Star Trek: Open a Channel: A Woman's Trek

Nana Visitor

• Publisher: Insight Editions
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9798886633023
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Nana Visitor, Star Trek’s Kira Nerys, explores how the series has portrayed and influenced women. Interviews with the stars, writers, producers, and celebrity fans reveal the struggles and triumphs of women both behind and in front of the camera throughout the sixty-year history of Star Trek, and how they have mirrored the experiences of women everywhere.

Nana Visitor, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Kira Nerys, explores how the series has portrayed and influenced women. Interviews—with the stars, writers, producers, and audience members from all walks of life, including a politician and an astronaut—highlight the struggles and triumphs of women both behind and in front of the camera throughout the sixty-year history of Star Trek, and how they have mirrored the experiences of women everywhere.

The groundbreaking casting of Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura in 1966 was a paradigm shift for women and people of color. Pioneering is no picnic, and she planned to leave the show until none other than the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. contextualized her appearance in people’s living rooms across America as a way for people of color to know they were indeed an important part of the future.

Since then, each Star Trek show has both reflected the values of its time and imagined a future of equality. In her first book, Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek, Nana Visitor sets out to discover both how Star Trek led the way for women, and how each show was trapped in its own era.

For Visitor, this is more than a book about Star Trek. It’s also about how society and the stories we tell have evolved in the last sixty years, and how the role of women has changed in that time.

STAR AUTHOR: Written by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actor Nana Visitor, famous for playing Major Kira Nerys. This is both her story and her journey through the stories of other women involved with Star Trek from the 1960s to the 21st century.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS: Features interviews with more than a dozen women who starred in Star Trek, including Kate Mulgrew, Sonequa Martin-Green, Terry Farrell, Gates McFadden, Denise Crosby, Tawny Newsome, and Jess Bush.

INSPIRING STORIES: Explore how Star Trek has influenced women in the real world, including soldiers, scientists, and even astronauts. For the book, author Nana Visitor visited ESA HQ and interviewed astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti while she was in orbit around Earth on the International Space Station.

PIONEERING SERIES: Following the humanistic tenets of creator Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek, throughout the decades, led the way in promoting diversity. Youths who grew up with Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, for example, not only learned to accept a woman as a leader but were also able to expand what they could imagine for themselves. The book makes clear how important storytelling is, and how the storytelling of Star Trek has had a profound effect on its audience.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1. Introducing ‘Star Trek’
• 2. Lucille Ball
• 3. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as Number One
• 4. Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman Rand
• 5. Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura
• 6. ‘Star Trek’s Guest Stars: Hollywood in the 1960s
• 7. Dorothy Fontana
• 8. ‘Star Trek’ Returns: ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and the 1980s
• 9. Denise Crosby as Lt. Tasha Yar
• 10. Gates McFadden as Dr. Beverly Crusher
• 11. Marina Sirtis as Counselor Troi
• 12. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as Lwaxana Troi
• 13. Alice Krige as the Borg Queen
• 14. Enter Nana: Hollywood in the 1990s
• 15. ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’
• 16. Nana Visitor as Major Kira
• 17. Terry Farrell as Jadzia Dax
• 18. Nicole de Boer as Ezri Dax
• 19. Penny Johnson Jerald as Kassidy Yates
• 20. Rosalind Chao as Keiko O’Brien
• 21. Chase Masterson as Leeta
• 22. ‘Star Trek: Voyager’
• 23. Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway
• 24. Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine
• 25. Jennifer Lien as Kes
• 26. Roxann Dawson as B’Elanna Torres
• 27. ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’
• 28. Jolene Blalock as T’Pol
• 29. Linda Park as Hoshi Sato
• 30. ‘Star Trek: Discovery’
• 31. Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham
• 32. Mary Wiseman as Sylvia Tilly
• 33. Mary Chieffo as L’Rell
• 34. ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’
• 35. Tawny Newsome as Beckett Mariner
• 36. ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’
• 37. Christina Chong as La’An Noonien-Singh
• 38. Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas
• 39. Jess Bush as Nurse Chapel
• Conclusion
• Inspired and Inspirational
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright