a talk presented to the Center for the
Study of Women, Science, & Technology
and the School of Literature,
Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology,
10 April 2001
Katie King
Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Being
explicit about and conscious of the practices of interdisciplinary work has
recently become inescapable as my women's studies department has started a new
Ph.D. program. All our collective understandings and misunderstandings are
brought to the fore as we negotiate the structure of the curriculum including
new courses, and the rituals of competency such as exams. Individual meanings
around interdisciplinary work and its various trainings sometimes overlap,
sometimes seem incommensurate. Our experiences with interdisciplinary work are
so various that it is hard to escape the knowledge that the word doesn't refer
to something we all agree upon. Many different
"interdisciplinarities" are referred to under this one term, which
even individually we use multiply, each version jockeying for position as what
some call "true interdisciplinarity." This is happening not just
within my department, but within the fields of women's studies, as we are by no
means the only folks in this position. Other women's studies Ph.D. programs are
quite recent, just begun, others just beginning as we are, and still others
about to begin, both in the U.S. and internationally. It's all too new for
there to be much consensus yet in this classification work; indeed I might
argue that these tensions and creativities and their very incommensurabilities
are powerfully productive. It is out of such local meanings within political
and institutional struggles, always requiring problematic translations across
communities of practice, always engaging in new classification work, that we
come to recognize new methods coming-into-being under the sign of this word
"interdisciplinary." No generation of feminists can claim mastery or
ownership of new ways of thinking about thinking, nor can any academic
disciplines or political theories, nor can any national academies. Such methods
and theoretical productions enable new translations, new visionary reframings
of contemporary geopolitical realities.
The
interdisciplinary field that I discover, identify and create I have been
calling since 1986 "Feminism and Writing Technologies." Feminism and
writing technologies situates the history of the book and its archival
interests, the study and practices of oral and print cultures, the creation and
study of new cybercultures, and the feminist investigations of technosciences,
all together as perspectives each upon the other, as practices each producing
the others, as modes of critique and as forms of everyday life. In my
university workplace--department, college and campus--being able to name your
research area is important, even important in a women's studies department for
even there researchers have often been trained in disciplinary fields.
Something brief, easily identifiable, and locatable in relation to a discipline
or recognized interdiscipline is preferred. "Feminism and writing
technologies" never fills these requirements.
A
field full of questions and questioning, working in feminism and writing
technologies requires one to ask: What are the politics of making distinctions
between the oral and the written? That is to say, what movements of power are
involved? What assumptions are made? That orality is one thing? That such
distinctions are self-evident? That there are single pivotal historical
divides? That these ideal
categories exist in the world? Whose "revolutions" are the alphabet,
literacy, printing or the internet? Global conceptual categories are
interrogated by local material practices, but what counts as local? What counts
as the material? the practical? the global? Assumption after assumption is
necessarily excavated in feminism and writing technologies, each such
assumption moving power in particular ways. Excavating such assumptions instead
points to alternative pasts, alternative materialities, alternative
contemporary possibilities, alternative movements of power. How to convey to
students, to fellow cultural workers (such as my colleagues in women's studies,
and other cultural critics across and through the borders of my workplace, a
university)--how to convey the pivotal importance of asking such questions and
excavating such assumptions today? The importance of broadening the historical
and cultural frameworks of engagement so as to contest for all these deeply
political meanings and materialities? How to understand this process as modes
of critique, forms of everyday life and what feminist technoscience theorists
call "working relations"?
As
I conceptualize it the field of feminism and writing technologies includes
histories of specific technologies, such as internet, satellite TV and other
interpenetrating communications infrastructures; printing, xeroxing and other
forms of reproduction; computers, book wheels, codex and other linking devices;
alphabets, chirographs, sound and video recording and other forms of
inscription; pencils, typewriters and other marking implements; paper, screen
and other surfaces of display; epic poetry, telenovelas and other formalized
oralities; pictographs, web sites and other artifacts of visual culture. It
also includes the methods by which such technologies are studied in the academy
and understood in everyday life: the working relations of technologies-in-use,
including the formal and popular technologies of knowledge-making, if you will.
