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This is part of an unfinished project that represents what an emergent gender and popular fiction scholar just cutting his teeth managed to think about how some pornographic Star Trek: The Next Generation fan fiction was doing a kind of vernacular gender theory. Since 1995, scholar study of fan fiction has matured a lot and in some communities gender theory has become a lingua franca for people living their genders in much more complex ways. There’s probably a lot about this piece that might come off as naive or mistaken, but as the parent of a transperson, I’m proud that long ago, in this piece, and in my Edward Scissorhands piece, I was already thinking about gender in ways that made it possible to accept their truth.
Although I have tried to complete this project a few times, the last time in 2009, I haven’t edited this piece. It stands here as it did when I presented it in 1995. If I had it to do over again, I’d aim to be less pedantic and scholarly. I found the stories I wrote about in ftp archives, rather than in the usenet discussion groups where fans published, read and discussed them. I wish I had looked harder for the places where those stories were part of a living culture, although I suspect my younger cishet self might have been embarrassed to participate in the ways that other early acafans did.
Head’s up – the primary sources I analyze in this piece are pornographic. All descriptions of explicit material is treated in a scholarly manner, and I don’t think that by today’s standards, the plot points I describe are particularly explicit, I do remember blushing as I read this paper aloud to audiences at the 1995 American Studies Association national conference.
A Paper Presented to the 1995 American Studies Association Conference
Eric Drown, University of Minnesota[1]
Emily Thompson, Panel Chair: Gendered Geographies of Cyberspace
v 1.2 © October-November 1995, All Rights Reserved
In the last few years, self-conscious work has begun on masculinity as an aesthetic, an ideology, an identity, and a social-historical phenomenon. Drafting along on the insights of feminism, teacher-scholars like Anthony Rotundo have rejected the mystical model of the men’s movement and traced the historical development of “American manhood” as a series of transformations in the rhetorics of masculinity. I hope to contribute to this work by reading Commander Data, the gentle mechanical man of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as a contested site for the production of masculinity, a site that enables men and women to investigate the models currently available to them.[2]
Before now, critical inquiry into the figure of the mechanical man (or more specifically the robot, cyborg, or android) has been conducted primarily by feminists such as Janet Bergstrom, Constance Penley, or Donna Haraway. Bergstrom’s “Androids and Androgyny” investigates the “commodification of the androgynous female type” by combining psychoanalytic insights into androgyny with a theory of style and resistance. Androgynous androids, she claims, often mask the very sexual differences that they seem meant to embody. Penley’s “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia” treats the cyborg of The Terminator as a figure of “tech” gone “noir,” threatening to disrupt the oedipal dramas that help underwrite the “[apocalyptic] corporate totalitarianism” of contemporary culture. Finally, Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” appeals to a cyborg epistemology as a way to evade the pitfalls of the Enlightenment dualisms that have facilitated “the logics and practices of domination.” Haraway uses the figure of the cyborg to make “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”[3]
While the revolutionary projects of these scholars enable them to mount sophisticated and effective attacks on the edifices of domination that structure the patriarchal culture of late-capitalism, too often the particular signs of struggle for the trope of the mechanical man get lost in theoretical postulates on meaning, gender, and subjectivity. For Bergstrom, Penley, and Haraway, the mechanical man is a figure of radical polysemy, a being neither human nor machine, contesting the possibility of fixing the meaning of culturally-constructed but naturalized categories such as gender, capital, and empiricism. In these readings mechanical men seem to function primarily as figures of critique, embodying the dehumanizing, alienating effects of patriarchy, while demonstrating the performative nature of human subjectivity. As a programmable, simulated human being, the inherently polysemic mechanical man enables these critics to deconstruct the “necessary” quality of some of the foundational rhetorics of patriarchy. But narratives such as The Terminator or Blade Runner, which feature mechanical men, also work to underwrite humanist rhetorics. Though polysemic, mechanical men live in particular narratives that variously enforce, challenge, or revise dominating social structures. As inhabitants of conflicted texts, mechanical men can too easily become semiotic placeholders, empty signs ready to be filled with meaning, whether by readers possessed by the rhetorical features of narrative or by critics possessed with the rhetorical features of theory. In either case the meaning of the mechanical man is determined situationally by one’s interpretive framework and skill in close reading. For those of us interested in how texts can hail cultural subjects, the response of actual readers is lost with this focus.
