Constance Penley

Name:	Constance Penley
Also Known As:
Occupation:	acafan
Medium:
Works:	NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America
Official Website(s):	at UCSB
Fan Website(s):
On Fanlore:	Related pages

Constance Penley is Professor of Film & Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara and a self-proclaimed "fan of slash fandom" Penley's areas of interest include feminist film theory, cultural studies, and science and technology studies. She has taught a notorious course on pornography called "Porn 101", and has written several important articles about slash and slash fandom. A large part of her book NASA/Trek: Popular science and sex in America is about slash fiction, as she cleverly indicates in the title.

Penley has gone to several Escapades conventions; in particular, she appeared at Escapade 1993 on a panel entitled "Academia and our Culture", with folklorist/media scholar Henry Jenkins, joined by fanfiction writers Shoshanna, and Meg G. She also appeared on a panel at Escapade 1998 called "Slash: a Continuation of Women's Writing" in which she discussed slash as "a continuation of women's writing, combining women's romance and the male quest romance.

She attended Escapade's 20th anniversary convention in 2010 where she appeared on a panel entitled "Academia/Fandom: Not Such Strange Bedfellows?" along with Henry Jenkins, Shoshanna, and cultural scholar/critic Anne Kustritz.

See Intergalactic Sex: Interview with Constance Penley

Notable Works

• "Brownian motion: Women, tactics, and technology. In Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, 35–161. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 1991.

• "Feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture." In Cultural studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 479–500. New York: Routledge. 1992.

• NASA/Trek: Popular science and sex in America. New York: Verso. 1997.