Between the extremes of the dystopian and utopian cyborg myths that I explained in the previous chapter, fan fiction in the late 1990s suggested a third fantasy, one of a loving union between a human female and a cyborg female. One of the most popular character pairings in fan fiction from this period was the “femslash” (female/female) pairing of Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway, a human, and Seven of Nine, who was born human but is, in the timeframe of the series, a de-assimilated Borg drone that retains some Borg characteristics (nanoprobes and various cybernetic implants); Seven, as she is called, is permanently part machine. Janeway/Seven stories are about a romantic and/or sexual relationship between an middle-aged woman and a twenty-something cyborg, and many Janeway/Seven fics from the late ’90s are of the “first-time” genre, in which Janeway and Seven have their first sexual encounter and Janeway must teach Seven about human communication and emotional and physical intimacy. Janeway helps Seven understand how to express her own desires and guides Seven in how to be sensitive and responsive to Janeway’s desires.
Janeway/Seven fics are about two different generations of powerful females coming together, the older woman drawing on her leadership abilities and years of experience to mentor, teach, coach, and nurture the younger woman, while the younger one is able to excite and arouse the older woman’s interest—in every possible way—with her machine-enhanced strength, intellect, and self-assuredness.
I argue that one reason for the popularity of Janeway/Seven femslash fan fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century was Janeway/Seven’s usefulness as an analogue for the reconciliation of print fandom and Net fandom after 1998. While one might readily agree with oral history participant Morgan Dawn (2012) that after 1998, “literally everybody was overrun by the Internet,” and can easily interpret the history of fandom as being completely dominated by net fans beginning in the late 1990s, the surge in fannish interest in Janeway/Seven, following Seven of Nine’s 1998 introduction on Star Trek: Voyager, inspires me to read what occurred in fandom at the turn of the millennium differently.
Janeway/Seven fic is about “crossing the line”: the generational line and the technological line. In the diegesis of Star Trek: Voyager, Janeway and Seven not only differ in age, they also occupy different places on the human–machine spectrum (Janeway is a human who is proficient at using technology, but who wars against the Borg that seek to wholly assimilate humankind; Seven was assimilated by the Borg at age six, and after Janeway effectively severs her connection to the Borg collective, Seven must learn to exist as a human–machine hybrid). Janeway/Seven fic, then, is concerned with the question of how two such different women can join together.
Most J/7 (as Janeway/Seven is often abbreviated) fic begins with the premise that the two women want one another—their felt need to join is not in question. But how the two can bridge their differences, and create unity out of apparent disparity, is at issue. Although I am sure some J/7 fanfic includes descriptions of the techno-erotics of a human woman coupling with a cyborg woman, it is not the mechanics, so to speak, of J/7 sex that seems to interest most J/7 authors; rather, the main question at the heart of many J/7 stories is how the two females manage to connect with one another despite each being deeply intimidated by the other. In other words, the coming-together of two extremely powerful women, who mutually desire, respect, and even fear one another, drives much J/7 storytelling. Here is an excerpt from a 1998 J/7 fic, “Just Between Us” by G. L. Dartt, which was the first of a fifty-story series, one of the most highly recommended bodies of work in the J/7 fanfic corpus.1 In this scene, Janeway and Seven are on the brink of their first sexual encounter, Seven lying naked on Janeway’s bed:
Oh my, Janeway considered as she slipped the robe from her shoulders, letting it drop to the floor. This might be more difficult than she had originally thought. Somehow, in her fantasies, everything had been rose petals and soft touches, straightforward with an instinctive knowledge of what to do. No hesitation, no confusion and certainly not the six foot reality of powerful Borg in full, splendidly healthy womanhood. It occurred to her suddenly that there might be a certain amount of logistics to this. … She’ll expect a lot more than any man would, you know. …
