X Marks the G-Spot:Femininity and Desire in a Women-Only Cyberspace

The David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs). [1] To anyone familiar with the television series, The X-Files, the name likely suggests a type of fan club made up of women who, as indicated in the opening quotation, are obsessed with the actor who plays the role of FBI Agent Fox Mulder. Such assumptions about female fans are not surprising in a culture that historically has been unable to accept a woman as a desiring and speaking subject. Like "Mrs. Hale," their members identify as fans of both series and actor but adamantly reject the discourse that positions them as "fangirls," instead claiming their position as desiring subjects in complex ways.

In this paper, I examine both the fangirl discourse and its rejection by DDEB members. I then discuss the encoding of heterosexual feminine desire in the context of online interaction among the participants of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade Research Project (DDEBRP), a mailing list that I set up with 19 DDEB members as part of an ethnographic study conducted between March 1996 and April 1997. All the participants self-identified in the initial questionnaire as white, either by using this category or using categories such as "European-American" or "Anglo-American." Thirteen participants indicated that they were between 30 and 40 years of age, and had completed at least two years of post-secondary education. Seven had begun and five had completed a master's degree. Like the DDEBs, the DDEBRP was a closed but un-moderated list, which means that nobody was able to join and participate without the approval of the list owner (myself), but that posts were automatically sent to all list members without being vetted by a moderator. As a female fan who has always refused the fangirl categorization and as an X-Files fan, I set up the list as a means of not simply observing firsthand the community-making practices of women who similarly refused this category, but of participating in the process. Not interested in being the researcher whom Valerie Walkerdine describes as "the silent Other who is present in, while apparently absent from, the text," [2] I chose to join and initiate discussion threads (the term for email exchanges with the same subject heading). Additionally, I included my contributions in the data analysis and, in this paper, use the term "DDEBRP members" in reference to both the participants and myself. Based on my analysis of the interaction, I argue that the encodings of desire for David Duchovny and other male celebrities, while heteronormative, either refuse or play with prescribed methods of desire offered to those of us with female bodies. Finally, I look at the DDEB practices in light of recent cyberfeminist theories of the cyborg.

Of Fangirls and Femininity

As part of a preliminary questionnaire, I asked the research participants why they had joined one of the DDEBs:

As the above comments make clear, the norms of Internet fandom rely on a plus male / minus male logic, whereby practices associated with femininity are compared to those associated with masculinity and found to be lacking. [6] So, while expression of desire by male fans was seen as legitimate fan talk on lists like alt.tv.x-files, that by female fans resulted in insults and accusations of "drooling" from the male participants, a term that suggests an infantile and even imbecilic act. Indeed, the term fan, an abbreviation of the Latin fanaticus, has relied on this logic since its first use in the early twentieth century. Sports writers first used the term playfully in reference to male sports enthusiasts, but film and theatre critics used it as a put-down of women who supposedly attended the performances for the sole purpose of admiring the actors. [7] Mia Farrow appears as one such fangirl in Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo, whose romantic fantasy comes true when her idol walks off the screen and into her life. The fangirl quickly became a powerful heteronormative, "minus male" subject position offered to those of us with female bodies who express admiration for a male celebrity. Laura Mulvey uses both Freudian and Lacanian notions of (hetero)sexual difference to argue that the narrative structure of Hollywood film operates on a heteronormative binary logic of an active "looking" male spectator and a passive "looked at" female character, who is positioned as the object of the desiring male gaze. [8] The female fan who looks, however, is not constructed as a desiring subject capable of objectification. Instead, she is "in love" with the male celebrity, unable to separate fantasy from reality:

These school girl fantasies, excerpted from the award-winning Canadian novel Fall on Your Knees, are typically extended to include adult admirers of male celebrities. The passage is also interesting because it reveals two different tropes of masculinity on offer to female fans: the Fairbanks and the Valentino. Douglas Fairbanks represents the more normative trope. [10] As Richard Dyer explains, "when not caught in an act, the male image still promises activity by the way the body is posed." In describing publicity shots of later star Humphrey Bogart, he refers to "the clenched first, the bulging muscles, the hardened jaws," as a "proliferation of phallic symbols... striving after what can never be achieved, the embodiment of phallic mystique." [11] Unlike Fairbanks, Valentino actively covets the gaze. According to Gaylyn Studlar, the latter represents " 'the lure of the flesh,' the male equivalent of the vamp," and, not surprisingly, American men felt it necessary to deride not only Valentino, referring to him disparagingly as a "pink powder puff," a "male butterfly" and a "man-woman," but also the women who desired him. His legions of adoring female fans were portrayed in the popular press as either mindless victims of manipulation or destroyers of traditional masculinity, "ultimately forc[ing] respectable men to ape the manners of these menial and sensual men to hold their own women...and this process would leave them lost and adrift." [12] In positioning himself as an object of desire, Valentino, unlike those of his contemporaries, unsettled the binary of active male spectator/passive female object.

In overtly positioning himself as erotic spectacle for a desirous female spectator, Valentino can be understood as the "father" of the new man, who began appearing in prominent British advertising campaigns for Levi's 501 jeans and Grey Flannel fragrance in the mid-1980s. [13] In one Levi's ad, a man is seen in the bathroom preening himself, presumably in preparation for a date. He then slips into the bath still wearing his jeans, the camera focussing on his crotch as the water envelops him. [14] The same game of reveal/conceal is played in the more famous launderette ad in which models Nick Kamen and James Mardle unbutton their jeans and toss them casually into the washing machine and then sit and wait in the buff to the dismay/titillation of the other patrons. Similarly, print ads for fashion-related products such as fragrance, clothing and underwear were often shot in soft focus or black and white and featured the naked male torso. [15] Thus, the new man, whose image had come to predominate the ad space of magazines such as GQ, Arena, For Him and The Face, could be described as self-conscious and concerned with image "but not in a wimpy or girly sort of way." [16] While these images were designed and deployed to sell products, television did not lag far behind in constructing the male body as sexual spectacle. Andrew Ross makes a case that the police drama Miami Vice was the first television show to position its male protagonists as objects of desire: "The widespread incidence of that male flesh...has become...a primary means of selling the show as TV commodity." [17] Similarly, contemporary Hollywood cinema begins to treat its audiences to regular displays of male flesh: Richard Gere in American Gigolo, Brad Pitt as a "toyboy" in Thelma and Louise and Kevin Costner's bare derriere in Dances with Wolves come to mind.

X-Files star David Duchovny certainly wears the look of the new man well, his image having appeared on the covers of GQ, Vanity Fair, Details, Playgirl, Rolling Stone (with X-Files co-star Gillian Anderson) and Us. Many of the poses are clearly intended to position him as an object of desire. These include headshots in which the actor is pouting at the spectator, as well as torso shots in which he appears with his shirt unbuttoned, wearing only an undershirt or not wearing any shirt at all. Then there are the images of him with legs casually sprawled apart to draw the viewer's gaze to his crotch. In one image, the discussion of which I present in the next section, he stands outdoors, hands at his side, a pair of suspenders framing his bare chest, which is further emphasized by the cropping of the image at the crotch. His arms and chest are well-toned and he has some muscle definition but could hardly be described as muscle bound. Instead of looking defiantly into the camera, as the macho trope demands, however, his eyes are averted and he seems to be squinting slightly as if looking into the sun. Moreover, his hair is tousled as if by the wind, creating a soft, almost vulnerable image. [18] Tasker asserts that the new man is, in part, a response to feminism and its critique of classic macho. [19] It is important to recognize, however, that images such as these are less likely indicative of a legitimisation of the female spectator than the growing consumer "presence" of the affluent gay man. Calvin Klein's underwear campaign receives particular credit for "taking the male body out of the gay closet and giving it a much wider application." [20] Nonetheless, mainstream representations of masculinity seek out the female gaze as a means of foreclosing the homoerotic male gaze. One such example is the television ad campaign that Coca-Cola ran in North America in 1996. A group of female office workers start primping and exhibiting signs of sexual excitement by licking their lips and wiping perspiration from their brows in anticipation of the arrival of the scantily clad muscle-bound "hunk" delivering a case of Coke. Thus, an alignment of gay male and feminist discourses "creates a space in which women can actively look," [21] and offers female fans like the DDEB members a means of refusing the fangirl subject position that continues to be offered in the age of the Internet.

