Previously on Femslash Friday: The Young Avengers.
Star Trek‘s greatest appeal, if you talk to the nerds who are really into it, is its bold embrace of a post-scarcity structure. In Star Trek, technology has allowed humanity to earnestly and fully eliminate sexism, racism, poverty, even extreme weather disasters or pollution. Every single structural problem on Earth is truly gone forever, they’re all really gone, and now humanity is doing the only thing really still worth doing, exploring space.
The Original Series was full of boundaries being broken—a black woman the equal of a white man, Russians working together with Americans. It also featured a stunningly close friendship between one James T. Kirk and Spock. This is Femslash Friday, so we will not go into their fascinating relationship, but needless to say, the fan reaction to it was huge. The very term “slash fiction” comes from Star Trek fans, who would identify their erotic zines like GRUP with terms like “Kirk/Spock” (Kirk slash Spock, get it??)
When The Next Generation booted up, dropping the “man” from “where no one has gone before!” intro speech, the hopes were high that like its predecessor, it’d push the bounds of what was regularly seen on TV. In terms of gender, it mostly punted. There’s one episode where Will Riker dates a member of a species without gender, but the alien quickly comes out as identifying as female, a crime punishable by brutal retaliation on her planet (Jonathan Frakes, aka Will Freaking Riker, later came out saying he felt the alien should have identified as male). Dr. Beverly Crusher falls in love with a Trill, a parasitic species that takes different hosts for dozens of lifetimes, but decides she can’t continue the relationship when the Trill switches from a male to a female host.
The next great same-sex Trek friendship that would meant for more would happen on Deep Space Nine, the show that started in 1993 and focused on Starfleet’s attempt to rebuild a Bajoran space station recovering from decades of a Cardassian occupation (Eastern Europe and Germany, Palestine and Israel, Native Americans and America, take your pick of metaphors). That relationship would be that of Cardassian tinker-tailor-spy Garak and the young gadabout doctor, Julian Bashir. Just ask Tumblr: these two dudes, trading breakfast and witty repartee were meant to be together. Andrew Robinson, who played Garak, claimed to play Garak as “omnisexual” at first, but then stopped doing that once people noticed, which was instantly. People really wanted a gay character on Star Trek!
So instead, let’s turn to a bond that wasn’t built on being clever, but rather on trust. Kira Nerys, former Bajoran Militia member and her planet’s liaison to Deep Space Nine. Kira’s a born warrior whose only regret is that she didn’t kill more of the Cardassian occupiers, and isn’t quite sure how to handle herself now that the war is over. She’s deeply spiritual and has little faith in the Federation, who consider her home to be a final frontier.
Enter Jadzia Dax. Dax is Deep Space Nine’s Science Officer, and is Jennifer Lawrence without the pratfalls. Jadzia is awesome. She’s a Trill and he stomach parasite slug is famed for being badass. She has life experiences and memories of trailblazing politicians and garrulous Federation diplomats even though she’s only 28! Her hobbies include beating misogynists at their own gambling games, beating misogynists at their own martial arts, spa days, tagging along on quests to see the emotional resonance they have for others and having casual sex.
Dax has the fourth same-sex kiss in television history in the fourth season episode “Rejoined.” The symbiotic relationship between a Trill slug and a Trill host is: the host gets all their memories and experiences, the slug gets to keep developing new memories and experiences. This means no continuing relationships with Trills from past lives. Dax used to be a guy in a heteronormative relationship with this Trill scientist who was also a woman in her past life, and even though they still love each other they are forbidden to be together! But they kiss anyway! That’s our Dax!
It’s worth noting that Kira and Dax aren’t best friends. Through a past life, Dax is best friend with the station’s commander, Ben Sisko, who endearingly gives her the gender-bending nickname “Old Man.” Kira’s closest to members of her old militia cell, as well as various higher-ups in the Bajoran government. But they’re the two women in management at the place they work and bond along those lines. The show doesn’t often shoehorn the two of them together, which helps to make their relationship feel authentic.
Their differences are myriad: Kira hates the holosuites, Dax loves them. Especially the sex programs (holodecks are like computers: it’s okay to do porn stuff with them in private, like the privately-owned ones on DS9, but it is frowned upon to do porn stuff with work ones, like the holodeck on the Enterprise). So when Dax takes Kira to the famed fuck-spas of Trill on the Holodeck, all Kira can do is laugh.
