Penley's NASA/TREK

Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America
- Focus on popular, rather than arcane or specialized, science. "Sketches a picture of our collective, if sometimes conflictual, imaginary of that human relation to science and technology" 4 Space as prime metaphor through which we imagine and re/write our relation to science and technology. Trek as prime arena for this. [Intersects with SLACK & WISE approach to technological culture.]
- Discursive network of "scientists, science writers, and scientific institutions to attract interest and support for advancing science and technology" 9 also fictional work, "ordinary people's extraordinary will to engage the world of science and technology. ... "fully in the American utopian tradition [LEO MARX], proposes that scientific experimentations be accompanied by social and sexual experimentation" 10
- NASA: Sexist, conservative and mismanaged - but she says this critique with love. Teacher in Space selection mismanaged (Pam Dawber a juror). Conflict between actual skills, PR, sexist denigration of women in technology, token exceptionalism (parallels with Earhart) MacAullife jokes "ultimately stories of female trouble" 54. Working through of national, generational trauma of Challenger. NASA hiring overachieving exceptional women: Ride, Jemison, Bondar, who all left the agency.
- NASA/TREK as "cultural icon" = NASA slashed by TREK. Mutual bidirectional influence.
- Popular response: MacAullife bios, fictional space films and novels. Possible because "NASA has already put itself on the terrain of fiction, folklore, myth and popular culture; NASA is fiction, folklore, myth and popular culture." 88
- /TREK: Extended description of and argument for innovation and value of Trek fan culture, particularly slash fiction. Rewriting of Trek narratives parallels how TREK in general rewrites narratives of NASA. Interaction with 'official' narratives, interaction with 'real' science.
- Appeal of gay relationships in slash (mostly written by women): allows articulation of an ideally equal relationship hard to imagine in a heterosexual relationship. Also creation of an ideal man whose masculinity can accommodate homosexual feelings. So gay relationship used to 'slash' or rewrite heterosexuality and masculinity, as it slashes TREK and NASA.
- Fan practices part of cultural working or rewriting larger cultural narratives [Note fans amused by academic overinflation of their relevance, see below]
- Cites Fiedler classic essay on Huck, interracial homosexual relationship as fundamental American trope: "the mythos of interethnic male bonding ... both reveals and conceals two essential aspects of American life: the homosocial bonds that structure U.S. culture and the bitter fact of racism" 136

Perfect contemporary example is the "How William Shatner Changed the World" 2005 History Channel documentary specifically about Trek's influence on inspiring science, technology, Nasa, etc.

Review by Michelle Erica Green [excerpts]

Penley chairs the film department at UCSB, teaches women's studies, and is a visiting professor this semester teaching a graduate art course at Mills College. ... A founding editor of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura, Penley has edited and authored several books and dozens of papers, but the 1998 publication of her NASA/Trek is receiving a different level of attention than her previous work. To the uninitiated, the title NASA/Trek probably doesn't raise eyebrows: it appears to suggest a split discussion of the space agency and the spacefaring series, which is one of the projects of this study of space travel and gender in the public imagination. Subtitled "Popular Science and Sex in America," the slim, witty volume covers such topics as sexist jokes about Christa McAuliffe, NASA's refusal to consider experiments with contraception in outer space, and the literary antecedents of Star Trek fan fiction.

But to those familiar with the popular use of "/" or "slash," NASA/Trek suggests something much more subversive. "Slash" refers to the rewriting of media characters in a sexual or romantic paradigm - specifically male buddy pairs. The primordial couple of fan slash publications were Kirk and Spock; the initial fan stories positing a sexual bond between the two men identified themselves in fanzines as "K/S," which led to the use of the slash as a convention for everything from S/H (Starsky/Hutch) to J/B (Jim "Sentinel" Ellison and Blair Sandburg), though the convention has crossed over into general adult fan fiction such as Mulder/Scully and Xena/Gabrielle.

