3 Twenty-first Century Neoliberal Man
Neoliberal Culture; Neoliberal Gender
During the neoliberalization of the 1970s, “ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom … . led to the neoliberalization of culture.”1 Neoliberal culture expressed itself through a philosophy that rests upon transference of authority from “official” (government) sources to private experts in fields ranging from psychology (self-help) to fashion, weight loss, and career planning. This shift also occurs through media presenting “information, evaluation, and reproach” aimed at solidifying a culture in which the individual bears sole responsibility for his or her own personal and professional welfare.2 In this process of shifting from individuals embedded in social class to untethered self-disciplined individuals, neoliberalism revoked but also reinvigorated white patriarchy—a feature that is also played out in several contemporary media texts.
Star Trek 2009, also called NuTrek, and Dexter exemplify the new representations of gender emerging from the fictionalized intersections of business, the military, science, and family relations. All include prominent supporting or colead roles for women, and generate a series of gender transformations that frequently make the female roles seem more significant than they are. Assuming that femininity and masculinity exist in a reciprocal relationship, I will analyze these texts to reveal the ways in which neoliberalism demands and accommodates shifts in gender definitions, masquerading them as progressive cultural positions. Neoliberal masculinity has appropriated certain formerly feminist positions to mask itself as a far more egalitarian relationship.
In gender terms, this operates on the basis of compromises made between masculinized power centers and feminist ideas. Neoliberal masculinity is premised upon accommodations and compromises between feminism, particularly the white bourgeois kind, and capitalism, a compromise that has fundamentally changed the nature of masculinity itself. Whereas many texts Toffer a return to stability based in a largely white patriarchy—neoliberalism has, as many argue—normalized a white neoliberal masculinity that can quite easily coexist with certain pragmatic feminist ideas; for example, “opening the paid labor market to women”3 without having to reorganize the patriarchal nature of the workplace. This along with the fact that child rearing and housework remained female-identified spheres of labor resulted in the unacknowledged labor of women in the home being joined to labor in the workplace for a 24/7 workday for women. Whereas women have gained partial acceptance in the public spheres of work, little about the nature and structure of the workplace itself has changed. In this way, the presence of female characters in workplace dramas signals an egalitarian workplace, whereas the narrative consigns these characters to primarily girlfriend roles. This limits their authority and power to the traditional one of female ascendancy through romantic control of a man.
Theorists discuss this merger as part of the phenomenon of postfeminism. Writers such as Susan Faludi, in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, which addresses the ways that conservativism undermines feminism, and, notably, Angela McRobbie have dealt with the issues surrounding the marginalization of feminism. McRobbie argues that feminism now exists in a web of very public conservative family values pushed to the forefront during the George W. Bush administration, and a widening array of choices, a “liberalization in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual, and kinship relations.”4 These are presented as very individualized choices. She also makes the point that feminism has transformed into a type of “Gramscian common sense,” and at that level, can be easily revoked as something old, no longer needed.5 I see this Gramscian transformation as a critical part of the way gender formulation works in a neoliberal cultural sphere.
This Gramscian transformation produces a gender model in which masculinity and femininity exist relationally through the morphing of feminist notions into already accepted common sense, and adapting this common sense into the notion of masculinity. Neoliberal men interact with women as if both were already liberated individuals, assuming that no attention need be given to power differentials in professional or personal relationships. This is based upon notions of the exceptional (although this is has greater weight in determining feminine representations) and the individual.
Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009) provides a striking example of a restoration of white masculine power (something that has never really been absent from media) modified by this neo-Gramscian transformation of feminism. Star Trek reboots a franchise owned by Paramount Pictures and is carefully calculated to refer to its “canon” images and characters while offering enough generic action film cues to broaden the audience outside of the Trek fan community. The prequel focuses on events leading to the assignment of the original television series’ Enterprise crew: Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Lt. Uhura, Mr. Sulu, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Chekhov. The narrative presents these events as a fast-paced action-adventure film in which the crew fights a generic threat to the Federation, an interplanetary political organization including Earth. This economic requirement of producing a genre film with broad appeal gives the film a real stake in reviving masculinist power. To do this, the film returns to a point just at the franchise’s origins, where a young James Kirk takes command of the Enterprise. This constitutes a return to the “Edenic past” of the franchise, and restores a feminist-inflected version of original representations of masculine power and control on-screen.
This is not a return to the reassuringly authoritative figures of Kirk and Spock; however, this representation cites those figures while making them considerably younger, less experienced, and superficially more egalitarian. This strategy resonates strongly with neoconservative values that flourish under neoliberalism economic regimes, and that complicate gender analysis.6 The original series did not feature any women in Starfleet high command positions, although it did feature a onetime appearance by a Romulan female ship’s captain. Later spinoffs and prequels featured women captains like Captain Kathryn Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager and Captain Erika Hernandez of the prequel series Enterprise. Next Generation featured two women doctors, Dr. Crusher and Dr. Pulaski, as well as security chief Tasha Yar and ship’s counselor Deanna Troi. Deep Space 9 featured Major Kira Nerys and science officer Jadzia Dax.