It is feminism--theory and activism--that offers the ways of thinking about
power investigating such methods. "Writing" in this sense comprehends
its largest meaning: it participates in oralities, rather than becoming their
opposite. It stresses meaning-making in many cultural forms; it stresses social
processes that are momentarily stabilized in human devices. And
"technologies" here are not just the latest machines for sale, or the
instruments and infrastructures of science, but the cultural refinements of
skills and tools, extensions of human bodies and minds with which we and the
world are continually reshaping in complex interconnecting agencies. (These
agencies I call "intra-actions" following feminist physicist Karen
Barad.) "Writing technologies" are the objects of study, but
"writing" technologies is also the process of engaging these objects.
As
a very junior faculty member participating in a women's studies faculty study
group in the mid 80's, when I tried to explain that I was investigating the
politics of making distinctions between what has been called "the
oral" and "the written," a more senior historian impatiently
insisted, "Something just is oral or written!" Although each
feminist there cared about and taught the importance of denaturalizing cultural
categories feminists critiqued, to no one was it obvious that orality and
literacy were variations on nature and culture. As a postdoc in another
university a friendly feminist colleague laughed when I said that
"feminism and writing technologies" was a field I had to both
recognize and invent, saying "You can't invent fields!" This from a
person in the still relatively recently created field of "Women's
Studies." Disciplines and new disciplinary formations depend on the
naturalization of pivotal objects and on classification work. (Bowker &
Star 1999) Questioning such objects, including categories, and the processes of
naturalization within such communities of practice at best makes you look
naive, at worst (in a university) makes you appear ignorant. Although I
remembered very clearly these same reactions during the creation of the field
of women's studies, others had not experienced them or had forgotten them, or
simply thought that this analogy was irrelevant.
I've
taken this language of objects, classification work, naturalization and
communities of practice from a new book by Leigh Star and Geoff Bowker called Sorting
Things Out: Classification and its consequences. (1999 MIT) I've found this
book and its apparatus very useful for thinking both about technological
infrastructures and about intellectual ones. Taken together investigations of
these infrastructures constitute that process I call "writing"
technologies. Ecologies, narratives and categories are all implicated in this
process. I hope today to give you a taste of how this is so, using materials
from my research as examples and as points of discussion. For the first half of
my time I will speak to the issues raised by thinking of feminism and writing
technologies as a field, what kind of work it does. Then in the second half of
the talk, I will offer an analysis from one of my research projects as an
example of some of this work. Think of the conditions of this talk too as
another example, one about the problematic work of translation across many
fields of practice. I can't do all the translation work required. You will have
to take up a considerable part of it, imaginatively entering into sites you
ordinarily wouldn't visit, or generously catching the spirit of a discussion of
something you know only too well and in more detail. All of us together will
thus be modeling the movement of intellectual objects across communities of
practice, engaging in the articulation work that is required to make sense of
such movement. I ask you to do the work of noticing what assumptions within
your communities of practice become visible as they are violated.
Years
ago my friend Sharon Traweek told me a story about a talk she gave early in the
course of her interdisciplinary research. Her work uses anthropological methods
to look at the histories and practices within various cultures of particle
physicists. Many of the folks in her audience were themselves particle
physicists and she was nervous about what they would think of her
representations of them and their work. After her talk one man got up and said
in a puzzled way: "Well, what you've said is all true. The only thing I don't
understand is that you talk about It all as if it all could have been some other
way." For feminists projects that involve denaturalizing objects and
ideas-as-objects are important precisely because then we can explore how things
could be some other way. Donna Haraway puts it hauntingly: "...the point
is to learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet
be...."
Right
now I'm working on the draft of my next book An Introduction to Feminism and
Writing Technologies. Years ago I decided that I needed to create some
"case studies" in order to demonstrate how the theoretical apparatus
I was developing could be useful to folks in various fields. I ended up looking
closely at what I now call "writing technology ecologies," focusing
on two very specific and deliberately very different ones. (Indeed, to some
people they seem so incongruous that they just have to laugh! I often laugh at
them myself. Sometimes laughter is a sign that assumptions are being violated.)
Let me briefly name them incongruously, and then explain them a little bit
more, so that perhaps their sense will be more obvious. One case study is about
17th c. Quaker women's writing on women's public speech. The other is about
contemporary fan fiction of the TV shows Xena and Highlander. Let
me explain them a little bit.
