Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage inBattlestar Galactica

Abstract

Science fiction rewrites the conflict between self and Other as encounters between human and alien, providing an ideal generic cover for an exploration of the evolving role of the U.S. globally. The sci-fi television series, Battlestar Galactica, depicts the two most familiar tropes of the Asian interracial family, the transnationally adopted Asian girl and the marriage of an Asian woman and a white man, reimagined as an interracial and interspecies family. Both kinds of multiracial families illustrate how metaphorical representations of U.S./Asian relations of have altered over time to rationalize the disjuncture between a celebratory rhetoric of globalization and U.S. multiculturalism and the neo colonial flow of Asian female labor.Although it attempts to show us future worlds, science fiction in mass media has much more to say about our contemporary moment. It would seem to be the quintessential genre of escapist fantasy, yet, along with its close twin of horror, science fiction makes manifest our collective anxieties, transforming and projecting them onto monstrous and alien bodies. A growing body of critical literature explores the association of these fantastic alien bodies with the material construction of contemporary raced bodies. This article extends a particular strain of recent work on race and science fiction which reads the narratives of extra planetary aliens as I would like to thank the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their suggestions for revisions.

Doctors in space (ships): biomedical uncertainties and medical authority in imagined futures

“…The setting of science fiction television in a utopian or dystopian future always refracts and focuses concerns about our present—it ‘makes manifest our collective anxieties, transforming and projecting them onto monstrous and alien bodies’ 39. The figure of the doctor represents different tensions about the delivery of posthuman healthcare: the genetically enhanced human, the alien physician and the AI non-human professional.…”

Imag(in)ing the post-national television fan: Counter-flows and hybrid ambivalence in Dramaworld

“…The depiction of heterosexual Asian women/White men couples has been the dominant representation of Asian sexuality, much more common even than the pairing of Asian women with Asian men (Koshy, 2004; Lee 1999; Ono and Pham, 2009). The depiction of Asian women/White men relationships in US media must be understood within the context of its global aspirations (Espiritu, 2004; Koshy, 2004; Nishime, 2011). The Asian woman is frequently represented as abused by Asian men and requiring rescue by the story's ‘white knight’ (Marchetti, 1993).…”

Media encoding in science fiction television: Battlestar Galactica as a site of critical cultural production

“…Long (2011) adds race-blind casting is not always as progressive as it sounds because it ‘ignores intersectional specificities among groups of men and women and the systemic power relations through which these differential experiences are produced and maintained’ (p. 1079). By pursuing a strategy of ‘color-blindness’ in their portrayals of race, BSG ’s creators run the risk of falling into representations that can be highly problematic when read on today’s terms (Nakamura, 2007; Nishime, 2011).…”

“…We present and analyze some of the specific discussions of the politics of racial and gender representation in the series. Our analysis speaks to a tradition of production scholarship which emphasizes the importance of the meaning-making that occurs within the encoding stages of media production (Cornea, 2009; D’Acci, 1994; Levine, 2001; Mann, 2009; Mayer (2011); Pearson, 2010) as well as scholarship that reads the sf genre as offering critical, political commentary on current events and social issues (Hantke, 2010; Kunkel, 2008; Nishime, 2011).…”