Trekphobia: Identity construction, concealment, policing, and Star Trek fans 

Michel Foucault famously claimed that homosexuality had been invented in 1870. There had been homosexual acts before, but not a homosexual identity. Foucault’s assertion was great publicity to highlight how sexuality is, to a degree, constructed by society, by culture, and therefore subject to change. “The sodomite,” Foucault said, “had been a temporary aberration: the homosexual was now a species.”

If we were to imagine the identity of generic Star Trek fans, we could determine this alien species’ birth date: 1964, when the show first aired. From the perspective of queer theory, I’ve looked at the intersections between Star Trek fans and homophobia and I found signs of something that can be called trekphobia. To be applying what we know of homophobia to the followers of a television show may seem irresponsible, insulting even. Some people’s phobic hatred of gay men, lesbians, and other queers, is so strong that given an opportunity, it leads them to commit crimes and even murder. Trekphobia has never gone so far. Still, it exists, primarily in three category types: genuine trekphobes, many of whom work in the media, who don’t know what they hate or why; the very active, fake trekphobes, who can be found at science fiction conventions and are actually trekphiles with issues; and the quiet trekphobes with internalized trekphobia, who do not parade their issues. They are your friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues. As they say, "they are everywhere."

Active trekphobes, like homophobes, become what Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, called “the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics.” Tactics such as the surveillance of everyone by everyone, Foucault observed, results in a “disciplinary society.”

I have attended a number of science fiction conventions in recent years where trek fans have been routinely treated with derision, if not hostility. If, in identifying the generic trek fan, there were a box for “sexuality,” “queer” would be checked. Queer, in the sense in which queer theory uses the term, meaning sexually non-normative. Can we check a box for "sex"? We can. The trek fan is female. According to Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, the Star Trek fans of the 1960s, who were mostly women, attempted to join the science fiction fan community, which had been a boys’ club for thirty or forty years prior. With women unable to break the barriers, though, the fan community, or fandom, became divided in two (gendered) groups. Trek fans developed their own networks outside the fan convention circuit and went on to create a unique form of literature, fan fiction. In time, as viewers of other television series organized fan communities, less literary Star Trek fans became part of a larger group known as “media fans.”

Interestingly, many autobiographical fan narratives sound like coming out stories. There are some tales of initiation, but most talk of discovery, of surprise, of getting over the surprise and seeking out other fans, of eventually finding a community and living happily ever after. It is an essentialist tone for an existential tale about an identity not available before 1964.

On the other hand, the media, and society more generally, stereotype Star Trek fans as sexually inadequate; the only outlet for the fan’s “impaired” sexuality are fantasies involving the characters of a favorite show. Fantasies are seen as unhealthy, as a poor substitute for a real sexuality. Media portrayals of the fan are mostly in the comic and pathetic mode. Occasionally, however, there is a touch of what anthropologist Gayle Rubin calls “erotic terror.” An atypical but striking example was provided a while back by an article on 8BM.com, headlined, “The connection no one wants to talk about: Star Trek and sex offenders.” Sex offenders tend to be “hard-core trekkies,” according to the author, who claimed the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit as a source.

Theories of Trekphobia
A better understanding of trekphobia can be gained by examining homophobia. Homophobia is a product of the mainstream gender-sex system. The targets of homophobia are men and women who do not behave as masculine men or feminine women are supposed to. Homophobia is related to how queer lives are contemplated by the law and reflected in the media; it is related to a culture’s perception of itself and is, thus, linked to racial, ethnic, and national hatred and paranoia. It is related to class and to poverty, and to classrooms, where it manifests itself as silence. It is related to unhappiness.

Oppression works at microlevels, in the everyday, in the ordinary, in the overlooked. As Foucault put it, power is not a matter of us and them, of up and down, but power is “net-like” and we’re all connected. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet is most helpful in thinking about trekphobia. She argues that the idea of the closet has been crucial in shaping the 20th century thought. The closet does not reflect a Western obsession with secrecy, rather, it is the other way around—Western either/or binaries have been influenced by the idea of the closet, as in the following examples: “masculine/feminine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, natural/artificial, new/old…”

There is also the binary of fan/non-fan, and trekkie/trekker.

