Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State

1958-Present

M. Wildermuth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137408884
• eBook ISBN: 9781137408891
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

As American security became increasingly dependent on technology to shape the consciousness of its populace and to defend them, science fiction shows like The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and The X-Files both promoted the regime's gendered logic and raised significant questions about that logic and its gendered roles.

C H A P T E R 1

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The Evolution of Gendered Security State Logic since World War II

Writing in 2003 about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, feminist media scholar Jayne Rodgers declared “It is as if the twentieth century never happened” (210). She was describing the way women and men were portrayed after the tragedy, in media representations that seemed to recall stereotypes of men and women that hailed back to the 1950s (206). “While men . . . were being constructed as heroes,” said Rodgers, “women were being constructed as victims” (207). “The heroic myth . . . was based on a strong sense of restoring [myths of] gender, as well as social and political order” (207). The mythology was that reflecting the gendered icons of “action man and passive woman” (208), most probably resulting without the news media intentionally meaning to represent men and women this stereotypically. Rather, it was the result of too many decades since television’s inception without women being equally represented in the work force of the media (201) in a culture where gender is “a form of conditioning which affects individuals—women and men—at the structural and interpersonal level” (200). In short, gendered hierarchies in the media world had been shaping gendered representations of the tragedy and the ensuing geopolitical struggle that emerged from the maelstrom.

Rodgers was not alone in voicing this concern. Iris Marion Young offered a definition of the gendered security state arising out of the 9/11 attacks and traced its ancestry back to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. She indicated that “a security state . . . constitutes itself to an . . . aggressor outside” by organizing its “political and economic capacities to respond to this threat.” Moreover, “the state must root out every enemy within” the state by keeping “watch on everyone” who could be an internal security threat” (225). The security state thereby comes to embody “a logic of masculinist protection” that reduces citizens to the roles of helpless women and children (223–225). In such a state, the masculine will be privileged above the feminine, and since anything challenging this established order could be characterized as the enemy within, a philosophy like feminism could be seen as dangerously subversive. Gendered hierarchies would have to be maintained to preserve the public order and make sure that threats, both internal and external, could be nullified to ensure security in the state (223–231).

Other feminist media scholars responded to the problems posed by gendered security state logic. As early as 2001, Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin had expressed their concern in The American Journal of International Law. “As the events” of 9/11 “first unfolded, women were invisible, except as victims alongside men.” Indeed, “The role of women police and firefighters in the emergency work after the various crashes has been given strikingly little exposure.” Moreover, the authors argued, most of the White House response to the attacks was articulated by men with “Condoleezza Rice, head of the National Security Council” playing “a relatively limited overt role in responding to the hijackings and the war in Afghanistan” (600). Of the 50 opinion pieces appearing directly after 9/11 in The New York Times, only two were authored by women (601). Such gendered either/or thinking privileged masculinized aggression over stereotypically feminine negotiation and made violence a too easy option to choose over discussion and diplomacy (604–605).

The feminist response continued years later in 2004 with Lynn Spigel in her essay on “Entertainment Wars.” Here Spigel considered the broader implications of the gendering of war and the logic of the security state in the larger context of media control and the shaping of the American consciousness regarding the conflict and gendered political identities. Building on Rodgers’s critique, Spigel argued that “one of the central ways” in which America’s “moral position” as an innocent country victimized by Islamic fundamentalist aggression was established by the media and the White House was “through the depiction of women victims” (246). “On television,” she said, “these myths of gender were often connected to age-old Western fantasies of the East in which ‘Oriental’ men assault (and even rape) Western women and, more symbolically, the west itself” (246). Indeed, Spigel continued, “President Bush used the image of female suffering in his first televised address before Congress after the attacks” (247). As an example of Al Quaeda’s evil, Bush cited the fact that Afghan women were not allowed to go to school. Spigel concluded that “President Bush asked TV audiences literally to imagine themselves taken over by Al Quaeda and in the woman’s place—the place of suffering.” She concluded that this image “was an emotional ploy through which he [Bush] connected his own war plan to a sense of moral righteousness and virtue” although he had never spoken of “these women in Afghanistan before that day” (248).

