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Dark, brooding, sexually menacing, Xena, Warrior Princess' reputation as a bloodthirsty killer who "wants to write her name across history in big bloody letters" ("The Warrior Princess"), positions her as a social and sexual outlaw. Assuming characteristics of other figures of social and sexual anxiety, such as the monster and the vampire, Xena scorches across rigid gender and sexual binary oppositions. Like Bonnie Zimmerman's lesbian outlaw, warrior, and witch oxymorons (1992), the saddling of the antagonistic terms of warrior and princess in the series title suggests the multiple creative and destructive, controlled and untamed aspects of Xena's nature. With towering, beautiful women delivering explosive Hong-Kong style martial arts against men and gods alike, Xena, Warrior Princess (thereafter X:WP) provides an invitingly vast scope for the dramatization of the incoherence of cultural hierarchies of gender and sexual identities.
Armed to the hilt with historically tested adventure narratives, innovative fight scenes and feminist reworkings of popular cultural myths, X:WP is first and foremost an action/fantasy series. The show also, however, repeatedly draws on horror motifs and particular images of madness to transcend conventional television formulas and create a new cultural imaginary space with rich sources for feminist and queer role models. One of the most forceful effects of the show's use of images of horror, madness and loss of control comes from their power to resist any single logical interpretation. The ice-cool, strapping warrior woman is daunting, but the raging "lunatic with lethal combat skills" ("The Furies") is infinitely more disturbing and difficult to comprehend. Horror narratives similarly act to rob us of certainty, leaving an unrecognizable vacuity: "There is an emptiness which cannot be explained [...] where the critic wishes to understand, the horror narrative resists interpretation, numbing the critical faculty with the spectacle of the unknown" (McCracken 128).
Such resistance helps to make visible the constructed nature of culturally sanctioned social and sexual hierarchies, that are otherwise assumed to be natural and immutable. Horror's power lies in its ability to "take apart a secure sense of self" and to explore "the fragile border between identity and non-identity as well as those social and sexual bonds that reveal the limits of our autonomy" (McCracken 129). In X:WP, the appropriation of concepts and images such as...