Gender Troubles in Science Fiction TV Productions: The Queer Gaze in Star Trek

The identity representation of non-binary and gender non-conforming people seems to have found fertile ground in TV Science Fiction which, since its early stages of genre development, has widely explored transgressive sexualities, transgender metamorphosis, transvestitism and androgyny. The Anglophone landscape of SF products embodies an ideal narrative tool through which it is not only possible to imagine alternative times and geographies but also the ‘non-place’, à la Augé (1995), where fluid identities of gender variant people, in their process of continuous transformation and reformulation, can be freely recognised as real entities. The SF subject is no longer seen as a coherent and unified being but becomes increasingly inevitably mutant, divided and dislocated and, as such, it freely participates in the process of linguistic change in unsemanticised contexts of use. In opposition to any kind of hateful discrimination leading to contemporary hate speech and the consequent creation of biases, fears and prejudices, trans and/or gender non-conforming people become the fully-fledged protagonists of contemporary SF televised narratives, playing main roles and integrating perfectly into fictional apocalyptic societies. The present paper explores and illustrates how, in the XXI-century Star Trek saga, in particular, the very notion of binary subjectivity, as described by the Cartesian cogito, slowly and timidly gives way to contemporary narratives of inclusion, leading to the creation of new characters who naturally inhabit the apocalyptic scenarios, through their often unstable and ‘de-gendered’ roles.