Anne
Cranny-Francis
Different Identities, Different Voices: Possibilities
and Pleasures in Some of Jean Lorrah's Star Trek Novels
Recent work by critics such as Henry Jenkins and Constance Penley on the
texts produced by fans of TV series such as Star Trek and Beauty and
the Beast has contributed greatly to an understanding of the pleasures and
uses made by viewers, and especially by fans, of the original texts.1
This article deals with a number of Trek novels by fan writer, Jean
Lorrah, published by Pocket Books, the publisher of Star Trek
novelizations and of original fictions based on the television series and films.2
As an academic and a fan, I read these books with a mixture of delight and
scholarly interest which together located some of the ways in which Lorrah's
work extrapolates the possibilties and pleasures offered by the television
series, Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It is worth noting here some details about the way in which the Star Trek
literature has developed. The writers of novels based on the original series,
Star Trek, or any of its successors—Star Trek: The Next Generation,
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager—take as the
basis of their fictional worlds the Trek world of the television series.
Subsequent writers build on their enhancement of this world, so that a complex
picture of the Trek world is constantly evolving; cross-references
between texts add coherence to that world.
Henry Jenkins and Constance Penley have both written about "slash" writing,
the Trek world writings and graphics which begin with the premise of
same-sex relationships between characters from the Trek universe (the
original slash material—"K/S fiction"—features an explicitly erotic relationship
between Kirk and Spock [K/S] of the original Star Trek series). In
discussing this work Jenkins and Penley raise a number of important issues about
the ways in which texts are used by viewers, particularly the way in which fans'
own textual production demonstrates that fan readings and (re)writings of the
original texts move beyond their mainstream readings. Slash writing offers
critics the opportunity to move beyond mere speculation about the tactical uses
fans and other viewers might make of their viewing; slash fiction is a concrete
example of this transgressive reading practice. Yet slash is simply one
(striking) version of a textual (reading and writing) practice which moves
beyond the possibilities realized in the original text(s). Lorrah's writing is
more conventional than slash, but it too focuses on the interpersonal
relationships between characters—and in the process, like slash, it interrogates
the nature of contemporary social relationships.
This paper traces Lorrah's (re)visions of heterosexual relationships and of
masculine and feminine identities, exploring their transgressive aspects while,
at the same time, noting the conservative elements in both the relationships and
the gendered identities which Lorrah describes. It also explores the mixture of
cultural references which constitute the Vulcan society of Lorrah's novels, and
which articulate within these texts a seldom-heard non-bourgeois voice.
Frequently I return to two strategic textual elements—telepathy and the alien—
used by Lorrah throughout these novels. Both are familiar sf conventions which,
it might be posited, were formulated in order to articulate specific needs and
desires impossible to formulate in realist modes of writing. Science fiction is
characterized by a number of conventions which can be used to produce a critique
of contemporary society. The use of the alien, the outsider, to interrogate the
nature of society (its values, beliefs, attitudes, practices) is as old as Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, often considered the first sf novel. Shelley uses
her creation—like Data, a man-made being or android—to comment on the
superficiality and cruelty of her own society.3 Telepathy, the
ability to enter the mind of another, may be seen as a response to the
individualist drive of bourgeois ideology and its (romantic) focus on the
essential isolation of all humans. Lorrah uses these sf conventions in her
novels to elaborate and to enrich the relationships and characterizations
established in the original Star Trek texts; in the process, her novels
pose some confrontational questions about the gendering of contemporary society,
and articulate a cultural voice not often heard in mainstream writing.
1. Heterosexual Intimacy: a Re-Visioning. In her first published novel,
The Vulcan Academy Murders (1984), Lorrah explores the relationship
between the parents of Mr Spock, the Vulcan first officer of the original
television series. Spock has a Human mother, Amanda Grayson, and a Vulcan
father, Sarek, characters introduced in the original television series in an
episode entitled "Journey to Babel." The relationship between Sarek and Amanda
is, in fact, crucial to the plot of The Vulcan Academy Murders since it
is the reason for the murders; one of Sarek's female students, Eleyna Miller, is
trying to kill Amanda so that she can marry Sarek herself. In the novel Lorrah
describes several other heterosexual relationships: one between two Vulcans (the
healer, Sorel, and his wife T'Zan), another between a Vulcan woman and a Human
man (Sorel's daughter, T'mir, and her partner, Daniel Corrigan), and a brief
encounter between Kirk and Eleyna Miller. In each case the major point of
interest is the nature of the bonding between the two people involved.
