Harbinger of Death or Beacon of Hope? Imagining Feminist and Queer Futures in Battlestar Galactica

By Hannah Moulton Belec

B.A. in Communication, May 2006, George Mason University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 20, 2012

Thesis directed by

Jennifer Christine Nash Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women’s Studies Todd Ramlow Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies Dedication

To Jenny Gonzalez Perdomo—it doesn’t take much imagining to know that your feminist future would have been bright.

ii Acknowledgements

So many people helped me get through the past two years, which have been the most stressful but most rewarding of my life. My very best friend, Elizabeth Gordon, pushed me to pursue grad school when I thought I wasn’t good enough. My friends in the GW

Graduate Feminists kept me sane and kept me laughing. My thesis adviser, Jen Nash, calmed me down when I came to her with disastrous drafts. And my thesis reader, Todd Ramlow, assured me that my ideas weren’t useless—even when they involved Mr. Darcy—and matched my enthusiasm for the amazing show that inspired this thesis. Liz Bolton gave me her invaluable advice, flexibility, and friendship. Callie Shutters commiserated as only another film studies scholar can, and she provided a sweet sister’s encouragement when I was most unsure of myself. And a man I don’t remember meeting, my great-grandfather

Hilton Hoyle Cary, helped make my graduate studies financially possible. Papa, thanks for giving me the chance to pursue this feminist degree, and thank you to the Scottish Rite for being his proxy.

But most of all, I need to thank the man who introduced me to Battlestar Galactica and, over the past two years, cooked me countless meals, ran most of my errands, washed all of my clothes, and consoled me through at least a half-dozen emotional meltdowns. I never could have or would have finished this thesis if it weren’t for my dear husband, Eric Belec.

Thanks for being the non-normative male half of what I read as our queer relationship.

iii Abstract

Harbinger of Death or Beacon of Hope? Imagining Feminist and Queer Futures in Battlestar Galactica

This project uses the 2004–09 TV series Battlestar Galactica to explore how science fiction helps audiences grapple with feminist issues and imagine more utopian worlds.

Drawing on feminist film theory, cyborg feminism, and queer theory, this paper reads queer and feminist resistance into Battlestar Galactica using fan analysis and original critique that uncovers the non-normative potential in the characters’ gender expressions and heterosexual and homosocial relationships.

iv Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

Reimagining Battlestar Galactica and Feminist Film Analysis 1

Queering Cylons and Soldiers 16

Cruising the Universe for Feminist and Queer Futures 45

Sine Qua Non 69

Works Cited 75

v Chapter 1 Reimagining Battlestar Galactica and Feminist Film Analysis

y the time Battlestar Galactica (BSG) aired its fourth season in 2009, the science

fiction show was reaching an average of 2.3 million viewers per episode.1 B Pictures of the cast posed in an homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper splashed across the pages of countless newspapers, magazines, and websites, accompanying feverish analysis and speculation about how the series would end. Would the weary, fugitive fleet that fans had followed for years finally find Earth? Would the Hellenic and Judeo-

Christian themes inform the answers to the enigmas of the show’s mythology? And who the frak was the fifth Cylon?

Although it took me a while to get on the bandwagon, by the time the fourth season of BSG was airing, I too was hooked and had caught up on the miniseries pilot, the background movie Razor, and seasons one, two, and three. In the painful year between the airing of the first half of season four and the last half—a result of the Writer’s Guild strike of

2007—I honestly was scared I would die before seeing the end of the series. Though that particular thought process was probably more a function of my neuroses than my fandom, needless to say, I was and am a huge fan of the series. I even dressed up as BSG’s badass lady fighter pilot Starbuck for Halloween 2011—complete with extra sets of push-ups leading up to the big day. Part of what drew me to the show, and what continues to draw me, are the ways that it expands acceptable gender expressions through its characters. But it’s also the provocative religious and supernatural mysteries, the family drama, the imperfect

1 According to a March 29, 2009, post on the ratings website TV by the Numbers, tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/ 2009/03/24/battlestar-galactica-finale-blasts-away-the- competition/15054

1 characters, and the sheer number of awesome women onscreen. And, after a lot of analysis, I now realize that part of the reason I love the show so much is because of the way that it incorporates and wrestles with feminist social and political issues—and not always progressively.

But I wasn’t always this at peace with my fandom. At certain points in the past few years, I’ve had trouble articulating whether I was even allowed, as a feminist media critic, to be a true fan of a show that is—according to my own analysis—at times not feminist enough and at times not feminist at all. My readings of the show have become more vexed as my knowledge of feminist and media theory deepens. This negotiation of the show is couched in a complicated mix of opposition, pleasure, and reinterpretation. And I’m not the only one engaged in such negotiations. This project is an answer to the questions that I kept finding myself asking after I had conducted 50-plus pages of scathing analysis for graduate school assignments that pronounced BSG just another postmodern, postfeminist text that upheld rather than subverted gender, racial, and sexual norms. Why do I, and other discerning feminist and LGBT media critics, still love this show? Am I allowed to love a show that feminist film theory indicates is regressive? Is BSG doing something for audiences that feminist analysis couldn’t show me?

Thus, this thesis is a labor of love that will addresses the tensions and contradictions that feminist cultural theorists encounter in relation to texts that, despite their sexist shortcomings, give us pleasure and allow us to engage in productive political imagining. As a feminist critic, I’ve gone through the phases that most students seem to go through after they start their feminist educations, popular or academic. First, you realize that sexism is everywhere. If you’re like me, you go back to school to learn the fanciest ways possible to say “that’s sexist,” and you deploy your arsenal ruthlessly. All of your old favorite movies

2 and shows are, as bell hooks might say, just upholding white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Even the progressive movies and shows that you like are ultimately, below the surface, just apolitical, shallow versions of the same old stories—independent women are miserable and lonely, rape victims are asking for it, old women are jealous hags, female sexuality is dangerous, queer women don’t exist, black women are hypersexual, and everyone else is probably somehow either discounted, silenced, eroticized, or exoticized.

This is certainly the mental journey I’ve taken with my favorite texts, including my favorite television show from the past few years—and the one that seemed to brim with so much progressive and feminist potential—Battlestar Galactica. The “reimagined” series—what

Creator and Executive Producer Ron Moore calls the 2004 show instead of a remake of the original one-season show from 1978—does gesture toward a more progressive, post-gender world. Just a few examples of these gestures in the show’s narrative include a pragmatic woman president, unisex bunks and bathrooms within the military, a big cast that is about half women and not all white, plenty of women officers in the Colonial fleet—including an admiral who outranks our patriarch leader Bill Adama—and using the term “sir” to refer to women as well as men in military power. But I’ve argued before that, ultimately, the dynamic women characters are punished for deviating from maternal femininity and that the show’s gestures toward a more progressive feminist politics ultimately just defer to and reinforce patriarchal authority.

And although I still stand by my readings, I’m having a harder time dismissing BSG’s politics that quickly anymore, especially when I see it inspiring as much discussion as it does in feminist and queer communities. Clearly, all viewers have complex relationships with the films and shows that they watch—they accept, enjoy, and perhaps feel empowered by certain aspects while they dismiss others. They can even identify and disidentify parts of themselves

3 with parts of the characters onscreen, as Jose Muñoz describes feeling about Bette Davis movies when he was a child (Disidentifications 15 ). It’s true that we all have these individualized, and sometimes collective, responses to all sorts of texts. But BSG is a different animal for me than some of the other shows I enjoy (or love to hate, as the case may be): Glee, Frasier, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Parks and Recreation, The Bachelor, the first halves of

Law and Order that I catch at the gym. And it’s different from my favorite movies—The

Graduate, Trainspotting, Pride and Prejudice, The Goonies—even though I’m ambivalent about them, too. The way the show engages with and inspires critique of current and future gender roles sets it apart. As I’ve often heard the show described, BSG depicts an often bleak reality of how you would expect we flawed humans to react and behave in dire situations. So, as

Patricia Melzer describes, the show’s setting in what we assume, in the beginning, is a near future, makes it an intriguing case study in what gender, race, and sexual relations can look like in the future (11). And because of its ensemble cast and open-ended moral stances, BSG invites us to critique the politics of now as well as the politics of our assumed democratic, egalitarian future.

BSG is also set apart because of its format as a sort of hybrid of film and television— its sheer volume of hours is much longer than a film would be, but unlike most other TV shows, BSG’s cancellation was driven by a planned end after four seasons because the story was “always meant to have a beginning, a middle, and finally, an end.”2 Thus, it bred a fervent devotion that spread over five years, teased out further than it would have been because of the Writers Guild of America strike. The hype was intense, and we were all waiting with bated breath for the 10-episode finale, which was aired a full year after the first

2 See Denise Martin’s May 31, 2007, LA Times piece latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2007/05/say_it_aint_fra.html. The statement from Creator and Executive Producer Ron Moore emphasized ending the show “on our own terms,” as a planned end rather than a response to dwindling viewership or interest. 4 half of the season. But this kind of drawn-out story, especially one that poses such series- long existential questions that it tries to answer in the last few episodes, inspired intense anticipation that didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, just end when the final episode aired in March of 2009. I think that this intensity is part of what keeps fans engaging with this text five years after the fact. It keeps us thinking about the things we love, hate, and find useful about imagining a future where apparent gender and LGB (there are no stated trans characters in

BSG) equality depends on investing more in a system very much like the American one.

Thus, the ambivalence that BSG conveys for me and for other viewers is something that we still invoke, feel, and discuss. Countless near-strangers have introduced themselves to me at parties when they hear that my thesis is about BSG. They come ask about it and launch into the moral questions, the mythical enigmas, the interpretations—they want to share theirs, and they want to hear mine. I’ve never met someone who has watched even a single episode not get sucked in, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have strong feelings about the show and what it meant. These personal interactions, along with the quality and quantity of what I’ve seen written about the show inside and outside academia, tell me that

BSG is a special kind of text, and I attribute its popularity, cultural relevance, and feminist potential to its open-endedness and the fact that it tackles social issues in a way that challenges viewers’ assumptions and forces them into ambivalence.

Kobena Mercer’s work helps me think about this textual ambivalence, by which I mean more than just mixed feelings. I find myself in a similar position as Mercer was in when he reconsidered his critiques of Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes, revising his original take in light of viewing them in a different context. He talks about the “structure of feeling” that is shared across authors, texts, and readers that are “always contingent, context bound, and historically specific” and that this feeling allows for a range of different readings of the

5 same text (189). He argues that, although Mapplethorpe’s nude photos of black men can be read as upholding the white male gaze, on second thought he sees the photos’ potential subversion in centering a homoerotic white male gaze, which is still marginalized for its queerness, in the context of fine arts and for depicting black men at all in the classically respected genre of nude art. By so viscerally depicting this apparent contradiction— potentially racist upholding of stereotypes of black men’s hypersexuality juxtaposed to the classical form of art portraits—the question that the art begs is thrown back to the reader, which forces the viewer to actively engage with the message, even though it’s potentially uncomfortable to do so (192). He also identifies with both the depicted subjects, as a black man, and the viewer, as a desiring gay subject (193). Because of this ambivalence in the potential identifications with the gaze—what he calls “ambivalent looking relations”—and with the photographs’ mixing of high and low culture, Mercer says that the photographs are open to a range of interpretations for different audiences to bring to bear (203).

In my own ambivalence toward BSG, I’m interested in acknowledging the problematic aspects of the show and my own implication in who I’m identifying with, onscreen and off, while using Mercer’s formulation of “yes I know, but …” (217). Like

Mercer in his defense of Un Chat D’Amour, I’m perfectly aware of the stereotypes, colonial apology, and looking relations that position BSG as yet another sexist piece of media. Mercer acknowledges the failings of the film he describes, but he still sees something else going on—something that can even be redeemed as a utopian fantasy. Similarly, I see something else going on here besides latent sexism. My ambivalence is deeper than an admission that

BSG can be read in several different ways (such as, on the one hand, BSG features a woman president, but on the other hand, she ends up a literal bedfellow of the patriarchal leader).

The ambivalence that I mean is a nagging sort of guilt mixed with the knowledge that, deep

6 down, this show is doing me some mental good in validating different kinds of masculinities and femininities. It’s giving marginalized audiences the same sort of validation, to which we can see feminist and queer communities testifying. But more than just redeeming the show for the pleasure that it gives me and others, my ambivalence drives me to investigate BSG’s political usefulness as a text that forces us to make sense of morally ambiguous situations and imagine what racial, gender, and sexual equality looks like.

Thus, I’ve come full circle on some of my old favorites, and especially Battlestar

Galactica, for a few reasons. I think most of us eventually find that making a summary judgment of every show or film as either strictly good or bad isn’t that useful. It’s not very fun, either. Because let’s be honest, basically everything is sexist and racist in some way—all while also upholding other forms of oppression. This project thus continues the work that

Merri Lisa Johnson describes when she says that she wants to usher in a change in the

“by-now formulaic feminist analyses” by asking what else there is to say about our complicated relationships with media (14). If it has become tiresome (and ineffective) to read all texts as just patriarchy up to its old tricks again, Johnson argues that we need to understand why some texts are still appealing to feminist viewers (16). To do that, we don’t ask whether a show is feminist or not or whether it is feminist enough, because we know that all texts now contain a mixture of feminist and anti-feminist themes (19). And we should also acknowledge that these questions aren’t useful to viewers or critics who still engage with and enjoy popular culture. We need to rethink the either/or that is so common in feminist film theory—a text is either feminist or not—and look at the more ambiguous sexual politics at play (17). The work of founding feminist film critics like Laura Mulvey was clearly part of my graduate education, and those kinds of theories have helped inspire this project. But like many critics in feminist media studies, I’m interested in getting away from

7 the pass-fail test against that essentially every cultural text will fail. More open-ended analyses can leave room to ask different kinds of questions: Why is this show popular? What anxieties does it address? How does it respond to or misinterpret feminist concerns? And how are viewers using it (Johnson 20)?

When Johnson describes this broadening of theoretical work, she mentions that queer theory is one of the tools that helps third-wave feminist media critics ask these questions. Queer theorists have also been absolutely central to addressing my ambivalence about BSG and to the framing of this project. Where I still feel that BSG fails to live up to the feminist potential it sets up, queer analysis helps redeem the show for me—often in relation to the same themes where I see its feminist potential shut down. BSG does this by showing the deviant in the otherwise assumed-normative, specifically in heterosexual relationships and in homosocial friendships. By “queer” I don’t necessarily mean LGBT themes or homoeroticism, though those representations do often come into play. In this project, I use queer to mean more broad revelations and identities that are non-normative, resist categorization, introduce potential for radical pluralism (Giffney 3), and open the doors to a future that is usually closed off and predetermined (6). Michael Warner’s rejection of the normative in The Trouble with Normal also deeply influences the conclusions of this project. In questioning the very existence of a state of normal and the benefits of pursuing sexual respectability, Warner directs us to stop seeking to belong in normativity and to instead help prove that the people who are labeled normative are still, in fact, deviant (70).

