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I just finished disc one of Stargate SG-1, season one, and have yet to feel the love. Perhaps it's my admiration for James Spader, though I feel I could get to like this Daniel Jackson. No, actually it's obviously "Emancipation," the third episode. Star Trek: TOS-level sexism I can swallow -- I'm a fan of Smallville, right? But poor anthropology really bugs me. (If you haven't seen the first season and think you might want to unspoiled, leave now.) So, the premise is that they go through the SG to a world where a lost Mongol tribe still runs free. Thanks to Mongol customs and/or customs adopted specifically to protect women from the depredations of the Gou'ald -- it's never made entirely clear -- they're very sexist and sex segregated. Sure, fine, whatever. But Jackson, the brilliant anthropologist, says two things that made me queasy. One: this is an opportunity to study an ancient civilization. Um, no. It's an opportunity to study a modern civilization descended, like ours, from an ancient civilization. One can dispute the effects of technology, specifically communications and transportation, on the pace of social change, but a thousand years was a long time even before the steam engine, and expecting a lost Mongol tribe to represent its ancestors of millenia ago is dumb. Even if we hypothesize that isolation slowed change because of lack of cultural contrast, that wouldn't make change stop. But, okay, I let that one go.
Then, two: we should come back with an all-male team because of the sex segregation. Now you're making me angry, Daniel. Sex segregation, preventing male anthropologists from learning much about what one half of the population thinks and does (female anthropologists, too), cries out for a mixed team. Unless you think that only what men do constitutes culture. And I'm sure he didn't mean that. Oh, wait, I'm not.
Ranting aside, the special effects are still pretty good, if not quite as impressive as those of the movie in my memory.
Two books, quickly, for contrast. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures, and Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_OncoMouseTM. Contrast, because both are academic books deeply embedded in preexisting academic literature and debates; both use what's easily denigrated as jargon; and only one sucks. I should say, in fairness to Haraway, that I've read about a third to a half of the stuff to which Hills' work is a contribution, albeit a long time ago, and much less of the literature of which Haraway's work is a part, so perhaps that colored my reaction. Hills is, however, ten times better at summarizing the positions taken by other people, so that even when I didn't know or remember the work well, I could follow his argument. Haraway just assumes you know what she's talking about.
Hills' book's topic is fairly self-evident. His main argument is almost an anti-argument, that a lot of contradictory things go on in fan cultures, and both the claims of liberation and of mental colonization that academics make are partial truths at best. He's very interested in the way that academic studies of fans seem to have to distinguish "fan" from "academic" in order to make fan studies respectable within the academy, and in order to preserve the status of the "academic" as opposed to the "fannish." That is, academics share many characteristics with fans: close reading of source texts, often an obsession with completism (have to read everything on topic X, or XF as the case may be), gatherings with fellows to talk in depth about things the world at large takes less seriously, etc. It is therefore important, he argues, for academics, particularly those who study fans, to explain why the social value of their endeavors is greater than that of fans.
Hills comes to few conclusions, which is a little frustrating but also refreshing compared to Constance Penley, Camille Bacon-Smith, and other totalizing analysts of fandom. One point that really interested me was that fandom conversion narratives have an explanatory gap: most people trying to explain their fandom, both its specific object and its intensity, offer reasons that are clearly insufficient. I can give an account of why I fell for the XF, but the strength of the obsession is still something of a mystery to me. I know why I loved Buffy, but not why I didn't love it like I loved the XF (though MustangSally's
"won't get fooled again" theory has some appeal). Hills is not a notably clear writer; this isn't easy going. But there are thoughts underneath. This book won't appeal if you're not seriously interested in fandom studies, but if you are I'd recommend it highly.
Haraway, by contrast -- well, if the title annoyed you, you've got a good idea of what the book is like. The trouble with jargon is that it can hide absence of thought. Of course, it can also obscure what thoughts there are, but those can usually be teased out with enough patience. I lacked such patience with Haraway's laundry lists of terms, deconstruction of cartoons that didn't seem to make any point beyond the plurality of meanings and the asserted hegemony of an always contestable bio-science, and repeated reference to really bad paintings whose meanings were so obscure that she felt she had to explain them, if you can call what she did explanation. (Link to some paintings from the painter's website here. You can tell what kind of painter she is from the fact that there are more position papers than paintings on the site.) The points, if there are any, get lost in a flurry of nouns, adjectives, and words, words, words. Randomly and representatively:
I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted. This is either too much or too little. Why "facts, laws, and objects"? Why "and" and "as well as" and all the rest? When Haraway does slow down and actually explain three ways in which baby formula in urban areas of developing countries has caused changes in breastfeeding and child death patterns that aren't reversible simply through health education, it's not only the most interesting three paragraphs of the book, it feels as if another writer had taken over, one who wanted you to understand a point instead of having as many neurons fire as possible per paragraph.
