A Woman in the Captain’s Chair, Trump in the White House

Thirty years after its premiere, David K. Seitz revisits “Star Trek: Voyager” and its groundbreaking first woman captain.

By David K. SeitzJanuary 16, 2025

• SF

• Television

TOWARD THE END of “Basics, Part I,” the cliff-hanger second-season finale of Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), Culluh (Anthony De Longis), a leader of a hostile extraterrestrial community called the Kazon, makes the persistence of patriarchy in Trek’s 24th century painfully clear. When Culluh and his crew seize the USS Voyager, the ship’s captain, the intrepid Kathryn Janeway, negotiates for her crew’s safety. Culluh responds by hitting her across the face.

All of Star Trek’s larger-than-life captains absorb more than their fair share of blows. Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s tenacity in the face of torture in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), for instance, remains one of Trek’s most salient images, as well as the source text for some of its campiest memes. But the words that accompany Culluh’s closed-hand slap—“You’ll be given no more respect than any Kazon woman, now that your ship and technology are mine”—leave little ambiguity as to the misogynist character of the violence directed at Janeway.

As a queer-feminist scholar and teacher and a Star Trek fan since childhood, I have found myself repeatedly returning to this scene, and to Voyager in general, since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016. The fifth television installment in the Trek metaseries, Voyager is perhaps best known as the first Trek franchise to cast a woman, the formidable Kate Mulgrew, in the lead role of commanding officer. January 16, 2025, marks the 30th anniversary of the program’s debut. Just four days later, a man with a long history of misogyny—a man who defeated the country’s first two women to become major-party presidential nominees in bitterly waged campaigns—will return to the White House. In such a moment, Culluh’s harsh gesture of misogynistic repudiation has come to feel both personal and broadly resonant. In such a moment, a return to Voyager—and to the apparently clear moral contrast it presents between the heroic Janeway and the odious Culluh—can seem to promise righteous consolation.

Perhaps part of what’s at stake in a look back at Voyager some three decades later are liberals’ own hopes for future vindication in a grim present. Captain Janeway’s seven-year quest to return her diverse crew, stranded in the galaxy’s far-flung Delta Quadrant, to their beloved, utopian 24th-century Earth has made the program a resonant text for contemporary efforts to imagine a renewed American idealism. True to Star Trek’s optimistic form, Culluh has, by the end of “Basics, Part II,” gotten his comeuppance, and Janeway and her crew have recovered their ship. And Voyager itself, although not as critically acclaimed as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99) or as commercially successful as The Next Generation, has been redeemed by its contemporary popularity on streaming platforms and its frequent invocation as a source of inspiration for women in politics and the sciences. Hailed by the Star Trek podcast Women at Warp as the first Trek series in which most episodes pass the Bechdel test, Voyager claims Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, and astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti among its high-profile devotees. Senator Cory Booker, for his part, attributed his 2020 presidential bid, launched with the slogan “Together, America, We Will Rise,” to a recently undertaken rewatch of Voyager’s 172 episodes.

Janeway’s position in the 1990s as Trek’s first woman captain, during an era when neoconservative “family values,” neoliberal “postfeminism,” and third-wave feminisms struggled for cultural dominance, was an impossible one, saddling both Mulgrew and the show’s writers with multiple, to some extent incommensurable, imperatives. But since first connecting with the character as what queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton would call a “proto-gay child” in the 1990s Midwest, I have always profoundly loved Voyager, and especially Janeway. Without knowing how formative queer-feminist solidarities would become (or perhaps, in retrospect, already were) for my intellectual and political development, something about Janeway’s quick wit and husky voice signaled to me that Voyager could be the kind of place where someone like me—an eccentric, nerdy, effeminate boy—could pursue knowledge and friendship as goods in themselves, away from the strictures of normative masculinity. I now teach a Star Trek course in the liberal arts department at a science and engineering institution that enrolls women and men in roughly equal numbers and has a significant number of LGBTQ+ students. When choosing an anchor text for the course, I often opt for Voyager precisely because of its feminist and queer valences.

Even so, in revisiting Voyager as it turns 30, what most strikes me is that there remains far more to the program, just as there is far more to our contemporary political conjuncture, than liberal or liberal feminist readings—which tend to privilege individual rights, representation, narratives of progress, and professional achievements over gender’s intimacy with larger-scale structural forces like capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism—permit us to see.

