by Sherry Ginn
Concluding Thoughts
As both sentient being and homeplace, Moya is, ultimately, neither. While the refugees of Farscape make Moya their home, their connectiveness to the concept of homeland remains, in a large part, with their originating destinations. As Tuan notes, “Attachment to the homeland is a common human emotion” (158). For the characters of Farscape, their attachment remains disjointed at best; Moya will always be their other home, a forge of their identities, but never the crucible in which they were spawned. Conversely, since Moya is homeplace, she can never fully be one of the crew; Battis notes this when he writes that Moya “has no definitive voice of her own, and is constantly being overridden by other characters” (11). Her opinion matters less because she is, in the end, not one of them. The crew inhabits her space; the space that Moya occupies, a space that, in another sentient being, would normally need to be navigated around by the other identities surrounding her, instead becomes the receptacle of these other individuals’ own identity struggles. Ruth Salvaggio, writing about the distinctly bifurcated nature of women’s bodies, suggests that “understood in these spatial terms, [it] makes her body a kind of ‘space-off’ since she is at once separate from others and in between—at once ‘here and elsewhere’” (275). In other words, Moya is here and not here; Moya is everywhere, and nowhere.
In the conclusion of “The Measure of a Man,” Captain Louvois, the judge advocate hearing Data’s case, ultimately rules in his favor. As she says in her judgment:
It sits there looking at me, and I don’t know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics, with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent, nor qualified, to answer those. I’ve got to make a ruling—to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We’ve all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have! But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose [“The Measure of a Man”].
Perhaps, then, this is the best possible definition we can accord for sentience: “the freedom to choose.” In this instance, sentience is given to Data—it is not proscribed to him at birth—but, then again, like Data, sentience as thus understood is not proscribed to any of us. The “freedom to choose” is something we all must attain and earn, something that tends to grow the further we wander from our own originating homeplaces. Moya, however, lacks the freedom to choose—at least the freedom to choose to be anything other than what she is. Without those who dwell within, without the notion of homeplace, Moya’s sentience is lost. She has freedom, but, ultimately, she has no choice. The crew fulfills her own identity fashioning in ways that she will never reciprocate for them. It seems, in the end, that an empty home is an unhappy home—and if the homeplace is sentient, then it knows how unhappy it is.
Notes
1. Of course, Zhaan was imprisoned for killing her lover to keep him from turning Delvia over to the Peacekeepers. This marks the end result of socioeconomic disenfranchisement—now compounded by legal disenfranchisement—that Zhaan asserts in the first episodes of the series began with her quasi-heretical views.
2. Moya does land on terrestrial space on occasion, notably in the second episode of the series, “I, E.T.,” but is largely depicted as a spacefaring organism.
3. The X-Men universe also features a race of whale-like, spacefaring creatures called the Acanti that are sometimes enslaved as transport vessels by a malevolent force called The Brood. The Acanti are sentient and intelligent, communicating through psionic “songs,” or sounds. The Acanti may have been a major source for Moya’s Leviathan species, but the Acanti are wholly biological, where Moya is biomechanoid, and once freed from the Brood, generally choose not to exist as transport vessels or homeplace, whereas Moya, once her control collar is removed, still functions primarily as both of those things.
4. Psychobiologists have, of course, studied and considered the possibility of emotional responses in higher functioning animals, such as grief over the loss of a close familial bond amongst chimpanzee groups, but such research is beyond the scope of this current study.
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Of Big Blue Butts and Bias
The Problem Body
Elizabeth Leigh Scherman
“Get your big blue butt down here!”
Astronaut John Crichton is shouting to his crewmate, the blue-skinned Delvian priest Zhaan, to come take a shift watching a suspicious guest, Traltixx. Crichton later calls the ship’s navigator “Shell head” and the imposing, tentacled D’Argo “Grizzly” and “Medusa.” In “Crackers Don’t Matter” (2.4), the crewmembers of the living ship Moya are under the influence of the maniacal Traltixx, and they are acting even more dysfunctional than usual. Pejoratives fly. Any corporeal or behavioral peculiarity among the group is grist for name-calling.
“Retard.”
“Cripple.”
“Idiot.”
These are among the terms we hear in our own society that label those among us who are perceived as having corporeal or behavioral peculiarities. It is amusing when Crichton calls his fellow shipmates names based on their bodies, and Zhaan takes little offense at being told she has a big blue butt. Among our fellow shipmates on this planet Earth, name-calling can signify disempowering rhetoric used by members of the dominant society over those less empowered; but, it can also signify camaraderie, equality, and reclamation of erstwhile pejorative words and imagery among those whom society has treated as outcasts. Science fiction can free us to consider variation and peculiarity from a brash and fearless point of view, but its location in fantastical worlds complicates our own human experiences of embodiment.
In a place such as Moya, the living craft that harbors the outcasts of many societies in the television series Farscape, every individual is singular. No two bodies are exactly the same, but this does not mean that discrimination does not exist on Moya. Each inhabitant of Moya has his or her own strengths and abilities, some of which prove to benefit the entire crew. However, each character also has his or her peculiarities that can create barriers to the group’s goals. Thus, these individuals impair Moya with their personalities, bodily limitations, and sensory needs or limitations. In addition, they are sometimes viewed as impaired by their fellow travelers, that is, they are seen as having inferior bodies, minds, or senses. We who view the adventures of the Farscape travelers from the “outside” may laugh at the names they call one another and the judgment that they place on one another’s bodies and behaviors, from friendly teasing to outright condemnation. Yet what we are witnessing is not, in the end, a story about aliens, but a story about ourselves.