Boy, I feel like a total cultural conservative now. Let me reassure you that I am, in fact, writing more gay porn about Superman even as you read this.
Then, two: we should come back with an all-male team because of the sex segregation. Now you're making me angry, Daniel. Sex segregation, preventing male anthropologists from learning much about what one half of the population thinks and does (female anthropologists, too), cries out for a mixed team. Unless you think that only what men do constitutes culture. And I'm sure he didn't mean that. Oh, wait, I'm not.
Ranting aside, the special effects are still pretty good, if not quite as impressive as those of the movie in my memory.
Two books, quickly, for contrast. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures, and Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_OncoMouseTM. Contrast, because both are academic books deeply embedded in preexisting academic literature and debates; both use what's easily denigrated as jargon; and only one sucks. I should say, in fairness to Haraway, that I've read about a third to a half of the stuff to which Hills' work is a contribution, albeit a long time ago, and much less of the literature of which Haraway's work is a part, so perhaps that colored my reaction. Hills is, however, ten times better at summarizing the positions taken by other people, so that even when I didn't know or remember the work well, I could follow his argument. Haraway just assumes you know what she's talking about.
Hills' book's topic is fairly self-evident. His main argument is almost an anti-argument, that a lot of contradictory things go on in fan cultures, and both the claims of liberation and of mental colonization that academics make are partial truths at best. He's very interested in the way that academic studies of fans seem to have to distinguish "fan" from "academic" in order to make fan studies respectable within the academy, and in order to preserve the status of the "academic" as opposed to the "fannish." That is, academics share many characteristics with fans: close reading of source texts, often an obsession with completism (have to read everything on topic X, or XF as the case may be), gatherings with fellows to talk in depth about things the world at large takes less seriously, etc. It is therefore important, he argues, for academics, particularly those who study fans, to explain why the social value of their endeavors is greater than that of fans.
Hills comes to few conclusions, which is a little frustrating but also refreshing compared to Constance Penley, Camille Bacon-Smith, and other totalizing analysts of fandom. One point that really interested me was that fandom conversion narratives have an explanatory gap: most people trying to explain their fandom, both its specific object and its intensity, offer reasons that are clearly insufficient. I can give an account of why I fell for the XF, but the strength of the obsession is still something of a mystery to me. I know why I loved Buffy, but not why I didn't love it like I loved the XF (though MustangSally's
"won't get fooled again" theory has some appeal). Hills is not a notably clear writer; this isn't easy going. But there are thoughts underneath. This book won't appeal if you're not seriously interested in fandom studies, but if you are I'd recommend it highly.
Haraway, by contrast -- well, if the title annoyed you, you've got a good idea of what the book is like. The trouble with jargon is that it can hide absence of thought. Of course, it can also obscure what thoughts there are, but those can usually be teased out with enough patience. I lacked such patience with Haraway's laundry lists of terms, deconstruction of cartoons that didn't seem to make any point beyond the plurality of meanings and the asserted hegemony of an always contestable bio-science, and repeated reference to really bad paintings whose meanings were so obscure that she felt she had to explain them, if you can call what she did explanation. (Link to some paintings from the painter's website here. You can tell what kind of painter she is from the fact that there are more position papers than paintings on the site.) The points, if there are any, get lost in a flurry of nouns, adjectives, and words, words, words. Randomly and representatively:
Hunger, well-being, and many kinds of self-determination -- implicated in contending agricultural ways of life with very different gender, class, racial, and regional implications -- are very much at stake. Like all technoscientific facts, laws, and objects, seeds only travel with their apparatus of production and sustenance. The apparatus includes genetic manipulations, biological theories, seed genome testing practices, credit systems, cultivation requirements, labor practices, marketing characteristics, legal networks of ownership, and much else. These apparatuses can be contested and changed, but not easily. Seeds are brought into being by, and carry along with themselves wherever they go, specific ways of life as well as particular sorts of dispossession and death. Such points should be second nature to any citizen of the republic of technoscience, but they bear repeating.
I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted. This is either too much or too little. Why "facts, laws, and objects"? Why "and" and "as well as" and all the rest? When Haraway does slow down and actually explain three ways in which baby formula in urban areas of developing countries has caused changes in breastfeeding and child death patterns that aren't reversible simply through health education, it's not only the most interesting three paragraphs of the book, it feels as if another writer had taken over, one who wanted you to understand a point instead of having as many neurons fire as possible per paragraph.
Boy, I feel like a total cultural conservative now. Let me reassure you that I am, in fact, writing more gay porn about Superman even as you read this.
