Gripla - 20.12.2016, Side 309

309
then, was the model? I did a lot of re-reading of the texts and eventually
came up with what, I realize in retrospect, was a project statement for
work I would do in the coming years.
to the extent, I wrote in that book review, that there was a social binary
in early Iceland as represented in the texts we have, it was between strong
and weak – the strong including able-bodied free men and the exceptional
woman, and the weak including slaves, old men, most women, and chil-
dren. What informs the norse material is, then, not so much a male-female
dichotomy as a strong-weak continuum on which gender is only one of
several operative considerations. this model implies a single standard of
behavior, a system that that largely privileged the male but was at the same
time “a system in which, because the strong woman was not inhibited by
a theoretical ceiling above which she could not rise, and the weak man not
protected by a theoretical floor below which he could not fall, the potential
for gender overlap in the social hierarchy was always present.” that the
sagas are manifestly fascinated with overlap scenarios is a point on which
I think we would all agree.
My research in the following years took up tropes in which that logic
was on display: the maiden warrior tradition; the whetting and lamenting
tradition as it played out over gender lines; the legal provision to the effect
that for certain purposes, brotherless daughters could become legal sons—
and so on. I wrote an article and then another and was starting to imagine
a book on the subject when two things happened.
one was that I discovered exploitation-horror cinema and realized that
this world too was governed by a strong-weak continuum that was on
constant and flamboyant display. (By exploitation horror I mean films like
slasher, rape-revenge, and occult movies of the lowest, trashiest sort—not
Hollywood movies, but what are sometimes called no-budget or garage
movies, the kind that showed at midnight in really bad theaters; were
seen mostly by boys and young men; and were not reviewed or publicly
discussed and were thus unknown to most adults, including film reviewers,
film theorists, even many filmmakers.) I was stunned by the first slasher
movie I saw – of course by its shock effects, but also by the way it upended
standard industry practices and film-theory truisms about gendered audi-
ence identification.
the second thing that happened about then was that I met my Berkeley
SAME FRAME