, technological accident, station shifts and so on. Traffic in mailed
video tapes, along with traffic in information about which stations in which
places show HL are two of the most constant negotiations over the list.
I’ve been worrying for months now about how to talk about
the Highlander listserve. One form this anxiety has materially settled into
revolves around questions about how to cite postings from the list, and thus
questions of what to talk about and how closely to follow specific posts; for
example, whether to actually quote posts or to do a lot of paraphrasing. My
friends who are sociologists and anthropologists are scandalized that I have
not positioned myself on the list primarily as researcher-in-residence and
given notice that everything I see may end up in my papers, while my friends
who are historical and literary types are scandalized that I might even
consider asking each person on the list for their particular individual
permission to quote from their posts. Assumptions underlying such divisions
over practice, property and accountability become even clearer if you look at
the in-process conventions for citation of electronic text now promulgated in
several places on the World Wide Web. The MLA, that is, the Modern Languages
Association, using a so-called “humanities” paradigm, posits listserve
communications in particular as informal publications, subject to citation
similar to an article in a journal, while the APA, the American Psychological
Association, using a so-called “social sciences” paradigm, posits listserve
communications as private mail, subject to citation as personal communications.
[I’ll pass around the MLA and APA info I downloaded from their Web sites.] I’ve
been dismayed at how little anyone I’ve tried to engage has actually wanted to
talk about this issue: people to whom I bring it up almost entirely simply “lay
down the law.” They know how it’s done, there is no question in their minds at
all; and that I can say others say something quite opposite actually has seemed
of no interest to most of them, no occasion for discussion or contingency.
Especially, hardly any one has seemed to want to think that any new issues of
research practice or intellectual property might be raised by list participation
or citation.
I didn’t intend to be an ethnographer of the HL list when
I first subscribed and I’m not sure this is a reasonable way to describe myself
now. Over a year ago I started off lurking just in order to find out more about
the tv show, which I found so very strange when I first encountered it. “Lurking”
means I read messages but did not myself post any. I was motivated by
curiosity, especially about all the gay fans I fantasized existed for the
program. I kept trying to find out a way to get in touch with them, and I kept
looking for gay-related discussion. I continued on the list partly as a new fan
and partly as a researcher. I posted as a fan, and I said in some posts and in
many private emails to folks on the list who I was and that I was a women’s
studies scholar working on writing technologies. More recently I’ve posted that
I was writing an academic article on Highlander, in fact I posted that I was
giving this talk and where and when it was, and I asked if anyone wanted to see
the paper I was writing, either in progress or after it was done. Several
people enthusiastically asked to see it when done, and some folks wrote that
they were also academics doing work in popular culture. In general however,
that I was doing this paper was of enormously minor importance in list
discussion. Anyone can subscribe to the list: it’s not private. On the other
hand, discussion is not archived, so if I cited something, it’s not like you
could go look it up and see it. If on the list, you can download any discussion
that interests you, and list members can return to their private archives of
list discussion and repost stuff from the past.
There are several electronic mail venues for Highlander as
well as several Web sites. There is the newsgroup I’ve already mentioned,
alt.tv.highlander, and other newsgroups that discuss tv or science fiction are
venues for HL discussion too. There is the IRC, the internet relay chat, where
HL discussion takes place at “#Joe’s” and at “#highlander.” There is the
listserve I’ve been discussing, HIGHLA-L, and its sibling, HLFIC-L, where
Highlander fan fiction is posted. There are HL chat groups on the commercial
online services AOL and Genie, and there are HL forums on two others,
Compuserve and Delphi. So-called “chat” takes place in real time, and
production people may be guests of honor, answering fan questions and
participating in fan discussion. Forums are postings by email that are
archived. AOL, or American On-Line, has occasional interactive conferencing on
which some HL actors have appeared, answering questions by email and being
interviewed by AOL conveners. These sessions are archived, along with the
Highlander FAQ and other HL materials and fan fiction at the Unofficial
Highlander World Wide Web site, which proudly announces: “Over 36,181 accesses
between Apr/01/95 and Sep/30/95 from 18,489 different sites in 50 countries.” F.A.Q.,
pronounced “fack,” stands for Frequently Asked Questions. Rather than having to
answer the same questions over and over for people newly online, new fans, also
called “newbies,” are directed to read the FAQ, which serves as an introduction
to the HL movies and tv series, and to HL fandom. Rysher runs a web site for HL
called “Glenfinnan” which has downloadable actor photos, plot descriptions for
upcoming eps, and a list of which eps will be showing when and on what tv
stations in various parts of the U.S. Gaumont has its own web site, which
includes some materials on HL the tv show and the cartoon. Both Rysher and
Gaumont promise to construct forums for HL discussion, but they don’t yet
exist. These are the principle web sites, but there are others as well,
personal, commercial and in conjunction with other tv fandoms and resources.
