subtext vs oppositional readings
Glaurung
This is another repost -- I am about to write an angry letter to my news
server administrator. No posts made from the server have appeared on DN
in the past 6 days. Morgan, we are both cursed.
Well, I wrote this to reply to a post Desnos made to Xenaverse. I don't
think Desnos reads atx, but since the reply turned into another of
those famous huge long Glaurung essays, with almost no quoting, I have
snipped desnos's few words and trimmed and revised a bit to make it stand
alone for a post to here.
On the relationship between "intentional" subtext inserted on purpose by
the creators of the show, "and resistant reading" subtext, and the extent
to which each is a factor on Xena:WP:
There are various kinds of subtext. Some exists simply by the fact that
gays and lesbians are starved for images with which they can identify (and
some "abnormal" aka nonconformist heterosexuals are bored with the
standard portrayals they are always seeing), and such people will read
queerness into whatever there is in this show or any show that can be read
into. Again, for those with a less-than-casual interest, I recommend
Alexander Doty's book "Making things perfectly queer" (Routledge, 1992?).
However, with some shows, like Xena or Hercules, the show is set up with a
male-male or female-female couple and no ongoing boy-girl love interest to
make the reading of queerness into the show more difficult. Xena has gone
about as far as any TV show has ever gone in making it not hard at all to
read queerness into the show, simply by being in the form of a travel show
about two women (thus no permanent male roles), by being about two women
who are not shrinking violets, by being, for TV, remarkably feminist, and
so on.
Add to the above the premise of the show's character dynamic -- that these
two women share a deep and profound friendship which can, in all honesty,
only be called loving -- and Xena makes a really big huge major blip on
the gaydar screen, regardless of the producers' intent as to how X and G's
sexuality will come across to the viewers.
Finally, however, in the case of this show, unlike any other show out
there ever AFAIK, the creators of the show have, collectively, for various
reasons, decided that they don't mind having their show read in a queer
way. To the contrary, they decided that they liked it and that it would
be fun to play up to that part of their audience. Contrast this reaction
to the response of Paramount to the explosion of Bashir/Garek M/M
fanfiction (which was to rewrite the onscreen friendship to be less talky
and more "manly," to give both characters girlfriends, etc etc), and you
see why it is that the fans tend to focus on how the subtext of the show
is intentionally inserted.
In fact, however (IMO and IIRC), intentionally inserted lesbian subtextual
innuendo has only appeared in a _significant_ way in the following handful
of episodes over the entire first two seasons -- altared states; girls
just wanna have fun; Here she comes, Miss amphipolis; a day in the life;
and blind faith.
Again in my opinion, all the talk about the subtextual content of Destiny,
The Quest, The Price, Lost Mariner, Return of Callisto, Greater Good, etc
etc etc, is fans reading the maintextual and non-sexual story of X and G's
friendship in queer (ie, sexual) terms, and is an oppositional reading of
those episodes.
I think that if Xena was a story about two men, it could still have the
same treatment and exploration of a friendship so intense that it could
only be called love, but it would never have gotten the same following
among gay men as Xena has among gay women. In fact, we already have a lot
of movies and TV shows that did for two men what Xena has been doing for
two women. They're called buddy films. The key and vital difference, I
think, is that homosocial, purportedly non-sexual love between two men is
such an old story that a huge host of compensatory "nobody had better call
us faggots" behaviors and attitudes have grown up around how men interact
with each other on screen. If Xena and Gabrielle were men, they would not
embrace and give each other all those little reassuring touches that
subtext fans like myself fixate on, but slap each other on the back, etc
-- all the usual buddy film things, all of which are specially designed to
desexualize the male-male relationship. When male buddies slap each other
on the back, joke about how they don't want to do any mushy stuff like
hugging, and so on, you have the cinematic equivalent of a red
flashing sign at the bottom of the screen saying, "these two men are
really and truly heterosexuals."
The key is, i think, that because of sexism, straight women in the
movies (and maybe even IRL, but let's stick to film to keep this simple)
have never, until very recently, had to come up with a similar set of
compensatory behaviors. And what compensatory behaviors they did come up
with were focused around staying in the feminine role assigned by a sexist
society. Which (sortof) explains the bigoted accusation that feminist
women are all lesbians -- one of the first things feminists must combat in
asserting the radical idea that women are people is traditional
femininity. And that femininity is a key part not only of maintaining
women's second class status, but (at least in the movies) of maintaining
straight women's claim to heterosexuality when they interact with other
women.
