Meta: Femslash -The G-Woman and The Fowl One: Fic and Femslash in The X-Files Fandom

[memories-child.livejournal.com]

Some of you may know that I'm currently doing a PhD, and my PhD is on The X-Files. Specifically I'm looking at fanfic, and one thing I find really interesting is the different ways in which Scully and Fowley are treated. I find Fowley fascinating, and one thing I like about her lack of backstory is how we're able, as fanfic writers, to create our own histories for her. This entry touches on that, and is drawn from an early draft of a chapter that will be published later this year in an anthology called Fic. I hope you find it interesting.

The G-Woman and The Fowl One: Fic and Femslash in The X-Files Fandom

When I woke up on the morning of 9th August, 2012, the internet was awash with rumours that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, stars of the cult TV series The X-Files, were a couple. My Facebook feed was full of friends, whom I had no idea had even watched the show, talking about it; on Twitter, serious academics whose work I follow were tweeting in delight; even The Guardian had a piece about the realisation of the "ultimate nerdy Gen-X dream" (2012:online). For a programme that went off air in 2002, and whose 2008 feature film was met with less than enthusiastic reviews, the amount of media attention given to its stars was unusual. Of course, for fans of the show, Mulder and Scully had been together for a long, long time.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a shipper (someone who wants Mulder and Scully in a relationship), but even I can see the desire to have these two attractive, intelligent lead characters in love. The chemistry between Mulder and Scully was one of the main reasons I watched the show (that and my childhood desire to become a crypto-zoologist, inspired by my obsession with ghosts, UFOs, Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster), and it’s one of the themes that continues to populate fanfic about the series. It continues to populate my fanfic about the series, and I’m a steadfast NoRomo. What attracts me to Mulder and Scully is one of the things that made the show a hit. Chris Carter (The X-Files creator) has often talked about his deliberate reversal of gender in the series: Mulder is intuitive and empathic, the believer (all traditionally feminine characteristics) while Scully is the scientist, the sceptic, the rational one, yet despite their differences they work together as a team. Scully may have been sent to spy on Mulder, but by The X-Files movie she is the only one that he trusts. It’s easy to see why so many fans love writing about these characters. In a comment to a post about fans’ favourite shipper moments in the X-Files LiveJournal community, coffeedrops writes:

I think their relationship goes beyond just kissing and having sex, if I explain myself. It’s about the trust, the respect they have, and how truly they appreciate the other… And at least for me, those tiny moments like a hug, or a forehead!kiss or things like the conversation in Detour [which takes place after Mulder has been injured by a mothman and Scully holds him close to keep him warm] are more important (2008:online)

Mulder and Scully are not your traditional romantic leads, and that allows us fanfic writers to play with expectations. We can write bad!fic in which Mulder and Scully attend the annual FBI masquerade ball and eventually leave together following a series of misunderstandings because the series never positioned them as characters who would attend such an event (much less take it seriously), and we can write fic in which Mulder is a stay-at-home dad while Scully works 12 hour shifts at a local hospital because it wouldn’t occur to Mulder that he should be the one (according to society, at least) who’s out earning the money. The trust and respect evident in the series thus allows fanfic writers more opportunities to write a range of stories. (I’ve written colonisation stories, missing scenes, smut and pre-series fic but I think my favourite is an Alternative Universe (AU) I wrote, set in Victorian London, in which Mulder and Scully investigate Jack the Ripper.)

