The Worlds of Farscape (29 page)

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Elizabeth Leigh Scherman

“Get your big blue butt down here!”

Astronaut John Crichton is shouting to his crewmate, the blue-skinned Delvian priest Zhaan, to come take a shift watching a suspicious guest, Traltixx. Crichton later calls the ship's navigator “Shell head” and the imposing, tentacled D'Argo “Grizzly” and “Medusa.” In “Crackers Don't Matter” (2.4), the crewmembers of the living ship Moya are under the influence of the maniacal Traltixx, and they are acting even more dysfunctional than usual. Pejoratives fly. Any corporeal or behavioral peculiarity among the group is grist for name-calling.

“Retard.”

“Cripple.”

“Idiot.”

These are among the terms we hear in our own society that label those among us who are perceived as having corporeal or behavioral peculiarities. It is amusing when Crichton calls his fellow shipmates names based on their bodies, and Zhaan takes little offense at being told she has a big blue butt. Among our fellow shipmates on this planet Earth, name-calling can signify disempowering rhetoric used by members of the dominant society over those less empowered; but, it can also signify camaraderie, equality, and reclamation of erstwhile pejorative words and imagery among those whom society has treated as outcasts. Science fiction can free us to consider variation and peculiarity from a brash and fearless point of view, but its location in fantastical worlds complicates our own human experiences of embodiment.

In a place such as Moya, the living craft that harbors the outcasts of many societies in the television series
Farscape
, every individual is singular. No two bodies are exactly the same, but this does not mean that discrimination does not exist on Moya. Each inhabitant of Moya has his or her own strengths and abilities, some of which prove to benefit the entire crew. However, each character also has his or her peculiarities that can create barriers to the group's goals. Thus, these individuals
impair
Moya with their personalities, bodily limitations, and sensory needs or limitations. In addition, they are sometimes viewed as impaired by their fellow travelers, that is, they are seen as having inferior bodies, minds, or senses. We who view the adventures of the
Farscape
travelers from the “outside” may laugh at the names they call one another and the judgment that they place on one another's bodies and behaviors, from friendly teasing to outright condemnation. Yet what we are witnessing is not, in the end, a story about aliens, but a story about ourselves.

Writing about
Farscape,
Jes Battis identifies such diverse bodies as “transgressive” and includes bodies of “women, Aboriginal peoples, poor communities, and transgendered people” in this group (Battis 120). Missing from Battis' list are
disabled people—
a population, despite encompassing one in five of us—whose existence is often absent in discussions about identity. This paper addresses that void and examines
Farscape
through the lens of disability.

What is disability? It is, ultimately, whatever the spectator or a society decides it to be. In a place where everyone is different, where each body is marvelously unique, it may be argued that disability ceases to exist; that no form of embodiment is superior to another. We might then approach
Farscape
as an icon of inclusion, as the “utopian village” described by disability activist Vic Finkelstein: a world where there are no barriers, and thus no impairment (“Attitudes
”)
. However, we would be mistaken. Disability does exist in
Farscape
, and its presence even among “transgressive” bodies informs our understanding of the discriminatory nature of disabling.

It might be helpful at this point to emphasize the ideological framework that underlies the very rhetoric of what we in this time and place call
disability
. A key area of debate is the idea of the
disability/impairment
dichotomy, which originated in the British disability model and has been put forth by pioneering social modelists such as Paul Hunt, Vic Finkelstein, Paul Abberly, Mike Oliver, Lennard Davis, and others. Colin Barnes writes that the social model of disability emphasizes the
accountability of society
toward people whose bodies or minds are considered to be
impaired
rather than on the personal, individual experience of disability (Barnes “Disabling Imagery” 5). Tom Shakespeare describes this approach as the belief that disability is an act of society and that “rather than the individual with the impairment being the problem, the problem is the failure of systems and environments to include and accommodate that person” (23). Both Finkelstein and Paul Abberly propose a purely social constructionist model of impairment by suggesting that in a utopian environment, there would be no impairments. However, Finkelstein cautions that the experience of being disabled is a “dynamic relationship between people with unique physical attributes (impairments) and the particular social and physical environment in which they function” (“Attitudes” 18). This description fits the world of
Farscape
to a ‘T': each traveler on Moya certainly has distinctive physical (and cognitive/behavioral) attributes, but they are not considered impairments by the owners of those attributes. The ‘impairment,' or disablement, comes about largely due to the reactions of others.