So while I share Bergstrom’s, Penley’s, and Haraway’s political project, I intend to follow media critic and theorist Henry Jenkins and shift the grounds of discussion from the production of a mass-mediated masculinity, to the reception, reproduction, and revision of that masculinity by fans both attracted to and dissatisfied with it. A production-oriented representation-of-gender analysis might use psychoanalytic, semiotic, or textual theory to compare Paramount’s Lt. Commander Data to received notions of masculinity in order to understand how mass-mediated representations help construct particular masculinities. But while analyses like these have taught us much about the machinery of domination, they have taught us less about how particular subjects have engaged the social and cultural forces constantly disciplining them. I’ll be focusing, then, more on the Commander Data of fan-produced Star Trek narratives than on the Data of the television series.
As Professor Jenkins argues in a 1992 study of fan culture (Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture) analytical focus on the televisual text has too often cast television fans as passive receivers of ideology.[4] An active television fan himself, Jenkins prefers to borrow a more engaged model of reception from the French sociologist Michel De Certeau. According to Jenkins’s reading of the interpretive practices of particular fan communities, television fans “poach” television texts; that is, they “rework and reappropriate” the texts they view (62). “Poachers,” he writes, “do not observe from the distance . . .; they trespass upon others’ property; they grab it and hold onto it; they internalize its meanings and remake these borrowed terms.” Television fans “draw . . . texts close not so that [they] can be possessed by it[,] but rather so that [they] may more fully possess it. Only by integrating media content back into their everyday lives, only by close engagement with its meanings and materials, can fans fully consume the fiction and make it an active resource” (62).
Described this way, fans’ appropriating reading practices are not dissimilar to those used by academic interpreters. Both fans and academics read texts purposefully and selectively. Both function as bricoleurs, cobbling together new texts from bits and pieces of other texts in order to get close to meanings that cannot otherwise be articulated in face of the linguistic, social, intellectual and juridical forces limiting discourse. It is easy, then, to recognize in these fan practices an active engagement with the narratives and meta-narratives that help structure everyday life. So, if we are to understand how Data can serve some fans as a construction site for a model masculinity, we must go with Jenkins and De Certeau and have a look beyond the primary televisual texts of the corporate “landowners” to the filched texts of the fan “poachers” (32).
While many of these texts are produced by aficionados, even dedicated poachers enjoy an ambivalent relationship to the TV texts that help determine the accepted boundaries of the official Star Trek universe. Several writers archived at startrek ftp sites (ftp.healer.com/pub/misc/startrek and ftp.cis.ksu.edu/startrek) explicitly refer to the televised shows as the “canon.” The concept of canon provides fans with a way to determine the “authenticity” of a fan-produced Star Trek text. While few fan stories have ever been elevated to canonical status by Paramount, stories can be more-or-less canonical. Texts that stray too far from the show’s fundamental narratives, characters, or themes are often explicitly marked by their authors as non-canonical. In the header of “Wisdom of the Ancients,” Anton Sanderfoot implores his readers not to “consider any of [his story] as ‘cannon’ [sic].” The author of “Aftershock” (Amy Raduege) chose to write a Next Generation story set after the recent Star Trek: Generations film, in a future not-yet-constructed, but staked out, by Paramount. In order to “minimize the amount of [her story] that will be rendered non-canon when STVIII comes out, she “left the actual mission of the _Enterprise-E_ suitably vague.”
Stories that make some significant revision in these canonical premises warn purist-readers not to read further. Karen Linzer, for example, warns readers that her story—“Uncertainties”—“is intended as erotica, and contains explicit descriptions of fairly kinky sex between consenting adults, including some bondage. If you’re offended by that sort of thing—or if you’re likely to take exception to a portrayal of everyone’s favorite android as something very different than the embodiment of sweet, goofy, innocence—please don’t read this. Or at least don’t complain to me after you do.” Other fan writers display a more ambivalent respect for the canon. The author of “Belly of the Whale,” for example, “believes [his] story conforms to ‘canon[.]’ [E]ven though conforming to the canon[,] given the rarely inspirational literary excellence of Trek in general[,] is hardly something to take too seriously.” Patti McKinnon, the poster of “Broken Dreams,” chafes at the creative restrictions the canon imposes on her and her colleagues: “As some of you know,” she writes, “writing a ST script is difficult; Paramount has at least 6 pages of things you can’t do, subjects and characters you can’t touch. . . . By the way, Paramount script guidelines FORBID the killing off of a character.” Clearly the canon sets thematic and character boundaries with which fan-writers must struggle as they pitch their stories to the knowledgeable Trek audiences likely to read them in self-selecting USENET groups. The canonical Data of the television show is, then, always the absent other to which the heretical, fan-built, Datas refer.