{NOTE: I am NOT talking about femininity in the sense of being concerned
for one's appearance, wearing makeup, etc, but rather the parts of what it
means to be feminine that have to do with personality -- the parts that
say that to be feminine a woman must be physically weak, mechanically and
technically inept, and most importantly, subservient to men and defining
of herself in terms of being pleasing to men. Please do not think that I
am saying that to be feminist or lesbian one must be ugly or any stupid
stuff like that.}
So without a repertoire of buddy-film back-slapping, and without the "oh
where is a man to help me get out of this situation" femininity of
incompetence, there is no real way to compensate for and defuse things,
no way to put that red flashing sign up at the bottom of the screen.
And without that red flashing sign, the intimacy of a friendship between
two women who are straight looks a lot like the romantic love between a
man and a woman or two women... or two men, for that matter.
<insert little cartoon of lit lightbulb> It suddenly occurs to me that
ideas of what sexual intimacy look like are really based on a female and
feminine (in yet a different sense of that word from the ones outlined
above) model of interaction. That's more the topic for a term paper or
perhaps a dissertation, however.
Since there is no tradition of buddy films about women to speak of, and
since women who are competent/not identified with existing for men are
also rare as hens teeth on tv, there was (and is) no established way for X
and G to show that they were straight. And unlike the two or three other
f/f buddy films and TV series which came in the dark ages B.X, the
producers, to the limit that MCA allows them, have expressed little or no
interest in establishing that X and G *are* straight by having them act
more "feminine" aka heterosexual.
On the question of the seeming conflict between intentionally inserted
subtext and resistant reading subtext, and fans's obsession with the
threat that TIIC may decide to axe the subtext in the future or treat it
inconsistently:
Of late, particularly in blind faith, there was, for me at least, a
"collision" between the intentionally inserted innuendo and the portrayal
of the X/G friendship. For me, the main source of subtext consists of the
fans doing a resistant reading of the X/G friendship -- and it is a
resistant reading even though compared to a lot of shows, there isn't a
hell of a lot of resistance to overcome. It seemed to me that for the
sake of inserting a little fun innuendo, the writers were taking liberties
with the integrity and level of commitment in the G/X friendship. Or it
seemed that the G/X friendship was being treated with the same lack of
seriousness as the intentionally inserted innuendo.
Add to this the way one of the producers had talked rather cavalierly
on interviews earlier this spring about how in the course of allowing the
show to evolve, they expected to lose part of their audience but would
make that up by picking up new viewers, and the (probably incorrect)
conclusions a lot of people on the Xena lists came up with were not all
that pretty for the subtext.
OTOH, another of the producers had expressed quite firmly that she had no
intention or interest in having G and X come across as definitely
straight. The seeming contradiction (based in what was probably a
misreading of the first producer's statements about losing parts of the
audience) has motivated a lot of concern by people who are worried that
the creators are not going to do the right thing with the subtext, or are
going to de-emphasize it, or otherwise somehow betray the fans who watch
because of the subtext. Probably that concern is, overall, ill-founded,
at least one would so hope.
The issue of consistency, on the other hand, is separate from the subtext.
A lot of people, including me, feel that it is important for the G/X
friendship to be treated consistently and seriously, even though nothing
else in the show seems to ever be treated seriously. I feel this for the
very simple reason that the characters and their relationship are what I
watch the show for. If there isn't something solid and stable there for
me to come back to, then, IMO, it isn't worth my time to be as obsessed as
I am. Of course, since resistant reading of the relationship is what
constitutes the great majority of the subtext, this consistency issue is
linked to the subtext -- but it's not the same thing. And as far as
consitency goes, it seems that the producers have decided that they don't
care to have any. Which is too bad.
As always, others' thoughts are welcome.
-- Glaurung (ship's dragon, Gabrielle adorer, & obsessed academic xenite)
=========================================================================
Convention-goer: How would you change Callisto's character if you could?
Hudson Leick: I think I'd like more clothes. -- At the Burbank Xena con.
(I like her. But she's too damn skinny to be pretty.)
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Shwartz
Glaurung <bb0...@binghamton.edu> wrote in article
<5lghls$b...@news2.zippo.com>...
First of all Woohoo in 177 lines I think you proved your point!
I have seen few scenes which I could call "gay behaviour"
Then I am telling myself that it's Gabby's and Xena have true intimate
FRIENDSHIP
based on love for each other, and I am not talking about sexual love like
lesbians have( no offence to anybody). Women behave much different around
each other than men do around men.
There is no dubt in my mind that the wirters nor the producers are NOT
trying to tell us something. Therefore I would like to conlude that what we
see or think it is, is simply our imaginations going wild.
Now how will all that turn out on Xena:WP, I can't say. We can't assume
anything.