17th
c. Quaker women's "writings"--in that larger sense of writing I
mentioned earlier, one that participates in oralities rather than excluding
them--include prophetic speech, performing religious dramatic enactments
including Quaker silence, and traveling in the ministry as yoke-mates; include
materials written out and circulated in manuscript, a particular publishing
practice of the time; and also include materials meant to be circulated in
print, usually illegally. One pivotal print shop out of which Quaker writings
were published was owned and operated by a woman printer. Quakers called all of
this "publishing truth" within their own time period's complex
writing technology ecology, an ecology in which gender, the politics of
religion, class and nationality, and representations of sexuality all figure as
movements of power. Since this is a historical case study another writing
technology ecology also figures however: that larger one across time, in which
a range of re-representations of these Quaker women by interested groups today
also figures. Some of these groups are: contemporary Quakers who see these 17th
c. women as emblems to heal splits in Quakerism today; academic and amateur
historians of sexuality who interrogate their travels in pairs, wondering what
possible relations to contemporary lesbianisms are indicated; historians of
religion and theology as well as women pastors, who place these women into new
gender sensitive mappings of women and religion; and feminist historians and
literary and cultural critics who consider how to make these writings
intelligible within shifting histories of women and cultural production.
Assumptions about print culture and its relation to oralities, cursory namings
of past writing technology "revolutions" and their meanings, and
relations of technology and cultural and literary production are all questioned
in this case study.
The
other case study examines the ecologies of global television
"writings"--again in that expanded meaning of writing, including a
wide range of forms of inscription. Such writings range from female fans
writing their own so-called "slash" sexual interventions into
international heterosexualities and circulating them in xerox publication and
on the Web, to mainstream international tv circulations of sexual and gender
images in niche marketing forms and multicultural ambiguities--all within
processes of globalization, neoliberal economic policies, new global
communications infrastructures, and formal and informal processes of
knowledge-making. TV is the global sign for a
fascinating set of technologies that complicates a range of assumptions people
bring to the phrase "writing technologies." At first glance it may
even seem rather silly to call the various TV technologies writing
technologies, especially to those who privilege a particular version of
inscription as "writing" and for whom writing is the very opposite of
the aural and the photographic. But even for those who resist the largest meanings
of writing technologies--that is, as particular formalized processes of
meaning-making embodied in specific cultural skills and devices--even for them,
a second look in this age of WebTV may give them pause. Satellite and cable
television are converging with telephone, computer and internet technologies in
ways that only this largest meaning of writing can apprehend. These
convergences are explicitly commercial, political and technological in ways
that are highly visible right now. This makes TV an extremely interesting
example for description and analysis, one that calls upon and creates new
intuitions about writing technologies. In the second half of this talk, I will
draw upon this TV research.
Both
of these case studies explore lesbian and gay historiography and art activisms.
Both situate us in a position to ask why we should call literary materials and
other cultural productions technology. Specific
momentary skills and devices--for example, the hand-held e-book today--are
conflations of local materialities on the one hand, and global relations
protected and connected to other skills and devices under global signs, such as
"the Book," on the other. Taking apart these global signs in order to
examine local materialities and other global (including historical)
relationships is one task of feminism and writing technologies. Literature is one powerful global sign under which
writing technologies are conflated, universalized, and decontextualized.
Inspecting literary materialities is a method for taking apart literature as
such a global sign and understanding its protected relationships to other
skills, devices and signs. Thus, understanding literary materials and
other cultural productions as technology, as cultural
refinements of skills and tools in historical flux, is the first method in feminism
and writing technologies.
Thinking about
the technologies of literary practice opens up cultural production to new
inspections of contemporary uses and meanings. Public alarms about education
generally and the status of its culturally hallowed symbol, the Book, are
powerful forms of public engagement today. Cultural products understood
traditionally as literature or the arts--such as poetry, novel, essay, drama,
sermon, letter, memoir, biography, painting, sculpture, dance--are joined by
other cultural products, overlappingly understood as popular culture, as high
art, and as commodities delivered technologically, such as documentary film,
video game, TV series, magazine ad, guerrilla theater, graffiti, environmental
installation, public mural, internet discussion group and web site.
