Interview with Constance Penley

Let’s start by talking about your background in rhetoric and film studies, and your consistent effort over the years to merge theories of representation and visual analysis with feminist theory. I see your work first emerging in ways that correspond to or parallel early cultural studies from the Birmingham School, but not in immediate dialogue with what was coming to be known as ‘cultural studies’. Your interests in feminist and psychoanalytic theory weren’t central to the very earliest formation of Birmingham cultural studies, though such interests would soon emerge in ways that were contentious as well as constitutive of ensuing developments in cultural studies. Did your coming out of rhetoric incline you toward cultural studies?

Good question! I remember sometime in the early 1990s I was surprised to see myself being cited as ‘a prominent cultural studies critic’. Though I was aware of the Birmingham School in the 1970s and 1980s, I and the other members of the Camera Obscura collective felt more aligned with the semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis and film theory of Screen and French film theory of the time – and our objects of study were experimental film, classical Hollywood cinema and film theory itself. But when I started to work on television, popular culture, popular science and even non-cinematic imaging technologies, and when my research took a more ethnographic bent toward studying the creativity of female media fans, people started seeing me as adopting a cultural studies approach, an interdisciplinary study of language, culture and power. But I didn’t know I was ‘doing cultural studies’. That’s when I realized that rhetoric, the study of power in language or the study of the logic of power in language, was just cultural studies before its time!

How did you end up in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and how did that training shape your intellectual trajectory that later came to be so closely associated with cultural studies?

I probably know more about St Augustine and Geoffrey of Vinsauf than most feminist theorists or film scholars, and I’ve come to realize that my formation in the history of rhetorical theory was crucial to everything I’ve done. But I didn’t go to Berkeley to go to graduate school – I went there to live. I wanted to get the hell out of the South and go to the most radical place the farthest away I could get, and that was Berkeley. (If this was a longer interview, I’d tell you how I stowed away on an airplane from Florida to California with, I’m not kidding, a girlfriend named Thelma!)

I did end up going to graduate school there, though in a very roundabout way. While working on Women & Film, then Camera Obscura, interning at the Pacific Film Archive, helping to start Marxist and film theory study groups, surviving on food stamps and taking every odd job imaginable, I went to every lecture I could on critical theory, semiotics, structuralism. I met Seymour Chatman at one of these lectures. He was (and is) a specialist in the linguistic analysis of literary style, who later wrote on film narrative and had been one of the first scholars to introduce structuralism and semiotics to the US. He invited me to sit in on his graduate seminar on narrative theory in the Rhetoric Department. Soon I was writing research papers on tagged and non-tagged sentences in Mrs Dalloway and giving oral presentations. One day Seymour said to me, ‘Don’t you think you should be in graduate school?’ I guess I should have gone into English because I had earned degrees in English Arts Education (to be a Florida high school teacher – that didn’t work out!), but in the early 1970s I thought going into an English department meant choosing a Shakespeare sonnet that hadn’t been done to death,and then doing it to death for the rest of your life. Rhetoric turned out to be perfect for me because it was so much broader in its methods, its objects, in everything. On the faculty were people who studied classical, medieval, 18th century and contemporary rhetorical theory, but also a historian of science, a sociolinguist, a jurisprudence scholar and a Harvard folklorist.

That’s quite an unusual mix.

Yes. I had an epiphanic moment about how strategic a rhetorical training could be when I was asked to apply to be the chair of the Duke University English Department, which was in receivership at the time and in chaos over the in-fighting between the more traditional period scholars and the poststructuralist and postmodern and queer theorists. The chair of the search committee asked me if I would please write just two pages about what I thought an English department should be, and I said: ‘No, I won’t do that. I want to go talk to the faculty, hear their ideas, not dictate something that will be perceived as set in stone.’ He said: ‘No, they have such horrible fantasies about what you would turn this department into. Please, please, please just do it.’ So I responded, but with a twist: I wrote two pages on why every English department should be a rhetoric department. In rhetoric, one doesn’t have to choose between aesthetic discourse and all other kinds of discourse or between high and low culture. Or, in my case, I didn’t have to choose between literature and film, or language and visual culture. I didn’t get the job, but it was probably because I did my job talk on pornography as male popular culture and illustrated it with old stag movies and a clip from John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut.

So in rhetoric you could bypass all those institutional fragmentations that had evolved into disciplinary sub-foci.

Yes – and also in the rhetoric department, after you passed an exhaustive masters exam on the history of rhetorical theory, you were encouraged and expected to go to another department or even departments for your doctoral specialty. For my PhD coursework I went abroad for two years to study film theory in the Paris Film Programme and Christian Metz’s seminar on cinema semiotics at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales which, wonderfully, had students in it from around the world. So even before I was deemed a cultural studies person, I had a training that took a highly interdisciplinary approach, borrowed from linguistics, literary theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, to studying the logic of power and knowledge in a broad range of cultural objects.

It’s important to understand that in the rhetorical tradition, everything is seen as an argument: from a political speech, a legal case, a historical account or a scientific theory to a novel, poem or film. Your research, too, must make an argument: you have to be able to convince the audience of the validity of your methods, the credibility of your evidence and the logic of your conclusions. I see the best cultural studies work as doing the same thing, especially when it refuses to go on the defensive about its approach or choice of object. So I didn’t find cultural studies – cultural studies kind of found me.