Eight months ago Newsweek proclaimed that web sites,
electronic forums and email about tv shows had become more interesting than the
shows themselves. HIGHLA-L has been around for three years and has over a 1000
subscribers from about 30 countries. Still most subscribers are from the U.S.
and discussion is conducted in English, although one Russian fan did teach us
to call HL “Gorets.”
List discussion is highly structured, highly coded, and
heavily regulated. HIGHLA-L is a moderated list. Here this means that email
directed to the list is automatically posed by listserve software, but the
moderator reads all of it, posts instructions to everyone, and possibly
disciplines unruly list members, usually by suspending connection for varying
periods, or by denying subscription altogether. Up to 250 messages are posted
every day, and sometimes more would be posted if the listserve software didn’t
reinforce this limit. Out of the 1000ish subscribers probably about 100 are
active posters, and only about 20-30 people are likely to post regularly, from
every day to every week, say. Most subscribers are women and the list owner is
a woman. While it is still true that men outnumber women on the internet
generally, there are regional densities of women: relatively speaking there are
more women using commercial servers like American On-Line than using other
pathways to the net, and according the new Online report from the Times Mirror
Center for The People and The Press “email is the only regular computer
activity in which women engage as frequently as men.”
When I first subscribed to HIGHLA-L I’d heard from a
student that there had been a flame war on alt.tv.highlander over the topic of
homosexual readings of the show. A flame war means that few substantive
messages are getting posted, and that most messages have become repetitive
vituperative attacks. When this happens on a list little communication goes on,
practically everything is “noise.” Controversal newsgroups tend to have so much
flaming going on that reading messages becomes too laborious. Subscription to a
listserve and a moderated one at that is intended to increase communication and
decrease flaming. Avoiding provoking a flame war was the reason I thought I’d
lurk to begin with before directly asking folks about gay fans, gay interests
in HL, and so on. Newbies lurking is actually considered good manners on most
listserves anyway. Lurking, posting, and learning list language and references
are elements in the processes of initiation to the list. I’m going a pass
around a post to illustrate the coded character of list communication: you’ll
note the interactive quotation-answer-quotation-answer style of writing, the
use of silly metaphors, emoticons (little pictures made from punctuation
symbols) and jokes to manage and discipline emotional content. This post
doesn’t show off the wide use of abbreviations and initials in communication
that are part of reducing finger movements in typing. This post does comment on
something it calls “List Culture,” which is all this stuff you’re supposed to
learn in order to be a good citizen on the list. Like other contemporary
practices of so-called “civility” the regulation of speech on the list has
complicated results, often practical, often repressive.
While lurking I saw someone had posted a comment that
suggested some homoerotic content to the show, and the list owner stepped in
and explained online that homosexuality was one of the “forbidden topics” on
the list, and that the reason for forbidding these topics was to preserve as
flame-free an environment as possible. I was horrified. I immediately began
considering short and long term strategies to push the envelope on this policy.
It became clear over time though that this policy couldn’t
be sustained. Jokes were made about it: for example, when the list owner and
many on the list were off to the HL fan convention in Denver, folks not going
made lots of jokes about indulging in forbidden topics to console themselves
for being left behind. Indeed, just before the convention-people had settled
back into regular posting mode, one thread (that is, one line of interactive
conversation) emerged, deliberately pushing the policy. A series of humorous
posts asked if Duncan was “blank.” A blank space was used to leave out the
forbidden words, but the intent of the questions was clear and presented in the
most blatantly present/absent sort of way. When other posters, in the list
owners absence, attempted to discipline the folks keeping this thread going,
these folks replied, Forbidden topics, what do you mean forbidden topics, we
are discussing Canadians! Since the show and the producers and many of the actors,
writers and staff, not to mention a large chunk of list members are Canadian,
this too had a strange edge, positioning U.S. list members, who are the
majority, as the center of list discourse, and offending some Canadians who
resented the link between homosexuality and Canadian nationality, but
delighting others. When the list owner returned the old policy was reinstated,
but those who’d contributed to the thread, we were able to identify each other
as those unhappy with the policy and interested in discussing homoerotic
elements in Highlander. I say “we” because I got in on the thread as soon as I
returned from Denver, stayed up most of one night to participate in and follow
it, and was later threatened by email with being unsubscribed.