In the context of a discussion on the DDEBRP, the participants made a key distinction between the romantic fantasy of the fangirl and the objectifying, desirous gaze of the active heterosexual female spectator.

Desire, for this research list member, was not about "courtly" or romantic love, but about lust. Rather than viewing female desire as based in biology, as seems to be suggested by the above comment, it is important to recognize desire as discursive product/process:

These narratives and storylines offer subjects ways of acting, speaking and desiring. Davies' use of the term interpellation, [23] however, suggests a "hailing" of the subject by dominant ideologies that has been criticized for ignoring the complexities, contradictions and uncertainties of the process of subjectification. [24] Moreover, dominant ideologies, better thought of as true discourses to avoid the Marxist problematic of base versus superstructure, can be displaced or undermined by alternative or oppositional ones. [25] This is the case with femininity. An alternative set of feminist discourses emerged out of the women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, resulting in a cluster of storylines that both reproduce and challenge plus male/minus male norms. "Drucilla" can therefore be said to have rejected the feminine narrative of romance traditionally offered to those of us with female bodies in favour of its reworked feminist version in which the heroine is not just a passive recipient of the hero's affections, but a desiring subject in her own right.

For her part, "Sonya" was willing to accept that "DD talk" contained some elements of romance, which she defined as "fantastical" and "idealistic":

Catherine Belsey points out that desire cannot be thought of as only involving "real" and "present" objects, and indeed, suggests that the object of desire is always discursively produced:

Duncombe and Marsden put it another way: "Even at what may feel like the most spontaneous and authentic moments in their lives being in love people are performing or staging romance." [27] That said, Belsey's choice of words to describe this "unreal" desire, "romance," "fairy tale," "madness," "obsession," have the unfortunate effect of offering up the spectre of the fangirl whose desires control her and not vice versa. "Sonya" makes it clear that she rejects the fangirl version of fantasy, as she continued:

"Liz" concurs by drawing a line between "real" and "present" objects of desire:

In rejecting the fangirl discourse of desire as delusion, the DDEBRP members are not just decoupling romance from erotic desire, but are challenging other normative feminine storylines as well.

Not only is a "good girl" not supposed to have sexual desire without love, but she is supposed to be "true" to her man and jealous of any rival for his affections. By characterizing the DDEB as a way to enjoy the "latest flavour of the month," "Moll" suggests a wanton "infidelity" to Duchovny as object. Moreover, the DDEBRP members "share" their object of desire, be it the "real" actor or the characters he plays, disrupting the heroine/other woman rivalry of the romance narrative. "Liz" further highlights this collective desire, saying

Fangirls together, by contrast, are supposed to whip each other up into a hysterical frenzy, their expression of desire reduced to fits of crying and screaming. Indeed, the section on fandom at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio is dominated by huge blowups of female fans of Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

"Drooling" over David

Harvey and Shalom refer to the "need to encode desire," by "naming it, renaming it, finding a verbal image for it, revealing it, recounting it...these are the verbal acts constantly repeated and refashioned by the desiring speaking subject." [29] In naming the desire produced by gazing at images of new men like Duchovny, DDEBRP members usually rejected the pejorative "drool" in favour of "squidge," a word that suggests the fluids and secretions of female sexual excitation. According to the participants, "squidge" is commonly used by female fans in relation to actors whom they find sexy. For example, Duchovny was described as a favourite "objet de squidge" and as "major squidge" in the subject line of the message on the "suspenders" image described in the previous section:

It is interesting that "Mrs. Hale" uses "squidge" and describes herself as "drooling" and "whimpering." Is this a deliberate play on the fangirl subject position? She then concludes her with the line: "oh my goddess" serves to affirm the connection between feminism, power, and desire. She then adds the following "disclaimer" addressed directly to me:

Expressing desire for an actor, as I have suggested, is risky business for female fans, even among themselves and especially in the "presence" of an academic who may have written her off as a fangirl.

