My name is Sheila Briggs and I'm a professor in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. Yes, I actually get paid to watch Xena and this is how it came about ...
I do an unusual mixture of stuff in an academic world which is highly specialized--feminism, theories of time and history, nineteenth-century German theology, early Christianity. Most of my friends, even those with Ph.D.s, fall asleep within five seconds of my beginning to tell them about my research. In fact, I have the same problem! At the moment, I'm writing a book about the early Christian apostle Paul and his attitudes towards women and Judaism, to both of which he did a disservice. When I got bogged down in an especially erudite issue of interpretation, I used to go to the TV and turn on the daytime talk shows for relief. Five minutes of "Women who have slept with their mother's boyfriend and now feel they want a sex change" was usually enough to send me back in horror the apostle Paul. Until I discovered Xena ...
What Xena offers is an outrageous and playful alternative to the patriarchal past of the ancient world which I normally study. The show takes the history, myths and symbols of the ancient world and turns them upside down, inside out and just about every other way. It does this with a feminist twist (achievemenst which historically have been attributed to men are now ascribed to Xena and other women). The series does not have a moral or religious agenda but it does explore moral situations and religious imagery. It doesn't offer its audience a pat set of answers on what life is and how we should live it. The storyline suggests, in fact, that events and situations are rarely how we first see them. Xena and Gabrielle find themselves questioning and reshaping their moral and spiritual values. To the extent that its audience gets involved in the characters and the plot, then the viewers find themselves thinking about the moral and spiritual issues raised in the stories.
So I became interested in who were the fans of the show and what were they getting out of it. As soon as I did a search of the Internet, I was made aware that the series had created a huge community of fans which communicate and collaborate with one another through the Web. The Internet transforms fan culture by allowing an interactive experience and even the makers of the series have used the opportunity to enter into electronic dialogue with their audience. Through the Internet I can study both the TV series and its viewers. Because the Internet is about interaction I thought I needed an appropriate method of research. I'm not doing a social scientific investigation of Xena fans, so I don't have to worry whether my web site, and the opinions I express there, could alter what others think and say and therefore skew my research.
If you haven't guessed already, I'm planning a book about Xena: Warrior Princess which looks at how moral ideas and religious imagery circulate in contemporary popular culture and what are the implications for how we conceive the past. I admit quite unashamedly that this web site is a research tool, but also (I hope) fun and thought-provoking. I have noticed that when I talk about my Xena research project, others no longer doze off after seconds. I get a few raised eyebrows, but I suspect that even among my academic colleagues this will be one book they will read rather than just put in a footnote.
