ENTERPRISE 04/30/'03: "Cogenitor" (1 Viewer)

[Dan Rudolph]

The copyrights on that stuff they gave them would be long expired by then.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Dan Rudolph wrote (post #41):


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The copyrights on that stuff they gave them would be long expired by then.





Not if big-time Hollywood has its way!


Terry St wrote (post #17):


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If the writers were really trying to tackle "otherness" by itself then they might have made the cogenitor's plight a little more ambiguous, or alien. Instead they chose to make it thoroughly human-like in its intellegence and curiosity, and desperately unhappy in it's circumstances, just as a human would be. . . . ., if this was a shot at "otherness" it was badly botched.






I don't claim the writers are "trying to tackle 'otherness'". In fact, just the opposite. If there's anything on a conscious level in these Hollywood production it's the avoidance of dealing with the true nature and the implications of otherness. Mostly, these things are just ignored. The idea of pregnant beings that could be perceived as "not-female" is quite disquieting to American audiences. The implications are studiously avoided. Take, for example, Enemy Mine (1986), where the pregnant, but unisexed "Drac" is always referred to as "it". In that movie the Drac's situation is analogized by the protagonist to that of a human female. "But I am not a woman!", it retorts in outrage. Outrage there seems an unnatural reaction since (1) it has probably never met---let alone gotten to know---a human female and, so, how would it know to be outraged by the comparison in the first place?; (2) it would seem more likely that it should "empathize" or identify with human females, as fellow childbearers, than with human males, in any event. The whole handling of the issue says more about Hollywood producers and their perceptions, whether right or wrong, of the possible reactions of American audiences, especially male viewers, to an obviously "male" being giving birth. The key to the avoidance, it seems to me, lies in the line of dialog explaining Drac reproduction: "In us, it just happens." (Oh, yeah---right!)

More often, as in this Enterprise episode, the edges of the cultural tabu are dulled or softened by casting the hermaphroditic or "third-sex" being with an actress. Can you imagine the same scenes of Tripp's initial "attraction" to this being---if you think that's what's going on---if the audience were to perceive the creature as more of a male than a female? I can imagine the reactions around here (and elsewhere) now: "Oooo, yuck!", etc. Tripp, like Riker in "The Outcast" with his female-looking androgynous J'nai love-interest, is put into a situation where, it is perceived, the audience can be sympathetic.



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There was never any question about whether or not the cogenitor might be happier fulfilling its prescribed role in its own society. Instead, we were beaten over the head with the idea that it was being horribly mistreated.





The deck is stacked too heavily in favor of "our" point of view: "liberate the slave / oppressed gender category". Standard ST moralizing.


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. . . . the aliens, despite having a thousand year head-start on humans, were barely any more technologically advanced. In the ST universe humans will advance as far in just a couple of centuries.





I thought you meant by


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The key moral in this episode is not "Respect other cultures" so much as it is "Yes, we're superior, but meddling can piss people off." It's obviously a comment on recent american foreign policy, but not a particularly perceptive or original one.





a moral and cultural superiority---to which my comments are addressed---, not a technological one.

A "thousand-year headstart" does NOT guarantee a thousand year's worth of continuous "advances". The assumption of steady and uninterrupted technological progress is a "Western", and particularly an American, fallacy.

However, the Vissians are presented as having a warp-drive technology that has advanced beyond needing magnetic containment of matter and antimatter, which is beyond anything in Federation technology in either TNG or DS 9, so far as I know.


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Still, I'd like to think North Americans, even from Kentucky, will become at least a little bit comfortable with discussing sexuality by the time we're flying to distant stars.





The writers and producers are playing to the early-21st-century audience they have now. Verisimilitude to what people might actually be like in the mid-22nd-second century is no more important to them than is the faithful representation of genuinely alien intelligent life. They affect open-mindedness without having a whole lot of it themselves, whether the subject be "respect for diversity" or inventive "imagining".


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The other idea that it seemed the writers were trying to push was that the human language, or English at least, is not well equipped for dealing with alien concepts. (Here's your "otherness") "It" is not a gendered pronoun, but is instead used in reference to genderless, or dual-gendered objects and persons. We default to using "it" for this third gender simply because we don't have a suitable pronoun. (I'd be interested to see how this episode translates to french since even objects have gender in their language.) While humans might get by with just "he", "she", and "it" when dealing with a race with three sexes, what about the Rigelians that have 4 or 5 sexes? Clearly "it" is not going to cover 2-3 sexes. We'd need more pronouns. Non-male/female genders might be offended by being referred to with a genderless pronoun anyways, similar to how you wouldn't want your significant other to refer to you as "it" when talking to your drinking buddies.





