Announcing Still Rejoined, a Star Trek DS9 fanzine celebrating the 25th anniversary of episode “Rejoined”

Almost 25 years ago, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aired an episode about two women falling (back) in love in complete disregard of Trill society. Celebrate with us all that is “Rejoined” and how it has impacted LGBT+ fans to this day!

We just really love those gay worms and hope you want to see more of them too! Help us spread the word about this project on wlw (worms loving worms)

[Twitter | Website]

@zine-scene @zineapps @zinefeed @zinefans @fandomzines​ @fanzinewatch​

(More details about Still Rejoined under the cut!)

Continua a leggere

I’m so glad to finally be able to tell everyone about this! We’ve been working hard setting up this zine, and we want this project to succeed!! please help us spread the word!

It’s that time of year again for our Fanwork Exchange!

Fanworks includes fanfic/fanart/fanmix/graphics/gifsets/etc. and there is no minimum/maximum length for fanfics.

If you’d like to be involved please fill out this form! It will be available till May 17th. You will need to add at least one pairing/prompt for someone to work with. (also verify if you’re using the tos/aos characters)

Please have your asks/messages open so we can contact you with your assignment, we will contact you May 20th/21st. When you get the prompts you can choose just one or as many as you’d like to fill.

Note: this exchange is a secret, if you have a question for the person you got please either ask on anon or ask us to ask them.

Fanworks are due July 12th, please put #sapphicstartrek in the first five tags or @ us along with the user you were assigned to.

If you have to drop out please let us know by June 14th so we can find a pitch hitter! If you have any questions let us know!

Please note: this is a femslash exchange only.

we’re here 

we’re queer

space: the final frontier

Star Trek and Gender

Hey, fellow trekkies, I’m gonna hold a presentation about Star Trek and Gender soon and need your help!

What are some episodes that come to mind that are about gender and genders or where gender features a large role in the plot and character development? Where were things and people maybe unnecessarily gendered?

Any and all shows are welcome, and so are scenes from movies. I’m especially looking for moments where the embodiment of gender was of importance (for example, the Borg used to be a genderless species but were gendered by the appearance of the Queen, yet their actors until then were all male and their agenda stereotypically masculine). And I’m very interested in finding connections between body ability and gender, so please hit me up with suggestions about disability in episodes too.

My eternal thanks for every help, and I hope to spark some interesting discussions too! I’ll be happy to write down the major points of my research and presentation too and point you to scientific literature if you’re interested!

Reblogs are very much appreciated. ❤

Hey remember those star fleet pride things I made in June? Well I’ve remade them! You can use these for whatever you want just remember to credit me.

Okay now I’m genuinely curious. Survey time!

Like or reblog this post if you are LGBTQIA+ and love Star Trek!

i love the star trek fandom so much (source)

of course we are

Safe blogs are great, but often they aren’t specific. I know I’ve told my family that I run a Star Trek blog, so giving them a url of an aesthetic blog isn’t going to help. So I’ve made @yamoksauce.

@yamoksauce is a safe blog that posts only Star Trek. Nothing will be controversial, no gay ships, no Star Trek meta that is risky (like the abortion posts, etc.), nothing that could endanger someone closeted or in an oppressive household. It will only post innocent screencaps and funny textposts that are to do with Star Trek (all series).

If you ever need to give out your url but don’t want to endanger yourself, use this blog! No personal details will be on there so anyone can use it, and there will be a basic theme including a tags page. Signal boosting is appreciated!

Sign Ups for TOS Spones Challenge are Open!

Hello Spones shippers! 

Sign Ups for TOS Spones Challenge: Summer 2016 are now officially open. If you want to participate please sign up. You will have from now (June 2nd) to the time you decide to post (between August 1st and August 31st) to create a fanwork that centers TOS Spock/McCoy’s relationship and the theme. 

Sign Up Here

Speaking of themes the votes are in and our theme is: 

(I take no credit for the image it was bestowed on me during Ship Wars 2010)

An incredibly important part of both Spock and McCoy is their identity as scientists. Whether it’s working in the lab trying to solve some impossible problem during the Five Year Mission, discussing the nature of V’Ger, arguing over the ethics of Genesis, or performing surgery on a torpedo science is also at the heart of their relationship to each other. 

How will you incorporate ‘team science’ into your TOS Spock/McCoy fanwork? 

If you have any questions check out the FAQ or message me 

STAR TREK FEMSLASH BIG BANG 2016

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Please consider signing up! There aren’t many at the moment and I’d love more people to participate. ❤️🖖🏼

TOS Spones Challenge

To elaborating on yesterday’s post, I would be interested in setting up and running a TOS Spones event. It would be a very low key simple challenge without a whole lot of commitment or work really for anyone, but I thought it could be fun.