That’s an interesting reflection that you share, because I think that comes up time and again with other American practitioners.

Janice Radway, too, was an accidental (or coincidental?) cultural studies scholar.

Yes, and this can be said of many in American studies, as there are a number of people who fit what you describe. What’s intriguing is that given the angles of interest – and you summed up nicely what I would say is a really flexible orientation to the problems of language, culture and power – you could be set up in many ways to be able to be understood as a cultural studies figure or to be absorbed into that tradition. This business of language and power – that is part of what a flexible rhetoric programme gives us – is interesting in that it precedes the Foucauldian move, but also becomes a position in which those critical reflections on language become increasingly thrown into high gear around discourse theory, theories of representation, which of course feeds back into your own initial work as well.

This is all making me remember Larry Grossberg’s response to my paper on slash fan culture at the big 1990 cultural studies conference. Because I had spent two years at the University of Illinois and remained such good friends with the conference organizers, Larry, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, they thought they could ask me to lead off the conference. How terrifying! There were, what, 600 people in the audience, huge cultural studies people from all over the world? Even more heartstopping for me were the local slashers I’d invited who were sitting in the audience. In any case, my paper was tremendously well received. But I remember coming down off the stage and Larry rushing up to me and saying – and you can put this on the record – ‘Oh, you’ve finally recanted on all that theory stuff and come over to our side!’ I just looked at him and said:

“Larry, everything people were responding to in my talk was all of the work that I’ve done in feminist theory, film theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis … Even though I’m now working on popular culture and doing my first somewhat ethnographic work here, what’s behind it, informing it, imbuing it, is all that ‘theory’ I’ve done before”.

But he was really exuberant about what he thought was my conversion from the dark side of theory. You hear that Larry?! But I have to say that I learned a lot about my own approach from his seeing it that way.

Could you say little bit about why the interest in film? Rhetoric isn’t necessarily predisposed to film, historically. It’s about written texts, oratory, captured language, spoken and written narratives. But film – there’s a technological twist.

I did the first film dissertation in the Berkeley Rhetoric Department, but there too I had to make an argument for it. When I went to the chair of the department to get his okay, he paused for a moment, then said, ‘Okay, but could you do something on film before 1913?’ Though I never understood why he settled on that date (before the Armory Show, pre-World War I?), I was able to successfully make the case for doing a rhetorical analysis of contemporary film theory.

That’s right: you said that anything could be an object of rhetorical study, but it’s interesting that film was still seen as a stretch, something you could only take on if you set it in film history’s antiquity.

But I really came to film through feminism, and even before I arrived in Berkeley. I never saw a lot of films when I was growing up in the South, except for occasional Saturday matinees. For some reason my mother thought it would be bad for me to see the kinds of romantic musicals my girl cousins loved, such as Gigi or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but horror films and bad science fiction were okay, so I grew up on The Blob, The Thing and Creature from the Black Lagoon. I have to confess, though, that I didn’t see the whole film of The Blob until I was an adult. I was too traumatized by the scene in the preview of the blob oozing into the theatre through the projection booth window behind the heads of the spectators. Maybe I became a film theorist just to manage that trauma.

It wasn’t until I got to college at the University of Florida [UF] that I got to see cinema – art films and foreign films. I remember going to the UF Student Union in 1967 or 1968 to see Pierrot le Fou by some director named Jean-Luc Godard. That, too, turned out to be a traumatic and formative experience. I staggered out of the air-conditioned theatre into the humid tropical night, asking myself how what I had just seen was a film. It was advertised as a film, I saw it projected on a screen in a theatre with an audience, but had no idea how that thing was a film. My whole career has been shaped by trying to figure that out; I’m still working on it.

You were saying you came to study film late, but found it through feminism?

Yes. There was a crazy professor at the University of Florida, W.R. Robinson, who was one of the first professors in the country to try to legitimate the study of film as part of an English department curriculum. He was teaching a film course to undergraduates but separately teaching a seminar on structuralism in literature to graduate students. Our sole text was that little 1970 Yale French Studies book Structuralism by Jacques Ehrmann – which didn’t make any more sense to me than Pierrot le Fou the first time I read it, but I determined to figure it out – I do my best, it seems, when utterly confounded. As it turned out, the grad students in the seminar studying structuralism in literature and sitting in on Robinson’s film class also made up our feminist consciousness-raising group. So right there in Gainesville, Florida, we were putting it all together: why couldn’t you do a structuralist analysis of film language to try to get at the logic of women’s representation in film? Our professor, the editor after all of 1967’s Man and the Movies, thought we were crazy, but we knew we were on to something.

My budding feminist interests also compelled me to want to write about something more mass cultural than literature, to be able to reach as many people as possible. If I have an overall goal for everything I do, it’s to make feminism popular! I was also drawn to film because it was a relatively new academic discipline where there were perhaps fewer barriers to women than in more traditional fields such as literature. It is very gratifying to look back from the 1970s to now to see how important women and feminists have been in shaping the field of film and media studies, with the most recent wave of that influence seen in the rise of ‘Console-ing Passions’, where feminist scholars have been instrumental in building the field of television studies.

