Drones, Clones, and Alpha Babes: Retrofitting Star Trek's Humanism, Post
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2006 Drones, clones, and alpha babes: retrofitting Star Trek’s humanism, post -9/11 Relke, Diana M.A. University of Calgary Press Relke, Diana M. A. "Drones, clones, and alpha babes: retrofitting Star Trek’s humanism, post -9/11". University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49319 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com DRONES, CLONES AND ALPHA BABES: RETROFITTING STAR TREK’S HUMANISM, POST- 9/11 by Diana M.A. Relke ISBN 978-1-55238-667-5 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ Alpha Babes IN THE elta Quad: Postfeminism and the Gendering of the Borg Drones_Book 1 2/23/06 12:33:30 PM Drones_Book 2 2/23/06 12:33:30 PM 1: Modernism/Postmodernism You will be assimilated. We will add your political and military distinctiveness to our own. Your armies will adapt to service US. NATO is irrelevant. The UN is irrelevant. Anti-war protest is irrelevant. Hell, even Saddam’s compliance is irrelevant! Resistance is futile. Have a nice day. George W. Borg. THIS ITEM OF women’s washroom graffiti appeared during the anxious winter of 2003, when Bush and Blair were marshalling their “coalition of the willing.” It belongs to the same genre of counterpropaganda that pro- duced hilarious critiques of the war based upon visuals from other science fiction classics – “Start Wars,” featuring Bush and Blair as war-obsessed Jedi knights; Bush as “The Turbanator”; and Mad Magazine’s depiction of the Bush administration as the cast of “Gulf Wars, Episode II: The Clone of the Attack.” In addition, as a form of textual poaching, this reworking of the Borg mandate brings to mind the underground fanzines, originally inspired by women’s wilful misreadings of the original Star Trek: rework- ing Trek’s stories forced it to deliver on its promise of gender equality on the final frontier. But, for me, George W. Borg mostly recalls Lynette Russell and Nathan Wolski’s “Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek, the Borg and the Post-colonial.” Published in the first issue of Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, this article challenges the dominant critical view of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) as “a thinly disguised metaphor for colonialism.” “Exploration, colonisation and assimilation are never far from the surface of the STNG text,” they concede. “Less apparent, how- ever, are aspects of the series which challenge the hegemonic view of this 3 Drones_Book 3 2/23/06 12:33:30 PM narrative and which present a post-colonial critique” (Russell and Wolski). Challenges to the hegemonic view of Star Trek are also the topic of the present essay, although postfeminism rather than post-colonialism is its primary focus. To my knowledge, no feminist reading of Voyager’s “Endgame,” which features the Federation’s final encounter with the Borg, has been attempt- ed. Feminist critics have been somewhat dismissive of the Voyager series on the basis of its liberal (post)feminist vision of the future – a critique which is relatively easy to support because of liberal feminism’s humanist assumptions. But I see plenty of space for resistant readings in “Endgame” and related episodes when considered together with The Next Generation’s encounters with the Borg, most importantly the feature-length film, First Contact. Moreover, viewed in the context of our post-9/11 world – a world characterized by a triumphant patriarchal revival that echoes the end of the first wave of political feminism during the Great War – Star Trek be- gins to look like a celebration of the good old days of the second wave. Indeed, when one looks back at Voyager from the perspective of Star Trek’s current series, Enterprise, with its two traditional female stereotypes – the compliant Asian beauty and the frigid bitch (see Minkowitz ) – one is apt to long for those good old days, when Captain Kathryn Janeway, flanked by two other outspoken, science-savvy Alpha females, often left the male members of her crew gaping at her prodigious intelligence and appetite for risk. “We are sometimes said to be living in a postfeminist era,” wrote Susan Moller Okin in 1991. “Whether this is supposed to mean that feminism has been vanquished, or that it has lost its point or its urgency because its aims have been largely fulfilled, the claim is false” (Okin 309). Whether late twentieth-century women viewers of TNG were disappointed or heartened by the series’ representation of gender, it was obvious that the twenty-fourth-century setting was postfeminist – although it wasn’t al- ways entirely clear just which of Okin’s two possible definitions its writers subscribed to. Personally, I find that the best approach to Star Trek, as to all mainstream popular culture, is to begin with the simple observation that if popular culture told us things about ourselves we didn’t want to know, popular culture wouldn’t be popular for long. As Joseph Campbell famously noted, we must live by some myth or other; thus, if Star Trek were to over- turn all the myths of gender by which we live our lives, we would not tune in to it, and corporate sponsors would withdraw their support. In other words, 4 rones, Clones, & Alpha Babes Drones_Book 4 2/23/06 12:33:31 PM even had Gene Roddenberry been the most radical of feminist television writers, he would still have been obliged to remain within the severe limits placed upon television by both its audience and its sponsors. Still, the pilot episode of the original Trek in 1966 featured a highly rational woman as second in command on the Enterprise. Roddenberry created her to balance out his passionate and impulsive starship Captain. But he was coerced by the network into scrapping that pilot and creating a new one, in which the logical Mr. Spock of the planet Vulcan replaced the Earth-woman as Executive Officer. The network’s excuse was that ac- ceptance of a woman of intelligence and authority was too much to ask of the American public; an extraterrestrial was supposedly more believable. What Roddenberry did succeed in retaining in his second pilot was a com- munications officer who was not only female but also Black. Back then, in those pre-feminist days, I was no fan of television, and had even less interest in the silly genre of science fiction, yet I can distinctly remember sitting up and taking notice. This was an important first for television in an era when we had little in the way of an understanding of the relationship between racism and representation, and had not yet invented the word “sexism.” The point I’m trying to make here is that, no matter how limited Roddenberry’s depiction of gender equality was in the original Trek and continued to be in The Next Generation, it was his instincts about the inevi- tability of women’s professionalism and authority that earned Star Trek a substantial female following.