We push the boundaries, but can we escape them? Do we ever truly write what we do not know, that which is outside of our experience?
When we write science fiction, do we write the future? Do we imagine who we will be “then?” Examining science fiction as ethnographies of the future, Anne Balsamo asks the question the following way: “Would we recognize our contemporary age as one of science’s past fictions?” (145)Just as Balsamo collapses time in her question, so does First Contact, in the Star Trek universe, make linear time a fiction. The present, past, and future are always at play with each other; time rifts frequently threaten to change the present that the crew of the Enterprise experiences. In First Contact, Picard and his crew are threatened by the Borg not only in the present, but in the past as well: the Borg threaten to assimilate all human life in Picard’s past, so that, in the future, humans will always already be cybernetic ( See Plot Summary). First Contact collapses our linear concept of time, and suggests that in the present, we always involve the past and future; yesterday and tomorrow somehow make today what it is.
Perhaps, then, we should read and watch First Contact as meta-science fiction. We can interpret science fiction, as we view the film, as a metaphor of the present. The above image of the “Gulf Wars” reiterates the idea that science fiction is a creative avenue by which we can discuss a present social reality. The poster recalls George Lucas’ Star Wars, films that re-assert the humanist agenda of reason, individuality, and personal freedom: the very ideals George W. Bush, in his war against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, presently champions in the Middle East. More about the Timeless Humanist Message
With their aliens, cybernetic organisms, and other worlds, are Star Wars and StarTrek post-human? Indeed, they imagine altered human bodies, and life forms that have evolved beyond “human,” but they, ultimately, do not escape the humanist agenda: they do not transcend the humanist preeminence of reason, and the virtues of courage, free will, and sacrifice.
Donna Haraway, in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” suggests that science fictions, like Star Trek, are unable to escape other hu/man tendencies, to the detriment of women. Haraway discusses the cyborg in literature,and observes that the cyborg in fiction is often female, and often a threat. Although the cyborg identity is often associated with femininity in a negative way, Haraway challenges women to embrace the image of the cyborg, and reconstruct it into a positive identity, so that it becomes an escape from the “dualisms” commonly used to describe “female:” self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, civilized/primitive, right/wrong, whole/part, maker/made(177). More Haraway
Haraway implies that the struggle to construct women’s experience occurs in both fiction and reality. There is no escapism. Literature does not let women escape a misogynist social reality.
Judith Fetterly expounds upon Haraway’s argument. She asserts that American literature is male:
To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male…. Our literature neither leaves women alone, nor allows them to participate. It insists on its universality in specifically male terms…. The woman reader’s relation to American literature is made even more problematic by the fact that our literature is frequently dedicated to defining what is peculiarly American about experience and identity. (561-62)
Women watching First Contact, might encounter this immasculation: the “cultural reality,” that forces women to identify with a hu/man point of view: the preference of the male, and suspicion, even fear of the female. Consult "The Borg Queen's Post-hu/manism as a Radical Feminist Threat". Interestingly, the film alludes to a classic American novel, Moby Dick. Captain Picard might be interpreted as a type of Ahab: his assimilation by the Borg Queen would become a kind of castration, just as Captain Ahab’s maiming is a kind of castration. More about Picard and American Literature.
The Borg Queen in First Contact represents the negative image that feminists must change. (For an overview of female characteristics in Star Trek: First Contact see First Contact: Female Character Profiles ). Fetterly underlines that female characters such as the Borg Queen, fit a literary stereotype: that of the “castrating bitch” (567). If characters like Deanna Troi and Beverly Crusher are not threatening, it might be because they have been “taught to think as men,” and have adopted a hu/manistic point of view.
Haraway’s manifesto criticizes radical feminist approaches that attempt to totalize women’s experience, and suggests certain radical approaches, ultimately, make women into non-beings. Harraway suggests that such radical approaches obliterate women’s political action and speech and produce “what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing – feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women” (159). Feminists, therefore, must escape a western-centered, male-centered ideology and construct new identity. The cyborg might be the location that allows women to re-create social identity. Haraway and her followers, if able to re-stigmatize and then embrace the image of the cyborg, will transcend hu/man ideology, because they will no longer participate “in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism” (160).
According to Haraway, “in the Western sense, the end of man is at stake” (160). However, Picard and his crew are also aware that this is the case, hence their desperate resistance of the Borg.
The question to ask of science fiction, then, might be: can men and women create a science fiction where we escape the patriarchal story of the past, and fight together in a future that is not the present?
