browngirl

It's not obvious in the stories I've posted so far, but I've been thinking about Uhura since my first squeeinducing sight of her in the new movie. (I'm working on a couple of stories including her, but, well, they need work.) Most wonderfully, it was over a month until I ran into the inevitable nasty reaction some slash fans always seem to have to female characters, this time occasionally flavored with racism. (I am refraining from linking to examples for the sake of my blood pressure.) So I was considering writing about what the character of Uhura and the explicit Spock/Uhura relationship mean to me personally and what I think they signify globally (please don't tell me that because the character of Lieutenant Nyota Uhura is African that her conception and representation have nothing to do with the racial discourse of the US over the last fifty years).

rawles wrote the essay I would have wanted to had I let myself and took on some of the most prominent objections as well. So let me just link to those.

And no, I'm not saying "you must love this character or you're evil." De gustibus non disputandum, and all that. But so very often the reasons given for disliking her follow the same misogynist patterns that are given time and again for hating female characters, especially those seen as threatening a slash pairing, and I think that pattern needs to be noted and challenged.