The alternative families that self-organize around Hera are one example of how normative reproductive schemas (among the synthetic Cylons, who are plagued by infertility, only a man and a woman in a loving relationship are able to bear children) can unravel into multiply cathected webs. Cylons Six, Three, Boomer and Sharon aren't Hera's only mothers; preceding their guardianship, before she is even born, this messianic baby is tied by blood to President Laura Roslin, who is miraculously cured of cancer on her deathbed by a transfusion of hybrid fetal cells. This is to say that the synergies of mediation work in reverse as well: if information is embodied, than biology is also a code, and one more transmissible between species than either humans or Cylons might like to admit. When blood becomes a life-giving inoculation, Hera's hybridity is rendered backwards compatible, diffusing retroactively into the older generation. Like this somatic vitality, love circulates increasingly across boundaries, complete with its own technologies of dissemination. For instance, Six and Gaius, another Cylon-human couple, turn to theological texts, symptomatic visions, and the Hybrid's raw data to interpret the place of their bond in the cosmic ecology, as Six tries to inculcate the humans with her newfound credo of peace. Fans' passion for Battlestar Galactica is analogously inter-species, and likewise its promiscuous propagation transgresses borders, capacitated by a distinctive media apparatus.
In the previous chapter, I explored epistemological procedures for investigating undisclosed desires. Here, my focus is a technology in the fan's toolkit: a spectatorial mechanism known colloquially as "slash goggles." This witticism evoking specialized eyewear (mine are always big, round, and pink) is a metaphor for a queer mode of viewing that interfaces with television's contradictions, excesses, gaps, and fragments – the orphans of its reproductive overabundance. Like Hera, who gains many more mothers when her parents lose her, these remnants often end up with a surplus rather than a dearth of willing guardians. The rich residue can take a number of forms, mobilized in erratic combinations and not limited to:
Hera is herself at the heart of a multivalent matrix of affinities that is the battleground for a campaign to populate the future. President Roslin ordains the genesis of a new family for Hera when she secrets the newborn away from Helo and Sharon and gives custody to a foster mother, Maya, with the collusion of Roslin's trusted advisor Tory Foster. This arrangement is thus authorized under presidential control, while nonetheless venturing outside the control of closed lineages of biology and parentage; it's already, in this sense, a queer family. To look at one similarly non-linear narrative orphan through our (girl)slash goggles: season two of Battlestar Galactica closed with a disconnected 20-minute segment previewing life on the New Caprica settlement "one year later" in the program's timeline. With explanation of the political and interpersonal configurations implied here deferred over the summer hiatus, this stray scenario offered a fertile medium for the cultivation of fans' desires, and for their preemptive reimaginings of the lost year. A 90-second scene of Roslin and Maya co-teaching and, as many conjectured, co-parenting at the settlement's school is a case in point. This quasi-domestic tableau is ripe with disproportionate intimacy, in large part because, instead of the typical shot-reverse-shot structure, the conversation is edited with both women in the frame, standing close and touching easily. The triangulation of this familiarity through their concurrent kinship with Hera, even or especially in such a minute installment, spawned a full-blown and deeply invested maternal lesbian romance between Roslin and Maya – in the vision of certain fans.
This dyad was amplified in season three by equally fleeting scenes that projected Tory into Roslin's inner circle during the missing year planet-side and thereafter, and this storyline bred its own orphans in turn. In the podcast for the episode "Collaborators," for example, producer Ron Moore describes shooting a subplot wherein Tory betrays Roslin politically, feeding information to her rival that results in underground executions. When these events were cut during the production process, the remaining interactions between Roslin and Tory were sutured back together around the death of Maya and the loss of Hera, whose escape Tory was supposed to help orchestrate. The fervor of Tory's emotional apology exceeds the pared down narrative basis of its reorganized timeline, and this overflowing intensity, screened by the goggles' optical algorithm, materializes as love -- the love of these women for the child, for her adoptive mother, and for each other. Fostering this prophetic and apocalyptic baby, outside the bounds of an authorized origin story, is what brings Roslin, Maya, and Tory together within the program. In parallel, this frayed maternal thread provides the seam for similarly unauthorized modes of seeing and desiring among queer fan families. Tory's status as a conduit for unnatural passions then reverberates further when she is outed as one of the final five Cylons at the end of season three, in keeping with technicity's queer resonances. Thus, as I hope I've demonstrated, the implications of such formations aren't confined to the diegesis: the narratives of Battlestar Galactica are one dimension in a dynamic heterarchy that embodies an interactive struggle among industry and fan producers over the evolution of television.