Unveiling the deviant and forcing the normal to interact with the queer destigmatizes variant sexualities and destabilizes what we think of as normativity (71). This project essentially helps prove that normativity doesn’t exist: in heterosexuality, in friendship, in LGBT relationships. And of course, much of The Trouble with Normal focuses on the marginalization

8 of deviant sexualities within the gay rights movement, much of which Warner argues attempts to de-sex a movement in response to the moralism of sexual shame. Thus, in proving that the normative—whether that’s homonormative, heteronormative, or otherwise—is also queer, this analysis helps assert that “we’re not pathological, but don’t think for that reason that we want to be normal” (59).

So, while it might seem strange to ignore the characters who are explicitly shown to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual in a queer analysis of BSG, my project will focus on queering the normative characters, not normalizing the queer characters. The two main characters who are gay—Admiral Helena Cain and officer Felix Gaeta—have been heavily discussed, especially in view of their potential tokenization as doomed, treacherous characters.3 But redeeming those representations isn’t part of Warner’s project, and it’s not a part of mine.

Queer theory doesn’t help me understand what is intriguing about BSG by unveiling positive representations of LGBT characters. The theory helps me instead look at relationships that we assume are normative—heterosexual love, childbearing, homosocial friendship—and it helps me find the queer in them so that the “straight” characters meet the gay ones halfway, so we can imagine BSG’s deviance, representation, politics, and progressivism outside the normative/queer dichotomy and outside of either/or. The gay characters are, in many ways, normative. And the straight characters are queer. So BSG’s politics, and its status as a feminist show, is a lot more complicated and queer than I once thought.

To explore this untapped potential in BSG, I’m giving more credence than I did before to fan readings and to my own queer analysis of the show. I’ll focus on particular feminist and LGBT fan reactions, because those are the ones that inspired me to reevaluate my own love for BSG. Seeing discerning audiences acknowledge BSG’s problems and

3 See Karen K. Burrows’ essay “The Luxury of Simply Being Human: Unwritten and Rewritten Queer Histories in Battlestar Galactica” in Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit, and Steel. 9 potentials made it OK for me to be both a fan and a feminist, because these reactions articulated the show’s promise along with its pitfalls.

If feminists or other cultural critics had to abstain from every politically murky or suspect text, we wouldn’t just be left with nothing to watch, we’d also be left without a pleasurable validation of our own identities and transgressive choices—without a tool for imagining, and perhaps inciting, political change. There might just be something politically useful about the pleasure we take from these texts and the meanings we are able to tease out of them. TV and film audiences aren’t lemmings. Lots of us who aren’t trained in theories of spectatorship came up with plenty of oppositional viewing strategies on our own4.

Critics would be condescending to think that they’re the only ones seeing the ideological messaging in sexist, racist, patriarchal, capital-loving media. Janice Radway talks about the assumption of a passive audience in her study of romance novels, Reading the

Romance. She admits that it would be easy for critics to dismiss the romance texts’ popularity by attributing it to blind false consciousness. It’s much harder to engage with the cultural work that readers are doing and how exactly they’re doing it and why (5). Radway says critics shouldn’t presume the impossibility of resistance from the start and should look at what real spectators do (for her project, readers of romance novels) and acknowledge that their comprehension of the texts is a process of meaning-making in which the reader actively interprets and reinterprets the work based on their own cultural codes and experiences (7).

She sought to find out what was “getting said” in these wildly popular texts to readers and why it was so important to them (8). Of course, giving more power to the spectator is a reaction that many critics have had to the descriptions of audiences as more passive—or at

4 I’m thinking especially of bell hooks’ “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” Manthia Diawara’s “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” and Jose Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 10 some points, more like comatose—of some of the founding texts of cultural theory and feminist film theory, works like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture

Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” or Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema.”

As Radway does, I’ll look at what is “getting said” through Battlestar Galactica from the points of view of fans who, like me, enjoy the show despite our knowledge of its feminist shortcomings. And I will argue that what is getting said through BSG is that even the paragon of sexual and gender normalcy—even the heterosexual, white-coded, military patriarchal authority—is queer. And in showing this tendency toward deviance, again and again, I’ll be doing the work that Michael Warner says we should do—to force an interaction with the queer, to “seek out queer culture, to interact with it and learn from it … to elaborate a commonly accessible world” (71).

There are obviously a lot of texts that I could have analyzed for my own and others’ ambivalence. But this project’s exploration of ambivalence and its political potential will focus on the 2004–09 remake of Battlestar Galactica for a few reasons. More than any other text I can think of, the show is nearly universally adored by mainstream critics and audiences alike, including feminist and queer audiences. The show is also, interestingly, read as progressive by mainstream critics, feminist critics, and even the show’s creators.5 Although

I’ve written analyses arguing that these aspects of the show are insufficient and unworthy of the gold-star feminist seal of approval, I—and many of my fellow critics—still see the show

5 Just a few examples include BSG star Jamie Bamber’s July 2006 interview in Out magazine, www.out.com/entertainment/2006/07/05/rocket-man?page=0,0, written by Matthew Breen; a chapter in New Decades on Political Science Fiction written by Woody Goulart and Wesley Y. Joe, p. 190; Kieran Tranter’s Law and Literature article “Frakking Toasters and Jurisprudences of Technology: The Exception, the Subject, and Techné in Battlestar Galactica” in Vol. 19, No. 1; and Hugh Hart’s January 2009 Wired article “Strong Women Steer Battlestar Galactica’s Final Voyage,” www.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/women-steer-bat; and the vast majority of essays in the BSG- dedicated anthologies that I’ll cite throughout this project. 11 as progressive because we see feminist, anti-racist, and queer things happening in BSG, along with and in spite of all the old stereotypes. I think BSG allows these interpretations more than other shows because of the social issues it wrestles with, because of its ensemble cast, and because of what Susan Douglas might call the “porous” nature of the show’s themes, meaning that it is thematically filled with moral aporias or questions that are open to interpretation (Douglas 9). These blind spots validate marginalized spectator positions and allow viewers to use the show as a space to productively imagine a world where sexism, racism, and homophobia aren’t quite so difficult to overcome. In Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with Mass Media, Douglas defends the teen-girl culture she grew up with and credits it with helping inspire and instruct the gender-rebellion that led to her own feminist awakening and that of other women’s libbers that led to the explosion of the women’s movement in the 1970s. This project will do similar reclamation work but will focus more on the queer subversion in BSG that allows for reinterpretation that indicts our current gender mores and introduces new possibilities for our social future.

One of the aspects of BSG that resonates with people, in my view, is an “idea of hope,” as Jose Muñoz describes as a critical affect and methodology. In Cruising Utopia, he talks about the productive work of engaging in a political past and future to change the present, a backward glance that allows a future vision (Cruising Utopia 186). While much of feminist activism is undercut by consumerism, apathy, or pessimism, pictures of a potentially more socially sophisticated society can give us a reason to resist the “stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 333 ). In the same way that Muñoz describes that “utopia will help embrace a politics of the here and now,” BSG foments imaginings of a more queer near-future that help us figure out how to get there at the same time as they indict our present failures. I’m interested in looking at Battlestar Galactica—a text

12 that has mobilized a diverse fan base that is doing highly engaged, resilient spectator work— as a show that encourages viewer ambivalence and in doing so inspires productive work in imagining a better future. The active viewership and meaning-making that the show inspires is inextricably linked to its deviance from normativity.

Although this project was inspired by my own viewership, it’s also part of a larger project to investigate one show’s influence on American cultural discourse at a moment when we were, and are, struggling to come to terms with the moral issues of a new, messier kind of warfare; increasing visibility of queer sexualities; high-tech reproductive technologies; and the persistence of gender and racial discrimination despite a few exceptional people’s success. And I admit in my reclamation that BSG doesn’t always address these issues fully or even adequately.

Despite seeing perfectly clearly all the things in the show that a Mulveyan feminist film theorist might argue will destroy my pleasure—including active and passive looking relations, objectification, and evidence for feminism’s obsolescence—I maintain that my experience, and that of the feminist and LGBT audiences I analyze, aren’t simply masochism. Why did BSG strike such a chord with us, and why does it continue to in online forums and at fan conventions? Why are there a half-dozen books of academic essays dedicated to BSG’s psychological, scientific, and social issues—most of which were published before the show even ended? What kind of queer or feminist work does the show inspire about our real-world politics?

I’ll explore these issues in the chapters that follow. In chapter two, I’ll take a look at the feminist and queer reappropriations and reinterpretations of BSG using articles and commentary from pop-feminist and LGBT blogs and publications, specifically Tiger

Beatdown, After Ellen, and Out magazine. These celebrations of BSG helped justify my own

13 love of BSG and helped me allow myself to love the progressivism in the show while still acknowledging its problems. Both the authors of these stories and the readers who write comments on the posts engage in complex, nuanced discussions of everything from casting, mise en scéne, religion, disability, and queerness, in addition to frequent analysis of gender and race. These blogs can add a lot to the existing academic discourse on BSG and on spectatorship, but they also indicate a larger project that BSG and its viewers engage in— imagining and critiquing a supposedly utopian, somewhat realistic view of what a future, egalitarian Earth might look like—all while redeeming the show for its deviant and progressive elements. I will expand on these readings by analyzing two of the most central relationships in the show—the heterosexual romance between Kara Thrace (pilot call sign:

Starbuck) and Lee Adama (pilot call sign: Apollo) and the intense friendship between

Admiral Bill Adama and his second-in-command, Saul Tigh—through a queer lens, reading the deviance into what could otherwise be assumed were sexually normative relationships.

In chapter three, I’ll explore the show’s attempt at a utopian depiction of gender equality and what we can take from it. Of course, many feminists have used the science fiction genre as an easy catalyst to imagine a world without sexism. It might seem strange to read BSG—a story about cyborgs chasing down the last 50,000 or so humans in the universe in the hopes of destroying humanity—as a utopia. But as Sarah Lefanu points out about feminist utopias, they’re not necessarily perfect worlds. They’re just better worlds (55). And I think, in many ways, we can read BSG as a world that’s better, at least in the beginning of the series, than our own. The show’s nods to what some of the actors have called “gender- blindness”6 show a near-future society that seems to have been the logical evolution of a democratic system like ours. Thus, BSG allows us to critique this vision of a potential future

6 See Jamie Bamber’s July 5, 2006, interview in Out magazine www.out.com/entertainment/2006/07/05/rocket-man?page=0,0. 14 egalitarianism to see whether that’s what equality looks like, whether we really think we can get there from where we are now, and whether we even want to get there. And although

BSG imagines itself as a genderless depiction of a more sophisticated society, it also aligns itself strategically with and against feminist utopias in its overlap with some of these themes, such as out-of-body birth, communal decision making, the potential of cybernetic life, and the fetishization of a female child as humanity’s savior. By incorporating political themes of equality and feminist dystopian and utopian themes, BSG’s creators and writers were doing political work—taking a guess at what gender and race equity can look like in a near-future cultural progressiveness that was made possible by technology. And while the feminist potential that the show sets up by addressing these themes seems to be shut down by reinforcing traditional gender norms and maternity, at the same time that they’re shut down, queerness helps open the possibilities back up—especially the possibilities of non-normative gender expression and family structure.

The discussions that this guesswork inspires might just help us build an Earth that is friendlier to queerness and deviance and less prone to marginalization and moralism. Who knows? Maybe life out there (in TV, if not in space) can inform life here. I hope so.

15 Chapter 2 Queering Cylons and Soldiers

’m not the only feminist who has criticized BSG’s gender, race, and queer politics

despite the mainstream press’ and the show creators’ assertions7 that BSG represents I a more progressive, egalitarian world.8 But reading through other academic and popular critiques, I see that I’m also not the only one who maintains a love for the show despite what we consciously identify as shortcomings. These viewing techniques could be described in terms of Jose Muñoz’s theories of disidentification or with bell hooks’ formulations of oppositional viewing, but this show in particular seems to have struck an analytical nerve in a way that most other shows don’t. But I will argue that BSG viewers do more than simply take what they like from the show and leave what they don’t. They actively remake the meaning of a show that often leaves the moral judgments and even key plot facts up to viewer interpretation. BSG is a show that forces its audience, much more than most, to do the judgment and moral evaluation that most texts deliver ready-made, whether it’s the implicit consumerist activism of many third-wave feminist texts or the heavy-handed anti-racist messages in Star Trek.9 It does this through consciously cultivating themes and narratives that blur the lines between antagonist and protagonist and through including

7 The show’s Creator and Executive Producer Ron Moore talks about reversing gender roles in lots of his podcasts for BSG, but in the one that goes along with the season two episode “Resistance,” he is more explicit when he describes why women can beat up men in BSG’s world. “The gender roles in this universe are so equal and so nonstereotypical in a lot of ways that little things like that pop through.” Read the transcript at en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Podcast:Resistance. 8 For example, “Chauvinist Pigs in Space,” by Juliet Lapidos, which was published on the Slate www.slate.com/articles/double_x/xxfactor_xxtra/2009/03/chauvinist_pigs_in_space.html; “A Dangerous Place for Women” by Ewan Kirkland in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?; and “Is Starbuck a Woman” by Sarah Conly in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Knowledge Here Begins out There 9 In Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future, Daniel Leonard Bernardi analyzes the famous sci-fi show’s implicit racial politics compared to the moral lessons that the characters learn about racism being unsophisticated and arbitrary. In one chapter, he focuses on an episode where two groups of aliens hate each other because each race’s body is half black and half white—one race is white on the right side of their bodies while the other is white on the left. 16 political themes that resonate with our real lives at the same time that they force us to reconsider the otherwise assumed moral high ground.

Several academic essays address this aspect of BSG’s storytelling as a trait that both sets it apart from other texts and that makes it simply a more pleasurable show to watch. In his introduction to the anthology Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or

Mission Frakked Up? co-editor Josef Steiff quotes the show’s star, Edward James Olmos, arguing that BSG makes us think and “is truth” (332). Olmos also says that the show doesn’t allow for apathy or disinterest—“you cannot sit there and not have an opinion. It will make you think and make you a better person” (Steiff 358).

Further, Steiff (and presumably his co-editor, Tristan D. Tamplin) circle back around to the idea of active text negotiation in the book’s sans-byline conclusion, “Coduction:

Cylons, Colonials, and Criticism.” In this essay, the authors use Wayne Booth’s notion of codution to talk about BSG as a text that encourages “ethical criticism” of its characters and themes; because it “encourages discussion about correct behavior,” they assert that BSG itself is highly ethical, which I interpret to mean a morally responsible text that accomplishes the kind of personal-improvement work that Olmos’s quote implies (Steiff 6305). To the essay’s authors, Booth’s formulation of coduction essentially means discussing your interpretations with as many people as possible to challenge your assumptions (6308). Part of the work that they describe through this theory is that there is an inherent value in

“discussing fiction ethically.” They are also invested in redefining media criticism as

“emphasizing the good and ameliorating the bad in fictional works” rather than “attacking or defending a given piece of fiction as morally good or evil” (6307). Steiff and Tamplin argue, then, that BSG “invites and encourages” these types of personal and political discussions but also—most importantly—that the show sets up answers to its dilemmas that audiences will

17 not be comfortable with and forces viewers to come to their own uneasy conclusions. The co-editors set up BSG as the antithesis to propaganda—as highly ethical art that provokes

“discussion by either providing no clear solutions or by allowing (or even encouraging) the audience to question the conclusions presented” (Steiff 6329). Unlike the hero-identification that audiences are used to in Hollywood productions, “Battlestar Galactica does not ask us to emulate or even admire the decisions the characters make, but it does force us to confront our own beliefs about such behavior” (Steiff 6358). The themes they cite are the Colonials’ troubling (but justified?) suicide bombing tactics against the Cylons during an occupation and President Laura Roslin’s fraught suspension of abortion rights in the service of the survival of the human race.