Dax keeps trying, though. She gets to Kira to pull a Bashir-O’Brien and dress up all silly for a Holodeck adventure through King Arthur’s time! Dedicated Star Trek fans (which, let’s be honest: how many DS9 fans had not seen TNG first? Surely there are some, but not most!) had already seen this time period in the memorable “Qpid,” where Worf challenged the idea of gender by being a man who refused to be defined by his so-called merriness. Perhaps that’s why the writers didn’t want to get too into what Kira and Dax did in the holosuite, but the clues they drop are like pieces of a delicious steak: that Kira knocks Lancelot the fuck out when he tries to kiss her, as she was playing a married woman in the program.
Is it that hard to imagine an exasperated Dax suddenly calling out “Freeze program!’ and saying, Kira, if it’s that hard for you to imagine anything, how about kissing someone real, and Kira’s all like what, and Dax goes in to kiss her in the midst of a frozen-in-place jousting tournament and Kira’s like, okay, I am into this? And then for the two of them to get flustered and realize that they due back on shift and run back through Quark’s, where a flushed Dax meets Worf for the first time?
No, it is not.
Tags: deep space nine, femslash fridays, jadzia dax, our first femslash friday by a MAN, star trek
Garak he found sexy, maybe, but Bashir’s true love was O’Brien.
I can see Dax but not really Kira being into it. Though alternate-evil-universe Kira would and did sleep with anyone.
No discussion of the extremely unconvincingly hetero Tasha Yar?
Also I’m pretty sure Counselor Troi’s mom would get with a chick if it was offered.
DS9/Next Generation just came along a bit too early for open gay relationships on TV; there was definitely a lot of ground they were afraid to explore.
O’Brien/Bashier OTP!
*_*
Aw, come on! Bashir traveled into the heart of the Cardassian Empire to confront the head of its secret police and appeal to him for Garak’s life. He enjoyed playing darts with O’Brien.
This has been an entirely accurate and well-rounded summary of all 7 seasons and reflects absolutely no bias or pre-disposition toward badass, sexy, secretive lizardmen.
We Shall Never Speak of Ezri.
You bet he “enjoyed playing darts with” the Chief.
They spent ALL their spare time together. LARPING. Now that is true love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3anMez6V_s
Not as good as the Kira/Dax video but it has some wonderful shots of their LARPing outfits.
Wasn’t there that episode where O’Brien’s wife was like “you love Bashir more than me!” and he was like “uh yeah that’s true, sorry”?
Yeah, I know people liked that. I kind of hated it, because it came after a decade of Keiko as the worst sf stereotype of the killjoy lady, from whom the Boys needed to escape in order to have fun. Their marriage was always — just super gross and awful to me in so very many ways, and so I was not into the whole “Ha ha, WOMEN, AMIRITE? Too bad we need them for marrying and having babies, when really the stuff we do without them will always be THE BEST.”
I really just. I hated the O’Briens’ whole relationship. All of it. It was the worst. I’m really quite dour and joyless about the subject. I’ll show myself out now.
I can’t really disagree with anything here, carry on.
Oh definitely. Poor Keiko. She should have dumped his ass.
O’Brien with Keiko was the scifi version of the dowdy sitcom dad with the inexplicably attractive and competent wife. Like she was seriously a badass botanist who married a petty officer, and *she* moved for *his* career, dropping her exciting science job to be a stay at home mom and then a schoolteacher for like a dozen kids. And then the show kept trying to convince us that she was some shrewish nag that he was merely tolerating rather than a beautiful, brilliant, supremely tolerant woman who had *married the fuck down*.
What bothers me most about the O’Brien marriage is that DS9 was a great place to explore civilian Starfleet life, since so much of DS9 is devoted to following non-Starfleet and non-Federation characters and how they interact with Starfleet/the Federation. And they make a few stabs at this with Keiko, and her unhappiness being stuck on DS9 & being a teacher rather than the botanist she trained to be, but never from *her* perspective, always from Chief O’Brien’s, so she comes off as the nagging killjoy wife.
I mean, even freaking Jake got multiple POV episodes, but not Keiko. Boo.
Yeah, that’s the crazy part. They went back and forth between, “But she’s so nurturing! Now she raises wee, sweet children instead of wee, sweet plants, and she’s happy!” and “She clearly kinda resents that she’s teaching elementary school when she’s a trained academic who served on the Federation flagship, and this is a *huge burden on her husband,* who just wants to have a pint in peace.” They couldn’t even settle on their terrible, depressing stereotype.