Vulcans are telepathic and their bonding is linked to their telepathic
ability. In several of the TV episodes Spock is seen using his telepathic
ability to enter the minds of other beings, to "mind-meld," something Humans are
described as finding very disturbing and intrusive. Lorrah uses the mind-meld as
the basis of Vulcan bonding, so that when two people decide to bond they enter
into an intimacy which is far closer than can be achieved in a Human
relationship. As they touch in the bonding ritual, they see and feel each
other's thoughts and feelings and that intimacy stays with them always. Whenever
they experience fear or insecurity, the other is always there to offer support
and caring. They also see through the eyes of the other, so that this caring is
supported by understanding.
Descriptions of Vulcan bonding recur periodically throughout the text, as if
they, not the murder mystery, were the major concern of the narrative. In this
light it is interesting to consider the generically mixed nature of this text as
a hybrid of detective fiction and science fiction. Working with the Bakhtinian
hypothesis that genres work to enact sets of discourses associated with specific
social interactions,4 it follows that generically mixed texts
are attempting to deal with discourses and social practices which are difficult
to specify or codify. In most cases this occurs because the social practice or
discourse being described and explored differs from the social norm—the generic
case, if you like. So these generically mixed texts express or enact a
negotiation of discourses, characteristically placing a non-mainstream practice
or discourse in the context of the mainstream or conservative
practice/discourse.
In The Vulcan Academy Murders Jean Lorrah negotiates both patriarchal
and non-patriarchal discourses to construct a vision of a profound
interpersonal intimacy which patriarchy, with its gendered division of
interpersonal labor, works against. This intimacy is also rarely discernible in
the original television series on which her text is based. In other words,
Lorrah's text is a radical reworking, an appropriation, of that text and
its seldom realized radical potential, in order to construct a revitalized
vision of a non-patriarchal heterosexual intimacy, something which, as Naomi
Wolf suggests in The Beauty Myth, has the potential to seriously disrupt
bourgeois capitalist society.5
In other ways, however, Lorrah's novel is very conservative: Amanda still
leaves her Vulcan husband frozen dinners in the freezer when she knows she will
be away for a while. The text is a complex and contradictory negotiation of
discourses, not a polemic of any kind, and the generic mixing in the text is
part of this negotiation. Through its sf component the text is able to set up an
interrogation of what it means to be Human, typically acted out through the
construction of the alien, the other, to comment upon the Human. This is placed
in tension with a conservative retelling of the detective plot in which, again
typically, a woman (Sarek's student, Eleyna Miller) is the source of evil.
Nevertheless, along the way Miller manipulates the patriarchal James Kirk
through his sexist responses to her, a fact he eventually recognizes and
explicitly discusses. So the stereotypical misogyny of the hard boiled detective
novel6 also works as part of a deconstruction of patriarchal
masculinity. And Miller's ruthlessness in her pursuit of Sarek is a pathetic
metaphor for the obsessive love which is a common romantic type in western
patriarchal culture, but which cannot possibly be a feature of relationships in
which intimacy and caring are profound and mutually-sustaining. In other words,
Lorrah's use of the science fiction/detective fiction hybrid exposes particular
realizations of patriarchy—the sexually predatory man and the obsessed and
obsessive woman —and also configures an intimate relationship which is
fundamentally deconstructive of patriarchal relations.
This complex and contradictory mixture of gender discourses is typical of all
Lorrah's novels. The sequel to The Vulcan Academy Murders, The IDIC
Epidemic (1988), is marked by a similar mixture of stereotypical feminine
and masculine behaviors alongside detailed descriptions of intimate
heterosexual unions whose alienness (to patriarchy) is emphasized by the alien
backgrounds of the characters involved. The only Humans who experience these
bonds do so in liaison with Vulcan partners. In The IDIC Epidemic one of
the most intimate relationships is between an Orion woman and a Klingon man;
neither culture is positively portrayed in the original Star Trek series,
yet Lorrah's characters construct a kind of loyalty and caring which is rare in
fiction. Again this union functions as an implicit critique of (patriarchal)
Human relationships, with the alien relationships interrogating the Human
failure to achieve an analogous state of sensitivity and trust.
