Constance Penley

Biography

Constance Penley

Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Founding Director and Co-Director Emeritus of the Carsey-Wolf Center there. She holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric from UC Berkeley and an M.Ed. in English Arts Education from the University of Florida, and studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and the leading feminist media journal, which recently reached its 100th issue.

She is recognized as a founder of four media subfields: feminist film theory, porn studies, fan studies, and environmental media. Her research areas are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She has authored, edited, or co-edited ten books.

Projects

NASA/TREK

NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (Verso, 1997), her most cited single-authored book.

Penley reads the American space program and Star Trek fandom as two accounts of the same subject, then declines to rank them. Her stated aim is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.

The material includes NASA's own promotional apparatus, the Challenger disaster, jokes circulated after it, and slash fiction written by fans. Her earlier article "Spaced Out: Remembering Christa McAuliffe" appeared in Camera Obscura in 1992.

Fan studies

Penley's work on slash fiction, women writing romantic and sexual relationships between male characters, established fan production as a legitimate research object and treated it as a form of vernacular theory rather than as symptom. This work sits alongside Henry Jenkins's on participatory culture and is one of the foundations of the field. See We Are Wizards for a later documentary treatment of the same territory.

Technoculture

Technoculture, co-edited with Andrew Ross (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and reviewed in American Literature by a group including Katherine Hayles. One of the collections that established cultural studies approaches to technology in the American academy.

The Visible Woman

The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science, co-edited with Paula A. Treichler and Lisa Cartwright (NYU Press, 1998). On how medical and scientific imaging technologies produce the bodies they claim to record.

Public art projects

PrimetimeArt by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place, first commissioned by MOCA Los Angeles in 1995 as In the Name of the Place, and rebooted by Red Bull Studios in New York in 2016 as TOTAL PROOF. Also Biospheria: an environmental opera.

She won the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award for "DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea," and co-produced HBO's Porn 101 with Katie Morgan, work she describes as continuing a dual research focus on popular science and popular sex.

Relevance

Penley's method is the useful part for this wiki. She treats fan production, jokes, and pornography as knowledge with its own structure rather than as raw material to be interpreted from above, which is close to an emic position applied to media rather than to a society.

The NASA/TREK argument also bears directly on how technology gets understood publicly. NASA's account of itself and the fan account of Star Trek are both stories people tell about space, and Penley's point is that the official one is not exempt from being read as a story.

Books

• The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
• NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America. Verso, 1997.
• Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Routledge, 1988.
• Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, co-ed. with Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom. University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
• Technoculture, co-ed. with Andrew Ross. University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
• Male Trouble, co-ed. with Sharon Willis. University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
• The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science, co-ed. with Paula A. Treichler and Lisa Cartwright. NYU Press, 1998.
• The Analysis of Film by Raymond Bellour, ed. Indiana University Press, 2000.
• The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, co-ed. with Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young. The Feminist Press, 2013. Translated into German and Spanish.
• Teaching Pornography, forthcoming. A memoir of thirty years learning to teach a subject many thought could not and should not be taught.

Further Reading

• We Are Wizards
• Collaborative Reality
• The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader
• Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
• How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway
• The Cyborg Handbook
• Chris Gray
• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
• Cyborgs and Citadels
• Critical Play: Radical Game Design
• Anthropology Through Science Fiction
• The Cybercultures Reader
• Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series
• Emic Approach

External Links

• Faculty page, UC Santa Barbara
• Carsey-Wolf Center