As it turns out, this kind of reading is exactly what the show’s Creator and Executive

Producer Ron Moore intended.

Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions. I like the show best when you get to a place where you’re not sure who you’re rooting for anymore, you’re not sure whose side you’re on. And you’re confused and you might even be angry about what we’re doing, but at least it’s forced you to a place of trying to define your own point of view on something (Miller).

Battlestar Galactica accomplishes this open-endedness in its evolving narrative, when we as the audience are left puzzling over identifying who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Part of that is also possible only because the cast is so large and because the secondary characters are still very prominent in the plots. But the show also encourages this viewing behavior on the visual level. If BSG is, as a futuristic science fiction show, presenting a kind of blank canvas upon which Moore imagines a different kind of (though achievable) democratic future, the show’s grey aesthetics and plain military costuming demand that the 18 viewer pay more attention to the verbal than the visual. While BSG does feature some very typical and explicit depictions of gender, most of the women’s costumes and makeup are so masculinized that the women are only legible as female after a second look. This project doesn’t focus much on the visuals of BSG except to confirm that, yes, the feminine women are mostly shot how Mulvey would expect them to be. But most of the principal women characters are so masculinized that viewers are forced to pay more attention to their words and their places in the story rather than their status as objects to be looked at. The lack of visual cues to tell viewers who should be active and who should be passive also fails to point out who is good and bad, who is right and wrong. These types of aesthetic choices, along with a wide cast of characters that make complicated decisions that carry emotional weight in the real world create a more open-ended, often uncomfortable text that inspires viewers to reinterpret the text.

Feminist and queer media theorists are also interested in exploring the potential of open-endedness and in avoiding rigid judgments of texts as all good or all bad. Merri Lisa

Johnson advocates moving beyond talking about texts as either feminist or not and whether they’re feminist enough; she instead is interested in talking about how texts reflect the unresolved potential of the women’s movement and how viewers and feminists are using them (17, 20). The ways that these particular feminist and queer audiences are interpreting some of the crucial relationships in BSG inspires me to take another look at the show—after initially dismissing it as yet another example of postfeminist pastiche—to see how it queers both heterosexual relationships and homosocial relationships (even while it relegates homosexual relationships to the background and normalizes them). The text leaves a tremendous amount of room for such a reading. Thus, I find myself doing a similar analysis to what Alexander Doty describes doing with The Wizard of Oz in his essay “My Beautiful

19 Wickedness.” In reinterpreting a lesbian coming-of-age fantasy into a popular text that might seem straightforwardly heteronormative, “I discover certain pleasures and investments” that

I will argue “become the catalyst for questioning conventional gender and sexuality categories” (152).

For my purposes, queering BSG does not exclusively mean that I’m reading lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender themes into the show’s subtext—though it is a big part of what this project will explore. I’m more interested in using queer theory as a way to unearth the non-normative in BSG, both social and sexual. In this way, I use the (admittedly fluid) academic idea of queerness to indicate more of a resistance to categorization and to the dominant normative (Giffney 5). I also use the theory’s tendency to emphasize that what you can uncover in subtext can speak just as loudly as what is explicit (Giffney 7) and to celebrate the potential productivity of texts leaving us unsettled or confused (Giffney 9).

But more specifically than queer theory at large, Michael Warner’s ideas of queerness as a nonpathological but non-normative state (59) that was never only about sexuality greatly influence the analyses I do in this chapter (62). Since he argues against the assimilationist tendencies in gay and lesbian politics, he also doesn’t see anything redemptive about normalizing depictions of queerness in media. Instead of seeing gay themes on TV and imagining “that we want to be normal,” Warner instead says that we should interact with queer cultures to learn that everyone deviates from the “norm” and to start building a more accessible world based on that knowledge (71).

The spirit of Warner’s project fits neatly into my own, because I’m reading non- normative sexuality into two relationships that I’ve only seen analyzed as heteronormative. It might seem odd that I’m omitting the only explicitly gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in this series—Admiral Helena Cain and Felix Gaeta and arguably Caprica Six and D’Anna

20 Biers—from my queer analysis. But I think that focusing on Cain and Gaeta’s admittedly problematic associations with ruthlessness and treachery has not only already been done, but it also assumes that their depiction should have been one of positive representation of a normalized gay or lesbian lifestyle.10 I would argue that BSG attempts to normalize much of their sexuality anyway, trying to render it irrelevant in the same way that gender is supposedly irrelevant. But regardless, to upend normative sexuality, normalizing the gay and lesbian characters does us no good. That’s why my project is to show the non-normative in heterosexual love triangles and in loyal homosocial friendships. Instead of normalizing the show’s queerness, I’ll be doing what Warner suggests, showing how everyone deviates from the norm, including four of the show’s main characters in two of the show’s most important relationships. Thus, the paragons of supposed sexual normalcy will be proven deviant, subverting the idea that they were ever normal or that sexual normality even exists.

Although these academics have laid great theoretical groundwork for my analysis, it is nonacademic BSG fans in blog communities who first inspired me to give the show more feminist credit after my initial dismissal of the show as a shallow, postfeminist text that reinscribed normative gender roles.11 What I saw when I took a second look was lots of evidence for more open-ended, oppositional, queer interpretations of one of the show’s primary homosocial friendships and one of its central heterosexual relationships. Thus, in this chapter, I will look at feminist and queer blog commentary on the show’s relationships, followed by a close reading of two of the show’s central romances and friendships, to argue that in BSG’s depiction of romances and friendships, the show explodes stereotypes and

Hollywood conventions of what heterosexual and homosocial relationships look like and

10 See Karen K. Burrows’ essay “The Luxury of Simply Being Human: Unwritten and Rewritten Queer Histories in Battlestar Galactica” in Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit, and Steel. 11 In a previous paper, I focused on how the fighter pilot Starbuck’s female masculinity made her successful in work but miserable in her personal life. 21 what roles women and men are expected to play in those relationships. To discuss how these relationships transgress the social boundaries that we’re familiar with, I’ll be using both feminist and queer lenses. In using the latter, I mean less that the relationships have anything to do with homosexuality or the LGBTQ community than that the relationships I analyze are in some way nonnormative—that they don’t follow the looking relations, costuming, gender roles, and activity or passivity that I’d expect of a heteronormative depiction.

The commentaries that I analyze were collected from blog posts on websites and blogs that are nonacademic and that cater to feminist and LGBTQ audiences. The posts that

I focus on are about characters or relationships that are interpreted in queer or oppositional ways. I’m especially interested in analyses that celebrate BSG’s progressiveness or usefulness to the feminist and queer communities since the main sites I draw from—Tiger Beatdown,

After Ellen, and Out magazine—feature writers and readerships that are well-practiced in unpacking the latent or overt sexism and homophobia in pop culture texts, as you can see in any cursory look through their posts or comment sections. Because these writers and blog readers are so quick to eviscerate other pop culture texts, I’m especially interested in their celebration of BSG, even as they admit to the same type of ambivalence that I feel. In future projects, I’d love to investigate how audiences that aren’t affiliated with feminist or homonormative LGBTQ political organizing—perhaps like Galactica Sitrep and the Sci-Fi

Channel’s message boards—understand these same relationships. Though they are a small cross section, the audiences that influenced this chapter have helped redeem BSG for me in a lot of ways—they’ve helped show me how the relationships depicted in the show move through and beyond stereotypical gender and sexuality representations—how the show simultaneously transcends some boundaries as it reinforces others. Through close readings, these audiences (including myself) do the important cultural work that Doty describes. “In

22 the context of a heterocentrist (homophobic, sexist) culture, close reading often becomes a social and political strategy … we can make what is invisible to so many, visible and what is denied, possible” (142).

In this chapter, I’ll move beyond the either/or analyses of texts that I mentioned in the last and move on to ambivalent analyses that grant agency to the viewer and complicate the political, cultural, and social uses of the text to audiences that Jose Muñoz might call

“minoritarian.” (Disidentifications 5). His theory of viewing as disidentification will help me describe the ways in which audiences, especially queer audiences, at the same time identify with and rehabilitate the stereotypes of queerness (Disidentifications 3). And because these cues are recognizable to minoritarian audiences while they don’t register to “majoritarian” audiences, the method of opting in and out of identification with characters describes “the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (Muñoz, Disidentifications 4). And as

Muñoz further describes, this survival strategy “works within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously” so that minority subjects validate their own sexual, racial, and gender identities working in and against the cultural texts that they’re drawn to

(Disidentifications 5). This allows for seeing promise in cues that other audiences might not recognize, and it also allows for reinterpretation of BSG while simultaneously acknowledging what is problematic in the show. BSG fits this type of analysis more than other texts because the show earned such a loyal queer and feminist following, inspired heated debate and speculation about the queerness of its otherwise assumed-straight characters and cast, made

23 gestures to the equality-in-female-access-to-masculinity of liberal feminism,12 and worked within and against the familiar political and social potential of feminist and queer utopia. So using these frameworks and BSG’s particular promise and interest for feminist and queer pleasure and politics, in this chapter and the next, I’ll explore what it is about BSG that allows for reinterpretation, what inspires deeper ideological engagement, and how audiences interpret the show to make their often invisible identities visible and validated.

Hardcore Feminists, Hardcore Fans

Though it doesn’t quite live up to its feminist potential, BSG does wrestle with feminist themes in a way that gestures toward progressivism. Many mainstream and feminist critics have taken those visual and narrative cues and run with them, even though, upon closer looks, they’d find the show’s feminist victories mixed at best. This section will analyze several ambivalent feminist responses to BSG before delving into how queer responses and analyses help redeem the show’s progressive potential. Despite acknowledging the ways in which BSG reinscribes very traditional, well-worn ideals and values about gender, race, and sexuality, feminist audiences still largely celebrate the show’s progressivism. Two-and-a-half years after the show’s finale aired, Flavia Dozan wrote an impassioned elegy, “The TV Show

That Had All the Complex and Strong Female Characters: Battlestar Galactica,” for the popular feminist website TigerBeatdown.com (Dozan). The site, which was founded by feminist writer Sady Doyle, is famous for its highly critical longform, more-academic-than- pop-feminist posts, which often feature scathing, detailed criticisms of pop culture texts,

12 I’m thinking here of the critiques of liberal feminism that Rosemarie Tong outlines on page 40 of Feminist Thought, that many of the more famous liberal feminists posit that equality under law will allow women access to “manly” virtues, jobs, and behaviors, assuming that feminism’s goal is to make it possible for women to become more like men. BSG seems to exemplify this goal in its gender-neutral military life and even in its acceptance of a female president. 24 especially shows have been celebrated as “feminist.” In fact, the day before Dozan’s commentary was posted, a fellow Tiger Beatdown writer published a nuanced critique of the notion of “strong women characters” as a pop culture goal, pointing out that this goal is a myopic one that benefits only straight, able-bodied, white women. Thus, it’s remarkable that, even after a few years’ worth of critical distance, Dozan’s commentary was still overwhelmingly positive. Although she pointed out the “staggering absence of queerness” and the negative association of the characters who were explicitly gay and lesbian (Admiral

Helena Cain is a ruthless, murderous leader, and Felix Gaeta is a traitorous mutineer—and both die for their crimes), she celebrated the show’s strong women and the sheer number of nonwhite main characters compared to most mainstream texts. She argued that the representations of both women and characters of color were neither good nor bad but “a complicated combination of traits and behaviors that represented the experience of being … human” [emphasis in original]. The characters were fleshed out—they weren’t tokens, they didn’t have one-dimensional agendas or desires. What seems to resonate with Dozan most in this comment is that the characters move beyond falling into either negative tropes or the positive representations of racial or gender uplift. And in saying that the characters are flawed and “human,” including the characters we think of as the enemies at the beginning,

BSG allows for more complex identification and disidentification with protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters—it helps explode the problematic active/passive looking relations that Mulvey famously described,13 which is especially important, radical, and effective since so many texts that make attempts to be “multicultural” still relegate

13 In one of the foundational texts in feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey describes the psychoanalytic looking relations that position an assumed male audience to identify with the active male protagonist, who objectifies and fetishizes the passive female character, who is often shot as a spectacle to be looked at—often in disembodied close-up shots of legs or other body parts. 25 women, people of color, and queer folks to either the background or to being the bad guys.

BSG allows the audience to reclaim these formerly negative and secondary characters by affirming their relatability and complicating their motives. Commenters on Dozan’s post seemed to agree. They weighed in on their favorite parts of the show, and many emphasized the depth given to potentially one-dimensional femme fatale characters like Caprica Six or

Ellen Tigh, both of whom start the series as clearly sexually charged temptresses but who end up as peace brokers and are also brilliant mathematical and biological minds.

BSG has also inspired feminist academics to reclaim, celebrate, and complicate the show’s heroines, despite of and because of their foibles.14 In her essay “Long Live Stardoe!

Can a Female Starbuck Survive?” Carla Kungl explores the double bind inherent in the heroine’s character—that Starbuck walks an impossible line between toughness and emotional expression, where she is “either despised for weakness when she exhibits emotion or despised for not being feminine when she doesn’t” and that her masculinity upsets the status quo by showing that men and women’s identities and roles are shifting (199). Despite this potential, Kungl argues that Starbuck ultimately presents a future that is at a safe and unattainable distance (presumably chronologically) that BSG’s women viewers can’t access, especially because real-life men aren’t invested in making fluid gender roles a reality (204).

But Kungl ends by again arguing that Starbuck helps redefine femininity in media representation because her occasional feminization, as when her maternal instincts kick in, helps to expand and complicate the role of the masculinized tough girl in positive ways

(207).

Both Dozan’s and Kungl’s analyses beg questions about what makes a text or a character feminist. And although I’m invested in Johnson’s project of getting away from

14 See the essays in note 8 but also Heather Rolufs’ “Eve, Lilith, and the Cylon Connection” in Battlestar Galactica: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? 26 describing texts as not feminist enough or as a binary of either feminist or not, it’s worth spending time discussing what kinds of aesthetic, cinematographic, and narrative elements that feminists—academic and otherwise—tend to identify when they analyze texts with a feminist lens. Although I won’t use these characteristics to create a litmus test to make an either/or judgment, they are useful to identify, if only so that I can better understand, unpack, and complicate the cues that appeal to and inspire feminist and queer audiences.

Dozan’s and Kungl’s analyses both rely on the idea of the “strong woman character,” which has been celebrated by many mainstream and third-wave feminist critics as a sign that women have come a long way in film. But this celebration, as I mentioned before, has been criticized as applicable only to certain white women, and it also tends to mean pretty shallow gestures to female activity (as opposed to Mulvey’s idea of female passivity in film narrative and cinematography) while still offering heroines up as sexual objects to be looked at and appreciated by the male (and queer female, as I’ll discuss below) gaze. And in

Battlestar Galactica, the strong woman character also tends to just mean the masculinization of women characters to be physically strong and less aesthetically feminine.

