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Article Excerpt
When, in 1996, I began formal research for my doctorate on male homosexuality and science fiction I had a number of reasons--political, pragmatic, and personal--for undertaking the project. Perhaps one of the more intellectually compelling, however, concerned the nature of sf on the one hand and the absence of any sustained examination of homosexuality in relation to it on the other. According to many accounts of the genre, science fiction is about imagining alternatives; it deals, by its very nature, in the business of speculation. It made sense therefore, I thought, to examine the genre's sexual speculations--specifically, to consider its engagement with the "alternative" sexual identity that is homosexuality.
One of the things that I quickly found--surprising to my mind, given sf's concern with exploring and speculating--was that there was a relative dearth of material to work on. I knew at the outset that there was no Big Book (this indeed was one of my reasons for undertaking the work); nevertheless I expected that a fairly substantial body of relevant critical literature would exist--mapping, at least in outline, the territory I was to explore. My preliminary research, however, suggested that this wasn't the case. (1) I also found, again quite quickly, that this problem--of absence--raised itself, albeit differently, with a number of the primary sources that I collected, that is, with actual science fiction stories. What I found, very often, was that texts that had been held to be about gays or gayness did not always seem to contain them or it; at least, they didn't in any undisputable way, and sometimes not in any obvious way.
In such stories homosexuality stands as myth in the sense elaborated by Roland Barthes; that is, it exists as a second-order signification, discernible only on account of a process in which "completed" signs--signifier and signified already united--come to signify again, on another, second level. This level, the level of connotation--as opposed to the first level, of denotation--is, according to Barthes, the level of myth. This article is about what may happen to homosexuality when it enjoys this mythic status and, as with many things, there's an up side and a down. Of course, identifying which is which depends on your affinity (or lack thereof) for same sex passion; I'll deal with what I consider the up side first.
As things turn out, the homo-friendly critic can have a lot of fun with mythic articulations of homosexuality. Texts that feature homosexuals who do nothing concrete to demonstrate that they are, in fact ... wait for it ... homosexuals (!) may lead readers to undertake "projects of confirmation" (Miller 125) in which eventually the most surprising circumstances or objects end up serving as the proof that such readers seek. You can probably imagine the frustrated question--asked, say, in a literary criticism class: "But how do you know that X or Y is gay?" And you can probably imagine typical answers: "Because of the way we're made to notice that X's look lingers there ..."; "Well, Y has no husband and she drinks pints of lager...." But what about: "Because the narrator tells us that that character has a pink towel in his bathroom?" (That's Ronald Merrick in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown [1966].) Or: "Because he shares a flat with another man and the phone is in the bedroom." This last example is drawn from D. A. Miller's analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), which film famously tells the story of two homosexuals, Brandon and Philip, who attempt--literally--to get away with murder. Nothing in the film, however, marks them, definit(iv)ely, as homosexuals. Miller argues that the combination of the "famously hardass Production Code in force at the time of the film's making" and, "more diffusely ... the cultural surround of legal, social, psychic, and aesthetic practices" (123) made clear-cut, denotative representation of homosexuality impossible. As a result, homosexuality made (makes) itself evident through connotation; but this has the unfortunate (or fortunate?) consequence of "raising the ghost of homosexuality all over the place." For, as Miller explains:
when, with homosexuality as with nothing else, what is connoted may not be denoted, whoever would establish a given connotation can only support it through other connotations equally precarious.... Needing corroboration, finding it only in what exhibits the same need, with no better affordance for meeting it, connotation thus tends to light everywhere, to put all signifiers to a test of their hospitality. Pushing its way through the Text, it will exploit the remotest contacts, enter into the most shameless liaisons, betray all canons of integrity--like an arriviste who hasn't arrived, it simply can't stop networking. (125)
It seems, at least in the first instance, that Miller is right. In the various examples I've just given, pints of lager, pink towels, and the location of a telephone all end up signifying homosexuality. In a science fiction context, following on from Miller, the tendency for connoted homosexuality to shed gay light over the entirety of a text comes into sharp focus in Gaylaxian discussions of Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) reported by Henry Jenkins. Connotation, Jenkins says, is either "suggestion or implication" (Tulloch and Jenkins 252) and readings that discover homosexuality in ST:TNG are shown to be mightily facilitated by the latter. The utopian logic of Gene Roddenberry's vision of the Star Trek universe, with its twin moral imperatives of non-interference (the Prime Directive) and absolute inter-cultural tolerance (IDIC--Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, a Vulcan philosophy), plus the occasional extratextual announcements (2) that the series would, sooner or later, contain a gay or lesbian character powerfully invite identifications of the crew of the Enterprise as lesbian, gay or--perhaps more easily--bisexual. I won't recapitulate the entirety of Jenkins's account here; I just want to remark that he also has observed an irony at play: while from one point of view in ST:TNG silence (arguably (3)) reigns on the subject, while the love that dare not speak its name remains, on one view, precisely just that, on another view the signifying protocols of connotation have precisely the opposite effect: homosexuality rears its head everywhere. Tasha Yar's short hair and occupation signify it; Data's quest to learn about all aspects of human experience means that he would, inevitably, indulge. From such a perspective, resistance to homosexuality--as the Borg...
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