A month or so earlier a new character had been introduced
to the series, the oldest known immie, the 5,000 year old Methos, who was
hiding out as a Watcher, one of the mortals who keeps track of immies. He was
an immediate hit: list members went crazy over the character and the actor, who
then came to the HL convention in Denver. He, Peter Wingfield, told us during
his Question and Answer session how he’d heard about his success with the fans
from the production people, who got reports from their creative consultants on
the reactions of fans on the various internet sites. He bubbled over with
excitement about getting such immediate feedback on his performance and how it
had encouraged the producers to use the new character in a series of story
arcs. Everyone was thrilled to hear he would be a recurring character. It was
his appearance in the next story line that provoked the final rebellion on the
part of list members, the refusal to continue the
homosexuality-as-forbidden-topic policy.
A brief on-screen exchange between Methos and Duncan, in
which Methos teased Duncan about his renovating a house in a playful, flirting
kind of way, and then was painted on the nose in retaliation, provoked many
fans; even those who were in principle against changing the forbidden topics policy.
Many could not resist speculating about the charismatic charge generated
between the two characters, was it erotic? and if so who was doing it? who was
the object? who was the subject? Almost no one was willing to allow the
principle character to have such erotic interests, but this new character,
without a series history, he they were willing to speculate about.
Within about 48 hours the policy had become moot. Over
those 48 hours there was almost no flaming, although there were many folks
unhappy about the shift they saw happening. The list owner did not intervene in
the discussion, although folks who wanted to suppress the topic repeatedly
asked her to enforce the policy. She did not post at all. When the thread had
run its course and had finally tapered off, she posted new discussion rules.
From then on homosexuality was no longer a forbidden topic, however it was a
marked topic: one had to include in the subject line of posts with homosexual
content the header: Same Sex Sex. This would permit those who found the topic
offensive to delete these posts unread, without banning the subject altogether.
[I’ll pass around a current posting with the Same Sex Sex header and the thread
it generated.]
Whether this set of events was reported on or of interest to
the producers one can only speculate now. However in the current Highlander
story arc Methos has acquired a mortal woman lover. During the run of this
thread I contacted by private email some of the folks who posted; I also posted
myself. Several folks who contributed to the thread pointed out that a fan
author had just posted a new fan story on the sibling fiction listserve,
HLFIC-L, that included a same sex sex scene between Duncan and Methos. Many fan
stories are sexually explicit, and same sex sex, despite and also because of
fanish homophobia, has a history in one fandom-specific genre of writing, known
today as “slash fiction.” I was able to contact one Highlander slash fiction
writer as a result of the shift in forbidden topics policy, which was great
because all my other slash fiction contacts up to that time had not turned up
Highlander slash. [I’ll pass around one HL/Star Trek/X-files crossover slash
novella, and some other fanfic, along with some HL history artifacts: a
timeline of the immortals, and a poster showing Duncan’s world travels.]
Originally slash fiction was called “K&S.” “K&S”
stands for “Kirk and Spock” and
slash fiction first emerged within Star Trek fandom, but was quickly
assimilated to other media fandoms, such as those interested in U.S. buddy
shows, like Starsky and Hutch, or in other science fiction, like the U.K’s
Blake Seven. Currently the show that seems to produce the most slash is the
now-cancelled Quantum Leap.
“K&S” became “K-slash-S” and then the generic form became simply
“slash.” In the archetypal slash story Spock
has entered
pon far, the periodic body state in which Vulcans must mate or die, but he and
Kirk are at that moment marooned on some deserted planet, unable to return to
Vulcan to find Spock a female Vulcan mate. Kirk, in great friendship and in a
state of supreme self-sacrifice, medicinally mates with Spock himself, and
Spock recovers. But afterward, Kirk finds himself dreaming of Spock and of
their sexual encounter over and over. In a half-dreaming/half-waking state he
finds himself besides Spock’s bed, obsessing over their comradeship of many
years. Spock awakens and this time their sexual encounter is deliberate and a
consummation of love and mutual desire. Slash fiction is sexually explicit,
highly romantic and traditionally totally repetitive and formulaic. In the
first years of K&S almost exactly the same story, the one I’ve recounted,
was told over and over with fairly minor variations. The story is often
accompanied by lovingly drawn pictures of flowery male penises, and of the
characters at the moment of orgasm. It is written by women, for their own
erotic consumption. You could call it a type of female pornography. It is also
the subject of lots of academic interest. When I tell my students about slash
fiction in say, a Science Fiction course, they are always confused by it. It
violates their sexual categories in which heterosexual people would read and
write opposite sex sex and homosexual people would read and write same sex sex.