Writing about Farscape, Jes Battis identifies such diverse bodies as “transgressive” and includes bodies of “women, Aboriginal peoples, poor communities, and transgendered people” in this group (Battis 120). Missing from Battis’ list are disabled people—a population, despite encompassing one in five of us—whose existence is often absent in discussions about identity. This paper addresses that void and examines Farscape through the lens of disability.
What is disability? It is, ultimately, whatever the spectator or a society decides it to be. In a place where everyone is different, where each body is marvelously unique, it may be argued that disability ceases to exist; that no form of embodiment is superior to another. We might then approach Farscape as an icon of inclusion, as the “utopian village” described by disability activist Vic Finkelstein: a world where there are no barriers, and thus no impairment (“Attitudes”). However, we would be mistaken. Disability does exist in Farscape, and its presence even among “transgressive” bodies informs our understanding of the discriminatory nature of disabling.
It might be helpful at this point to emphasize the ideological framework that underlies the very rhetoric of what we in this time and place call disability. A key area of debate is the idea of the disability/impairment dichotomy, which originated in the British disability model and has been put forth by pioneering social modelists such as Paul Hunt, Vic Finkelstein, Paul Abberly, Mike Oliver, Lennard Davis, and others. Colin Barnes writes that the social model of disability emphasizes the accountability of society toward people whose bodies or minds are considered to be impaired rather than on the personal, individual experience of disability (Barnes “Disabling Imagery” 5). Tom Shakespeare describes this approach as the belief that disability is an act of society and that “rather than the individual with the impairment being the problem, the problem is the failure of systems and environments to include and accommodate that person” (23). Both Finkelstein and Paul Abberly propose a purely social constructionist model of impairment by suggesting that in a utopian environment, there would be no impairments. However, Finkelstein cautions that the experience of being disabled is a “dynamic relationship between people with unique physical attributes (impairments) and the particular social and physical environment in which they function” (“Attitudes” 18). This description fits the world of Farscape to a ‘T’: each traveler on Moya certainly has distinctive physical (and cognitive/behavioral) attributes, but they are not considered impairments by the owners of those attributes. The ‘impairment,’ or disablement, comes about largely due to the reactions of others.
Most disability studies researchers, however, do not necessarily believe that impairment cannot be the physiological characteristic of a body, but rather that there is a distinction between an atypical body or mind/behavior (and the argument can be made that each body on Moya is “atypical” both to the spectator and to the fellow travelers) and the deliberate social and political discrimination which results from that reality. Early British activists explained it this way: “It is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society” (UPIAS, 176:3, cited in Shakespeare 30). In the Amendments to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, the term disability includes being regarded as having such an impairment (emphasis mine). It may be the characters in the Farscape universe, or those of us who are watching them on the screen, or both, who regard a particular character as having an impairment. Thus what we continue to see in episodes of Farscape are acts of discrimination or disabling behavior based upon one or more members of Farscape regarding another character as being deficient or impaired in some way, based on appearance or behavior. Inescapably, this on-screen event of discrimination lends itself to a multiplicity of readings, but disability is the reading that I will extract and defend, not as the “correct” reading, but as one reading which the text invites and which has the power to enable new or resistive conceptualizations of disability.
To that end, this essay explores two aspects of Farscape: first, the patterns or predictable signifiers (both corporeal and rhetorical) by which individuals in the episodes are perceived as inferior or impaired, and the implications these signifiers carry for our own society; and second, the paradigm of astronaut John Crichton as himself impaired/disabled within the alien world of Moya and her travels, and the lens this offers us toward our understanding of disability as a social construction.
On the Fringe of the Margins: Age and Blindness in Farscape
Science fiction and fantastical worlds have been valued by many as holding the potential to be an inspiration of inclusivity (see,
for example, Battis; Einstein; Neale; Henderson and associates) in which creatures and individuals of many different species or variations must cooperate in order to reach a common goal. Stephen Neale writes: “The issue of humanness lies at the heart of science fiction” (102). It is notable, then, when within such a diverse environment—and Moya is certainly one—certain characters are more likely than others to be devalued or judged prima facie based on their corporeal appearance or performance, that is, their body or their behavior. These characters may be suspect, if not identified as outright evil, from the moment they walk onto the screen, and it is not uncommon for them to be shunned or even annihilated before the episode is over. A more subtle form of discrimination is to relegate such characters to the role of comic relief, positions that are often asexual and less empowered than others in their society.
Whereas all individuals may be seen as having the potential to be marginalized in Farscape, depending upon the situation and the society/world they encounter, certain characters persist on the fringe even of those margins. They are on the far outside borders of society, and more often than not, we identify them as such from the moment they enter the story. These characters are disabled—discriminated against based on perceived inferiority—in repeated instances. Over time, patterns have emerged in television and cinema regarding the types of bodies and behaviors that point to or “signify” an undesirable or inferior being. These signifiers provide clues as to what “differences” in our own society we still consider to be undesirable, despite our self-righteous claims of inclusivity. There are many such signifiers in classic science fiction that are echoed in Farscape, but the examples I investigate here are age and blindness or atypical vision. These corporeal peculiarities have parallels to life experiences in our own world, and we, like the community of Moya, are often too quick to judge or discriminate in response to them. When characters with these qualities appear on the screen, they are rarely incidental. Their presence carries meaning, whether maleficence, wisdom, or pathos. This meaning may be constructed in the minds of those on Moya as well as in the minds of those of us who watch Farscape.