Kicking Ass and Taking Names, or We Love Dana Scully

Or, I do, at least. There is a new X-Files movie coming out later this week. I intend to see it, although I admit I worry it won't be as good as I want it to be.

I came across this post on Feministing today. My experience was similar to that writer's. The X-Files appeared on TV when I was 14, and it ended my senior year of college. I grew up watching that show, and I totally wanted to be Scully when I grew up. Minus the abducted-by-aliens bit, and the infertility bit, and the cancer bit.



Actually, now that I consider it, my attachment to the Scully character is like my attachment to the Roslin character. I love the fact that they exist, I would not want to live either of their lives, and now and again the respective narratives in which they are enmeshed do things that make me go squick. Yes, I learned a new word via posting about fanfic. Squick. Squick. Squick.

I talked about the parallels between these two ages ago, and I won't go into it again. I am not the only person to whom this has occurred, either. Again, my failure to take notes kicks my ass, and I can't find the place I saw this, but someone had done a play by play comparison of the two characters. Totally worked.

On the subject of character pairings, I read some Scully slash recently. Scully/Monica, specifically. For whatever reason, it didn't grab me. Might have been the story, might have been the weather, might have been the fact that I was mostly thinking about Maryland that day and dissertation revision is not conducive to losing oneself in worlds of imagination. Charles Calvert is just not a turn-on, on many, many levels.

Or, it might have been my own personal relationship to the X-Files narrative. I absorbed that show in my mid to late teens (I didn't watch it much during college, and returned only in the last season, to see the end) and at that point in my life, it had not occurred to me that I could find other girls hot. There was no element of desire in my fangirldom. For whatever reason, the 'wow, hot' part of my brain and the 'Scully is awesome' part of my brain are non-overlapping components of a Venn diagram. Roslin, as dedicated readers may have guessed, is a different case.

But anyway. This post is verging into squickdom.

The X-Files also coincided with my growth as a feminist. I had read The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex at thirteen or fourteen, and my up-bringing was very much influenced by the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. Which was a great thing for me. But I had the fortune, or misfortune, never to run into any serious difficulties due to gender while I was growing up. My feminism came a little too easily.

But in college, for the first time in my life, I had one of those moments. A tenured professor at my undergraduate alma mater, Snide University, laughed at something I said one day during a discussion of my plans for graduate school, and told me, "you're too pretty to be a history graduate student." The fuck you that I did not utter that day still trembles on my lips whenever I think about that.

It was after this, and a few other such incidents, that I realized why Scully was such a kick-ass character.

So, rock on, Starbuck.