In the original series, the suppression of women in command was more overt than NuTrek. In “Turnabout Intruder” (1969) Kirk states that women are not allowed to captain a starship, making explicit the subordinate status of women, characterizing this as “unfair,” which seems to point to a more egalitarian masculinity. Later in the episode, he states that Janice, the woman in question, has been driven mad by her hatred of her own femininity. In fact, she has been driven to anger by years of working in a sexist institution that fails to recognize her talent.7
In NuTrek, no women are seen in command of ships, and on one occasion, when Kirk and Spock leave the bridge, seventeen-year-old Ensign Chekhov is given command, despite the presence of several women lieutenants on the bridge, including Uhura at the communications station. This is an almost invisible moment of sexism, as Lt. Uhura’s station is at the rear of the bridge concealed behind a computer screen. If we compare the series and the new film overall, there was considerably more complexity to the original Star Trek’s treatment of women. NuTrek operates more subtly on the issue of women in command, assuming that feminism has already been institutionalized, so there is no overt hostility toward women characters. Instead, they are moved to the margins of the frame and of the narrative, producing a neoliberal social narrative that relies on a neo-Gramscian shift of feminism into a “commonsense” position.
Another common narrative trope of the original series depicted a woman officer who is almost immediately ready to betray the ship and her comrades, if the villain of the week is charismatic enough. Episodes featuring Khan (“Space Seed”) and the God Apollo (“Who Mourns for Adonais”) are two examples.8 Other episodes featured no-nonsense women officers such as Lt. Rahda, a South Asian onetime helmsman, or African American Lt. Charlene Taylor, chief engineer during one episode. The 2009 film presents images of a masculinity that appropriates and negates feminism, rendering it irrelevant, thus relegating the few women to more traditional, conservative places in the narrative. This point is explored in the following.
The Placement of Women
If my total analysis simply dwelt on resurgent white patriarchy, it would seem much like hegemonic masculinity recentering itself through the adoption of neoliberal values of individualism. The textual positioning of women provides another twist in the gender model. Women become present but largely invisible in terms of narrative impact, and this gives more visibility to male authority. One of the contradictions of neoliberalism occurs in the relationship between production and consumption. Whereas males are encouraged to buy grooming and fashion products, in order to be good consumers, production and control of commodities remains masculine. Men may embrace the previously derided feminized position of consumer, but women remain restricted in terms of assuming positions of authority, as in the “glass ceiling” phenomenon. I think it is precisely the economic demand on men to purchase personal products that creates a pushback effect on the production side. Men may purchase hair products, but the authority and control of a masculinist society prevents men from being overly “feminized.”
In Star Trek Uhura is nearly the sole black face onscreen, and bears a double burden of representation, as female and black.9 In the neoliberal gender scheme of merging masculinized power structures with feminist ideals, Uhura is depicted as the smartest, best linguist and communication expert in Starfleet Academy. She rejects Kirk’s advances at their first meeting, and throws him out of her dorm room when she discovers him hiding under her roommate’s bed. All of these character traits indicate a confident, accomplished, intelligent female officer, who is not undercut by pursuing male companionship at all costs.
It is instructive to compare Uhura to another postfeminist, fictional neoliberal career woman: Bridget Jones. She’s a smart, sympathetic character, who sabotages her professional career in pursuit of a more central goal of marriage and children.10 Uhura’s apparent professionalism makes her seem altogether different from Bridget until we discover that she and Mr. Spock, her teacher at the academy, have been lovers and are continuing their relationship on board the Enterprise. The point here is not the fact that she has a lover, but the film’s restriction of her role to that of love interest after a few opening scenes establishing her intellect. This is the issue: Uhura cannot simply be an accomplished bridge officer, but has to be represented as Ta “woman” as well. This is typical of postfeminist gender relations and the compromise of neoliberalism with feminist ideals. Starfleet is depicted as an “equal opportunity meritocracy” in which women are judged equal to men. However, what characterizes this gender formation is its neo-Gramscian transparency, the assumption that feminism is no longer needed as a critique of power.11 The transformation of feminism into an accepted part of institutional “common sense” works through the neoliberal emphasis on individualism. If equal advancement is now open to formerly marginalized groups of women, then feminist critique of institutions and cultural objects becomes unnecessary, and, to a degree, shameful and retrogressive. Individuals under neoliberalism are responsible for their own success or failure on the job, and in their personal lives as well.
