Returning to the most basic definition of feminism as grounded in human equality rather than gendered categories, Voyager as a feminist heterotopia does not function as a model of supreme consensus, agreement and harmony. Rather, the ship is a location of varied and conflicting ideas that interrelate, like the many individuals within its community, not to be resolved, but to add to the strength and diversity of the larger discourse and its accompanying spaces.
Avia Dove-Viebahn in “Embodying Hybridity, (En)Gendering Community: Captain Janeway and the Enactment of a Feminist Heterotopia on Star Trek: Voyager, in Women’s Studies, 2007.
Dove-Viebahn describes Voyager using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which is a space of otherness and non-hegemony, where diversity is affirmed. In this case, it is a site of different people and ideas interrelating, contradicting each other, and working together, “designed to embrace difference as well as harmony”.
