A few years ago I went for a first date with a guy I met online. It was almost unreal how much we had in common. As we played Scrabble at a coffee shop we kept bringing up more and more things we had in common. At one point I asked if there was any …
I follow StarTrek.com on Facebook and a few weeks ago, something caught my eye: an article about a study on the “fake geek girl” debate by Marie-Pierre Renaud. Renaud is a graduate student of sociocultural anthropology at Laval University in Quebec and is one of the founders of the fabulous blog The Geek Anthropologist. For anyone not familiar …
“[In ‘The Emissary’,] K’Ehleyr and Deanna Troi have a revealing exchange about being caught between cultures. Like Deanna, whose father was human but whose mother is Betazoid, K’Ehleyr is half-human (on her mother’s side) and half-Klingon (on her father’s side). But because she appears very Klingon, with dark coloring and prominent facial ridges, K’Ehleyr has …
This episode [Angel One] repeats many elements of the classic woman ruler. She is shown to be unenlightened and susceptible to masculine charm…The quick collapse of Beata into Riker’s arms, and that of her colleague Ariel into the survivor Ramsay’s arms, suggests that this planet of women just needed real men to show up. Women …
One of the most pressing problems for the producers of [Star Trek: Voyager] was how to represent a strong female leader of the future. For them, this became the ‘…constant search for the middle ground. Somewhere in between a simpering weakling and an aggressive Amazon warrior.’ The struggle that the writers, producers, and actor faced …
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 …