Human women, for the most part, have positive roles in Star Trek: First Contact. Deanna Troi and Beverly Crusher are well trained, high ranking Starfleet officers who help to lead the Enterprise alongside Captain Picard. Clearly, as humans in a diverse universe, they are idealized characters, and serve as examples as the best the universe has to offer. Yet, within the human race, they are not as preferred as Picard and other male characters. They wear uniforms that exploit their bodies in ways the men's uniforms do not.
Furthermore, they fill "traditional" "female" roles: Beverly nurtures the sick and Troi nurtures Picard, emotionally. Troi also functions as "object" on the mission to locate Zefram Cochrane (Deanna is needed on the mission to Earth in order to pre-occupy Cochrane: she is a beautiful woman that Cochrane desires, so he remains in the bar with her. Once Riker arrives, her role in the mission is complete. The men assist Cochrane in attaining warp speed, humankind's revolutionary and possibly, ultimate, achievement, while Deanna cheers from Earth). Human women fill a secondary role in the Star Trek Universe.
The film reveals a hierarchy: Human is preferred over other, and male is preferred over female.
The Borg Queen is a threat to humanity because she is not human. She, and her subjects, are cybernetic organisms that seek to assimilate all other organisms into their collective. The Borg Queen poses a threat to Picard and the rest of humanity, because she will, if not resisted, subjugate the species.
Although the Borg Queen is a threat because she is post-human, her threat derives from her subversive femininity as well. Her sexuality is seductive: she sexualizes the choice she tempts Data with to abandon the human hegemony for her own. She also attempts to seduce Picard, purposing to de-hu/manize him by demanding he give up his free will to her, so she can dominate Picard, and therefore, dominate hu/mankind.
The Borg Queen is both post-human and female. Clearly, she threatens the active masculine principle modeled by Picard, and mimicked by Data. Through assimilation, not only will the Borg Queen put under erasure liberal humanist values, she will also make hu/man passive - she will emmasculate him. Picard faces the threat of losing his identity as a patriarchal, human powerhouse.
If First Contact creates a hierarchy of worth that prefers human over non/post-human, and male over female, Lily's character confuses the construct, somewhat. As a female human from the twentieth century, she challenges Picard's stubborn and assertive hu/manness and reveals that the constructed hierarchy is just that: a contrived creation. Lily might put part of the hierarchy under erasure, revealing that male and female human are the measure of all things.
At the film's end, Picard threatens to deconstruct the hierarchy when he envies Lily's place at the beginning of the future he fights for. In the same scene, Lily reveals her jealousy of Picard as a man of the future that does not have to expereince the newness and anxiety of the new age. We might conclude, then, that Lily reminds Picard of the timeless humanist values that he, as the representative of the Federation, and Lily's future, champions throughout the universe - values that compliment Picard's masculinity.
Yet the film does not finish here. Instead, the film ends with Picard engaging the future with a command to launch the ship into warp speed and move on to its next mission. Picard, as hu/man, is given the last word. And, we are left with an impression that, in comparison to hu/man, there is something subversive about woman.
First Contact: Male Character Profiles
Borg Queen
Lily
Counselor Troi/Dr. Crusher