Most disability studies researchers, however, do not necessarily believe that impairment cannot be the physiological characteristic of a body, but rather that there is a distinction between an
atypical body
or mind/behavior
(and the argument can be made that each body on Moya is “atypical” both to the spectator and to the fellow travelers) and the deliberate social and political
discrimination
which results from that reality. Early British activists explained it this way: “It is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society” (UPIAS, 176:3, cited in Shakespeare 30). In the Amendments to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, the term disability includes
being regarded as having such an impairment
(emphasis mine). It may be the characters in the
Farscape
universe, or those of us who are watching them on the screen, or both, who regard a particular character as having an impairment. Thus what we continue to see in episodes of
Farscape
are
acts of discrimination
or
disabling behavior
based upon one or more members of
Farscape
regarding another character as being deficient or impaired in some way, based on appearance or behavior. Inescapably, this on-screen event of discrimination lends itself to a multiplicity of readings,
but disability is the reading that I will extract and defend,
not as the “correct” reading, but as one reading which the text invites and which has the power to enable new or resistive conceptualizations of disability.

To that end, this essay explores two aspects of
Farscape
: first, the patterns or predictable signifiers (both corporeal and rhetorical) by which individuals in the episodes are perceived as inferior or impaired, and the implications these signifiers carry for our own society; and second, the paradigm of astronaut John Crichton as himself impaired/disabled within the alien world of Moya and her travels, and the lens this offers us toward our understanding of disability as a social construction.

Science fiction and fantastical worlds have been valued by many as holding the potential to be an inspiration of inclusivity (see, for example, Battis; Einstein; Neale; Henderson and associates) in which creatures and individuals of many different species or variations must cooperate in order to reach a common goal. Stephen Neale writes: “The issue of humanness lies at the heart of science fiction” (102). It is notable, then, when within such a diverse environment—and Moya is certainly one—certain characters are more likely than others to be devalued or judged
prima facie
based on their corporeal appearance or performance, that is, their body or their behavior. These characters may be suspect, if not identified as outright evil, from the moment they walk onto the screen, and it is not uncommon for them to be shunned or even annihilated before the episode is over. A more subtle form of discrimination is to relegate such characters to the role of comic relief, positions that are often asexual and less empowered than others in their society.

Whereas all individuals may be seen as having the potential to be marginalized in
Farscape
, depending upon the situation and the society/world they encounter, certain characters persist on the fringe even of those margins. They are on the far outside borders of society, and more often than not, we identify them as such from the moment they enter the story. These characters are
disabled—
discriminated against based on perceived inferiority—in repeated instances. Over time, patterns have emerged in television and cinema regarding the types of bodies and behaviors that point to or “signify” an undesirable or inferior being. These signifiers provide clues as to what “differences” in our own society we still consider to be undesirable, despite our self-righteous claims of inclusivity. There are many such signifiers in classic science fiction that are echoed in
Farscape,
but the examples I investigate here are
age
and
blindness or atypical vision
. These corporeal peculiarities have parallels to life experiences in our own world, and we, like the community of Moya, are often too quick to judge or discriminate in response to them. When characters with these qualities appear on the screen, they are rarely incidental. Their presence carries meaning, whether maleficence, wisdom, or pathos. This meaning may be constructed in the minds of those on Moya as well as in the minds of those of us who watch
Farscape
.