Like Rodgers, Spigel thought that this was part of the media’s attempt to restore order and specifically information flow after the catastrophe (235–239). But she also saw more involved here than just accidental reinforcement of stereotypes by news programs. First of all, she saw all of the television genres being involved in this project—including “dramatic [TV] series, talk shows, documentaries, special ‘event’ TV, and even cartoons” that not only restored information flow but also promoted “nationalist myths” (239). Indeed, even the Internet was involved in this process (248; 260–261). She was raising the question as to what degree the electronic media could influence American audiences and thereby promote myths of national unity at the expense of the kind of dissent that Iris Marion Young indicated would not be tolerated by the gendered logic supporting a national security state. Spigel noted that “after 9/11 many people found it important to ‘perform’ the role of citizen, which included the performance of belief in national unity. And if you didn’t perform this role, then somehow you were a bad American” as “Bill Maher learned with a vengeance when his show Politically Incorrect was canceled” after his critique of the war (255). Nevertheless, Spigel concluded that in a multimedia post–network age, nationalist rhetoric, gendered or not, was more of a “niche market . . . than . . . a unifying cultural dominant” (256). Indeed, as if she somehow anticipated the rhetoric of the Obama administration that would replace the Bush presidency, she said it was best to forgo an apocalyptic rhetoric and “hold on to a politics of hope” that would “embrace the new global media” as a means to listen to the third world rather than “clutter the globe with messages about ‘how good we are’” (263).

Serious questions were emerging from this feminist discussion of the possibility that 9/11 could not only spark the rise of a potentially oppressive security state but also influence the public’s perceptions of gender in the post–9/11 cultural milieu. In truth, Iris Marion Young correctly pointed to the fact that the rhetoric of the security state has a history. But it is equally worth pointing out that this history and its significance for men and women in the United States had been discussed earlier in the context of feminism and American security states since World War II. Specifically, Cynthia Enloe, in her study, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, said that the “Cold War depended on a deeply militarized understanding of identity and security. Militarization relies on distinct notions about masculinity, notions that only have staying power if they are legitimized by women as well as men” (3). Indeed, “because . . . the militarization of the last three generations of Americans has been so deep and so subtle . . . we scarcely yet know how to map its gendered terrain.” Nevertheless, we must study “the varieties of masculinity and femininity that it took to create the Cold War and the sorts of transformations in the relationships between men and women it will take to ensure that the ending processes move forward” (5). In short, for Enloe, writing in 1993, the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union made possible the interrogation of traditional categories of gender that had helped shape the Cold War culture by casting men and women in roles that made men the defenders and women the objects of protection. For her, a subtle but important shift occurred after WWII that would bolster traditional gender hierarchies and help make possible the rise of the American security state which would limit women to the roles of victims much more so than had been the case in WWII (16). As if she foresaw the return of the gendered rhetoric of the security state after the 1990s, she concluded “As long as patriarchal assumptions about masculinity and femininity shape people’s beliefs and identities and their relationships with one another, militarization, however temporarily stanched, lies dormant, capable of rising again, and yet again” (70).

Enloe’s depiction of the gendered security state as a recurring cultural event shaping the consciousness, the economies, and war-making capacities of militarized states in America (and indeed, as she argues, around the world) is easily substantiated by a perusal of American history since WWII and is a good place to begin this survey of representations of women in science fiction television from 1959 to the present. Since WWII, the relationship between the media and the government of this country has been strong and, as we will see in our survey of American security state politics and rhetoric below, has evolved with the growing complexity of televisual culture and its related electronic media. Indeed, reinforcement of traditional gender roles has been a major focus of the media cultures emerging in the American security state since WWII. It became an essential part of the rhetoric against Communism just as it has recently become a part of the rhetoric against Al Quaeda and related adversarial agencies in the American post–9/11 geopolitical scene. But as the review below of the politics and sexology of these security states will indicate, the result has been a media culture which has questioned and even sometimes subverted traditional gender categories. These efforts at subversion have been implemented with a kind of clarity and reflexivity that seems to have been made possible at least in part because security states tried so hard to define appropriate roles for men and women in the face of dangers from outside and from inside the respective statees. It is part of the paradox posed by postwar information-based cultures described by N. Katherine Hayles in her study Chaos Bound: “In more than one sense, the Cold War brought totalitarianism home to Americans. As information networks expanded and data banks interlocked with one another, the new technology promised a level of control never before possible.” Nevertheless, these emerging information networks also offered “the liberating possibility that one may escape the information net by slipping along its interstices” (5–6). A potentially oppressive information matrix might also provide the tools for escaping its influences.

