What Khan a feminist geopolitics do?

It may seem blithe or even intellectually arrogant to open a discussion of such an erudite, thoughtful text as Feminist Geopolitics with an epigram from Star Trek II. In my defense, most critics agree that The Wrath of Khan was the best of the films with the original cast. Further, the text practically begs for such a move. Let me elaborate. The plot of the film revolves around the Genesis device, which was designed to take inert, dead planets and terraform them into earth-like ‘Class M’ planets that could subsequently be colonized by the United Federation of Planets. Reducing the planet to subatomic particles and then reassembling it in a new, more vital form would enable new life forms to be deposited, including humans. As such, Genesis speaks quite clearly to the themes that animate Dixon’s book: both the inchoate, latent fertility to be found in all (heavenly) bodies and also the way in which that immanence is always profoundly gendered and vulnerable to state intervention. It is not a coincidence that such dead astral bodies are referred to as ‘barren’ and that the subsequent colonization by the quasi-military Starfleet was intended to head off other reproductive profligacies of the flesh: overpopulation and subsequent food shortages. That Dr Marcus—the creator of Genesis—is also the mother of Admiral James T. Kirk’s only son only further freights the anxieties around social reproduction in the film. But there is yet another reason to open with The Wrath of Khan, and that is the role of the Genesis device in terraforming here on earth. By that, I mean that the film was a breakthrough in the world of cinematic special effects; the simulation of the ‘Genesis effect’ was reportedly the first-ever film scene in which everything on the screen is a computer-generated image (CGI). In other words, the scene itself was the first-ever assembling of a lively world from a range of purely digital materials (Price, 2009). The leap forward made in the film involved both the layering of various fully digital elements (atmosphere, craters, stars, and so on) to compose the new world and also the use of fractal images to lend complexity and ‘liveliness’ to the resultant moving image. This breakthrough opened up new virtual spaces of the geowhen allied with the exponential increases in computing power that have pushed CGI so far in the intervening 35 years. Therefore, in both plot and form, The Wrath of Khan is aligned with Feminist Geopolitics (albeit far less sophisticated but with better action sequences). In what follows I first trace the points of connection between this book and its eponymous literature while simultaneously highlighting the quite important divergences. I conclude with a few comments on the ‘immaterial state’ in this account of geopolitics.