The relationship between economically driven changes in the populace and the workforce under neoliberalism relate closely to the representation of women in the workplace. Because flexible capitalism both allowed and demanded gender shifts in the workforce,12 this dynamic of allowing and demanding gender reconfiguration functions through the apparent incorporation of feminist values. However, this accommodation of neoliberalism to feminism is not total; women’s positions are vulnerable in significant ways.
The costuming of Starfleet cadets and officers also raises a complex issue about neoliberal representation. Almost all women officers on the Enterprise wear the very short miniskirted uniform of the original series. A few women officers appear in slacks, but the tiny skirts dominate, matched with knee-high boots. To really tease out the implications of this garb we need to consider the shift of signification that has occurred between the original appearance of the miniskirt and its revival here.
In the 1960s, some interpreted the miniskirt as a signal of women’s sexual liberation that could be read as a self-confident assertion of one’s own comfort with their body. Nichelle Nichols, Uhura in the 1960s series, stated she regarded the miniskirt she wore as “liberating,”13 as part of the women’s liberation movement. In the ensuing decades, feminist media and cultural critical theory developed an analysis of clothing and the sexual liberation rhetoric related to patriarchal culture. Whereas I cannot recapitulate the entire argument here, it is crucial to note the emphasis this critique places upon the construction of women’s images as a venue for masculine pleasure. This leads us to the twenty-first century, and a culture imbued with images of “Girls Gone Wild” flashing their breasts and using the rhetoric of empowerment to explain it. A concomitant phenomenon is the emergence of more sexually explicit female images in advertising, notably underwear ads. Sisley and Armani underwear ads feature women in scanty brassieres and pants, sitting on the side of a bed, legs spread, or with both hands placed between closed legs. McRobbie argues that these ads work through a presentation that invites an ironic response, a ‘we get it and we’re too cool to be bothered’ reaction from women). She identifies a generational shift in the way women perceive media texts, citing the prevalence of an Tironic, gender-educated framework that demands silence in order to meet generational standards of “cool” and sophistication.14
The need to maintain an air of cultural sophistication therefore suppresses feminist critique. Few critical voices have discussed costuming in this film, and fans that have raised it on Star Trek bulletin boards receive apathetic or mildly hostile responses. Posters at one site raised issues with the ways the film marginalized her, including reducing her to Spock’s girlfriend, having her role on the Enterprise be a very marginal one, and objectifying her with the miniskirt. One response to the original post demonstrated a lack of interest: “Is there really anything wrong with having Uhura standing around saying ‘Hailing frequencies open’ though? Y’know, any actual problems other than feeling sorry for the actress?” Further down the thread, this answer appeared: “Female characters in a franchise that is supposed to be about an egalitarian future should not be depicted as basically being high-tech secretaries. They should take as active of roles in the plot as male characters.” Mild hostility toward the whole topic also emerged: “I’m so tired of people complaining about Uhura in this movie. She got at least as much to do in the movie as Sulu or Chekov.”15 Other bulletin boards devoted to the film had some variations of this discussion, but none so lengthy (that I found) as the one cited here.
The so-called “ironic” objectification of women constitutes another way that women under neoliberalism “bear” masculinity. By acceding to a distanced view of their own bodies, women actualize masculinity. There is value in owning a healthy view of your body, of being comfortable in your skin, but this position is complicated by the visual objectification of women occurring in web images and videos, film, underwear ads, reality shows, makeover shows, and other genres.
The larger concern for feminists is tracing and combating the emergence and diffusion of this so-called ironic objectification. The postfeminist discourse about the body, which owes so much to psychoanalysis, Foucault, and postmodern theorists, reduced the materiality of the objects of study to elements of discourse, a theoretical trope that Theresa Ebert addresses in her discussion of a shift in feminist theory that erases materiality enables or is concomitant with a shift from feminist critique of patriarchal power centers and structures to more individualized theory less centered on social issues and political classes.16
The sleight of hand that removes “society” from equations of power and refocuses on the individual becomes easier if cultural critics turn their gaze away from institutions and more toward individual fulfillment. It is now, in our culture, an individual’s fault if she is not pretty, skinny, or smart enough to land a job she wants, or to get the man she wants. Instead, critiques must turn to the culture of individual self-improvement that operates across genders, sexual orientations, and age-groups, which demands individuals shoulder the responsibility for failure. Without eliminating agency, which differs from the totalizing neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility—critiques of the culture of beauty, or masculine power, of institutional bias enable a clearer consideration of oppressive social forces structuring people’s lives. Neoliberalism appropriated feminist rhetoric and shifted it to individuals, eliminating social aspects of critique. This movement has suppressed a large part of its critical value while appearing to maintain a type of cultural openness. If we eliminate the notion of social structures, then it is pointless to analyze gendered images in dialectic with each other.
