SEVEN OF NINE: IDENTITY CONSTRUCTIONS OF A QUEER AND QUEERED WOMAN IN STAR TREK

Abstract

Since 1966, Star Trek has been credited with portraying a utopian future wherein dividing lines in today’s societies, such as race and gender, no longer cause issue. As a significant part of popular culture, the franchise has the ability to influence social change, but faces conflicting ideals as it reflects and espouses dominant societal messages at the time of air. This paper examines how successful Star Trek has been in adhering to its original utopian vision of depicting a future absent of gender discrimination through the character, Seven of Nine. Assimilated into the alien Borg Collective as a young girl, Seven of Nine is represented as struggling with conventional markers of womanhood that humanity is shown to entail in the series Star Trek: Voyager. She subsequently returns to the franchise in Star Trek: Picard, making her an ideal character with which the evolution of gender and queer identity over time may be assessed. Stamou’s (2018b) framework of ‘Discursive strategies of identity construction in interaction’, which incorporates interactional and critical discourse analysis tools, is used to elucidate how scripted television dialogue, in conjunction with visual resources, index and transmit these ideological perspectives to audiences. Through this study of how traditional elements of womanhood are represented via Seven of Nine, such as motherhood and romantic love, findings of the paper demonstrate that productions of femininity and heterosexuality are constructed as inherent to humanity in Star Trek: Voyager. Conversely, Star Trek: Picard questions fixed notions of female identity. It is hoped that this discussion of Seven of Nine will bring about more critical consideration of how women, and in particular queer women, may be represented onscreen.