That’s amazing that you were making those links even before you got to Berkeley.

You can imagine my thrill when I finally got there and discovered there was a magazine called Women & Film, which had just moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area! Tom Luddy, who was then the Director of the Pacific Film Archive [PFA], gave the magazine a tiny office in the PFA and introduced the editors who would later become the Camera Obscura collective to the Women & Film editors. The four of us worked on the magazine for two years before leaving to start a more theoretical journal that we could edit collectively. It cracks me up when younger women ask me, ‘Where did you go to school to study feminist film theory?’ I tell them there wasn’t any such place. We had to make it up as we went along, through creating the journals, reading groups, conferences and film festivals, long before it was a disciplinary area of its own.

By the way, what compelled you ‘to get the hell out of the South’?

I have a love/hate relationship with my benighted natal state. In my infamous (or at least I hope it’s infamous) essay ‘Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn’, which addresses class, taste and humour in porn looked at as male popular culture, I argue that there is no better preparation for grasping the intricacies of contemporary theory and cultural studies than negotiating a Florida cracker childhood and adolescence. Not completely tongue-in-cheek, I claimed that I understood the gist of structuralist binaries, semiosis, the linguistic nature of the unconscious, the disciplinary micro-organization of power and the distinguishing operations of taste and culture long before I left the groves of central Florida for the groves of academe.

How does such theoretical precociousness emerge in cracker culture? Just think of the intense conceptual work involved in figuring out the differential meanings of white trash – what it is because of what it is not, a regular downhome version of honey and ashes, the raw and the cooked. A Southern white child is required to learn that white trash folks are the ‘lowest of the low’. If you are white trash, then, you have to engage in the never-ending labour of distinguishing yourself, of codifying your behaviour to clearly signify a difference from blackness that will, in spite of everything, express some miniscule, if pathetic, measure of your culture’s superiority – at least to those above you who use the epithet ‘white trash’ to emphasize just how beyond the pale you are. This is hard going, because the differences between the every day lives of poor blacks and poor whites in the rural South are few and ephemeral. This isn’t to deny the difference of ‘race’ – and how that difference is lived – but to point to the crushing weight, on all those lives, of enduring poverty and the daily humiliations that come with it. Mitch Duneier reminded me that Eugene Genovese claimed that the origins of ‘white trash’ as an epithet came from black slaves, their hostility toward poor whites fostered by wealthy landowners wanting to prevent any interracial unity that might be turned against a system that oppressed both blacks and whites (kind of like ‘fag hag’ being deployed as an epithet to drive a wedge between those who could be natural allies). But crackers don’t have to be content merely to learn the complex stratagems of maintaining the tenuous distinctions of white trash culture.

It’s also possible to devise a critical method of using ‘white trash’ against ‘white trash’. The epithet ‘white trash’ can be deployed in a similar way to the original usage of ‘politically correct’ within Left circles, where a group would adopt the phrase to police its own excesses. My brother and I had a favourite game, which was to try to figure out which side of the family was the trashiest: our mother’s Tennessee hillbilly clan, or our father’s Florida cracker kin. The point of the game (another deliriously Bourdieuian work of distinction!) wasn’t to come to a definitive conclusion – we agreed it was pretty much a toss-up – but to try to selectively ‘de-trash’ ourselves, to figure out just how trashy we were so we could monitor or modify our thinking and behaviour as much as possible. We vied to amass the most self-humiliating family statistics by claiming for mom’s or dad’s side the greatest number of cousins married to one another, uncles ‘sent up the river’ for stealing TV sets, junked cars on blocks in the front yard, converts to Jehovah’s Witnesses or grandparents who uttered racist remarks with the most vehemence and flagrancy.

This funny but painful ‘de-trashing’ project shows that ‘white-trashness’ doesn’t just involve the effort to make a distinction in response to a label coercively imposed from above, but can also be a prime source for developing the kinds of skills needed to grasp the social and political dynamics of everyday life. Growing up ‘white trash’, then, gave me the conceptual framework for understanding the work of distinction and the methods of criticism – but the real advantage lies in the way that upbringing helped this nascent theorist grasp the idea of agency and resistance in an utterly disdained social group whose very definition presumes it to have no ‘culture’ at all. The work of distinction in ‘white trash’ can be deployed downward, across but also up, to challenge the assumed social and moral superiority of the middle and professional classes.

So at least in retrospect you can love or appreciate what your Southern upbringing gave you, even if working it through was sometimes painful?

Yes, but I think I never completely recovered from another Southern identify that I felt got imposed on me. In the first week of my freshman literature class at the University of Florida, we were introduced to Flannery O’Connor’s stories. It was such a shock. I went straight to the library to check out all of her books and took them back to my room in the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings dormitory, which I did not leave for the next week. I couldn’t understand how all of my relatives were in these stories, my life was in these stories – and then I discovered that my life, which I thought of as just my life, was a literary genre and it was called Southern Gothic.

