Queer Sci-Fi

I love science fiction and reading the excerpt from Octavia Butler's Wild Seed has forced me exam how sexuality is represented in the sci-fi shows, movies, and books I love. There's a lot out there in the sci-fi world which is overtly sexist or homophobic. But there's hope! In the vast ocean of science fiction, there are many books, movies, and tv shows which is not!

Torchwood is a more adult spin-off of the long-running Doctor Who series. I'm fairly certain all of the main characters from the show are queer. Russell Davies, the creator of the show, was intentionally trying to break the idea of sexuality being fixed or stable. While the relationship between the characters Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones develops through the series, we learn about their past relationships with men, women, and aliens as well. There is an episode where Toshiko Sato is in a relationship with an alien who takes the female form, but later in the series, she attempts to create a relationship with another main character, Owen Harper.

While this show celebrates the fluidity of sexuality, it is also problematic. The three male characters, Jack, Ianto, and Owen, are fluid in their sexualities, but there is no fluidity in their gender. They are stereotypical “manly” men who are violent, aggressive, and in charge. They show few emotions other than anger. They are able-bodied and white. Toshiko is a problematic character because of how she's portrayed, stereotypically asian and feminine. She's portrayed as passive, overly academic, strait-laced, and unobtrusive. Gwen Cooper is complex character. She demonstrates her sexual fluidity, but for most of the series, she's one half of a typical heterosexual couple. While she has a more apparently masculine, aggressive role (she's always seen kicking alien butt where as he is usually seen in their home), she's also the one who ends up pregnant (once with an alien baby and once with an actual human baby she wanted).

Smell Like a Man, Man.

Okay, so right now you’re probably wondering why there’s a body wash commercial on this queer theory blog. Stay with me!

Old Spice’s newest line of commercials, all in the same vein as the one posted above (more are available on youtube), advertise their product as a solution to overly flowery and perfumed soaps and body washes; a solution proffered not to a modern Everyman (in a general and wide sense), but to specific enactment of masculinity and manhood. Old Spice’s commercials market themselves specifically for the “man’s man,” a mythical ideal directed at exemplars (and aspiring exemplars) of masculinity.

This got me thinking about previous discussions we’ve engaged in, both on the blog (namely, here) and during class, about the creation of strict definitions of difference, and how this creation of rigid boundaries serves as a method of bolstering systems of dominance. In Berila’s discussion of ACT UP and the construction of the “toxic” bodies of folks living with AIDS, she argues that the construction of a “toxic” body works as a way to strictly compartmentalize the sectors of American population which are “pure” and “toxic.” Thus, the construction of the “toxic” body is necessary, because through this continual process of constructing what is “toxic,” what is “pure” can be upheld. Berila argues that bodies are constructed as “toxic” so that the “pure” of the nation can define themselves by negation: the dominant group is “pure” because it is not “toxic.”

So, what does this have to do with hygiene products? Old Spice, in its assertion that (real) “men” should only smell like “men,” polices the boundaries between masculinity and femininity and creates these strict barriers between the masculine and the feminine specifically to uphold what is “manly.”

And what is manly? Not womanly. Specifically, Old Spice’s commercials ensure that the “manly” and the “womanly” stay far away from one another, rigidly enforcing gender codes. The commercial opens with an overly hairy chest—immediately connecting manhood to testosterone and giving the man’s chest an animalistic, bearlike presence. Not only are “men” only allowed to smell like “men” (which Old Spice identifies as overtly masculine, intimately connected to brute strength and uncontrollable aggression), but “men” stampede through anything even remotely connected to the feminine. More specifically, men stampede through items often seen as gifts “men” usually give to “women” they are romantically interested in, which suggests how much value Old Spice (and “real men”) find in these tokens.