By Tav Nyong’o
7. It’s S/K, not K/S (yes, it matters)
I never quite got it, by the way. Slash fiction, that is: the fan genre of narrative that fantasizes catching Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Mister Spock in flagrante delicto. I’ll say it here: William Shatner does nothing for me. And I think I identify too much as a Vulcan to really relish being with a Vulcan like Leonard Nimoy. So despite a queer trekkie, I never “shipped” Kirk and Spock, as the kids now say. At least not until the latest reboot of the franchise — with its casting of queer, doe-eyed Zachary Pinto in the role a knowing wink at its shipping audience — practically begged me to.
6. Slash is neither the love of sameness nor of difference, but of the performative punctuation of the two

One received wisdom holds that slash fiction is actually a genre written by and for straight women, who insist on projecting romantic scenarios where no screenwriter had gone before. Despite being an ardent Trekkie, I have however never really immersed myself in this particular fan archive, so I just, a bit idly, imagine slash to be a kind of feminine ecriture, a queer feminist rewriting of a master text whose blatant violations of the Bechdel test admits no possible response short of a complete transcoding. In this world, Kirk and Spock are not lonely bachelors stranded in space, but loving bedfellows who exchange thoughts and sentiments (the one more thought, the other more sentiment) and give themselves over to langour and play.
I suspect, nonetheless, as does the cartoonist below, that any number of straight men also “ship” Kirk/Spock (probably, fewer I am guessing ship Spock/Kirk). I have no novel theory of heteroflexibility to offer to account for this: Freud taught us a century ago that everyone is capable of making a same sex object choice and in fact has already done so in their unconscious. And if shipping is just having a wet dream under erasure, perhaps it is no surprise to find Kirk and Spock still secluding themselves from this generation’s pornographic spotlight. Not closeted, not self-hating, they are simply discreet. Three’s a crowd.
5. Spock is a Jew
4. Spock is Asian, and a woman
The orientalist overcoding of the Vulcans as some ancient wise race from the East increasingly finds a contemporary sequel in manga depictions of an Asian Spock and blond Kirk. Again, I have no theories beyond the obvious nod to postmodern pastiche and cultural globalization, but I do find it both interesting (and maybe even a bit worrisome) that K/S should be pulled out of taciturn obscurity and made to conform too easily to a legible East/West dualism. On the other hand, when the creativity capacity of queer fabulists the world over fully outstrip the source text, they unsettle a certain white supremacist logic of discovery and conquest, opening outer space to other, decolonial uses.
It is also interesting to see the loving pair grow younger as they age, a fate as inapposite as that of the original Number One in the un-signed 1964 pilot for Star Trek, played by Majel Barrett. Somehow the brainy, intellectual foil to the passionate captain did not scan for studio executives when that foil was female bodied. Although Spock appears in that original pilot, he steps into the Barrett’s role as number one in the series proper, and, thereby, into the romantic sub-plot of aloof feminine reserve played against passionate male impetuousness that she had set up in that unnumbered, unaired episode.
The original pilot didn’t feature the African American starfleet member Lt. Uhura, but it was a story — deemed “too cerebral” by the network — of human captivity. Captain Pike (Kirk’s predecessor) is trapped by an alien race, the Talosians, who tries to get him to reproduce with another human, captured in an earlier crash, in order to generate a servile class. He is obliged to make love to a trapped woman at the pain of being sent mad by the mind-controlling Talosians, Vina, but his contempt and hatred of being enslaved prove too strong. (This is a classic motif in the white mythology of Anglo-Saxon liberty by the way: slavery may be a condition suited for other, lesser races, but not for us!) While the Talosians snare the two additional women from the starship Enterprise, the Captain won’t deign to mate with them either (female willingness and suitability for both marriage and slavery is, of course, assumed by both the Talosians and the screenwriters of this teleplay). Having survived a raw clash of wills, the Talosians give up and return all three starfleet members to the ship, leaving behind Vina who, it is revealed (spoiler alert) is not young and beautiful, but aged and grotestquely disfigured from her crash. Too late to be rescued by reality, Vina waves a sad goodbye to the Captain before walking off, hand in hand with the illusion of him created for her by the Talosians.
I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?
And that I was a maiden Queen:
Guarded by an Angel mild;
Witless woe, was ne’er beguil’d!
And I wept both night and day
And he wip’d my tears away
And I wept both day and night
And hid from him my hearts delight
So he took his wings and fled:
Then the morn blush’d rosy red:
I dried my tears & armd my fears,
With ten thousand shields and spears.
Soon my Angel came again:
I was arm’d, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.
Blake is K/S, by the way, I think. At least in his dreams.
3. Spock isn’t Black, but Star Trek began as a captivity narrative
Are shippers just digging deeper into homonormative pathologies, or are they displaying the restless and recombinant inventiveness of a connective generation, when they attempt to resolve the real contradictions of race, gender, and sexuality by reimagining slash fiction, beyond the erotic dyad, as a kind of super team: S/U/K?
2. Where life is an illusion, love is only logical.
The enduring appeal of slash, such as I can discern it, is that even the nerdy, awkward, overly rational and reticent can and need love. I doubt this appeal has lost its relevance in our era of alleged nerd ascendancy. Anyway, Spock wasn’t that nerdy, wasn’t that geeky. He was aloof and enigmatic, loyal and logical, cool and conflicted. Now that the actor who created the role has passed on, the actor who succeeded him might be able to perform out from under his long shadow. More likely, however, as Joseph Roach notes of all acts of surrogation, the real replacement for Spock will be found elsewhere than in his official successor.
1. Number your days
Spock cannot be replaced. He is finite, and falls back into the one. An alert shipper notes that the hashtag #LLAP may be too crypto-Christian in its patterns of memorialization, especially in the image of an afterlife that is implicitly promised. The Vulcan do not offer that sign to the dead. When Spock or Kirk die (as they seem to die repeatedly in the incompossible worlds of Star Trek, where Adam sins and does not sin) the surviving lover refuses to receive a parting benediction in his mourning. Live long and prosper? I shall do neither. Live long and prosper. No.
The shipped and the bereft are thus brought back to the one, which teaches us to number our days, that we might get a head of wisdom.
In Memoriam: Leonard Simon Nimoy. Mar 26, 1931 – Feb 27, 2015