CHLOE MAGAZINE
A TEACHER USES
STAR TREK
FOR DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS
on race and gender
words by James Smalls - Professor of Art History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County
The television series Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–1969) debuted one year after my immediate family
and I relocated from the Harlem district of New York City to an area of South Central Los Angeles in 1965.
Th is was also the year in which that latter metropolis erupted
into riots that became known collectively as the Watts
Rebellion. The television series became a form of escape from
the surroundings of a depressing urban reality and envisioning
a more tolerant future.
As it turned out, however, TV was not to be the key to that
future. Rather, that entrée would be provided by many subsequent years of formal education that would spark in me an
intellectual curiosity about the inner workings of the trek of life
– engaging the tangibles of this world as well as the intangibles
I imagined to exist beyond the stars.
It was through the arts and humanities that I attempted to
grapple with the many intersecting questions I had about
things that mattered most to me, such as race, gender and
sexuality, as well as technology of the past, present and future.
Fast forward half a century – to where I help my students
attempt to make sense of exactly those same relevant, complex
questions.
Teaching complex, contemporary issues.
After earning a doctoral degree in art history and teaching at
the university level for 25 of those intervening years, I have
observed a contradiction in the majority of students of this
Generation Y: they seem connected and yet very distanced from
the overwhelming complexities of the world around them.
The point of connection appears strongest in the area of
popular culture. The disconnect, ironically, seems vested in a
contemporary (sometimes blind) obsession with technology.
As a historian of art and visual culture by training, I wrestled
with how popular culture and technology might be combined
in a thought-provoking fashion with difficult and uncomfortable social and personal matters. How might these issues be
made important to a student’s contemporary situation, to her
or his daily experiences and encounters?
I found part of the answer by traveling back to the 1960s, when
difficult social change movements around race (civil rights,
black power), gender (the women’s movement) and sexuality
(the gay and lesbian movement) were in full swing and paralleled the national obsession with technology, the space race
and indulgence in popular culture as a way to both escape and
liberate ourselves.
The result of my time travel was the creation of a new course
for the 21st century entitled “Roaming the Star Trek Universe:
Race, Gender, and Alien Sexualities.” The course explores the
Star Trek universe of science fiction television as one way to
probe critical issues of race, gender and alternate forms of sexuality. The response to the course offering was overwhelming.
But why would students be interested, and why teach such a
course in today’s complex world?
Why does it matter?
Certainly, this is not the first nor last course to be taught on
Star Trek. However, what makes it different, or at least unusual,
is its open-ended interest in the intersecting dynamics of race,
gender and varying forms of sexuality.
As a persuasive tool in imagining the possibilities of the future,
Star Trek has the power and pull to immerse the individual
completely through stories and characters that give meaning
and purpose to our collective sense of identity and existence.
For instance, in the original series episode, called “Let that be
your last battlefield” (1969), the conflict between two bicolored humanoids named Lokai and Bele leads to questions
of racial and political friction, assigning racial designations and
bringing out the tensions of identity politics.