Networked Reenactments NETWORKED REENACTMENTS Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell KATIE KING Foreword by Donna Haraway duke university press Durham & London 2011 ∫ 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. In memory of days spent with my mother—Jean Anderson King—at her nursing home, where, huddling over my laptop together, we watched downloaded episodes of Boston Legal and laughed out loud— sharing ironies and contradictions of same-sex silliness. CONTENTS ix FOREWORD by Donna Haraway xv PREFACE. What Are Reenactments in This Book? xix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION. A Thick Description amid Authorships, Audiences, and Agencies in the Nineties 1 21 Nationalities, Sexualities, and Global tv highlander, xena, and meanings of european union 2 59 Science in American Life among the culture warriors 3 129 tv and the Web Come Together 4 203 Scholars and Intellectual Entrepreneurs 273 CONCLUSION. Toward a Feminist Transdisciplinary Posthumanities 301 NOTES 335 BIBLIOGRAPHY 351 INDEX FOREWORD. Donna Haraway cat’s cradle is a game of relaying patterns, of one hand, or a pair of hands, holding still to receive something from another, and then relaying by adding something new, by proposing another knot, another web. Or better, it is not the hands that give and receive exactly, but the patterns, the patterning. Cat’s cradle can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship is like that too; it is passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching. Maybe that is why Katie King is such a good partner in worlding. Over three decades, she has been that kind of partner for me, and Networked Reenactments is an invitation to readers to join in thick, collaborative patterning. Networked reenactments is her practice for sf worlding, for speculative fabulations and speculative feminisms in the big, generous knottings that open up ways to think, play, connect, distinguish, work, and live. Recently, King named ‘‘epistemologies’’ as ‘‘stories knowledges tell.’’∞ That is what Networked Reenactments does; this important book performs ‘‘stories knowledges tell’’ with great skill, in different material and concep- tual grains of detail and resolution. She shows her readers how to ask what ‘‘grain of detail’’ might mean in situated inquiries. She writes about ‘‘epis- temological melodramas’’ with verve and appreciation, and she is herself a master weaver of these grainy stories. A geometrician at heart, King thinks about whether a pattern is linearly layered or nodally networked and how that makes a difference. She appreciates, practices, and theorizes both ‘‘intensive’’ scholarship, with its demands for considerable focused and exclusive expertise, and ‘‘extensive’’ scholarship, with its powers of