So for those who don't know me, I'm a grad student, a political scientist, and I'm specifically interested in the study of discourse--that is, the ways language is used to construct meanings and identities, and the effects that such construction has on political behaviors, outcomes, and reality.  (Think a Foucault/Habermas cage match, and you've roughly got the inside of my head.)  This, plus my own rabid fangirling, has lead me to become very interested in media fandoms as discursive spheres.  Do we, as participants in fandom(s), end up constructing new political ideas as a result of the politics of the shows we engage with?  In resistance to them?  What do we do when shows we love (for whatever reasons) have politics we despise, either long-term or for single moments?  

At the moment, I'm turning these questions towards a very specific question for an anthology chapter, which is the way in which gender and power interact in three speculative/sci-fi shows: The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and (the new) Battlestar Galactica.  I've picked these shows for a bunch of reasons: they're consciously and seriously intellectual, each of them engages with gender in significant ways but very differently, they appeared at different moments in time and have built up a significant corpus of both actual show material and both fan and academic analysis.  Oh, and they are awesome and I love them.  

Obviously, I could just do a strict textual analysis here on the different ways in which women and men are granted and denied power within the series, but I'm just (only) interested in that.  I'm interested in how we, as fans, reinterpret these texts, and then create communal understandings and arguments about them.  I'm interested in the tension between canon and fantext, the movement either towards or away more radical/progressive meanings of the original text.  What do we develop as readers?  How do we transform the texts, both through analysis and discussion and through fanart?  

So, why am I posting this?  Because fandom is collective, and I wanna talk to the collective.  If you think about gender at all (and I mean gender here not as a synonym for 'women'--I think Xander is as important to gender representation in Buffy as Buffy is, Mulder as important as Scully, Lee as important as Kara), how do you think about it when you are watching/reading/writing about your shows?  Do you feel there are things to fix, or to maintain?  To what extent do you think any of these things get discussed--either openly or subtextually--in your fandom?  

My own thoughts are very much in process, but I'll share some quick bullets:

• I'm identifying each show as having a different gender framework, a lens through which it understands maleness, femaleness, and the relationship between them.  TXF is non-feminist, Buffy is feminist, BSG is post-feminist (which, shockingly, I mean in a good way; it appears to me to be set after the feminist revolution has won like 98.99% of its major goals).  
• I have lots of snarky things to say about TXF, but the basic notion is that Fantext Scully pwns Canon Scully most of the time.  Certainly, there's a lot of fic that writes normative femininity back onto her body and actions, but the majority--or at least the best stuff--actually spends most of its time writing her into a position of significantly more strength and authority than she is allowed in canon.  Not to mention that, for Canon Scully, behaving in normatively feminine ways strips her of her power (see Emily, Milagro, Weepy!Scully of S8&9; see also the entire character of Monica Reyes, who is a lost opportunity IMO), while Fantext Scully can be both feminine AND authoritative.
• For Buffy, I think the feminism of the show structures why fans respond to it the way they do; again, it's a message that femininity and power don't have to be separated, and in fact inhere in each other.  In fact, I think the biggest political/feminist message in the show is about the structure of power--that it is necessarily collective and better if shared with others.  
• For BSG, I think it structures the holding of power such that there are different varieties of power, which do not belong to different genders.  Different characters may share traits in how they handle power, but each powerholder has a unique perspective that shapes hir actions.  The main tensions are over the ability to provide publically justifiably reasons for action.  Basically, I'm still at the very beginning of this, and haven't even begun to do any of the fantext work, so, fellow fans, point me the way.

Anyway, what do you think?  How do you rewrite questions of gender and power as you watch TV?  

(Assuming my chapter is accepted, I'll be sure to post publication info once it comes out, and will cite this conversation and any individuals I quote specifically.  Please feel free to pass this link around, to wherever it makes sense.  Thanks in advance for joining the conversation! )