My Heart Belongs to Janeway
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | My Heart Belongs to Janeway |
| Creator: | Elizabeth Reba Weise |
| Date(s): | September 1996 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: Voyager, other Treks |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | My Heart Belongs to Janeway |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
My Heart Belongs to Janeway is a 1996 essay by Elizabeth Reba Weise that was posted to an online blog/fansite called "stim."
While the essay has a title referencing Janeway, many incarnations of Trek are discussed.
It is part of a series of snarky, irreverent articles: see stim's Trek Tribute (scroll down). One of those was the controversial Please Captain, Not in Front of the Klingons.
Some Topics Discussed
- the awesomeness of the female characters in various Treks
- the author believes the female characters improved somewhat as the time went on
- girls don't want to be Uhura ("didn't do much on the Enterprise but open hailing frequencies" but that she "got to be black"), Rand ("got to be raped by Kirk's dark side," "wear one of the most complicated hairstyles ever recorded in 23rd-century annals," and "[stands] off to the side, a cup of coffee in one hand, a sheaf of reports to be initialed in the other."), and Chapel ("brings around soup for fussy Vulcans")
- "Star Trek: The Next Generation was a good start. There were some attempts to fix what had been seriously wrong in the old Trek. If you look very closely at some of the first Next Generation shows you'll see mini-skirted men wandering around in the background. It didn't last long, but it was a nice touch."
- the author must not get out much: "To this day I harbor a secret hope that D.C. Fontana is a woman."
- delight at one of the "steamier kisses between two women ever seen on network television — was the culmination of several years worth of letter campaigns by organized gay fans. "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry promised before his death that gay characters would show up in the 24th century. We're still waiting—but that kiss took some of the edge off the wait."
- references the Bechdel Test
Excerpts
I grew up wanting to serve aboard the Starship Enterprise. I wanted to explore Vulcan, learn Klingon, visit Romulus. I wanted to snap to attention when Captain Kirk showed up on the bridge, wanted to work with Mr. Spock down in the xenobiology lab, wanted to be a part of that inestimable crew and sail with her to the edges of the universe. "Star Trek" caught my imagination early on and has held it ever since.
And yet, it was an odd, dual desire. With my utter love of Star Trek I experienced two universes, one lying on top of the other, the edges wavy and confusing, my own body indistinct and precarious in both. In one, my imagined world, I was a crew member. In the heat of battle, Kirk threw me a phaser to take down a renegade Andorian. In a tense moment on the bridge, Spock nodded, quietly pleased, when my quick thinking on the computer allowed the ship to overcome a Tellarite attack.
In the other universe, the one I saw on the screen every night from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., I couldn't be any of those things because I was a girl. I knew that women didn't do much on the Enterprise but open hailing frequencies and bring around soup for fussy Vulcans.
Voyeurism: It's a dilemma that anyone on the outside quickly gets used to; if we didn't, we'd go crazy. It took Spock years to learn how to suppress his human side. By the age of eight I was an expert at the psychic back-flip necessary to turn myself inside out so that I was one of the boys — the doers—not one of the girls — the watchers.
We all were. In my Camp Fire Girls group, which consisted of seven girls who played "Star Trek" at every opportunity, we fought bitterly over who "had" to be Uhura. Who wanted to just sit up on the bridge and monitor subspace frequencies all day?
Oh, but it feels like a betrayal to ask even that much of "Star Trek." They tried—they did such amazing things for the time. Here was a cast that included blacks, Asians, Russians (this in the middle of the Cold War), even aliens and that wasn't the issue — they just happened to be there. Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future was the best thing going in 1966. It was utopian and wondrous.
But it was still almost entirely male. In Classic Trek, the men were the interesting characters: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy fought fascinating interior demons — Spock's dual Human/Vulcan nature; Kirk's inability to bond with anything but his ship; McCoy's alienated loneliness as a divorced father with little connection to his daughter — while periodically saving the galaxy.
The women of the Enterprise weren't anywhere near as intriguing. Uhura got to be black. Nurse Chapel got to suffer unrequited love for Spock. Yeoman Rand got to be raped by Kirk's dark side in "The Enemy Within" and wear one of the most complicated hairstyles ever recorded in 23rd-century annals.
The only other women where the ones who floated through Kirk's bed or occasionally ended up with McCoy (usually dying at the end) or wanting (but not having) Mr. Spock. The most fascinating woman to show up was the Romulan commander who tried to talk Spock into defecting to the Empire — with a strong undercurrent of unspoken desire on both their parts.
[snipped]
Tellingly, the Commander, the highest-ranking female military figure to appear in Classic Trek, wasn't even given a name—only a title. She was the only woman on the original Star Trek I actually wanted to be and there wasn't even anything to call her.