The event could be either generally TOS Spones or more specifically Spones work taking place after the five year mission, so TMP and onward (model on the Old Married Spirk Challenge.) 

I do love original movie era Spones (it’s my favorite) but we could go more general than that. Since Spones shippers are a small community and TOS Spones shippers an even smaller one more general might be better. We could do a TOS Spone challenge that then had a general theme people could interpret anyway they wanted to. If we decide to do that I would be willing to set up a poll with some theme ideas and see what people liked best.  

What do people think?  Would folks be interested in this kind of challenge? Should it be more original movie era specific or more generally TOS Spones? Should there be a theme or no theme?

I am entirely onboard with this! I’m happy to ascribe to any theme or not, whatever people prefer. D'you have a concept of when you’d want the event to take place?

my thoughts were if there is interest I’ll take a couple days-week or so to put together a site, come up with rules, FAQ, do polls etc. Then open sign ups (which could be rolling). Give people a couple months to get stuff done and then start the posting period in August-September? That was my rough time frame, but nothing is set in stone yet. I would be willing to push the posting period into October if need be or start it in early August. Depending on if people want more or less time.  

STAR TREK FEMSLASH BIG BANG 2016

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When: 

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90% guaranteed way to get me to like a thing: aliens 100% guaranteed way to get me to like a thing: gay aliens

I really don’t want gay subtext in Star Trek anymore.

I want text.

It’s time for text.

Agreed. Forget the gay subtext, give me gay supertext. Or super gay text, I’m not picky.

The Warp Rainbow

Queer, the Final Frontier: The Limits of Gender and Sexuality in the Star Trek Universe

Star Trek, in both its series and film iterations, has become a staple of American entertainment on screens big and small. First airing in 1966, in the wake of the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Star Trek has been known to push boundaries with respect to racial and gender norms. Indeed, the series’ philosophy can be “summarized by the famous acronym IDIC – ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’” (Greven 34). Yet, when it comes to explicitly portraying queer characters and relationships, Star Trek fails to represent an aspect of life that is a reality for much of the franchise’s fanbase. At times, the franchise expands the limits of gender performance, the majority of episodes affirm a heteronormative and heterosexual experience, largely in the absence of queerness altogether. Viewers must rely on reading queerness into Star Trek by framing storylines as allegories for queer experiences. Ultimately, however, throughout the history of the franchise, those behind the show tip-toe around queerness and rely on traditional gender norms and heteronormativity when creating character relationships on Star Trek.

With respect to gender performance, in general, outside of relationships, Star Trek remains fairly traditional, especially when the gender performances of the characters are analyzed through the lens of power dynamics. This is most apparent with the characters Natasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), Kira Nerys in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9), and Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager. All three of these women characters are portrayed as less feminine than the other women characters in their respective series. All three of these women characters also happen to be quite powerful: Natasha Yar is Chief of Security on the Enterprise in TNG; Kira Nerys is First Officer and Liaison to the Bajoran Provisional Government, stationed on the Deep Space Nine space station; and Kathryn Janeway is Captain of the USS Voyager. Much of their masculinity is associated with what might be described as their ruthlessness in tough situations and their relationships with violence in war situations. Other women characters exhibit more femininity, and they have “softer” professions. For example, Keiko O’Brien in TNG and DS9 is a botanist and teacher, and Kes from Voyager is a medical assistant. Beverly Crusher, Chief Medical Officer in TNG, and Jadzia Dax, Chief Science Officer in DS9, are closer to a middle-point on a gender-binary spectrum. Both Kathryn Janeway and Beverly Crusher, are portrayed as motherly in many instances, which is in alignment with their ages, at least within a framework of traditional gender norms.

Yet, even with this ostensible adherence to traditional gender norms, the Star Trek universe, at least within the Federation, does attempt to portray equality among the sexes. Throughout Starfleet, one encounters women officers from ensigns to admirals. Women exist in professions from bartenders to nurses to diplomats. Some women are teachers while others are terrorists. The franchise does succeed in depicting a multiplicity of possibility with respect to working women. However, one cannot help but to question the insistence that women in power be referred to as “sir.” Although women are portrayed as being quite capable, the framing of their capability is being as capable as men. When women in Star Trek are shown to succeed in various aspects of professional life, they are portrayed as moving toward masculinity and moving into male spaces. One is only supposed to call Captain Janeway “ma’am” at “crunch time,” possibly because under a great deal of stress one might forget to do what may simply be a hat-tip toward political correctness. This suggests that gender equality is still an issue in the Star Trek future, and that the equality that seems to be a fact may only be an aspiration that is encouraged by Starfleet while not completely achieved.

