| Abstrakt: |
This article explores the relationship between sf and narratives of technological progress through a reading of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), examining the series within the historical context of the growing use of home Internet during the late 1980s and 1990s. I argue that TNG highlights the ways in which narratives about the Internet and its use were structured by neoconservative "family values" and by ideas about technological development rooted in Enlightenment narratives of historical evolution, and shaped by heteronormative, patriarchal, and Eurocentric power relations. TNG's construction of familial relationships within the series is partially organized by this heteronormative logic, which dominated discourses around the family and Internet technology during the era, while simultaneously subverting this logic and illuminating the utopian potential of queer kinship. Particularly central to the logic undergirding discussions about the promise and threat of home Internet was the figure of the child. Building on Lee Edelman's (2004) notion of "reproductive futurity," I mobilize the concept of "reproductive techno-futurity" to explore how TNG, through the character of Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner), highlights the inter-articulation of reproductive futurity with evolutionary concepts of technological progress while also gesturing to the limits of these figurations through queer re-imaginings of the technological child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
