As I explained in my very first post, I, and many media and gender scholars and critics, work under the belief that gender is a socially constructed set of behaviors, attitudes, and appearances that seem “natural” because they have been reproduced over and over by a majority of people in our society. In truth, social constructionists believe, there is nothing natural or inherent about gender codes/roles and gendered qualities. The concept of social construction opposes essentialist notions of gender; essentialism proposes that there are indeed inherent differences between men and women, and that gender codes are simply an expression of these innate differences.
An essentialist analysis of gender might claim, for example, that men are stronger than women because they are the natural hunters and defenders of a society going back to prehistoric times, that because they are physically stronger men naturally take on dominant behaviors and attitudes. Women, on the other hand, are the natural nurturers and caretakers because they bear children; women are also in need of protection because they are physically weaker, hence their submissive relation to dominant men.
–I’d just like to pause here to make ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that I do not believe a single word of the previous paragraph! I kind of hated having to write that paragraph at all, but it is necessary as background knowledge to the rest of today’s post. Moving on now…–
A social constructionist point of view would claim instead that gender codes and roles only appear natural because we have been so thoroughly conditioned by them that they have become perfectly normal to us. (And being a good Whovian, I happen to know there’s nothing perfect about normal!)
(And simple gender arrangements are for cowards, too!)
For social constructionists, rather than reflecting innate behavioral differences between the sexes (or among them, depending on how many sexes you claim exist), gender codes/roles reflect social values and traditions that define the “norm” for men and women in a given society. To return to the above example (the essentialist argument, not Doctor Who!), a social constructionist analysis of gender would claim that men are not innately stronger or more dominant than women. There are in fact societies where women are the dominant gender. In patriarchal societies, however, the long-standing gendered traditions of men taking on more aggressive, dominant behaviors make it appear that they are “naturally” the stronger/dominant gender. Likewise, social constructionists argue that women are not inherently weaker, nor are they naturally inclined to be nurturers and caretakers, but that women instead have traditionally been socialized into these roles, so much so that it seems natural for women to be primary caregivers in our society.
So if gender codes and roles are not actually natural – if they are the sociological equivalent of figments of our collective imagination – why have they lasted so long? Why base a society’s gender relations on binary genders at all? I’m not sure there’s a definite answer to that question, and if there is, I certainly don’t have it! Gender codes and roles exist; some of us, shall we say, extremely dislike, them; some find comfort and fulfillment in knowing what is “expected” of them as women or men; some may not care one way or the other.
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) cares, however. Two episodes in particular have held my attention for the past six months since I finished watching TNG: #113 “Angel One” and #517 “The Outcast.” Both episodes highlight Star Trek‘s belief in social constructionism, though essentialist arguments are also included at times as the episodes negotiate the issues surrounding gender and its place in humanoid societies both fictional and real. While they take different directions and propose two different outcomes to gender problems, these two episodes also reveal and emphasize gender’s position as a social practice rather than a natural quality.
Above: The senior officers of the Enterprise-D in TNG. From left: Lieutenant Geordi LaForge (Levar Burton), Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Lieutenant Worf (Michael Dorn), Doctor Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), and Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes).
In “Angel One” (1988), written by Patrick Barry and directed by Michael Rhodes, the Enterprise visits a planet inhabited by “an unusual matriarchal society where the female is as aggressively dominant as the male gender was on Earth hundreds of years ago. Here, the female is the hunter, the soldier, larger and stronger than the male, an arrangement considered most sensible and natural” (Picard’s voice-over log entry, 5:10). A small group of Federation civilians has been stranded on the planet, Angel One, for several years, and after discovering their ship adrift in space, the Enterprise has finally come in search of survivors.
Captain Picard’s voice-over description of Angel One, offered just five minutes into the episode, immediately emphasizes three key aspects of the episode’s approach to gender: 1) Angel One’s matriarchal system is “unusual”; 2) the binary division of the sexes on Angel One echoes a past gender division on Earth; and 3) Angel One’s binary gender system is considered natural among the planet’s inhabitants.
