Demoting Women on the Screen and in the Board Room

In this essay, we address the ways in which resources, power relations, cultural understandings, political systems, ideologies, and human agents combine to maintain, contest, and negotiate mediated understandings of gender and “race.” Those issues invoke a vast body of theory and research, so our approach is selective, focusing specifically on gender representations in the film Star Trek (J. J. Abrams, 2009) and on gendered relationships within the ultimate owner of that film, National Amusements. We address these relationships in terms of neoliberalism—the ideology which, through governmental and economic reorganizations, facilitated the creation of transindustrial conglomerates like National Amusements and caused intermittent recessions between 1980 and 2001, culminating in the Great Recession of 2007–2009. We begin by contextualizing these contemporary entities through a glance back at the television series Star Trek (CBS, 1966–1969) and its original owner, Desilu Productions.

Airing on RCA’s NBC, the first Star Trek imagined a future in which the integration of species, genders, and races within species was a fact of life on the starship Enterprise. Yet this vision was not postspecies, postgender, or postrace by any means, as indicated by the continuing banter among Spock, McCoy, and Kirk regarding Spock’s bispecies status and his decision to live as a Vulcan among humans. Generally characterized as a liberal text in its original television run, Star Trek was produced by Desilu Productions, whose owner and chief executive, Lucille Ball, had green-lighted it.

Having been a fashion model, film contract player, and radio actress, Ball was undoubtedly familiar with sexism in the workplace. But she was also familiar with racial prejudice, having married Desi Arnaz, a Cuban immigrant, in 1940. In 1948, Ball starred in the radio series My Favorite Husband on CBS, based on the novel Mr. and Mrs. Cugat: The Record of a Happy Marriage.¹ Although she and costar Richard Denning premiered as the Cugats, they subsequently became the Coopers for most of the series. When CBS decided to televise the radio show, Ball negotiated for Arnaz to play the husband. Her attempt to replace an Anglo-American with a Cuban immigrant failed, and she abandoned My Favorite Husband, which also failed on television. This cleared the way for Ball and Arnaz to found Desilu Productions and launch I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957), with themselves playing Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Later, she divorced Arnaz, bought out his share of the company, and took control of Desilu, which made her the only female executive in television. Given Ball’s personal and professional experiences, Star Trek’s concerns about gender and race must have rung true.

With the original Star Trek tagged as “liberal,” much speculation centered on J. J. Abrams’s reboot of that franchise with the 2009 film Star Trek. The liberal position had been losing power as neoliberalism began its ascendance in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Central to the new position was the assumption that policies addressing inequalities due to gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth are no longer necessary. Because everyone is fully integrated into society and has the same opportunities, according to the neoliberal position, we can ignore demographic categories or social identities.

In this view, economic deregulation has secured fully free markets, allowing each person to rise according to his or her native intelligence, work ethic, and individual personality. Thus, for our postracial and/or postgender society, equality is guaranteed by competition: the best people will rise regardless of demography. Recognizing the significance of this perspective in social life, we first discuss the female characters of the new Star Trek franchise in terms of representations and roles, to see how neoliberalism presents a facade of equality through assumptions of a postracial, postfeminist world. We focus on the female characters of the new Star Trek franchise—Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldaña) and her roommate Gaila (Rachel Nichols) in the 2009 film, and Uhura and Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) in the sequel. We then locate this neoliberal text within the corporate context of National Amusements, in which Sumner Redstone owns 80 percent of the...