Take Janeway’s clashes with the Kazon, which begin in the series pilot and span much of Voyager’s first two seasons. The Kazon are, among other things, climate refugees, survivors of an atmospheric disaster induced by a powerful entity called the Caretaker, who left the surface of their world devoid of water. Although the Caretaker arranges climate reparations, he does so on decidedly selective terms, providing the Kazons’ neighbors, the Ocampa, with a lush underground paradise but barring any Kazon from entry. Where the Ocampa are largely fair-skinned and depicted as gentle and intelligent, the Kazon, who were based by Voyager writers on sensationalized media coverage of Los Angeles gang conflicts, have copper skin and textured hair. Despite all of Star Trek’s anti-racist bona fides, Janeway approves of the Caretaker’s racist projections, averring that the Ocampa must be protected from Kazon “greed.”

Although the Kazon do ultimately steal Voyager’s coveted Starfleet technology, then, they do so only after Janeway has deemed them morally unfit for such a transfer from a wealthy society to an impoverished one—a recurring point of contention in climate negotiations on our own planet. If the Kazon can thus be criticized as racial caricatures of the wretched of the Earth, they might at the same time be read as allegorizing unmet demands for global climate justice. In such light, we might understand Janeway as both a target of Culluh’s grievous misogyny and an unfortunate exemplar of what Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar call an “imperial feminism” and what Ajay Singh Chaudhary calls “right-wing climate realism,” representative of a wealthy society that hoards resources for weathering climate destruction. In our own time, as liberal officials embrace abortion rights with a long-awaited enthusiasm, but fracking and draconian border policies have seemingly become objects of a troubling bipartisan consensus, Janeway’s contradictions, and not only her vaunted heroism, are what make her both salient and enlightening.

Consider, too, the geopolitical subtext of what became Janeway’s most important relationship. Voyager arguably hit its stride in its fourth season with the addition of Jeri Ryan to the cast in the role of Seven of Nine, a strong-willed, hyperrational, glamorous young woman of human origin and a former member of the authoritarian Borg Collective. A great deal has been said about the off-screen conflict between Mulgrew and Ryan, much of which stemmed from Mulgrew’s objection to the addition of a “Borg babe” in an excruciatingly skintight bodysuit to a program with an ostensibly feminist premise. The tension between Seven’s insubordinate yet imperious demeanor and Janeway’s dauntless authority made for an electric on-screen dynamic.

But if the Janeway-Seven rapport is widely read for both its mother-daughter and its lesbian subtexts, Janeway’s “liberation” of Seven from the Borg against her will also reverberates uncomfortably in a moment when the cause of women’s rights continues to be appropriated to imperialist ends. When Seven condemns Janeway’s hypocrisy for forcibly removing her from the Borg, a collective often read as a phobic caricature of the groupthink that supposedly characterizes communist and Muslim polities, Janeway retorts, in the season four episode “The Gift,” that Seven “lost the capacity to make a rational choice the moment” she became Borg. “They took that from you, and until I’m convinced you’ve gotten it back, I’m making the choice for you.” On an allegorical level, this dispute between two characters portrayed by white women recalls Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the imperial-feminist wish to “save brown women from brown men.”

Many have observed that the dynamic between Janeway and Seven of Nine to some extent eclipsed other characters in Voyager’s last four seasons. For some, the writers’ choice to privilege Janeway, Seven, and the ship’s holographic doctor (Robert Picardo)—all compelling characters, but all played by white actors—represented a step back from the initial potential of the show’s racially diverse supporting cast, which to this day includes the Asian and Latinx actors with the most screen time in the Trek franchise. Yet we should not overlook installments in which Voyager’s supporting characters of color are, in fact, thoughtfully developed in ways that exceed liberal logics of identity.