Contemporary forms of cultural production create interference patterns upon the
symbolic resonance field of author-text-reader (or producer-object-consumer; or
production-distribution-consumption). Such idealized a priori categories break
down with the examination of new cultural products, are revealed as
historically and culturally specific forms of protected relationship, and turn
out to obscure as well as illuminate usable pasts and presents. Literary and
intellectual properties are in unsettling flux. While a future of
"content-providers" rather than authors is one bleak vision mobilized
by the relentless commodification of every new technology, the very
instabilities of productive agencies that multinational capital is attempting
to manage and exploit, may be more interesting than it yet appears. That is,
may be so if feminism engages with such writing technologies of these possible
presents, as well as with altering our shaping of usable pasts.
For example, the field of women's writing has generally focused
upon the literary works of the last three centuries, with exceptional authors
and texts surfacing only occasionally in earlier periods. This is because
literacy has been understood as the limiting horizon of writing by women, and
authors to be the necessary originators of visible works, cultural processes,
and literary intelligibility. But shift the terms of value and the kinds of
cultural productions that count, and far richer worlds of relationship among
women and culture become intelligible and important. Feminism and writing
technologies is a lens into those richer worlds. As
we contemplate useable pasts, we note, for example, that women readers and
collectors of books emerge as gatekeepers, facilitators and patrons of literary
culture. Ballad hawkers and retellers' acts of sedition and improvisation are
recognized, documented in court and prison records. Women printers and
preachers participate in political and religious public life. Commonplace books
and cookbooks, women as collators and copyists; prayers, visions and songs,
women as visionaries and troubadours; manuscript publication and circulation,
women as intellectuals and colleagues; signatures and personal marks on public
petitions, women as citizens and historical agents; thus multiple objects and
multiple agencies characterize how feminism and writing technologies
looks to and creates usable pasts. Both in these
alternative pasts and today in alternative presents, where authorship is not
understood as the only or even the most important productive agency, but one of
many in material systems of writing technologies, enlivened realities are made
visible. These are writing technology ecologies of interdependent parts, under
specific historical regimes of power. Functionality of such ecologies is not
the point of understanding their systems, but rather how they reveal
materializing social change and cultural forms in flux.
Feminism and Writing Technologies highlights particular threads of
interconnection among the natural and social sciences and the humanities. It
interrogates and has interests and histories in threads through all of them,
through their academic instantiations, objects of knowledge and methods, and
also threading through their uses and meanings in everyday life as writing
technologies. Caught up in the struggles for resources and authority in
academic and state institutions, those in the humanities have been constrained
to emphasize their separations and distinctiveness from the natural and social
sciences, an ideological tradition shot through historically with meanings of
class and privilege, and appeals to character, religion, morality and nation.
Feminism and Writing Technologies suggests that the "writings" of the
humanities, are always already "technologies." That the competition
for resources that current institutional arrangements foster obscures the
equally real interconnections among the natural and social sciences and the
humanities (or within and between the natural and human "sciences").
It suggests that it is these interconnections that are what matter today in
reconfigurations of knowledge and knowledge institutions. Indeed, it suggests
that what are needed are new educational institutionalizations and new
classifications that foster our apprehension of these interconnections and that
limit the kinds of competition for resources that misleadingly overemphasize
their separations in the course of urging status hierarchies among them. And
finally, Feminism and Writing Technologies requires that such global
disciplinary and interdisciplinary categories be interrogated by the kinds of
interventions in knowledge construction feminism has undertaken in the academy,
interventions that emphasize accountability in the making of knowledge, rather
than efficiency in the production of knowledge workers. Writing technologies
defined expansively can be the heartening entry way into the technologies /
technics of knowledge production in the natural and human sciences. Feminism
and Writing Technologies enlivens the understanding and participation in such
knowledge production through historical and cultural perspectives that center
human and other natural agencies complexly intertwined. Humanism, humanistic
inquiry, the humanities and human agency are culturally and historically
contextualized, engaged and interrogated. These are the stakes that a
reconfiguring humanities has in Feminism and Writing Technologies: for
scientists, social scientists and humanists all to be educated to grasp current
technological and social change in perspective, to learn comparisons, cultural
and historic, that illuminate what sorts of powers are shifting, embodied in
the technologies of arts, science and culture altering before us.