In the introduction to NASA/Trek, Penley labels the "homoerotic, pornographic, utopian romances" set in the Star Trek universe "ingenious subversions" of a popular legend, and adds that slash fans made her realize that NASA creates popular legend just as Trek does - for instance, in the ongoing repression of the details of the deaths of the Challenger astronauts. Though she writes "as a fan of NASA," Penley does not hold back in her criticism of the agency in its gendered double standards, its sexual conservatism that is both a cause and effect of women's being denied equal opportunities in space, and its mismanagement of the Teacher in Space program. Still, Penley's book is very positive about NASA, Trek, and the role both play in our slow progress toward the stars - and toward the idealized universes of our science fiction, both canon and fanfic (popular fan terms for the actual events of a series and the fan fiction created by viewers, which may diverge wildly from "reality" as posited by the series).

...

The interviewer on the Sci-Fi Channel wanted Penley to talk about sexism and misogyny in the roles for women on Star Trek, "but I don't find that interesting." During the second part of "The Menagerie," Penley discussed instead her interest in what fans do to subvert the text of the show. "I kept trying to bring it around to the fans - I think I said at one point in the interview that I'm in fact less interested in Star Trek as a text than I am in looking at what fans do with it, how they creatively interact with it and engage with it," she notes.

Penley has served on panels with Professor Henry Jenkins of M.I.T., the other major name in academic study of fandom, and is a bit bemused by what fans think of academic culture. "They put on this skit where they made fun of academic writers on slash on the grounds that we were too easy on them, too celebratory - they were a bit bemused with the section of NASA/Trek that asked the question of what kind of American fiction was slash writing, and they were going, 'Oh! We're a literary legacy!'"

But Penley realized that no one had ever asked the question before, and wanted to place slash writing within a historical as well as sociological context. "I was at a sociology graduate field work seminar, and a sociologist put the question to me of how typical is this slash impulse," she explains. "I didn't know that this was 'the typicality question' in sociology, and that I was supposed to go out across the culture and see how widespread this behavior was. Instead I answered it as a literary historian, and I said, 'I think that this goes right back to the 19th century. It's typical to the concerns and thematics of American fiction writing, both high and low.' I was already starting to get the idea that it was literary work. I finally realized that it was indeed an ingenous fusing of the male quest romance with the domestic or sentimental novel, in a way that elided most of the problems with both." Thus, Penley posits slash as a merger of two quintessentially American literary genres, which makes overt the homophilia in stories of men on the frontier, yet permits the familial sort of bonds found in women's domestic novels.

"Slash fandom is about women writing," she insists. The professor hopes to work more on this topic, possibly in conjunction with a documentary filmmaker from Glasgow who has interviewed the thirteen surviving women who had tested for the Mercury program. After hearing Penley on a BBC radio program, he contacted her and the two met in Edinburgh. "He asked me if I would be interested in being a part of this film, and I said yes, but I would be interested in having it be about current and former astronauts and women who played fictional travelers in space, like Kate Mulgrew and Jodie Foster and Erin Gray, because that would make it more about women in space in the cultural imaginary. I might go back to that, but I have too many projects!"

Penley insists that she wrote NASA/Trek not just for academics and fans, but for a much broader population of people interested in science and culture. "More and more I'm not interested in writing just to produce scholarship - I want to get the kind of scholarship that we do in the humanities out circulating in other public spheres," she says, borrowing a concept from literary theory. "NASA/Trek was not just for academics; I really wanted scientists to read it." The book received lengthy positive reviews in science journals, including Nature, New Scientist, and Space Policy, with affirmative nods in Science and The Economist.

Whether this will prove detrimental to an academy that prefers mentions in French theory journals is a different question, but Penley doesn't think so. She wrote one essay, 'From NASA to The 700 Club (With a Detour Through Hollywood): Cultural Studies in the Public Sphere' for the book Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, in which she makes the point that pornography is not banned because it's "unpopular speech" which would offend most people, but because it is "popular speech" - vulgar not in the obscene but in the working-class sense. Another publication, "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn" in the book White Trash: Race and Gender in America, makes a similar argument.
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