[re-enactment]
(The video above is what I actually presented at the event. The text below is slightly different/longer.)
(eta: I adapted/expanded this essay for Media in Transition 5, and published it in FlowTV)
Hera Has Six Mommies (A Transmedia Love Story): Orphan Television and Lesbian Spectacles
(illustrations)
Being in a room with Mary McDonnell feels about as dazzlingly improbable to me as stepping into a sci-fi plot. This is to say, her presence here today is a perfectly vertiginous example of cult television's signature allure: the romance it mediates between a show and its audience. Programs like Battlestar Galactica promise fans that, if our devotion is strong enough, it can penetrate the dimensional barrier of the TV screen, allowing us to reach (sci-fi fashion) through the glass and bring our reality into contact with a parallel universe. Love is cult TV's reproductive technology, because it is only by inspiring our passion across this gap that it succeeds economically, spawns the serials, franchises and spinoffs that are its forms of self-perpetuation. On Battlestar Galactica, love is also the Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and, I quote, "the shape of things to come." Cult TV is likewise "the shape of things to come," as television at large is increasingly embracing its strategies for generating fan desire: complex and fragmentary worlds that demand creative engagement to fill in their blanks; discontinuous storytelling that bridges time, space, and media formats. Television is learning that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.
Like fan desire, the Cylon version threatens the sanctioned boundaries of information. The Cylon body is a medium, able to communicate with other machines through touch. For the sake of survival, the Colonial Fleet forbids computer networks because they're vulnerable to Cylon hacks and viruses. For the sake of their show's survival, on the contrary, Battlestar Galactica's Powers That Be welcome fandom's hive mind into their textual networks. One of the franchise's innovations is to make the process of TV production itself available as content, offering a smorgasbord of excess onscreen and behind-the-scenes material on its official web site. TV form has always been characterized by diffusion, collaboration, and contingency, but rarely has it marketed and propagated these qualities so openly, endlessly recycling and reworking the show's text and putting the show's metatext in intercourse with fans. These open networks, like the Fleet's computers, are vulnerable to media technologies. I'd like to introduce you to one such apparatus from the fan's toolkit: the girlslash goggles [put them on]. This is, of course, a dramatization; you don't actually need enormous pink sunglass to engage this specular technology, and I invite you all to put on your own imaginary pair now. But first, let me explain what girlslash goggles do: they enable you to see lesbian desire where it might otherwise be invisible (there's a corresponding male version, boyslash goggles, that you may wish to test drive on your own). Now that we're properly equipped, I can tell you a love story about how six women (three human, three Cylon) made adoptive families for Hera into and out of their passion for each other, and about how some fans (myself included) craved these families enough to breach the TV screen to find them.
Girlslash goggles are a visual machinery that interfaces with television's contradictions, excesses, gaps, and fragments -- what I'm metaphorically calling its orphans. Battlestar Galactica's messianic child, Hera, isn't literally an orphan -- she's the baby, biologically, of Sharon and Helo. But before she's even born she's tied by blood to President Roslin, who is miraculously cured of cancer on her deathbed by an injection of Hera's human-Cylon fetal cells. Torn, we might assume, between interpreting the child's hybridity as an unknown but mortal threat, and as an insistent bond of kinship [FIG 2], Laura ordains the genesis of a new family for Hera when she secretly hands her off to a foster mother, Maya, with the collusion of the doctor and her trusted advisor Tory [FIG 3]. This family is, on the one hand, more under Laura's control, but on the other, it's outside the control of closed lineages of genes and parentage -- it's already, in this sense, a "queer" family. The first narrative orphan I'd like to look at (through our girlslash goggles) is similarly un-linear: this is the temporally disconnected 20-minute segment that closed season 2 with a 1-year jump into the future -- practically an engraved invitation to fans to adopt the missing time over the summer hiatus and process it through our own familial technologies. With any canonical explanation for the political and interpersonal configurations suggested in this teaser suspended for seven months in TV network time, this stray scenario provided a fertile medium for the cultivation of fan desire and its ensuing pre-rewritings of the lost year.
A case in point: the included 90-second scene of Laura and Maya co-teaching and, as many conjectured, co-parenting at the settlement's school [FIG 4]. Take a moment to speculate, via these spectacles, on the disproportionate intimacy of this quasi-domestic tableau -- instead of the typical shot-reverse-shot structure, this conversation is edited with both characters in the frame [FIG 5], standing close and touching easily [FIG 6]. The triangulation of this warmth through their shared connection to Hera [FIG 7], even or especially in this minute installment, spawned a full-blown and deeply invested fan narrative of maternal lesbian romance. This dyad was amplified come season three by equally fleeting scenes that projected Tory into Roslin's inner circle during the lost year planetside and thereafter [FIG 8]. There were orphans of this storyline in turn. In the podcast for the episode "Collaborators," for example, producer Ron Moore describes shooting a subplot wherein Tory betrays Laura politically, feeding information to her rival which results in underground executions. When these events were excised during the production process, Laura and Tory's relationship was sutured back together around the death of Maya and the loss of Hera, whose escape Tory was supposed to help orchestrate [FIG 9]. The fervor of Tory's emotional apology [FIG 10] exceeds the pared down narrative basis of its reorganized timeline. This overflowing intensity, screened by the girlslash goggles' optical algorithm of course, materializes as love -- the love of these women for the child [FIG 11], for her adoptive mother, and for each other [FIG 12]. Fostering this prophetic and apocalyptic child, outside the bounds of an authorized origin story, is what brings Laura, Maya, and Tory together within the show. In parallel, this frayed maternal thread provides the seam for similarly unauthorized modes of seeing and desiring among queer fan families.