Of course, the idea that gender equality is aspirational rather than achieved in the Star Trek universe is speculative, much like what are perceived as depictions of queerness in the franchise. Queerness in Star Trek is generally understood in allegorical terms, and these allegorical conceptions of queerness are informed by the aforementioned gender norms, focusing heavily on homoeroticism.

The most famous perceived homoerotic relationship on Star Trek comes from The Original Series (TOS) and is the subject of a large portion of slash fiction writing and visual art: the relationship between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. According to David Greven, professor of English at Connecticut College and author of Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films, “K/S, as it is famously called in slash fiction, is a same-sex love story that is so visible and sustained for such duration that it threatens to explode its allegorical confines” (Greven 5). Greven goes on to explain:

The relationship between Captain Kirk and Spock is an iteration of an old trope. The notion that Kirk and Spock are in a relationship comes from the outside. In TOS, Kirk and Spock are in a non-sexual, same-sex relationship: “What chiefly prevents the Kirk and Spock relationship from being broadly recognized as a preeminent example of same-sex love in popular culture is that Trek never acknowledges the relationship as such” (Greven 6). The relationship between Kirk and Spock, although it is queered in a supplemental category connected to the franchise, is not an explicit depiction of queerness in Star Trek.

Another example of this sort of speculation can be seen in Greven’s recounting of an episode called “Let That Be Your Last Battle” from the third season of TOS, in which two men are the only people left of their species on their planet after a civil war annihilates the rest of the population. At the end of the episode, they continue to fight, which Greven describes at “homoerotic grappling” (Greven 4). Greven frames as homoerotic what most people would probably only understand to be a fight scene. In the absence of queer characters, viewers resort to this sort of speculation.

A third example of this queering through speculation is Greven’s recounting of an episode of Voyager, called “Demon,” in which Ensign Harry Kim and Lieutenant Tom Paris have their DNA replicated by an alien species when they are incapacitated on a Class Y, or Demon, planet (Greven 34). The species exists as “a biomimetic compound that copies DNA,” and must come into contact with the DNA of other organisms in order to reproduce (Greven 34). At the end of the episode Captain Janeway allows the alien species to use the DNA of the crew of the USS Voyager to create its own crew in their image, leading Greven to argue:

Once again, the episode is read as a queer allegory. In this instance, although Greven reads it back into the episode, sexuality is absent from the storyline. The alien species reproduces through imitation, not through sexual reproduction. Greven frames this lack of reproduction through sex as a sign of queerness, but it is closer to a general otherness, something far outside of the human experience, which Greven tends to conflate with queerness in his book. Indeed, much of what is perceived as queerness in Star Trek is actually a general portrayal of otherness, devoid of the sexual contact and desire that is essential to the queer experience.

There are times, however, at which queerness is encountered in Star Trek, although those times tends to be few, far-between, and problematic. The most famous encounter with queerness in Star Trek happens in an episode of TNG, in which the Enterprise assists the J’naii, an androgynous species that has abolished gender, with the retrieval of a stranded vessel:

This episode is problematic for several reasons. Soren is played by a woman actor, which means that, at least visually, the intimate relationship between Riker and Soren falls within the parameters of acceptable gender performance. According to Robin Roberts, “Jonathan Frakes complained about TNG’s failure of nerve to make Soren ‘obviously male’” (Greven 40). The episode also suggests that existing at one extreme of a gender binary is inevitable. Rather than framing the absence of gender as a means through which the J’naii could move beyond gendered expectations, the absence of gender was framed as the root of a repressive society, against which Soren had to rebel. The story could be read as an endorsement of gender norms, although that reading would be harsh and reductive.

In the second and third seasons of DS9, in the episodes entitled “Crossover” and “Through the Looking Glass,” Kira Nerys runs the Deep Space Nine space station in a “mirror universe,” in which a Klingon-Bajoran-Cardassian alliance control the Alpha Quadrant, holding humans as slaves. In “Crossover,” Major Kira meets the “evil” version of herself when she crosses over into this mirror universe. The evil version of Major Kira seems to flirt with the “real” Major Kira throughout the episode. The evil version of Major Kira is once again sexualized in “Through the Looking Glass” when she is shown lounging with her body between a man and a woman as the man caresses her. Although sexual contact outside of flirtation or a simple caress never explicitly occurs in either episode, the possibility is presented to the viewer. And, again, Star Trek’s depiction of queerness is problematic. In this case, queerness is associated with villainy. Queerness is presented as negative sexual deviance. The real Major Kira does not reciprocate the slight sexual advances from her counterpart. Major Kira is good, and, therefore, Major Kira is straight.

