Title: The Persistence of Difference: Postfeminism, Popular Dis- course, and Heterosexuality in Star Trek: The Next Generation
Abstract: In her introduction to Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, Constance Penley observes that fiction film as a genre..is now more hyperbolically concerned than ever with the question of difference, typically posed as that of the difference between human and nonhuman... (vii). As Penley notes elsewhere, although traditional accounts of science fiction describe it as uninterested in human sexuality-perhaps because of its assumed audience of preadolescent boys-the genre often addresses questions of sexual difference and sexual relations alongside other differences such as human/alien and organism/machine (Brownian Motion 138).1 This engagement with differences in gender identity and sexual desire is nowhere more evident than in Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this essay, I want to explore the heterosexual paradigm imagined by TNG and its participation in a larger cultural discourse about gender roles, romantic relationships, and the role of difference in the fulfillment of'desire. In several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation we see explorations of two related categories of sociosexual experience: the possibility on the one hand of a romantic relationship with an other whose gender/sexual identity is not defined in terms of heterosexual oppositions; and the imagination on the other of a beloved whose desirability is based on an ideal of heterosexual difference. In particular, I will focus on the utopian impulse at work in much of Star Trek, and especially in several TNG episodes, and its disruption as Star Trek's liberal-reformist elements encounter the conservative-even reactionary -gender ideologies at work in contemporary popular culture discourse. TNG tries to imagine utopian romantic configurations and ideal sexual others, only to tell us, first, that such relationships are necessarily heterosexual, and second, that heterosexuality is inherently unable to fulfill the desire it is supposed to serve. This breakdown of possible solutions to difference is part of the larger contestation over gender difference which has been taking place in the cultural discourse of the US during the last two decades. This essay focuses specifically on popular media articulations of the postfeminist and New Traditionalist segments of that discourse, whose primary project is to reaffirm patriarchal heterosexuality and the gender roles associated therewith against the combined threats-as the discourse constructs it-of feminism and non-heterosexual sexuality.2 But along the way, these pop-culture articulations of postfeminism and
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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