1. Star Trek and Subjectivity: Fan Videos as
Sexual Textual Critiques

2. Andrea R. Marshall
Drexel University iSchool
andrea.marshall@drexel.edu
http://drexel.academia.edu/AndreaMarshall

3. What are fan videos?
• Where can we find them?
• Who is creating them?
• Who is watching them?

4. Star Trek and Subjectivity
• What are visual fanfiction discourses?
• How do fan videos become reader response
critiques of canonical Star Trek tropes?
• How do Star Trek fans construct their
sociotechnical identities in digital
environments?

5. The Male Gaze (Mulvey 1975)
”the gaze is male whenever it
directs itself at, and takes pleasure
in, women, where women function
as erotic objects” – Laura Mulvey

6. “Is that a girl?” “That’s a girl.” –Kirk and Charlie,
“Charlie X”

7. Wait a minute……(Before)

8. Oh, nevermind….(After)

9. Star Trek contains within it a problem that many vids have
attempted, literally or metaphorically, to solve: at the center of
the text is a displaced woman. The original, failed Star Trek pilot
"The Cage" (1964), written by Gene Roddenberry and featuring
Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, also introduced the
captain's aloof, unemotional, and tactically brilliant second in
command. This was not the famously logical Spock; rather, her
name—fitting for such a mechanical woman—was "Number
One." Although Spock was in the pilot, he was not the cool,
highly rational Spock we know now. In fact, Star Trek's insistence
on the Enterprise's first officer as an unemotional mind makes
particular sense if the character is a woman: it is a 1960s picture
of an unnatural—for which read: strong, highly rational,
technologically minded—woman.
(Coppa, 2008)

10. While Number One haunts Star Trek through the
overdetermined figure of Spock, Majel Barrett
Roddenberry was recast in two roles that exemplify the
problematic way that women are typically represented
in popular culture: Nurse Christine Chapel, whose
primary characterological gestus is her embarrassing
and hopeless public crush on Spock, and the
disembodied voice of the Enterprise. It is hard not to
see Barrett's transformation from Number One to
Christine Chapel as a degradation on every level: role,
status, and image.
(Coppa 2008)

11. Star Trek as Roving Eye
• Fan videos visually disrupt and confront the sexist
tropes present within all iterations of the television
series and feature films, by the subversive reediting
of the metanarratives (as source materials), adding
new narrative structures in textual format (YouTube
description boxes), and including musical
soundtracks intended to convey moods, tropes,
stories, and the inner lives of the canonical Star
Trek characters.

12. Additional Fanonical Discourses
• Fan videos also engage with the
metanarrative of Star Trek, and transcend the
discursive boundaries of these visual texts by
creating their own original fan characters
(OFCs), and original storylines. In these videos,
fanonical discourses become reflexive tools to
construct autonomous sociotechnical
identities as creators, to generate new ways
of seeing Star Trek multiverses.

13. Example One: “Toxic” by YouTube Author MissDreary (Maybe Nurse Chapel shouldn’t pursue an emotionally
withdrawn Vulcan? Maybe Spock is being a total jerk? Maybe this is a totally dysfunctional canonical trope in
which Nurse Chapel is depicted as an irrational lovestruck ‘chick’?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFxqkhoudo
The author’s annotations:
Audio: Toxic by Britney Spears
Video: Star Trek TOS
Plot: Spock is toxic and Chapel is poisoned.

14. Example Two: “Aurora”
Original fan created series created entirely in CGI format, by Tim Vining. Two female protagonists are featured in
this series-a human cargo ship captain and her one-woman crew, her Vulcan first mate. Unfortunately, the
gendered gaze recurs here as both parody and fanonical trope.
Trailer for upcoming sequel in the series “Thine
Own Self” (two crewmates walk into an
intergalactic strip club and some gender
bending ensues?….)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz8B3PssFHw

15. Tisha Turk, “Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan
Fiction” (2010)
For fans who produce and consume fan works, the
boundaries of the
source text‘s fictional world are not fixed; rather, they are
infinitely expandable.
Fans‘ tendency to treat source texts as open rather than
closed
is encouraged by the ways in which media fandom is
organized around,
though not limited to, serial television.

16. Sources
Coppa, F. (2008). Women," Star Trek," and the early development of fannish vidding. Transformative
Works and Cultures, 1.
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory
and Criticism, 438-48.
Turk, T. (2010). Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction. Metalepsis in Popular Culture, 87-107.
Turk, T., & Johnson, J. (2011). Toward an ecology of vidding. Transformative Works and Cultures, 9.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Charlie_X_(episode)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFxqkhoudo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFxqkhoudo
http://loyalkng.com/2009/07/14/vulcan-alberta-canada-live-long-prosper/
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64