Seven of Nine watched as Janeway slid onto the bed beside her. … It was hard for her to think clearly. She wondered if there were something wrong with her implants, a feedback loop perhaps. She was also confused by how swiftly and easily Janeway had taken complete command of the situation, and now Seven found that she could only follow the older woman’s lead. (Dartt 1998)
In this scene, Janeway and Seven appear equally uncertain of themselves. Each is simultaneously impressed and daunted by the other’s confidence. Janeway is awed by the alluring hybrid female before her, as indicated by Janeway’s (mental) description of Seven: “the six foot reality of powerful Borg in full, splendidly healthy womanhood” (the combination of “Borg” and “full womanhood” seems to double Seven’s appeal to Janeway, rather than making Janeway uneasy at the uncanniness of a cyborg body). Seven is more than a woman, being part machine, and therefore, Janeway predicts, Seven will expect “more than any man would.” Seven is literally a superhuman being, a more-than-human cyborg, and Janeway infers that this means that Seven will place superhuman demands on Janeway as a lover, as a partner. For her part, Seven is stunned—unable to “think clearly,” “confused,” wondering if there is a technical failing in her Borg neural implants—by Janeway’s quickly “taking complete command” of their lovemaking session, such that Seven can “only follow the older woman’s lead.” Janeway is the commanding officer of the Voyager, so Seven may be intimidated by Janeway’s standing and authority as much as by anything that Janeway does as a lover, but Janeway’s innate leadership skills are such that she may be asserting them just as strongly in her bed as she does on the bridge of her ship.
In my reading, Janeway is an incarnation, in the figure of a single character, of print fandom, while Seven represents Net fandom. Print fandom in the ’90s was made up of an older generation of female fans, women who regarded the Internet as a supplement to embodied fannish practices and print-based fannish objects, but not as a primary or central site and medium of fannish communication and publishing. Janeway can be seen as a highly positive symbol of print fandom, as her accumulated years of experience, her willingness to use advanced technologies combined with a firm resistance to being incorporated by a networked collective, and her history of command are all portrayed as strengths, for both herself and her crew, in both the television series and in fan fiction based on that series.
Net fandom in the ’90s had younger female fans as members, women who regarded the Internet as the core arena of fannish being and doing, women who readily “merged” with networking technologies and did not necessarily regard in-person or print fandom as more special or more important than Internet fandom. Seven positively represents this group in her advanced technical knowledge and her sophisticated capacity to interface with, and manipulate, complex machine-based systems, her supreme air of self-confidence (arising from her youthful beauty in addition to her technological skills), and in her ability to repeatedly demonstrate to the noncyborg crew members of Voyager the advantages of being “half-digital.” The pairing of Janeway/Seven therefore is a fantasy about print fandom and Net fandom joining and combining, not exactly easily, but in a way that brings pleasure and excitement to both parties. In both the text of Voyager and the “Just Between Us” fan story, Janeway is impressed with Seven’s more-than-humanness, but is not afraid to lead and teach the younger cyborg; Seven is overwhelmed by Janeway’s surety and authority, but that does not stop her from being assertive, forthright, and direct with Janeway in their ordinary communications and in their lovemaking.
Understanding Janeway as an incarnation of print fandom and Seven as a stand-in for Net fandom, we can read Janeway/Seven fanfics as expressive of a strong wish in late-1990s fandom that print fans and Net fans, older female fans and younger female fans, will respect and learn from one another’s skills and abilities, each one bringing their own unique attitudes toward human/machine identities and practices to their relationship. This female and queer bond between Janeway and Seven is a romanticization of the possible unity among different categories of female and queer fans, which has the potential to deliver to women fans “more than any man would,” or, at least, something very different than any man can: the continuity, the perpetuation, of a female and queer tradition across generations, even as new media radically alter how that tradition is routinely performed.