Although the visual cues of the strong woman character are rampant in BSG and although they do tend to attract feminist attention, the show does more to earn its feminist badge than simply offering a masculinized female aesthetic. As Dozan mentioned, part of what makes BSG progressive is its quota of nonmale, nonwhite characters. In an industry where women make up only about 27 percent of speaking roles in film—and when they do appear, they’re disproportionately young, thin, hypersexualized, wearing tight or revealing clothing, and domesticated—BSG’s cast of women and people of color offer a more realistic contrast, if not necessarily a formula of how many gendered and raced bodies add up to make a feminist text (Smith 1). And given that the women protagonists who do show up in

27 pop culture texts are almost always white, BSG’s racial diversity counts (even though the principal women are white, with the exception of Grace Park, who is Korean). And, of course, the sheer number of women and nonwhite characters wouldn’t matter if they weren’t in substantial roles and fleshed out as meaningful characters instead of token stereotypes that just help white men do what they need to do. But the mere fact that BSG’s casting clearly made nonwhiteness a priority—including, arguably, in its main patriarchal figure, the non-racially marked (at least in the reimagined series15) Admiral Bill Adama, played by the

Latino Edward James Olmos—bolsters its feminist credibility, especially as the show works with and against elements of feminist utopia. I couldn’t claim BSG as such a productive depiction of what the world could be like in the future if it were simply a whitewashed version of second-wave liberal, feminist values. Arguably, the way BSG redefines race relations within the text as inter-species and inter-planetary, not as ethnic, could be interpreted as problematic in the same way that I see its claim to gender-blindness as problematic. But in the cases of BSG’s representations of race, gender, and even sexuality, I think what counts most is envisioning worlds where people who aren’t white exist and play integral roles in society; providing work for (at least some) actors who don’t fit the typical

Hollywood mold of young, white, and thin; and taking a guess at what a better racial, gender, and sexual social system might look like.

Like Dozan and Kungl, I too see BSG’s potential in its more nuanced portrayals of

“strong women characters,” which in this show means more that the women are central, embody lots of different points on the spectrum of traditional femininity, and aren’t all white. But these aren’t the only reasons that I would call BSG a feminist text. I do see more

15 In the prequel series Caprica, Bill Adama’s home planet of Tauron is more explicitly described as raced—a vague mix of what could be read as Latino or Italian. 28 going on in BSG than cyborg-seductress tropes,16 women with muscles, and a passing grade on the Bechdel test.17 But to call BSG a feminist text implies that I could define what a feminist text is, which I can’t. No one can. But, at the same time, I think the patterns we see in feminist and queer reaction to BSG can help lay some groundwork—by looking at what they and I find useful about the show in relation to real-life feminist and queer politics—to start forming a definition of what makes a text progressive and what makes a text politically useful. I hope that others will help refine and add onto these formulations as they notice patterns in what is or is not compatible or productive for feminism in media.

I can’t cite a specific definition of what makes a show progressive and compare BSG to that standard because that standard doesn’t exist. So how I define productive texts, inspired by what I see in BSG, will be partially by what a feminist text shouldn’t do. I can say that BSG is different from the (rightfully) commonly eviscerated postfeminist texts that incorporate feminist values to promote the apolitical consumerism and individual self- fulfillment that upholds neoliberalism.18 Part of what differentiates BSG from those types of texts is that it takes place outside of a visible economic system. Since the government and military have relocated to space, there are still class labor issues, but there’s no real market to speak of in BSG, aside from passing mentions of a black market. Thus, nothing about politics, self-fulfillment, or female independence is tied up in consumerism, self-care, or salary.

16 As argued in the web series Feminist Frequency on May 19, 2001, www.feministfrequency.com/2011/05/tropes-vs-women-4-the-evil-demon-seductress. 17 Introduced in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, writer and artist Alison Bechdel created a simple test for whether or not you should see a movie. 1) Are there more than two women characters who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man? The Bechdel test is a common element of much pop-feminist film critique. 18 See Diane Negra’s What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism and Nina Power’s One- Dimensional Woman. 29 Aside from the lack of overt association with capitalism, the potential in strong women characters, and counting nonwhite, nonmale bodies, I think that the most important thing that makes BSG a progressive feminist text is that it allows more room—through the aesthetics and ensemble cast that I mentioned before and through telling the same narrative through multiple perspectives—than most shows for moral ambiguity and reinterpretation.

While this tendency doesn’t de facto make a show feminist, it does encourage the kinds of active viewership that early feminist and cultural film theorists championed as a way to oppose racist and sexist media. BSG encourages this opposition not by being offensive but by taking as a given the value of viewer freedom of reinterpretation rather than the typical top-down propagandizing that most texts seem to do. The potential for subversive messaging might not be inherently about sex or gender, but it’s very likely to intersect with radical or radicalizing messages about sex and gender oppression. I’ll talk a little more about this in the next chapter, but as you’ll see in the following analyses, BSG leaves a lot of potential for reinterpretation and for queering gender as well as sexual and social relationships, in part because of its muted aesthetics, which offer a more vague canvas on which viewers can rework narratives than a more colorful, highly detailed aesthetic would.

The show is able to accomplish this in part because, as a science fiction text that is set in a very different time and place, it is removed from our current social system, so in some ways its characters (and thus viewer imaginations) are less restricted by our current state of gender affairs. And part of BSG’s feminist potential has to do with its medium—since TV shows involve a much higher volume of on-screen hours, BSG’s women characters are allowed more time for characterization and complexity, expanding the depictions of “strong” or

“positive” women characters along the way. And the show’s moral ambiguity prevents a simple two-sided reading—the one the text explicitly sends and the one that a feminist critic

30 might reveal in analysis. Even the show’s costuming forces the viewer to navigate an unfamiliar grey area—the men are frequently set up as sex objects, the women are muscular and often unfeminine, and all the characters are mixed up on a ship that has no gender- segregated spaces. So although feminist critics tend to see the flaws of characters and identify them in relation to common stereotypes about women or queer relationships or race relations, there’s enough complexity built into the plot and usually enough time spent with those characters to inspire alternate or reimagined readings.

Queering the Queer, Queering the Normative

Mainstream queer reinterpretations of BSG speak perfectly to this potential for active and selective viewing and to my own ambivalence about the show as both feminist and problematic rather than either feminist or not. These interpretations, which read queerness into the show despite the text’s almost uniform heteronormativity, position the audience in direct opposition to the text while taking great pleasure in the show as it exists and in what they seem to see as a better opportunity than usual to see themselves and to fantasize about queering their (usually already somewhat queered) favorite characters.

BSG got a lot of attention in publications like Out magazine and on the pop culture sites AfterEllen.com and AfterElton.com, which cater to mainstream queer audiences—the former targeted more to women and the latter to men. Their taglines are both “the pop culture site that plays for your team.” BSG seemed to strike a chord with these audiences for a few reasons. After Ellen’s readers loved the show partially because it cast several women who were already lesbian icons—namely Lucy Lawless and Michelle Forbes, who identify as bi and lesbian respectively. Not only did these casting decisions garner attention from queer women audiences, but the characters that Lawless and Forbes played were also seen as

31 potentially queer by After Ellen’s readers just by virtue of the actresses’ past roles and real- life identification. Incidentally, Forbes’ character was another example of BSG’s female- masculine military women, and her character, Admiral Helena Cain, was revealed to be in a lesbian relationship in the TV movie Razor, which is part of the BSG cannon but wasn’t part of the TV series. Lawless’ character was also coded as queer when she had a polyamorous sexual relationship with a man and another female Cylon. But conversely, audiences also wondered about the real-life identifications of characters they interpreted as queer, especially the actors who played Starbuck and Apollo.19 How the perceived and actual queerness of the actors interact with or help reveal the queer themes on the show inspired the After Ellen and

After Elton readers, and me, to look more carefully at the text for potential queer themes.

Although I would never say that an actor’s queerness must follow her or him to every role— a notion that has unfairly hindered gay actors from being cast as hetero romantic leads—for these queer audiences in particular, the mere presence of queer actors helped them make

BSG’s queer subtext visible, and it emboldened them to reinterpret characters and relationships as queer, even if they weren’t coded that way. And opening that space for analysis helped me discover and reclaim BSG as a progressive text—it helped make visible for me what had been invisible before, behind my ambivalent admission that I loved the show despite having to admit its failings as a feminist text.

One of the ways that gay men read BSG as queer is in seeing characters like Lee

Adama (pilot call sign: Apollo) or Karl Agathon (pilot call sign: Helo) as sexually objectified for their gay male gaze. The show does foreground their muscular, often shirtless bodies in revealing tank tops and sweaty sex scenes. This could arguably just invert Mulvey’s binary of

19 If you dare to look through the mostly hateful comments, see this message board for a July 8, 2008, query on the actress who plays Starbuck stallioncornell.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8602 and this Sci-Fi Channel forum posting from November 18, 2006, on the actor who plays Apollo forums.syfy.com/index.php?showtopic=2254405&st=20 32 women’s to-be-looked-at-ness for a female gaze—surely women appreciate this display—but because of the assumed male gaze in film and because male viewers are so used to looking for women to be sexualized and fetishized on screen, male viewers will—even unconsciously or inadvertently—find themselves objectifying and perhaps taking pleasure in seeing male bodies sexualized in the same way. The sheer inversion of normal looking relations, though, also gives “minoritarian” audiences a pleasure they’re usually denied so that hetero women and queer men are the assumed appreciators of the usually not objectified male body. Just one example can be seen in a story about BSG in Out magazine in which the author describes a scene in season two that features Apollo standing in his bunk in nothing but a towel. The author writes that it was “no less than a queer blogosophere sensation” (Breen).

But in true Mulveyan fashion, BSG still sets some women up as objects of the gaze, too, but not always for the audience that the theorist envisioned. After Ellen’s readers appreciated the explicit shots of femme fatale bombshell Caprica Six, and they also expressed appreciation for being able to look at the traditionally feminine (and shot, costumed, and lit accordingly) Laura Roslin in addition to the women characters who were coded more masculine. In that way, the show reproduces and eroticizes lesbian butch- femme aesthetics and reinforces the binary between these kinds of femininities (Doty 145).

These characters—like Starbuck, Athena/Boomer, Kat, Kendra Shaw, and Cain—whose femininity are more subdued by muscles, understated makeup, bravado, and sometimes short haircuts, inspire queer readings of their characters as butch lesbians. Clearly not all queer women fall into that specific category of gender performance, but since it is a more visible one, it seems to be easily recognized to After Ellen readers. As once commenter wrote, “Starbuck is a butch, beautiful badass through and through” (Riendeau). And when characters are explicitly queer in the text, After Ellen writers and commenters still embrace

33 the storyline. Karman Kregloe’s review of Razor for After Ellen acknowledges that, on the surface, the relationship between Cain and the Cylon Gina—which ends with Gina’s outing as a Cylon agent and her subsequent torture and gang rape at Cain’s orders—could be read as yet another example of “the tired old morality tale warning against homosexuality: Don’t do it, or else.” While acknowledging this, Kregloe maintains that the portrayal is more nuanced than that because of Cain’s war imperative and because at least BSG, unlike many other sci-fi texts, depicts a queer relationship in which one of the partners isn’t an alien. She argues that Cylons, though arguably not quite human, are a middle ground and that this simple gesture helps legitimize queer relationships—“it’s a sign of progress” (Kregloe).

When Badass Butches and Lesbianish Men Get Together

The above commentaries are just a few of the queer readings that academic anthologies and popular websites offered. Instead of stopping short at reading the queerness of the show as beginning and ending with the explicitly queer characters Felix Gaeta and

Admiral Helena Cain, as many academic readings did, these fan responses inspired me to take another look at characters who I haven’t seen discussed in detail as queer. Though I have read at least one thoughtful academic essay on Cylons’ queer potential,20 what I have not seen is a substantive queer analysis of one of the central heterosexual relationships in the show, the Apollo and Starbuck romantic entanglement, or of the central homosocial relationship in the show, the unending loyalty and love between Saul Tigh and Bill Adama.

20 See Shira Chess’ “The C-Word: Queering the Cylons” in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? 34 The star-crossed love story of Apollo and Kara Thrace (pilot call sign: Starbuck) can be read as yet another “interminable”21 storyline that predictably prioritizes heterosexual romance. But in many ways—how Apollo and Starbuck’s gender roles are reversed in their relationship, the fact that the love story itself is ultimately unresolved and never reaches a happy ending, and because the relationship is set up as symbolically incestuous—their relationship adds up to an unconventional representation that opens the doors for new ways for gender and heterosexual relationships to be defined and practiced.

As I’ve discussed, queer and straight audiences alike have interpreted Starbuck’s character as very masculine. She’s still recognizably female (and significantly feminized in certain story arcs), but the aesthetic decisions that went into crafting her hair, makeup, and wardrobe all seem to try to make her look as masculine as possible. And the way she is shot, with few exceptions, doesn’t frame her in the Mulveyan way of being an object for the look of a presumed male audience that would appreciate sexually objectifying her—especially since that would help tame her otherwise phallic aggression and physical prowess. Apollo, on the other hand, has been described as “lesbianish” by queer female audiences22—presumably because of his delicate facial features and well-kept but arguably butch hair, costuming, posture, and his feminized position in relation to Starbuck in their relationship. Starbuck’s husband, Sam Anders, is also identified as a lesbianish man for the same reasons. Both men are also often the objects of the audience’s gaze—in form-fitting shirts that accentuate their muscles and in the aforementioned scene in which Apollo is very nearly naked, save for a

21 See the August 11, 2011, comment by Abigail on Flavia Dozan’s aforementioned Tiger Beatdown post, tigerbeatdown.com/2011/08/11/the-tv-show-that-had-all-the-complex-and-strong-female- characters-battlestar-galactica. 22 See Malinda Lo’s February 21, 2008, After Ellen post anticipating season four, www.afterellen.com/blog/malinda/43-days-until-starbuck-returns. 35 towel—and therefore appear often in the cinematographically passive position, which

Mulvey describes is where women are typically placed.

But in addition to aesthetics, the emotional roles that Apollo and Starbuck play in their relationships with each other and with their respective spouses are a near mirror- reversal of what you might expect if you’ve ever seen a melodrama or romantic comedy. In

“Unfinished Business,” we see Starbuck acting out a callous, aggressive sexuality that is characteristic of most of her romantic encounters. After a sex scene that emphasizes the muscles of both partners that makes it impossible to decipher the genders and the identities of the bodies, the audience sees Starbuck get up immediately post-coitus, after she tells her husband that the tryst was just what she wanted. We find out momentarily that this isn’t a comment about a common lovemaking session between a blissful couple—the pair are estranged, and Starbuck arranged the encounter simply to satisfy her sexual appetite. She is apparently happy with this arrangement, but her husband isn’t. He dryly responds that he’s

“glad to be of service” before he tries to convince her to give their marriage another shot.

