113 research outputs found

    “Resistance is futile.” Or is it?:the characterization of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation

    Get PDF
    Abstract. This study analyzes how the Borg are characterized and depicted and how this characterization develops in the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994). The focus of this study is not to cover the entirety of this series, but instead focus on a few episodes relevant to the study. Furthermore, the study focuses also on what kind of different themes are represented and reflected with the depiction and characterization of the Borg and how these occur. The Borg are an alien, cybernetic humanoid species, typically depicted as antagonists in the Star Trek world. The Borg are also typically depicted as machine-like automatons, linked into a hive mind that is shared within their entire Borg Collective. Therefore, they are typically represented as lacking a sense of individuality. The methodology applied in the study for analyzing the characters and their actions is functional semiotic approach, which is a character-based approach to film and TV analysis. Comprehension of the characters and their interaction with each other are considered to be one of the most important elements in the narrative comprehension and interpretation. Functional semiotic approach can also be used to apply a delicate framework for analyzing the relationships between the characters. The study also adopts the notion of the theory of de-villainization, which includes the concepts of geopolitics and empathic reading. These are used to complement the theoretical framework for the analysis. The process of de-villainization blurs the line between the threshold of a protagonist and an antagonist. Empathic reading requires the understanding of the historical context surrounding a villainized group or population. In the concept of geopolitics, the role of an individual representative of an antagonized group is considered to be of significant importance in how outsiders perceive them. This study suggests that the Borg are first depicted as a nearly indestructible, dangerous threat to humans and other cultures in the world of Star Trek, as they assimilate other species into their collective. However, the Borg are later humanized and depicted in a more ambiguous manner. Eventually, an individual Borg character, Hugh, is even portrayed as a protagonist in the episode “I Borg.” This is done with the characterization of Hugh after he is detached from the Borg Collective. Hugh begins to develop a sense of individuality and appreciation of it. Hugh is also depicted to be an outsider in his appearance in the episode “I Borg.” As an outsider, he questions the actions and behavior of the human characters. This is used to reflect an optimistic view of humanity and traditional humanistic values that are typically seen in a positive light, such as forgiveness, individuality and empathy. Star Trek has often reflected different contemporary and relevant social issues and humanistic values, and this TV series aims to convey these issues and values to the viewer in the characterization of Hugh.TiivistelmĂ€. TĂ€mĂ€ pro gradu -tutkielma analysoi, kuinka