2. Intimacy and identity: Data's story. In her two Next Generation
novels, Survivors (1989) and Metamorphosis (1990), Lorrah again
investigates the nature of intimacy, in both cases through the experiences of
the android Second Officer, Lieutenant Data. Survivors builds on an
episode of the television series in which the female security chief, Lieutenant
Natasha Yar, affected by a virus which destroys inhibitions, seduces Data. Data,
we learn, is programmed to respond in an appropriate way to such demands. As in
the series itself, however, this seduction is crucial to Data's understanding of
himself as a sentient being. In Survivors he has to contend with Yar's
refusal to acknowledge the event and he is instrumental in bringing her together
with her former lover, in the process discovering how much Yar means to him—and
what this then tells him about the nature of his own subjectivity. Perhaps the
chief clue to Lorrah's conception of Data's struggle to formulate his
subjectivity is in his reassessment of Will Riker's opening greeting, which
refers to him as Pinocchio: "He had had to search the ship's data banks for the
reference, but when he found and accessed it seconds later, even though Riker
passed it off as a joke, he was stunned at being compared to the subject of a
story about the magical power of love" (Survivors [NY: Pocket Books,
1989] 129).
Throughout Survivors the tension between Data's mechanical nature and
his organic nature is an essential element of each narrative—the adventure in
which Yar and Data are involved as Star Fleet officers, the narrative of Yar's
life, Data's investigation of what it means to be Human—which is translated into
his ability to love his colleagues and friends at one level and his intimate
friends such as Yar at another.
In Metamorphosis Data is granted his wish to become Human, and he then
finds himself enmeshed in the complexities of interpersonal relationships.
Predictably, this novel is a kind of morality tale of self-discovery and
self-acceptance: Data has to learn that he is happiest being the android he is,
not the Human he thinks he might want to be—yet it is significant that Data's
self-discovery is prompted by love, by his involvement in a "love triangle." In
fact, his attempt to deal with interpersonal and sexual relations as a Human
being who still thinks like an android (that is, interrogatively) is the focus
of the book. Several story strands surround this central problematic, which must
be resolved for those stories to proceed. Again Lorrah uses the potential of
science fiction to explore interpersonal relations in an innovative way—one
which is particularly expressive of concerns about the alienating, anti-intimacy
consequences of patriarchy. So even as Data explores the sexuality which is made
available to him by his Human metamorphosis, he is troubled by feelings that he
is "being unfair" to the woman he is sleeping with—which is not, however, a
concern she shares. In this construction of Data as a man, Lorrah articulates
the desire for different kinds of masculinity that Penley and others have
located in fan writing. In the fan materials this is often recognized in more
overtly transgressive texts such as slash writing, but here the expression seems
equally strong, though framed within a more traditional genre. Data the man and
Data the android share features which the male partners of Lorrah's positive
heterosexual unions all share: they are totally honorable, selflessly caring,
and honest, qualities which are antithetical to the patriarchal masculine,
particularly in relationships with women. Again it might be suggested that
Lorrah is articulating (the desire for) a new kind of masculinity, one freed
from the restraints of patriarchy and so able to be caring and honest and
non-patronizing.
3. Gendered Identity: a New Masculinity. Interestingly, there is a change
in Lorrah's own focus between her first and her most recent novel. Where The
Vulcan Academy Murders concentrated on exploring the nature of intimacy in
relationships, Metamorphosis focuses instead on the kind of masculinity
required for such intimacy. And it is surely significant here that the male
character involved is an android. Perhaps this, too, is part of the text's
negotiation with patriarchy: the character who embodies the features which
constitute a new masculinity is also embodied literally in ways which are both
typical of, and interrogative of, patriarchy. Data is extremely strong, highly
intelligent, and lacking in emotion (he does not have the emotion chip which is
installed in his evil twin, Lore); as such, he is a kind of patriarchal
stereotype. He is also a piece of technology and, at least since the beginnings
of the industrial revolution, technology in western societies has been a
masculine domain, most recently a province for the dreaming of bourgeois,
masculine dreams of power and control. However, Data is also a deconstruction of
that patriarchal stereotype precisely because he is a machine; that is, his
emotional and interpersonal inadequacies demonstrate the way in which patriarchy
constitutes the masculine as emotionally incompetent, cold, "mechanical." His
desire to be Human might then be read as the desire for liberation from that
restrictive and repressive stereotype; to be fully Human it is not possible to
be fully patriarchal. So it is no accident that Data's emotional growth is
bumbling and marked by set-backs; in a sense, this might be seen as a reflection
of the position of many men battling the patriarchal identities socially imposed
on them.
