Book review: NASA/Trek

[ahorbinski]

Bibliographic Data: Penley, Constance. NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. New York: Verso, 1997.

Main Argument: Penley argues that what she calls "NASA/TREK"--the hybrid pop culture object that is NASA and Star Trek, combined--is "popular science," which is "a collectively elaborated story that weaves together science and science fiction to help write, think, and launch us into space" (9). In her view, "popular science, fully in the American utopian tradition, proposes that scientific experimentation be accompanied by social and sexual experimentation" and that "we are, or should be, popular scientists one and all" (10).

Historiographical Engagement: Lots of theory, some SF writers

Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Penley starts from the claim that "going into space" has become the "prime metaphor" for making sense of science and technology, and that science is enormously popular in America, if we know where to look for that popularity and can take it on its own terms. She makes some very incisive criticisms of Carl Sagan, who in her view was "doggedly vehement in his denunciations of popular culture and people's everyday engagement with science and technology" (9). [Here we might cf. the storm of criticism Neil DeGrasse Tyson endured after he criticized some of the "science" of Gravity.] But in Penley's view, popular science "is ordinary people's extraordinary will to engage with the world of science and technology" and "envisions a science that boldly goes where no one has gone before but remains answerable to human needs and social desires" (10).

Important points

If, indeed, Star Trek is the theory and NASA the practice, one would expect the TREK half of NASA/TREK to make a major contribution to writing a more inclusive and progressive story, especially since Star Trek aims to portray a peaceful, tolerant, nondiscriminatory culture three centuries from now. But it took seventy-eight Star Trek episodes, six movies, and two more television spinoff series before there was a female captain. … Like NASA, Star Trek wants to foreground individual extraordinary women but not address their institutional absence, in terms of numbers or positions of authority. … In principle, NASA and Star Trek should be mutually inspiring each other, pushing against each other to push forward, but instead each seems to reflect the ambivalence of the other toward the idea of women in space. (89-90)

# In the "NASA/" section, Penley highlights groups of people who have rewritten the NASA/Trek narrative: female astronauts, science journalists, female writers, and even NASA administrators themselves.

# In Penley's reading, what makes the fan/writers of Kirk/Spock fics interesting is that "not only have they remade the Star Trek fictional universe to their own desiring ends, they have accomplished this by enthusiastically mimicking the technologies of mass-market cultural production and by constantly debating their own relation, as women, to those technologies. They have, therefore, carefully considered the ways they make decisions about how to sue the technological resources available to them ad the ways they rewrite bodies and technologies in their utopian romances" (106-07).

# NB: Penley repeats the assertion that female fans of "slash" are straight. However, she redeems herself somewhat when she asserts that "the conceptual strength of slash writing forces us to see that it is more interesting to look at what the fans are doing with this individually and collectively elaborated discourse than it is to discuss what it 'represents'" (124).

# Penley also argues that the work of slash writers "embodies the same impulse as the female 19thC popular novelists: to transform the public sphere by imaginatively demonstrating how it could be improved through making it more answerable to women's interests" (134). She does note the complicity of K/S fan fiction with the traditional neglect of racism and racial tensions, as well as its partaking in the "homosocial male Sacred Marriage" of American literature, and discusses the question of misogyny in slash as well--she says slash avoids misogyny, which I would very much question. She concludes that "it is thus not only fascinating (as Spock would say) but logical (as Spock would also say) that amateur women writers around the country would, in the early 1970s, 'spontaneously' get the idea of writing their sexual and social utopias through a futuristic and technologized version of the Sacred Marriage of males" (145).

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples

The boldness, then, of the slashers' version of 'boldly going where no one has gone before,' is not so much their move into a hitherto male practice of illicit sexual representation but their intervention in the vast space of television industry mass production. Their rewriting of the TREK side of the NASA/TREK story relies in very large part, however, on the shock of the taboo sex they introduce into it, in the tradition that dates from the 16thC of using pornography as a populist, often revolutionary, vehicle to attack and transform hegemonic ideas and powerful institutions.

The slash version of Star Trek--an underground fiction produced by women that is illicitly sexual, homoerotic, egalitarian, and antiracist--ofers the sharpest possible challenge to the NASA side of the NASA/TREK story. Slash writing devotes as much time to inner space as to outer space, emphasizes women's inclusion and creative control, and offers a much more satisfying utopian solution than NASA has yet been able to conceive. But a slashed NASA/TREK is popular science at its best. It is an experiment in imagining new forms of sexual and racial equality, democracy, and a fully human relation to the world of science and technology. NASA/TREK is a much needed utopian narrative of and for our time. (148)

Critical assessment: It has to be said up front that this book has not aged well, which makes it all the more annoying when people writing now cite only this book for arguments about fans. As the quotation from the last page of the book above should make clear, moreover, this is very much part of the "first wave" of fan studies in that its attitude towards fans and fan works is so utopian. Fandom certainly can be a space for the production and contemplation of alternatives at multiple levels, but that does not make everything fans do part of some better world.

Further reading: Contact; Gravity; Galaxy Quest; Katie King, Networked Reenactments

Comments

[lnhammer]

she says slash avoids misogyny, which I would very much question

Er. Yeah. *cough cough*

---L.

[ahorbinski]

YEAH.