Borg-nimisten hahmojen hahmon kuvaus toteutetaan ja esitetÀÀn ja kuinka tĂ€mĂ€ hahmon kuvaus kehittyy scifi-televisiosarjassa Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994). Tutkimuksen tarkoitus ei ole kattaa Borgien esiintymistĂ€ koko sarjassa, vaan sen sijaan keskittyĂ€ muutamaan tutkimukselle relevanttiin jaksoon. Tutkimus keskittyy lisĂ€ksi siihen, minkĂ€laisia teemoja Borgien esittĂ€misellĂ€ ja hahmon kuvauksella ilmaistaan ja heijastetaan, sekĂ€ kuinka nĂ€mĂ€ tulevat esille. Borgit ovat maapallon ulkopuolinen, teknologialla vahvistettu, kyberneettinen ihmismĂ€inen laji, jotka esitetÀÀn tyypillisesti antagonisteina Star Trekin maailmassa. Borgit esitetÀÀn tyypillisesti myös konemaisina, robotteja muistuttavina olentoina, jotka ovat yhteydessĂ€ toisiinsa jaetussa tajunnassa ja kollektiivissa. SiitĂ€ syystĂ€ Borgeilta tyypillisesti puuttuu yksilöllisyyden taju. Tutkimuksessa kĂ€ytetty metodologia hahmojen analyysiin ja heidĂ€n toimimiseensa on toiminnallinen semioottinen lĂ€hestymistapa, joka on hahmopohjainen lĂ€hestymistapa elokuva- ja TV analyysiin. Hahmojen ja heidĂ€n keskinĂ€isen vuorovaikutuksensa ymmĂ€rtĂ€mistĂ€ pidetÀÀn yhtenĂ€ tĂ€rkeimmistĂ€ elementeistĂ€ narratiivisessa ymmĂ€rryksessĂ€ ja tulkinnassa. Toiminnallista semioottista lĂ€hestymistapaa voidaan kĂ€yttÀÀ myös tarkan kehyksen luomiseen hahmojen keskinĂ€isten suhteiden analysoinnissa. Tutkimus kĂ€yttÀÀ myös antagonistien inhimillistĂ€misen teoriaa, johon sisĂ€ltyy geopolitiikan ja empaattisen lukemisen kĂ€sitteet. NĂ€itĂ€ kĂ€ytetÀÀn tĂ€ydentĂ€vĂ€nĂ€ teoreettisena kehyksenĂ€ tutkimuksen analyysissĂ€. Antagonistin inhimillistĂ€mistĂ€ voidaan kĂ€yttÀÀ protagonistin ja antagonistin rajan sumentamiseen. Empaattinen tulkinta vaatii historiallisen kontekstin ymmĂ€rtĂ€mistĂ€ koskien ryhmÀÀ tai populaatiota, jotka tyypillisesti nĂ€hdÀÀn antagonisteina. Geopolitiikan kĂ€sitteessĂ€ nĂ€hdÀÀn, ettĂ€ yksittĂ€isellĂ€ edustajalla on merkittĂ€vĂ€ rooli siinĂ€, kuinka ulkopuoliset mieltĂ€vĂ€t ryhmĂ€n, joka tyypillisesti nĂ€hdÀÀn antagonisteina. Tutkimuksen analyysi osoittaa, ettĂ€ Borgit kuvataan ensin lĂ€hes tuhoutumattomana, vaarallisena uhkana ihmisille ja muille Star Trekin maailman kulttuureille, koska Borgit sulauttavat muita lajeja osaksi heidĂ€n kollektiiviaan. Borgit kuitenkin inhimillistetÀÀn ja esitetÀÀn myöhemmin monitulkinnaisella tavalla. YksittĂ€istĂ€ Borg-hahmoa esitetÀÀn jopa protagonistina jaksossa ”I Borg.” TĂ€mĂ€ toteutetaan Hugh-nimisen Borgin hahmon kuvauksella sen jĂ€lkeen, kun hĂ€n erkaantuu Borgien kollektiivista. TĂ€lle hahmolle alkaa kehittyĂ€ yksilöllisyyden tunne ja arvostus sitĂ€ kohtaan. Hugh kuvataan myös ulkopuolisena hahmona hĂ€nen esiintymisessÀÀn jaksossa ”I Borg.” Hugh kyseenalaistaa ulkopuolisena hahmona usein ihmishahmojen toimintaa ja kĂ€ytöstĂ€. TĂ€tĂ€ kĂ€ytetÀÀn sellaisten perinteisten humanististen arvojen heijastamiseen, mitkĂ€ nĂ€hdÀÀn tyypillisesti positiivisessa valossa, kuten anteeksiantaminen, yksilöllisyys ja empatia. Star Trek on usein heijastanut erilaisia aikakauden mukaisia ja relevantteja sosiaalisia ongelmia sekĂ€ humanistisia arvoja, ja tĂ€mĂ€ TV-sarja pyrkii ilmaisemaan nĂ€itĂ€ ongelmia ja arvoja katsojalle Hugh’n hahmon kuvauksella ja esittĂ€misellĂ€

