Gender Politics: The Next Generation
Jul. 27th, 2010 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mhuzzellApologies if you've already read this rant/ramble. I put it up on my "real blog" ages ago, but apparently no one reads that one? Anyway, I've been pretty non-interactive on the internets recently. Wish I could say I've been doing stuff out in the Real World, but actually I've just been reading more physical books, as opposed to pixels. But I figured I should post something to let y'all know I'm still (sort of) around.
I've been watching a lot of Star Trek recently. (Don't laugh.) I find it pretty nostalgic, even having seldom actively watched it as a child, since my mother's been a Trekkie ever since the days of Captain Kirk and the first interracial kiss on television. Not that I ever watched Captain Kirk, since there were always new episodes of new series, and the ones I associate with childhood are those from the early '90s: The Next Generation -- Captain Picard, Geordi La Forge, Data. It is cheesy and wholesome and sweet, but with space aliens.
Something's been bothering me, though, and it's not just the utterly nonsensical physics, or the ideological mallets banging through the plot of every show. Well, related to the latter. Closely related.
See, the original Star Trek was intentionally cast with a crew that was racially and sexually diverse, the better to display Gene Roddenberry's vision of a socially egalitarian future society. See above: first interracial kiss on television (though for some reason the many inter-species kisses did not cause such a stir... presumaby because the actress playing Uhura really was black, while all the ubiquitously blonde aliens were obviously just safe white girls with a little bit of facial putty.) I read somewhere that in the pilot episode, the First Officer was played by a woman, though this was changed for the series because network execs didn't think a 1960s audience would find a female commander plausible. This changed over the course of the series, of course, with Star Trek: Voyager even having a female captain. (And, for what it's worth, in TNG we are introduced to a number of female admirals in Star Fleet.)
So as far as women having the same economic power as men, the show does okay -- though, I'm not sure whether 'economic' is an appropriate term here, since the show seems to operate in a (blessedly) post-capitalist society where money does not exist. In terms of sexual politics, however, the 24th Century appears to be gloomily like the 20th -- and, though the makers of the show may perhaps be forgiven for their lack of prescience of their own near futures -- to have even lost some of the advances of the 21st. I am talking, of course, about gay characters. Or, more accurately, the total lack thereof.
It's hard to criticise something for an absence. It could be incidental. However, it's pretty hard to stomach a show that tries so hard to be 'inclusive' in the '90s Liberal sense of the word, with its many Powerful Female Characters and racially diverse crew (albeit mostly-white main cast -- and, for that matter, a crew only 'racially diverse' by the standards of the United States, not the globe. But nevermind.) Homosexuality seems conspicuously absent. And it's not like they haven't given themselves opportunities to talk about it.
In one episode, Dr. Crusher, one of the ship's Powerful Women, falls in love with a visiting science officer, who turns out to actually be a symbiotic parasite living inside the body of the 'person' she had fallen for, and when that body dies it has to be temporarily housed in Commander Riker's body, while it awaits a new host body from its home planet. Yet, through a bit of personal angst, Dr. Crusher finds that she can still love this person, even when it is in the form of her (male) colleague, and not the body she originally fell for, because love conquers all!. Skip to the end: Dr. Crusher sits in a room awaiting Her Love, which has just been installed in a new host. A woman enters. Female: INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLE! So she breaks it off. She, uh, just can't deal with all of this constant changing of her lover's body -- despite the lack of any indication that this body will last less than a good few decades; the other had only been lost due to a freak accident. The End.
Another episode (117: 'The Outcast' -- Spoiler Alert!) seems like a clear allegory for the repression of sexual 'deviants' in our own society. The Enterprise meets a totally androgynous race of aliens, one of whom feels like she is, deep inside, really a woman (and thus, of course, falls in love with Commander Riker). This genderedness is heavily repressed in her society; she is discovered, and psychologically "reprogrammed" to "fix" her gender back to neutral. But... the episode does nothing with this potential allegory, and if anything, allows it to re-enforce the heteronormativity that permeates the entire show.
Because, of course, it's not the lack of any non-heterosexual characters that makes the show heteronormative. That, as mentioned, could simply be incidental -- in the same way that there are not representatives of every human ethnicity among the crew of the Enterprise; identity politics can get a bit silly that way, and I want to be clear that that's not what I'm criticising. Rather, it is the fact that, as evidenced by their conversation, the questions they ask alien races, and the questions that alien races (even androgynous races!) ask them, all characters are automatically assumed to be heterosexual. The mere possibility of a female being attracted to other females, or a male to other males, is never broached. Not even once. Granted, I have a few more seasons of TNG left to watch, and I haven't seen most of Deep Space Nine or Voyager... but given the Very Traditional nature of what few actual relationships and marriages exist in Star Trek thus far, I don't have much hope.
