For the next few weeks, leading up to Theorizing the Web 2013, we’ll be posting a series of previews of some of the papers we’ll be showcasing at the conference. This is one of those. Stay tuned for lots more!

Andrea Marshall – “Star Trek and Subjectivity: Fan Videos as Sexual Textual Critiques”

Panel: Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Star Trek franchise has produced several successful television series and film adaptations, including the most recent one of 2009. Female fans of Star Trek have for decades actively involved themselves in the participatory cultural practice of fan fiction authorship first in ‘zine’ forms and then within online communities with the advent of the internet and online fan communities. Many of these fan communities provide autonomous voices for female fans that directly confront the sexist norms that appear to prevail in all versions of the Star Trek franchise, through the production of these fan produced artifacts. These fan-generated narratives act as reader responses that in turn produce oppositional discourses that simultaneously reimagine the Star Trek multiverses in new and innovative ways for female characters, and make visible the presence of active women participants within Star Trek fan cultures.  These female fan discourses are collaboratively generated close readings and textual critiques of the Star Trek master narratives; Coppa (2008) has discussed the potential for female authored videos to disrupt the traditional gendered tropes of women characters within Star Trek. Furthermore, Turk (2010) observers that the creation of fan videos provides a space in which female creators collectively, as peer collaborators and united communities, might disrupt and confront the male gaze (Mulvey 1975) that is a common vantage point within the Star Trek series. The rise of open source sites such as YouTube and the advent of social media allows female fan communities to flourish and for future female Star Trek fans to read, watch, and respond to visual texts that continue to evolve from ‘fan vids’ to active and engaged feminist critiques that continue to problematize and reimagine the position of women as characters and as fans in Star Trek.

Andrea is a PhD student and researcher at the Drexel iSchool.