It’s not clear whether Picard, by saying that Angel One is “an unusual matriarchal society,” means that matriarchies are uncommon or that Angel One’s matriarchal system is strange for a matriarchy. If the latter, an essentialist notion of what a matriarchy is/should be may be at work. Essentialism would claim that women are inherently more peaceable than men, making a matriarchy ruled by aggressive women a highly unusual one. However, based on the Trek universe as a whole, it seems more likely that the former scenario is the case in Picard’s dialogue: matriarchies are simply uncommon in humanoid experience – although that viewpoint doesn’t necessarily avoid essentialism in TNG’s construction of 24th-century social possibilities. It potentially implies that male-dominated societies are simply more common (i.e., more “natural”?) than female-dominated ones, begging the question of how far Star Trek really believes in its social constructionist premises.
Either way, Picard’s voice-over foregrounds Angel One’s society as an unusual example of gender relations, foreseeing the reactions viewers are likely to have and recognizing that they will probably find the episode’s content to be strange or even uncomfortable.
Secondly, by alluding to the past divisions of gender on Earth, Picard initiates the episode’s emphasis on social constructionism. He suggests that gender codes and relations can change, depending on the society’s needs and expectations, as did Earth’s as humans matured and entered the United Federation of Planets.
Thirdly, however, Picard also recognizes the existence of essentialist notions of gender when he says that Angel One’s inhabitants find their gender codes to be “most sensible and natural.” The social constructionism of the Federation is contrasted with the essentialist matriarchy of Angel One.
As representatives of the Enterprise crew negotiate with Angel One’s leaders to try to find the missing Federation civilians, the episode highlights the need for tolerance and acceptance of varied social values among different cultures. Lieutenant Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) and Counselor Troi burst into giggles when Commander Riker insists on dressing in the outfit worn by men on Angel One before his audience with the leader Beata (Karen Montgomery), but Riker firmly explains his belief in respecting and honoring indigenous traditions as a vital aspect of diplomacy.
Furthermore, although people of 24th-century Earth believe that equality between the sexes is the intended state of human social evolution regarding gender, the Enterprise officers (who actually represent several different Federation planets) do not seek to impose this value on the people of Angel One. When the missing civilians are finally discovered but refuse to leave Angel One, the Enterprise cannot force them to leave, even though Beata has condemned the stubborn, anti-matriarchal civilians to death. Forcing the civilians to leave Angel One would violate the Prime Directive, which protects the rights of private Federation citizens, mandating that Starfleet regulations apply only to members of Starfleet. The Enterprise officers must therefore engage in further negotiation until Beata alters the sentence to exile.
This solution, exile, raises some interesting, and perhaps troubling, questions about how social disputes surrounding gender may be resolved. The Federation civilians (who are all men in this case) resist Beata’s rule because they find Angel One’s matriarchal system sexist and oppressive to its men. Men on Angel One cannot vote, do not hold public office, and have no influence on daily social life. Despite Riker’s own objections to this arrangement, Beata refuses to initiate changes toward gender equality, choosing instead to delay such a possibility by exiling the proponents of gender equality (both foreign and indigenous individuals) to a distant region of the planet.
If, as “Angel One” suggests in its solution, proponents of different gender arrangements cannot live together peacefully, this is an uncharacteristically pessimistic message for Star Trek, a series renowned for its optimism about the future of humanity. However, we do know from “Angel One” itself that the Federation and Starfleet, the key voices of Star Trek, believe that the social destiny of human gender relations is true equality. Therefore, Beata is only delaying the inevitable by exiling her opponents, and avoiding possibly severe civil conflict in the process.
I think the real heart of “Angel One” is its attempt to envision a world where the gender relations we viewers know are flipped, exposing how silly it is that we define men and women as being “naturally” this or “naturally” that. Of course the men of Angel One appear silly to us, since the concept of men as innately passive and delicate runs counter to the dominant male stereotypes in our culture. But that very silliness seems to be the point rather than the flaw in “Angel One” – it draws our attention to how gender difference functions, and the Enterprise officers’ interactions with Beata and her fellow leaders then force us to question how real or necessary constructed gender differences are.
Skipping ahead four seasons to “The Outcast” (1992), written by Jeri Taylor and directed by Robert Scheerer, there is a different gender topic and a different outcome at play. This time, the Enterprise is assisting the J’naii, an androgynous people who have no gender. The J’naii are, in fact, bemused by and curious about the binary genders they observe on the Enterprise. However, as the J’naii Soren (Melinda Culea) reveals to Riker, long ago the J’naii also had two genders – but they evolved into an androgynous race considered (by the J’naii) to be superior to their previous gendered society.