Several writers have also commented that Data is often positioned in a
stereotypically feminine role, primarily via the "otherness" which places him
outside the masculine mainstream represented by characters such as (the macho)
Will Riker and (the coolly paternal) Jean-Luc Picard. This reading might include
references to Data's gentleness and nurturing, perhaps also to his emotional
tentativeness, all of which are commonly identified as feminine characteristics.
In reading Data differently I am arguing for and from a perspective in which
these characteristics are not specified as either feminine or masculine, but as
available to both. When they are embodied in a specifically masculine being,
they can be read not as the feminine side of that man (which maintains those
features as stereotypically feminine and tends to reproduce a conservative
description of the feminine and the masculine), but as a new kind of
masculinity, one that is characterized by both strength and nurturing, intellect
and emotion.
4. Gendered identity: a new femininity. Lorrah's novels also explore a
new kind of femininity through her narrative of the female survivor. This is the
story of a courageous woman who overcomes appalling deprivation and cruelty,
often physical and/or sexual, on the way to achieving autonomy; in a sense,
Lorrah is working within the framework of a kind of anti-victim narrative. Her
novels, The IDIC Epidemic and Survivors, both contain this
narrative, as does another Trek novel, The Pandora Principle
(1990) by Carolyn Clowes. It also motivates a number of Anne McCaffrey's works,
notably her recent novel, Sassinak (1990), co-authored with Elizabeth
Moon.
Lorrah's The IDIC Epidemic focuses on the story of a young Vulcan
woman, T'Pina, who has to come to terms with the discovery that she is not who
she thought she was; she is, in fact, biologically a Romulan, a member of a
breakaway Vulcan tribe whose culture is antithetical to Vulcan culture. Because
of the clan-like nature of Vulcan society with its focus on family
relationships, this is an extremely traumatic discovery. In a sense, T'Pina
loses her sense of herself—not simply because she is biologically "other" than
Vulcan (an essentialist reading which verges on racism) but because she has lost
her place—her position—in the network of relationships which defines who she is.
A great deal of the novel is devoted to her reconstruction of her own
subjectivity in dialogue with those around her, her adoptive Vulcan mother, her
healer, and her friends. This narrative explores the social and cultural
construction of subjectivity through situating it in opposition to biology.
Lorrah's work is interesting in that her focus is the interpersonal
relationships in which T'Pina is enmeshed, rather than in an action-adventure
story typical of science fiction. Ultimately T'Pina survives her ordeal, with
her sense of self strengthened by her negotiation of the intersections between
biology and culture.
In Survivors, Lorrah again deals with the construction of a feminine
subjectivity which survives both emotional and physical deprivation. In this
novel she constructs a background for the Next Generation character,
Lieutenant Natassha Yar. Yar is described as growing up in a post-apocalyptic
environment, abandoned by her mother at the age of five, sheltered through
childhood by an older woman, and then having to fend for herself against rape
and slave gangs. Yar is resourceful and cunning and she survives this terrible
life, although she is not untouched by it. Not surprisingly her major problem in
adulthood is that she is wary of any form of intimacy. The story of Yar's life
is threaded through the adventure story which is the focus of Survivors,
with Lorrah at times alternating chapters of Yar's life with chapters of the
adventure. The narrative of Survivors is the product of the interaction
between these two stories—and it concerns both Yar and Data.
Lorrah situates this story shortly after Yar's seduction of Data, an event he
is still attempting to understand. Through the interplay of stories Yar is shown
coming to terms with her embarrassment over that situation, realizing that her
upset is caused by her own fear of betrayal, not by Data's non-Human nature.
That betrayal is inscribed in the person of the former lover with whom she once
again makes contact in the adventure story which is also part of Survivors.