The subject of fan fiction and discussion in USENET groups,[5] Data has a life beyond the television series that enables fans attracted-to-but-dissatisfied-with Paramount’s version to rewrite his identity as they see fit. As an invented, programmable, life form, all Datas—canonical or heretical— dramatize the primary insight of post-structuralist gender theory; put simply, gender exists only insofar as it is performed. According to theorist Joan Cocks, men and women are subject to what she calls a “regime of Masculine/feminine” which “imposes upon each of the two kinds of bodies a particular norm and characteristic deviation.”[6] And further, as Judith Butler argues, this norm and deviation, which we know as gender, is “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”[7]
Stories about androids are one site where such stylized repetitions occur. In SF, androids are models of human beings; they are both superior and inferior to their human counterparts. Android-fiction, thereby, often explores the lacks which structure human subjectivity; that is, the mechanical man motif often spotlights the ideological inventions human beings use to convince themselves that they are individuals, free and whole. Since the televised series establishes Data as a protean subject in search of identity, many aspects of his identities are open to fan- (and academic-) revision. In individually and collectively-produced stories, parodies, erotica, technical manuals, top ten lists, and other discursive forms, on-line fans extend, rewrite, and otherwise engage some of Star Trek’s fundamental narratives. They also use these forms to investigate cultural inventions such as masculinity.
Since Data was created, and not born, he might logically have had no gender at all. But, according to a fan-piece by Christine Morgan, Data’s creator must have “noted that [humans] had marked problems with gender neutrality and androgyny,” and so gave him a sex.[8] But while Data’s sex is clearly determined by his physical make-up, several televised episodes establish that his gender-identity is constituted exclusively through programmed subroutines. In “The Offspring” Data constructs a genderless android child who later chooses to become a girl. In “In Theory” he writes a romance subroutine for a recently-single security officer named Jenna D’Sora. And in “The Naked Now” the android assures tough security chief Tasha Yar that he is “fully functional” and programmed in a wide range of pleasuring techniques. (She, incidentally, asks him to be “gentle,” hence the title of this paper.) While these episodes establish that Data’s gender-identity is performed, they also establish that he is male in gender as well as in sex.
Unfortunately, for some of Data’s fans, the implications of a variable gender remain largely potential on television. Because he is Gene Roddenberry’s model of a reflected life worth living, the masculinities available to the canonical Data are varied but limited. Each of his attempts to construct a model masculinity simply replicates a narrow range of widely-accepted ways of being male; on television Data can be a caring father to his android-daughter Lal, a skilled-but-gentle lover to a psychologically fragile Tasha Yar, a romantic companion to jilted Jenna, a fellow to Geordi and Wesley, a kindly uncle to bereft children, and a valued member of Picard’s crew. That is, on television, he must be the perfect gentleman. He can’t, as one Top Ten list has it, respond to news that Wesley Crusher has been smoking marijuana with a list of hip synonyms for pot.[9] Nor can he submit to a randy Riker, or take his friendship with Geordi behind closed doors, possibilities that are explored often in Next Generation fan erotica. So while, in theory, Data’s performative masculinity is boundless, Paramount prefers to naturalize his gender-identity as much as possible. For the producers of The Next Generation, the problematic question must be: Is Data human? But for some fan writers the more pertinent questions are: Is Data a man? And then: What kind of man is he?
Star Trek’s televisual texts outline a universe of potential; they promise attentive fans unseen wonders in excess of what is actually televised. But the Star Trek universe retains its wide-spread attraction for fans by remaining merely potential. Despite its humanist project to interrogate social structure, the show routinely stays within social and generic limits designed to preserve both the necessary on-going hermeneutics of series television and an appeal to a broad audience. It is just this combination of possibility and limit that drives fans to textual poaching. According to Jenkins, poaching fans engage in “a mode of interpretation that draws them far beyond the information explicitly present and toward the construction of a meta-text that is larger, richer, more complex and interesting than the original series. The meta-text is a collaborative enterprise; its construction effaces the distinction between reader and writer, opening the program to appropriation by its audience” (278). Said another way poaching fans write themselves into the spaces of ideological and aesthetic potential in the canonical Trek universe, and, in so doing, unlock its possibilities.
