Stories for [Boys] Girls: Female Fans Read The X-Files

This article is a discussion of the ways that meaning is made by female fans of the (once) popular American television series, The X-Files. The findings are based on a year long ethnography case study with members of 3 private e-mail lists ostensibly dedicated to the former lead actor: The David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades. I argue that the interpretative practices of the participants, in the form of interaction on a list set up for research purposes, were imbricated with performances of both normative and oppositional femininities. Specifically, I examine the ways that the female participants worked to gain shared pleasures from texts produced predominantly by men for men. Two gendered communal practices are examined in detail in this article-"identification" with the characters and the reading of romantic story lines into the existing texts. I also consider the classed practice of reading the primary texts critically and the collective narratives produced as a result.