Star Trek’s Temporal Cyborgs: Disability, Narrative, and Curative Time

Abstract

Cyborgs allow Star Trek to represent disability in the future without naming it. Speculative medical technology “cures” disabled bodies, yet the exaggerated visuality of the cyborg also emphasizes disability’s indelible presence. These cyborgs materialize the hegemony of curative time, the ableist compulsion to perceive disability as an untenable state of non-life and so demand its immediate cure at all costs. Cure in media often entails violent erasure in the form of character death, removal from the narrative, or obfuscation through cyborgism. However, cyborg characters as complex assemblages of technology and ideology have the capacity to signify multiply. The cyborg’s contentious nature discourages us from analyzing such characters within a binary framework of “good” or “bad” disability representations. This article instead proposes “curative narrative time” as a new critical analytic allowing disability media studies to examine the understudied temporal dimension of disability representation. In the case study of Star Trek, the concept of curative narrative time enables us to critique the franchise’s structural ableism without discrediting all the critical potential of its disabled cyborgs. Celebrating cyborgs like Geordi La Forge who refuse erasure of their disabilities, seeking out disability in cyborgs like Paul Stamets who are presumed able-bodied, and acknowledging the dis/ability ramifications of all characters becoming increasingly cyborg through embodied technologies allows us to assemble these fragments into a crip imagined future while interrogating the limits of the franchise’s contemporary paradigm of disability representation.