Starbuck takes on the role we might expect from a husband—the sexually driven commitment-phobe who strings along and uses a lover and runs from his emotional problems. And Anders plays the role of the jilted but still-hopeful wife, who wants the emotional connection along with the sex.

Starbuck further exemplifies her masculine role later in the episode, when the audience finds out why she and Apollo haven’t been on speaking terms for half the season.

In a flashback sequence that is intercut with a boxing tournament where the pair let out their sexual and emotional frustrations with each other in the ring, we see that, the night before

Starbuck eloped with Anders, she and Apollo shared a passionate night where they finally consummated a long, long, longstanding passion for each other. Apollo readily proclaims his

36 love for her and urges her to voice her own. Eventually she does. They each agree to leave their partners and be together. But in the morning, Apollo wakes up to find that Starbuck is not only gone but has impulsively suggested to Anders that they elope, immediately. Again taking the role of the man who is absent the morning after sex, Starbuck also runs from her true feelings in a way that is often associated with masculine repression and fear of loss of emotional control (just one example would be Mr. Big impulsively marrying a young socialite rather than the protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, in Sex and the City). And for his part, Apollo takes on the feminine role of the affectionate partner who is in touch with his feelings and ready to proclaim them and commit to a monogamous relationship—as long as it’s with

Starbuck.

In “Eye of Jupiter,” we see Anders and Apollo both take on the roles usually associated with women in a love triangle that involves a married couple and “the other woman.” In representations of the home wrecker—in movies like Fatal Attraction, Swimfan, or Obsessed—the other woman usually wants her male lover to leave his wife and marry her, sometimes leading to a verbal or violent altercation between the two women. In this case, the two men have a tense confrontation. Anders knows about Apollo and Starbuck’s affair, but Anders also dismisses the relationship by taking on the role of the jilted wife that we’ve seen in films like Network, An Education, and The Joneses when he admits that he knows “what my wife is like” and that Apollo shouldn’t flatter himself by thinking that he’s the first person she has cheated with. And when Apollo and Starbuck reunite in that episode, we quickly see the two, now both married, again take the opposite roles that you’d think when

Starbuck refuses to divorce, preferring to bend the rules of a sacrament rather than break the vow, but Apollo refuses to keep cheating, wanting to follow his heart.

37 Although the sexual tension between these two certainly takes up a lot of screen time and is present throughout all four seasons, it is never resolved in the way that we typically see heterosexual relationships treated. There are three episodes where the two can be seen finally showing each other how they feel—in “Unfinished Business,” when they box each other and when we see them finally have sex; in “Eye of Jupiter,” when we see them reunited and having a passionate affair; and in “Deadlock,” when we see them kiss goodbye before Apollo leaves the military to start his political career—but these brief snippets never resolve into a relationship. They’re teases that never allow us to see these two characters happily invested in the type of monogamous relationship that Hollywood typically tries to sell us—that even though there are lots of potential romantic matches for you, there’s really only one special person that our protagonists are meant to be with, and they’ll end the film/show/book happily matched with that person. The series finale, “Daybreak,” continues this trend of just-missed opportunities when Starbuck vanishes into thin air while talking to

Apollo. Audiences were left without the easy happy ending the show could have given us, instead forcing us to graple with questions about the nature of Starbuck’s vague divinity or humanity.

Finally, the last aspect of Starbuck and Apollo’s relationship that precludes it from typical heteronormativity is the fact that, for the entire series, aside from the few episodes I just mentioned, they are set up as siblings in rivalry. The series’ pilot and finale bookend

Starbuck’s entrance into the Adama family as a surrogate sister to Apollo and a surrogate daughter to Admiral Bill Adama by foregrounding her relationship with Apollo’s dead brother, Zak Adama. Starbuck was engaged to Zak back before the Cylon attack, and she spends the first half of the first season haunted by her role in his death—as his commanding officer and flight-school teacher, she passed him even though he failed his flight tests. He

38 later died in a flying accident. As Bill Adama’s potential daughter-in-law, Starbuck and

Adama bonded at Zak’s funeral and later when she was posted under his command on the

Battlestar Galactica, and the pair’s father-daughter relationship is one of the most endearing relationships in the series. Over and over again, we see Adama bending military protocol to

“find our girl” (“You Can’t Go Home Again”) and make exceptions to save Starbuck’s life, similar to the gestures he makes to save his own son Apollo’s. In the finale, when Starbuck’s human nature is called into question by mysterious events, Adama spells out their relationship explicitly when Starbuck admits that she doesn’t know what she is. “I know what you are,” Adama says. “You’re my daughter, don’t forget it.” In many ways, Apollo and

Starbuck complete the colonial family that Adama and President Laura Roslin lead—the younger two are the children of the benevolent leaders of the masculine military and feminine civilian government.23 Later in the same episode, Apollo and Starbuck appear onscreen together to wave goodbye to their symbolic parents a final time—a familiar image that we’ve seen over and over again in films and TV shows, though this time, the parents are leaving on a spaceship instead of in a car. Together, they make a happy nuclear family.

In these roles, as the military’s and government’s rambunctious and competitive star fighter pilots, Apollo and Starbuck spend much of the series acting out sibling rivalry instead of sexual tension. They tease each other endlessly, but they’re ever loyal to each other and to

“the old man,” their common ground, their father. But if we can read their emotional tension and fighting as sibling rivalry as much as we can read it as flirting, it lends incestuous overtones to their relationship. Although the audience can see their mutual attraction, it’s interesting that their father seemingly cannot. When Adama tells Apollo in “Unfinished

Business” that Starbuck has married Anders, Apollo’s face contorts in devastation, which

23 For an analysis of the colonial romance, see Magali Rennes’ essay “Kiss Me, Now Die” in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? 39 Adama is completely oblivious to. How could a man who spends so much time with these two people not see how they feel about each other? Either he doesn’t think that match is possible because of the incest taboo or he discourages it because it would symbolically violate that taboo—they are better to him as siblings than as lovers. Either way, it queers the relationship in such a way that it can’t be a typical depiction of heteronormativity since the end result seems to be that their union was always non-normative in the eyes of the series’ ultimate moral leader, Bill Adama.

Brokeback Galactica

If you search “Brokeback Galactica” on YouTube, you’ll find a handful of user-made videos that have re-cut footage from BSG to make it seem like a love story between two characters who aren’t lovers in the text. Most use the score from Brokeback Mountain behind the now-loaded dialogue and meaningful glances. My favorites depict Anders and Apollo reliving the scenes I just discussed—the devastation of Apollo hearing that Anders and

Starbuck got married, the fighting over the affair in “Eye of Jupiter.” The difference is that

Apollo’s devastation is because of his feelings for Anders, and their sweaty ensuing altercations are now read as sexual tension between the two men instead of sexual competition over a woman. The dialogue is muted under the music, aside from one line:

Apollo telling Anders “I can’t let you go” and “I need you.”24 We’re left with the inevitable conclusion that the physical staging of these scenes is undeniably homoerotic.

Another Brokeback Galactica video addresses a relationship that I’ve never seen read as queer elsewhere, even though I think there’s a goldmine of textual cues to lead audiences to that conclusion. The video interprets the strong friendship between Adama and his

24 Watch the Anders and Lee version at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hEL14VVjH8. 40 second in command, Saul Tigh, as a romantic one.25 Interestingly, this particular video doesn’t touch much on the clues that led me to read the Adama-Tigh bromance as queer—it relies mostly on the theme music and now-meaningful glances. Despite their respective marriages and relationships with women, I read Adama and Tigh as queer for several reasons: The two are constantly reaffirming their allegiance to and need for each other as primary to their heterosexual entanglements, the longevity of their relationship is oversentimentalized through flashbacks, and Tigh’s wife explicitly spells out that she views

Adama as her competition for her husband’s attentions and loyalties.

Adama and Tigh fit several of the characteristics that Cynthia Fuchs outlines in her reading of buddy comedies as homoerotic havens for men’s self-identity (197). Fuchs emphasizes that the male-male pair’s loyalty to each other—especially if they’re old war buddies, as Adama and Tigh are—is a sign of their moral incorruptibility (198) and that the presence of a woman is often an unresolveable threat to this bond (203). Indeed, when

Adama finds out in “Revelations” that his old friend is one of the very Cylons that Adama has spent the entire series fighting, the resulting fallout is the kind of breakdown you might expect after the betrayal of a lover. Adama confronts Tigh in a suicidal rage and asks antagonistic questions about the authenticity of their friendship. Adama asks if Tigh was programmed to be his friend, to emulate the things he respects, to make him laugh

(“Sometimes a Great Notion”), questions that are often used to interrogate the authenticity of a lover’s feelings. The romantic confrontation scenes in movies like She’s All That or 10

Things I Hate About You come to mind. Adama sobs uncontrollably, falls on the floor, and punches a mirror. Inconsolable, Adama is eventually found by his son Apollo, who helps his

25 Watch the Adama and Tigh one at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRsEBZCS6po. 41 dad off the floor. At no other point in the series do we see the big, bad admiral so completely emotionally unhinged.

Over and over again, we see the relationship these men have with each other—and with the military as an extension of their friendship—taking precedence over their marriages.

Adama was famously absent for much of his marriage and his sons’ upbringing because of his investment in his military career (“A Day in the Life”). Similarly, we see Tigh’s loyalty to

Adama take precedence over Tigh’s attention to his own career and to the political aspirations of his wife, Ellen. This long-standing friendship was based on a mutual desire to be reinstated into the Colonial Fleet after they had outlived their usefulness after an earlier

Cylon War, and their meeting is sentimentalized through flashbacks that feature a sepia-tone- like filter and some truly ridiculous hairpieces. Their affection is communicated through brief commentary and through Adama’s kept promise that, after he was reinstated, that he would make sure to help his friend do the same.

This loyalty is read as explicitly queer by one very vocal character in the series, Tigh’s wife, Ellen. When we first meet her in “Tigh Me up, Tigh Me Down,” Ellen is introduced as

Tigh’s miraculously alive, estranged wife. She clearly resents Adama’s pull on Tigh, especially since his duties prevent him from lapsing into an alcohol-fueled stupor. To try and separate the two men, Ellen claims that Adama put his hand on her leg at that night’s dinner and had molested her when she was pretending to be asleep. Tellingly, Tigh immediately scorns Ellen and recognizes that she’s just trying to manipulate him. Later, Ellen sweetly hugs Adama while whispering to him threateningly not to fuck with her (well, not to frak with her).

This sentiment survives through the end of the series. In season four, after we presume Ellen dead, she resurrects and is revealed as a Cylon. When she finds out in

“Deadlock” that Tigh has moved on to a romantic relationship with Caprica Six, Ellen can’t

42 figure out which competitor she hates more—the other woman or the other man. Ellen ultimately uses Tigh’s love for Adama to prove to Caprica Six that Tigh doesn’t love any woman as much as he loves his friend. “You just don’t want to leave the one you really love,” Ellen says to Tigh. “Do you see, little girl?” Ellen taunts Caprica Six. “There is something in the universe that he loves far more than you or me, and that’s Bill Adama.” We see, through Tigh’s decision to remain with the fleet rather than follow his wife or his pregnant lover to run away with the Cylons, that this must be true. He even planned to name his unborn son Liam, which can be short for William, Bill Adama’s full first name. Though

Tigh tearfully insists that “it’s not like that” later in the episode when he embraces his friend after the child’s death, it’s hard not to view Liam as a namesake. And of course, since boys’ names are often passed down from father to son, it’s easy to read the gesture as one of

Adama’s symbolic, fantasy fatherhood of Tigh’s baby.

In the extended version of the finale (“Daybreak Part 2”), but not in the original cut of the episode, Ellen describes the men’s relationship even more explicitly when she objects again (in a flashback to life before the Cylon nuclear attack) to the fact that Tigh’s career path is completely dependent on Adama’s retirement decisions. She criticizes the fact that

Tigh looks up to Adama and calls him “the old man” even though Tigh is the older one.

“When are you gonna strap on your own pair and stop following him around like some lovesick kid?” she asks. When Tigh becomes furious with her over her comments and leaves the strip club where they’re drinking together, she shouts, “Go ahead with your real lover.

You’ll come back to me, Saul. You always do!”

Reading these relationships as something other than heteronormative or homosocial is something that BSG makes easy with its boundary-crossing characterizations and stories.

But what do these readings help catalyze, as Doty investigated through his reading of Wizard

43 of Oz? They help unveil BSG’s potential to upend normativity by queering the quintessence of normative sexuality: young, white, heterosexual love and old, white patriarchal authority.

Audiences have free reign to come to these conclusions because of the show’s looking relations—which unabashedly invite the female gaze onto men and butch women alike—but also because of its casting and narrative subtext. Because BSG leaves us room to wonder about the queerness of some characters and their ability to bend to our desires and imaginings, it encourages queer readings of even the relationships and characters that would otherwise seem to be the poster children of normativity. And because two of the most important, and supposedly normative, relationships can so easily be read as queered in gender performance and in deviant sexuality, the idea of normativity itself is disrupted. As it turns out, everyone is sexually deviant—normativity in BSG doesn’t exist, which reminds us that it doesn’t exist in the real world.

This queer potential to read difference into heteronormative relationships also has an element of the utopian, a potential that can be useful for our political and cultural present and future. The next chapter will explore the idea that these imaginings and BSG’s interactions with utopian and dystopian themes can coalesce into a kind of queer futurism that we can use to not only read other texts but to make room for the queer in our real lives.

Once again, I found that where I got stuck in BSG’s disappointment in comparison to feminist theories, queer theory helped me reclaim the show’s subversive potential.

44 Chapter 3 Cruising the Universe for Feminist and Queer Futures

oliticians, utopians, feminists and artists have always told stories about the

promise or doom of the future. Apostles wrote of the four horsemen of the P apocalypse, and some people interpret the Mayan calendar—and thus the world—as ominously ending in 2012. But utopian imaginings of a better future—even if it’s not a perfect future—haven’t just satisfied our desire to dream, they’ve often been at the heart of political movements. The horrifying conclusions of allowing anti-choice rhetoric and lawmaking to lead to futures like the one imagined in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s

Tale certainly keep me on my political toes, and I’m not the only one. But on the other hand, a show like Battlestar Galactica opens up encouraging possibilities for the future even as it interacts with the themes of feminist utopian and dystopian imaginings.

Feminist utopias can help guide our legislative agenda today, and dystopian fears can help us fight against the political assaults against women’s rights, especially in light of recent attacks on reproductive freedom.26 Feminists have used science fiction film and literature to work through such anxieties, and the scholars who have studied and documented these women’s work seem to agree that the idea of a distant future is an especially productive jumping off point for feminist cultural work. In fact, some scholars argue that science fiction necessarily entails feminist theory making, just by virtue of navigating its intersections of politics, theory, and imagination (Melzer 10). And because science fiction is temporally distant, in a time that could entail either possibility or oppression, it also acts as a site where feminist theories can be tested out. Though clearly fictionalized, these stories can then act as

26 As of spring 2012, take your pick. The so-called “war on women” has involved shocking anti-abortion laws passed at the state level, and presidential candidates wax poetic about the evils of birth control. 45 case studies, canvases upon which we can see the logical conclusions of the assumptions our feminist theories make (Melzer 11). Of course, with this potential comes the ambivalence that I’ve experienced in my own reactions to shows like BSG, which inspires but also disappoints me in so many ways. But perhaps this ambivalence is a productive feeling, similar to what Patricia Melzer describes when she talks about the contradictions of cyborg feminism. “By embracing ambivalence and partiality … cyborg feminism insists on recognizing problematic tendencies within feminist thought,” she writes. “Cultural texts within this discussion are understood as tools of domination as well as of imagination and resistance; issues of representation and the production of meaning are central to cyborg feminism. Cultural texts are thus part of cyborg feminism’s analyses of oppression, and science fiction is its main site of theory production” (Melzer 25).