I might haveta go off and write me some DS9/GotG fan fic where Keiko discovers Groot.
not enough upvotes in the world
Joyless is exactly the right word for the O’Briens’ marriage, starting in TNG really with the “will they or won’t they?” wedding silliness. I like Miles O’Brien a lot. I think writing him and Keiko as an actual, you know, partnership would have been awesome.
There are two arcs that really could have had more depth than they did. the one where Keiko goes on the fancypants botany mission despite being all, “But am I bailing on my responsibilities back here to my MAN and my FAMILY??” Miles ultimately is all, “Look, I married a botanist and I’ve been keeping you from botany and it’s unfair and you should go do botany things if that’s what you want to do.” That was a moment where I could really imagine that they were life partners instead of Types, negotiating those uncomfortable dual-career things with respect and affection. Too bad that’s all we got.
The second one is where Kira ends up being a surrogate mother to their second child. I hate, hate, hate that the ONE thing they seemed to do with this storyline is to make O’Brien and Kira look at each other and go, “You know, we really could have had a thing here…in an alternate timeline, because in this one we’re not going to wreck the existing marriage to explore this thing, so we’ll just agree this never happened and I’ll have your baby totally platonically.” How profoundly isolating for Keiko–she’s a barrier to this cool what-if scenario, her pregnancy has ended traumatically even if a baby will result, and here she is on the outside of yet another thing.
She’s destined to be on the outside–whether it’s on the outside of Bashir/O’Brien’s bro-ness or the Bajoran fundies’ wingnuttery or whatever.
Apparently I have many feelings about Keiko.
Unfortunately, Keiko’s second pregnancy was used as the explanation for Nana Visitor’s actual pregnancy. They couldn’t justify Kira’s being pregnant, and they couldn’t shoot around the pregnancy. So, the clusterfuck of that plotline happened.
Oh, I know the back story, I just think that there are so many things they could have done with the “Kira carries O’Brienlet to term” narrative that they didn’t. They could have gone into what that meant for Keiko more instead of using it as an O’Brien Must Suffer thing.
Rewatching this in 2014, it really seemed silly that they “couldn’t justify” Nana Visitor’s actual pregnancy. Just have her have Shakar’s baby (or whoever her boyfriend was at the time), and then it turns out the Bajoran custom is that early childhood parenting is coded male. Were they trying to avoid the Murphy Brown situation? I dunno, pregnancy out of wedlock — especially that of an alien from a non-Earth culture — just doesn’t seem that controversial to me, and frankly didn’t at the time, either.
They could have had a story arc where one of Keiko’s teams was having trouble keeping samples alive, and Miles engineered some super-awesome containment pod that controlled light and humidity perfectly despite the [technobabble problems plaguing our intrepid botanists]! They could have had this fantastic relationship of equals, two people who are both exceptionally good at their respective jobs,but noooo. Nagging shrew (who can’t accept her wifely role) and hen-pecked mechanic it is.
Personally, I think that, after he came out as genetically engineered, Bashir was increasingly unwilling to play along with the “I love my wife, but oh you kid” thing that O’Brien had going on, where he got to do manly man things with his best friend, have sex and babies with him wife, and not have to fully commit to either of them. Bashir got him to admit to wishing Keiko were “more like a man,” and then they just dropped the whole thing.
At least that was my take on the cooling of their relationship after the genetic enhancements came to light. Julian was sick of playing Best Bros with Complicated Feelings. One coming out stood in for the other coming out, for anyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear.
Bashir and O’Brien appeal to the part of me that enjoys comfortable, meaningful friendships, and Garak and Bashir appeal to the part of me that enjoys fiction relationships where one person trusts the other even though they really shouldn’t, but their trust is not misplaced, even though it probably should be. (Side note, has anyone else read the Star Trek novel that Andrew Robinson wrote that’s meant to be a letter from Garak to Bashir?)
I…have read that. Yes.
It’s not bad! I mean, it’s a Star Trek novelization. It’s not *great.* But if you’re willing to play in the ballpark of “Star Trek novelizations,” it’s worth reading.
Yeah, as far as Star Trek novelizations go, it’s one of the better that I’ve read, but it’s definitely not the best book ever. I did appreciate the tinge of bitterness that came through about how he’d wanted to play Garak’s sexuality as ambiguous, though.
