I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Slashing the Borg: Resistance Is Fertile

1 5 1 Resistance Is Fertile Slashing the Borg Cyborg writing is about . . . seizing the tools that mark the world that marked [one] as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. —donna haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature in science friction, mechanical reproduction is strictly X- rated.The Toronto-based queer fanzine is devoted to campy,technoporn burlesques of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Borg” episodes. (For non-Trekkers, the Borg are the implacable man-machines who periodically imperil Truth, Justice, and the United Federation of Planets on ST:TNG.) Produced by Glenn Mielke, Nancy Johnston, and Miriam Jones, Science Friction features panting tales of RoboCopulation , pornographic “Sonnets from the Borgugese,”and “heartstoppingly explicit illustrations,”spiral-bound and sealed in a“plastic splash guard cover” for your one-handed reading convenience.1 Science Friction, whose battle cry is “If Paramount can’t give us that queer episode, just make it so!” is a textbook example of what media theorists call “textual poaching,” the guerrilla semiotics in which consumers-turned-producers perversely rework popular fictions . Henry Jenkins, a scholar of fan cultures, and Constance Penley, a feminist film theorist, have documented a form of textual poaching S L A S H I N G T H E B O R G 1 5 2 known as “slash” erotica written by female fans of the original Star Trek TV series and published in underground fanzines. Typically, it is about Captain Kirk and the Vulcan science officer Mr. Spock and is thus dubbed “K/S” for short, yielding the term “slash.” Spun from the perceived homoerotic subtext in Star Trek narratives , slash tales are often animated by feminist impulses. In his seminal essay “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching,” Jenkins points out that although science fiction is arguably “by, for, and about men of action, Star Trek seems to hold out a suggestion of nontraditional feminine pleasures, of greater and more active involvement for women within the adventure of professional space travel, while finally reneging on those promises. . . . fan writers characterize themselves as ‘repairing the damage’ caused by the program’s inconsistent and often demeaning treatment of its female characters.”2 In her essay “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” Constance Penley theorizes that“slashers”(their preferred term)—the majority of whom are heterosexual women working in the “pink-collar ,‘subprofessional,’ or high-tech service industry sectors”—embroider gay themes because “writing a story about two men avoids the built-in inequality of the romance formula, in which dominance and submission are invariably the respective roles of male and female.”3 Since Trek slash is at its heart a utopian vision of male–female interaction cloaked in the tropes of mainstream SF, it presumes a twentythird -century man who is neither Schwarzeneggerian “hard guy” nor Alan Alda-esque “sensitive man,” but the best of both. Further, writes Penley, “slash does not stop with retooling the male psyche; it goes after the body as well.”4 A subgenre has sprung up around the sexual heat that overcomes Mr. Spock and all Vulcan males every seven years, the pon faar; in Fever, an underground ’zine given over exclusively to pon faar porn, slashers play nimbly on the obvious parallels to menstruation, even to the extent of depicting Spock as suffering from the male equivalent of PMS. Another, more marginal subgenre revolves around Kirk and Spock’s attempts to have a child. In one 1 5 3 S L A S H I N G T H E B O R G story, Dr. McCoy genetically engineers a fertilized Kirk/Spock ovum, which is brought to term in an artificial womb designed by Scotty, the starship’s chief engineer.5 Slashers’ feminist attempts to “rewrite” the male body as well as the male psyche through the vehicle of homoerotic SF fantasies are underscored by “a very real appreciation,” Penley writes,“of gay men in their efforts to redefine masculinity, and . . . feelings of solidarity with them insofar as gay men too inhabit bodies that are still a legal, moral, and religious battleground”—a point made dramatically (and comically) clear in gay Trekkers’ own attempts to rewrite gender norms by slashing the Borg. (The term slash seems to have come unstuck from the strictly literal usage; it is now applied to TVinspired homoerotica, whether...