Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell - Softcover

King, Katie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822350726 ISBN 13: 9780822350729

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Since the 1990s, the knowledge, culture, and entertainment industries have found themselves experimenting, not altogether voluntarily, with communicating complex information across multiple media platforms. Against a backdrop of competing national priorities, changing technologies, globalization, and academic capitalism, these industries have sought to reach increasingly differentiated local audiences, even as distributed production practices have made the lack of authorial control increasingly obvious. As Katie King describes in Networked Reenactments, science-styled television-such as the Secrets of Lost Empires series shown on the PBS program Nova-demonstrates how new technical and collaborative skills are honed by television producers, curators, hobbyists, fans, and even scholars. Examining how transmedia storytelling is produced across platforms such as television and the web, she analyzes what this all means for the humanities. What sort of knowledge projects take up these skills, attending to grain of detail, evoking affective intensities, and zooming in and out, representing multiple scales, as well as many different perspectives? And what might this mean for feminist transdisciplinary work, or something sometimes called the posthumanities?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katie King is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women's Movements.

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NETWORKED REENACTMENTS

Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges TellBy KATIE KING

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5072-9

Contents

FOREWORD by Donna Haraway.........................................................................................xvPREFACE. What Are Reenactments in This Book?......................................................................xixACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION. A Thick Description amid Authorships, Audiences, and Agencies in the Nineties.......................211 Nationalities, Sexualities, and Global TV HIGHLANDER, XENA, AND MEANINGS OF EUROPEAN UNION.....................592 Science in American Life AMONG THE CULTURE WARRIORS............................................................1293 TV and the Web Come Together....................................................................................2034 Scholars and Intellectual Entrepreneurs.........................................................................273CONCLUSION. Toward a Feminist Transdisciplinary Posthumanities....................................................301NOTES.............................................................................................................335BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................351

Chapter One

NATIONALITIES, SEXUALITIES, AND GLOBAL TV Highlander, Xena, and Meanings of European Union

COUNTDOWN, 1992: TRAVELING IMAGES

THE YEAR 1992 was the countdown year for the formation of the European single market, the regional economic entity—utopian for some, dystopian for others—now intended to recenter Europe in a global politics fragmented in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union (even given that earlier plans for "European Community" considerably predated "the fall of Communism"). It was this new "European Union" that would necessarily refigure what counted as Europe—literally which countries now would be in this redesigned entity "Europe" and which not—and that now would also reconceive the telescoping meanings of nationalisms, regionalisms, and localisms backdropped by the global economy. The year 1992 also marked the five hundredth anniversary of the so-called discovery of the new world: the invasion of the Americas by European conquerors. The contest to represent that moment in this one was part of a new "war" of "image superpowers":= engaging national desires to valorize old colonialisms in the face of new ones, and oppositional political movements attempting to address the face of new racisms in Europe and elsewhere only too often traveling as national and ethnic identities.

The year 1992 was also when the action adventure TV series Highlander first premiered—"the first European co-produced weekly hour to be sold into the US syndication market." Based on a fantasy world of immortal sword fighters similar to the worlds created in comics and computer games, Highlander might well be historically positioned among conventions refined in hobby communities such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. Today Highlander communities are managed on the web, often by commercial interests. It is here with Highlander we begin looking for and at reenactments networked under globalization.

And in this chapter Highlander is paired with its mid-nineties US counterpart, Xena: Warrior Princess, as a complementary but differently centered response to changing conditions in media making, one in a trajectory of off-shoring production at other ranges of globalization. This chapter takes as its case study of globalization processes the political economies of images within and beyond the European Union generated by those making, using, selling, and showing off the action adventure TV shows Highlander and Xena. It introduces thick descriptions of globalization processes that in later chapters work to narrate and demonstrate interconnecting televisual infrastructures.

So this chapter starts off with noting how sexual and national identities inhabit strangely shifting geographies, literal sets on which to stage productions of European Union. Commercial powers named in cultural studies by David Morley and Kevin Robins, "enterprise culture" and "heritage culture," showcase a particular kind of "global citizenship." Freddie Mercury of the mega-international rock group Queen displays such citizenship in a range of sexualized masculinities, before and together with the Highlander films and TV series. Sexual and national identities are intertwined as forbidden topics in interactive Highlander Internet communities of practice. Such communities literally construct a map of the niche markets for consuming the reenactments of Highlander and Xena, while their interactive dynamics animate image maps of European Union. All together these shiftings, stagings, and mappings exemplify forms of consciousness cultivated, sometimes celebrated, and necessarily inhabited by those of us altered and altering under globalization.

GLOBAL GAY FORMATIONS AND LOCAL HOMOSEXUALITIES

My own pleasure in Highlander began with the principal actor Adrian Paul's eroticized image. I immediately (and somewhat idiosyncratically) "recognized" it as gay (the image, not necessarily the main story character Duncan MacLeod, 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. Perhaps that is 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 was the use of Paris's Shakespeare and Company as a location and story site—this bookstore that in the twenties on the Rue de l'Odéon had been run and made famous by lesbian lovers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier was now 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 originally sung by the late Freddie Mercury. Mercury had died of aids in November 1991, the year before the TV series Highlander began.

It was not that I assumed that there was a latent homosexual subtext, a topic repeatedly raised in the mid-nineties on the international 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. 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822350726
• ISBN 13: 9780822350729
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 388
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar