The Fan Fiction Studies Reader

9. Future Men

9 FutureMen Constance Penley The K/Sers are constantly asking themselves why they are drawn to writing their sexual and social utopian romances across the bodies of two men, and why these two men in particular. Their answers range from the pleasures of writing explicit same-sex erotica to the fact that 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 men and women. There are also advantages to writing about a futuristic couple: it is far from incidental that women have chosen to write their erotic stories about a couple living in a fully automated world in which there will never be fights over who has to scrub the tub, take care of the kids, cook, or do the laundry. Indeed, one reason the fans give for their difficulty in slashing Star Trek: The Next Generation is that children and families now live on the Enterprise (albeit in a detachable section!), and that those circumstances severely limit the erotic possibilities. All the same, one still wonders why these futuristic bodies—this couple of the twenty-third century—must be imagined and written as male bodies. Why are the women fans so alienated from their own bodies that they can write erotic fantasies only in relation to a nonfemale body? Some who have thought about this question, fans and critics alike, have tried to show that Kirk and Spock are not coded as male but are rather androgynous, even arguing that this was the case on the original show. Slash readers and writers would then be identifying with and eroticizing characters who combine traits of masculinity and femininity. However, the more I read of the slash literature, the more I am convinced that Kirk and Spock are clearly meant to be male. Understanding this helps to answer the question about the women fans’ alienation from their own bodies. For the bodies from which these women 178 chapter 9 are alienated are twentieth-century women’s bodies: bodies that are a legal, moral, and religious battleground, that are the site of contraceptive failure, that are seen to pose the greatest potential danger to the fetuses they house, that are held to painfully higher standards of physical beauty than those of the other sex. Rejecting the perfect Amazons of female fantasy/sword-andsorcery writing, the K/Sers opt instead for the project of at least trying to write real men. (From what I have seen and read in the fandom, I would argue that it is indeed a rejection of the Amazons’ perceived artificiality and not a rejection of lesbianism, even though most of the K/Sers are heterosexual.) What must be remembered also is the K/Sers’ penchant for “making do”: when asked why they do not create original characters who could be women as well as men, they most often respond that they are just “working with what’s out there.” In this case it happens to be the world of television, an arena typically populated with strong male characters with whom to identify and take as erotic objects. The writers also insist that one can enter the Star Trek world through the male characters only, since the female characters, like Lt. Uhura, Nurse Chapel, and Yeoman Rand, were so marginalized on the show by the sketchiness of their roles and the feminine stereotyping to which they were subjected. The desire to write real men can be carried out only within a project of retooling masculinity itself, which is precisely what K/S writing sets out to do. It is for this reason as well that Kirk and Spock must be clearly male and not mushily androgynous. This “retooling” is made easier by locating it in a science fiction universe that is both futuristic and offers several generic tropes that prove useful to the project. Feminists, as well as the fans in their daily lives, have had to confront the fact that we may not see the hoped-for “new” or “transformed” men in our lifetimes, and if the truth be told, we often ridicule the efforts of men who try to remake themselves along feminist lines (as Donna Haraway says, “I’d rather go to bed with a cyborg than a sensitive man.”)1 The idea of sexual equality, which will necessarily require a renovated masculinity, is taking a long time to become a lived reality and is hard to imagine, much...