Bibliographic record
Abstract
ATHENA'S DAUGHTERS: Television's New Women Warriors Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy, eds. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003; 175pp. Athena's Daughters: Television's New Women Warriors is collection of essays concerned with the rising popularity of female action heroes on television. Looking primarily at Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with chapter each on La Femme Nikita and Star Trek: Voyager, this anthology interrogates the female warrior figure and her potential to destabilize popular perceptions of patriarchal power systems. The contributors employ variety of methods to assess such possibilities, including textual analyses, historical evaluations, and ethnographic interviews. What emerges is collection of diverse yet cautiously optimistic perspectives on this trend, multifaceted depiction of how feminist storytelling is both inscribed within and simultaneously rewrites the predominantly male narrative of heroism. Female action heroes are not new to television, as Sherrie Innis shows in Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. They are the descendants of Wonder Woman, Charlie's Angels, and Agent 99, among others. The renewed feminist interest in characters like Buffy and stems from the increased visibility of the woman warrior figure's perplexing nature - her propensity to disrupt the paradigm of male heroism and violence and her traditionally feminine sex appeal and marketability. Although these characters often reinforce problematic stereotypes of gender, race, and sexuality, the collections editors Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy note in their introduction that this cultural trope is also a potential ally to the feminist project of reinventing the world, by aligning heroism and action with female strength and ability (p. 10). The first section focuses on the challenge Xena: Warrior Princess (X: WP) poses to ideals of Western antiquity and supremacy, through the relocation of heroism, community, and sexual power in feminine spheres. For instance, in Xena as Ancient Hero, Alison Futrell conducts close reading of the show's revisions to Aeschylus' The Eumenides, arguing that X:WP's interpretation foregrounds female authority in sharp contrast to its misogynistic disavowal in the original, rewriting Western culture's largely patriarchal foundational myths. Helen Caudill looks at online fan fiction, highlighting the fans' fascination with the program's intertwined themes of love and violence, especially as they are played out between and her companion Gabrielle. While in some ways upholding masculinist hero narratives - Xena, like male heroes, gets beautiful woman as her prize - the inscription of sexuality into female power presents news ways for the audience to construct gender in real life. The ambiguous textual copresence of female power and images of stereotypical femininity also haunts the articles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS). Particularly intriguing is the survey of male fans in 'Action, Chicks, Everything,' in which Lee Parpart, like Caudill, investigates fans' uses of and responses to television series. While most work posits BTVS's gender politics as its primary attraction for females, Parpart determines that BTVS's male audience typically views its tough women as novel part of the series' entertainment. Parpart's discovery is one variation on the anthology's recurring theme of the problematic nature of polysemy. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".