“Your Sister in St. Scully”: An Electronic Community of Female Fans of The X-Files

Abstract

They have been described as avid, extreme, hardcore, freakish, and obsessed. Amidst the vast subculture (including a virtual university) devoted to the intricacies of the Fox network drama The X-Files, online fans of the television show, which began its eight-season run in 1993, have designed hundreds of thousands of Web pages devoted to the series.1 Fan cultures and communities, and the formation of fan groups by women in particular, have received more attention in scholarly circles recently. For example, Janice Radway and Helen Taylor have explored women's subversive use of romance novels and Gone with the Wind, respectively, for several years, Nancy K. Baym has examined how a rhetori-online discussion forum of soap opera aficionados. Similarly, the well-known work of Camille Bacon-Smith, John Fiske, and Henry Jenkins has drawn attention to the dynamics of television fandom and how fans create new discourses out of their fascination with specific series.2 They focus especially on the science fiction community: “cons” (the shorthand for conventions), online bulletin boards and list-servs, fanzines, and the genre of slash (writing involving same-sex relationships).3

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