That is precisely what this survey of science fiction will reveal happening in parallel to the brief historical overview of the culture that is about to follow. An interesting rhythm emerges in security state culture where the potentially oppressive features of the culture expressed in the politics, legalism, and televisual representations of gender nevertheless often help shape resistance to traditional gender stereotypes. Science fiction television will prove to be an excellent touchstone and barometer for measuring and charting the impact of this conflict between ideologies in the gendered rhetoric of these states. This is partly because men and women in science fiction scenarios so often play roles that allow science fiction television to explore themes essential to the comprehension of the significance of gender in security states. Both sexes are often depicted in science fiction TV as members of elite professional groups such as astronauts, soldiers, enforcers of the law, and scientists. This enables analysis of what might be the imagined legitimate limits of how men and women can act and interact in both the public and the private realms. Since women have often been restricted by traditional culture to the domestic and private realm, any depictions of them in contemporary or futuristic settings that subvert such expectations can provide some sense of how progressive a depiction of gendered roles is in comparison to the more conservative standards of the time. Moreover, such depictions of women in both public and private realms can help illuminate to what degree women in the television productions support expectations of women conforming to the role of the victim.

Equally significant is the importance of themes in science fiction related to the uses and abuses of technology, including information technologies. Technology that augments the human subject’s capabilities either intellectually or physically can provide a litmus test for assaying to what degree the use of technology to enhance the empowerment of the female subject is supported in a work of science fiction. Especially important is how the woman’s relationship to information technology is depicted. As the survey below will indicate, one line of traditional thinking often underscored by security states indicates that women are associated with the negative effects of information technology on the masses. Because women are often associated stereotypically with irrationalism, they are also depicted using information technology to subvert masculinized rationalism in such a fashion as to pose an internal security risk to the gendered hierarchy of the state which is the basis for its strength and security. The more women are depicted as responsible and intelligent wielders of this technology, or the more they help show that nonrational modes of proceeding can also be good for the body politic, the more progressive the television program can be deemed to be in the context of the very consistent cultural norms of past and current security states.

At least one other theme in science fiction TV is vitally important in the context of gendered hierarchies in American national security states. And this is the theme of to what degree technology in general can, while seeming to augment the human subject, have just the opposite effect on humanity. As our survey below will show, such cultural events as the nuclear arms race and the impact of an ongoing information revolution also engender fear in security states. Such technologies raise the possibility that we are being dehumanized by technology, or simply losing control over our destiny as machines and information systems develop a life of their own. The degree to which women are allowed to participate in resisting these threats says much in science fiction and the culture informing it. It can indicate to what degree positive attitudes are emerging toward women as active participants in protecting humanity from security threats instead of being the sources or the objects of those threats. Since fear over the use of destructive technological forces is a source of concern that seems to have supported the rise of potentially subversive agencies like the counter culture (as described below), this theme in association with representation of women in the state will be highly significant in this study. Women do indeed emerge at times as saviors of humanity in the private and the public realm.

A survey of the interaction of conflicting ideologies on gender since WWII and their impact on the culture, politics, and laws connected to gender-related issues in the ensuing decades will provide the context of our analysis of gender in American science fiction television from 1959 to the present. Much emphasis will be given to how feminism evolves in response to logic of the security state. This will enable us in later chapters to interpret representations of women in science fiction television shows in the context of the most progressive feminist thinking of the shows’ respective times. This will minimize present day bias when assessing the progressivism of the shows discussed. This will also deepen appreciation of the relationship of feminism to the evolution of security state masculinist logic in the gendered hierarchy.