Since BSG conjectures at what a more politically and socially progressive society would look like and engages with feminist and queer themes, the show’s political potential is invested in a lot more than representation. As it guesses at what would make a more sophisticated and egalitarian political system, BSG shows us what many feminists’ current political goals could look like in the future. BSG gives us a case study for a future where women are able to assume masculine roles27 and have, by most accounts, achieved full, formal equality with men. But BSG also shows us some of the flaws and some of the potentials of the ideal of women having equal opportunity to exhibit masculinity and assume men’s roles. More importantly, it also forces us to interrogate whether that’s the ideal we want by showing us the logical conclusion of simply inverting the masculine/feminine binary. At the same time, BSG intersects with both feminist utopian themes and queer futures by questioning normative sexualities and embracing moral ambivalence. And while

27 See note 12. 46 BSG closes the possibilities of feminist utopian futures—at least in its engagement with the themes that popular feminist utopian fiction and theory have focused on—the show opens up possibilities for queer futures. Thus, this chapter will first explore the ways that BSG sets up and then shuts down the possibilities of feminist utopian themes of out-of-body gestation and cyborg feminism. It will then go on to look at these same themes through a queer lens to argue that they are redeemed through queer defiance of normativity.

Feminist Futures

BSG producers made conscious choices to distinguish the remake from its predecessor and from present-day reality by casting more women, putting those characters in positions of power, and downplaying sexual difference in civilian and military life. Just a few examples of these shallow aesthetic changes in the show’s narrative include a pragmatic woman president, plenty of women officers in the Colonial fleet—including an admiral who outranks our patriarch leader Commander Bill Adama—and using the term “sir” to refer to women as well as men in military power. In some ways, BSG’s utopian project is implicit in its simple temporal setting (a futuristic one) and in its marked difference from its past incarnation and from its contemporaries in the proportion of women and non-white characters, compared with the overwhelmingly white and male standard for mainstream TV and film. By utopian I don’t mean that it attempts to show a perfect future world, I mean more that it posits what a more egalitarian social system would look like—it takes a reasoned guess at the logical conclusions of our current system, based on the assumed values of equality that is still based on a preference for masculinity. But the show also overlaps more explicitly with the themes of feminist utopia and dystopia in science fiction. BSG positions itself strategically in alliance with and in opposition to themes that appear in famous feminist

47 utopian and dystopian fiction. Analyzing these connections reveals much about the underlying assumptions of the show’s imagined future—where, to me, BSG’s potentials for feminism fail but also where they unveil potential in queerness.

To address this contradiction, you must first understand a little more about the biological and spiritual nature of the cyborg antagonists, the Cylons, because their non- normative reproductive options, their social system, and their hybridity of biology and technology mark them as inherently non-normative and as echoing the ways in which radical, second wave feminists theorized gender utopia. After an initial human-Cylon war in which the sentient machines rebelled against their human masters, who invented the Cylons to “make life easier,” the Cylons retreated and evolved beyond their robotic capabilities. This evolution blurred the line between mechanical and biological: Every Cylon ship and warrior is a fleshy, bloody—but also robotic—sentient being. Blurring the line between organic and mechanic even more are the 12 models of humanoid Cylons, seven of which (whom?) have countless copies of the same body mold (the copies look identical and are played by the same actor) and five of which are singular models; all 12 can download their consciousness into another body if they are killed.

I’ve argued before that the complicated potential of the Cylons is ultimately demonized and dismissed in BSG. And that’s partially true, especially where BSG runs up against familiar elements of utopia. For instance, BSG’s protagonists don’t abide by the political structure often dreamed of in utopias: socialism (Lefanu 21). In fact, the Colonials are criticized for relying too heavily on technology by creating robots to take over the less- desirable wage-labor jobs, and our protagonists are situated in opposition to the evil and mysterious Cylons, whose democratic and mostly nonhierarchical power structure resembles socialism. Of the seven humanoid models we see in the first few seasons, all have an equal

48 say in decision making, which is executed by a majority vote. The “cybernetic communism” that Cylons seem to embody is one of the themes that Sarah Lefanu identifies in Feminism and Science Fiction as typical in feminist science fiction utopias, since the end of wages and the end of wage labor in these stories tends to have unquestioned social benefits (21).

Apparently BSG doesn’t value this type of social system—as can be argued in their very name, the Colonials, which conjures up the abuses of our real-world colonialism. Thus, they are assumed to be colonizing, militarized capitalists.

Lefanu also argues, like Melzer, that utopias have helped feminists envision a better future. She specifically argues that women were inspired to write sci-fi in the 1970s as a reaction against women characters’ perpetual marginalization and exclusion from roles in male-written fictions that concerned masculine themes like exploration and war (3). Women were barred from those activities in the real world, and since sci-fi is informed by the author’s reality, women characters were also on the sidelines in these male adventures (53).

So women wrote themselves into science fiction and increasingly used the genre as a catalyst to imagine a world without sexism. One of the most important things Lefanu points out about feminist utopias, though, is that they’re not necessarily perfect worlds. They’re just better worlds (55). She describes feminist science fiction as not the “what if” that men tended to imagine but the “if only” (64).

Along with imagining a world without sexism where women are freer actors in their own lives and fictions, Lefanu identifies several recurring themes in feminist science fiction utopias: tribalism, eco-consciousness, sexual permissiveness, challenges to heterosexuality, nonurban settings, out-of-body gestation, separatism, and rescue of a female child. (54–55).

She goes on to describe that feminist dystopias tend to be concerned with the terror of being under the unquestioned “law of the father” and the fear that women will be reduced entirely

49 to their role in biological reproduction, as is depicted in A Handmaid’s Tale (73). Other themes typically associated with dystopia are a bleak, perhaps post-apocalyptic world; political chaos; and characters who exhibit the malevolence of human nature.

Although BSG imagines itself as a gender-less depiction of a more progressive society, it also aligns itself with and against feminist dreams and nightmares—blurring its status as a good or bad feminist text—in its overlap with some of these themes. Communal living is a given when you live in an enclosed environment, and sexual permissiveness is arguably present in the form of the swaggering and promiscuous female fighter pilot

Starbuck. Unlike many dystopias, BSG doesn’t involve continual surveillance, but it does show a tightly-controlled military order that has essentially permanently instated martial law.

Once the Cylons attack, the rule of law is quickly replaced by military order (Tranter 51).

Symbolized by wizened, white patriarch Bill Adama, military wisdom—often in the face of pesky civilians demanding their civil rights—is legitimated as always in control, always insightful, and always benevolent.

But one of the most significant dystopian and utopian themes that BSG straddles—a theme that had a lot of feminist potential that is ultimately shut down and demonized by the narrative—is its obsession with reproduction and resurrection. The burden of childbirth and child rearing has been a subject of endless theorizing in the history of feminism, and radical feminists have attempted to envision worlds where women are freed from what they think is the essentialized role that holds women down socially (Tong 75). In works like Marge

Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, we see an out-of-body gestational fantasy where technology is crucial to biological reproduction processes that don’t oppress women. In the story, a single mother travels through time to a future land where babies are gestated in tanks and enter the community at specifically planned times. As Lafanu describes, “The sexual

50 difference between women and men is totally divorced from reproduction and child rearing.

There is no wage labor, no drudgery, no social, political, or sexual hierarchies,” which is possible because women are unburdened from the assumed primary responsibility of childbearing and childrearing and because men share equally in the process (58).

Since childbearing is such an important element of feminist utopia and dystopia, the most intriguing part of Cylon life from that perspective is resurrection: their technologically advanced setup wherein bodies die but consciousness is maintained and downloaded into another, identical cloned body. The resurrection process, though painful and shocking, means that Cylons don’t fear death, don’t long for an afterlife, and don’t lose the insight they’ve learned when they die. They are, essentially, their own descendents. Thus, for propagating their species, they are not dependent on the patriarchal, heterosexual family unit that has dominated the vast majority of societies. Their reproduction is asexual—it doesn’t depend on one man and one woman being in a relationship that carries gender roles and expectations. Without children and without being in a couple, women are unburdened from the often submissive and self-sacrificing roles of being mothers and wives. Although they are only 40 years old—the humanoid cylons were made 40 years before the events of the show—they’ll be able to presumably live forever, gaining more and more experience and wisdom throughout their endless lives. There’s no child rearing in this scenario because there are no children—there’s no need to pass on your genes when you can stick around forever.

In the context of freeing women from childbirth and rearing, it’s a rather utopian vision—and one that brings Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism to mind. In her manifesto,

Haraway argues for a new socialist feminism that refuses essentialism, resists demonizing technology, and explodes binaries—male-female and human-machine among them. She writes that the cyborg imagery can help us achieve a “utopian dream of a monstrous world

51 without gender,” one that is conducive to coalition building, not born (or created) with a presumption of innocence, not reverential, and unencumbered by heterosexual human reproduction (181). In Haraway’s cyborg vision, we see the potential for Cylons to blur the lines that humans are so used to drawing. There is potential to disconnect humans from the spiritual burdens of innocence and to separate women from the social and physical burden of childbirth. Although Cylons don’t live up to Haraway’s dream entirely—they are extremely reverential to “the one true God”—Cylons at least don’t have to reproduce to sustain their population.

But ultimately, this feminist potential is demonized for its mechanization (and for the lack of love in sex that, according to the show, is supposedly necessary for biological reproduction), and the lifestyle is deemed spiritually deficient compared with some Cylons’ obsession with women’s gestation and live birth as a religious mandate. This struggle between resurrection and live birth ultimately manifests itself in the final battle of good versus evil, and the Cylons that appreciate biological reproduction join the humans on the side of good, fighting the Cylons who want to keep their powers of resurrection. The possibility of escaping the pains and burdens of heterosexual reproduction is ultimately shut down as that technology (and all technology) is destroyed and humans go back to basics on their new home planet, our Earth millions of years ago.

At the same time, the Cylons’ obsession with reproduction—the humanoid models can apparently not successfully procreate amongst themselves—introduces a series of events that further blur the line between feminist utopian and dystopian futures in BSG and further demonizes any technological interventions in biological reproduction. In their initial experiments into reproduction, the Cylons launch a nightmarish project of capturing human women to anesthetize as womb factories for experimentation. The existence of what are

52 called “farms” on the show share similarities with the famous feminist dystopia A

Handmaid’s Tale, wherein Margaret Atwood envisions a future where women’s rights and identities have been violently diminished under the leadership of a military religious state. In this future United States called Gilead, women are strictly controlled and reduced to three separate functions as wives, servants and handmaids—and the last role’s sole purpose is to be impregnated by military commanders.

In the second season of BSG, the brutish, arrogant, brilliant heroine Kara Thrace

(pilot call sign: Starbuck) becomes a victim of the “farms” after she is shot and captured by the Cylons on a mission on her destroyed home planet. Starbuck initially thinks she is in a hospital but soon figures out that the one doctor who is tending to her is a humanoid Cylon who is keeping her sedated and performing unexplained surgeries on her, including removing one of her ovaries. During her escape from the largely abandoned hospital,

Starbuck finds a room that houses rows of human women, most of whom are visibly pregnant, sedated in a dark room with their legs propped up by what look like a gynecologist’s stirrups, hooked up to machines. She sees a friend who was captured at the same time, who begs Starbuck to kill her and destroy the “baby machines” (“The Farm”).

The scene is shot to accentuate the horror of the setup—we first see Starbuck’s reaction and hear an unnerving string theme on the soundtrack before the camera turns around from a sparse shot of Starbuck up against a white wall to reveal the room of semiconscious women in a clean, spacious room where they are being imprisoned and reduced to their most basic biological function. This is one of the only episodes where Starbuck’s gender difference is foregrounded in the plot. Her violent feminization in “The Farm” reminds us that she, a remarkably masculine character and one of the show’s “gender-blind” claims to fame, can be

53 just as easily reduced to her biology as the women hooked up to machines on the farms, and this is a notion that she, and we by extension, find deeply disturbing and disgusting.

In depicting the Cylons’ obsession with heterosexual reproduction, BSG frames their somewhat utopian existence without death or birth as spiritually deficient. When they attempt to create life in the farms, it’s clearly framed as a repugnant, moral nightmare because of its emphasis on technology and not female Cylons’ gestation. The disturbing images of the farms are a sharp contrast to the way the pregnancies of the two most prominent female Cylon models, Sharon Agathon (pilot call sign: Athena) and Caprica Six are treated—as miraculous and triumphant, as humanized. Because of the dichotomy that

BSG sets up to indicate what kind of reproduction is acceptable and what isn’t, it’s curious that the show doesn’t depict Cylons trying out-of-body gestation in pods—instead of appropriating human women’s bodies—since the Cylons are advanced enough to evolve into adult humanoid forms and essentially download and upload souls for resurrection into bodies that are housed in womb-like pods. The Cylons’ experiments with non- heteronormative reproduction could have lined up quite closely with Marge Piercy’s utopian vision, but BSG shut down that possibility by instead emphasizing the dystopian in technology and reinscribing the rightness and naturalness of women’s association with pregnancy and childbirth.

But in addition to informing the feminist possibilities of technological intervention in reproduction, Haraway’s theory of cyborg feminism reveals another paragon of wasted potential in BSG in the form of the villain-turned-maternal-hero Caprica Six. The leggy, often scantily clad blonde is one of many copies of humanoid Cylons, indistinguishable from humans except that there are only 12 models—seven of which (whom?) have countless identical copies. Model number six is the Cylon we’re first introduced to. One copy of this

54 model—the one who seduces scientist Gaius Baltar to get access to and then disarm the

Colonial defense mainframe—comes to be known as Caprica Six, named for her former residence on the capital planet of Caprica and for her role in what becomes the nuclear holocaust of the 12 Colonies. Although her actions on Caprica put her in clear femme fatale territory, Caprica Six is one of the oft-lauded “strong women” characters of BSG .28

The praise usually centers on the character’s multidimensionality—that she’s not just a femme fatale, she evolves into something more. While it’s true that Caprica Six develops into a very different woman than the one we usually see in tight, red dresses in the beginning, the multidimensional character she becomes is a meek, quiet, maternal potential wife. The more Caprica Six is allied with our Colonial protagonists and the better we feel about her as a character corresponds with her increased domestication into a woman who is driven by her love for one of two men and her maternal obsession with one of two children.

Although Caprica Six starts the series with cyborg feminist potential, she comes to exemplify the postfeminist trope of independent women downshifting personal ambition to retreat back to the family roles without which their lives seem deficient (Negra 21).

