If only Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny could only save each other from making bad career moves...anyway, I was always partial to Diana Fowley myself (was she any less feminist?), but she won't be in the new movie.

haha...I'm actually watching the entire series on DVD - attempting at least to remember what it was all about before we go see the movie and I was thinking the EXACT same thing yesterday. There are a few episodes that are about her sexuality and the vulnerability of women, but the great majority of them are about a woman bringing intellectual rigor to a situation. On the other hand, my husband says you can look at it as if the female character is a big nag spoiling all of the male characters fun. But that's the way of the patriarchy...damned if you do...damned if you don't.

While the show was on air when I was a kid, it was a family tradition for all of us to gather around the TV and watch X-Files together. I was practically raised on that show, and I always loved Scully! Though I don't count her as an explicit role model, I wouldn't be surprised if she influenced my love for scientific discovery and investigation.

Holy crap, I was freaking fanatical about this show back in the day. Seriously, any Rolling Stone/TV Guide/Entertainment Weekly with even a hint of Scully or Mulder HAD to be mine.
I hope they do at least an OK job with this movie. And DON'T make Dana and Fox fall in love!
As far as feminist hero goes, I could totally see it. She was also a heroine to skeptics everywhere.

loveloveLOVE agent scully!

(and mulder and x-files altogheter). what a well-written show. i miss it.

The X-Files was a show for a different time. Unlike women in other sci-fi shows past and present, Scully dressed professionally - no skin-tight clothes or exposed cleavage that would get you fired in real life. She had opinions and she stuck to them. She was educated and confident. She could shoot just as well as Mulder, and didn't hesitate to tackle her fair share of bad guys. AWESOME.

I don't think there were many people as obsessed with this show as I was, back in the day. Scully was my idol, for a very long time, and it wasn't till now, with the appearance of the new movie, and all this analysis coming out, that i'm really starting to realize how much she shaped my early connections to feminism. As my best friend said when we talked about all these Scully-feminism articles on the blogosphere, "damn, we grew up with a badass."

Hmmm, I liked the show and I liked Scully. But I would never label her feminist.

Towards the end it got painful watching her justify and enable every insane thing Mulder did. And she was always endangered at some point with the end result of her beauty being thrown into the mix.

But she was better than most female characters on TV. That I will agree on.

You know I used to watch this show religiously and it isn't until this post that pointed out Scully as a feminist did I see her as such...

i was surprised to learn it was gillian anderson who began the craze of women posing in thieir underwear in "lad's mags" back in the 1990's. maybe she wanted to get away from the image of scully?

I'm a junior in high school, and just discovered X-files earlier this year. My boyfriend was actually the one who was into it- and had bought all the seasons. :P I've been slowly making my way through all the DVD sets, and it is hands-down the best show I've ever seen. Scully is one of the only TV characters that really makes me proud to be a woman. It's awesome that she's the one who has the medical background, and gets down and dirty with autopsies and the like. haha-- So refreshing and empowering as compared to getting down and dirty at the mall, don't you think?

I'm excited too that some people might rediscover the series and that a new generation of young girls might be exposed to one of the most intensely awesome women ever to grace the screen. I was just a wee one when the show was on TV, and only realized when I came back to it a year ago how much it actually affected me. Now that's good television.

That said, I'm a little surprised that everyone's painting the show with the Wide Feminist Brush - there are a whole whack of things about the show, and especially about how her character is written, that are actually pretty nasty. If anyone here knows their episodes (and I feel like you might), I blogged recently on the details.

The short argument is, almost all of the flaws she did have were tied pretty closely to stereotypical views of women, and I think most of the places where her character did fail to be convincing happened when the show's writers were forced to give her a private aspect that they wanted to treat as gendered.

I'd love to be off-base about this - other than the Simpsons, I've given this show more hours of my life than any other - but, I don't know. I love the things Rebecca Traister and Starzki6 love, but I still think there are things to be critical about. Maybe I'm asking too much.

I never actually counted her as one of my role models, but the character must of had an impact on me because I watched the show religiously when I was a preteen. I know things The X Files, MTV's Daria, and the comedy of Janeane Garofalo shaped me greatly while I was growing up simply because that is what I was exposed to. Thank God.

to chime in with my own blog post, i also wrote about ms. dana scully recently, along with two other feminst-y 90's tv characters. my blog is mostly fashion-related but i usually veer off topic.

ripittoshreds.blogspot.com

I just watched the movie last night and it was AWESOME!

Dr. Scully kicks total ass (and still wins all her fights).