It's far more complicated than you think.

First of all, you're confusing, as do many, grammatical gender with natural gender. The pronoun it is not "genderless"; it designates a "neuter" gender (a gender "not-male"/"not-female"). (Well, actually it's more complicated than that, since it in modern English also stands for the dummy subject, as in "It's not me who's off his rocker, it's you", where the "it" of the two clauses is a mere subject place-holder that doesn't refer to any identifiable referent.)

With grammatical gender, the gender of the word used to designate ("name") something is what's in focus, and "gender" is only a way of saying word such-and-such belongs in such-and-such a class of nouns/pronouns. The "thing" so designated doesn't have to have the same "gender" in nature as the word that names it. (Latin femina, feminæ 'woman' (feminine) versus agricola, agricolæ 'farmer' (masculine!). German Weib (and Old English wi:angry:???) 'woman' is neuter, as is Germ. Kind 'child', though it is a living thing, which may be of either gender.) With natural gender, referents are classified according to their (cognitively perceived) "natural" state. Living things (animal) that can (potentially) bear offspring---are usually "feminine"; living things (animal) that can propagate, but not bear young are "masculine"; things that are not living can ordinarily do neither and are relegated, in English at least, to the "thing"-class. Therefore, under such a system things are assigned gender, only if their known or perceived properties (behaviors, abilities, (sometimes) appearance) point to a gender-like quality, but most referents will lack such properties and are just thought of as "things". That goes for nouns, less for personal pronouns (which do not name, but refer, instead) that stand for those "things" as well.



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Contrary to what the writers think, most human languages are pretty good at incorporating new ideas and concepts. There are a lot of words in the english language that were adopted from foreign languages when no suitable English word previously existed. Upon encountering a race with three or more genders, humans would probably just adopt the alien pronouns for new genders. This is one aspect of language that hasn't really been addressed that well in any ST series. Even with a universal translator there are going to be words and concepts in alien languages which have no analogue in human languages. New words will need to be added to our own lexicon in order to express them.





Maybe, if they even had pronouns. Note Data's words in Nemesis when speaking at the Riker-Troi wedding party: "Ladies and gentlemen, and [honored?] transgendered species, . . ."

The big problem with the so-called Universal Translator is that it cannot, by definition, also be a "Universal Interpreter". Rendering meaningful communication from one language to another---hell, even from one person to another speaking the same language---is as much as anything a matter of interpretation. Language (linguistic behavior) is far too complex for any (plausible) machine to handle accurately and preceisely.

Even your statement quite simplifies the real problems involved here. It is partly a matter of lexicon, of course, but it's also very much a matter of grammar (grammatical category). In some languages concord ("agreement") with respect to gender, number (singular, dual/paral, plural), and or case ("subjective", "possessive", "indirect-objective", "objective") must obligatorily obtain between nouns or pronouns and adjectives or verbs as well (as in Semitic). In other, mostly "non-Western" languages, there are additional or alternate categories that must be concorded (e.g., "spatiality" (shape of the referent; what kind of "space" does it take up: rotund, circular, flat, rectangular, vel sim.?) or animacy ("living" or not?)). And these other properties likewise interact with each other to complicate linguistic output. There are human language types such as polysynthetic (e.g., many Amerindian languages), where often the point at which the verb ends and the agent of the action or the patient ("object") of the action can scarcely be discerned by a nonnative speaker, or agglutinative (e.g., Turkish), where what we think of as pronouns are buried within long strings of morphemes (meaningful units within a given language system) that would be hard, if not impossible, to abstract for "borrowing". And these kinds of situations assume that true aliens would even communicate like us. They could use other kinds of "language" (e.g., clicks ("tsk! tsk! tsk!") as the Hottentots in Southern Africa do (see TNG episode "Schisms" for an example), electronic buzzes as the Tholians seem to ("Future Tense"), or musical tones (Voyager episode #161 "The Void"), or some other means that we could not even perceive with the naked ear (because, e.g., too high-pitched, or too low).