The most striking depiction (although not the most famous, since TNG is more popular than DS9) of queerness in Star Trek occurs in the fourth season of DS9. In the episode, entitled “Rejoined,” Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax is reunited with Lenara Khan. Both characters are Trill, a humanoid species that joins with organisms called symbionts that carry the memories and personalities of past hosts. Two former hosts, a man and a woman, of the symbionts joined with Dax and Khan, two women, at the time of the episode were a married couple. Dax and Khan fall in love in the episode, but any relationship between them is forbidden by the Trill government. Conversing with Chief Medical Officer Julian Bashir, Major Kira says, “The one thing I don’t understand is why Dax and Lanara can’t just pick up where they left off. I mean if they’re still in love with each other…” Bashir replies, “Ah, now there’s the rub. Even if they do have feelings for each other, it’s strictly against the rules of Trill society to acknowledge it in any way.” Kira disdainfully replies, “Ugh! Rules?” And Bashir continues to explain: “Well, it’s more of a taboo really. Having a relationship with a lover from a past life is called reassociation, and the Trill feel very strongly that it’s unnatural.” Kira, still confused, asks: “Unnatural!? How can it be unnatural for a married couple to resume their marriage?” The episode continues with moments of discomfort as Khan’s travel companions, including her brother, express how wrong it would be for her to continue her relationship with Dax. Dax decides that she will express her love, even in the face of possible exile from Trill. After the two women share a passionate kiss, Khan decides that he family and career are more important to her than reassociation with Dax.

“Rejoined” is the clearest representation of queerness and queer metaphor in Star Trek. The conflict in the episode without a doubt represents the turbulent experience of being in the closet and coming out. Yet, queerness is still not explicitly depicted. Although a kiss is shared between two women in the episode, the love is a holdover from a marriage between a man and a woman. One way of understanding the message of this episode is that love transcends gender and physical bodies. But, once again, queerness is desexualized and heteronormativized. As mentioned before, the love at the center of the episode is between a man and a woman, but also love is emphasized at the expense of physical or sexual attraction. The sexual dimension of queerness is erased in order to depict a possible emotional queerness. At no point in the history of Star Trek is queer sexuality explicitly depicted. Queerness in Star Trek always comes with a catch, whose purpose is to suppress the queerness in order to make it more consumable for a diverse audience.

If one were to read Star Trek generously, one may consider all of the inter-species relationships in the series as under the umbrella of queerness. What could be more subversive than having an intimate relationship with a non-human person? Because aliens evolved on different planets in different star systems, with conditions different from those found on Earth, there is the possibility that humans and aliens may be sexually incompatible, at least in the area of vanilla sex. Therefore, sex itself must be redefined and taken out of a heteronormative reproductive context. This itself is a queering of sexual dynamics that is hardly explored on Star Trek, although an avid viewer does frequently have the pleasure of seeing Ferengi have their ears rubbed. Without the physical compatibility of “matching” genitalia, the category of sex is removed from the situation of intimate encounters, and what is left is gender performance. And this is where Star Trek fails to expand the limits of its depictions of queerness. Although inter-species sex could have been framed as an exercise in queering Star Trek, the series end up relying so heavily on gender performance when matching characters for sexual relationships that it is clear that inter-species relationships are actually only representative of male-female human sexual interaction.

The strict adherence to traditional gender performances, even across species, is the product of one of three possibilities: coincidence, inherence, or compulsion. It may simply be a coincidence that in the Star Trek universe, the majority of humanoid species exist within a gender binary and present according to gender norms that would be considered traditional in Western Earth culture. That is highly unlikely. The second possibility, which is highly problematic, is that traditional gender performance is absolutely natural, that it is inherent to all species, which suggests that it is a trait inherited from the common humanoid ancestor revealed in the twentieth episode of the sixth season of TNG, “The Chase.” The third possibility is that adherence to the traditional gender norms of Western Earth culture are a requirement for admittance into the United Federation of Planets. However, the requirement may be a soft one, a reflection of the human supremacy and Earthly cultural imperialism that is a staple of the Federation. Those in power, who decide whether or not a species is admitted to the Federation, may decide that a species that does not adhere to traditional gender norms is simply not good enough for entrance into the alliance. In this case, the Oankali from Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, as technologically advanced as they are, would be culturally incompatible with the Federation. But, of course, to fail to recognize the reality that the gender performances in Star Trek are simply a reflection of the culture of the creators of the franchise would be foolish. Although the United Federation of Planets is framed as a troubled utopia in the Star Trek universe, the dominant culture, as much as it reflects the aspirations of the creators of the franchise, it is still created through the lens of the culture within which the creators lived.

The entire Star Trek franchise is built on the recreation of heteronormativity and normative gender performance. Attempts at pushing boundaries, such as putting male extras in skirted Starfleet uniforms, were largely abandoned. In the end, the queer or curious viewer is left to create queerness in the Star Trek universe on their own. Of course, there is the possibility of a queer main character in the new Star Trek series planned for release in 2017. For now, however, queerness continues to function as the unexplored sector of the Star Trek universe.