Caprica Six could have been a strong woman, and she could have complicated the human-machine binary since she and another woman-embodied Cylon defector, Athena, display human emotion in such a profound way that they become completely indistinguishable from their human counterparts. Haraway would have lamented the wasted potential of Caprica Six as a model of cyborg feminism. Remember, Haraway’s famous essay dreams of a feminism that explodes the binaries between masculine and feminine, machine and biology—one that is conducive to coalition building, not born (or created) with a

28 See the comments on Flavia Dozan’s Tiger Beatdown post that is referenced in the last chapter or the January 2009 Wired story “Strong Women Steer Battlestar Galactica’s Final Voyage” by Hugh Hart www.wired.com/underwire/2009/01/women-steer-bat. 55 presumption of innocence, not reverential, and unencumbered by heterosexual human reproduction (181). And when we first meet her, Caprica Six shows she has the potential to blur the lines that humans are so used to drawing between race, gender, and other roles.

Caprica Six is presumably just as smart as celebrated genius Gaius Baltar (she rewrote some of his algorithms before the Cylon attack, so she’s clearly got the science and math talent that women are often culturally assumed to lack). She’s also superhumanly strong— easily able to overpower larger, muscular human men. And she’s a charismatic leader—as she demonstrates when she temporarily convinces the Cylons to change their goal of annihilation into a peaceful diplomacy with the humans (“Downloaded”). The Cylon society in general seems less preoccupied with gender roles than the humans—reproductive and domestic labor don’t exist where there are no children and no wage-labor jobs. And the

Cylons are initially more democratic than their colonial counterparts. So where did BSG’s most famous Cylon go wrong?

The devout Cylons (so much for Haraway’s expectation that cyborgs be unreverential) cite a desire to embody God’s love as their motivation for biological parenthood. And no Cylon model is more overwhelmed by the desire to be a mother and a wife more than the initially ruthless and powerful Caprica Six. After the Cylons destroy the colonies, Caprica Six becomes a much different woman, and it’s difficult to reconcile one of her first onscreen acts with her later domestication and maternal preoccupation. In one of the very first scenes of the pilot, Caprica Six walks through an open-air market before the

Cylon attack and exchanges pleasantries with a woman who is pushing a newborn in a stroller. After remarking about how fragile the child looks, Caprica Six breaks the baby’s neck and slowly walks away as the mother screams in horror (“Miniseries”). It’s interesting

56 that this is our introduction to a character who will become increasingly associated with motherhood as BSG progresses.

While I don’t think that Six’s murder of this human baby is necessarily part of her cyborg potential—I don’t generally condone murder in any circumstances—it can be interpreted as another example of the character’s active disavowal of the socially prescribed expectations for women’s maternal instincts. The act could be interpreted as a mercy killing considering a nuclear holocaust was imminent, but the way that Six even gets close to the baby in the first place and the way that she’s juxtaposed to the child’s mother in that scene are purposeful. Six strikes up a conversation with the mother, during which the mother assumes that Six shares the same reverence for children’s innocence and the same longing to be a wife and mother. I’m sure most of us have seen scenes like this play out in public. The fact that Six’s comments are about the child’s delicacy and helplessness fly under the radar as close enough to cooing over cuteness—even if they’re a little unnerving, given that she’s about to prove how easily babies can be broken. Her calm walk away from the scene as we hear the mother’s blood-curdling screams reinforce the cold lack of femininity even further—here we see a kind of woman who is all sex but no nurturing. And while women shouldn’t necessarily aspire to murdering babies and having no respect for the lives of children (or adults), Caprica Six does show how a cyborg feminism might reject the expectations of motherhood. Caprica Six can even be linked to the queer death drive that

Lee Edelman describes—she ends up interested in the “reproductive futurism” of childbearing and rearing, but at first she kills any potential for fetishization or love of children (50). Another Cylon, Cavill, exhibits the same disinterest in children’s innocence when he stabs a child to death for essentially no reason in the background film The Plan.

57 But all of this changes very quickly after Caprica Six’s introduction. Though she seemed rather ruthless in her mission to get information from Baltar to make the human genocide possible, after Caprica Six succeeds she is filled with regret and an inexplicable lovesickness for a relationship that was based on utility: for her, the defense mainframe information and for Baltar, sex with a leggy blonde. Her pining for lost love corresponds with her (imaginary) incarnation’s—an angelic embodiment of Caprica whom only Baltar can see and talk to—obsession with motherhood and the Cylon-human hybrid child, Hera. Of course, the real Caprica Six is equally obsessed with Hera—as are the other Cylon models— as their hope for a reproductive future. In fact, the imaginary Caprica insists that Hera is actually Baltar’s and her child. Although this is clearly untrue, Caprica’s maternal longings are put to good use as Hera’s guardian (along with Baltar, completing the heterosexual family ideal) in two battle scenes.

It is her maternal feelings for Hera that lead Caprica Six to eventually defect from the safety of a Cylon base ship and bring Hera back to Galactica so she can get medical treatment for an illness that the Cylon doctors don’t understand. This leads to her immediate imprisonment on Galactica—a display of self-sacrificial surrogate motherhood. Her interrogations and later conjugal visits with Saul Tigh lead to her eventual pregnancy and baffling relationship with the wizened, cantankerous Galactica second in command. When

Caprica is released from prison and playing wife to Tigh, she’s unrecognizable from the vixen powerhouse, baby-neck-snapper, and impassioned Cylon leader we see in the beginning of the series. Although she can still hold her own in a fight, she’s completely psychologically tamed as a potential mother and timid wife figure. When Tigh fails to display his commitment to their future family unit, Caprica’s devastation leads to a late-term miscarriage. After her potential motherhood vanishes, she finds another chance to fulfill a

58 maternal guardian role in protecting Hera during a battle and settling down with Baltar on a farm on Earth.

Ultimately, Caprica Six’s cyborg potential—of the sort Haraway describes but also in the leadership and ambition that seems intrinsic to other copies of her model, like the rebel leader Natalie—ends up more and more wasted as she is tamed by her postfeminist retreatism. Unfulfilled in her military career, such as it can be in a democratic cyborg society, an initially strong but dubious woman character gets more complex but weaker (and infinitely more boring) as she makes the shift from foe to trusted, unthreatening woman.

The more traditionally domestic choices she makes, the more she is rewarded and allied with the protagonists. She made the choice to be a meeker, more maternal and submissive version of herself, and this postfeminist text loves her for it.

In imagining a feminist future, BSG disallows the possibilities that some of the most influential feminist theorists and writers have put forth—the potential of cyborg feminism and the potential of a different method of reproduction. But while I see these potential feminist utopias shut down to reinforce biology and maternity over all else, I see these same themes recovered when I look at them through a queer lens. Let’s take a look at what BSG’s utopian themes can look like as queer futures.

Queer Futures

While BSG shuts down its feminist utopian possibilities, it simultaneously opens up new ones in queering the same two themes I discussed above: gender performance and reproduction. Here I should again emphasize that by “queer” I don’t necessarily mean

LGBT themes or homoeroticism. In addition to the definitions I used in the last chapter— that queer theory reveals and identifies the non-normative and resists categorization—I also

59 mean, for the purposes of analyzing BSG, that queer analysis is also about introducing the potential for radical pluralism (Giffney 3) and about opening the doors to a future that is usually closed off and predetermined (Giffney 6). I mean what Michael Warner talks about in The Trouble with Normal when he says that sex draws people together and suggests alternative possibilities for life (49). And for mass media especially, it’s about debunking the lie that normal is a fixed state of being that is universally desirable. To me, BSG’s potential for a feminist utopian project is stalled at the moments that it emphasizes and proscribes normative heterosexuality—the traditionally feminine and maternal woman. But, as I argued in the last chapter, BSG also does queer and feminist work by representing non-normative femininity within and outside heterosexual relationships and non-normative eroticism in homosocial relationships. In encouraging queer readings of these otherwise normative relationships, BSG helps show the deviance in what could otherwise pass as normal sexuality, friendship, and gender expression.

Warner argues that seeing queer depictions like these—not to be confused with depictions of LGBT characters or themes, which could still be normative—is productive in itself. He writes that by seeing and interacting with people who are different from you (or in the case of media texts, we could say interacting with and being exposed to scenes of queer cultures and difference), you unlearn the perspective that prioritizes and desires normalcy.

“[Y]ou begin to recognize that there are other worlds of interaction that the mass media cannot comprehend, worlds that they can only deform when they project images of ghettos and other deviant scenes. … It is a way of transforming oneself and at the same time helping to elaborate a commonly accessible world” (71).

One of the reasons that I think queerness and futurity are part of BSG’s intended project comes down to the show’s muted, greyed-out aesthetics. The most obvious examples

60 of this are the show’s imagined living and bathing spaces—the unisex bathrooms and bunks.

These gender-neutral spaces seem to heed Judith Halberstam’s call for wider parameters of gender identification by blurring the biological as well as performative line between masculinity and femininity—by purposefully integrating men’s and women’s living and bathing spaces in military life—as not two ends of a binary that need to be separated but as two matter-of-fact differences that don’t particularly need to be upheld. Halberstam argues that the bathroom paradigm represents a deeply problematic gender binary (which BSG purports to eschew in doing away with sex-segregated spaces). “The bathroom, as we know it, actually represents the crumbling edifice of gender in the 20th century,” writes

Halberstam (24). BSG allies itself with the desire to explode these gender binaries; these spaces represent a blurring of gender performance at the same time as they depict the addition of women into men’s traditional spaces of military living and into performances of masculinity.

Throughout the series, we also see several women, but especially hotshot pilot

Starbuck, embodying what Halberstam might call “female masculinity.” From the first moments we see Starbuck onscreen, she performs masculinity: She jogs around the ship with short, slicked-back hair and chomps on a cigar while gambling and shit-talking—right before she gets in a fight and punches the ship’s second in command. These characteristics in particular are a nod to the machismo that Dirk Benedict embodied when he played the womanizing, swaggering (and male) Starbuck in the original 1979 Battlestar Galactica. So although these characteristics may not be masculine in and of themselves, they’re coded as such because of their association with the original character’s swagger. In some ways,

Starbuck can be read alternately in Halberstam’s terms as a tomboy or butch. Halberstam describes a tomboy as a girl with an understandable desire for the greater freedoms, mobility,

61 and self-motivation that boys enjoy and that these traits are considered acceptable and maybe even admirable in girls up until puberty (6). Tomboys reflect an aspiration toward masculinity that is justifiable since masculinity is so much more valued. But these childhood desires are typically disallowed and punished once a girl reaches puberty, making way for an embrace of womanhood. Starbuck is no longer a girl, but her rebellion and angst can be read as immaturity (especially when it’s framed in familial ways against father figure Bill Adama or as sibling rivalry with Lee Adama), as can her mercurial approach to relationships and her job. Admittedly, Starbuck falls more in the realm of the “approved female masculinity” of action stars like the muscular Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day or Sigourney

Weaver in Alien. Halberstam crucially points out that although these women showcase hard bodies, played-down wardrobes, impressive push-up reps, and physical power, their masculinity is tamed by a “resolute heterosexuality” that shuts down the possibility of queerness (28). But, as I argued in the last chapter, Starbuck can be read as queer—both as a lesbian by LGBT audiences and as a character who queers her role in heterosexual relationships. Starbuck’s appearance is one more way that queerness opens up the feminist possibilities that normativity would have shut down.

Halberstam argues that female masculinity has the power to explode the gender binary system and “make gender optional,” (27) to give people access to more varied definitions of gender and blur the lines of masculine and feminine identities, behaviors, and aesthetics. She builds off Judith Butler’s work of describing gender as performative and masculinity as a multiple trait that shapes everyone, regardless of sex. But masculinity is more identifiable when it appears where we don’t expect it to—in a woman. Halberstam argues that since men have a stronghold on masculinity now, they’re threatened when women show that they can successfully appropriate or embody it (15). Although Starbuck

62 does threaten some of the men around her, her female masculinity doesn’t seem to be threatening enough to get in the way of her attractiveness to men, expanding the realms of appropriate gender expressions by emphasizing what might otherwise be considered deviant femininity.

In the same way that the show queers gender possibilities through Starbuck and other characters, it also opens up ways of non-normative ideas about procreation and parenting. The show’s dramas over reproduction introduce queer parenting models through the miraculous birth of a child born to a humanoid Cylon mother, Athena, and a human father, Karl Agathon (pilot call sign: Helo). Academics have read the story of Hera’s parentage and Cylons’ attempts at reproduction through the lenses of both fear of miscegenation and of legitimization of queer reproduction.29 But to understand Hera’s potential to explode binaries and open up queer potential, you need to know a little more about the child who ends up being an ancestor to us here on Earth.

Hera is raised, protected, and desired by a long list of surrogate parents in addition to her biological ones. As the first Cylon-human hybrid child—the first proof that it was even possible for the two species to procreate or for Cylons to biologically procreate at all—she is at once an object of fascination and revulsion. For the Colonials, she is at first an unknown, assumed dangerous threat—a being that further blurs the line between human and humanoid Cylon. For the Cylons, she is at first a “miracle from God,” a successful experiment in heterosexual reproduction since the humanoid Cylons can’t procreate the old fashioned, human way. The vague reasoning for that failure is their lack of “love” in sex with

29 See Magali Rennes’ “Kiss Me, Now Die!” and Shira Chess’ “The C-Word: Queering the Cylons” in Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin’s Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? 63 each other—a diagnosis that is partially proven wrong later in the series, when Saul Tigh and

Caprica Six are able to conceive but then miscarry.

After Hera is born prematurely, the president of the Colonies, Laura Roslin, places

Hera in the care of an adoptive mother, Maya, and tells Hera’s parents that the child is dead.

Eventually, Hera is found by the Cylons and taken aboard their ship, where she is celebrated as a miracle but where she is fussy and ultimately becomes ill. At this point, even though she is cared for by a humanoid Cylon model who is genetically identical to her mother, Hera knows the difference when her real mother arrives to rescue her—perhaps signaling the primacy of biological parenthood over adoptive family forms. But at the same time, the drama of protecting Hera—which plays out several times in the series and is the impetus for the final battle in the series finale—cannot be accomplished without the help of surrogate and adoptive parents. As early as season one, scientist Gaius Baltar finds out in his divine hallucinations that he and Caprica Six are destined to be the protectors of Hera—they are even explicitly named as Hera’s parents when Baltar’s hallucination of Six describes Hera as

“our child” (“Scattered”). Baltar is left wondering, understandably, how it’s possible that he and Caprica are the parents of a child who was conceived by two others. But in the finale, we find out that their much-discussed parenthood was symbolic and brief: The two usher

Hera through and protect her at a crucial point in the final battle of the series. And although

Baltar and Caprica Six are nonplussed after realizing how anti-climactic their role was in

Hera’s destiny, the fact that their guardianship was so hyped up and valued in the series by divine visions (presumably inspired by God) places tremendous value on them in their roles as surrogate parents to Hera. Similarly, the evil Cylon Boomer—another version of the model eight Cylon, the same model as Hera’s mother—is morally redeemed for giving in to her instinct to protect Hera from being subjected to scientific experiments and death at the

64 hands of Cylons who think they can use Hera’s innards to unlock the secret to resurrection

(the humans had destroyed the technology in an earlier episode). In the finale, Boomer protects Hera and delivers her back to her parents.