With respect to gendering, I doubt that humans would adopt alien grammatical categories to suit such awakened realities as 4th or 5th genders. The various genders would probably be assigned gendering categories in human language according to how human beings perceived the members of those categories and assigned them to already established human categories. A simplified "local" (U.S.) example of the problem: note the difficulty of foisting words like "Latina" on English-speakers. It seems "unnatural" to a native speaker of English because the usage falls outside of the laws or rules of English grammar to feminize most nouns, and especially ethnicons. (One proof of the force of this is the deliberate attempt to banish the word actress, which some in Hollywood seem to want to go the way of hostess, Negress, Jewess, and the like, because they are marked (that is, they draw attention to themselves when used) in modern English. Such words have already disappeared, not because of conscious sociopolitical pressures, but because their formation in modern English points them out as relics of a former and now moribund grammatical category. (We don't call a female "governor" a governess, now, do we?) As a result, they are words that can now, both in fact and by perception, be easily disposed of.) Feminization of nouns is a living feature of Romance languages, like Spanish, but not of (modern) English.

Will_B wrote (post #31):


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Regarding the pronoun issue, how about: he, she, and thou? Thou generally means "you" but it could be tweaked to mean something else.





We've already had long dialogs about suppressing gendered pronouns and making up "nongendered" ones.

 

[Brian]

Did anyone else notice that Tripp uses a Radio Shack analog SPL meter to calibrate the warp engines (around the 18 minute mark)? I got a good chuckle out of it since mine was sitting on the coffee table in front of me at the time.

As for the quality of the episode, I think any show that can generate this much serious discussion has shown its value.

-B

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Terry St wrote (post #17):

Not a good argument. Languages like Finnish and Turkish do fine with just one generic third-person pronoun to cover all genders---which is really to say, they don't have "gender"---and both (all) numbers. There's no reason our present pronouns couldn't carry the lexical-semantic weight of covering more genders---about which more below---in future. After all, we ourselves get along just fine using a common third-person pronoun, they, for the plural, regardless of gender, as do most speakers of northern Indo-European languages. Germans get along fine with sie 'she', sie 'they' (all genders), Sie 'you' (formal, either gender), etc.

And, by the way, I should've pointed out in my earlier reply to this that (personal) pronoun-borrowing across languages is rather rare and happens only under conditions of intimate cultural contact among language groups. That's how we got they, their(s), and them in English, from the Danes who invaded and repopulated parts of England in the Middle Ages. The native third-person pronoun of the plural was simply replaced. So, those future humans you have in mind will probably have to become mighty close to those aliens in order to end up borrowing their pronouns.

As with the Enemy Mine example, the imputing of human offense-taking to (supposedly) alien intelligences debases and trivializes the alienage of those species---it unfoundedly "humanizes" them---, and lays bare our own linguistic and cultural biasses.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Doug Smith wrote (post #12):

I think each of you has a point. I believe the concept of a three-gendered species is certainly sufficiently "out there" to be science-fictional. However, that's as far as I can go. The question then becomes, what do the writers and producers of the story do with the conceit? And, in that test, the story fails, as Mr. Briggs points out. The Vissians are too familiar, too safe, and, yes, too like US. ("Have some tangy wine to go with that 'aromatic' cheese, my horny tactical cutey?")

What has further bothered me in the course of reading and evaluating the posts in this thread about "gender", both grammatical and natural, is that the more I think about it, the less plausible all this seems to me. The more phenotypically and emotionally humanlike you, as a writer, make an "alien" species, the harder it becomes for the discerning viewer (or reader) to accept the major physiological divergences of the type that are posited here.

We've already seen the Vissians---who are phenotypically thoroughly humanoid---but what about these "Rigelians" with multiple genders? Well, a consultation of The Star Trek Encyclopedia (2nd ed.) reveals them to be a: "Humanoid species with a physiology similar to that of Vulcans" (pg. 410), although the Rigel system consists of 6 inhabited planets (4 class-M) out of 10 total (according to the recently published Star Trek Star Charts: The Complete Atlas of Star Trek (pg. 59), by Geoffrey Mandel), so which "Rigelians" are being referred to in the episode is not clear. But, since this species is apparently humanoid, whatever strength the claim of multiple genders for it might have, it is absolutely diluted.

To get to the heart of the matter one needs to ask: What is "gender", anyway? It seems to me it is a species-specific specialization---how's that for alliteration?---of reproductive function on the part of the membership. And that form of reproduction is, of course, sexual. Given the commonalities of physiological "humanoidality"---we must improvise for these new situations, mustn't we?---, how likely---and, hence, how plausible---is it that some humanoids would require not just three, but four or five sexes for reproduction??? I would say that humans have been very efficient---in fact, way too efficient---in (over)breeding on Earth with just two sexes: the sexual urge is strong (overwhelming at times) and the equipment all works, so why would parallelly evolved species need more/other? Sounds mighty inefficient to me, evolutionarily speaking. If they need 4 and more genders to initiate/facilitate each reproductive act, it seems to me "Mother Nature" is telling them something, something not so good about the long-range prospects of their species. Yet, these are presented as "advanced" races in ST.