They decide these women are sexually confused: why would they be interested in
men having sex with men? are they heterosexual? are they lesbians? What are
they? Somehow, heterosexual men consuming descriptions and pictures of women
making love with women, a common motif in the history of male porn, doesn’t
raise any of these questions. That’s just normal male heterosexuality.
Precisely because slash doesn’t sit comfortably within
quite silly expectations of female heterosexuality, it ends up exceeding it.
Some feminists have celebrated slash as politically transgressive. But whatever
transgressive powers it has is very context-specific, and pretty subtle. I
think slash does contribute to some erosion of monolithic notions of
heterosexuality and simple dichotomies of heterosex and homosex. I find slash
fiction most interesting when it eroticizes dissonances between sexual subject
locations and identities and sexual acts and practices. It is this kind of
eroticized dissonance that I speculate is commodified as a new transnational
pleasure in the global circulation of the multiethnic multisexual images of
Adrian Paul and Freddy Mercury. Now, I came out as a lesbian in the Gay
Liberation movement in the historical moment just before the women’s movement
became the privileged site for feminist coming out experiences and before the
subsequent flowering of lesbian literatures. Being and becoming homosexual was
told by and enacted around me by men, and I had to occupy an ambiguously
gendered “homosexuality” in order to become what was then called “a gay woman.”
So inhabiting and mobilizing such dissonance is part of my own lesbian sexual
history, and is undoubtedly the ground on which my political alliances with gay
men were formed and have continued, and out of which my recognition of gay
interests in the circulation of the images of Adrian Paul and Freddy Mercury
are produced.
Since we have only so much time here, there is a lot I
haven’t talked about that I’ve already researched, and of course, my study is
still in progress anyway. What you’ve gotten is really the introduction to
Highlander, to fan fiction and to listserves, and I’ve only been able to barely
suggest the theoretical apparatus I’m both using and also illustrating. My
intention in a larger version of this first Highlander paper is to layer on top
of the commodification of this dissonant erotic image circulation I’ve tried to
indirectly and allusively suggest for you some other shifting and commodified
identities. I’m especially interested in those of an EU reconfigured Europe,
and a newly Europeanized Britain whose shadowy historical interdependencies,
with France in particular, are also pivotal in the colonial history of Canada,
as well as the internalized colonial history of the U.K. itself. Another
element this connects with is the emerging “market for loyalties” that the EU
represents, indeed the creeping replacement of national identities with
consumer identities that globalization promises; these forces produce this
market for loyalties that is the history of capitalism itself, in which today
some communications legal scholars claim “the consumer pays for one set of
identities or another in ways we call ‘loyalty’ or ‘citizenship.’”
I also want to layer on to this, the history of the film
production company Gaumont, its 100 year old economic strategy of vertical
integration that today gives way to a double-edged use of both protectionist
controls in favor of national film products along side of a free trade
transnationalism of tv production. An additional layering would be the dynamic
interplay between global tv and satellite, telephone and computer technologies
and the ways the home is increasingly delivered up to information technology,
in a regime in which the information revolution is only too equivalent to “the
control revolution.” There’s also quite a lot more to say about the rock group
Queen and international HL fan culture, its concerns with copyright and
intellectual property and its enactments of national identities through music
and tv celebrities and technologies; along side with the management of erotic
energy in fan culture: for example, Adrian Paul’s attempts to turn his fan club
into a vehicle for community peace practices in the U.S., Britain and France.
Highlander merchandising and fan conventions, and gay SF groups like the
Gaylaxians are also worth talking about, as are the ways in which demarcation
lines between movies, tv, cable, video and other media forms blur as new
technologies and new fandoms reconfigure objects and their uses.
