New Life and New Civilizations: Exploring Star Trek Comics by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Sequart Organization
Published: 2014-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

Female Sexual Agency: Saavik’s Pon Farr

Women’s sexual agency is a potent and complex topic in a feminist discussion. In the context of classical narrative cinema, as Linda Williams wrote in her famous paper, “When the Woman Looks”: “to see is to desire.”[43] Seeing, or the subversion of the male gaze, is a psychologically loaded act that implies agency on the part of the viewer. In the patriarchal system, the “seeing” needs of men are paramount, from the way that women are dressed and asked to act in scenes to the specific subject material at hand. For a woman to “look” usually brings about dire consequences, as Mary Ann Doane pointed out in another classic 1970s feminist paper.[44] Whether the woman has been granted the ability to “look” by a patriarchal force or they presume to take this power in what amounts to a parody of the male ability, this behavior generally has dire consequences for the female character, and both represent responses to victimization. The consequences of the woman “looking,” particularly in the sort of horror cinema Williams and Doane were discussing, usually to drastic and tragic forms. This pattern, alas, is also played out here.

The phenomenon in Star Trek where a category of characters (Vulcans) are periodically driven temporarily insane with sexual desire would seem, then, to form a very good test case for female subversion of the male gaze. Pon farr, the Vulcan biological drive to mate once every seven years, was first introduced by renowned science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon in the original series episode “Amok Time.”[45] Pon farr forces those who suffer from it to enter what Vulcans refer to as plak tow, or “the blood fever,” in which their logic and control disappears and they are lost in a haze of lust and rage until mating is accomplished. In the original series, this occurs with Spock, who is ultimately forced to fight (rather than to do that other f-word), in order to give voice to his deep primal urges. Leonard Nimoy plays this blood fever as a smoldering, non-specific rage. Anger seems to be his primary emotion, along with a latent sexism (directed against Nurse Chapel in an early scene). To coin a phrase, something about this characterization is not quite logical. A person in what is essentially a lust-haze would, one should think, display at least a small amount of interest in sex, rather than simply acting out aggressively. The simple reading would be that the show’s creators were (1) seeking a safe, TV-friendly way to portray such a lurid subject and (2) making the point that when men are denied sexual release, they often turn to violence as a substitute.

This portrayal of pon farr in the original series is relevant to our discussion in the sense that it stands (or should stand) in contrast with the way the same process occurs with Saavik in issues #7-8 of this comics run. When a woman undergoes this process (and it was never truly evident in the

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