The most worrying issue in this context is the open anti-trekkie feeling from trek fans who are out as such. The trekkie versus trekker controversy (the “terminology wars,” in Henry Jenkins’s phrase) has been going on for over a decade. Fans prefer trekker, according to Jenkins. In a 2001 interview for the online journal Intensities, he explained:

“The term ‘trekkie’ did not originate in the Star Trek fan community, it was a term applied by literary SF fans to these women who were now attracted to television, and it was an exercise in cultural hierarchy. A trekkie is like a ‘groupie’—the idea of the ‘trekkie’ is someone who wanted to tear clothes off Leonard Nimoy like female fans wanted to tear clothes off the Beatles. But the female trek fans immediately said ‘no, we don’t want to do that, we’re interested in a fictional universe and we want to be part of trek culture, and so we’re trekkers not trekkies.’ So that battle erupted in terminology, and the journalistic community gravitated toward the more derogatory term that could be traced back to the literary SF fans. That’s why that term took root and only recently has a more active vision of fandom displaced it—now we see fewer and fewer articles that use the term ‘trekkie’, and more and more of them using the word ‘trekker’.”

This may sound like an objective account, but it’s nothing of the kind. It is made to appear like a historical record of authentic female fans in the 1960s, speaking through Jenkins as if he were a medium in a trance.

Perhaps his version is right after all, but Jenkins is a trekker, and he goes on to explain, in the same interview, that “trekkie is such a negative, inflaming word to my generation of fans.” The key word here is “generation.” Funny how–and how fast–words change in value. The war is over. Exhibit A: a discussion forum on the Internet, where someone had come across this word, “trekkie,” and, “did anyone have a definition?” The question was posed in December 2003, and answers have been trickling in to this day. Here are a few samples:

“I’m a ‘normal’ trek fan, but I have met some true ‘trekkies’ before.”

“A ‘trekker’ just sounds like someone who goes on long walks somewhere.”

“I always felt like the name ‘trekker’ sounded rather elitist.”

The war is not over. Exhibit B: an Internet site with “The Lite-Hearted Trekkie Vs. Trekker List.” Here are some examples:

“A trekker loves watching the show, nit picking and discussing it with friends … A trekkie loves watching those documentaries filmed aboard the Enterprise.”

“A trekker meets Marina Sirtis … at a convention, tells her how pretty (he) thinks she is, that it is too bad she is married or (he) would ask her out … A trekkie meets Deanna Troi (the character Marina Sirtis plays)… at a convention … and asks her if she is still seeing Riker (male character in the series)...”

The comments above result in dumping negative stereotypes of the fan onto trekkies, so that the queering of trekkies is balanced by a normativization of trekkers. The comments also provide a counter to the argument that hatred is built up of ignorance. Here, hatred is built from intimate knowledge. Clearly, trekkers are contributing to the stereotyping game in the media.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, explained that the inspiration behind the series is founded in his conviction that: “(F)iction affects people more strongly than news and public affairs. Drama makes you identify with what’s happening. …It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by (in the context of heavily censored television) and it did.”

Star Trek is set in a future that is very specific. No hunger, no war, no religion, no class, no gender discrimination, no racial/ethnic discrimination, and no limit to the available genders and sexualities. The central philosophical tenet of an alien species, the Vulcans, has often been hailed as one of the most beautiful queer slogans of all time: “Infinite diversity, in infinite combinations.”

This is one possible future–for many of us, the only future worth thinking about. If trekphobia is rampant, if people are having trouble even saying in public that they enjoy a television show, how on earth are we going to survive as individuals? How, on Earth? The answer is we can’t. We won’t. We have to sort out the small problems, as we encounter them, every day, in everything we do. We are all part of a net, remember? And with this net, we can catch the stars.

Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka’s work is informed by feminism, anarchism, and queer theory. From 2003 to 2005 she was the coordinator of the Dublin Queer Studies Group. Currently, she is completing a Ph.D. in Anglo-Irish literature on the topic of Kate O'Brien and the Basque Country at University College Dublin.

This article is based on a paper delivered on 4th July 2005, at The(e)ories—Advanced Seminars for Queer Research, University College Dublin, Ireland. Thanks to Noreen Giffney, Michael O’Rourke, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Ronan Bagall, and everyone at the ‘Gay Trekkies’ group in Dublin.