In addition, orthographic representations of sounds or gestures of sexual excitation were often deployed. One example is an exchange about the actor Michael Biehn:

Metaphor was also a frequent means of expressing sexual desire. Using the Collins COBUILD corpus of English, made up of over 200 million words culled from a plethora of print sources, Alice Deignan composed nine classifications for conventional metaphors of desire. One of these is desire as fire:

"Mrs. Hale" uses the fire metaphor in the exchange about Biehn ("Did the temperature suddenly rise in here?"). Another thread began with "Bel" expressing desire for men with deep voices. She then asked, "Besides DD :-) what kind of guys catch your eye?"

"Mrs. Hale" and "Ardis" provide a list of desirable men, based on their ability to "ignite" desire within them.

Another common metaphor used on the DDEBRP was that of desire as appetite. The need for food, as that for warmth, "is one of our most basic physical needs, which may provide a further reason for the frequency and range of expressions of this metaphor." [32] Moreover, satisfying hunger, like desire, "is a source of pleasure." [33] In this vein, the actor Billy Zane is referred to as "some nice eyecandy." In another exchange, "Daphne" teases "Mrs. Hale," "You'd drink [Duchovny] for lunch every day if you could! :->,"whose reply draws on the heat metaphor:

In another exchange, Mrs. Hale concluded a message with the one-liner, "Would like some DD Jelly." This leads to a humourous exchange of food metaphors with "Winnie":

This exchange also reveals the degree to which desire and humour were intertwined on the DDEBRP. In many cases a suggestive one-liner was dropped into a more general thread. For example, when asking "Mrs. Hale" for a copy of one of her erotic pieces of fan fiction, "Moll" added, "Pretty please with David on top (or on the bottom, whichever you prefer)." Similarly, when "Erin" wrote that she "wanted to do cartwheels" when she found a sexy image of Duchovny in her email inbox, "Dani" quipped, "I'd do cartwheels, too, if I found David in my box," to which she adds, "hey, it was just sitting there, waiting to be said!" When one participant mentioned that she had interviewed Duchovny for a magazine article, "Winnie" exclaimed, "Would that we could all Get David. Yow!!" On one level, these jokes function as a protective shield to deflect any charges of "drooling" over an actor, the line between drool and squidge always a fine one. On another, they are key to the process of community making on the DDEBRP. In this context, humour turns the object of desire into a social lubricant, [34] whose primary function is to facilitate list interaction and enable participants of the thread to establish a sense of community.

While my analysis of the data revealed namings of desire as squidge, use of conventional metaphors of desire, and suggestive word play, it reveals a paucity of sexually explicit or pornographic language of desire. There is no mention, for example, of female genitalia in a state of arousal. Several of the DDEBRP members write erotic fan fiction, which does contain such language, and they post these stories on the fan fiction websites. So, it was not that members do not use such language in certain contexts. However, the pressure exerted by normative discourses of femininity to be "ladylike," which includes avoidance of sexually explicit language, cannot be discounted. Again, my "presence" as a researcher may also have contributed to the more conventional or humourous expression of desire.

The Clothes Make the New Man

Central to many of the exchanges in which the DDEBRP members expressed desire for Duchovny and other male celebrities were references to style of attire or hairstyle. As notions of being "in fashion," "out of fashion," "fashionable," and "fashion-conscious" are imbricated with femininity, [35] talking about style can be understood as a performance of femininity, a performance actively encouraged by the new man who regularly deploys fashion to covet the gaze. The DDEBRP members identified particular "looks" as desirable. One such look was that of the "man in the suit." Duchovny usually wears a suit and tie as Fox Mulder on The X-Files, which generated this comment from "Bel":