The fact that Hera’s parentage and guardianship is queered from the start—even aside from her being parented by a half-dozen people, a la Marge Piercy’s vision—because of the tenuous status of Hera’s mother’s Cylon nature, which is juxtaposed with humanity in its potential dismissal of heterosexual reproduction.30 It is because of this association with otherness that Hera is initially such a threat to the Colonials, who don’t want to blur the lines between themselves and the Cylon other—though they clearly find that otherness irresistible, sexually and otherwise. And Hera’s queered humanity proves not only acceptable to the Colonials but ends up useful and valued. At one point, Hera’s blood cures Laura

Roslin’s cancer (“Epiphanies”). And further, her very hybrid queerness is presumed, in the logic of the show, to be the source of the advantageous genetic diversity that we enjoy on

Earth—not to mention our only hope for not falling into the same traps that the racially pure humans and Cylons both did before us: creating robot slaves that eventually rebel and destroy us. In “Deadlock,” Saul Tigh spells it out: “Pure human didn’t work. Pure Cylon didn’t work. It’s too weak.” In this sense, the deviance in Hera’s very biology is what makes her worthy of survival, but it also makes her our best hope for escaping the doom of the normative as forewarned on the several destroyed planets that the fleet comes across. At each world, we learn that the same exact story has transpired—the world’s inhabitants created robot slaves, those slaves rebelled and destroyed the planet in revenge. At the end of

30 See especially Shira Chess’ “The C-Word: Queering the Cylons” in Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin’s Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?

65 the series, we find out that we have a chance to escape this cycle of destruction. And our chance is embodied in Hera’s queerness.

For the humans on today’s planet Earth—for you and me—Hera is discovered, through an archeological dig discussed in the finale, to be a mitochondrial Eve, the woman from whom all humans living today descended. In some ways, Hera ushered in the end of humanity. But viewers found out that the end of humanity didn’t mean their extinction—it meant their merging with Cylons to create a new race. And when the allied Cylons and humans find Earth in the finale, we are assumed to be the result of that hybrid union. And through Hera’s hybridity, we are bequeathed with the potential to break the vicious cycle of violence that the show mythically describes happening over and over again in a cycle of destruction throughout eternity. “This has all happened before, this will all happen again,” says the show’s religious figures. But at the end of the series, we get a different spin when two divine beings ruminate on 21st century Earth’s potential—“This has all happened before, but the question remains, does it have to happen again?” (“Daybreak, Part II”).

Because Hera opens the possibility to a freer world here on our Earth, BSG seems to be challenging us to work to make sure our world lives up to its potential, as symbolized by queerness.

A One-Way Trip

All of this obsession with Hera as the hope for the future—especially in the implied importance of Hera’s own progeny, us—could arguably fall into the destructive rhetoric of what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” a constant appeal to holding the future “in trust” for the sake of the next generation (144). As a result of this rhetoric, “the lives, the speech, and the freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of deference

66 to imaginary children” (Edelman 248). To oppose this stultifying rhetoric, Edelman proposes that queer activists instead embrace a future-negating death drive that affirms pleasure over reproduction and upends the heteronormative social fabric just as much as conservatives fear it will (182).

Within the logic of Edelman’s arguments, BSG’s queerness comes through. Hera’s hybridity queers her in a way that saves her from normativity. So she’s not the same type of child figure that Edelman describes, who is always assumed normative and must be protected from queerness (248). And this hybrid nature also signals an embrace of the death of two species—human and Cylon—in the creation of Hera’s new, mixed race of beings. In fact, the ultimate joining of these two species’ genetics is characterized as a death—and a queer pleasure, since human-cylon sex is so irresistible—throughout most of the series. In the very last episode, the imaginary Caprica Six tells Baltar that “the end times are approaching—humanity’s final chapter is about to be written” and that he will “tak[e] charge of mankind’s remnants and guid[e] them to their end” (“Daybreak”), and in Razor, Starbuck is prophesized to be a “harbinger of death” who will “lead the human race to its end.” Until late in the series, the reproductive futures of both the Cylons and the humans depend on something very different from Hera’s hybridity. Although the Cylons’ reproductive experiments are what resulted in Hera’s birth, the Cylons wouldn’t have resorted to interbreeding with humans if they didn’t have to. When a pure Cylon baby is conceived between Caprica Six and Saul Tigh, most of the Cylons alter their focus on Hera to the

(ultimately never born) pure-Cylon child. And certainly the humans, with their constant updates of numbers on a whiteboard—the current population count that President Laura

Roslin keeps—didn’t have hybridity in mind when they encouraged people to “start having babies” to ensure humankind’s survival(Miniseries).

67 Despite the show’s emphasis on reproduction at first, it ends up embracing the death of each pure species in the form of Hera and the assumed interbreeding that the Cylons and humans will continue to do on Earth. This death drive is clear even in the final mission of the series, when Admiral Bill Adama leads what very well could be a suicide mission to rescue Hera from the enemy Cylons. It’s a mission that doesn’t really need to happen—the human fleet could just keep running, the same as they’ve been doing for four seasons.

Adama somewhat inexplicably changes course, after at first refusing to go on a rescue mission when Hera is kidnapped, to lead a volunteer mission to save her. Most of the series’ principal characters volunteer for the mission, which Adama warns them all is “likely to be a one-way trip” (“Daybreak”). They’re volunteering for a rescue that they assume will fail to save a child who, herself, represents the end of humanity and the end of Cylons—but the birth of a queer future.

BSG wrestles not only with feminist and queer issues but with issues of potential and futurity. And where it seems to fail when set against feminist utopian hopes and dystopian fears, it reclaims its progressiveness in queerness. The show’s themes and morals constantly fly in the face of normativity. And although BSG’s obsession with procreation and Hera as a symbol of the future could be read as a nod to heteronormative “reproductive futurism,” the show ultimately rejects even those notions of normativity in its embrace of the symbolic death drive even while it appears to worship the figure of the child. In the next chapter, I’ll finish by discussing how all of these rejections of normativity add up in BSG’s project of opening up queer possibilities for the future.

68 Chapter 4 Sine Qua Non

mbivalence is what inspired this project, but utility is what kept it alive. More

than just redeeming the show for the pleasure that it gives me and others, this A ambivalence required me to grapple with Battlestar Galactica’s complicated feminist issues and investigate the show’s political usefulness. Because of its setting and its up-front assumptions about what a more progressive society looks like in terms of intersecting identities, BSG forces us to wonder: Is what we’re watching a kind of utopia?

What does equality look like here, and what does it mean? Is it really equality? Is utopia just a matter of achieving equality?

In the same way that Jose Muñoz describes that “utopia will help embrace a politics of the here and now,” BSG foments imaginings of a more queer near-future that help us figure out how to get there at the same time that they indict our present failures. Battlestar

Galactica is a text that has mobilized a diverse fan base that is doing highly engaged, resilient spectator work. It is a show that encourages viewer ambivalence, and in doing so it inspires productive work in imagining a better future.

As I discussed in the previous chapters, there’s plenty of queer subtext in BSG, along with some explicitly queer representations. In chapter two, I reviewed some fan reactions to

BSG that mirrored my own ambivalence with the text and found progressive potential despite knowing that the show failed on some feminist and queer political levels. I then offered my own queer analysis of the gender performances of the Starbuck-Apollo-Anders love triangle that emphasized Starbuck’s masculinity, the men’s relative femininity, and the incestuous undertones of Starbuck and Apollo’s star-crossed relationship. The queer subtext in the homosocial friendship between Bill Adama and Saul Tigh rounded out the chapter to 69 prove that even the paragons of heteronormativity—hetero romance and brotherhood— could be proven to be queer and deviant. Chapter three went on to analyze how BSG intersects with second-wave feminist utopian and dystopian themes. Where the show fails in the feminist potential it set up, it redeems itself in queerness by repeatedly emphasizing a break from normativity.

These depictions introduce the possibility for different types of homosocial, heterosexual, and queer relationships. That they all exist temporally in a futuristic world is part of BSG’s utopian project, opening up future possibilities for escaping the normative that don’t seem to exist on modern-day Earth. But utopian projects are invested in the past and the present in addition to the potential future. Muñoz talks about the utility of queer utopianism as the idea of hope. In Cruising for Utopia he describes his “approach to hope as a critical methodology [that] can be best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (185). BSG indicts its viewers’ past and present by looking forward to our potential future if we keep on the same political path. Since BSG seemingly represents the kind of gender, race, and sexual equality that we can expect to naturally result from a democratic system like ours, we have to interrogate whether or not this end result is satisfying, attainable, or desirable.

And this potential, according to Muñoz, is valuable in itself. He talks about “a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality [that] is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” and that, though often disappointed, the hope for a potential utopia is “indispensable to the act of imaging transformation” (275). And even though imagining utopias or even knowing that they’ll in some ways inevitably fail—as I argued BSG did according to feminist

70 utopian and dystopian themes—“the eventual disappointment of hope is not a reason to forsake it as a critical thought process,” he says (Muñoz 286).

Ideas like this help me work though my own feminist ambivalence about BSG because, although it disappoints in many ways, it’s at least trying to wrestle with feminist ideas—their pragmatism, their desirability, their failures. As Muñoz sees the present as

“underlined by what [he] consider[s] to be today’s hamstrung pragmatic gay agenda,” I see many of the stated goals of U.S. feminist groups as colonialist and myopic. Being so cynical and cautious about getting behind movements like SlutWalk or the Feminist Majority

Foundation’s women’s campaign in Afghanistan, it’s easy to just become stunted by how problematic Western activism can be and to dismiss utopian imagining as naiveté. And it’s easy to dismiss the pop culture texts that engage with feminist thought as ultimately lacking.

But I appreciate BSG’s attempts to address the possibilities of the future, and I see it as mirroring Muñoz’s “critical investment in utopia, which is nothing like naive but, instead, profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present” (333).

But more than its attempt to wrestle with the future and with feminist ideas for what the future could look like, I appreciate how BSG does the political work that Michael Warner calls us to do in queering the normative. Jose Muñoz describes queerness as being inherently tied to possibility and futurity, even if it’s not temporally so. “Queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future,” he writes. Muñoz says that the future is queerness’s domain and that queerness itself is “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (124). When I and others read queerness into BSG—into Starbuck and Apollo’s relationship, Tigh and

Adama’s, or anyone else’s—I see a potential for queering the types of relationships that we usually assume to be normative, which then helps prove that there is no normal. That

71 potential carries with it the implication that those representations as they currently stand aren’t enough, that we need to open the doors for queerness, deviance, nonnormativity. The queer utopianism of BSG critiques the present and the past of its viewership and opens up unrealized possibilities for our futures.

Jameson’s writings on utopia argue that discussions of the future should do just such work, that they should necessarily draw on and critique the past and present. He argues in

Archaeologies of the Future that “even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience.”

This chaining to present reality, Jameson says, is still necessary for imagining political change to the systems we live in and inspiring us to action. The enclave of the Colonial fleet draws on the stated ideal (of U.S. policy) of gender equity by envisioning a type of utopian space in real social space, using political and social referents—whether they be abortion politics or unremarked-upon gay and lesbian relationships. And while these visions can mark a text as distant from our material present, Jameson warns that utopian visions that distinguish themselves too radically from the now become more unimaginable and unrealizeable (xi). In this sense, BSG might be a desirable utopia since it is built in a world with similar laws, social structures, and stereotypes. But that familiarity also implies that we can trust our current political systems to get us to BSG’s level of egalitarianism and that their ideas of equality are what we should be aiming for.

Of course, the idea of aiming for a future is a notion that is loaded with assumptions of productive temporality, the idea that progress is inevitable as time passes. But the cyclical nature of the show’s ethos—this has all happened before, this will all happen again—flies in the face of our Western idea of progress. Muñoz describes that the “temporally calibrated idea of ecstasy contains the potential to help us encounter a queer temporality, a thing that is not the linearity that many of us have been calling straight time” (3382). Thus, even though

72 BSG’s themes are so dependent on what Lee Edelman talks about as the anti-queer fetishization of procreative future, symbolized by children (149), the show’s actual time line—the cycle of life and destruction that “this has all happened before, this will all happen again” with different people playing different parts each time—intersects with the possibility of a queer future, as opposed to the linear nature of normative “straight” time. Of course, the promise of a queer future can distract from the concerns of the present. But if we aren’t taking the time to figure out something better than what we have, how can we ever get there?

Although there are no clear answers, the simple act of envisioning a better world is, as Jameson says, a heuristic and a worthwhile one (11). While feminist utopias tend to depict stagnant perfection, real life is a process—and often a painful one. Envisioning a next step to this process, or an end goal, is a crucial step to get us closer to utopia—or at least closer to equality. Although BSG can be read as a deeply flawed and myopic view of gender equality, the show’s grounding in familiar politics makes it a more useful imagining than a depiction of perfect stasis. It has me thinking “what if?” and “if only” at the same time.

Muñoz describes his project in Cruising Utopia as doing something similar. It’s “about an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning. I offer this book as a resource for the political imagination. This text is meant to serve as something of a flight plan for a collective political becoming” (3439). In the same way, I see BSG’s political project as a jumping-off point for feminist deliberation about what it is we really want our outcomes to be and how we can imagine getting there.

BSG positions itself as an example of what gender equity can look like in a liberal humanist society that looks a lot like the one Americans live in. Interrogating these depictions reveals problematic postmodern, postfeminist nostalgia for white, militaristic

73 patriarchy, but realizing this helps us unpack what’s really progressive about BSG and, by extension, what’s really progressive about the political moves we make toward our own visions of equality. I read beyond BSG’s apparent normativity to see the deviance in its most

“normal” characters, and this helps reinforce the fact that in real life, we shouldn’t be aiming for respectability lest we be marginalized; we need to start from the margins to de-center what’s normal. If we recognized everyone and everything as ultimately deviant, we wouldn’t be so invested in trying to attain normality at the expense of marginalizing others for not measuring up. None of us do, so let’s stop trying and stop lionizing the paragons of normal and instead prove that even they are deviants.

BSG taught me this lesson, with a lot help from queer theory. But the show also catalyzed a chain reaction of conflicting feminist analyses in myself and others. BSG challenged me on themes of gender, race, sexuality, and class in film. And importantly, it did so as a flawed but still compelling text. I’ll remember BSG as not only the show I labored over for two years in graduate school. I’ll remember it as the complicated mix of feminist, queer, and regressive themes that made it OK for me to be a feminist cinephile again. These lessons helped redeem one of my favorite shows for me, but they also unveiled a productive way to approach media as a feminist. Beyond whether a show measures up to feminist potential, texts can have other important messages to impart about not only other intersecting identities but also queerness and normativity. Applying these lessons offers a more nuanced way to critique and understand texts. I know that I’ll carry these ideas with me as I go on, thanks to Michael Warner and the other queer theorists who influenced this project. I hope others do, too, and that it helps them imagine different, better, more feminist, and more queer futures. Without that—sine qua non—it’s nearly impossible to change the present.

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