Of course, this isn’t to say that there aren’t problems inherent in the series which fans don’t challenge. Henry Jenkins notes that fandom "is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it" (2006a:247). This combination of fascination and frustration is evident within The X-Files fandom, as Narida writes:

I love these characters and through fiction, can give them, me, and readers who want it, relief from the sexual tension evident between the characters week after week, year after year. It’s a harmless, easy way of diffusing my feelings of "I can’t take this anymore!" and then the next week to be able to return to the tension once again. Fan fiction is a medium fans use to ease all kinds of frustration with the show (which many people have expressed at one point or other), and UST is just one of many. (2008:online)

A lot of the Mulder/Scully fanfic I read tries to deal with some of these frustrations, particularly around the representation of Scully. Although she has been lauded as a strong female character there are, as Emily Regan Wills notes, "at least three different narratives in which Scully is feminized and rendered powerless: Scully as abductee, as sexually desirable, and as a (potential) mother" (2009:9). The problematic narrative which many fanfic writers attempt to redress is that of Scully as mother. Many fans were frustrated, if not downright angry, with Chris Carter during the ‘William’ storyline of seasons eight and nine. The strong, capable Scully we had seen previously appeared to have been replaced with a woman who ran more often than she fought, and spent far too much time crying over a missing Mulder than she did attempting to find him. But the biggest problem came when Scully gave the baby she had longed for through much of the series up for adoption. Fans argued that Scully would not behave like this, citing both her ability as an FBI agent to protect her son and the nullification of William’s alien DNA by Jeffrey Spender as reasons for their unhappiness with the story arc. Like many others on my LiveJournal friends-list, I’ve written fic dealing with William. I’ve written drabbles (short pieces, usually no longer than 1,000 words) in which Scully and Mulder watch their son from afar while on the run, and I’ve written colonisation stories in which William finds Mulder and Scully and faces the invasion with his family. More recently, however, I’ve been interested in the series’ secondary characters. In the last few years I’ve started writing about Cancer Man and Teena Mulder, Samantha Mulder, and, most controversially of all, Diana Fowley and Mulder.

Fowley was introduced in season five, with Chris Carter saying that she "was a character you were destined to hate because she was a competitor for Mulder’s affection with Scully" (2008:131). The Mulder/Scully/Fowley love triangle, however, has been criticised as being ‘off-putting’ (Handlen, 2011:online) and Den of Geek ranked Fowley among their 10 most disappointing female characters in sci-fi TV (2010:online). In comparison to Scully, Fowley appears to epitomise the cliché of ‘ball-busting bitch’. She returned to the X-Files with Jeffrey Spender when Mulder was removed from the post and appeared to be working closely with the Cigarette Smoking Man at various points throughout the series. But while fanfic writers often go to great lengths to redress the slights against Scully through fic (as I have done), hating Fowley quickly became a favourite fan past-time. The Diana Fowley Hater’s Brigade was created in 1999 and contains links to fan fiction, poems and songs about Fowley (almost all of them wishing her dead) as well as a mailing list. The Anti Diana Fowley Archive, which lists fan fiction stories relating to Diana Fowley and includes titles such as ‘Die Fowley Die!’ and ‘Diana Fowley dies!!!’ was also set up in 1999. We discover in ‘The Sixth Extinction II: Armor Fati’, however, that Fowley helped to save Mulder’s life, sacrificing her own in the process. To me, this makes Fowley a more sympathetic character as she is aligned with other women of The X-Files who have made sacrifices, including Scully. Few fans, however, agree with this assessment. In their examination of X-Files fan fiction, Christine Scodari and Jenna L. Felder suggested that Mulder's trust of the duplicitous Fowley and his refusal to clarify his relationship with her to Scully caused what shippers view as a breach in the partnership and developing romance. They write that "Fanfic answers sixth season chagrin by stating in headers that the objectionable events are going to be ignored, or by reconciling the agents and eliminating ‘The Fowl One,’ often mortally and at Mulder or Scully's hand" (2000:247), but in her post to the halfamoon LiveJournal community, wendelah1 writes that

Diana Fowley is one of the most neglected, misunderstood, and hated characters in TXF fandom. I guess it’s no secret that I love her […] I like writing her [because] : (1.) she’s an intelligent, complicated, middle-aged woman with divided loyalties, and (2.) smart as she is, she’s still in love with someone she knows she can’t have. (2012:online)