In the real world, female neoliberals like Margaret Thatcher, the first woman prime minister of England, appropriated notions of freedom and individuality to separate themselves from political classes. Although she experienced several incidents of gender discrimination, she discounts these entirely, preferring to see herself, and other successful women, as exceptions to the rule. The neoliberal individualism she espoused denies the possibility of women as a political class.17 In this way, political parties and their spokespersons function, as Gramsci said, to disseminate conceptions of the world.18
In Star Trek, there is clearly a relation between the emphasis on the individualized male melodrama, particularly of Spock, and the limitation of Uhura’s scenes to “girlfriend” episodes. Feminism is both present and submerged in this neoliberal text through the assumption that female equality is so normalized that nothing further need occur with a woman character: simply hang some credentials on her character and plug her in a minor role as a girlfriend, wife, or mother.
The reciprocal relations of gender under neoliberalism create a space for masculinity to acknowledge feminist ideals, such as equality in the workplace, or to accept women as legitimate authority figures. Femininity also works reciprocally, acknowledging masculinity ideals. This process produces representations of women who are successful in the workplace but still functioning as subordinate figures, still primarily focused on romance, or whose appearance remains sexualized. Crucially, this operation allows males to appear egalitarian while still commanding positions of higher authority, or of the voice of reason in the workplace.
This reciprocity evidently creates no space in outer space for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transsexuals. Star Trek has yet to feature an openly gay character in any of its television or film versions, although there are apparently gay characters in some of the Star Trek novels. Whereas there has been considerable speculation about certain Trek characters, including Kathryn Janeway and Seven of Nine (Voyager), as well as a long tradition of slash, these are all productions of fan speculation and fan fiction.
The Enterprise’S Young Men
Scenes of Kirk and Spock’s problematic childhoods create a causal link to their adult actions. A young Kirk destroys an antique Corvette that apparently belongs to an older male relative or stepfather. Young Spock fights viciously with bullies who call his father a “traitor” and his mother a “whore” and who taunt him for being half-human. An oedipalized narrative situates Kirk as a reckless young man whose problems with authority stem from his father’s death while commanding a starship. Spock’s issues are also related to his father, a Vulcan who married an Earth woman, setting up his biracial son for scorn and harassment from Vulcan children. Even the attack of the villain is that of an individual terrorist whose acts stem from an intensely personalized response to a planetary disaster, a “supernova” that destroyed his home planet, and with it, his pregnant wife.
Crucially, both Kirk and Spock succeed on their own individual merits. The head of the Vulcan Science Academy congratulates Spock for achieving intellectual distinction despite his unfortunate circumstances, i.e., his human mother. This statement marks Spock as an exception, an outsider, implying that he succeeds without the support of cultural or familial networks. Kirk also succeeds alone, as the film implies that he has a largely absent mother and a hostile stepfather. A Starfleet captain notes that he is a “genius,” despite his troubled youth. Kirk boasts he will complete the four-year Starfleet Academy program in three years, which he does. He alone questions the value of a difficult command simulation, and sabotages it in order to demonstrate that it is a bogus test of capabilities. The sabotage makes him an even greater exception, the only cadet to pass the test, albeit dishonestly.
Despite this emphasis on the individual, Kirk and Spock clearly form a male character dyad; this grouping forms the basis of the narrative structure of any particular version of Star Trek. Kirk is a conventional “rebel” with issues stemming from the loss of his father virtually at the moment of his birth. Spock’s biracial nature reads differently now from the 1960s; it speaks to the emphasis on the culture of biracialism that emerged in the 2008 election through endless examination of Obama’s degrees of “blackness” or “whiteness.”
This version of Spock may be more emotional than the original Spock. It is a difficult call due to the complicated nature of Spock’s portrayal in the television series. The one definitive difference lies in new Spock’s ability to express emotion without the rationalizations offered in the television series. The original Spock did become involved with women occasionally but almost always was under the influence of drugs, or otherwise affected, in order to show the audience that emotion is not part of his normal behavior. The re-imagined Spock, however, shows a range of emotion: romantic desire, anger, and bereavement without any of these rationalizations.
This Kirk differs significantly from the previous portrayal. The character has been re-imagined as someone to whom group values of discipline, honesty, moral authority, military or academic ethics matter little, but to whom instinctual individual actions and self-confidence are paramount. Kirk and Spock both exhibit anger and a brutal fighting style during the film; however, Kirk is applauded for his aggressive masculinity by being rewarded with the captaincy of the Enterprise, whereas the film leads the audience to see Spock’s displays of anger, when goaded by Kirk, as inappropriate. The most extreme of these displays leads to his removal as acting captain, thus rewarding Kirk for the very quality judged negatively in Spock.
