Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State

Writing in 2003 about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, feminist media scholar Jayne Rodgers declared “It is as if the twentieth century never happened” (210). She was describing the way women and men were portrayed after the tragedy, in media representations that seemed to recall stereotypes of men and women that hailed back to the 1950s (206). “While men… were being constructed as heroes,” said Rodgers, “women were being constructed as victims” (207). “The heroic myth… was based on a strong sense of restoring [myths of] gender, as well as social and political order” (207). The mythology was that reflecting the gendered icons of “action man and passive woman” (208), most probably resulting without the news media intentionally meaning to represent men and women this stereotypically. Rather, it was the result of too many decades since television’s inception without women being equally represented in the work force of the media (201) in a culture where gender is “a form of conditioning which affects individuals—women and men—at the structural and interpersonal level” (200). In short, gendered hierarchies in the media world had been shaping gendered representations of the tragedy and the ensuing geopolitical struggle that emerged from the maelstrom.

The gendered logic of the American security state would come under strain even before the missiles of October would bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in 1962, for the state was being tested already after an unnerving stalemate in Korea in 1954. If the consumer culture of the Eisenhower era sent comforting messages to men and women about the security of their nuclear family and country after a divisive and controversial military action, other messages were forthcoming that would indicate that the gendered hierarchic state was facing serious threats from its Communist enemies. Hydrogen bombs would, after mid-decade, pose a greater danger than the nuclear weapons of a decade earlier, as would Russia’s investment in developing ballistic missiles, something the Eisenhower administration had apparently underestimated. ¹ Armageddon would not require four hours of flight by Tupolev bombers to cross the North Pole; the deed shortly could be done with missiles flying over a thousand miles per hour and arriving in minutes.

If the dangers posed by the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s had encouraged change and rethinking of traditional values, as Margot Henriksen’s arguments indicate in chapter 1, then the Vietnam conflict and its aftermath could only further enhance the conditions for change in the American security state’s hierarchies and ideologies. The histories cited in chapter 1 support such a conclusion. As the 1960s ended and the 1970s began, the rise of more radical feminist political groups and the emergence of more radical feminist philosophies among feminist activists and academicians reflected a reconsideration and evolution of the comparatively simpler goals of Old Left feminists in the Betty Friedan mold. The first stage of feminism emphasized the significance and necessity of women obtaining the rights to equal pay in and access to the public realm which, once entered by women in this egalitarian fashion, would guarantee a new mindset for women that would liberate them from the inhibiting and soul-denying roles implied in the cultural trope of the feminine mystique. Women would emerge as self-possessed subjects who would find the psychological and social wholeness denied to them in the private domestic world of the security state whose gendered hierarchies supported the Cold War militarization of America and likewise denied women a place in the public realm.

In chapter 1, Cynthia Enloe’s optimistic prose recalled how progressive New Left feminism could entertain the possibility that the demilitarization of American society and culture after the Cold War might lead to experimentation with gender roles that would mitigate the effects of the security state’s gender-based hierarchy. Indeed, there was reason to believe that much reform might be expected from a liberal president whose ties to Camelot (Clinton had actually met President Kennedy as a youth and, as President, visited JFK’s grave during the Clinton inauguration) and whose rhetoric of hope to an America suffering its worst economic trouble since the Depression (“I feel your pain”) might have some truly progressive agendas waiting in the wings. Indeed, this potential for progress is often cited as part of the legacy of the Clinton era. Looking back, perhaps somewhat nostalgically at the Clinton era during the early years of the 9/11 George Bush security regime, culture critic James Berger in a PMLA article wrote these words to contrast the 1990s regime with that of 9/11:

By the mid-1990s significant social movements were organizing industrial and agricultural workers, students and environmentalists to protect political freedom, national sovereignty, and labor and environmental regulations, and to oppose the efforts of corporations and their allies in government to impose on the entire world a new gilded age of outlaw capitalism. [But the] destruction of the World Trade Center stifled much of this multiplicity of voices, as the Bush administration and the corporate powers it represents used this traumatic event to help establish in the world “one single faith,” which would be articulated in a single language of “homeland security.” (“Towers” 342–343)

Michaele Ferguson argues that from the beginning of the 9/11 cultural milieu there was an attempt in the administration to frame gender issues in such a fashion as to support the gendered hierarchical masculinist protectionism of the national security state. This was done in more than one way. Even before the attacks, gender inequality was always characterized as a thing of the past (200), as if to draw on the Reagan era rhetoric of what James Berger in chapter 3 called America as achieved utopia. But after the attacks, gender issues were directly connected to the geopolitical scene. By doing so, the administration could create a rhetoric which would frame gender issues in accordance with two emerging cultural narratives:

The first of these is a narrative of masculinist protection. We [men] are superior to you [women] (because we are civilized or we have a democracy) and therefore must take on the role of your protector. We will go to war against those who would hurt you… The second of these narratives is that of international women’s liberation. Women’s rights at home were achieved long ago, so there is no need for feminists to agitate for them at home… So our attention is best directed toward liberating women in other countries. (210–211)