The only thing that saved me from being hailed as Southern Gothic (‘white trash’ was one thing, but Southern Gothic entirely something else) was heading back to the library to find every bit of criticism on O’Connor. That’s when I discovered that she was a Catholic and that all of her stories were about the concept of grace. As soon as I realized that my culture had been ripped off for someone’s religious ruminations, I wanted to get my life back, though I’m still haunted by understanding the extreme power of literature and culture to hail you in a certain way and the difficulty of negotiating with that power. Finally, I used geography to escape the South (along with tips on how to stow away on an airplane from Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book).

Going back to this idea of cultural studies finding you, I’m wondering if you think it’s possible that cultural studies really needed to contend with feminism at that historical moment? And then I wonder if you could comment a little bit on how your work on Camera Obscura, your work with female fan communities and your work on pornography has provided a kind of intersection that enabled cultural studies to address issues of gender and sexuality and other axes of difference. What has all of this work added to cultural studies, or how has it complicated cultural studies and set new agendas for it over the last 20 years?

Whew! I don’t know if I can cover the whole history of that intersection or collision of cultural studies and feminism that Stuart Hall so outrageously addressed, when he said that feminism came in like a thief in the night and crapped on the table of cultural studies – and he meant that in a good way! So rather than cover the last 20 or so years of the ways feminism has influenced or complicated (or ‘interrupted’, as Stuart also put it) cultural studies, let me try to narrow it down to one moment when I explicitly took on the question of what contending with issues of gender and sexuality could bring to cultural studies – even if I didn’t know I was doing that at the time.

My paper for the Illinois Cultural Studies conference, ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Study of Popular Culture’, was taken as just such an intervention, though looking back it’s clear that I also wanted to ask what feminism could learn from cultural studies and what both could learn from psychoanalysis. In the story of my encounter with the underground of female media fans who rewrite popular television shows into pornographic, homoerotic romances to answer to their own sexual and social desires, I wanted to do several things. One was just to share the subversive joy of this creative practice of turning largely male, mass-produced culture into popular or folk culture for women. Another was to ask, along with the highly self-reflexive and self-analytical participants in this fandom, how and why they do what they do, as consumers of culture who turn into producers of culture. I had tremendous admiration for the women in slash fandom for their creativity, but also for the way they are so self-reflexive and self-analytical about their community and their practices.

John Michaels, in his book Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals and Enlightenment Value goes easiest on me among other cultural studies scholars of fandom, by saying that I manage to retain a critical sense while nonetheless immersing myself in fan culture. Still, he dings me for casting the slashers as organic intellectuals for the quality of their textual analysis and narrative interpretations (which could put the MLA to shame!) and their self-ethnographic degree of understanding how this writers’ community understands itself. But I wouldn’t quarantine them (thanks Andrew Ross) from academia by calling them ‘organic’ intellectuals. They’re just intellectuals! Joanna Russ told Marge Piercy who told me: ‘Forget Bread Loaf, forget the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – slash fandom is the best writing workshop around.’

Not to mention that they were forming self-organizing communities to create, share and evaluate their work in a gift economy exchange through zines, letterzines [line-by-line story reviews], music slide shows and mash-up videos [songvids] long before the internet. They created social media before there was social media. Through their efforts to establish fan ethics and etiquette (constructive criticism only, lots of mentoring, no flaming), they also created netiquette before the net. Lisa, you remember how I so needed someone else to see how much was going on in this fandom – and how much we could learn from the fans – that I took you along to a slash convention.

I was blown away. I had never heard people talking so lucidly about popular culture in my life. It was powerful.

If my work on fan culture introduced some important gender and sexuality issues into the methods and objects of cultural studies, that move owes a lot to insights that came out of the feminist film theoretical engagement with psychoanalysis. There’s a remarkable 1989 special issue of Camera Obscura, ‘The Spectratrix’, edited by Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane. For some reason we never turned it into a book, which is a shame because there’s never been anything like it. The special issue brought together 60 individual responses and four national survey responses to a questionnaire about, basically, ‘What did you used to think about female spectatorship, and what do you think now? If you’ve changed your view, why did your opinion or approach change? And what happens to the notion of the female spectator developed in film theory when addressing television and popular culture?’ A final survey question that seems a bit of an aside or add-on, turns out to be crucial for my understanding of media fan fiction: ‘If “reading against the grain” has been important to feminist film criticism, how can we account for the possibility of creating a reading space for women in which they can forge their own meanings?’