A Stitch in Time! It’s been on my list for so long that I’m almost afraid of actually reading it, rather than leaving it to the Unexplored Realm of Possibility.
Honestly, I read it and was like “…what did I just read?” I enjoy Andrew Robinson’s take on his character, though! It’s a pretty okay read overall, especially if you read it after watching all of the Garak episodes.
Paragraph 6 took me *directly* back into my college-years crush on Jadzia. She can and should have ANYONE SHE WANTS. She’s like a space-Mallory.
I’m too invested in in Kira/Odo to really go for this, but Jadzia is multisexual, completely and utterly. I like to think that for the Trill the concept of monosexuality is a little weird.
It was actually a really big deal to me, back in the day, that there was a small subplot during her engagement to Worf where he’s jealous of her flirting with a woman on vacation. And the gender is portrayed as an absolute non-issue. He is not surprised by it. He is not either more or less accommodating because it’s a woman. He’s irked in 100% exactly the same way he would be if she’d flirted with a dude in front of him. I often think about that episode when the subject of representation comes up: how minor it was, and how much I cherished it. Jadzia and DS9 4ever.
The Riker-on-Crusher action is forever burned in my brain in the absolute worst kind of way. Highly preferred the hate sex between Ensign Roh and Number One, and the near-stagnant romantic tension that persisted for SEVEN YEARS between Crusher and Picard.
I will never be over that we didn’t get any type of Picard/Crusher resolution. NEVER.
In the series finale we learned that in the future they were supposed to get married and then divorced, so I chose to believe they’d still end up together. Just, you know, avoiding the divorce part.
I knoooooow. I mean, my favorite thing about Riker is his willingness to just throw himself into any and all crazy situations, like “You want me to put your alien lobster boyfriend inside me? Sounds like a plan!”, but I did not need the mental images of him and Crusher macking and also I refuse to believe in a future where it is less unsettling to sleep with your friend’s body when his brain’s not home than to have a gay relationship.
Even when I was…6? 7? Whatever season of TNG that was, I thought the “maybe humanity will eventually evolve a better way of loving” line was stupid. It’s like, dude, you’re 400 years in the future; romantic paradigms evolve faster than that.
NB: I did not have the “romantic paradigms” language I have now, I just thought that line was an incredibly weak justification for Beverly’s inaction.
I may or may not have written a long rant about that line both in an academic paper and on my Star Trek blog. Honestly, I would rather have nothing than something so woefully insufficient. At least with nothing I can imagine whatever I want — this episode, trying and failing to push boundaries, only reinforces those boundaries, saying plainly “Our imagination goes this far and no further. We can imagine a universe of aliens and androids but lesbians are a bridge too far.” What it said to me was that even in the future, in basically my idealized fictional universe, I was still too strange to be accepted, because their “capacity for love” just hadn’t caught up with me yet.
I mean, I grew up on TOS and Kirk/Spock and didn’t watch TNG until college so I wasn’t scarred for life or anything.
Also, I nominate “Metamorphosis” from TOS for a way better representation of 24th century attitudes toward relationships. The crew meet a 21st century man kept alive by a mist creature, and are like, “Oh yeah, she digs you.” “Who digs me?” “Mist creature. Duh.” And when he freaks out, Kirk, McCoy, and Spock are basically like “I don’t know why any kind of love would freak you out, what a completely parochial attitude [direct Spock quote], in our present enlightened times we celebrate all relationships! you could at least consider dating a mist creature.”
I’m really very upset about how many opportunities Star Trek has had to show queer relationships, and how utterly it’s failed to explore those opportunities.
I am now forced to acknowledge that Enterprise, with its 4-person Denobulan marriages, may have actually done something right. It’s not much of a moment, and it’s played somewhat for laughs, but it’s…marginally better than “oh crap you have boobs now, I am confused and can no longer love you.”
When I saw the Trill-on-Trill thumbnail for this post in the header, my mouth literally fell open and I gasped in delight, then I started giggling. (It’s a good thing I don’t work in an office.)
Thank you thank you thank.
Okay going to go read it now. 😀
As excellent as expected. I have bookmarked this post to return to anytime I am sad.
DS9 was the best ST show.
Dax was the best many things.
There were many bests on DS9.
I think I stopped watching when they brought on Dax 2.0. I’ve always meant to pick it up again at that point…should I? How was NuDax?