Spock’s outburst measures negatively against his intellectual background, in comparison with Kirk, who appears as a more rounded authority figure, that is, a white man with exceptional managerial skills, an ability to inspire others to follow his leadership, and an intelligence not prominently on display much of the time. Spock’s intellect poses a problem because he promotes analysis that stands in the way of immediate, impulsive, heartfelt (emotional) action. When Kirk opposes Spock’s plan to rendezvous with the rest of Starfleet ships not destroyed by the Narada, he creates a dyad of analysis/action, thought/deed, and enacts the “looking without leaping” quality that Pike admired and saw a need for in Starfleet. The film has already foreshadowed the fact that Kirk’s impulsiveness will be the right path to follow, and in light of that, Spock’s cautious analysis and lack of preemptive action against the Narada seems just plain wrong.
The success of the Enterprise’s battle with the Narada rests primarily on tactics developed by Chekov and Spock. Kirk participates, but his role is to rescue Captain Pike, his symbolic father figure, while Spock uses a small spaceship to actually destroy the drill threatening Earth and, ultimately, the enemy ship. Yet the film ends with Kirk alone being rewarded with a medal, a promotion to captain, and permanent command of the Enterprise. This is presumably a reward for making an impulse call to fight the Narada alone.
This whole narrative process recenters authority on a white man of action, and reinforces the primacy of the white male by slavishly reproducing the character range of the original series, situating the sole female officer of any importance primarily as a girlfriend of one of the heroes. After a scene where Uhura tells Captain Pike of her discovery of the Romulan destruction of the Klingon fleet, the bulk of her on-screen time comprises interactions with Spock in the role of his girlfriend.
The 1960s Enterprise bridge crew looked progressive for the time, with a black woman in charge of communications, and an Asian American helmsman, whereas Spock represented an acceptable (alien) face of biracialism. The series as a whole featured a fairly diverse range of ethnicities. While rewatching the original series, I noted numerous appearances by African American, South Asian, and Hispanic officers and crew, albeit most in minor or onetime guest roles. To reestablish that degree of progressiveness, the current film would have had to broaden the representation of characters’ racial, gender, and sexual orientation significantly to acknowledge the increased contemporary public presence of diversity, and our greater adherence to it as a basic value.
This would have entailed reimagining characters more radically such as a female, black, or Hispanic Kirk. The film’s representation chimes nicely with our neoliberalized culture, in which the bourgeoisie gives lip service to diversity while working very hard to maintain a white, masculinist class hierarchy. Unlike Battlestar Galactica, which rebooted a 1970s television series with a significantly altered set of characters, Star Trek chose to obey its prime directive, “Protect the Franchise,” by keeping the major group of characters within a demographic that would appeal to the audience that they sought.19
Keeping the characters reassuringly similar to the ones in the original series allows the film to recirculate a proven generic formula, without making too many changes that would destroy the Star Trek “brand.” There was significantly more profit at stake in the rebooting of Star Trek than in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. An origins story allows for much younger characters than their 1960s counterparts, appealing to new generations of moviegoers. The producers sought a balance of the familiar and the new to pull in hard-core Trekkers but to widen the film’s ability to play to younger audiences and non–science fiction fans, who would hopefully see this as a young, hip, action film, a ploy encapsulated in one of the film’s television spots, titled “This Is Not Your Father’s Star Trek.”20
Dexter and Neoliberal Self-Discipline
Dexter, a Showtime series about a serial killer who works as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police Department, offers another narratological way to normalize feminism, thus allowing masculine desires to operate rather freely. Through pretense, Dexter seems to conform to female desires for egalitarian relationships with sensitive, nurturing men.
Dexter was orphaned at an early age when he witnessed his police informant mother’s brutal murder with a chain saw. Harry Morgan, the police detective running the informant, adopted Dexter. Realizing early that his adopted son was a sociopathic killer, he taught him to use this urge as a way to rid society of criminals that the justice system could not convict. He gave Dexter a code that requires him to conform outwardly to social mores; he taught him to smile in photographs, to ask a girl to a prom, to have a drink with work pals, because these are the things that normal people do. He taught Dexter how to make clean kills, taught him safe body disposal methods, and, generally, how to keep his secret well hidden. We learn of the code through a combination of flashbacks, visits from Harry’s ghost, and from Dexter’s internal monologue.
Over the course of the show, Dexter’s character has evolved from a cold but superficially charming and funny serial killer—but only of bad guys—to someone who has acted the part of caring brother, friend, and husband so well that he senses the beginning of real emotional connections. Dexter must make himself into the image of a man who accommodates feminist desires, and he must use internalized self-discipline to achieve that image. Dexter’s narrative features a repeated trope of conflict between the internal, murderous Dexter, known as the “dark passenger,” and external, solid worker, husband, and father. This dual life causes problems; often family or work crises interrupt Dexter’s meticulous plans for disposing of his kills. During one execution, wife Rita calls with a request that he get medicine for their sick baby. Dexter continues the kill but cannot dispose of the body, so he hides it. As he drives home with the medication, sleep deprivation from nights with a new baby hits him, and he wrecks his car. He must now watch helplessly from the gurney as police examine his vehicle, which still contains his “kill kit” of tools, duct tape, plastic sheets, and other accessories. He gets away with it this time, but the most recent season put him on a trajectory toward a very serious collision of the two aspects of his character. Each incident on this trajectory reveals the conflict between conflicting drives as dangerous and impossible to reconcile.
