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In his book Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, Jeff Greenwald reports a conversation with Star Trek writer Ron Moore and his wife, Ruby in which they discuss whether Captain Kathryn Janeway (of Star Trek: Voyager) "will ever get laid." Aside from concluding that "it's the old double standard" (Greenwald, 1998:142), they fail to come up with any answers. Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), in fact, does, apparently, "get laid" on at least three occasions but, in each case, she is shown either to be misguided in her choice of partner or, in one memorable instance, temporarily "evolved" into something beyond human and thus not responsible for her actions. Unlike her predecessors, James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the widowed Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) of Deep Space Nine who, despite being involved in a particularly brutal war, manages to woo a replacement mother for his teenage son, Janeway is consistently punished for daring to express her sexuality. This paper will examine the sex life of starship captains in the context of the sexual politics of the Star Trek universe. Why, I want to ask, can this imagined future world support a female captain but not one who achieves a satisfactory sexual relationship?
The short answer, of course, is that the political values of the Star Trek universe mirror the values of the century, and the culture, in which the series were produced. Thus, despite the fact that The Original Series (TOS) produced the first interracial kiss on US TV and successive series have addressed, if indirectly, inequalities of race, gender and sexuality, a persistent subtext reproduces these same inequalities as they struggle to extrapolate a benign and egalitarian future from the self-deceptions of contemporary neo-liberalism. What I want to examine here are the specific anxieties that emerge when a woman is imagined in a position of command but the fundamental social structures of patriarchal liberalism remain intact. I will argue that, in the context of the Star Trek series' reproduction of 19th century moral values, Janeway can be read as representing the Victorian construction of correct female sexuality in terms of domesticity and self-abnegation, with its attendant assumption of compulsory heterosexuality. As I will demonstrate, the restrictions that this imposes...