As a (~straight male) kid, I loved all the fascinating gender and sexuality questions posed by the Trill (like the “old Man” bit you mentioned, and how comfortable Cisco was with Dax in this sense), and was bummed that they never pushed it farther.
Ezri was awkward and insecure and not nearly as omni-awesome as Jadzia had been. I get the feeling that most viewers resented her, but I didn’t think she was bad.
She was the fucking worst.
Ezri was… not awesome… She was just kind of bland and bumbling, because she hadn’t gone through the Symbiosis Commission to get the symbiote, so she was totally unprepared to have anyone else in her head. The writers kind of made that too much of her character, and then the series ended.
She wasn’t actively bad, they just never really tried or got a chance to try to make her as completely awesome as Jadzia. Space-Mallory upthread is the perfect explanation of Jadzia, and Ezri was… not.
Yeah I think it was mostly a writing problem with Ezri. She was supposed to be like the Troi figure but then the writers decided they liked having a holographic lounge singer in that role better and then she never had time to grow into any other characteristics so mostly she was an object for boys to fight over and she was weirdly fine with that for a Dax which seemed…dumb.
I think they were imagining her as sort of an audience insert, an Everywoman who would find this crazy, dangerous world as new and overwhelming as the viewer might. And that might have worked in s1, but by the seventh frigging season, we really did know the crazy, dangerous world pretty well and didn’t need that type of golly-gee-whiz character to walk us through the confusing bits.
But mostly, it just felt terrible to get this very simplistic character who was marked mainly by her extensive unpreparedness for anything as a replacement for a character who was always one of the most omnicompetent and brashly confident in the entire franchise. As a new character, Ezri could’ve become something. As *very literally* our new Dax, she felt like a giant “fuck you” to people who *ahem* might have had genuine investment in the Dax that existed until that point.
OH AND ALSO, Julian’s relationship with Jadzia was straight-up harassment, and there were layers upon layers of ick that he’s eventually rewarded for it with…Dax, but not the cool Dax who rightly thought he was a callow doofus, but the lonely and confused Dax who wasn’t sure where she fit into the world. That’s…bad. That’s a Bad Writing Decision. It’s just. It’s bad.
I basically ret-con Ezri’s “If Worf hadn’t come along it would have been you” line as total BS because SHE likes Bashir. Jadzia’s in the symbiote screaming “KIRA! It would have been KIRA! Julian was a total douche when I met him.”
I just pretend that the Season 6 finale/all of Season 7 never happened. I’m happier that way.
That really feels like the time-diluted, vague impression I have. I have a lot of nostalgia love for this show (I semi-recently re-watched the first season at least <a href=”http://(http://onefinemess.rhinopanda.net/tag/deep-space-nine/” target=”_blank”>(http://onefinemess.rhinopanda.net/tag/deep-space-nine/ if anyone is bored enough to read my reactions, as well as keeping track of the “knowing smiles”)), but my memory has this general sense of “downhill after Dax” (aka A.D.?), like how one crummy character can really weight down a show – as well as how much the old Dax contributed.
Ugh. I so want to re-watch this and have Dax never leave.
I have been waiting for a DS9 Femslash Friday and now it has happened!
Also, here’s a video that’s sort of like Femslash Friday for all of Star Trek (or, clips of the women of Star Trek interacting with each other set to “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper”).
This is quite great. Kudos all around!
Future suggestion: Olivia & Fauxlivia from “Fringe.”
Noooo, Olivia/Astrid, red/blue affiliation irrelevant.
Definitely Red Astrid. I really like Blue Astrid, but I adore Red Astrid.
So this vid just popped up on my Tumblr dash.
Kind of relatedly, apparently Michael Dorn wants to make a new Worf-based Star Trek show? I want someone to fund him just to see where it goes.. http://www.trektoday.com/content/2014/08/dorn-on-…
Kind of relatedly, apparently Michael Dorn wants to make a new Worf-based Star Trek show? I want someone to fund him just to see where it goes.. http://www.trektoday.com/content/2014/08/dorn-on-…
At last!
Also, this exists: http://instagram.com/p/qcXk0jJVK_
I'm late to this article but this is totally the correct interpretation. All the Dax left when Jadzia left. Granted one might argue that Ezri hadn't been trained to deal with Trill multiple memories so she just ignored whatever the Dax symbiont pushed on her. But stil!