NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America by Constance Penley, Verso,
拢11, ISBN 0860916170
IN 1986 an explosion on board the space shuttle Challenger hurled its
still-conscious crew at terminal velocity into the Pacific. With them died lay
passenger Christa McAuliffe, an elementary school teacher with a
representatively mediocre social background and no head for basic
science鈥攋ust as in 1927, when Mildred Doran, a 22-year-old elementary
school teacher from Caro, Michigan, died as a passenger in the ill-conceived and
ill-fated Pineapple Derby air race, another 鈥渟acrifice to adventure鈥�. The author
of NASA/ Trek, Constance Penley, is an adept ironist and draws out many
such historical parallels in this brief, lively and refreshingly positive
deconstruction of American attitudes towards women in space exploration.
NASA may be the 鈥渃an-do鈥� agency but it certainly cannot 鈥渄o鈥� sex. Take for
example, its resistance to the work of Yvonne Clearwater, head of habitability
research at the Ames Research Center, who expressed a wish to study issues of
sexuality. Apparently she was told to assume that 鈥渟ex simply would not occur鈥�
in space. Can they be serious? If NASA is going to refuse to fund studies into,
say, contraceptive techniques in weightlessness, then women will be effectively
barred from space. Ban women, perhaps they are thinking, and you ban sex.
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But do you?
Penley argues for the existence of a powerful, quintessentially American
antipathy towards women鈥檚 involvement in exploration. Sick jokes surrounded the
Challenger disaster, perhaps a symptom of this antipathy that reduces issues of
national crisis into vignettes of women as trouble. Lacking a coherent ideology
for change, NASA repeatedly falls back on the liberal-feminist notion that time
heals all wounds: that in the future鈥攕ay, three centuries from
now鈥攖he example of exceptional women like aviator Amelia Earhart,
McAuliffe and Sally Ride will have inspired us into sexually equal relations.
Such is the future posited by that global utopia, Star Trek.
Penley explores the way the tropes and characters, philosphy and visual style
of Star Trek and its spinoffs, have been retooled to provide both NASA
and its critics with a critical and rhetorical arsenal. Star Trek-ese, Penley
argues, is the shared language we use when we row about space. This language
achieves its most complex and expressive form among a group of pseudonymous
female Star Trek fans: writers who explore鈥攖hrough the romantic
pornography of S/K (for Spock and Kirk) or 鈥渟lash鈥� fiction鈥攖he homosexual
relationship between Captain James T. Kirk and Science Officer Spock.
There have always been, of course, homoerotic undercurrents running through
frontier literature鈥攖he white settler and his dusky companion sharing an
immaculate male love in the wilderness. But these are less surprising than the
number of scenes in which the victimised black man forgives his oppressor:
Moby Dick鈥檚 Queequeg is racked by fever; James Fenimore Cooper鈥檚 Indian is
hopelessly depressed and alone; Mark Twain鈥檚 Jim is loaded down with chains, and
so on. The frontier genre is arguably a hopeless, romanticised dream of racial
reconciliation.
Slash fiction, Penley argues, begins to untangle and recast that
dream鈥攁 dream on which NASA, like earlier American frontier narratives, is
based. This time, it鈥檚 not hopeless. This time, the dark and the light man are
not friends; they are lovers. This time, miscegenation is possible; in the
Vulcan-human body of Spock, it is even evident. Sex becomes possible, especially
that expression of sexuality which so threatens the prevailing
industrial-military order (it is hard not to question the orders of those you
love).
The problem with NASA/Trek is that it stops. On page 4, Penley says
she wants to 鈥渞ewrite NASA鈥�, adding that this is 鈥渁n arrogant and ridiculously
utopian ambition鈥�. Unfortunately, she seems to have taken her own comment to
heart. NASA/Trek, having equipped itself with the tools it needs to
鈥渟lash鈥� NASA, ends in midstream in a numbingly glib two-page afterword. Apart
from the occasional obfuscation, Penley is an engaging social critic. But she
needs to get her hands dirty. At the moment her arguments are fannish: a pretty
portal leading out of the world, not a new and empowering way back into it.