Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction
Jes Battis
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 184511342X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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histories for white western spectators. ‘What is wrong with you people?’2 John demands in the premiere episode of the show, just before he is knocked unconscious by an alien with a venomous tongue. That alien is D’Argo, a tentacled, tattooed, ill-tempered Luxan warrior, who—eventually—becomes John’s closest friend. But before this friendship emerges, and before Moya’s mismatched crew of prisoners and political exiles begin to bond with each other, John’s question remains quite appropriate. What
background—loving parents, middle-class suburbia, and the cultural flexibility necessary to do whatever he wants—then Scorpius represents the antithesis of that life. He reminds us in the episode ‘Incubator’ (3.11) that ‘my first memory . . . was pain,’ and goes on to describe how his experience growing up under Scarran oppression was a nightmare of physical and psychological torture.13 The more pressure Scorpius puts on John, the closer he pursues him, the more he is forcing John to re-live
‘man’ to D’Argo, then ‘man’ as a discursive category, and as a sexed reality, becomes a much more flexible signifier to be shared among humans and aliens. These evolving relationships force us to ask, not simply what kind of ‘man’ D’Argo is, but what kind of Luxan John is, or what kind of human Scorpius is. What does it mean to ask what kind of Luxan John is? It means the same thing as asking what kind of a man D’Argo is. Although ‘male’ and ‘female’ as gendered and sexed categories seem to
included) have evinced any sort of interest in writing on fantasy/SF literatures and cultures. In fact, most of the innovative scholarly writing on fantasy and gender to emerge within the past few years has been focused on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose genre-crossing elements make it a likely target for interdisciplinary analysis. Critics have, since the 1970s, written sporadically on gender and SF, concentrating mostly on the work of canonical ‘gender utopia/dystopia’ authors like Ursula K. Le
valuable literature that applies to all genders, all sexualities, rather than an illicit backroom pleasure that only ‘those’ people (read: working class) talk about or enjoy. farscape 07-ch5.fm Page 119 Tuesday, January 30, 2007 5:01 PM ‘Point it Like a Gun and Shoot’ ~ 119 Linda Williams describes this as the shift from obscene to on/scene, which ‘marks both the controversy and scandal of the increasingly public representations of diverse forms of sexuality and the fact that they have become