Yet she also recognizes the similarities between him and Data and this
recognition enables her to overcome her fears. In Yar's story Lorrah dramatizes
the concerns of many women in a society in which the violence used to suppress
women is often emotional, with actual or potential physical violence a constant
threat. In surviving the inhumanity of her upbringing Yar is a hero, not a
victim, one who can even assist the men (and androids) with whom she comes into
contact to perceive a different kind of masculinity than the one which produced
her fear.
Carolyn Clowes gives an interestingly similar history to the Vulcan/Romulan
hybrid Lieutenant Saavik, who first appeared in the second Star Trek
movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Saavik survives a desert
world by wit, cunning, and physical endurance and is eventually rescued by Spock
who raises her as a daughter. Saavik too has devils in her past to subdue, as
does Sassinak, the hero of the Planet Pirates trilogy by Anne McCaffrey
and Elizabeth Moon. Captured by pirates as a child and forced to witness the
deaths of her family, Sassinak survives ill-treatment and constant threat to
become an autonomous and successful woman.
All of these women are strong and courageous. They may have help in dealing
with their traumas, often from paternal male figures, but they remain active
characters making choices about their lives and their relationships. They never
settle down with those male characters, but instead leave them to pursue
separate lives. All of these writers are constructing a new kind of female
character, often in a discursive tension with the old, but nevertheless there to
offer a revision of the narrative possibilities for women.
Lorrah has written these narratives especially for the women of her Star
Trek world, rather than simply enhancing already existing narratives. In a
sense these are the women whom we early Star Trek viewers knew were
there, even though the series itself rarely made them available to us. In spite
of that, it somehow helped produce the conditions for their existence, which is
why it was so important even to those of us who grew up in a different culture,
in a different place. Joanna Russ cites the same interest in her novel, The
Female Man, when she describes female (and feminist) icon, Marlene Dietrich,
as "a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows" (§4.v:60). The early Star Trek series
created the vision of an egalitarian and peaceful society (even as it went into
space encased in heavy weaponry). For women it opened up the dreaming space
Pamela Sargent refers to in the introduction to her anthology, Women of
Wonder (1975):
Only sf and fantasy literature
can show us women in entirely new or strange surroundings. It can explore what
we might become if and when the present restrictions on our lives vanish, or
show us new problems and restrictions that might arise. It can show us the
remarkable woman as normal where past literature shows her as the exception.
(lx)
Even though the women we actually saw on Star Trek spent their lives
in uncomfortable micro-skirts and screamed a great deal, even though many were
evil in ways which harked back—sometimes literally—to Medusa, it was fairly
clear to the teleliterate and intelligent female viewer that these trappings
were not typical of the women of the 23rd century, but were simply the way these
women had to be presented for a relatively unsophisticated 20th-century
audience. Furthermore, they showed that it was possible not only to wear those
awful clothes and be patronized by smirking men, but also to look for new worlds
and new civilizations. In other words, Star Trek enacted the complex and
conflictual positioning of women in the 1960s. And Jean Lorrah has seized on the
possibilities opened up by this positioning to create a new kind of female
character and a new and empowering feminine narrative.
5. Class Identity: a Different (Textual) Voice. Although issues of
gendered identity and interpersonal relationships seem to be the main focus of
Lorrah's novels, another aspect of her Trek world which deserves some
attention is her description of Vulcan society. A number of Star Trek
novels have now been written about Vulcans, including one, Diane Duane's
Spock's World (1988), which gives a history of Vulcan civilization. Lorrah's
own descriptions of Vulcan society are orthodox in Trek terms: Vulcan
society is organized into clans, often governed by a matriarchal figure such as
T'Pau, a character from the TV series whom Lorrah uses in The Vulcan Academy
Murders. Within the clan the strongest unit is the family. On Vulcan,
families traditionally arrange marriages for their children (the basis of the
first Vulcan story of the television series, "Amok Time"), although this is a
tradition which is shown to be changing. In The Vulcan Academy Murders
Lorrah adds another facet to Vulcan social organization, the Kahs-wan ritual, a
test of maturity and endurance which Vulcan children must undertake to achieve
the status of young adults. This ceremony seems to be based on accounts of
Native American rituals.
Vulcan society was briefly sketched in three episodes of the original series.