ETA: Salon article on the same theme: http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/06/30/gay_trek/print.html
I've been watching a lot of Star Trek recently. (Don't laugh.) I find it pretty nostalgic, even having seldom actively watched it as a child, since my mother's been a Trekkie ever since the days of Captain Kirk and the first interracial kiss on television. Not that I ever watched Captain Kirk, since there were always new episodes of new series, and the ones I associate with childhood are those from the early '90s: The Next Generation -- Captain Picard, Geordi La Forge, Data. It is cheesy and wholesome and sweet, but with space aliens.
Something's been bothering me, though, and it's not just the utterly nonsensical physics, or the ideological mallets banging through the plot of every show. Well, related to the latter. Closely related.
See, the original Star Trek was intentionally cast with a crew that was racially and sexually diverse, the better to display Gene Roddenberry's vision of a socially egalitarian future society. See above: first interracial kiss on television (though for some reason the many inter-species kisses did not cause such a stir... presumaby because the actress playing Uhura really was black, while all the ubiquitously blonde aliens were obviously just safe white girls with a little bit of facial putty.) I read somewhere that in the pilot episode, the First Officer was played by a woman, though this was changed for the series because network execs didn't think a 1960s audience would find a female commander plausible. This changed over the course of the series, of course, with Star Trek: Voyager even having a female captain. (And, for what it's worth, in TNG we are introduced to a number of female admirals in Star Fleet.)
So as far as women having the same economic power as men, the show does okay -- though, I'm not sure whether 'economic' is an appropriate term here, since the show seems to operate in a (blessedly) post-capitalist society where money does not exist. In terms of sexual politics, however, the 24th Century appears to be gloomily like the 20th -- and, though the makers of the show may perhaps be forgiven for their lack of prescience of their own near futures -- to have even lost some of the advances of the 21st. I am talking, of course, about gay characters. Or, more accurately, the total lack thereof.
It's hard to criticise something for an absence. It could be incidental. However, it's pretty hard to stomach a show that tries so hard to be 'inclusive' in the '90s Liberal sense of the word, with its many Powerful Female Characters and racially diverse crew (albeit mostly-white main cast -- and, for that matter, a crew only 'racially diverse' by the standards of the United States, not the globe. But nevermind.) Homosexuality seems conspicuously absent. And it's not like they haven't given themselves opportunities to talk about it.
In one episode, Dr. Crusher, one of the ship's Powerful Women, falls in love with a visiting science officer, who turns out to actually be a symbiotic parasite living inside the body of the 'person' she had fallen for, and when that body dies it has to be temporarily housed in Commander Riker's body, while it awaits a new host body from its home planet. Yet, through a bit of personal angst, Dr. Crusher finds that she can still love this person, even when it is in the form of her (male) colleague, and not the body she originally fell for, because love conquers all!. Skip to the end: Dr. Crusher sits in a room awaiting Her Love, which has just been installed in a new host. A woman enters. Female: INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLE! So she breaks it off. She, uh, just can't deal with all of this constant changing of her lover's body -- despite the lack of any indication that this body will last less than a good few decades; the other had only been lost due to a freak accident. The End.
Another episode (117: 'The Outcast' -- Spoiler Alert!) seems like a clear allegory for the repression of sexual 'deviants' in our own society. The Enterprise meets a totally androgynous race of aliens, one of whom feels like she is, deep inside, really a woman (and thus, of course, falls in love with Commander Riker). This genderedness is heavily repressed in her society; she is discovered, and psychologically "reprogrammed" to "fix" her gender back to neutral. But... the episode does nothing with this potential allegory, and if anything, allows it to re-enforce the heteronormativity that permeates the entire show.
Because, of course, it's not the lack of any non-heterosexual characters that makes the show heteronormative. That, as mentioned, could simply be incidental -- in the same way that there are not representatives of every human ethnicity among the crew of the Enterprise; identity politics can get a bit silly that way, and I want to be clear that that's not what I'm criticising. Rather, it is the fact that, as evidenced by their conversation, the questions they ask alien races, and the questions that alien races (even androgynous races!) ask them, all characters are automatically assumed to be heterosexual. The mere possibility of a female being attracted to other females, or a male to other males, is never broached. Not even once. Granted, I have a few more seasons of TNG left to watch, and I haven't seen most of Deep Space Nine or Voyager... but given the Very Traditional nature of what few actual relationships and marriages exist in Star Trek thus far, I don't have much hope.
ETA: Salon article on the same theme: http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/06/30/gay_trek/print.html
