“Spock’s Brain” and the Perpetuation of Sexist Control
Regular readers will have noted that though Star Trek is discussed often in this space, not once have I discussed The Original Series. I rarely watch it. There are a handful of good science fiction episodes, but most of the series lacks everything that equates to quality and more than a few are prime examples of being subject to its time, perpetuating stereotypes and dogmatic, oppressive ideas. One such episode is “Spock’s Brain.” I am aware it is a fan favorite due to the novelty of Spock continuing to function, his mind and body, after his brain has been removed. I understand. Viewers are having fun with it. A closer look at “Spock’s Brain” will show that the episode seeks to perpetuate sexist and controlling ideas about women and suppress women’s freedom.
Please allow me to borrow the phrasing from this article, “Climate Change Isn’t Sexist, but The Way We Talk About It Is,” and put forward that science fiction isn’t sexist, but the way it is sometimes presented is. This post will allow a very easy understanding of how “Spock’s Brain” not only reinforces traditional dangerous sexist ideas, but seeks to push back against the women’s movement of the 1950s and 1960s as well. In all, the messaging of the episode is that women’s independence is a threat to men and should be countered through any means of control.
Sigma Draconis VI was a planet that had once been highly advanced, but fell into an extended ice age. As a result when Kirk and the landing team beam down they find men behaving in an archetypal, primitive manner. These men could barely speak coherently. They did not have more advanced tribal clothing making techniques. They only understood that they must attack the landing party. They are the essence of barbarians. This planet has a separation between men and women. The women leave literal man traps in cave walls, with food and weapons, hoping to capture men to enslave them. This is what Star Trek of the 1960s is reflecting as a threat from women who are empowered. The danger that these men fall into to if they are trapped is they will have a belt placed around their waist that will cause immobilizing pain if they do not behave according to the women’s will. The women, of course, have complete control over them. The women live underground where it is warm and they have a futuristic environment full of the comforts of a more advanced civilization. Neither the men or the women have a concept of mating, it is shown, and we will come back to this later.
When Kirk and the landing party try to talk to Kara, the leader among the women on the planet, she is presented as the other women, too feeble to carry on a conversation. They try to convince her to give Spock’s brain back and she is shown to not have the capacity to understand what even a small child would understand. Here the men on the surface are demonstrated as mentally weak due to women controlling the planet and the women are shown to be mentally weak to reinforce ideas about women who have too much freedom. Why do I put this forward. Observe Kara’s behavior over the course of their conversation. She cannot control herself. She demonstrated all the listed “symptoms” of the once common diagnosis of Hysteria. Please see my article, “Hysteria in the Late Nineteenth-Century,” for a detailed analysis. Hysteria was a diagnosis given to white, middle and upper class women through the most unscientific means that were only men’s attempt to enforce their own power of influence and control to make women feeble and subjected.
The often repeated line from Kara, showing her as out of control and not able to understand her surroundings, “Brain, brain! What is brain?” is a clear example that women left in positions of equality will lose their grip on sanity. From my linked article above,
Hysteria was more than just a simple disease, Laura Briggs writes. It was “the way nineteenth-century U.S. and European cultures made sense of women’s changing roles” such as “their increasing participation in a (rapidly changing) public sphere, paid employment, and declining fertility” (246). It is interesting to emphasize that Briggs, like other scholars, represents hysteria as a condition imposed on white women. There were racial elements to this diagnosis. Briggs also points out that it was a condition that middle class white women were subject to as lower class white women and women of color were understood to not be subject to the consequences of “overcivilization” (Briggs 246). However, Augustine and the other women profiled in Asti Hustvedt’s book, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Ninteenth-Century Paris, were poor, lower class women and girls (Hustvedt 4). The three women profiled in this book “lived at a time when women were exclusively defined through their relations with men. Fatherless, unmarried, and poor, these three women found themselves in a world that had little use for them” (Hustvedt 4). One has to make the conclusion that hysteria was forced upon women of all classes, as “overcivilization” for middle class women and by association an extension of that subversive criminality for lower class women.
Spock, who has taken the role of the “Controller” in this episode that will see to the protection and livelihood of the women underground is completely fine, even when his brain having been removed from his body. If that terminology is not enough, the women, or the Eymorgs (the brute men on the surface were named Morgs), were call “the Others.” At the time, Other was a term already being used among philosophers and critical thinkers and writers, but had not made its way into the vernacular as it has today. However, today, an objective mind can clearly see what is being said.
To say that the women who lived in comfort had childlike minds would not be fair. They were less mentally capable than a child. They were othered. Meanwhile, the men were forced to live on the freezing surface in the most primitive conditions were portrayed as victims. The messaging taking place is clearly a push-back against the greater liberties women have gained in the 1950s and 1960s, being far more common in the workforce and gaining greater autonomy than in generations prior. The growing feminist movement of the 1960s may have been a prime target of the threat of empowered women depicted in this episode all while stripping women of their agency.
I am aware it would be argued by some that the ending of this episode which sees Spock’s brain returned to him and the end of the Controller (and female superiority) might be seen as victory for parity. Kirk attempts to explain to Kara that life will be different. What Kirk believes he is doing is bringing women and men on the planet together again so that they can be mates (I told you I would come back to this) and presumably restores an equality of the sexes. However, it can also be argued that Kirk is again playing the role of the arbiter of gender. Consider Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s often read and studied short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Paula Treichler, in her essay, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” (1984, Tulsa Studies of Women’s Literature) states that the yellow wallpaper “is a metaphor for women’s discourse” (62). On the surface women’s expressiveness reveals systems of contradictions but once liberated “it expresses what is elsewhere kept hidden and embodies patterns that the patriarchal order ignores, suppresses, fears as grotesque, or fails to perceive at all” (Treichler 62). In being deprived from her creative expression the narrator projects the contradictions of her diagnosis and prescribed therapy onto the patterns and design – the makeup – of the wallpaper. In questioning the integrity of the design of the wallpaper she is calling into question the validity of her husband’s diagnosis and prescribed cure. What Captain Kirk has just done on this planet is to enable men to again prescribe cures for women who seek creativity and freedom. Kirk is in fact the man replacing the Controller and enforcing a “cure” that will dominate women on this planet for generations to come.