Finally, as a last illustrative example I want to tell you
about one of the first dynamics of Highlander that got me thinking about layers
of locals and globals. This was the way in which location elements in the show
were made globally and locally multivalent: for example, scenes shot in
Vancouver would include buildings and geographical features familiar to
Canadians as Canadian, but set dressing would use details, such as U.S. postal
uniforms, to suggest to U.S. audiences unfamiliar with the Canadian landmarks
that the scene took place in the U.S. What counted as generic and what counted
as specific in national place-holding shifted back and forth, depending upon
one’s own location in flows of national tvs. Alternately, scenes shot in Paris
ubiquitously included landmarks that signal “Paris” unambiguously and
reductively: for example, Duncan’s houseboat was originally docked behind Notre
Dame, so that every shot included that place marker. This season it is docked
near the Eiffel Tower. Paris as local place was most meaningful as the site of
global tourism and its signifiers. I see this nexus as one form of layers of
locals and globals that is an analog to the global gay formations and local
homosexualities of Highlander and its transnationalization. I share the concerns
about the political effects of such transnationalization that Rosemary Hennessy
so pointedly analyzes in her attempts to intervene into Queer celebrations of
the anesthetization of daily life. Thinking in layers of locals and globals
requires thinking of both transnational terrors and possibilities
simultaneously. In one’s own historical moment, it is not always clear which
political elements are terrors and which are possibilities. But since we know
that the technologies of daily life are themselves “frozen social relations” in
Donna Haraway’s phraseology, we know we must act and struggle, often without
being sure what our actions mean, with which forces to ally, and how effective
we can be. This is why I study and teach Feminism and Writing Technologies and
why I both take pleasure in and critique such cultural materials as Highlander.
Notes: References
in order mentioned:
·
Jeffrey Ressner, “Freddie Mercury: 1946-1991:
Queen singer is rock’s first major AIDS casualty.” Rolling Stone (January 9,
1992): 13; Adam Block, Richard Laermer, “Freddie Mercury and the AIDS closet,”
Advocate (December 31, 1991): 74; Jeff Clark-Meads, “Queen sales soar in wake
of Freddie Mercury death,” Billboard (December 21, 1991): 14.
·
Jess Cagle, “America Sees Shades of Gay,” Entertainment
Weekly (#291, Sept. 8, 1995), 22, 24, 31.
·
Rosemary Hennessy, “Queer visibility in
commodity culture,” in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, eds.
Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 164, 165,
177.
·
See Katie King, "Feminism and Writing
Technologies: Teaching Queerish Travels through Maps, Territories, and
Pattern." Configurations 2 (Winter 1994): 89-106; "Local and Global:
AIDS Activism and Feminist Theory." In Imaging Technologies, Inscribing
Science. Special issue of camera obscura 28 (January 1992):78-99.
·
See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in
Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1992) 200.
·
Mike Freeman, “Rysher: on the grow in the
slow-go ‘90’s,” Broadcasting (August 3, 1992): 17-18. Suzan Ayscough, “The
experiment that spawned an industry,” Variety (Nov. 16, 1992), 52-3; and Joseph
Schuman, “TV game entered with a vengeance,” Variety (Dec. 12, 1994), 57-8.
·
Highlander (USA: 1985, 128 mins.), dir. Russell
Mulcahy (Australia); Highlander
II: The Quickening (USA: 1991, 100 mins.), dir. Russell Mulcahy; Highlander:
The Final Dimension (alternative title: Highlander III: The Sorcerer) (CA/FR
with UK: 1994, 99 mins), dir. Andy Morahan (UK). Michael Williams, “Gaumont TV
expands on automation. (French television production subsidiary),” Variety
(Dec. 13, 1993):33. See also “Gaumont en bref” [online; accessed March 27,
1996]. Available World Wide Web: http://www.gaumont.fr/
·
Mike Freeman, “It’s Official: Cox to buy
RYSHER,” Broadcasting (Feb. 1, 1993), 19-20; John Brodie, “Rysher sets to make
splash into pic pool,” Variety
(March 6, 1995), 13-4. Final credits declare that the France / Canada
co-production is in association with Rysher TPE (see Brodie’s article) and with
M6 (the French TV station) and Reteitalia (part of Silvio Berlusconi’s Italian
broadcasting holdings). See
“Verlyn Keith Samples,” Broadcasting & Cable (Aug. 23, 1993): 83; Michael
Williams, “French weblet going public: M6 eyes stock market for ‘94,” Variety
(Sept. 13. 1993), 47; and Geoffrey Foisie, “Hollywood heads for Europe, hat in
hand,” Broadcasting & Cable (Nov. 15, 1993): 70.
·
Mike Freeman, “Violence study targets first-run:
networks credited with improvement; Capitol Hill asks for copies of report.
