the FINAL frontier
For my and my partner’s final project we analyzed the three main women’s roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season One. We chose season one because there are seven and doing the whole series would have been too much work than we had time for; plus we believed the three women are categorized and shown in very stereotypical roles even though the program was supposed to be progressive. Our working thesis during this project was even though this was placed in the 24th century the women (Tasha Yar, Deanna Troi, and Beverly Crusher) were all portrayed in very feminine 20th century roles.
We discussed each of the three women’s portrayals in the episodes and touched on other alien species and their depiction of women (being subordinate or openly mocked for being a maternal society.)
We used three articles to help with our thesis. The in class reading was Kaplan and the gaze. The two out of class articles were Lynn Joyrich’s “Feminist Enterprise? Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Occupation of Femininity� and Robin Roberts’ “Sexual Generations, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gender.�
Comments
First of all, I absolutely loved your presentation. I haven't watched the show since I was about seven, so it was interesting to see aspects of it that I remembered and how I saw the women being portrayed with a brain free of all the academic feminist rhetoric. I remember viewing Beverly Crusher as the mother figure, and thinking she and Captain Picard actually were the parents. I remember thinking Deanna Troi was beautiful, but other than that, I can't remember anything particularly distinctive about their intellect or leadership skills, although I can with some of the men. I found this interesting, given that on the surface, the show seems to promote (uniform violations aside) gender equity.
What struck me the most, however, is the fact that Deanna Troi, as you said, is an "Empath." This is her major skill other than uniform violations. It reminded me not only of the female as a figure relegated to the inferior, subpar level of being "not male" and therefore as Laura Mulvey puts it, "silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning." It seems to me that this is exactly what Deanna Troi does--she senses the feelings of others and can be nurturing, but she doesn't actually cause/ lead/ make anything happen. In other words, she never ventures out of her typecast box of female stereotype.
This made me wonder about the type of struggle the writers of the program must have had (as you showed they went through several changes) in terms of showing women as "equal" crew members. E. Ann Kaplan talks about this in her "Introduction." She says that melodrama debates are less about 'essentalizing' women, "rather on what it means to be a female spectator of films with female (not male) protagonists."
As I encompassed this 'spectator' position in watching the show as a little girl, it makes me wonder about just what it is society wants to see--is this type of typecasted character being fed to female viewers because there's a demand for it from women, or simply because it's a recurring problem that writers don't know how to get around?
Posted by: Julia Krieger | December 17, 2007 09:51 AM