While the masculinities of the canonical Data are limited by the producers’ appeal to popular taste, the masculinities of the heretical Datas must appeal to much smaller niche audiences, audiences of aficionados with well-established preferences for specific characters, themes, and narratives. There are, for example, stories marked “especially for Picard/Crusher fans” or for “adult readers with open minds.”[10] The upshot is that as the need to please a broad readership decreases the range of masculinities available to Data increases. This is not to say that representations of Data in fan fiction are necessarily liberating—the Data of fan fiction is often still a gentle mechanical man—but sometimes the category of a mechanical gentleman is expanded beyond the parameters of the television series as particular fan-writers perform specific gender-identities for well-defined audiences.
The specificity of these gender performances are most easily visible in erotica and romance pieces, since questions of gender often dominate these kinds of stories. In such narratives, fans use Data to indulge in wish-fulfillment fantasies, or to personify a non-judgemental ethical-sexual code. Stories such as “Fully Functional” (Christine Morgan), “A Cruel Universe” (Tanya Dean), “Close Encounters of the Sexual Kind,” (Eros), “Unmasked” (Naomi Novik), “Geordi’s Rebirth” (Robert Berquette) and “Uncertainties” (Karen Linzer) turn on specific wish-fulfilling fantasies: In these stories Data’s fully-voluntary, extremely-varied, male sexual response both limits the threat of uncontrollable male desire and makes him into the ultimate, long-lasting, sex-toy. Both readings are indicated by the oft-repeated joke that Data is a great lover because, when you’re done with him, you can turn him off. Similarly, his lack of emotions provides grist for “coming-into-humanity-by-the-love-of-a-good-(woman)(man)” narratives, and allows some writers to dramatize an appreciative emotive male response to the motif of women’s empathy. And, finally, his gentle gender-bending enables some readers to begin to erode distinctions between straight and gay sexualities.
Let me address, first, the last of these claims: In Naomi Novik’s “Unmasked,” Data is possessed by several mythological personalities stored in an alien archive. Picard must take on the role of Korgano, a potent male figure, whose role is to subdue the goddess Masaka by “satisfying her without taking his own release first.” Since Masaka has taken up residence in Data’s body, the torrid sex-scene between Picard and Masaka is functionally male-male. But throughout the scene, Novik uses the feminine pronoun to refer to the Masaka-Data character. As I read the scene, I found myself imagining Masaka as a woman except when forced by the mechanics of the lovemaking to remember that I was reading a description of male-male sex. Since a tender Data-Picard love-scene follows the Masaka-Picard sex-scene, I suspect that the Masaka-Picard encounter might function as a bridge for straight male readers, enabling them to come to appreciate the privileged lovemaking of Data and Picard at the end of the story.
Other work to reframe male-male sex is done in John Green’s “Geordi’s Rebirth” (posted by Robert Bequette). Data is fortunate not to have internalized the social stigmas against homosexuality with which Geordi’s grandmother had equipped him. Data’s ability not to judge, that is, to simply experience and appreciate male-male sexual relationships, and his promise to “be gentle” enables Geordi to “find his true self” in male-male desire. Interestingly, this rebirth narrative is coupled with Data’s sociological experiment in penis enhancement. When Geordi walks into Data’s quarters, the android is busy enlarging his “male sex organ” in order to “see how being overly endowed changes [his] interactions with others.” His working hypothesis is that, in the twentieth century, penis size corresponded with male status. Functionally, this line of inquiry seems designed to get both Geordi’s and Data’s penises out into the open, but, coupled with the coming-out story, the android’s sociological hypothesis is confirmed; skilled use of his 24-centimeter wrist-thick penis enables him to change the nature of his interactions with Geordi, and so, fulfill the obligations of friendship. As Data tells Geordi: “I could do no less than everything in my power to help you overcome any problem you face.” Here, Data personifies a non-judgmental, specifically masculine, sexual innocence that validates Geordi’s desire for him and so brings him into humanity.
Stories that feature Data as a straight man often reverse these dynamics.Instead of Data’s lacks being enabling, they are symptoms of his inhumanity. If in “Geordi’s Rebirth” Data’s emotional neutrality enables him to embody a male version of the “love-of-a-good-person” trope, in stories such “A Cruel Universe” and “Uncertainties,” only the love-of-a-good-woman can make Data fully functional, that is, make him emotive, masculine, and so, fully human.