In this scene from the "Humbug" episode, [36] Mulder leans against a doorway in the background of a shot as if modelling a suit. This classic representation of an upper-class masculinity, however, is actually parodied by the show's producers, for in the foreground is the midget owner of the motel, where the FBI agents lodge while conducting their investigation, telling Scully that the real "freaks" in society are tall, well-dressed men like Mulder. Valerie Steele notes that a suit "is certainly not sexy in the way that many women's clothes are," that is, it does not reveal or accentuate parts of the body. Instead, it is the garment's association with masculine power that makes the wearer look sexually appealing. [37] I would add the tailored suit also signals that its wearer is upper-class. In contrast, a man wearing a suit that is poorly cut and made of polyester would hardly be thought of as attractive. Moreover, as the scene makes explicit, the sexiness of the suit is directly linked to the body type of the man who wears it. Just as clothing styles have changed, so have styles of bodies, "the development of the modern physical ideal: younger, taller, thinner and more muscular [beginning] around the turn of the century...for both sexes." [38] In this sense, Duchovny at six feet and 170 pounds with a fit, trim build is a perfect "match" for the suit. [39] Hence, even if the midget had worn an expensive suit, it is highly unlikely that "Bel," or anyone else, would think he looks sexy.

Although Duchovny usually wore a suit and tie in his role of Fox Mulder, it was the tuxedos he wore to award shows that generated discussion:

Both "Mrs. Hale "and "Daphne" agreed that he looked wonderful; "Mrs. Hale" cynically suggested, "maybe that's why he won the award :)." It is noteworthy that another male celebrity present at the ceremony, Patrick Stewart (most famous for his role in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation as Captain Jean-Luc Picard), was also spoken of admiringly in terms of his "classic" evening wear:

Duchovny, however, did not always appear at such events dressed so conventionally. As the following exchange indicates, some variations of the traditional black tuxedo were thought to suit him:

Deviating too far from the conventions of formal dress, however, was not seen as appealing. As the earlier reference to "funny stuff" from "Sonya" indicates, the shiny outfit that Duchovny wore to the 1995 Emmy Awards ceremony, a queer look associated with performers such as Liberace, Elton John or Michael Jackson, disrupts heteronormative feminine desire, even if only momentarily. Although not as radical a departure from fashion norms, the boldly striped outfit he wore on an appearance on The David Letterman Show inspired this comment from "Erin": "Heh...and what was with that suit? I saw a post on Usenet called something like 'Did DD mug an ice cream man?' and almost died laughing."

The formal look, however, was not the only one that DDEBRP members liked. In an exchange in which Duchovny was described as looking "yummy" in the role of Mulder, "Erin" commented on a promotional program that contained clips of the Anderson and Duchovny being interviewed about their characters:

Although this image is clearly not a publicity photo, it does not actually work against the grain of normative masculinity in the way that the shiny suit did. The adoption of aspects of working-class dress by the middle classes began in earnest in the early 1970s and now "dressing down" in a T-shirt and jeans is presented in countless ad campaigns as fashionable and sexy for both men and women. [41] Moreover, thanks to actors such as Don Johnson of Miami Vice and singers such as George Michael, a few days' worth of facial stubble is also accepted as fashionable on the right male face. It is therefore not that much of a stretch to read the airport snapshot as if it were an 8x10 glossy. It is also important to note that this exchange, like a number of the others, is another example of collective objectification, with the two participants "working" the image to extend their mutual pleasure and desire.

From Fangirl to Cyborg

That the performances of collective, communal feminine desire from DDEBRP took place in the realm of the virtual is indicative of another level of transgression of gender norms. In turning their backs on the public spaces of Internet fandom, and forming private women-only lists in which to encode feminine desire, the DDEB members were challenging masculine "truths" of disembodiment and desire that pervade theories of cyberspace. The term cyberspace, coined by science fiction/cyberpunk writer William Gibson, is where characters "jack in" to their computers, rendering the biological body obsolete, a worthless piece of "meat." [42] Others appropriate the notion, waxing enthusiastically about "leaving our bodies behind" [43] when interacting electronically in/on Usenet newsgroups, chat rooms, MUDs, GMUKs, [44] and electronic mailing lists. When one enters cyberspace, "one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone." [45] Mark Dery addresses the same claim in postmodern jargon: "The upside of incorporeal interaction is a technologically enabled, postmulticultural vision of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity, and other problematic constructions," allowing ICT users to "float free of biological and sociocultural determinants." [46]