In the previous chapter, I explored epistemological procedures for investigating undisclosed desires. Here, my focus is a technology in the fan's toolkit: a spectatorial mechanism known colloquially as "slash goggles." This witticism evoking specialized eyewear (mine are always big, round, and pink) is a metaphor for a queer mode of viewing that interfaces with television's contradictions, excesses, gaps, and fragments – the orphans of its reproductive overabundance. Like Hera, who gains many more mothers when her parents lose her, these remnants often end up with a surplus rather than a dearth of willing guardians. The rich residue can take a number of forms, mobilized in erratic combinations and not limited to:
- characterization: including the overdetermined cultural codes that we all use, however unjustifiably, to read the stereotypical markers of sexuality in appearance, accessories, and mannerisms
- mise-en-scene: how characters are shot, framed, lit, scored, etc.
- performance: the wealth of non-verbal information loosely gathered under the umbrella of "subtext" (how close a duo stand together, the duration and the weight of their gazes...)
- narrative: the explicit plot and dialogue elements, especially intrigue or emotion that is not fully elaborated, and extending to the more indirect connections between characters, which may remain vital even when shared screentime is limited (the love triangle being a classic example of a geometry that often links characters of the same gender)
- metatext: the whole constellation of extra-diegetic minutia and speculation that permeates interpretive communities (as only one of the infinite details: the fact that Lucy Lawless is best known for her role as the eponymous lesbian icon in Xena: Warrior Princess, rendering her BSG character Three to some degree pre-queered)
Hera is herself at the heart of a multivalent matrix of affinities that is the battleground for a campaign to populate the future. President Roslin ordains the genesis of a new family for Hera when she secrets the newborn away from Helo and Sharon and gives custody to a foster mother, Maya, with the collusion of Roslin's trusted advisor Tory Foster. This arrangement is thus authorized under presidential control, while nonetheless venturing outside the control of closed lineages of biology and parentage; it's already, in this sense, a queer family. To look at one similarly non-linear narrative orphan through our (girl)slash goggles: season two of Battlestar Galactica closed with a disconnected 20-minute segment previewing life on the New Caprica settlement "one year later" in the program's timeline. With explanation of the political and interpersonal configurations implied here deferred over the summer hiatus, this stray scenario offered a fertile medium for the cultivation of fans' desires, and for their preemptive reimaginings of the lost year. A 90-second scene of Roslin and Maya co-teaching and, as many conjectured, co-parenting at the settlement's school is a case in point. This quasi-domestic tableau is ripe with disproportionate intimacy, in large part because, instead of the typical shot-reverse-shot structure, the conversation is edited with both women in the frame, standing close and touching easily. The triangulation of this familiarity through their concurrent kinship with Hera, even or especially in such a minute installment, spawned a full-blown and deeply invested maternal lesbian romance between Roslin and Maya – in the vision of certain fans.
This dyad was amplified in season three by equally fleeting scenes that projected Tory into Roslin's inner circle during the missing year planet-side and thereafter, and this storyline bred its own orphans in turn. In the podcast for the episode "Collaborators," for example, producer Ron Moore describes shooting a subplot wherein Tory betrays Roslin politically, feeding information to her rival that results in underground executions. When these events were cut during the production process, the remaining interactions between Roslin and Tory were sutured back together around the death of Maya and the loss of Hera, whose escape Tory was supposed to help orchestrate. The fervor of Tory's emotional apology exceeds the pared down narrative basis of its reorganized timeline, and this overflowing intensity, screened by the goggles' optical algorithm, materializes as love -- the love of these women for the child, for her adoptive mother, and for each other. Fostering this prophetic and apocalyptic baby, outside the bounds of an authorized origin story, is what brings Roslin, Maya, and Tory together within the program. In parallel, this frayed maternal thread provides the seam for similarly unauthorized modes of seeing and desiring among queer fan families. Tory's status as a conduit for unnatural passions then reverberates further when she is outed as one of the final five Cylons at the end of season three, in keeping with technicity's queer resonances. Thus, as I hope I've demonstrated, the implications of such formations aren't confined to the diegesis: the narratives of Battlestar Galactica are one dimension in a dynamic heterarchy that embodies an interactive struggle among industry and fan producers over the evolution of television.