Dexter operates in a context where masculinity has reconfigured itself under neoliberalism. He pathetically tries to make himself believe that his contradictions can be reconciled in happiness, even as the evidence of his failure to reconcile his fractured desires mounts around him. He accidentally murders an innocent man, a violation of his code. His attempt to execute a serial killer fails and his wife is murdered. Season Four ends with Dexter seeing his infant son sitting in a pool of the murdered wife’s blood, an event eerily similar to Dexter’s own childhood witnessing of his mother’s murder. This event signals that the problems in Dexter’s attempt to become a model of bourgeois masculinity have just been brutally passed to another generation through the results of his own miscalculations. His attempts to deal with his inner passenger and to use that passenger for constructive murder (of unconvicted killers) have failed.
Dexter maintains a secret life hidden beneath a convincing surface persona. He works hard to deny that he is connected to society through relations with family and friends. He works hard to discipline himself into a bourgeois worker. He does not succeed in this, but nevertheless this represents an attempt at neoliberal masculinity. This requires putting family, lovers, wives, and friends at a distance. He is not quite successful at that; as certain moments in the show reveal their slippage, and the emotional and spiritual costs of conformism and self-discipline cause fractures that eventually destroy the family relations they constructed.
The Serial Killer, His Wife, and His Sister
Dexter enacts neoliberal gender construction in several ways. Most slyly, Dexter represents an extreme version of neoliberal privatization of public services, as he often disposes of killers that the Miami Police Department fails to catch. I find this aspect of the show quite amusing, almost as if the writers were winking at the audience about the current trend to privatize city services. Dexter is also a self-created persona, produced through the type of neoliberal individualized self-discipline.
More importantly, Dexter’s relationships with women highlight neoliberal strategies that create space for feminism while denying its relevance. Dexter is perhaps the most complicated text I discuss; despite the series’ attempts to undercut female characters, Lt. Maria LaGuerta, Dexter’s commander, and Det. Debra Morgan, Dexter’s stepsister, possess deep complexity that resists marginalization.
Debra Morgan begins the series as a vice cop but works her way up to homicide detective. She embodies a certain type of tough female cop, having a very foul mouth, excellent firearm skills, and an athletic build that she works hard to maintain. She makes mistakes, however, and a running joke is Deb’s poor boyfriend choices. The worst of these mistakes occurs when she dates the man who turns out to be the Ice Truck Killer, one of the show’s luridly named villains. She manifests great strength in her recovery from her lover’s attempt to murder her, struggles through post-traumatic stress syndrome, and demonstrates intelligence, determination, and courage on the job. Debra wants Dexter to “be a brother” and she works to enhance their closeness. The sociopathic part of Dexter sees this as a burden placed upon him by bourgeois family ideals. He draws upon Harry’s code to deal with it, talking himself through family encounters so he can seem normal. He continually denies an attachment to Debra but his actions undermine the truth of these statements.
Dexter’s relationship with his girlfriend, later wife, Rita is where the neoliberal gender formations coalesce most strongly. Rita is a rape victim whose initial value to Dexter is as a cover for his inability to care for others. Her lack of interest in sex suits him as well. He avoids sexual intimacy because he fears that he cannot hide his true self during sexual intercourse. Dexter plays the devoted, sensitive man to perfection, telling Rita to take her time to heal. This display makes Rita fall deeply in love with him, and their relationship progresses to marriage and a baby. Deb and Rita allow Dexter to role-play an enlightened man, someone who has apparently internalized certain, though not all, feminist values, and lets him give minimal emotional involvement to them until some crisis strikes.
Dexter’s emotions emerge when Rita and Deb are threatened. When Dexter’s sociopathic lover tries to kill Rita and the children. Dexter finds himself driven to protect them by killing her. Dexter also steps in to murder the Ice Truck Killer who turns out to be his long-lost biological brother, when he tries to kill Deb. Dexter refuses his brother’s offer of a relationship based upon their shared love of killing. Instead, he goes after him to keep him from murdering Deb.
Dexter’s core relational emotions come into play only when a woman he cares for is threatened. This is not necessarily a result of his sensitivity but of the character’s reversion to the generic masculine behavior. Dexter is most real when he is killing; that is his true self, as he claims in his voice-overs.
