Space, the Feminist Frontier: Essays on Sex and Gender in Star Trek

by Jennifer C. Garlen (editor), Anissa M. Graham (editor)

For nearly 60 years, Star Trek has imagined humanity's future while reflecting its present. Star The Original Series debuted with three male leads, but in the wake of a Trek renaissance that began with Star Discovery in 2017, additional series have explored the frontiers of representation, making the present moment ripe for new critical engagement and thoughtful reflection on the narratives that have shaped the journey thus far.

Using the lens of feminist criticism and theory, this collection of essays presents a diverse array of academic and fan scholars engaging with the past, present, and future of Star Trek. Contributors consider issues like Klingon marriage, Majel Barrett's legacy, the Bechdel-Wallace test, LGBTQ+ representation, and more. They offer updated readings on legacy characters while also addressing wholly new characters like Michael Burnham, Beckett Mariner, and Adira Tal. Their essays provide some of the first critical examinations of the newest additions to the Trek franchise, including Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks.

265 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2024

About the author

A former English professor, Jennifer now writes about classic movies for Examiner.com and her own blog, Virtual Virago. She has degrees in English from Agnes Scott College, Georgia Southern University, and Auburn University. She also writes introductions to literary classics and works in popular culture studies.

Reviews

[Lavinia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional collection of essays that articulates, in exquisitely researched words, many ways in which Star Trek reflected and shaped the last sixty years. No Trek is looked over, and representation, one of the major points for which Star Trek has always been praised, is fully contextualized. I enjoyed both detailed analyses covering more focused time-frames and pieces following longer threads that passed through multiple incarnations of Trek. (Majel Barrett and her characters, especially Lwaxana Troi, have a profoundly resonating place in my heart.) As far as my early, foundational Trek-cultural pillars go, I belong to the generation of The Next Generation through and through, with a lot of love for Deep Space Nine and Enterprise (in the sense that I often end up rewatching episodes and could probably recite a few of them), but I enjoy all Trek and the new (to me) perspectives on its cultural impact that this book brought are, to put it quite simply, invaluable.