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Can you imagine a world without Star Trek—without warp drive, phasers, photon torpedoes, tricorders, communicators, and transporters? After six Hollywood movies and twenty-five years of nonstop television presence, Star Trek is, indeed, a pervasive cultural phenomenon! This is the first critical, scholarly look at the mysteries, hidden meanings, and complex issues of the text known as Star Trek.Looking at the original Spock-Kirk Star Trek, the contributors ask and answer questions such as: What are the cultural conditions surrounding the homoerotic relationship between Kirk and Spock? How does the show depict gender relations while simultaneously recreating the cultural conditions under which women continue to experience sexual aggression and violence? They also explore Star Trek: The Next Generation, raising issues such as: Was Data a battlefield on which the struggle for human rights was waged? Did militarism and warring versions of masculinity intersect at Worf?Readers will discover the unique charges of cultural studies scholarship and how it enables us to designate a powerful pop-cultural phenomenon such as Star Trek into a legitimate site of study. The thirteen essayists address the very real and necessary topics of hegemony, utopias, militarism, colonialism, gender, violence, race, class, sexuality, and liminality, analyzing individual episodes and overarching themes of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Their insights on how Star Trek affects what we understand our culture to be, how it represents the social and political order, and how it reproduces pleasure and pain in its televisual texts, will fascinate scholars, students, and Trekkers alike.
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1 | "A Part of Myself No Man Should Ever See": Reading Captain Kirk's Multiple Masculinities | 10 |
| 2 | When the Body Speaks: Deanna Troi's Tenuous Authority and the Rationalization of Federation Superiority in Star Trek: The Next Generation Rape Narratives | 33 |
| 3 | Liminality: Worf Metonymic Signifier of Racial, Cultural, and National Differences | 51 |
| 4 | Dating Data: Miscegenation in Star Trek: The Next Generation | 69 |
| 5 | Cyborgs in Utopia: The Problem of Radical Difference in Star Trek: The Next Generation | 95 |
| 6 | A Fabricated Space: Assimilating the Individual on Star Trek: The Next Generation | 115 |
| 7 | "For the Greater Good": Trilateralism and Hegemony in Star Trek: The Next Generation | 137 |
| 8 | Domesticating Terrorism: A Neocolonial Economy of Differance | 157 |
| 9 | Boys in Space: Star Trek, Latency, and the Neverending Story | 189 |
| 10 | Enjoyment (in) Between Fathers: General Chang as Homoerotic Enablement in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country | 211 |
| 11 | "All Good Things...": The End of Star Trek: The Next Generation, The End of Camelot - The End of the Tale about Woman as Handmaid to Patriarchy as Superman | 231 |
| 12 | Weaving the Cyborg Shroud: Mourning and Deferral in Star Trek: The Next Generation | 245 |
| Appendix A | Interview with Henry Jenkins | 259 |
| Appendix B | A Selective Bibliography of Critical Work on Star Trek | 279 |
| About the Book | 283 | |
| About the Editors and Contributors | 285 | |
| Index | 289 |
Overview
Can you imagine a world without Star Trek—without warp drive, phasers, photon torpedoes, tricorders, communicators, and transporters? After six Hollywood movies and twenty-five years of nonstop television presence, Star Trek is, indeed, a pervasive cultural phenomenon! This is the first critical, scholarly look at the mysteries, hidden meanings, and complex issues of the text known as Star Trek.Looking at the original Spock-Kirk Star Trek, the contributors ask and answer questions such as: What are the cultural ...