In my own response, I said, ‘Oops, I’ve never done any work on the female spectator’ – and that’s been on purpose. Influenced by the psychoanalytic account of identification and desire in the work of fantasy, I believed there was no essential female spectator because at the level of the unconscious there is no sexual differentiation; rather, the possibility of taking up a range of shifting identificatory positions across femininity and masculinity, sadism and masochism, aggression and passivity. Gender is not destiny, at least when it comes to the unconscious. But such fluidity in the processes of identification and desire shouldn’t be seen as necessarily more positive and progressive – it just is. My ‘Spectatrix’ entry questioned the way that new feminist work on feminism and popular culture too often dismissed the work on subjectivity and sexual difference developed over the last 15 years in feminist film theory in the belief that other models were more suited to the study of popular forms like the romance, melodrama or soap opera. This new feminist work on popular culture frequently adopted Nancy Chodorow’s object–relations model of female subjectivity to describe how women read, view and consume mass-produced culture. It was a model that just seemed nicer, less phallic, more female-friendly, where the social and the psychical were not so far apart, leaving open the possibility of being able to reform the unconscious through reforming the social. But claiming that popular culture texts ‘work’ by allowing or inducing women readers or viewers to imaginatively, through identification with the heroine, regress to a pre-Oedipal state of fusion with the mother, to a place where women can find the nurture denied them in a patriarchal society, seemed way too reductive to me – especially in the face of my encounter with the slash fans’ reading, writing and communal practices. I believed that the psychoanalytic account of fantasy, which describes how the subject participates in and restages a scenario in which crucial questions about desire, knowledge and identity are posed, and in which the subject can oscillate through a number of identificatory positions, could help to provide a fuller account of what women do with popular culture. We can’t forget the psychoanalytic insights that Juliet Mitchell, and especially Jacqueline Rose, brought to feminism and the analysis of culture. To me, slash writing itself offers its own psychoanalytic insights into everything from the difficulty and instability of identification and desire, to the way that pleasure and anxiety are always bound up with one another.

Cultural analysis needs a psychoanalytic theory that is all about the incommensurability of the psyche to the social to understand what motivates these popular culture consumers and producers to do what they do. Or, as Jacques Lacan put it: ‘There is no sexual relation.’

It seems that much of your work has focused on the processes of identification rather than the fixing of identities?

That might be a good shorthand for what I do. I’m remembering one time when that contrast was really brought home to me. I was invited to give the first media paper in the Harvard Literary Theory seminar, and I gave a presentation on slash fandom. The leader of the seminar, someone who had done a great deal of important work on women and the avant-garde (and who was probably impressed by the work that I and the Camera Obscura collective had done on that subject), was livid at the end of my presentation – livid – and couldn’t understand why it had been so well-received. She demanded to know why I was privileging women who wrote their stories through men’s bodies, not authentic women’s bodies like their own. She was also aghast that these writers didn’t create original stories but took storylines from TV shows. I don’t remember if it was explicitly said that day, but another condemnation I would often hear is: ‘These women are writing pornography, not erotica.’

That response is surprising, given that your work on female fan culture has been seen as such a catalyst of cultural studies research in the US.

But that was early on, before that work had been published. One thing I’ve learned from that response – that I’ve had the chance to learn over and over again – is how often what we’re doing is arguing about taste, often from a class or caste perspective. When we accuse someone or something of being inauthentic or lacking in originality, we’re really saying it offends our sense of taste or propriety. We also find it unseemly when we see people doing something not befitting their place in the world. I showed Mark Rappaport some slash videos once, and he couldn’t believe they’d been made by women hobbyists who were teachers, librarians, intensive care nurses, copy shop managers, police dispatchers. This is Mark Rappaport of the brilliant found-footage mash-up Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, who has been doing this since the 1970s. He said this is postmodern pastiche, what artists do – how can amateurs be doing this? (Steve Fagin was there and can vouch for me.)

But even with that rejection of or questioning of the fans’ creations and your analyses, it has still sparked a lot of other work in media and cultural studies.

That enthusiastic response to my work on fandom does continue to amaze me, especially since, again, I didn’t know I was ‘doing’ cultural studies. It has been both gratifying and frustrating to be granted such founding canonical status. Though seen as inspiring, my work has also been used by critics as a stand-in for all of US cultural studies, denigrated as doing nothing but telling cute stories of resistance, of romanticizing agency, of losing all political criticality. But for me the benchmark of cultural usefulness, or even political effectiveness, is what you can learn from studying popular culture with the methods that have come to be known as ‘cultural studies’.

Learning from popular culture seems to be a hallmark of your method.

Yes, I feel I learned so much from the slash fans and I hope others have too. I learned how ingeniously strategic one can be in entering into and rewriting mass-produced culture, and in forming communities that can support your craft. I also learned from the fans the tough love approach. No one knows and loves the text better than a fan – the true sense of ‘amateur’ – and no one is more critical of mass cultural producers’ failure of the imagination, especially the erotic imagination.

I remember at one point I heard you say that fans are the most passionate critics. It seems that you learned a lot from their tactics and the way they imagined their own relationship to the culture industry. One of the things that distinguishes you as a cultural studies scholar is your bold moves in terms of getting inside the system, so to speak. I think about this in relation to the GALA Committee Melrose Place project, which involved changing the television content: the signal that’s going out into people’s homes. Also to the work you’ve done with porn, bringing the industry into your classroom, taking your students to the sets of the films and serving as an expert witness in federal obscenity trials. So, too, you’ve made your way into NASA and the sciences, from the response to your NASA/TREK book, lectures at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Kennedy Space Center, to your MacArthur-funded ‘Digital Ocean’ project.

So could you talk a little bit about how you got to this place in your own work that’s way beyond textual analysis or rhetorical analysis, where it’s almost like a kind of experimental cultural studies – where you had the guts to get in there and change representation?

