Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in Star Trek: Next Generation
Western Journal of Communication, 65(4) (Fall 20011, 392-415 Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in Star Trek: The Next Generation Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki Through an analysis of the popular syndicated television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, this essay begins to theorize the relationship between collective visions of the future and the identity politics of the present. Focusing on the tension between the show's utopian rhetoric of the future and its representational practices with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, it is argued that The Next Generation invites audiences to participate in a shared sense of the future that constrains human agency and (re)pro duces the current cultural hegemony with regard to identity politics. The closing section calls for critics to continue politicizing mediated images that appeal to popular imagi nation and to develop and implement a pedagogical practice of counter-imagination. TAR TREK-by which we mean the four dramatic television series, S the animated cartoon, the nine full-length motion pictures, the hundreds of novels and comics, the multi-million-dollar-a-year mer chandizing industry of toys, games, recordings, and clothing, the un precedented exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Wash ington D.C., the science modules developed for teaching elementary school children about physics and medicine (Mestel, 1994; Anthony, 1994), the special topics courses at colleges and universities (Nagler, 1994), and the three distinctive fan co-cultures of Trekkers, Trekkies, and slash novelists each with their own annual conventions (Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995; Bacon-Smith, 1992; Penley, 1997)-has been entertain ing audiences, young and old, for forty years now.
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