Let me turn now to my second
case study, and talk to you today a bit about the television show Xena,
now in its sixth year of production. Xena, and its twin TV show Hercules, are U.S. shows
filmed and produced in New Zealand. Like the clothes we wear in the U.S. today,
much of the food we eat, the electronics equipment we love, TV and some other
culture industries are "off-shored" to reduce production costs and to
increase control over labor--that is to say, people-- elements in global
divisions of labor that characterize this moment in history. It is this moment
in history that I use the term "postmodern" to describe, and it is
not unconnected with another term, "postcolonial," which like it is
complexly shot through with terror and possibility. Xena plays to global
audiences, which was not at all anticipated by the producers who originated the
show for U.S. consumption but during its first year immediately capitalized
upon these unanticipated markets. The structural effects of global conditions
of production have something to do with the show's appeal to global
audiences--for example, some visual and verbal allusions and references to
non-U.S. centered jokes and other cultural elements. But the common wisdom in
Hollywood is that it is genre, the kind of narrative, that matters the most in
TV that travels globally, especially action-adventure stories that are visually
stimulating and rely less on subtle verbal interaction. Within the U.S. Xena
is less famous for its global range of audiences than for its ambiguities of
sexuality, but there are structural similarities in these multiple
possibilities of narrative. I'm very interested in TV that is ambi-sexual,
ambi-ethnic and ambi-cultural and Xena is one example, and one of the
few in which the producers and actors have publicly commented on these
qualities and on their intentions and forms of production.
The term
"niche markets" is usually used to describe commercial products made
for specific local audiences, like rainbow jewelry for gay folks. But what we
see in the TV show Xena is something similar but also taken to the next
level of complexity in what I call "layers of locals and globals": a
single global product intended for a contradictory nest of niche markets, some
of whom may derive their cultural pleasures from this very "contradictory
nesting." Despite the common wisdom of Hollywood that valorizes the
simplicity of genre formula as globally attractive, another element, actually a
complexity of address may also be attractive to specific audiences. Indeed such
complexity of address and its multiple narratives may be the form of
"consciousness" cultivated by such cultural products, a consciousness
appropriate in a globalized world not only of world-wide divisions of labor and
production, but also of migrating populations, of cultural mixings in a range
of media, of newly invented traditionalisms, such as religious fundamentalism
and ethnic identities, and of sexual and family arrangements altered by the
shape of global capitalism. Individual producers and advertisers are not in
control of, indeed barely grasp, the commercial implications of these tastes
and forms of consciousness. Nor do cultural critics know what they will come to
mean in the future, what their political effects will be however much we might
suspect terrors, or however much we might long for possibilities.
As I suggested,
some of the effects of global production itself are pleasurable: the backdrops
of New Zealand providing settings unlike U.S. venues or Kiwi slang enlivening
the other anachronistic postmodernisms of Xena's appropriations of many
cultures' mythologies and histories. Global production itself becomes a
spectacle bundled with the TV show. Actors as "stars" have always
been part of this bundled package sold along with the film or TV product, and
"behind the scenes"
elements of production that exploit the actors further have long been the stuff
of fan interest. But it is more recent that intense interest is also focused on
box office sales, the buying and selling of multinational corporations and
stories about their owners and CEOs, the quoting of producers and writers about
their intentions with the product, speculations about the political effects of
the contents of stories, and so on, are also "bundled" with the
product as items to be sold, in TV venues like Entertainment Tonight or
supermarket magazines like Entertainment Weekly. Such concerns often
were narrowly professional ones in the past, of importance mainly to folks in
the industry and not also commodified and sold as they are increasingly today.
And the fact that multinationals now encompass many forms of media makes for
multiple Xena products: tie-in novels and paraphernalia like dolls,
calendars, CDs, screensavers, and t-shirts, and alternate venues like web sites
and conventions, and coffee table and companion documentary books telling the
stories of production, listing episodes and their writers, and offering
critical discussions, from fans, from journalists, and from academics. One
might call such a proliferation of commercial products, especially those with
an emphasis on the pleasures of commercial production itself "commercially
exuberant."
