10 Times Star Trek: The Next Generation Went Woke
Star Trek's Next Gen redefined the warp scale on 'woke.'
In our opening article to this series, we deconstructed the opposing definitions of 'woke' in order to amplify the word's actual meaning: "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." Applying that to The Original Series, we concluded that, "Star Trek has been 'woke' since its earliest days." Here, we will be continuing in the progressive tense.
It's hardly a spoiler by now to say, after the oh-so-many decades, that Star Trek: The Next Generation was 'woke' — in the non-co-opted sense — or 'politically liberal,' if you prefer. The only debate is to what degree. As it branched out into a new century, with a new ship and a new crew, The Next Generation continued and expanded upon the social and political commentary that had characterised its predecessor, shining a light on a yet broader array of social injustices and inequalities. It is true that, on certain issues, The Next Generation has rightly been reproached for failing to replicate the boldness and forward-thinking of The Original Series, which itself had always led the conversation. By and large, however, in comparison, The Next Generation was woker.
Finally, if what we are doing here is the deconstruction of 'woke' in order to (re)promote it, it is perhaps worth quoting the following from Bruno Perreau's Queer Theory: The French Response: "the deconstruction of norms cannot be dissociated from their reproduction."
We know that our own use of 'woke' runs the risk of reproducing it in the pejorative. But, in order to point out that Star Trek has always been positively and optimistically progressive, that's a risk we'll have to take.
10. No MAN To No ONE
One thing we learnt from the now world-famous speech in the opening credits of The Original Series was that there is no reason you can't split the infinitive. The 'rule' against it was mostly the invention of a few particularly insistent grammarians of the 19th century. Today, no sensible grammar will tell you not to boldly go.
If Kirk broke the seemingly hard-and-fast strictures of syntax, it would be up to The Next Generation, with a nod at the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, to work on the semantics. The 'man' in 'no man has gone… ' might well have meant a 'human being; a person,' but it did its definitional work through exclusion, or as the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) states, "[until the 20th century] to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males."
The switch to 'no ONE' in Picard's version opened up a new space that included women not by implication but by design.
Semantics is one thing, concrete action on gender equality is another. In that sense, The Next Generation did break ground from the very beginning with the character of Natasha Yar in particular in a non-stereotypical gender role. The Original Series infamously ended on an episode that basically said women weren't allowed to be starship captains and should just be happy with their lot, but The Next Gen strove to include women in top-level command positions — all the way up to Admirals such as Shanthi, Brand, and Nechayev — carrying on from the work that was begun by actress Madge Sinclair in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.