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS: GENDER IN SECURITY STATES OF THE 1950S AND THE 1960S

The connection between media and the WWII security state is described with clarity in Koppes and Black’s study, Hollywood Goes to War. The rise of the Hayes office in the time before the war enabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create the Office of War Information (OWI). As this study shows, the job of the OWI was to turn Hollywood into a propaganda machine to help America win the war against fascism:

Officials of the Office of War Information . . . issued a constantly updated manual instructing the studios in how to assist the war effort, sat in on story conferences with Hollywood’s top brass, reviewed the screenplays of every major studio (except the recalcitrant Paramount) pressured the movie makers to change scripts and even scrap pictures when they found objectionable material, and sometimes wrote dialogue for key speeches. . . . [T]he government was able to exercise considerable influence over the content of wartime movies. (vi–vii)

One might expect such an effort to result in the depiction of men and women in traditional roles where men would do the fighting and women would stay at home, but such was not the case in a war where everyone needed to be mobilized to win. Hence, the Bureau of Motion Pictures, working hand in hand with the OWI, took it upon themselves to encourage filmmakers to illustrate how women’s roles were changing during the war and changing permanently. Koppes and Black indicate the effort was to depict women moving from the private to the public realm to help win the war:

BMP’s largely female reviewing staff was sharply attuned to what women meant to the war effort and what war meant to women. They urged the studios to show women taking the place of men on the job and putting their children in day care centers. . . . Women were not going “to return en masse” to the kitchen at war’s end. They were entitled to “ample opportunity and equal pay.” The BMP staff urged Hollywood to find new ways to interpret these new roles for the public. . . . [W]omen’s “new expression” was a much more threatening challenge to Hollywood’s [former] trite portraits of women and family. (145)

This challenge would not be maintained by the ensuing media culture of the Cold War in the 1950s. Cold War America would not require the mobilization of massive numbers of troops and civilians to fight a war for territorial acquisition and material gain on a conventional battlefield. With the superpowers frozen in a nuclear stalemate, the new form of mobilization would be ideological and focused on mediated reassertion of gendered hierarchies. As Cynthia Enloe says, in the 1950s, danger was gendered where men were socialized into the gendered culture by taking on the role of protector while women would play the role of victim and nurturer. Hence, the “government was already taking steps to roll back the allegedly anomalous gender changes wrought by World War II.” Thus, “[pressing] women—especially white, middle class women—back into the domestic sphere went hand in hand with promoting consumer capitalism; the feminine mystique became a solid pillar of the U.S. version of Cold War culture as did its remasculinized military.” This would “protect U.S. citizens from the lure of Communism” (15–16). Hence the FBI’s probe to remove lesbians from the US Army’s women’s softball league (16–17). The Cold War became “a series of contests over the definitions of masculinity and femininity that would sustain or dilute that rivalry” between the superpowers (19).

Robert Corber’s scholarship confirms this and demonstrates the wide-ranging influence of gendered hierarchies in the Cold War. He argues that “anti-Stalinist intellectuals such as [Arthur] Schlesinger, [Lionel] Trilling, and [Leslie] Fiedler participated in the production and consolidation of the political and cultural settlement historians of postwar society often call the Cold War consensus. Under the terms of this settlement, the only way in which women, African Americans, and other historically disenfranchised groups could gain recognition for their contribution to the war effort was by limiting their demands for recognition.” Anti-Stalinists sought to distance themselves from social programs of the New...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   The Evolution of Gendered Security State Logic since World War II
• 2   Before and After the Missile Crisis, Science Fiction Television and Gender, 1958–1968
• 3   In the Wake of Vietnam—the Paradoxes of the 1970s and the Conflicts of the 1980s
• 4   The 1990s—the Complexity of Gender in the Clinton Era
• 5   Trials and Triumphs in the 9/11 Milieu
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index