Gender Science Fiction Television And The American Security State PDF Download

The 1990s ushered in what historian Susan Stryker describes as "a tremendous burst of new transgender activism" in the United States. Concomitantly, the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation led to a renaissance of US science fiction television. This dissertation asks, what is the relation between transgender (trans) politics and US science fiction (sf) television from 1990 to the present? The theoretical framework is Trans/Elemental feminism, a new paradigm developed in the dissertation. The method is multiperspectival cultural studies, which considers how the production, content, and reception of media texts and their metatexts collectively determine the texts' meaning. The data include trade articles about the television industry; published interviews with producers; 3,175 hours of televisual content; commercial advertisements for television programs; films, novels, and webisodes (Web episodes) in selected media franchises; professional reviews; online discussion boards; fan fiction; and fan videos. The analysis reveals that, having failed in the 1990s to annihilate trans liberation, sf television producers have sought in the twenty-first century to assimilate trans liberationists into cisgenderism (a positive bias toward the normative alignment of gender assignment, gender identity, and gender expression), male genderism (a positive bias toward maleness), masculinism (a positive bias toward masculinity), heterosexism, white racism, and US nationalism. They have done so through the tropes of the trans victim, the post-post-gender cyborg woman, and the postfeminist soft butch, the latter two of which are terms coined in this dissertation. This process has marked the emergence of transnormative nationalism, another term coined in the dissertation. During this time, the content has increased in polysemy (the capacity for multiple meanings). This trend has encouraged viewers to read the content from different ideological positions, but it has not directly caused viewers to change from one position to another. However, trans liberationist viewers have effected such change through engaging in the reading practice that philosopher Michel de Certeau describes as "poaching" (recontextualizing elements of the text) for critical trans pedagogy. Thus sf television has not changed the world, but the viewers have.