Breaking Binary Being in the Future Fiction of Star Trek
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Portland State University PDXScholar University Honors Theses University Honors College 11-16-2018 Breaking Binary Being in the Future Fiction of Star Trek Jeremiah D. Ackerman Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/honorstheses Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Ackerman, Jeremiah D., "Breaking Binary Being in the Future Fiction of Star Trek" (2018). University Honors Theses. Paper 644. https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.659 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in University Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. 1 Breaking Binary Being in the Future Fiction of Star Trek by Jeremiah D. Ackerman An undergraduate honors thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science in University Honors and Philosophy Thesis Adviser Brenda Glascott Portland State University 2018 2 “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness ( Set Phasers To Stun ) When I was a kid, I read comic books like the “X-men” that dealt with how a group of people with mutant abilities sought to utilize their potential and exist peacefully alongside the rest of human society. In these stories, the mutant characters faced discrimination, prejudice, and termination often associated with the fears society had about their differences from the normal features of everyday people (non-mutants). I understood in my young mind that these mutants, although different, were also people. And over the years I continued to look at comic books/graphic novels, science fiction, and storytelling in general with a passion to understand what the stories that we create are saying about the human experience, people’s differences, and the struggles people face within societies through history and into the future. I was introduced to the franchise series Star Trek when I was eight years old, at the time when Star Trek: The Next Generation was in its second season. At the time I was not really aware of the philosophical content that was loaded into the episodes of the series, but I remember thinking, “This is the future; this is what the future looks like and this is what people do, and how they act, in the future.” As a child, I perceived Star Trek as representing the results of human achievements and the progress that humanity will make in the future world, and beyond, a better place. It wasn’t until much later that I came to understand that a core feature to the show’s premise was the attempt to offer a more equitable human state of existence in a future- reality. I started to wonder if Star Trek was offering a fair projection of a truly more equitable society, if it offered representation of all kinds of people, or just certain types of people. I started watching Star Trek trying to discover what kinds of connections I could make between our real world in the present and the future world portrayed in Star Trek. What is Star Trek saying about 3 social progress, changes in normative behaviors, empowerment of historically oppressed groups of people, and the inclusion of diverse or expanding nuances in things like gender and identity? In this thesis, I refer to the “feminine” as having qualities or appearances traditionally associated with women (like delicacy, submissiveness/vulnerability, and prettiness), traits that have traditionally been cited as feminine but are not strictly universally identical. And I refer to the “masculine” as having qualities or appearances traditionally associated with men (like strength, aggressiveness, and stoicism). I use these general understandings to challenge the traditional and embedded views of those who see gender as a “binary” feature in which persons that are born with one of two sexed bodies (male\female) are associated with a gender that is naturally tied to being of male or female sex. Traditionally embedded ideas of the gender binary will be used to gauge whether characters and gender roles portrayed in Star Trek reflect ideas of hegemonic masculinity, or if they have envisioned broad and novel representations of beingness. There appears to be an underlying trend of binary ideas in the gender performances depicted in some stories about humanity’s more equitable future, and not enough representations of alternative identity qualities. The movements for trans-gender rights, gender equality and gender neutrality are emerging social justice issues in our current social and political discourses. Is science fiction is keeping up with the social movements that will affect societal changes of the future? Has Star Trek, specifically, been doing a good job in helping us to imagine alternate conditions, states, and possibilities? Does Star Trek offer an accurate account of the gender identity spectrum, or the possibility that gender roles could change over time? Can science fiction project an imaginative idea of the future that acts to potentially help us (the writer/reader/audience) 4 envision progress that takes place in the future or do we utilize the imaginative future to work out problems we face in the present? Michel Foucault’s view of “episteme” in “The Order of Things” (chapters 4 - 5) frames the understanding of people’s perspective and establishment of categorical knowledge as changing over time, in which societies and the things we take as regularities in knowledge are always changing. Foucault questions the authority of what is known by arguing that knowledge in this sense is limited by the way that people agree to use language, so what is known can only reflect the limits of a particular verbal system of the era. And so it is very likely that whatever the actual state of the future of things will or would be can only be spoken of unintelligibly in the present: how can we represent something in literature that we have yet to acknowledge, identify, or give a name to and incorporate into our language system? The challenge then is imagining completely unfamiliar features of the future within the discursive constraints of the present. With speculative fiction like Star Trek, I argue that the imagined future of beingness is often considerably constrained within a binary understanding of gender. American literary critic Fredric Jameson, known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, believes that science-fiction storytelling does not only provide a way to imagine our future, but also to “de-familiarize and restructure our experience of our own present.” (151) It is important for the audience of fantasy and science fiction, who actively looks at science fiction as a portal to the possibilities of our actual future, to keep in mind that Jameson is saying that science fiction is a way of using our imagination to alter our known reality. These texts give us the freedom to ask: - What if it was this way? What if features appeared different, or worked differently? What would that world be like? Would it be better, or worse? Imagination can help us envision our ideas of a better world, a more peaceful world, a more equitable future. But 5 sometimes those visions are only partial; they can imagine a particular state of the world, but sometimes struggle to answer how society arrived at such a state. There are different ways we can use our imagination to build concepts of how we see or understand the world. Storytelling found in narratives about life (ancestral knowledge of creation, folklore, dark fairy tales, historical master narratives, and religion) are examples of how imagination has been used to powerfully shape belief and action in the real world. Fiction about humanity’s greater future might be said to have a degree of moral responsibility involved in what it depicts, since it offers its audiences a framework of the world that might allow for greater inclusiveness of diverse and emerging ideas, knowledge, and understanding, particularly through the representations of under-represented groups with alternative modes of identity that may be peripheral to mainstream culture. In an interview that was hosted by Zoe Carpenter in Portland, Oregon, 13th, October, 2015, titled, “Listening to the Unheard Voices.” the late American novelist, Ursula Le Guin, was asked to comment on her use of alternate political and social systems in the worlds she’s created and the types of opportunities. that might not appear in realist fiction. Le Guin said, “If you make it up you can open the doors to possibilities, whereas if you’re writing metafiction, realistic fiction, fiction that says ‘this is how it is’ in a sense the doors are all closed.” Le Guin thinks that imaginative fiction allows us to go through these new doors and see what’s on the other side and how things work there. Le Guin shared an anecdote from her life, in which a teenage fan of hers approached her and said “Do you know why I love Star Trek?” When Le Guin asked the young girl why, the teen replied, “Because it shows me a future where I can 6 live.” Le Guin thought this hope for a place where the teen belongs and is recognizable and fits in was what the young girl was getting from watching Star Trek and reading science fiction. Carpenter concluded her interview asking Le Guin what she thought of “progress” as it might appear through storytelling, since Le Guin has thought so much about the future. Le Guin questioned what progress even means, but replied that she is only interested in the present and the past, because no one knows what the future is.