That’s a great compliment coming from you, Lisa, who has been no slouch at boldly going where no humanities scholar has gone before! One of the many ways the slash fans have inspired me to dive right into the belly of the (cultural) beast is to teach pornography in the first place. I was struck by how many of the fans wouldn’t call themselves feminists, or who certainly didn’t think that feminism was the right vehicle for their concerns. But I found the fans to have a strong sense of the importance of gender equality and justice in their creative work, the formation of their community and the way they talked about social and political issues in their domestic and work lives. What I came to realize – and this was in the late 1980s, early 1990s – was that like a lot of other people, the fans had a media-inflamed perception that all feminists were anti-porn, which to them meant ‘anti-sex’ and ‘anti-men’.

The slash fans also saw feminism largely as a movement for upper-middle-class professional women, whom they imagined would disdain popular culture, especially television. I think they were just rejecting feminism before feminism could reject them. They liked porn, sex, men and television and, rather than denounce them, wanted to have their delicious way with them. (Though I was at one slash convention panel where the moderator asked audience members to raise their hands to indicate if they were more embarrassed about being a pornographer, or a woman who likes to watch a lot of television. They all said that it’s way better to be thought of as a pornographer than a woman television fan – at least being a female pornographer has some caché that being a female couch potato does not!)

I knew there were a lot more feminist academics out there like me – pro-sex and anti-censorship – than there were Dworkins and MacKinnons. I wanted to get that more progressive and inclusive notion of a feminist out there circulating in the world to counter a vision of a feminism that had degenerated, once again, into a temperance, sex-hygiene or moral purity movement, which had become the biggest turn-off to feminism’s popularity. I also knew that if I taught a course on pornography it would get a lot of attention – and it did, from the pages of the local paper to The New Yorker and Hustler, from Readers Digest to Rolling Stone and from HBO to The 700 Club. I hope I’ve succeeded in helping to get a more progressive image of a feminist out there. Again, my biggest project is to make feminism popular!

The slash fans also inspired me to want to teach pornography by the quality of their work and their attention to this genre. I had never had much exposure to pornography, and was moved for the first time by their stories and artwork. Camera Obscura had never given it any scholarly attention, so low-level seemed the arguments on all sides. So too, as a film scholar, I was astonished by how people feel perfectly comfortable debating, legislating and regulating something they know almost nothing about aesthetically, sociologically or historically. So I felt compelled as both a feminist and a media theorist to be out front in teaching pornography. My book in progress, Teaching Pornography, is about the litany of surprises that I and my students had in approaching pornography by not asking, ‘is it art or not, deviance or not, even feminist or not’, but first, ‘What is it as film and popular culture?’ It’s true that it makes a huge pedagogical difference that students in my class can study not only the history of pornographic film and media as a genre, but can also interact with adult industry leaders from the nearby San Fernando Valley, including performers, directors, editors, industry trade journal writers and publishers, health practitioners, studio heads, legal representatives as well as veterans of the alt-, feminist, gay and educational areas of the industry, many of whom are located a little further away in the San Francisco Bay Area. My students are encouraged to have their opinions about the industry and its detractors, but only after gaining a thorough textual, historical, legal, industrial and ethnographic understanding.

Haven’t you been asked to testify in federal obscenity trials?

Yes, and many of my students got a chance to interact with the most awarded director, producer and studio head in adult industry history, John Stagliano of Evil Angel, who was indicted on seven counts of obscenity in federal court. John and his attorney Allan Gelbard asked me to serve as the expert witness in his trial in Washington, DC. The rest of the attorneys on his team were a ‘Who’s Who’ of the First Amendment: two of Larry Flynt’s attorneys, the attorney who had successfully defended the director of the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati from [allegedly] ‘pandering obscenity’ for a Mapplethorpe show, and the one who got the posthumous pardon for Lenny Bruce. My charge was to defend the work on the third prong of Miller v. State of California: whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific merit. This was going to be a special challenge because the judge, like judges in recent obscenity prosecutions, was trying to say that when it comes to porn, the jury doesn’t have to see the whole works but only selections that the state witnesses choose to show by saying, basically, if you see one scene, you’ve seen them all. What’s a feminist cultural studies scholar to do? Yes, it’s very possible to give a scholarly argument that Jay Sin’s Milk Nymphos, Joey Silvera’s Storm Squirters 2 or the website trailer for Belladonna’s Fetish Fanatic 5 are not lacking in serious artistic value (in the high art sense), but how do you also argue for their value as popular culture, also meriting free speech protection? What do you do about the fact that adult videos featuring women exchanging bodily fluids and engaging in some light bondage have become the most obscene work in the land?

My students, who were able to view the indicted videos in class (I told Stagliano that it would give them scientific value if we showed them in a university classroom), could not get their minds around why these videos were being charged as obscene. After all, they’d seen porn films from 1907 to the internet and couldn’t understand why this nice, smart, creative and principled man should go to prison for 36 years for such work – so they pitched in to help transcribe the videos to help me and the defence team. My class turned into the Innocence Project for Porn, especially after I posted on my door the federal subpoena for my syllabi. Not to keep you in suspense, Stagliano in United States v. John Stagliano was acquitted with no possibility of appeal when the Department of Justice’s case entirely fell apart. That’s a longer story for another day (and my book, Teaching Pornography).