For example, one
pleasure associated with Xena is not immediately available upon viewing,
a kind of semi-private, or perhaps, better, "special-public"
element. In Xena the final
credits, which flash by more quickly than one can read, and which share the
screen with upcoming episode trailers, are followed by disclaimers, one legal,
one humorous. In one famous episode "Destiny," the production credits
end with the following humorous disclaimer: "Julius Caesar was not harmed
during the production of this motion picture. However, the Producers deny any
responsibility for any unfortunate acts of betrayal causing some
discomfort." These comic disclaimers are so embedded as to be hidden: I
can't read them off the TV myself, and only can barely see them on
"pause" or "slow" with my VCR. To get this one I raided the
store of such carefully, even compulsively visioned sightings produced by fans
at the Logomancy fan site on the Web. What wasn't harmed here was "Julius
Caesar," the chronologically specific character in a play of anachronism,
the emblem of Western Culture who parodies himself for us as he tells us in the
episode that "Gaul is divided into three parts." In first season
episodes other such Western authorities mocked but in disclaimer not harmed
were "Unrelenting or Severely Punishing Deities," "Fathers,
Spiritual or Biological," and "Males, Centaurs or Amazons," each
of these poking fun at the kind of feminism displayed both subversively and
often commercially in Xena.
It's not just
that the producers make fun of possible objections to the violence of this
episode of Xena when, after saying Caesar was not harmed, they also
"deny any responsibility for any unfortunate acts of betrayal causing some
discomfort." Here they also make fun of any fussy concerns about their
recycled versions of myths, cultural traditions, and national histories. The
humorous disclaimer on Xena includes as production pleasures, the
credits and legalities, and the technologies of recovery, inside the spectacle.
Indeed the obvious joke of this episode's disclaimer is that Julius Caesar is
never hurt in the story--only Xena is hurt. His betrayals of her are both
emotional and brutally physical. In the story line Caesar's mode of killing
Xena is to crucify her: the Western cultural betrayal by the producers then
being to elevate Xena to Christ-like status, and indeed to construct a story in
which she too is resurrected, not just once, but twice. Note how the humorous
ironies accustom and habituate viewers to casual movements from one level of
abstraction to another, to sorting out easily those relative and relational
shifts among levels of locals and globals involved in getting all the jokes
against religion and tradition, and in playing one's proper market roles in a
globalized economy. In TV Guide, in a little descriptive box alerting
readers to elements of interest in TV episodes, another episode of Xena
was highlighted as having angered Hindu fundamentalists in the similarly
parodic use of Indian mythologies and religions. These very political and
religious objections were commodified as a parodic element to be bundled with
other production pleasures. Such parody of myth, religion and tradition is
positioned in the TV show as feminist.
Female
friendship is the most valued theme in the TV show, and is visually complicated
and narratively explored in most episodes of Xena. Ways of expressing
female friendship, love and the possibilities of sexuality among women are
parallel threads of imagery, narrative, symbolism and humor, even while both
Xena and her female companion Gabrielle have explicit male lovers in various
episodes. What one might call audience and narrative polyphony--simultaneous
appeals to more than one story line, each one pitched to a different niche
market--allows for multiple interpretations of specific moments in pivotal
episodes. Fans who explicitly see audience polyphony in production intentions,
feel empowered to argue for their audience interests with producers and
writers. For example, fans who enjoy sensual and sexual metaphors of female
friendship, who are encouraged by the deliberate allusions to lesbian
sexuality, refer to this recurrent element as "the subtext." They
argue with writers and producers to make this narrative more explicit in the
stories, and the producers have publicly both encouraged them and also insisted
on ambiguous multiple possibilities. In the episode which follows "Destiny,"
called "The Quest," Xena and Gabrielle share a much hyped kiss, but
one which simultaneously melds both the image of Xena and Gabrielle kissing and
the image of Gabrielle and the man in whose body Xena's spirit has been
sheltered, kissing. We see both possibilities on the TV screen, in swift
parallel.