Dexter’s camouflaged serial killer is an ambiguous but intriguing site for a critique of masculinity. His character could be read as a critique of feminization of men, that is, that of the ways society forces the raw, tempestuous, testosterone-filled male to a docile role of emasculated husband and father. Or it can be read as a more feminist critique of the unwillingness of males to domesticate themselves as they become adults. Scenes in which Rita demands sexual attention and help with the baby can support these readings. However, audience sympathies lie with Dexter. His point of view is paramount to this series, and the audience has privileged access to his memories, his visions of his dead father, and his internal dialogue. We literally watch and hear Dexter’s self-discipline in action during those scenes. We get that with no other character. Dexter also has the best lines, a type of mordant social commentary that provides much of the show’s appeal.
We see Rita from his point of view, and the actor playing her (Julie Benz) has numerous scenes of exaggerated wifely concern and annoying maternal playfulness. She drives a post-concussion Dexter to work, singing “Karma Chameleon” to the baby in the backseat while shaking a little feathered toy to get his attention. She also shakes the toy in Dexter’s face and sings to him. Dexter keeps up a smiling response until the second Rita turns away. Then his facial expression shifts into one of scary annoyance. Before another workday morning drive, Rita tells Dexter, she has Bananarama’s greatest hits. Dexter in voice-over puns that “It’s going to be a cruel summer.”21
Dexter’s violence is horrifying, but within the textual system, justifiable and even enjoyable to the audience. The series positions Dexter as an attractive protagonist, whom the audience does not want to get caught; regardless of how many victims he dumps into the ocean. We know that he only kills criminals, and we are complicit in the vigilantism of the show. The series cleverly makes the audience approve of a private citizen taking justice into his own hands to serve his personal demons.
Dexter also presents the figure of neoliberal personal responsibility. He alone must strive to maintain his façade; deal with the criminals society cannot catch, and protect “his” women. Cultural institutions exist all around him but Dexter alone bears the responsibility for helping himself (under his own twisted understanding, that is).
Globalism
Star Trek is a global text in several senses: its political economy points toward a film constructed as a revival of a franchise that had never been global. The Enterprise crew is marked and marketed as a revival of a historic group icon of utopian diversity. To be truly diverse, Paramount Studios, the producer of Star Trek and the owner of the rights to the television series and earlier movies, would have to shift this representation closer to contemporary notions of diversity. The anodyne representations of gender and race and the elision of class in this film are subsumed under a visual rhetoric of intergalactic togetherness that largely lacks true diversity. The film lacks Hispanics, blacks, whether diasporic or indigenous African; in fact, there is an almost complete absence of Earth citizens from the southern hemisphere and women in key narrative positions. The film chose the galactic over the global!
This substitution of limited, spurious diversity for an open, heterogeneous reimagining suggests a paradigmatic neoliberal strategy of suppressing issues of race and gender across national boundaries. The Federation’s open society is rather confined and does not seem particularly utopian. But this is Star Trek’s primary strategy: the future is so bright that issues of difference are irrelevant. Star Trek makes a claim to globalism through the substitution of fictional off-world races, notably Vulcans. Other off-world peoples appear in the film in nonspeaking roles—can there be a subaltern extra-terrestrial? However, it must be noted that this film did not do well overseas, indicating that its appeal to utopianism works better in the U.S. where we like our globalism diluted and ethnocentric.
The weak appearance of global culture and diversity can be tied to the need to hit the foreign markets, a strategy that also rationalizes the film’s action-adventure template. Star Trek films have never performed well outside the United States, except for Germany, and the films have a reputation for being dialogue heavy and short on action. The philosophical and literary references used in earlier Star Trek films, themselves largely pulled from Western history, are absent. Uniformly young, attractive actors play the leads, in the hope of pulling in a younger demographic. Despite these changes in format, the film did not do well enough overseas to put Star Trek into the $500 million dollar box office, or “superhit” category.22 These changes in strategy are typical of the franchise’s management. Eileen Meehan has studied the political economy of this franchise in depth. She notes that Star Trek films from the very first were a series of bad decisions aimed at franchise protection rather than quality filmmaking,23 and the lack of subtext in this film continues that institutional history.
Diversionary Tactics
Star Trek has a long history of a claim to utopianism. However, NuTrek uses off-world aliens as a way to paper over its lack of real diversity and construct a sham global utopianism in an organization whose leadership seems almost exclusively male and largely white. Social class is never alluded to, although there are clearly technocrats, bureaucrats, and laborers in this future society. The film shows us a working class in the spaceship yard in Iowa, and hints at a divide between elites and nonelites, setting an early scene of a pre-Starfleet Kirk and Uhura in a bar near this shipyard. This silence is in keeping with a neoliberal product; there is no society, class doesn’t matter, and there is nothing but the individual. This silence on class is an important part of the neoliberal narrative.