A clear metaphor for contemporary issues in gay/lesbian/queer politics, particularly issues surrounding “closeting” and “coming out,” “The Outcast” has a fair share to say as well about constructed versus essentialist gender concepts. Like the history of gender in the Federation, the J’naiis’ past reveals Trek‘s belief that social codes change with time and social needs, supporting a social constructionist viewpoint. However, as does “Angel One,” “The Outcast” simultaneously reveals some of the central limitations in Trek‘s dealings with gender topics.
Click here to watch a clip from Soren’s tribunal, a key scene in “The Outcast.”
The outcome of “The Outcast” is the unfortunate “rehabilitation” or “cure” of those J’naii who express gender to a state of androgyny (defined in this episode as “no gender”). This is most likely due to the episode’s function as an allegory for contemporary queer issues, but the “solution” of the fictional plot is hardly desirable for real life. Again, though, I think criticism of “The Outcast” would be remiss without recognizing that the episode is primarily about the tragedy of trying to “cure” people of their chosen gender/identity inclinations. Trek certainly does not advocate this course of action as being even remotely desirable.
Despite Trek‘s friendliness and sympathy toward queer issues, there is relatively little about the series itself that is straightforwardly queer. TNG and its sibling series rely most often on allegorical story lines that blur the boundaries between real and fictional issues. Additionally, Trek‘s tendency to “flip” gender and other issues, to reverse who represents what in its allegories (as women are the dominant gender and men the submissive in “Angel One”), makes it even more difficult to determine what Trek‘s conclusions actually are about many real-life social issues. (Though the experienced Trek viewer can easily guess, in most cases.)
More often than not, Trek wants to make people think, without telling them what or how to think. And that is, at least in my opinion, actually more beneficial to Trek and to viewers in the long run than if the series were to be always espousing decidedly progressive political views. Trek‘s ambiguity is what makes it so compelling from a critical standpoint, as well as capable of connecting with more than just the most progressively minded of viewers.
Nonetheless, in “Angel One” and “The Outcast,” there are some things Trek fails to do: both episodes rely on a binary, heteronormative underpinning that supports essentialist gender claims despite TNG’s obvious wish to align itself with social constructionist views. This is especially worrisome in “The Outcast,” where the only recourse non-normative J’naii have is to identify as females attracted to males or vice-versa. There is no possibility raised of homosexual/pansexual/asexual J’naii or the problems these gender identities might cause within their society.
In “Angel One,” too, there is a recourse to essentialist heteronormative ideals in that there must be a fully dominant gender coupled with a fully submissive one; the more obvious binary aspect of “Angel One” is that the dominant women are of course attracted to the submissive men, never to each other. (Likewise for the men.) The possibility of non-heterosexual pairings is, as in “The Outcast,” not even addressed in “Angel One.”
No series is ever going to be perfect when it comes to such divisive social issues as gender politics, but I think it’s fair to say that TNG made a good attempt to address gender in a respectful, inclusive manner despite the limitations of its methods. Even more, TNG – though appearing limited to us now in 2014 – was probably in the lead when it first aired in the late 1980s and early 90s. It and other Trek series undoubtedly laid the foundations for more progressive attempts at tackling gender issues, visible in 21st-century works such as the revived Battlestar Galactica (whose creator Ronald D. Moore was a producer of TNG), the revived Doctor Who, its spin-off Torchwood, and other space-oriented sci-fi shows.
The ambiguity in Trek makes it difficult much of the time to draw truly progressive messages unproblematically from the series, but the point of Trek, as “Angel One” and “The Outcast” do demonstrate, is not to merely be “progressive” politically but to respect different social values and cultural traditions. The fact that this rule is the Prime Directive of Starfleet reinforces the conclusion that Trek is first and foremost about tolerance, whether for systems of binary gender codes, gender equality, or no gender at all. In this way, Trek continues to be quite forward-thinking, offering a standard we can all aspire to live up to.
On Friday: The Iconography of Westeros: Symbolic Storytelling in Game of Thrones. It’s time for a little Art History lesson as we investigate how symbols and visual signs enhance and help to explain the densely populated story and setting of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic in its HBO incarnation.
Time Lords, Superheroes, and Brave New Worlds 