    TALKING ABOUT CLONE CLUB: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF ORPHAN BLACK

    Get PDF
    Orphan Black is a television series rich with complex female clone characters and themes of surveillance and monster/monstrous feminine. I explore these two main themes through an analysis of the on-screen action in several characters’ story arcs. I am examining Orphan Black while revisiting Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and considering the genres of horror and science fiction. I argue that the representation of the clones destabilizes woman as Other in terms of female monstrosity, expands the cyborg metaphor, and contributes to the feminist analysis of science fiction

    Selves and Spaces in Science Fiction

    No full text
    This thesis proposes a critical framework by which science fiction can be read as an indicator of significant trends and debates in science and culture. It takes as its starting point Brian Aldiss's statement that science fiction's purpose is to articulate in fictional form a definition of humanity and its status in the universe that will stand in the light of science. Science fiction exists as a means by which scientific concepts are constructed as cultural interpretations, and as both have changed significantly over the period from the emergence of the genre in the mid nineteenth century through the twentieth century, analysis of science-fictional forms and practices can reveal the processes of their evolution. A critical framework is constructed based on Aldiss' definition, identifying first, a construction of selfhood and spatiality - physical and metaphysical - as being fundamental, and secondly, identifying the emergence and evolution of major 'Orders' that take different approaches to key issues and which engage with each other both antagonistically and creatively. The thesis begins with an investigation of the cultural construction of space and then covers the emergence of science fiction as it relates to the project to define humanity and its standing in the universe in a manner consistent with science. Three Orders and their emergence are then described according to their architectonic schemae and their epistemological and creative processes. The first is the Modernist Order, based on Cartesian spatiality and mind-body dualism and empirical scientific practice. The second, which emerged as an attempt to synthesise modern science with traditional culture, is the Neohumanist Order. The third, still very much in flux, is the Posthumanist Order, which is very much inspired both by postmodernism and cybernetics. The three following chapters deal with the Orders in turn, selecting exemplary texts from their emergent and developed (or developing) stages, suggesting also the points in the development of each where another Order has disengaged and emerged in its own right. Because science and culture evolve over time, examination of the Orders is intrinsically linked to a concept of science fiction as being an ongoing discourse, each selected text is interpreted as being a response to a particular issue at a particular cultural moment, but nonetheless connected to predecessor and successor texts that represent a line of argument pursued over time within and between Orders. The Orders are not hermetic by any means, and their most enlightening aspects can be their varying treatment of a common concept. The cyborg furnishes an excellent example, being treated differently by each of the Orders as it is an image of the integration of humanity and technology. Issues such as self, body, boundary, location, the other and communication are all represented in the cyborg and the next two chapters discuss the cyborg as treated by different Orders, in the first case, as a body and in the second case, as an inhabitant and creation of architectonics and culture. The conclusion then discusses the current state of affairs regarding the system of Orders as a critical method. It is shown that 'impure' texts that contain aspects of each of the Orders do not negate their usefulness, but rather demonstrate it as texts (and postmodern texts in particular) provide stages on which the Orders can be displayed engaging with each other

    Cyborgology and the limits of human and machine implosion

    Get PDF
    Introduction Anxiety accompanies human/machine intersections. This condition is, however, relatively new. Early work on machinic extensions of humans (men in particular) for space travel occurred at roughly the same time as other forms of technology, such as television, began to proliferate in everyday life. With the increasing rate of this proliferation, some might say invasion, of technology, it is now widely acknowledged the extent to which various forms of technology shape our worlds. At times, this anxiety takes a phobic turn, questioning the extent to which these technologies, as a whole, benefit human life on this planet: In our more reflexive moments, we are suspicious that the technological instruments intended to heal and bring us together - the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the fax machine, medical apparatus - are in truth driving us further apart. We fear that we are isolated bodies, plugged into technological toys and tools but divorced from the comforts of human proximity and touch. Even worse, the material products of technical-scientific reason have proliferated until they promise to transform the planet into a wasted metallic reflection of its misguided demigod. (Rushing and Frentz, 1995:13-14) Fear of isolation and environmental degradation and anxiousness about the possibility that an increased relationship with and/or reliance upon technology might mean that humans could not survive without machines; perhaps even that human and machine are becoming integrated at the expense of pure' humanness In short, the boundary between human and machine is becoming blurred, if not eradicated. (see document

    Drones, Clones, and Alpha Babes

    Get PDF
    The Star Trek franchise represents one of the most successful emanations of popular media in our culture. The number of books, both popular and scholarly, published on the subject of Star Trek is massive, with more and more titles printed every year. Very few, however, have looked at Star Trek in terms of the dialectics of humanism and the posthuman, the pervasiveness of advanced technology, and the complications of gender identity. In Drones, Clones and Alpha Babes, Diana Relke sheds light on how the Star Trek narratives influence and are influenced by shifting cultural values in the United States, using these as portals to the sociopolitical and sociocultural landscapes of the United States, pre- and post-9/11. From her Canadian perspective, Relke focuses on Star Trek's uniquely American version of liberal humanism, extends it into a broader analysis of ideological features, and avoids a completely positive or negative critique, choosing instead to honour the contradictions inherent in the complexity of the subject