(Center for Media and Public Affairs),” Broadcasting & Cable 124 (Feb 14,
1994): 30.
·
Bill Panzer and David Abramowitz Question and
Answer session, and Adrian Paul Q & A, Oct. 7, 1995, The Gathering Two [HL
fan convention], Denver, Colorado.
·
See Stewart M. Clamen, “Canadian TV Exports
List” (last updated Dec. 18, 1995) [online, accessed March 15, 1996]. Available
World Wide Web: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/Unofficial/Canadiana/tv/exports/Exports.latest
See TV Net, “Canada” (last updated Jan. 5, 1996) [online; accessed March 27,
1996]. Available World Wide Web: http://tvnet.com/TVnet.html#TVnet See also TV Net, “France” (last updated
Feb. 18, 1996) and “UK” (last updated Jan. 1, 1996) [online; accessed March 27,
1996]. Available World Wide Web: http://tvnet.com/TVnet.html#TVnet
·
Eli Noam, Television in Europe (New York: Oxford
UP, 1991) 95-114.
·
“Berlusconi on trial. (former Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi charged with corruption),” Maclean's (Jan 29, 1996):
25. See also Geoffrey Foisie, “Hollywood heads for Europe, hat in hand: foreign
investment in U.S. TV productions grows,” Broadcasting & Cable (Nov. 15,
1993): 70; Meredith Amdur, “Reteitalia going public. (Fininvest starts public
stock offering),” Broadcasting & Cable (March 8, 1993): 67; and Hank Werba,
“Television powers Fininvest growth: 10th anniversary Reteitalia,” Variety
(April 27, 1988): 59.
·
David Sanjek, “Home Alone: the phenomenon of
direct-to-video.” Cineaste 21 (Win./Spr. 1995) 98-101.
·
Don E. Peterson, “The Best of the Rest,” Sci-Fi
TV Fall Preview (Oct. 1995), 72.
See also Steve Coe, “Hours: where the action-adventure is,” Broadcasting (Jan.
18, 1993): 50-1.
·
Lynda Ryan, “Highlander Heartthrob Adrian Paul:
TV’s Romantic Hero of the Year,” Romantic Times (Sept. 1995); Cinescape’s 1995
Science Fiction Television Yearbook (Fall 1995), “Highlander: the series,”
60-1.
·
EMI, 1995,
“Queen--The Ultimate Biography,” [online; accessed May 2, 1996]
Available http://www.riv.nl/emi/pop/queen/history.htm
·
Hogan, Guide to...Queen , 96.
·
See also Camile Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women
(Philadelphia, U Pennsylvania P, 1992), Appendix C: Who Are Fanziners?
Demographics, 319-323.
·
Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women (Philadelphia: U
Pennsylvania P, 1992); Jenkins, Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 1992).
See Penley, “The Female Spectatrix,” Camera Obsura 20-21: 256-59; “Brownian
Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” In Technoculture, eds. Constance
Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1991).
·
Chapters 4-7: 81-200.
·
Ann Gray, Video Playtime : the Gendering of a
Leisure Technology (New York : Routledge, 1992).
·
http://mithral.iit.edu:8080/highlander/
·
http://www.rysher.com/highlander/
·
http://www.gaumont.fr/
·
Nikki Finke, “Tune in, log on, for better TV,”
Newsweek (Sept. 25, 1995): 20A.
·
Daniel Akst, “Postcard from Cyberspace: At last
some credible numbers...,” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 8, 1995): D4. Also “Technology in the American
Househol,” (Washington, DC: Times Mirror Center for the People
and the Press, Oct. 16, 1995) 3.
·
For example, see chapters 8, 9, and 10 in
Camille Bacon-Smith, 203-281; chapter 6 in Henry Jenkins, 185-222, and
“Pornography By Women For Women, With Love” in Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas,
Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Feminist Essays (Trumansburg NY:
Crossing P, 1985) 79-99.
·
Monroe E. Price, “The market for loyalties:
electronic media and the global competition for allegiances,” Yale Law Journal
104 (Dec. 1994), 667-705.
·
Kevin Robins, “Bringing it all back home,”
Futures 22 (Oct. 1990): 870-80 and with Frank Webster, “’I’ll be watching
you,’” Sociology 27 (May 1993): 243-53. See also with Asu Aksoy, “Hollywood for
the 21st century: global competition for critical mass in image markets,”
Cambridge Journal of Economics 16 (March 1992): 1-23. Sanjek, “Home Alone.”