Amongst the Fowley-centric fic which wendelah1 recommends is maidenjedi’s Something Strange. A post-ep for ‘The End’, the fic follows Fowley through her return to the US and her arrival at the briefing on the events which take place in the episode. Although Fowley is portrayed as disloyal and untrustworthy in the series, in fic her motivations are examined in much greater detail. Through lines such as "She wasn't sure why she had agreed to come. Someone else could've handled the dirty work. She thought longingly of Saudi heat and sand, of Arabic voices. She'd rather pretend there if she had to at all" (2009:online) the reader discovers where Fowley has been since leaving America, as well as her state of mind on returning. Fowley’s feelings for Mulder are laid bare, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of the character, but through her description of Fowley’s reaction to Mulder, maidenjedi shows us a much more vulnerable woman than that which we see in the series:

Fox's eyes lingered on her face as they always had, thankful and a little awed. The meeting broke up around them, and still they watched each other. She felt excited and glad and nervous, so changed from when she had walked in here. She made to move over to him through the small throng of gossiping, speculating agents in black.
She hesitated only once.
A small figure topped with red hair got up from the table and got to Fox first. He dropped his stare down to her as she placed her hand on his arm. She whispered to him, he answered her. All his attention was on her, and Diana felt the dread return. (2009:online)

It is this barely-hinted at aspect of Fowley that I find interesting as a writer. Although fans often complain about Chris Carter’s predilection for leaving loose ends, this actually works well in allowing fic writers to create a back story for Fowley. The wedding ring Mulder wears in a flashback in the season six episode ‘Unusual Suspects’ hints at a previous relationship, and I (along with other fans) have taken that to mean he was married to Fowley. But what would such a relationship have looked like? And why did it go so horribly wrong? In my own, personal canon, Fowley was sent to seduce Mulder in order for the Syndicate to keep tabs on him. Neither she, nor Cancer Man, foresaw her falling for him, however, and her loyalties became more and more divided. This is why she was sent overseas, but it’s also why she sacrificed herself to save Mulder’s life. This kind of fan production is discussed by Henry Jenkins in book Textual Poachers, in which he argues that fan fiction is a form of resistance which "actively assert[s fans’] mastery over the mass-produced texts" (1992:23-4). Much academic work continues to focus on this idea of fanfic as resistant, and slash fiction (where same sex relationships are imagined between male characters who are canonically heterosexual) is considered a prime example of this, with Constance Penley suggesting that slash fiction was "one of the most radical and intriguing female appropriations of a popular culture product that [she] had ever seen" (1992:484). Of course, other genres can be just as resistive as slash, as Will Brooker argues:

slash fiction plays exactly the same game with the primary texts, on a formal level, as does genfic [more commonly referred to as het in fandom], its heterosexual counterpart. [Gen] stories that do nothing more than fill in the gaps … [or het stories which] expand on [an] evolving relationship … are no less radical than slash in terms of their relationship with the primary texts. Slash relies on the [texts] as much as genfic does; genfic departs from the [texts] as much as slash does. (2002:133)

As a fanfic writer who now spends a lot of time coming up with stories about Fowley, I would argue that fanfic which portrays her in direct contrast to her depiction on The X-Files, is just as resistive as slash. But femslash (where same sex relationships are imagined between female characters who are canonically heterosexual) which features Fowley is perhaps the most resistive of them all. Bacon-Smith (1992) and Green, Jenkins and Jenkins (1998) argue that femslash has been largely ignored because there are not enough strong female characters on television, while Ciconi (1998) suggests that slash enables writers to examine relationships between characters who are equals in patriarchal society – women are not equals. However, the positioning of both Scully and Fowley as FBI special agents places them relatively highly up the chain within the male-dominated field of law enforcement and, while arguments can be made about their lack of equality within the institution of Federal Government specifically and patriarchal society more generally, nonetheless they are both equals. idella’s The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades is an AU which shows Scully and Fowley developing a relationship following Mulder’s disappearance after being reinstated to The X-Files in season six. The fic comprises of five ‘parts’, chronological but not continuous, and begins in the way viewers of the series would expect it to, following Fowley’s apparent betrayal of Mulder at the end of season five. Scully is suspicious of her new partner’s motivation, both in joining The X-Files division now, and in her former relationship with Mulder. In this way, the fic mirrors viewers’ (and readers’) expectations: Fowley is not to be trusted, and her assignment to The X-Files as Scully’s partner is further evidence of her role as spy. As the fic progresses, though, Scully’s (and thus the reader’s) attitude to Fowley shifts:

