Constance Penley

Interview with Constance Penley

Jon Cruz (JC): Let’s start by talking about your background in rhetoric and film studies, and your consistent effort over the years to merge theories of representation and visual analysis with feminist theory. I see your work first emerging in ways that correspond to or parallel early cultural studies from the Birmingham School, but not in immediate dialogue with what was coming to be known as ‘cultural studies’. Your interests in feminist and psychoanalytic theory weren’t central to the very earliest formation of Birmingham cultural studies, though such interests would soon emerge in ways that were contentious as well as constitutive of ensuing developments in cultural studies. Did your coming out of rhetoric incline you toward cultural studies? Constance Penley Good question! I remember sometime in the early 1990s I was (CP): surprised to see myself being cited as ‘a prominent cultural studies critic’. Though I was aware of the Birmingham School in the 1970s and 1980s, I and the other members of the Camera Obscura collective felt more aligned with the semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis and film theory of Screen and French film theory of the time – and our objects of study were experimental film, classical Hollywood cinema and film theory itself. But when I started to work on television, popular culture, popular science and even noncinematic imaging technologies, and when my research took a more ethnographic bent toward studying the creativity of female media fans, people started seeing me as adopting a cultural studies approach, an interdisciplinary study of language, culture and power. But I didn’t know I was ‘doing cultural studies’. That’s when I realized