Just felt like this speech from a 1992 episode of a TV show should be appreciated this year for no reason in particular
You would never get this on today’s TV
This is such a fascinating moment for queer TV for me, because it’s queer, but like, it’s also worth noting that the person annoucing this comes from a culture with a weird sort of imposed gender-neutrality, which in our world is the queerer thing. It’s both like, a radical act of queer acceptance for the person doing it, which is cool and beautiful. But that’s undercut a little in my eyes because the thing she’s coming out as is a straight woman, i.e. what our culture generally wants her to be.
On the one hand it’s a depiction of a government that has enshrined in law that its citizens cannot be anything other than gender neutral, which is extremely radical. On the other, it loses its sting when it’s moving from state that is queer by our standards, to becoming a straight woman who’s going to sleep with the designated lady’s man.
Which is more important, the queerness of the story in its own context, or how those depictions read to the audience? I don’t really know, but I’m fascinated by all the implications
I remember (sometime around 2000 or 2001) an analysis that argued that this complex mix of messages was an attempt at “plausible deniability”
similar to other things Star Trek did that hinted strongly at queerness in a time before they dared to try any unambiguous queerness.
Because Star Trek was, at the time, a pretty big corporate endeavor, trying very hard to appeal to the widest mainstream audience possible, while also trying to maintain the image of being kinda revolutionary, with people who liked that sort of thing.
basically, the argument went: every Star Trek episode that hints at something “controversial” for the time must have at least two possible interpretations– one for each side of the controversy– so as not to make anyone too angry
according to that analysis, the pro-queer-rights interpretation of this episode went something like: “It is good to accept people who have different gender presentation (and different attraction) from what your society considers the norm. Societies hurt people for diverging from these norms, and it is a tragedy when they succeed at this.”
while the anti-queer rights interpretation draws strongly from the fact that the entire society, including the one rule-breaker, were played by women… and so the “rule-breaking,” from the audience perspective, just looks like “a woman saying that she’s a woman and is attracted to men.”
The anti-queer-rights interpretation would go something like, “Wouldn’t it be an awful dystopia if androgynous lesbians took over the world, and made it illegal for women to be feminine and heterosexual? you can see this horrible future on the horizon already”
Either interpretation can allow the viewer to root for the protagonists, and against the oppressive society, and be sad for the characters when the episode ends the way it does (with her being “cured” and brainwashed back into her assigned role)… whether they are gay or trans or vehemently prejudiced against all that.
…I dunno. I do think there was some value in this analysis, but not sure how far I agree with it.
I do think Star Trek was very often a struggle between different voices, including those who passionately wanted to make statements, and those who wanted to give the appearance of making statements but not actually risk upsetting any potential sources of profit.