Scully's partnership with Fowley is not as tempestuous as she would have predicted. She suspects this is simply because she does not care enough about what Fowley thinks to waste time arguing. They agree, or they don't, and Scully turns in her little reports and gets on with her life, such as it is. […]

She's been exceptionally quiet today, and Scully wonders if it's because of the nasty comments made earlier. What could she say that Fowley doesn't already know? Fowley could spout the same platitudes at her. Scully slows down for a red light. "Small towns, you know," she says. "Small minds." (2010:online)

The ‘nasty comments’ refer to local law enforcement’s surprise at dealing with two female agents, so Scully and Fowley as female Federal agents are pushed together in the fic. Similarly, their shared history with Mulder also enables each to recognise the other’s concern at his disappearance and brings them closer. When Fowley propositions Scully in an aeroplane bathroom, then, it seems almost inevitable: though neither woman likes the other, she is the only person who knows how she feels. Catherine Tosenberger suggests that the joy of an enemyslash pairing lies in watching the antagonists overcome their differences. She writes that "dislike is recast as sexual tension, and when the characters are both men, part of the pleasure is in seeing their negotiation of expectations of male aggression (rather than friendship) in terms of desire" (2008: 193). Scully and Fowley, as strong characters, are also able to resort to aggression, however, and this also segues into desire in the fic:

Scully crosses the room in three quick strides and presses her gun to Fowley's head. She doesn't flinch, but she looks like she's paying attention now. Scully takes a step back, keeping her gun trained on her partner. "Who's after you?" she asks. "Are they after both of us?"[…]

When she opens her eyes, Diana is standing with her head to one side, looking at Scully consideringly. Scully touches her wrist. It's cold and smooth, and Diana leans forward and kisses Scully. The past two months are pressing down, and the weight of them makes her sag against Diana. When she pulls away, she realizes she's still holding her weapon. "You should go," she says. (2010:online)

While much of the academic work on The X-Files fan fiction so far has focussed on Mulder and Scully, fic which focuses on Fowley, as well as femslash pairing Scully and Fowley, is an important tool which fans use to critique constructions of gender on the show. I haven’t written any Scully/Fowley femslash (yet), but I enjoy reading it because of the way it depicts these two complex characters and their motivations. I’ll never believe that Scully and Fowley could love each other the way that Mulder and Scully obviously do (unless we’re talking AU), but I can easily believe that they could be drawn together as two female FBI agents in a man’s Federal Government, or as two women who have loved the same man and have subsequently lost him. Femslash featuring Scully and Fowley does a similar thing to what I do when I write Fowley fanfic; it fleshes out her back story and attempts to understand her better as a character. It also tries to persuade other fans that she is more complex a character than that which we see on the show. It doesn’t always work, of course, but we still have fun doing it.

Bibligraphy
Bacon-Smith, C. 1992. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Brooker, W. 2002. Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans. New York: Continuum.

Ciconi, M. 1998 ‘Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing’, in Harris, C. and A. Alexander (eds) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

coffeedrops, 2008. ‘The Definitive Top Shipper Moments’ available at http://xfiles.livejournal.com/1993970.html?thread=17695986#t17695986 (accessed 11 December 2010).

Den of Geek, 2010. ‘The 10 most disappointing female characters in sci-fi TV’ available at http://www.denofgeek.com/television/525697/the_10_most_disappointing_female_characters_in_scifi_tv.html (accessed 10 October 2012).