In “A Cruel Universe” (Tanya Dean), Data falls in love with Lt. Commander Lucia Talon, the last remaining woman in Starfleet still wearing a miniskirt. At the beginning of the story, Data cares for Commander Talon after she sustains an injury during a potential warp-core breach. He “gently” takes her to sickbay, where he “gently” removes a piece of metal from her leg. Talon finds the android’s voice “so calm and gentle” that she falls in love with him. Despite his reluctance to form a relationship with her, because of his previous experience with Jenna, she pursues him. Data’s reluctance begins to melt when Talon promises to help him become more human. As the story goes on, she teaches him to sneeze and validates the aesthetic sensibility of his paintings. Gushing, Data says, “I am extremely grateful to you, Lucia, for being so understanding. It would seem no one had ever understood me this well.” Ultimately, Lucia pays the good woman’s conventional price, and sacrifices her life so that her beloved may live. Data becomes a real man by shedding tears for her, and “whispering, sadly, softly, ‘If I am capable of love at all—I love you, Lucia.’”
Less traditional in its path to humanization, “Uncertainties” (Karen Linzer) offers Data the chance to come into manhood by acting out his domination fantasies with a willing partner. Troubled by sexually violent dreams, Data is concerned that his sexual arousal is at odds with his ethics program. For Data, given his experiences with his evil emotional twin brother Lore, emotions have dangerous implications. For civilian cyberneticist Jriba MacKenzie, Data’s sense of arousal may indicate simply that he’s “developing a sense of potency.” The story documents Data’s movement from sex as performance to sex as a humanizing experience. At the beginning of the story, the android is able to “perform sexually, but ‘perform’ was an apt description; he felt no desire, no emotional response, and no physical pleasure.” But by the end, as Jriba encourages Data to act out his domination fantasies on her, he becomes capable of feeling. When his ethics program doesn’t interfere with their bondage routine, his sense of guilt disappears, his once voluntary sexual response becomes involuntary, and he’s free to explore his bold new masculinity.
Jriba shares Data’s fantasies of domination. As she explains it to Data, domination “has something to do with ‘claiming your power to create an experience’—realizing your ability to evoke an intense response in someone.” Data dominates her and she enjoys it. But the meaning of this sexual encounter is unclear. Just before she drifts off to sleep, she praises Data for making himself vulnerable to her. Readers are clearly meant to see her decision as enabling, as a decision to claim for herself the power to create an intense experience. As a fully human being, the logic goes, she is free to choose whatever kind of sexual encounter she desires. Yet, while the “experience has given [Data] a great deal to consider,” the story offers readers little evidence of its transformative effect on Jriba. She takes up the dominated role primarily in service of bringing Data to a full and potent masculinity.
Each of these analyses demonstrates that Data is a site for the investigation of masculinity by Next Generation fan-writers. Interestingly, most of the stories in which Data’s masculinity play a significant role seem to be written by women (the exception in this admittedly small sample is “Geordi’s Rebirth”). Fan-stories written by men use Data more often as a hermeneutic device—that is, as a theory-maker driving the information-gathering aspects of action-adventure plots—than as a romantic or sexual hero. One hypothesis that arises from this gendered division of labor is that the stakes in revising masculinities are clearer to some of the female poachers than they are to many of the male fan-writers.
Leaving aside the cases of “Geordi’s Rebirth” and “Unmasked” for a moment, if we take this hypothesis as a starting point for speculation, we can ask what kinds of revisions the women-writers are making. Most often their investigations address the aspects of masculinity that have historically touched the lives of women most intimately, that is how men function in their personal relationships with women. Each of the stories I’ve described here, including “Geordi’s Rebirth,” set Data in the context of a humanizing romantic-sexual relationship. The tender, emotive, other-oriented, and potent masculinity to which he comes through the ministrations of Talon and Jriba—and which he offers to Geordi—is a far cry from both the silent, self-centered enforcer of the Feminine Mystique and the troubled, emotive, but self-centered New Man masculinity embodied paradigmatically and stereotypically in 1970s Alan Alda characters.[11] I suspect that some of the female poachers rework Data in order to offer him as a model of a “true masculinity” for their mates. That they couple traditional romance narratives with pornographic narratives to make these revisions suggests that their goals are not to revise the fundamental structures of heterosexual romantic relationships, but to change the particular ways their men embody those structures. It also may be that in using the form of the romance narrative, these authors address their stories primarily to other women. If this is indeed the case, then these writers may use a particular discourse of masculinity to perform particular combinations of masculinity and femininity for one another’s pleasure.