To celebrate the body's supposed absence in cyberspace is to understand it as a form of vessel that "in real life" necessarily houses yet restricts an essential self. However, if one recognizes that the body and the identities associated with it are discursive products/productions, then disembodiment is not a possibility. That said, in her now renowned "Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway makes the case that ICTs and biotechnologies "are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide." [47] She puts forward the notion of the cyborg as "a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is the dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right." [48] The cyborg has become a powerful symbol of the leaky boundaries between the organic and the machinic, between species, between masculine bodies and feminine bodies, for it is, in part, the assumed impermeability of such binaries which has served to exclude and marginalise those associated with the "wrong" side: nature, woman, other.

The danger with this "strong" form of cyberfeminism is that it seems to ascribe some type of magical power or agency to technology that allows boundaries/binaries to be overridden. Furthermore, Haraway's concluding proclamation "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" sets up a boundary between the cyberfeminist vision and other materialist feminist visions, which reclaim the female body that has been excluded, denigrated or marginalised for centuries in Anglo-European culture. The cyberfeminist art collective VNS Matrix attempts to acknowledge the centrality of the erotic feminine body to the feminist cyborg project, this fusion of feminist visions captured in a slogan that appeared on Australian billboards and on their website: "The clitoris is the direct line to the matrix." [49] The DDEB members themselves made a similar move, although for somewhat different reasons, rejecting the term cyborg to describe themselves (a term I had used in a conference paper), in favour of net goddess.

By creating and maintaining a cyberspace based on feminine desire, even if heteronormative, the members of the DDEBs, in effect, short circuit Internet fan practices organized around phallic desire. In rejecting the position of the fangirl, the DDEBRP members take up that of the desiring subject who gazes wantonly and playfully at male celebrities, objectifying them as erotic spectacle and encoding desire collectively in a number of ways: through naming it "squidge," using orthographic representations of "sounds" and "gestures" of desire, as well as through use of metaphor. Discourses of fashion were also mobilized to discuss the desirability of certain masculine "looks" from the classic suit to T-shirt and jeans. These encodings of desire are performances of femininity that are both normative and alternative. They are normative in that they maintain the gender boundary, [50] but alternative in that they invert the plus male/minus male logic of the romantic quest narratives for the man of one's dreams, for "true" love "unsullied" by lust. By primarily relying on metaphor to encode desire, the DDEBRP members took up a feminine discourse of "lady-like" discretion and avoidance of crude or sexually explicit language. On the other hand, these performances of modesty are also ironic, a deliberate choice to create humour and a sense of community. Desiring a new man such as Duchovny is on the one hand a rejection of classic macho masculinity, which is itself a rejection of the feminine. On the other hand, this collective desire is normative in that it is still a response to a white, middle-class masculinity that does not transgress the boundaries of heterosexual "taste."

Although the DDEB members do not radically rewrite gender boundaries, their online practices remind us that normative cybernarratives and storylines can and, indeed, must be rewritten. Take the storyline of the 1999 summer blockbuster film The Matrix. According to the character known only as the Oracle, the destiny of the male hero, Neo, is to be "The One" who saves humanity from the machinic creators of the enslaving virtual world known as the Matrix. The destiny of Trinity, the kickass heroine of the resistance who serves as Neo's guide and comrade in arms, however, is simply to fall in love with The One. Instead of subsuming and effacing/erasing "true love," the DDEBs (en)gender a different cyborg tale: one of wanton, playful, communal desire of Many. Maybe the clitoris is the direct line to The Matrix after all.

University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario

Notes

1. The "brigades" referred to here are three women-only electronic mailing lists.

2. Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (New York: Verso, 1990).