I had a question for you later about the future of cultural studies and the kinds of new objects it might take on, but hearing what you’re saying now, I think you might be saying it’s not a matter of finding new objects but entering into new areas, here taking on the cultural craziness of existing obscenity law. I’m also thinking that ‘doing cultural studies’ for you is like what you said you were doing with feminist film theory, just making it up as you go along, what Lisa called your experimental cultural studies approach?

The only other thing that I’ve written that directly addressed this issue of cultural studies’ objects and methods and places is ‘From NASA to The 700 Club (with a Detour through Hollywood): Cultural Studies in the Public Sphere’, in Disciplinary and Dissent in Cultural Studies, a half-decade later sequel to the Illinois Cultural Studies conference book. The sequel’s editors, Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar, wanted to ask: ‘Whither Cultural Studies?’ in the wake of its sometimes too easy, sometimes difficult assimilation by more traditional disciplines, especially in the US. In that essay, I told three stories (all at my own expense) of my attempts to travel cultural studies into the public spheres of NASA, a theatrical feature documentary about pornography and the federal courts (in an earlier federal obscenity trial in Louisville, Kentucky).

I agree with them in their introduction that cultural studies has hugely helped to open up the possible objects of cultural studies research, especially in language departments and area studies. Right here at University of California Santa Barbara, for example, English is a bastion of cultural studies research, through its many initiatives such as American Cultures in Global Contexts, Literature and the Environment, Literature and the Mind, Transcriptions and Transliteracies. Our East Asian department is now East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies. At the very least, cultural studies has allowed traditional disciplines to take on a more comparative and global perspective.

In ‘From NASA to The 700 Club’ I cite Harvey Molotch’s essay, ‘Going Out’, as another source of inspiration besides the slash fans. He laments that sociologists are such wallflowers, afraid to get out on the dancefloor or into the field, and exhorts them to get out more. A friend of mine said that my essay could be entitled ‘Connie’s Big Adventures in the Public Sphere’ because it is fashioned out of three stories about my attempts – successful, failed and inconclusive – to travel cultural studies work into other public spheres. I say ‘other public spheres’ because, of course, there are more than one, and to oppose the kind of thinking (too often coming from the Left) that doesn’t consider the university to be a significant public sphere. But in my experience and for my purposes, the university is not so much an ivory tower as the muddy trenches. After all, as everyone from Stuart Hall to Pat Buchanan says, we are in a state of cultural war, and the university, in both its public and private versions but especially public, is the site of some of the messiest skirmishes and prolonged battles. I don’t imagine this travelling, then, as trips ‘out from’ or ‘beyond’ the university, but as a to-ing and fro-ing between and among public spheres. I also cite Bruce Robbins’ argument that public spheres don’t so much exist, as have to be made.

In a way, the GALA Committee’s Melrose Place project, In the Name of the Place, was all about turning the private sphere of commercial broadcast television into a public sphere of civic and artistic engagement.

Exactly! The project involved working with almost 100 artists and television producers to create and place 200 artworks and props on the set of Melrose Place over a period of two seasons (45 episodes). The pieces were then exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in the ‘Uncommon Sense’ show, the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea and Grand Arts in Kansas City. The penultimate performance of the project took place at Sotheby’s in Beverly Hills on 12 November 1998 as the artworks were auctioned off and the proceeds given to a charity that supports the education of women over 35. As the only media scholar among the GALA Committee members, the set of Melrose Place and the syndicated broadcast of the show around the world on Rupert Murdoch’s satellites became a kind of media lab for me, to see how far it might be possible to go into the belly of the media beast. When the artist Mel Chin first contacted me about the project, which started as a minor hack and turned into a major collaboration with the creators, producers and cast of Aaron Spelling’s primetime soap opera, I signed on 30 seconds into his telling me about it. If the slash fans taught us how to rewrite television shows to suit their own desiring ends, what would it be like to actually enter into the show’s production and help to rewrite it from the inside?

The Museum of Contemporary Art commission for the ‘Uncommon Sense’ show was to create large public artworks that engaged in complex negotiations with some community of Los Angeles. Working from the scripts, we were able to create art pieces that intersected with and galvanized the show’s, themes, characters, plotlines and locations. We – and I do mean we: no piece went onto the set unless at least three people had worked on it and nothing was signed – created pieces that set off ideas about violence in Los Angeles, the US and around the world, sexuality and ‘race’, global public health and the environment, among others. In every piece and every plotline we were allowed to write or influence, we tried to cross the bandwiths of art and television. Though the GALA Committee has often been characterized as a terrorist or guerrilla group, in fact we collaborated with the TV people to use art to make better television and television to make better art and, in so doing, to create a public sphere within the space of commercial broadcast television. Not to mention, we created the world’s largest art video work as re-runs are beamed down around the planet via Rupert Murdoch’s satellites.

Of the many places you have channelled the entire GALA Committee to tell the story of this project, one was at the Birmingham Cultural Studies conference in 2001. I remember your commenting on how surprised you were that this was one of the only presentations on art at the conference that year.