The film takes place largely on the iconic starship Enterprise, a fitting locale because neoliberalization deploys the language of freedom and free enterprise. As the “flagship” of the Federation fleet, the name also symbolizes unvoiced imperial ambitions, which contradict the film’s overt declaration that Starfleet is a “humanitarian and peacekeeping force.” A type of complacency hovers over the Star Trek universe; no one ever questions their mission or their right to “boldly go where no man [changed to no one] has gone before.” This tagline eerily recalls Earth empires, which looked upon the continents they found in their voyages as unclaimed, empty new worlds. Within this highly charged symbolic setting, an individualized male melodrama occurs that suppresses consideration of the political culture of the Federation, or Starfleet. It is a narrative that features an accomplished woman officer but one whose presence alone appears as a signifier that feminism has accomplished its goals.
The ideology of neoliberal capitalism operates through such diversionary tactics, and the cultural products produced under neoliberalism narrativize these operations in ways that seem natural. This is of course, classic ideology as distinct from discourse, which is a problematic frame for analysis of these issues. Theresa Ebert notes, “Discourse blurs the hierarchies of power, we cannot distinguish the powerful from the powerless, the exploiting from the exploited. It represents the social in such a way that all persons are at the same time powerful and powerless, exploiting and exploited, a social in which the privileges of the upper class are mystified”.24
Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates the internal contradictions of a neoliberal ideology of masculinity constructed through a social narrative. The ways in which gender is contested under neoliberalism cannot be easily summarized, but this chapter maps the more evident stress points: individualism, reciprocity, and exceptionalism. Whereas Kirk, the less-developed character discussed here, provides an example of the neoliberal corporate man who never questions the organization or its goals, and who is determined to succeed quickly on his own and at any cost, Dexter is a more complicated figure. His secret life speaks to a “lone-wolf” status, a romantic trope he uses to describe himself. He has a highly elaborated façade created through neoliberal-type internalized self-discipline. This surface conceals crimes and ethical transgressions of identity theft, adultery, and murder. He considers himself solely responsible for creating a self in line with hegemonic value systems, live a detached life as an observer and imitator of cultural behavior. Dexter remakes himself constantly to appear in the mold of hegemonic masculinity, and suffers emotional stress, fear, and anger because of the pressure of maintaining this image. By revealing the fissures imposed on his life through the constraints of neoliberal masculinity, this text offers at least a mild critique of neoliberal ideology, and demonstrates the costs of living in the twenty-first-century neoliberal world.
Notes
1 Harvey, 2005, p. 47.
2 Sender, 2006, p. 135.
3 Arnot, David, and Weiner, 1999, p. 51.
4 McRobbie, 2009, p. 412.
5 Ibid.
6 Apple, 2001, p. 115.
7 Although the original series did not feature women in command of Starfleet ships, an episode of season 3, “The Enterprise Incident” (9/27/1968) featured a Romulan starship captain, Liviana Charvanek (Joanne Linville). In the final (to date) Star Trek television series, the prequel Enterprise, this prohibition of women captains was eliminated and the series featured the aforementioned Captain Hernandez of the starship Columbia in two episodes in 2005 and 2006.
8 In “Space Seed,” the Enterprise discovers a twentieth-century genetically enhanced crew of supermen and women in suspended animation aboard their old spaceship, including the murderous dictator Khan. The Enterprise’s historian, Lt. Marla McGivers, falls for Khan and collaborates with him to take over the Enterprise. “Who Mourns for Adonais?” features a lieutenant identified only as “Carolyn” who falls in love with the god Apollo, whom the Enterprise crew discovers during an away mission. She temporarily “forgets her duty” and sides with Apollo in the struggle between Kirk and the Olympian.
9 Tyler Perry appears in two brief scenes, and a few black crewmen work aboard the Enterprise.
10 McRobbie, 2009, p. 412.
11 Ibid.
12 Sender, 2006, p. 146.
13 Beck, 1991.
14 McRobbie, 2009, pp. 417– 418.
15 Anonymous comment, September 5, 2010, on “Star Trek character Uhura,” TrekBBS.
16 Ebert 4.
17 Tudor, 1997, p. 138.
18 Gramsci, 1971, p. 335.
19 Battlestar Galactica recast a prominent “playboy” character, Starbuck, as a woman played by Katee Sackhoff. Boomer, originally a black man, became an Asian woman who was a secret Cylon, and Hispanic actor Edward James Olmos played Commander Adama this time. The one curious lapse in the picture of diversity in this series was its minimal casting of blacks. One bridge officer, Dualla, and one Cylon, Simon, were the most prominent black characters in the series.
20 Cadillac also used this advertising tagline in the 1980s. The recirculation of it here only emphasizes the studio’s view of the Star Trek movie, and the franchise, as a branded product; they capitalize on the brand while promoting its difference for a new generation of spectators.
21 “Cruel Summer” is the name of a Bananarama song as well as a comment on the circumstances.
22 Pascale, 2009. http://trekmovie.com/2009/10/05/star-trek-finishes-theatrical-run-with-385m-full-boxoffice-analysis/
23 Meehan, 2009.
24 Ebert 8.
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