The function of the alternative masculinities in “Geordi’s Rebirth” and “Unmasked” is, in my judgment, equally ambivalent. In both stories Data is coded neither as gay nor bisexual, but as sexually neutral; he is incapable of taking pleasure himself but functions as a site for Geordi’s or Picard’s pleasure. Because Data’s references to Geordi’s “problems” refer primarily to the guilt imposed upon him by his intolerant Grandmother, I believe “Geordi’s Rebirth” is less a celebration of male-male sexuality, than an appeal to heterosexuals not to further bigoted belief systems. Likewise, “Unmasked” seems to aim its representations of gay sex at a straight audience, offering heterosexual readers a graded path to follow in their sensuality education. The story begins with an expression of Picard’s frustrated desire for Data, follows with a bout of heterosexual sex between Whorf and Troi, a pair of over-determined simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual sex scenes featuring the male-female Data/Masaka character with, first Troi, then Picard, and finally a male-male scene where Picard finally consummates his desire with Data. The sex in the story is open to many sensibilities, but its sexual hermeneutics seem designed to lead heterosexual readers from what might be seen as a troubling male-male desire through a sequence of ambiguously-gendered erotic awakening experience to discover gay sex as an expression of friendship and romantic love. Both stories seem to display gay sex for the appreciation of heterosexual audiences. Thus I believe the masculinities offered by the Datas of “Geordi’s Rebirth” and “Unmasked,” like the masculinities of “A Cruel World” and “Uncertainties,” should be understood as revisions primarily intended to extend alternative ways of being male to straight men.
With these claims in mind, I think it fair to argue that the masculinity Trek fan-writers feel most in need of revision is straight masculinity. As the privileged form of the rhetoric, “straight masculinity” has too often been a rhetoric of oppression for women and gay men. The authors of these stories attempt to encourage straight men to craft new gentle relationships with women and with alternative masculinities. Just how receptive straight men are to the revised-but-still-problematic masculinities offered by these stories will be difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the fact that these poached texts offer straight men a point of entry into discussions about new masculinities is an encouraging sign that perhaps straight men may soon perceive their own interests in revising the ways they perform their gender.[12]
[1]All permissions requests should be made to Eric Drown, edrown[at]gwu.edu
[2]E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993).
[3]Janet Bergstrom, “Androids and Androgyny,” Camera Obscura 15 (Fall 1986): 37-65, the descriptive phrase is from the editorial in the same issue, 5; Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia,” Camera Obscura 15 (Fall 1986): 67-84, quote from page 67; Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” is reprinted in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J. Nicholson (New York, 1989): 190-233, citations from pages 219 and 191.
[4]Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. (New York and London, 1992), 60-3.
[5]Such as alt.startrek.creative, rec.arts.startrek.*, and alt.sex.fetish.startrek.
[6]Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique and Political Theory (New York, 1989): 61. Quoted in David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, 1992): 10.
[7]Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990). Quoted in David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, 1992): 8.
[8]Christine Morgan, “Fully Functional.”
[9]From a TNG Top Ten list posted on alt.startrek.creative.
[10]M. A. Boyd, “A Mind of Her Own,” (a Picard/Crusher romance) and Naomi Novik, “Unmasked” (m/f, m/m, transgender erotica featuring Data possessed by several characters from an alien mythology).
[11]Cf. Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963) and Barbara Ehrenreich, “At Last, A New Man,” and “Wimps” in The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (New York, 1990), 121-41.
[12]Arguments about the conditions and possibilities of semiosis are indeed crucial to our understanding of the structures of domination in late-capitalism; but at some point we must go beyond critique and begin to construct Haraway’s cyborg epistemology. That is we must responsibly begin to craft alternative signifying systems in order to build the new logics needed to imagine the world we want to live in. Perhaps, to begin this task, we must swallow a contradiction: meaning is arbitrary, but we must learn, once again, how to make believable meanings if we would challenge the powerfully persuasive meta-narratives that still dominate American culture despite the principled decentering work of intellectuals in many fields. As the inheritors of cultural privilege, contemporary straight white men are one group in particular that must face these challenges of meaning if they are to contribute to the construction of an equitable society. Simply put, men must construct new masculinities for themselves and for their sons.