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Hang in there for the rest of the season... there are some gems there. Yes, they get some stuff wrong. But they get other stuff right.
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(I have thrown Judith Butler across the room more than once on that count. And when she started arguing that bio-differences aren't really *that* different, I looked at the baby I was nursing and laughed)
I may have to check out Hill. After all, Jenkins holds the "Randolph Scott" position in my reference list.
Conversion narratives always are lacking. Whether religious, fannish or political They are intense, personal experiences.
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Personally, I don't think dislike of bad writing makes one a cultural conservative. And that paragraph? I feel comfortable calling it bad writing.
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no subject
Despite some problems in its final two seasons, I would say that BtVS had a more artistically successful run than XF. However, like you, I never gave my heart to BtVS in the same way as I gave it to XF. It also took me awhile to warm up to BtVS. Why?
First of all, I didn't like the self-congratulatory way critics were praising the show. They seemed to be saying, "Oh, look how broad-minded we are for liking a show about a teen-age vampire slayer." (Tom Carson's piece for "Esquire" is the best example of this.) Second, I saw the original movie once on cable and didn't like it. Third, I was growing old and thus acquiring a hate for all things youth-related. Fourth, the show indulged in that form of reflexive irony which I dislike in today's culture.
However, the best reason is this -- I got to XF first, and I got there on my own. No critics were hailing it as the "breakthrough show of the season." It was just this science fiction show from Fox tucked away on a Friday night. (My first episode was "Squeeze," by the way.) I watched it on my own. I developed my reactions to it without seeing it through somebody else's eyes first.
We always lean toward our "little discoveries." We appreciate the love we develop independently.
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I watched BtVS's premiere, and was taping by episode 3, so I felt that I'd made the discovery on my own. Both shows have their share of postmodern irony, in my view, though BtVS is a lot heavier on the irony, and much better at mixing blood and laughter. In so many ways, BtVS is better written -- dialogue, character development, continuity (say it three times and once more for good luck!) -- and maybe it seemed more complete to me, less crying out for me to fill the gaps. As I said, I really can't explain my dual reactions, which is part of what made me find Hill's book interesting.
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Of course academics are just like fen--it's the insanity with which meaningless minor points are debated. There's an anthology "Shakespeare: Left and Right" (Ivo Kamps, ed.) which sounds just like your basic mailing list flame war...only longer. And academia, too, has its Tin Hat Brigades.
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...Out of curiosity, what were the three ways?
I enjoyed the reviews generally as well (hadn't thought about academics/fans in that way before, either); thanks.
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Donna Haraway
In general, I think Haraway's earlier work is more interesting and somewhat better-written, although she is never a great stylist. Her very earliest feminist critical work on primatology and the gendered ways in which scientists and science popularizers select the species they consider "representative" of human behaviors, regardless of genetic relationship to humanity, is written with much more clarity and pointedness, probably because she started out as a primatologist and not only knows what she's talking about, but *knows* that she knows what she's talking about.
I'm sort of fond of "A Cyborg Manifesto," but that's because I know the SF novels she's talking about, can make that section of the essay make sense, and can use that as a key to decipher the rest of the essay.
I like her mostly because she thinks like a science fiction writer: she thinks of society, human behaviors, constructions of science as being limited or enabled by current knowledge, as being subject to change, is open to changes in things most people take as givens, and is open to seeing monolithic givens as actually made up of complicated connections between various behaviors, power structures, and fields of knowledge. This is something I expected to find a lot of in feminist theory when I first started studying it, but which I didn't find much of at all.
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Re: Donna Haraway
For me, Catharine MacKinnon was the most intriguing feminist theorist; I worshipped her for years, even though I slowly came to reject much of what she says about regulation of pornography. She's such an amazing writer, a demagogue of our own, that I read all feminist theory around her. I'm also fond of Cynthia Enloe and Carol Tavris.
One of the things I like about MacKinnon is that in a way she's the direct intellectual descendant of John Stuart Mill, on whom I had a huge intellectual crush. What you found in Haraway, I found in Mill/MacKinnon -- the recognition that current conditions not only are mutable, but affect what we think is immutable, that the "natural" in human relations is a word for "constructed," at the same time recognizing that "culturally constructed" is in no way the opposite of "real."
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Re: Donna Haraway
MacKinnon's antiporn stance always put me off; I haven't read Tavris; I am very fond of Enloe.
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Re: Donna Haraway
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So did your attempt to convert me to XF fail (as against the striking success of BtVS) because BtVS is better written, or has more irony, or because XF isn't a coming-of-age story? I'd go with 1 and 3, but not 2; and note that being better-written is not the same thing as having more irony.
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Yeah! I can't wait to read it.