Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek

Media, metonyms, minutiae and myopia

• Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek
• Edited by Taylor Harrison, Sarah Projansky, Kent A. Ono, Elyce Rae Helford
• Westview Press
• $16.50/$23.00 Canada
• Trade Paperback, Sept. 1996

n the last of the 12 essays that constitute Enterprise Zones, co-editor Taylor Harrison comments (a bit late): "The objection could be raised at this point that it is unfair to ask a television text to bear such weight. Such an objection is misguided, for it suggests that there are some texts that deserve serious consideration and some that do not; further, that texts that could stand such scrutiny are somehow less prosthetic -- less artificial -- than is a television show about adventure in space."

"Serious consideration" is an understatement. Despite its relatively short length, Enterprise Zones is an extremely complex, dense collection that takes on aspects and episodes of Star Trek in exhaustively minute and scholarly detail. The analytical focus is on cultural symbolism -- Data as racial Other, Worf as representative of cultural liminality, Troi both as voiceless victim of patriarchal repression and as an image of patriarchy's death, etc.

There are a number of repeated themes throughout: many of the essays have a strongly feminist stance, and an undue number of them swerve from their main points to deconstruct Trek as a "neocolonialist narrative" that encourages the assimilation and normalization of disparate cultures while hypocritically preaching tolerance and diversity. The Next Generation is relatively over-represented, despite the admirable attempts to touch on everything from fandom to Kirk/Spock homo-erotica.

But the topics -- like the quality of writing and analysis -- cover a broadly scattershot range. Trek has, in its time, attempted to symbolically address concepts ranging from racial integration to political imperialism, and these essays acknowledge those efforts on an unsparingly intellectual and abstract level, sometimes in shot-by-shot detail. Harrison is entirely accurate -- there's no reason to believe Trek can't support this level of thought.

However, author Henry Jenkins is also correct when he complains in an interview in Enterprise Zones' appendix that media academia tends to require writers to distance themselves from the shows they discuss, and adopt a "dryer, more impersonal, more theoretical language" to authenticate their analysis. Most of the Zones essays, with their focus on minutiae, abstraction, and subjective symbolic interpretation presented as unequivocal reality, make for challenging but extremely stiff reading.

There are exceptions to the rule -- most notably, Ilsa J. Bick's "Boys in Space," which courageously attempts an anecdotal but rigorously inclusive overview of the entire Trek mythos as a "Peter Pan"-like latency narrative. But for the most part, Zones is likely to appeal most to readers who have already taken several giant steps away from Trek and are willing to view it through a microscope at a great distance.

I personally challenge anyone without multiple doctorates to read all the way through Evan Haffner's essay on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country without once reaching for a dictionary. Very educational. -- Tasha

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