The Borg and Radical Performativity in Star Trek"

Chloe - leaver http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts/archive/volume9/leaver Chloe Search UWA UWA Website for keywords... Go Welcome What is Women's Studies? Undergraduate Honours Postgraduate Staff Tama Leaver Research Projects Web Resources 'Your appeal to my humanity is pointless': The Borg and Radical Performativity in Site Map Star Trek1 Contact Outskirts online journal According to feminist critic Anne Cranny-Francis, the genre of science fiction has two distinct types. The Archived Issues first, 'hard' science fiction, utilises science and technology simply as a 'prop' for 'conventional stories of Volume 15 adventure and heroism' and adheres unproblematically to dominant, conservative constructions of Volume 14 Volume 13 meaning; the second, 'soft' science fiction, problematises some aspect of the 'everyday, from common Volume 12 sense' using scientific discourse to disrupt the 'normal', potentially conflicting with dominant meaning Volume 11 systems [2] The former has traditionally been patriarchal, conservative and invariably presents a 'boys Volume 10 with their toys' scenario. [3] Utilising Cranny-Francis' hard/soft dichotomy as boundary points for an Volume 9 analytical spectrum, the popular American science fiction televisual franchise [4] Star Trek ostensibly Volume 8 falls toward the harder side, often presenting a latent ideology of 'optimistic imperialism' in the guise of Volume 7 exploration and multiculturalism, completely in keeping with the dominant political and military Volume 6 discourses of the United States of America. [5] One of the high-tech 'toys' encountered by the crews of Volume 5 the USS Enterprise, and later the USS Voyager, is the Borg: cybernetically enhanced humanoids linked Volume 4 Volume 3 together with a single collective 'hive' mind. In the initial skirmishes with the Borg in Star Trek: The Volume 2 Next Generation they were represented as androgynous, but later encounters, specifically in the First Volume 1 Contact film and the Star Trek: Voyager (ST:V) series, dealt with cyborgs that were gendered. [6] While Submissions a textual or genre reading of the texts in question (in this case, Star Trek episodes and films) primarily Editorial Consultants focuses on the meanings and ideology 'intended' by the producers and writers, a more nuanced analysis can be constructed if audiences are, in some manner, accounted for in terms of meaning creation. In the cases where 'female' Borg are encountered, I will argue that the commercially constructed science fiction of Star Trek which is usually positioned at toward the harder end of the spectrum can, at times, be read by audiences in a softer manner; in terms of gender the audience can, at times, construct meanings from the text which challenge the dominant patriarchal hegemony rather than allying with it. Alice Krige's character, the Borg Queen, was the first notable 'female' Borg in the Star Trek metanarrative. The characterisation was driven by the constraints on cinematic production. Since motion pictures need to appeal to a far broader audience than a television series, they necessarily present more self-contained narratives, which must reach resolution by the end of the film. The transference of the Borg from the small to large screen meant the disembodied collective of the Borg needed to be focused into a single character or group to allow a direct, immediate and resolvable conflict. Thus, the Borg Queen was created. The first image of the Borg Queen immediately presents a challenge to traditional ideas of embodied gender (and embodiment per se): she appears as only a torso and head with cybernetic implants and a metallic spine, suspended from thick black cables. The torso is lowered onto a waiting headless 'body', with which the Queen's upper section interconnects. [7] As Robert Wilson has argued, the replacement of biological elements with cybernetic implants 'evoke[s] a consciousness of dis-integration', implicitly challenging the coherence and borders of the human body. [8] The Borg Queen represents more potent a challenge than a simple implant or prosthesis would since her entire body is modularised and fragmented. Moreover, the Queen's lack of stability in terms of embodiment contrasts with the ostensibly coherent and protected white male bodies of the 'great men'-Picard and Data-that the movie glorifies. [9] The combination of the Borg Queen's fragmented body and overtly sexualised performance code her character as representative of the both seductive and inherently threatening way technologies are deployed in Star Trek: First Contact in relation to embodiment. It is not what the Queen lacks or fragments, however, but what her character has metaphorically appropriated that creates the predominant psychological tension between the Borg and the mandatory 'hero', Captain Picard. In the opening scene of First Contact, Picard remembers when he (in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation) was "assimilated", essentially becoming part of the Borg collective. [10] The traumatic image that both infuriates and terrifies Picard is the memory of the Borg penetrating him as they augmented him with long cylindrical cybernetic implants. In psychoanalytic terms, the flashback reveals an appropriated phallus traumatically invading a heterosexual white male body. However, the trauma Picard experiences in not only sexual in nature. Picard's coherence as an individual in humanist terms is thrown into flux in the flashback since he is intricately and intimately linked to technology; his subjectivity can no longer even purport to maintain a dichotomy between organic and technological, challenging the very humanist ontology that Picard as Captain relies upon. Later in the film, when the Captain again confronts the Borg Queen, he is overwhelmed by a jump-cut flashback of her taunting him as a phallic drill penetrates his eye. Likewise, when the android who is trying to attain 1 of 7 17/12/2006 10:18 Chloe - leaver http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts/archive/volume9/leaver the (traditional) humanist ideal of a white male existence (often described in the series simply as "being human"), Data, is captured by the Borg and as the Queen interrogates him, she again appropriates threatening phallic imagery, 'invading' Data's body with two penetrative drills, the double phallus. For Data who is a technological creation, an android, the threat is more complex since he is ostensibly already a hybrid of technological and organic [11], but the biological and emotional play a smaller part than he would prefer. However, when the Borg Queen's new technologies reify Data's interface between the biological and technological, he is overwhelmed, at times appearing to completely subsume his usual rationality in the face of the experiencing the heightened 'pleasures of the flesh' the Borg Queen offers. Thus the Borg Queen's threat is neither exclusively technologically nor organically driven, but rather the menace derives from her explicit challenges to the normalised boundaries between technology and humanity, and the relations between those boundaries and the subjectivity of Data and Picard. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler argues that neither 'gender' nor 'sex' is an essential property of identity, but rather that gender is a performative category which through its repeated stylised performances constitutes the idea of an ostensibly prediscursive sex. Although controversial, Butler's argument that 'gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings' through which the various performances of gender construct ideas of biological sex is a powerful analytical framework. [12] Moreover, Butler's model of performativity is particularly empowering for cultural studies in that is implies that radical gender performances not only challenge normalised gender identity but also are a means to make visible the processes through which both gender and notions of biological sex are constituted. The Borg Queen's disruptive performativity not only challenges Data and Captain Picard's traditionally patriarchal perspective but also edges toward illuminating the artificiality of any essentialist (or humanist) conceptualisation of identity. Not only does the Borg Queen metaphorically wield phallic power, but she is also the leader, or representative head, of a powerful collective and the Borg 'drones' which she seemingly commands are almost all male (in terms of actors in the film, at least). While the Borg Queen can be read as temporarily allowing 'softer' readings of the science fictional space, challenging traditional notions of gender roles and embodiment within the 'harder' surrounding narrative of the film, the pervasive ideological conservatism of Star Trek is ultimately maintained at a narratological level in that the Queen is not only defeated but is also executed in a particularly gruesome manner with her skin and body being ripped away by powerful corrosives. Significantly, the Borg Queen's defeat is engineered by an alliance between those two males she most consistently threatened - Data and Picard - and their success reinforces the ideological status quo, the male characters conquering the technological seductress. The laboured symbolism is explicit after the Queen's death as Picard reasserts his masculinity, picking up the twitching metallic spine and head of the deceased Borg Queen and snapping the spine in two, metaphorically destroying both the appropriated phallus and the threat of technological hybridity. The Queen's radical performativity

Load more