What Khan a feminist geopolitics do?

Genesis

It may seem blithe or even intellectually arrogant to open a discussion of such an erudite, thoughtful text as Feminist Geopolitics with an epigram from Star Trek II. In my defense, most critics agree that The Wrath of Khan was the best of the films with the original cast. Further, the text practically begs for such a move. Let me elaborate.

The plot of the film revolves around the Genesis device, which was designed to take inert, dead planets and terraform them into earth-like ‘Class M’ planets that could subsequently be colonized by the United Federation of Planets. Reducing the planet to subatomic particles and then reassembling it in a new, more vital form would enable new life forms to be deposited, including humans. ¹ As such, Genesis speaks quite clearly to the themes that animate Dixon’s book: both the inchoate, latent fertility to be found in all (heavenly) bodies and also the way in which that immanence is always profoundly gendered and vulnerable to state intervention. It is not a coincidence that such dead astral bodies are referred to as ‘barren’ and that the subsequent colonization by the quasi-military Starfleet was intended to head off other reproductive profligacies of the flesh: overpopulation and subsequent food shortages. That Dr Marcus—the creator of Genesis—is also the mother of Admiral James T. Kirk’s only son only further freights the anxieties around social reproduction in the film.

But there is yet another reason to open with The Wrath of Khan, and that is the role of the Genesis device in terraforming here on earth. By that, I mean that the film was a breakthrough in the world of cinematic special effects; the simulation of the ‘Genesis effect’ was reportedly the first-ever film scene in which everything on the screen is a computer-generated image (CGI). In other words, the scene itself was the first-ever assembling of a lively world from a range of purely digital materials (Price, 2009). The leap forward made in the film involved both the layering of various fully digital elements (atmosphere, craters, stars, and so on) to compose the new world and also the use of fractal images to lend complexity and ‘liveliness’ to the resultant moving image. ² This breakthrough opened up new virtual spaces of the geo- when allied with the exponential increases in computing power that have pushed CGI so far in the intervening 35 years. Therefore, in both plot and form, The Wrath of Khan is aligned with Feminist Geopolitics (albeit far less sophisticated but with better action sequences). In what follows I first trace the points of connection between this book and its eponymous literature while simultaneously highlighting the quite important divergences. I conclude with a few comments on the ‘immaterial state’ in this account of geopolitics.

Contiguities and divergences

Feminist Geopolitics is a powerful manifesto for how thinking in feminist materialism can inform existing research in feminist geopolitics, which has typically taken a more subject-centered notion of the body as its object. Instead of following this tradition, Dixon—drawing on thinkers such as Braidotti (2008) and Grosz (2008)—articulates a different vision that nevertheless shares certain core concerns. For instance, Feminist Geopolitics is particularly interested in the monstrosity of bodies that are neither this-nor-that, and which blur the binaries that underpin our contemporary geopolitical order. Obviously gender is one of these binaries, and here, Dixon is solidly in line with the agenda of the broader feminist geopolitics literature. Yet Dixon goes further by exploring the world of the semi-living, from stem cells to BioArt. We might include the Genesis planet in this category as similarly monstrous, its tremendous vitality both invigorating (spoiler alert: it literally brings Spock back to life) and ultimately the cause of its own destruction. Like a cancer, the planet is vital excess that is simultaneously life and death incarnate.

The Genesis planet is also monstrous in its uncanny (for 1982) CGI combination of virtuality and reality. Dixon asks,

If we no longer afford a common sense reality to those topographic representations of a globe composed of externalized physical features overlain by sharp lines that tell us where nation-states begin and end, then what other imaginaries can come to the fore as a means of configuring such an Earthly geography? (Dixon, 2015: 180)

This haptic sensibility is not only in terms of her selection of topics (she has a whole chapter dedicated to abhorrence) but also in terms of the spaces formed through relations, which—much like the Vulcan mind-meld and nerve-pinch—rely on contiguity for the conducting of affects. The embodiment of Feminist Geopolitics is not merely the situatedness of a perspective or a subject position, as it can sometimes be in the wider literature. Rather, it is a sense of the body as something fleshy, decomposable, potentially networked or augmented, and so on. This is a refreshing framing that opens up a great many new topics for consideration, as Dixon demonstrates through her eclectic tour of European and North American history. Of particular note is the attention that she lavishes on bones, the materialized evidence of geopolitical (and other) traumas. One needs a (literally) posthuman perspective on bodies to lavish attention on these artifacts.

A final touchstone with the wider feminist geopolitics literature is Dixon’s interest in a progressive geopolitics. In most of the feminist geopolitics literature, there is a strong emphasis on activism and indeed on the everyday work of those beyond the academy who perform a feminist geopolitics without any of the labels attached (e.g. Koopman, 2011). Dixon is obviously supportive of this activism and yet strikes a different note:

I want to conclude […] by insisting that though such a molar politics can certainly help to advance women’s self-determination in specific contexts, thus enhancing their capacities for action and thus their materially composed selves, it can also congeal women’s possibilities for becoming, as well as the very notion of what a feminist project is. (Dixon, 2015: 183)

Dixon’s aforementioned emphasis on touch and a haptic sensibility appears to be more than a strategic choice; it strikes me as a metaphor for the relationship between Feminist Geopolitics and feminist geopolitics. This work has many points of connection to feminist geopolitics but is invested in its own creative processes of differentiation and becoming. I suspect many will subsequently bristle at the enclosure enacted by the simplicity of the title, as a book that is clearly marking out new posthuman terrain is seemingly positioned as the definitive statement. Nevertheless, the question that Dixon asks in the title of chapter 1 (‘What can a feminist geopolitics do?’) is undoubtedly clear by the end of chapter 7: a whole lot.

Immaterial states?

One facet of the book that gives me pause, however, is the relative absence of the state in this theoretical account of geopolitics. That is not to say that the state does not feature; it can be found all through the case studies, from early military surgeons to state-sponsored stem cell banks. And indeed, Dixon highlights that feminist thought has been ‘open to recognizing, describing and thinking about approaches that imagined the geo- and –politics in ways that did not take the state for granted’ (Dixon, 2015: 22). Nevertheless, Dixon repeatedly takes aim at the discourses of classical geopolitics, especially the Westphalian state system and the social Darwinism of realpolitik. Certainly, these discourses are—as has been well-documented—ripe for demolition. Nevertheless, I would have liked to see Dixon put her prodigious intellectual resources—especially given the book’s subtitle—toward a generative theorizing of the state through the lens of feminist materialism. Perhaps, like The Wrath of Khan, a sequel is in the offing?