The episode, "Amok Time" (1966), constructed an ancient, clan-ruled warrior
culture which had learned to curb its violence in order to prevent the culture's
self-destruction. Violence was either suppressed, through the practice of mental
disciplines, or ritualized, as in the marriage challenge in which Spock engages
in that episode. The fundamentally war-like nature of Vulcan society is
reinforced by its likeness to Romulan culture, which is revealed as a radical
off-shoot of the earlier warrior culture in the episode, "Balance of Terror"
(1967). In "Amok Time", also, the clan-based nature of Vulcan culture is shown,
as Spock participates in a ceremony presided over by matriarchal clan leader,
T'Pau.
In another episode to which I have already referred, "Journey to Babel"
(1967), the nature of Vulcan interpersonal relations is illustrated by the
relationship between Spock and his parents, Sarek and Amanda. Sarek and Amanda's
relationship in this episode is very conventional, with Amanda deferring totally
to Sarek in public, while in private teasing him about her feelings for him.
From this basis writers like Lorrah have constructed a very different
relationship, with elements of that (patriarchal) conventionality in tension
with a radically reworked notion of intimacy. Between Spock and his parents
there is a kind of impasse, and we later learn that this is because Spock has
chosen Starfleet over a career at the Vulcan Academy of Science, Sarek's
workplace; Spock thereby breaks with a Vulcan tradition in which sons follow
their fathers into particular professions or careers. The notion that Spock's
career decision constitutes such disloyalty is an interestingly non-bourgeois
concept, and accords with configurations of the culture as clan-based and/or
aristocratic. This family disunity is the foil against which the story of the
Babel ambassadors is played out, and the episode only ends happily when Sarek
and Spock are reconciled.
Probably the only other thing we learn about Spock's family in the original
series is that it is very "well connected." In "Amok Time," Kirk is astonished
to find that Spock's clan leader is T'Pau, the only Vulcan to have refused a
place on the council of the Federation of Planets. This is translated by the
Trek novelists as a kind of aristocracy; Sarek, in particular, is portrayed
as an aristocratic figure, whose "hawk-like" features inscribe that status
(although it's worth noting that "hawk-like" is also a common Anglo description
of Native American features).
All of these features of Vulcan life seem to situate it as a very particular
kind of society, not the individualist bourgeois society of most television
series, but a social formation closest to that described by sociologist Basil
Bernstein as "positional" (176-79). In positional families—which include working
class as well as old (upper) middle-class and aristocratic families—roles are
clearly marked; decision-making is a function of status; there are close
interactions between parents and grandparents; boundary areas become sites of
disputes which are characteristically settled along status lines, rather than
opportunities for individual debate; children tend to communicate openly with
age-mates who are a major source of learning and relevance. These
characteristics typify the relationships depicted among Spock, his parents, and
other members of Vulcan society in Lorrah's books, in the television series, and
in most other novelistic representations. The critical dispute between Spock and
his father, Sarek, over choice of career can be understood in these terms as a
betrayal by Spock of the fundamental principles of (positional) Vulcan society.
In constructing Vulcans as "other," then, writers draw on a range of
non-Anglo and/or non-bourgeois cultures, including Native American (or a
particular version thereof), aristocratic, and working-class. What these
different cultural constructions share (and what the multiple determinations
indicate) is a non-individualist notion of the subject; these are cultures in
which the individual is always conceptualized as part of a network of
relationships from which she/he draws solidarity, status, strength,
responsibility. Which leads me back to Vulcan telepathy. It may be that, for
writers and readers living in an individuated bourgeois society, telepathy is
one way of conceptualizing the kind of negotiated consciousness typical of
non-bourgeois culture and non-bourgeois individual subjectivity. It is a
metaphor for the negotiation of consciousness which is quite difficult to
conceptualize if you are working within an individualist notion of personality
or identity which is fundamentally asocial.
6. Conclusion. Telepathy might, therefore, be seen as serving two
purposes in Lorrah's writing (and, I suspect, in a great deal of other sf
writing). Firstly, in intimate relationships, it enables the writer to describe
an intimacy based on the mutual negotiation of subjectivities, a concept which
requires a more flexible and fluid notion of subjectivity than is implicit in
most familiar versions of subjective identity. Using telepathy as a narrative
element, the writer is able to configure a merging of subjectivities which an
individualist model of subjectivity would project as loss of personal integrity.
