Film and television set in outer space has a significant history of destabilizing gender roles. Depictions of female characters in Star Trek (1966) and Alien (1979) subverted viewer expectations and imagined space travel as (almost) an equal-opportunity venture. More recent depictions of women in space—including in Firefly (2002), The Expanse (2015), and Lost in Space (2018)—have further destabilized gender roles and challenged the “spaces” women are typically allowed to inhabit in popular film and television. While it is tempting to simply claim that the instability of outer space itself opens possibilities for destabilizing gender roles, this paper will seek to complicate that oversimplification by reading these narratives in conversation with spatial studies and feminist studies.
Recently scholars in spatial studies have argued that “spaces” are created through juxtaposition and coexistence. Feminist theorists have countered that the body itself is both the means through which sense is made of this juxtaposition (synthesis) and another object of juxtaposition. Because of this duel role the body plays in the creation of spaces, both object and the means through which objects are interpreted and synthesized, spaces are gendered by our interpretations and by our gendered bodily practices. In other words, no spaces—outer or otherwise—can escape being gendered because we bring gendered practices and interpretations with us when we create space. This should be triply true of narratives about a fictional outer space where the “outer space,” the spaces occupied by characters, and the characters themselves have all been created from within a gendered culture.
So how do space dramas undermine gender roles? Ultimately I will argue that space dramas destabilize gender roles through depictions of female characters because they seek to represent what’s alien to us—and nothing makes a narrative more alien than a strong human woman.
About the presenterSarah Maitland
Sarah Maitland finished her Ph.D. in the spring of 2015. Her dissertation, “Temperance in the Age of Feeling: Sensibility, Pedagogy, and Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” examines the influence of classical temperance on the emerging fields of neurology and education during the Romantic period. Her research interests also include Spenser and Milton studies, the sentimental novel, and popular culture. Sarah Maitland is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Virginia University.