Admittedly, such love stories tend to remain invisible to those of us not equipped with specialized eyewear -- at least, I'd suggest, among the human characters. In Battlestar Galactica's symbology, most questions and figures of difference are displaced onto the Cylons, including sexual deviance. The penultimate episode of season two, "Downloaded," represents issues of machine vs. human, programming vs. individuality, genocide vs. peace, as a lesbian love triangle between Three and the resurrected copies of Caprica and Boomer [FIG 13], setting the stage for Three to later inherit the mantle of motherhood from her human counterparts [FIG 14]. For Three, this Cylon foster family [FIG 15] is of a piece with her fascination with Caprica [FIG 16] and her holy destiny, a configuration that shades gracefully into the infamous implied threesome [FIG 17]. This is, for the record, the only queer sex on Battlestar Galactica to date that can be seen without custom glasses [remove goggles]. On one hand, Cylon sexuality (like so many aspects of the Cylons as a theme) offers a quasi-utopian vision of a world where boundaries are more fluid. Lucy Lawless described this permissive philosophy on a Comicon panel: "Cylons... haven't attached some sort of morality to nudity and sexuality and all that stuff, and they're extremely experimental." On the other hand, this move marks bisexuality as categorically alien, as if it is only in an amoral culture of evil robots that such sexual "experimentation" could take place. Moreover, such non-procreative sex troubles reproduction even for the unrepressed Cylon "family." The Cylon system of direct, asexual replication, cloning bodies and memories within each model, is disrupted by the individual desires of Cylons in love -- for her perversions, Three is ultimately sentenced to the Cylon version of death. The parallel Cylon project of human-like sexual reproduction is equally flummoxed by the multiplication of mothers, as evidenced when Hera contracts a mysterious illness under Boomer's care, and only a return to her bio-family offers hope for a cure. Thus ends the saga of Hera's lesbian mommies, at least for now. So while the spaces for queer families and lesbian spectacles are there in the interstices of the show, it's difficult to avoid the impression that, when all is said and done, a child belongs with her birth parents.
This speaks to the ways that Battlestar Galactica's promiscuous textuality, its diffusion across multiple sites outside the show itself, its refreshingly open canon, still doesn't escape a hierarchy of form with the TV episodes at the top. The deleted scenes, the commentary, the interviews are still bastard children, and the families of fan desire that bloom around them are still illegitimate. Battlestar Galactica offers the ground for collective cultivation of an epic lesbian love story, in the furrows between the fragments of the text and the technologies of seeing it puts into play. At the same time, it offers is conditions of visibility that make these families always possible but never perceptible to the naked eye, that writes lesbian desire out of the story as it is authored and authorized. Now, this is not to say that this erasure doesn't bring its own pleasures. If cult TV holds out as its lure a love that I've called interdimensional -- love that spans the gap between televisual and real worlds -- this potential is, by definition, never fully realized. By not giving us what we want, by leaving some stories orphaned and some desires unrequited, TV keeps us coming back for more, thereby reproducing its audience. The play of queer visibility across textual conventions, media formats, and optical equipment leaves apertures for our labor, for our imagination, and for the love that brings us together today.
Questions for Mary:
(I presented these to her informally at lunch, but we never officially discussed them at the panel)
- Battlestar Galactica has been criticized for falling into a typical sci-fi pattern of baby fever this season, with control over their bodies and offspring taken away from female characters and everyone regrouping around the project of reproduction. But one could also interpret these particular narratives of reproduction as putting forward unusual and progressive models of family relations. There's also been a lot of debate about the questions of gender, age, and sexuality that intersect in the portrayal of Laura Roslin. Middle-aged female characters without partners or children are exceedingly rare in the media, and on this front the tendency to nonetheless cast Laura in a maternal role (literally or symbolically) can be frustratingly regressive. It also can be a strategy for evacuating Laura's sexuality, as if the maternal and the sexual are mutually exclusive. At the same time, Laura's quasi-maternal position can be seen as an opportunity to read alternative configurations of family, gender, sexuality, and power onto that role. So, what's your take on this nexus of issues?
- Given how much extra material Battlestar Galactica apparently shoots that ends up being cut from the episodes in their final form, you must have a very different experience of and perspective on the narrative than those of us who can only watch it on TV (and sometimes in bonus fragments on the internet). How do you think that divergent knowledge affects your engagement with the show and with its fans?