3. The Usenet newsgroup dedicated to talk about The X-Files.

4. "Julia" and "Kellie" are the participants' real names, and I use them with permission as the information identifying them as the founders of the DDEB is available to anyone who visits their websites. All other participant names are pseudonyms chosen by the participants themselves.

5. In presenting data from the DDEBRP, I try to approximate the form of the original email message. To save space and preserve confidentiality, I have removed the message headers, lines from previous messages that were included in the body of the reply, and any signatures. I provide ellipses between messages if I have removed any text from the thread. [Additionally, the MFS editors have placed all of the DDEBRP quotations in a separate font to preserve the atmosphere of the Internet environment in which this research was conducted.]

6. Dale Spender provides a fuller description of plus male/minus male logic characteristics in Man Made Language, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).

7. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York Routledge, 1992).

8. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

9. Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1996), 196.

10. In Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993) this is referred to as "classic macho."

11. Quoted in S. Moore, "Here's Looking at You, Kid!" in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, eds. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London: Women's Press, 1988): 45-59.

12. Gaylyn Studlar, "Valentino, 'Optic Intoxication,' and Dance Madness," in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993) 27-28.

13. For a detailed definition and examination of the "new man" see Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication (London: Routledge, 1996) and S. Moore, "Here's Looking at You Kid!"

14. Moore, "Here's Looking at You, Kid!," 54.

15. Barnard, Fashion as Communication.

16. Ibid., 138.

17. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 112.

18. This image, along with many others, is posted on David Duchovny Image Gallery on the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade3 website. January 2000 <http:www.ddeb3.org/images.html>.

19. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies.

20. D. Kelly, "Adonis Shrugged," Globe and Mail 26 November 1998, D6.

21. Moore, "Here's Looking at You, Kid!" 53.

22. Bronwyn Davies, "The Problem of Desire," Social Problems 37 no. 4 (November 1990): 501.

23. The use of this term invokes the widely disseminated theory proposed by Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971): 121-73.

24. For trenchant critiques of Althusser's model of subjectification see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); John Frow, "Discourse and Power," in Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Stuart Hall, "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall," Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45-60.

25. My use of "true discourse" follows Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," in The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Dorset Press, 1972): 215-37.

26. Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 78.

27. Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom, eds., introduction to Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance, and Intimacy (London: Routledge, 1997), 2.

28. Jake is the character Duchovny portrayed on the HBO series Red Shoe Diaries.

29. Harvey and Shalom, Language and Desire, 2.

30. This participant chose the pseudonym "Mrs. Hale" as a playful reference to The X-Files episode "Little Green Men," in which FBI Agent Fox Mulder uses the alias "George E. Hale." The participant is very clear that "in real life" she always uses her own last name, and not that of her husband.

31. Alice Deignan, "Metaphors of Desire," in Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance, and Intimacy, eds. Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom (London: Routledge, 1997), 34.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 30.

34. I am grateful to Lee Easton for this turn of phrase.

35. Barbara A. Schreier, introduction to Men and Women: Dressing the Part, eds. Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1989), 2.

36. Originally aired on 31 March 1995.

37. Valerie Steele, "Clothing and Sexuality," in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, eds. Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1989), 61.

38. Valerie Steele, "Appearance and Identity," in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, eds. Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1989), 20.

39. David Duchovny's "vital statistics" can be found on the Definitive David Duchovny FAQ. January 2000. <http:www.munchyn.com/dd/ddgaq.html>.

40. PSEB stands for the Patrick Stewart Estrogen Brigade, which was the first all-female electronic mailing list to be called a "brigade."

41. Barnard, Fashion as Communication.

42. See William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); Id., Count Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1986); and Id., Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988).

43. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1993), 10.

44. MUD is an acronym for "multi-user domain," and GMUK stands for "graphical multi-user konversation."

45. Steven G. Jones, introduction to Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997), 15.

46. Mark Dery, introduction to Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 3-4.

47. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1992), 164.

48. Ibid., 181.

49. Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture (Toronto: Doubleday, 1997), 59.

50. Other fan X-Files lists exist or have existed such as the Gillian Anderson Estrogen Brigade and the David Duchovny Testosterone Brigade that do produce queer gazes.