While the Star Trek franchise is synonymous with diversity, queerness has been unfortunately interpreted more as a tragic plot device rather than presenting fully realized queer characters in series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. However, the more recent programme Star Trek: Lower Decks appears to embrace Gene Roddenberry’s utopian ethos in that diversity is default in the future through multiple queer and queer-coded women. This article analyses how bisexual protagonist Ensign Beckett Mariner eventually finds support over the course of the series through her relationships with the characters Captain Amina Ramsey, Ensign D’Vana Tendi and Ensign Jennifer Sh’reyan. Unlike previous attempts at queer plots, the focal points in these moments emphasize character and community instead of violence and drama. This article proposes that Star Trek: Lower Decks signals a more positive shift in how queer characters are interpreted in the science fiction utopian franchise.

Star Trek: Lower Decks and utopian queer intimacy

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INTRODUCTIONSpace, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.- Captain James T. Kirk(Star Trek: The Original Series Prologue)You understand what the Federation is, don't you? It's important. It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...- Captain Christopher Pike(Star Trek 2009)Bookending the Star Trek canon, from the 1966 original TV series to the 2009 reboot movie series, these two quotes encapsulate the narrative subtext of this popular culture phenomenon. From explicit expansionism to implicit moral superiority, Gene Roddenberry's fictional universe provides a half century of subtle, and not-so-subtle, support for the idea of American hegemony. Famous for its utopian, upbeat vision of the future, the Star Trek universe of the 1960s depicted a futuristic Pax Americana, where the USS Enterprise is sent out to spread enlightenment in the dangerous conflict zones at the edges of the known universe, while the core of the Federation remains safe-safe not only from the threat of acknowledged enemies, such as the Klingons and Romulans, but also from the unknown, the strange, and the exotic, whose introductions to the Federation will be mediated through distance and the actions of these "expeditionary" forces who are tasked with making "first contacts."Fifty years later, the text of this narrative universe has changed dramatically. Threats are now existential, world-ending events like the destruction of entire planets. The core worlds of the Federation are repeatedly put at risk and the antagonists are no longer predictable state-surrogate rival empires, but are atomized individuals, non-state violent actors (NSVAs), and previously unknown hostile species, not encountered on the edges of Federation-controlled space, but striking directly at its heart. Yet, some of the basic assumptions of the Pax Americana remain in place: the Federation is the inclusive, altruistic, progressive umbrella organization that is under threat from irrational, aggressive, and often solitary external threats. In this way, the narrative moves from the moral certainties of a mid-20th century, bi-polar Cold War world to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainties of multi-polarity and its challenges in the early 21st century.The overarching contention of this paper is that hegemony, specifically a hegemony of western liberal ideas (democracy, selfdetermination, individualism, free-market capitalism) provides a continual sub-textual theme throughout the five series and thirteen films of the Star Trek universe. Even as the overt text has shifted from utopian optimism to Hobbesian chaos, the fixed theme of expanding a benevolent hegemony underpins all of the main story arcs and provides tension in the narrative, where themes that play out in the text as self-conscious, progressive and critical are countered in a subtext that is often sub-conscious, conformist and unreflective.HEGEMONY, IDEALISM AND REALISM: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE.Hegemony comes from a Greek verb meaning to dominate or lead, and the term was originally used as a way to describe relations between the Greek city-states. Modern usage of the term has diverged into two distinct, but often overlapping, theoretical constructs, cultural hegemony and the state-centered international relations discussion of power relationships (O'Sullivan 1986).The concept of cultural hegemony originates in early Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, but is greatly expanded with Antonio Gramsci's work on historical materialism and the maintenance of bourgeois control of society through what he calls "manufactured consent." (Gramsci 1988). For Gramsci, the foundational tenets of capitalism and materialism are disseminated through society in such a way as to normalize the aspirations and behaviors of the elites and allow them to control the direction of cultural and economic change. …

Fiona M. Davidson

Papers

Owning the Future: Manifest Destiny and the Vision of American Hegemony in Star Trek