The season five episode “The Disease,” for example, gives us a moving picture of operations officer Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) in a torrid, forbidden love affair with a dissident from a xenophobic society. Although the relationship cannot endure, the episode explodes stereotypes about Asians as compliant model minorities and imagines alternative forms of ethical response to emasculating racist tropes. Similarly, the season seven episode “Lineage” follows chief engineer B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson), who is of both human and Klingon ancestry but has deeply internalized the Federation’s anti-Klingon hatred, in her bid to racially “improve” the appearance of her unborn child. Exposing the limits of Starfleet’s “postracial” liberalism, “Lineage” rejects pseudoscientific racist “solutions” in favor of a capacious anti-eugenicist moral imagination that has been a core Trek principle from the franchise’s outset. As contemporary political pundits, rightly or wrongly, anticipate increasingly multiracial formations of the US political Right, Voyager’s supporting characters offer resources for understanding the fraught emotional dynamics of “minority” conservatisms, as well as for imagining more emancipatory options.

But the Voyager episodes that most captivated me on this rewatch—those that struck me as perhaps best anticipating and addressing the contradictions of our own times—were two Janeway-centric cliff-hangers: “Year of Hell” and “Equinox” (from seasons four through six).

“Year of Hell” pits Janeway against Annorax (Kurtwood Smith), a brilliant but morally vacuous scientist obsessively devoted to the restoration of his people’s imperial power by wielding a weapon that erases entire peoples and worlds from history. Behind Annorax’s technical devotion to this task, which he has pursued for over two centuries, are both the ever-elusive goal of restoring his dead wife and the unexamined presumption that his own personal loss and technocratic mastery of space and time permit him to elude ethical culpability for genocide. But the presence of Voyager—a rogue element from the other side of the galaxy unanticipated in Annorax’s calculations—undercuts these fantasies of omniscience, and he furiously pursues the ship’s destruction for over eight devastating months.

“Year of Hell” is best remembered for Janeway’s final iconic suicide run on Annorax’s ship, resetting the entire timeline with her quip, “Time’s up!” But I came away from this viewing with a new appreciation for the writers’ tight juxtaposition of Annorax’s imperial calculations with scenes set in Voyager’s newly opened astrometrics lab, a kind of 24th-century map room. Even as “Year of Hell” indicts Annorax as a genocidal maniac, then, it also suggests that both crews share an investment in the epistemic and political command of space and time, reminding us of geographical empiricism’s long and ongoing history of service to empire.

“Equinox” makes Starfleet’s latent imperial investments explicit, introducing a second Starfleet ship, the USS Equinox, that was stranded in the Delta Quadrant at the same time as Voyager. Though the crew is initially greeted as long-lost friends and fellow survivors, it soon becomes clear that the Equinox’s quest for home has relied on techniques far more insidious than even Janeway’s worst excesses: juicing its engines by killing and harvesting the energy-rich remains of hundreds of sentient extraterrestrial life forms—shrieking, winged fauna that look something like a cross between a butterfly and a bat, and that menace the Equinox like 24th-century Furies. Though Equinox captain Rudy Ransom (John Savage) defends this genocidal extractivism with a mix of grim pragmatism and Starfleet protocol, Janeway is unequivocal: “I doubt that protocol covers mass murder.” She relentlessly pursues the Equinox, seeking “poetic justice” even over the objections of her senior staff. Perhaps the most compelling (and damning) image that “Equinox” offers for our own perilous moment is that of an embattled Ransom, grimly resigned to his deadly undertaking and mentally checking out via a virtual reality neural interface, until even he can’t hide from Janeway and the Furies anymore and has an unexpected change of heart.

The risk of a look back at Voyager is a lapse into nostalgia for the putative optimism and innocence of the 1990s. Such a longing suffuses contemporary political and cultural discourse across the mainstream ideological spectrum, palpable in idealizations of everyone from the Clintons to Trump to, say, Jennifer Aniston or David Duchovny. It is broadly true that the culture industry’s escapism can pacify audiences and manufacture their consent, fueling the forms of dissociation that at once conceal and legitimate ongoing genocides in Gaza, the Congo, and elsewhere. But as “Equinox” in particular suggests, perhaps Star Trek’s little morality tales, through figures such as Janeway and her foes, remain valuable insofar as they indict both mass commercial entertainment’s complicity and our own.

Revisiting Voyager for its contradictions need not mean loving it or its captain any less. Indeed, many of my students who share an appreciation for Janeway are also thoughtful and brave advocates on a host of international solidarity and anti-genocide concerns. If we can muster the maturity and critical intelligence to look back to the 1990s for more than consolation—if we are open, in other words, to mapping the contradictions that still define culture and politics in our colonial but contestable present—then a look at back Voyager can prove all the more enlightening.