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Type of Document Thesis Author Myers, Brian Hunt Author's Email Address bhm02c@fsu.edu URN etd-04132008-095916 Title When Discourses Collide: Hegemony, Domestinormativity, and the Active Audience in Xena: Warrior Princess Degree Master of Arts Department English, Department of Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Leigh Edwards Committee Chair Caroline Joan Picart Committee Member Jennifer Proffitt Committee Member Keywords
- Active Audience
- Fandom
- Domestinormativity
- Television
- Gender
- Feminist Media Studies
- Poststructuralism
- Political Economy
- Gramsci
- Hegemony
- Television Studies
- Queer Theory
- Gender
- Feminism
- Xena
- Synergy
- Globalization
- Fan Fiction
Date of Defense 2008-03-26 Availability unrestricted Abstract This thesis argues that corporate practices of hegemony produce oppositional discourses on gender and sexuality through its appropriation and incorporation of feminist and queer fan discourses into television programming such as Xena: Warrior Princess. As a result, Xena: Warrior Princess can be read as a political site of struggle over the meaning of gender and sexuality. The destabilizing potential of these oppositional fan interpretations and practices, though, is simultaneously enabled and delimited to varying degrees by its situation within mass media institutions. In order to make this argument, my thesis is divided into three general sections, the first of which argues that the producers of Xena incorporated elements into the text from a wide variety of communities, particularly queer communities, in order to increase audience shares and profits. The second section examines how hegemonic and subaltern modes of gender and sexuality were negotiated within the text of Xena by framing the series within poststructuralist feminist debates and broadly arguing that attempts to fix the sexed and gendered identities of Xena’s characters was undermined by the slippage of meaning enabled, but not totalized, by Xena’s production practices. My final section concludes with a reconfiguration of the “active audience” by focusing upon the feedback loop between production and consumption practices in Xena, which positioned fans as forces that attempt to fix and ground interpretations of Xena rather than radically opening them.Files
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