22K122333

Revisioning Star Trek as toxically masculine

In the essay Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift¹, Erin Horakova argues that our collective member of TOS is in fact a false rememberence and that:

1. Kirk was not a womanizer, but the text established that he had respectful long-term relationships with highly educated career women that ended amicably. That the "green woman" scene never occurred, and Kirk's sexual encounters were often coersive.
2. Kirk's brashness is overrrated. That he is depicted as a responsible captain, who follows Starfleet regulations, and makes cunning decisions in the heat of difficult situations.

Our memory of Kirk as a womanizer, means we can not give him agency to be vunerable in the sexual encounters he faces. We transform sexual assault of a male protagonist into conquests. We rewrite him as brash and remove his emotional vulnerability in order to remake him into our own contemporary toxically masculine culture. That history is not a line of progress and that some aspects of the 1960s and 70s were more progressive than today. This collective re-imagine occurs to many popular culture icons to remove the radical cultural elements for a safe artifact for the kyriarchy.

Horakova concludes that we should be careful of cultural drift in our readings and that our interpretation of texts is based on what the text actually says and not a collective re-imagine of that text.

External References

1. Horakova, Erin Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift  <http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/>. Strange Horizons. Retrieved 2022-05-27.

Linked References

• zettels
  
  • [[22K122333]] - Revision Star Trek as toxically mascluine