Not that any of this kept my sister and I from sitting mesmerized before the television. We loved the show, loved the characters, loved the ship and all her crew. But we didn't take the lack of women for granted. We scoured the credits for women's names, each one somehow a personal triumph. To this day I harbor a secret hope thatD.C. Fontana is a woman.
Into the 20th Century: The show was canceled. It went into syndication. I grew up. I got jobs. I joined feminist theory discussion groups. But one can read only so many Doris Lessing novels; and a little suspension of disbelief is necessary to stay sane in this world: I still loved Star Trek.
I didn't care that Kirk was a sexist jerk. I didn't care that Vulcan women were chattel to be handed around by their families. I still would have given anything to be on the bridge of the Enterprise as it warped its way across the galaxy. But before I was driven out of my mind by the cognitive dissonance generated by the loving stories that allowed aliens but not women to be three-dimensional, a new era dawned.
Star Trek movies started coming out, and suddenly everyone had made the leap into the 20th century. Christine Chapel went to medical school (finally!) and came back to the Enterprise in 2270 as a staff physician. Uhura was promoted to Starfleet Command on Earth, and Janice Rand became a communications officer under Captain Sulu.
But the weight of precedent hung heavy on the movies; it was a boy's universe. The main characters were still men, and they were the ones who got to do the exciting things—like save the women. Enticingly interesting female captains showed up on view screens occasionally—usually in peril from some menace that only Kirk, Spock, and McCoy could fix. It took another hundred years for Starfleet to catch up to the 20th century. Kind of.
... it was Chief of Security Tasha Yar who became the embodiment of fifteen years of longing for strong, active women in Starfleet — the kind of woman a girl might want to play because she got to do something.
Yar was complex, capable, and cunning. She was a gust of fresh air, and also voted "most likely to turn out to be lesbian" by some of us. But our hopes were crushed when she ended up with Data while under the influence of the inhibition-stripping Psi 2000 virus.
[snipped]
Here was someone you could sink your teeth into. She was tough, driven and—oh be still my heart—she barked out orders with the best of them.
That's always been one of the most annoying traits of many of the women on "Star Trek"—their wimpy voices. Troi's lovely accent is tempered by an unfortunate "there-there" therapist's tone. Crusher speaks in a breathy voice several notes below what I'm sure must be her normal speech range, surrounding everything she says with a force field that radiates the message "I'm still a woman beneath this doctor's smock; you don't really have to take me seriously."
Ro's departure from the show (and the Federation) is one of the most gripping episodes of the "Star Trek" pantheon thus far. It includes an intense scene with Captain Picard in which her loyalty to him battles, and eventually loses to, her sense of duty to a greater cause. My God. A woman who sacrifices herself not for love, but for loyalty to a higher cause. After all those years I'd grown used to seeing Kirk do that, but when Ro did it too I found myself short of breath. Here was a female character whom men could imagine themselves being; and in so doing, they might even experience the same flip we'd been breaking our backs over all these years.
Tarting Up "Deep Space Nine": It seemed like paradise when "Deep Space Nine" first appeared with its two leading women characters, Major Kira Nerys and Science Officer Jadzia Dax. Of the two, Kira was the most promising. She had spent years as a guerrilla fighter in the Bajoran underground, and, for at least her first two years on the show, she got to be as intense, professional and military as the rest of them. But a strong, capable, androgynous woman was clearly just a little too intimidating for Paramount. Last season, the makers of the show started tarting Kira up. Her hair grew fluffier, her eye makeup got entirely out of hand, and there was that memorable episode in which her evil bisexual twin from an alternate universe traipsed around in tight black leather.
Dax hasn't fared much better. It seems that anyone who's lived six or so lives should have more personality. They are letting a little more passion show up of late, maybe to make up for what they're doing to Kira.
A Future for Everyone: With Voyager we have achieved liftoff. Say what you will about the lack of plot, on this show it's the women who save the universe, and they do it with engineering, not phasers. Not only that, but the most intuitive character, Chakotay, is a man.
Imagine what kind of an effect this will have on all those little girls and boys stretched out on their stomachs in the living room watching "Star Trek" the way my sister and I did so many years ago. Imagine them as they eat dry Coco Puffs straight from the box as the ship once again falls into terrible danger.
Imagine the neural pathways, which have closed for us adults, that will stay open for these children as they watch the crew dealing with crisis. Chakotay agonizes over and speaks to his own inner spirits. Tuvok the Vulcan talks about his love for his children. And Captain Katherine Janeway and Lieutenant B'lanna Torres save them all with science.
"Torres, you're with me in engineering."
[snipped]
What will these words mean to little girls all over the world who watch as these two women revel in using their brains, as these two women crawl through Jefferies' tubes to fix what's broken, as these two women work together to save the galaxy? These two women aren't afraid of being smart. They don't shy away from physics and math, ionic phase-distortions, and dilithium; they take charge and give orders and never worry that this somehow makes them less worthy, because they know that their entire worth isn't about being female, it's about being.