This is what we mean about not thinking through the implications of one's premises. Naturally, one can always retort: "Well, we just don't get to see how they're different, that's all." And, yes, but that's the very nub of the criticism: "real science fiction"™ would explore the science of the premise (these alleged biological differences) and give some scientifically plausible explanation of their possibility, instead of having the story dissolve into a mere heavy-handed "morality play" about how the humans feel---"our" point of view---about the social situation associated with that science-fictional premise.

What we are left with, instead, is just such a "morality play", only one informed by the audience-titillating prospect of ménage à trois (quatre/cinq/de plus) situations, hinted at in the (to my mind unjustifiably amusing) line of Phlox's about "having pictures", the utterance of which has the practical effect of reducing the whole story to little more than a writer's joke. (B (as with Fric(k) and Frac(k), it doesn't matter which "B"): "Let's see . . . what's it going to be this week?" B): "I got it! How 'bout 'group sex in outer space'?!?" B: "Sounds good! It's got 'heat'. It's got numbers. Go with it! . . . Oh, and throw in a little preachy pathos to get past Standards and Practices.") Messrs. Berman and Braga, and some portion of the audience, may be laughing, but I, personally, am not amused. And, again, I say: what if males were cast in these "third-sex" roles, instead of females? I think it a safe bet that visions of such ménages would evoke very different reactions from the predominantly male audiences---note the reaction to the joke about Spock in a thong---, some members of whom chime in here and elsewhere to express their amusement at or enthusiasm for such lusty scenarios when women are cast in the analogous roles.

 

[Andres Munoz]

Jesus, Rex, you don't have to reply to every single person on the thread. Those are some of the longest and colorful (font colors) posts I've read on this forum!

I'm getting a headache!

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Finally (and in all probability) to close off this thread, I found a timely little bit of reporting this morning that proves that all this discussion has not been for nothing. The relevant excerpt follows:

The Boston Globe (online): "SCIENCE MUSING: The historic conflict between X and Y"

by Chet Raymo

dateline: May 6, 2003

Now, that's a neat trick.

So, you see, the prospects of gender confusion (a "third sex") are fully at play even on this planet.

 

[Randy Tennison]

Did anyone else notice that Tripp uses a Radio Shack analog SPL meter to calibrate the warp engines

I saw that too, Brian, and it cracked me up. I actually rewound and paused it on TIVO to see it.

I liked the episode. It wasn't the typical crappy storyline they had been using for a while. And I liked Archer's response to Tripp. That's what a Captain says!

 

[doug zdanivsky]

Hmm.. It's gratifying to see that this episode provoked such thought-provoking discussion.

It's proved better than the actual episode!

I enjoyed this episode alot, and I've said it before.. but I hope they keep their crap-to-not-too-shabby ratio at an acceptable level at least..

I've learned not to get my hopes up with this show, but I have my fingers crossed just the same!

 

[Rex Bachmann]

(post #45):

You know, the whole episode is one big misstep, as far as I can see. Maybe I missed a line that explains the gender "arrangement", but, if so, so did everyone else, it seems. As I see it the writers set up a reproductive system that requires three genders, so that should mean that there are three naturally occurring genders among the Vissians. If so, that should also mean that in any given Vissian reproductive cycle---any "generation", that is---it would be necessary that some regular proportion of the offspring be male, some be female, and some be "cogenitorial", in order for the species to keep going.

Well, that further means that any reproducing couple (trio?) has a threefold possibility of a successful live birth: masculine, feminine, or---you guessed it---"cogenitorial".

Now, the questions not asked in the episode:

---What happens if a newborn infant is "cogenitorial"?
---Do the parents themselves reject it? Do they look upon their own offspring as an animal? Not bother to give it a name?
---How likely would that be, seeing that the third gender would have to be fairly well represented in the Vissian populace (rather than some "freak of nature") and is, according to the story, an absolutely necessary component in the reproductive act in a population that seems to have problems reproducing in the first place?
---Why wouldn't such individuals, in fact, form a prestige class among the Vissians? ("Without us, you got squat!")

How false does a story have to be to its premise before certain parties wake up? If you're going to do "morality plays", you'd better be prepared for all the angles. The writers of this episode clearly were not.