My favorite
episode of Xena is elaborately allusive, even back to this episode
internally. Some of the most complexly edited episodes of Xena are what
are called "bottle episodes." Bottle episodes are created out of
clips of previous shows, and intended to conserve production time and thus
costs. Xena is now famous for its bottle episodes and for using this
highly allusive episode form even in more expensive production intentions. One
of my favorite episodes, similarly densely allusive, but not created out of
clips from previous ones, is entitled "The Bitter Suite," that is,
"Suite" spelled s-u-i-t-e." The trailer for this episode calls
it "the most talked about episode of the season....an all musical
adventure." And indeed many musical genres, most with TV versions, are
sewn together and parodied in this show. Musically alluded to are both specific
productions and generic forms; for example, there are several allusions to the
Judy Garland film version of The Wizard of Oz, while there are also
allusions to Gilbert and Sullivan, to nursery rhyme songs, to Broadway
musicals, to classic films in the Ziegfeld Follies tradition, to old episodes
of I Love Lucy making fun of operas, to country music, and so on. There
are visual allusions to productions of Wagner's Ring cycle, to Busby Berkeley
movies and to Las Vegas show productions.
[clip trailer]
then [clip to Callisto's kiss]
Xena's recurrent
enemy Callisto is both a figure and narrator in the complex dreamy Tarot game show
structure of the episode, which is both very funny and surprisingly poignant
and touching. A climax episode in a long story-arc, Xena and Gabrielle, have
become enemies in the course of Callisto's manipulations. Each one has had a
child, and Callisto has manipulated their children's deaths in such a way that
each is in some way responsible for the death of the other's child. In the
previous episode Xena and Gabrielle's friendship and love has become murderous
hatred, hatred which is reviewed at the beginning of this one when Xena
brutally attempts to kill Gabrielle. Both plunge into a waterfall and the
swirling visuals suggest naked bodies undulating in the waters. Xena is
awakened by Callisto's kiss, which recalls the moment of her climatic kiss with
Gabrielle in the past. Callisto's mocking voice-over ironizes both kiss and
episode title when she sings, "You taste it, how evil and good coexist;
the Bitter and Sweet of it, all on the lips that you kissed." The episode
elaborates how Xena and Gabrielle are painfully reconciled, and how important
memory, betrayal and forgiveness are in friendship and in understandings of the
self. Multiple ironies make it possible to interpret the episode emotionally,
pop-psychologically, humorously, politically, mockingly, and in combinations of
all of these. The emotional climax fades to a final scene of Xena and Gabrielle
lying in each other's arms, engulfed by waves on a beach, in a momentary
allusion to the famous erotic cinematic moment in the film From Here to
Eternity--an allusion which is immediately defused by Xena and Gabrielle
leaning back into the sand in hilarious laughter. Journalistic interviews of
actors, writers and producers always emphasize this comic element of the shows
and paint a picture of a production company having a great time making fun of
it all. This "commercial exuberance" might be understood as the
keynote of Xena, bundled together with its varying products, and always
creating and coloring its forms of feminism.
[?clip of final
scene & laughter?]
So to ambi-sexual, ambi-ethnic and ambi-cultural one can add
ambi-feminist to Xena's multiple layers of locals and globals. Should this boil
down essentially to cynical manipulation? While I do believe cynical
manipulation is a piece of such audience polyphony, I also believe that to
point to such manipulations does not exhaust this historical form of all of its
meaning. I refer again to the kind of consciousness cultivated by such global
products, created out of commercial intentions, but also out of conditions of
global production, which create new pleasures and tastes. Indeed, able to
engage world historical subjects now properly addressed complexly in a
globalized world not only of world-wide divisions of labor and production, but
also of migrating populations, cultural mixings, newly invented
traditionalisms, and of proliferating forms of sexuality and family
arrangements, all altered by the shape of global capitalism. The forms of
feminism created in layers of locals and globals are structural as well as
intentional, are necessarily extraordinarily various when properly
international, and their political futures are yet to be actualized. My reasons
for doing this kind of analysis of Xena is to focus on the layers of
locals and globals that are the resources and forms of consciousness both
created but also made available by what Chela Sandoval has called "the
democratization of oppression" that characterizes the shifting powers of
multi-capitalism. I believe that any new political movements, among them
feminist and lesbian and gay human rights activisms, must be very sophisticated
in their understandings of their own commodification within such layered global
and local structures, as well as be risk-taking in their appropriations of
pleasures, identities and political strategies. Feminism and writing
technologies is a lens onto this kind of examination, "writing"
technologies, engaging ecologies, narratives, and categories.