Janeway/Seven fic reframes “print fandom versus net fandom” as “print fandom/net fandom,” the slash, as always in fandom, signifying pairing, partnership, eroticism, longing, lust. Janeway loving Seven is a fantasy of print fans loving Net fans for their easy relationship with the technical, their understanding of the human–technological relation as fluid and dynamic and not as a strict opposition; this love of Net fans can overlook or forgive Net fans’ impoliteness (most Voyager crewmembers find Seven to be quite rude), brashness, and occasional disdain for the “purely” human. Seven loving Janeway is a fantasy of Net fans loving print fans for their maturity, their experience, their authoritative knowledge, and their passionate defense of human being and human doing, despite print fans’ inability to fully understand the benefits of human–technical hybridity, and their stubborn prioritization of all things human over anything cyborg. To my thinking, Janeway/Seven fic rose to popularity in the late 1990s because fans wanted reassurance that print fandom and Net fandom were uniting of their own volition, motivated by mutual admiration and desire, rather than because the Internet “assimilated” all of fandom into its totalizing collective.
In the Voyager series, though Janeway and Seven’s relationship never takes an explicitly sexual turn, the two characters develop a warm friendship and deep trust. Janeway and Seven’s bond may have stood for a rapprochement between those who resisted the invasion of everyday life by digital technologies, and those who welcomed the wave of new media, for many of Voyager’s viewers in the late ’90s and early ’00s, not only for fanfic writers and readers. But, however close Janeway and Seven became in the series and in fan fiction, they remained complete opposites in one respect: their preferences with regard to practices of cultural memory. On Voyager, Janeway’s memory modes are embodied. She verbally narrates her “Captain’s Log,” presumably recording entries regularly (the viewer hears excerpts from Janeway’s log as the framing narration of each episode), and on one memorable occasion, at the close of episode 4.01, in which Voyager tangles with both the Borg and another highly technologically advanced race, Janeway opts to situate herself in a holodeck simulation of Renaissance-era Italy, and to handwrite her log entry with an inked quill on parchment paper, by candlelight. When her First Officer finds her in the holodeck, hunched over a fifteenth-century desk, he remarks that she is writing her log “the old-fashioned way.” Janeway explains, “I wanted to get as far away from bio-implants and fluidic space and … and this feels more human, somehow.” Janeway, like print fans, thinks of memory as an embodied practice (her logs are either spoken aloud or handwritten). For Janeway, the physical performance of record-keeping is a reinforcement of human culture, and a refusal of machine culture.
Seven, on the other hand, relates to memory very differently than Janeway. Seven is proud of the fact that all the memories of her early life have been uploaded to, and stored in, the Borg’s cloud-like shared memory, and that therefore a part of her will live forever. She frequently shows that she possesses a remarkably wide-ranging, detailed, digitally enhanced, eidetic memory—she can access all of the Borg’s knowledge that she “downloaded” before she was disconnected from the collective, and she informs her fellow crewmates that she “requires only seconds to commit what I see to memory” (episode 4.20). Seven’s interest in her own past, and in the past of Earth and of Starfleet, is selective. She understands that voluminous records are stored in Voyager’s central computer, but she does not delve into them as deeply or as often as she is advised to. For example, when Janeway discovers some data on Seven’s birth parents, and suggests that Seven scan the information, Seven replies that she “may do that someday” (episode 4.06); in another episode, when Seven is asked if she is familiar with the Earth event known as World War II, Seven answers that she “knows nothing” about it (episode 4.18).
Seven, like Net fans, assumes that any and all cultural memory will be available to her when she requires it, and thus she is not overly concerned with making an effort to record new memories or to recover older memories. Seven, the cyborg, seems to absolutely trust that the complex technological structures that have always surrounded and supported her—the Borg collective, Voyager’s intranet, and her own neural implants—are constantly, consistently, keeping perfect records of everything that she, the human race, and many other species have experienced. For this reason, she takes an almost casual approach to cultural memory, not valuing it very highly, and only utilizing archives when she has a pressing need, rather than to learn about any traditions that preceded her. In the matter of cultural memory, then, Seven is an excellent representative of the fan who relies entirely on digital cultural memory, trusting that its infrastructure can be relied upon to fill in any gaps, whenever necessary.