    Pathologies of vision : representations of deviant women and the cyborg body

    Get PDF
    This thesis investigates the figure of the cyborg as conceptualised by Donna Haraway in The Cyborg Manifesto (1991). The figure of the cyborg, as a transgressive figure in the late twentieth century within socialist feminist discourse, is problematized with regard to its efficacy as a creature that challenges the constructed nature of gender and contests the boundary between human and machine through its ambiguous nature. Haraway’s notions of the cyborg, which she bases partly on cyborg characters from Science Fiction literature, deny the ocularcentric traditions that have structured gender and the body. Similarly, Haraway does not engage adequately with the figure of the cyborg with regard to situating it historically. This thesis unpacks both the visual and the historical aspects that have structured the cyborg body. By engaging with these concepts, the cyborg emerges as a figure that is identified through visual signifiers of female deviance and pathology. By reading female deviance and pathology on the body of the nineteenth-century hysteric, similarities can be drawn between the hysteric and the cyborg. Through a reading of Alien (1979); Blade Runner (1982); and Star Trek: First Contact (1996) key cyborg texts of the late twentieth century, the figure of the cyborg, and its relation to the deviant pathologised female can be understood when read against the body of the hysteric and how it was visually coded and communicate

    Cyborgs in Latin America

    Full text link
    Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity. The book takes a literary and cultural studies approach in examining narrative, film and advertising campaigns from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay by such artists as Ricardo Piglia, Edmundo Paz SoldĂĄn, Carmen Boullosa and Alberto Fuguet among others. Using and criticizing theoretical models developed by Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the book will appeal to specialists and students of Latin American Studies; Posthuman Theory; and Literature, Science and Technology Studies

    Technofetishism of posthuman bodies: representations of cyborgs, ghosts, and monsters in contemporary Japanese science fiction film and animation

    Get PDF
    The thesis uses a feminist approach to explore the representation of the cyborg in Japanese film and animation in relation to gender, the body, and national identity. Whereas the figure of the cyborg is predominantly pervasive in cinematic science fiction, the Japanese popular imagination of cyborgs not only crosses cinematic genre boundaries between monster, disaster, horror, science fiction, and fantasy but also crosses over to the medium of animation. In regard to the academic research on Japanese cinema and animation, there is a serious gap in articulating concepts such as live-action film, animation, gender, and the cyborg. This thesis, therefore, intends to fill the gap by investigating the gendered cyborg through a feminist lens to understand the interplay between gender, the body and the cyborg within historical-social contexts. Consequently, the questions proposed below are the starting point to reassess the relationship between Japanese cinema, animation, and the cyborg. How has Japanese popular culture been obsessed with the figure of the cyborg? What is the relationship between Japanese live-action film and Japanese animation in terms of the popular imagination of the cyborg? In particular, how might we discuss the representation of the cyborg in relation to the concept of national identity and the associated ideology of “Japaneseness”, within the framework of Donna Haraway’s influential cyborg theory and feminist theory? The questions are addressed in the four sections of the thesis to explore the representation of the gendered cyborg. First, I outline the concept of the cyborg as it has been developed in relation to notions of gender and the ‘cyborg’ in Western theory. Secondly, I explore the issues in theorising the science fiction genre in Japanese cinema and animation and then address the problem of defining science fiction in relation to the phenomenon of the cyborg’s genre-crossing. Finally, I provide a contextualising discussion of gender politics and gender roles in Japan in order to justify my use of Western feminist theory as well as discuss the strengths and limitations of such an approach before moving, in the remainder of the thesis, to an examination of a number of case studies drawn from Japanese cinema and animation

    Gothic economies: Global capitalism and the boundaries of identity

    Get PDF
    Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens\u27 depictions of industrial London characterize it as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and social demons; the monster in Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of science and technology. Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula, perhaps the most effective global narrative to come out of the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment atavism onto the turn-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of the postmodern technopolis---the fiction of William Gibson, for example---has continued to borrow Gothic motifs and devices. This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism and the modern metropolis---representations based in the anxieties and desires that accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time, Gothic allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation from feudal constraints. Much 19th and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city---the site of economic, political and cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror---a set of mixed emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a bourgeois utopia ---a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the utopia always harbors the potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected in the process of creating modernity
    • 

    corecore