In Lorrah's writing this merging or sharing is the basis for a vision of
heterosexual intimacy which is fundamentally non-patriarchal. Lorrah
extrapolates the possibilities and pleasures offered by her readings of the
original texts and the sf conventions which constitute them to articulate a
desire for a non-patriarchal heterosexual intimacy and for gendered identities
(masculine and feminine) not constrained by patriarchal stereotypes.
Secondly, in her vision of Vulcan society, melded together by not only
telepathic sharing but also an intricate web of interpersonal relationships
which constitute the individual positioning of its members, Lorrah produces a
strikingly unconventional cultural construct. Her introduction of Native
American ritual (through the Kahs-wan) reinforces her attempt to position this
society outside the bourgeois norm of contemporary western society. In doing so,
Lorrah gives voice to a discourse which is not common in mainstream fiction—a
non-bourgeois discourse which is realized (or expressed) textually in the
interpersonal relations it structures.
As I noted at the beginning of this paper, Lorrah's novels are in some ways
very conventional: they reproduce an orthodox Trek world; most are
generically uncomplicated; and discursively they enact some very conservative
positionings (patriarchal feminine and masculine). However, the novels also do
more and other than this. They also enact some unorthodox desires—for
non-patriarchal relationships and identities—and give voice to both
non-patriarchal and non-bourgeois voices. While not as confrontational as slash
fiction, it may be that Jean Lorrah's gentle novels about intimacy and identity
are equally transgressive.
NOTES
1. See particularly Henry Jenkins, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread,
Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching," Close Encounters: Film,
Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn
Spigel, & Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1991), 171-202; Henry
Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture
(1992); Constance Penley, "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics and Technology,"
Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley & Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1991), 135-61; Constance Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the
Study of Popular Culture," Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
Nelson & Paula A. Treichler (NY: Routledge, 1992), 479-500. See also Anne
Cranny-Francis, Engendered Fiction: Analysing Gender in the Production and
Reception of Texts (1992) and Popular Culture (1994); John Tulloch &
Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek
(1995); Henry Jenkins "`If I Could Speak with Your Sound': Textual Proximity,
Liminal Identication, and the Music of the Science Fiction Community." Camera
Obscura 23:149-76, May 1991.
2. In the "Foreword" to her novels Lorrah states: "I learned to write fiction
through fanzine writing, and made many wonderful friends through Trekfandom."
Jean Lorrah has written many other self-published novels and stories which
circulate within fan culture (examples include Full Moon Rising, NTM
Collected [Volumes I and II], and Trust, Like the Soul.
3. See my Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (NY: St
Martin's; Cambridge: Polity, 1990), especially chapter 2, for a discussion of
the interrogative potential and uses of sf.
4. See my "Introduction" to Feminist Fiction (see previous note),
16-22, for a discussion of the critical use of the concept of "genre," based in
the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, as in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
(1981).
5. As Naomi Wolf argues: "that is (somewhat reductively), if men and women
were able to come together on the grounds of mutual respect and self-respect,
then the system which functions by positioning individuals as lacking (sex,
love) and so on as consumers (of products which can give access to sex, love)
will cease to function"—The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used
Against Women (NY: Vintage, 1990), 146.
6. On which see John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula
Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), particularly chapter 6, "The
Hard-Boiled Detective Story."
WORKS CITED
Bernstein, Basil B. Class, Codes and Control. Volume 1. Theoretical
Studies towards a Sociology of Language. St. Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1973.
Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. 1975. London: The Women's Press, 1985.
Sargent, Pamela. "Introduction: Women in Science Fiction." Women of
Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women. Ed. Sargent. NY:
Vintage, 1975. xiii-lxiv.
ABSTRACT. Fan writer Jean Lorrah has published a number of novels
based on the series, Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This article explores several of Lorrah's novels, tracing within them both
conservative and non-mainstream voices and discourses. Alongside patriarchal
representations of gender relationships, Lorrah offers an exploration of
interpersonal intimacy which is fundamentally subversive of patriarchal
strategies. Her female characters are both feminine and autonomous, victimized
but not victims. And in her representation of Vulcan society Lorrah articulates
values which are alien indeed to bourgeois society: solidarity, cohesion,
loyalty, kinship. These novels do not have the shock value of the
sexually-explicit "slash" writings, and yet they voice values and attitudes
which may be equally challenging to mainstream opinion. (ACF)
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