Green, S, C. Jenkins, and H. Jenkins. (1998) ‘Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from the Terra Nostra Underground and Strange Bedfellows’, in Harris, C. and A. Alexander (eds) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Handlen, Z. 2011. ‘The X-Files/Millennium’ available at http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-enda-room-with-no-view,60203/ (accessed 13 May 2012).

Hurwitz, M and C. Knowles. 2008. The Complete X-Files: Behind the Series the Myths and the Movies. New York, US: Insight Editions.

idella, 2010. The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades available at http://xf-santa.livejournal.com/48315.html (accessed 8 January 2010).

Jenkins, H. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television, Fans and Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge

Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Maidenjedi, 2009. Something Strange available at http://users.pdsys.org/~maidenjedi/fanfic/something_strange.txt (accessed 6 February 2012).

Narida, 2000. ‘Is smut erotica or just pornography, and how do you write it without bursting into flames? available at http://www.vanishingscroll.com/narida/stories/WSarticle.htm (accessed 12 December 2010).

Penley, C. 1992. ‘Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture’, in Grossberg, L., C Nelson and P A. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.

Reed, J. 2012. ‘David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson: a dream couple?’
available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/09/david-duchovny-gillian-anderson-dream-couple (accessed 9 August 2012).

Tosenberger, C. 2008. ‘Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction’, in Children's Literature 36, pp.185--207.

Scodari, C., and J. L. Felder. 2000. ‘Creating a pocket universe: “Shippers,” fan fiction, and The X-Files Online’, Communication Studies, 51 (3), pp.238-257.

wendelah1, 2012. Fic Recs: Diana Fowley (The X-Files) available at http://halfamoon.livejournal.com/270567.html (accessed 6 February 2012).

Wills, E, 2002. The Political Possibilities of Fandom: Transformational Discourses on Gender and Power in The X-Files Fandom available at http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/6/2/9/2/pages362928/p362928-1.php (Accessed 21 November 2009).

Comments

[littlegreen42.livejournal.com]

When I first heard about Diana Fowley, I was actually excited. I thought it would be interesting to learn more about Mulder's past by having his ex-girlfriend (I never read her as his ex-wife) join the show. But I ended up being disappointed. I was deeply annoyed that the writers didn't really give us much of a backstory. I mean, it was never clear whether she'd worked on the X-Files as Mulder's partner -- which would make one wonder, wouldn't she be mentioned in some of the old X-Files reports? It seemed silly and unbelievable, then, that Scully couldn't seem to find any information on her. This, to me, showed that the writers really didn't care about coming up with a plausible story, and it felt as though Diana Fowley had just been introduced for cheap romantic tension, and just so fans would hate her. So I ended up feeling very negatively about the introduction of Diana Fowley to the storyline.

But I also started noticing a very troubling thing. People's hatred of Fowley went beyond the kind of criticisms I noted above. There was a distinct level of ugly sexism to the hatred. People would call her a "bitch," a "slut," or claim that she was too "ugly" for Mulder, and that there was something wrong with Mulder for being attracted to a woman that fans deemed "ugly." I think there are legitimate reasons not to like Diana Fowley. But if all you can do is spout sexist slurs at her, then I'm not very impressed.

Eventually, Mulder and Fowley's relationship began to fascinate me. It seems to have been longterm (at least, that's my interpretation -- the information about Mulder's past relationship with her, and his past in general, is pretty murky), and Mulder doesn't really seem like the kind of guy who would be good at maintaining a long term relationship. He's obsessive, work-focused, and can often be very self-centered. He also strikes me as someone who would be very difficult to live with. Don't get me wrong, I love Mulder, he's my favourite character -- but he just doesn't seem like prime relationship material (which is probably why I'm not a Mulder/Scully shipper, to be honest -- but that's another discussion for another time). So I'm just, I guess, fascinated by how the Mulder/Fowley dynamic would have played out, and it's something I like to explore in fic -- though, admittedly, I've only publicly posted one Mulder/Fowley fic to date, and most of these "fics" haven't even made it past the "idea stage" to be written down.

Anyway: I hope your PhD is doing well!