Yes – whatever happened to the criticality of art as a practice in cultural studies? I am fortunate here at UC Santa Barbara to have Dick Hebdige as a colleague, who has done so much, critically and institutionally, through his own work and the development of the systemwide UC Institute for Research in the Arts, to foster those tactics of art intervention and collaboration.

One fascinating aspect of your work in cultural studies is the range of topics and issues you have managed to address over the years. In addition to your work in the areas of feminist film theory, fan culture, contemporary art and pornography, you have been an active participant in critiques of science and technology. I think of the pathbreaking book you co-edited with Andrew Ross, Technoculture, as well as your highly influential book NASA/TREK, along with your more recent efforts to develop an environmental media initiative at UC Santa Barbara and the major MacArthur Digital Media and Learning grant you recently won for the ‘Digital Ocean’ project. Can you close by describing how your work took this turn, and by offering some thoughts about the nexus between cultural studies and science and technology studies?

I’ve always been in interested in science in and as popular culture. Science ‘as’ popular culture is, of course, science fiction: the genre that, along with porn, I’ve found to be the best to think with about our past, present and future technocultural selves. Science ‘in’ popular culture is popular science, which is all the ways that scientific endeavours such as space exploration borrow from popular culture, such as Star Trek, to explain and promote those endeavours both to themselves and the public. Popular science is also the desire of ordinary people to engage with science, through everything from fan rewriting to forming communities of space enthusiasts to build a more democratic and imaginative space programme. Once you start looking at science in and as popular culture, you have put science in a realm that is amenable to a cultural studies approach, especially in trying to understand science in everyday life and the everyday life of science.

I like to think that I succeeded in crossing the interests of science and popular culture when NASA/TREK got reviewed in Nature, New Scientist and the International Journal of Space Policy, with reviewers saying things like ‘NASA should have the kind of tough love critics you find in slash fandom – citizens and scientists alike who appreciate the goals of the space agency’, but think it could be rewritten to make it better serve both science and the popular imagination. So too, I was happy that the ‘Digital Ocean’ project, which involves seeding the ocean with social media to allow scientists and citizens to collaborate on ocean sustainability, successfully crossed science and popular culture. I loved hearing the marine scientists working on the project saying, ‘We’re creating a fan base for the world’s ocean’.

Do you have any concerns that perhaps intellectuals should be wary of, with regard to the long-range viability of cultural studies? Is it in trouble? Or do you think it’s got carte blanche? Those are two extremes. Do you think 10 years from now this will be a vibrant kind of issue? Are there forces out there that would like to trim it back? What is your sense of the academy, as a force field either inimical to, or advantageous for, continuing this intellectual spirit with which you have spent many years working?

Since I didn’t even know I was doing cultural studies, perhaps I’m not the best to make programmatic statements about its current status and future. But I can say a few things from what I think I’ve learned about its limitations and possibilities. First, I’m most concerned about the limitations we might put on ourselves by requiring a purity about the scope and methods of cultural studies. My least favourite word coming out of my Berkeley days is ‘recuperation’. It seemed as if any idea, any suggestion for taking action, had to be vetted for purity, for having no chance of being recuperated by patriarchy, capitalism or dominant cinema. I found that vetting led to nothing other than social quietism and political paralysis. That’s why I appreciate theorists such as Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak, who argue for a politics of impurity.

I have been criticized for being sympathetic with the goals of NASA (a civilian space agency, remember), or for going too far into the corporate belly of the beast with the GALA Committee Melrose Place project. I think there are even some cultural studies folks who are a little nervous about a humanities scholar who has her own National Science Foundation Fast Lane number, and gets research funding from the multi-billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen (even if it is for ocean sustainability research). The Carsey-Wolf Center, which supports teaching, research and public programming about media here at UC Santa Barbara, has been accused of complicity and contagion for its support by some of the leading lights of the entertainment industry, including our own successful alumni – even though they support us because we aren’t a film school that offers merely a pre-professional training, but instead teach production only within a strong liberal arts and sciences, critical studies curriculum.

So I guess I’m for a messy and impure cultural studies, practised by whomever wants to make a claim to be doing it. What I value is a project’s success at turning tactics into strategies. Michel de Certeau made the distinction between the tactical manoeuvres used by the relatively powerless, who own nothing and have little or no institutional backing, and the strategies deployed by the relatively powerful, who own nearly everything and occupy physical spaces – but he was criticized for having no theory of how people might translate tactics into strategies. I think the GALA Committee figured out how to do just that in turning a minor art hack into a major collaboration with the producers of commercial broadcast television. And the ‘Digital Ocean’ project learned from media fan tactics how to strategically use social media for ocean science research and education.

Cultural studies has given the humanities and social sciences a model for collaborative, interdisciplinary, problem-solving research that allows us to partner with the sciences as well. That wondrous possibility’s main threat is the privatization of higher education, where we lose shared governance and are siloed into our own disciplines, where we are to teach and do research for private profit and not the public good. It may be that cultural studies turns out to be our main bulwark against the ravages of such privatization. At least I hope so. I think an impure cultural studies will help us best negotiate that future.