There are many ways to queer a conversation, a policy, or a location. One would hope that I’m actively queering the internet with the simple act of writing this blog, but unfortunately queering as a method of interpretation is something I must quanitfy.

Given my research is focused around the queer subtext, coding, and baiting within the Star Trek franchise, I’ve tailored this article to fit within that area. This will change as the project progresses.

When measuring queerness in research, it’s important to devise a method of settling on key focus points or episodes. Looking deeper into my current ranking system, I’ve identified that the system may be susceptible to a ‘queerer-than-thou’ method of identification and measurement. Given the documented animosity of communities that adopt a ranking system for how queer someone/something is, I feel an ethical need to shift my ranking system away from this idea. The best starting point, for me, was to re-read and build further into Alexander Doty’s work, specifically around how queerness manifests in popular culture. He, within Making Things Perfectly Queer, discusses the ways in which media is ‘queered’ as a practice. These methods of queering manifest as: someone involved in the content creation intentionally embedding queerness, a contemporary cultural reading by queer individuals at the time of content release, and adopting a reception of the content in a way that can be considered “queer” in some way.

Each episode will be analysed using two of the three methods of queer reading created by Mark Lipton — negotiation of singular focus or character, and the ‘detective’ model or reading with the grain of the content. These methods, in conjunction with Doty’s aforementioned elements of ‘queering’, produce a less subjective, and less problematic method of noting something’s queerness, as well as the ‘how’ it is coded queer. This may serve a dual purpose, both in analysis of overarching concepts, and for further narrowing down of focus of episodes and films.

Expanding these criteria out into three key points, I’ve settled on:

1. Does it feel as if actors/producers who are queer identified or aligned had particular sway over this content?
   • For example; the scene in ‘The Naked Time’ episode of Star Trek – The Original Series in which Sulu removes his shirt and begins to stroke his sword and thrust it at other men on the ship, highlighting the phallic nature of the object, holds a queerness to it due to the open homosexuality of George Takei
2. Is there existing cultural reading and use of the text by self-identified ‘gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and queers’ from a specifically historical context?
   • For example; the concepts in the World Without Women chapter of In bed with Sherlock Holmes, in which a historical context is given for the queer readings within Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, despite the author’s views on homosexuality.
   • This will be significantly easier to achieve in modern trek (Star Trek – Discovery, Star Trek – Picard, Star Trek – Prodigy, and Star Trek – Strange New Worlds) as their ‘contemporary’ and ‘historical’ context is now.
3. Is it possible to take a position that can be considered to be “queer” in some way without breaking existing cannon? This isn’t contingent of a person’s declared ‘sexual and gender allegiances’.
   • The best example of this is ‘can it be shipped’. Has the online fandom used the text to generate para-textual narratives. The way I’ve been using this already is the ‘x’ concepts; Picard x Q, Picard x Riker, Geordi x Data, Kirk x Spock, etc.

I still intend to utilise my existing 1-10 rating scale in my notes, though I will try to unpack the queer coding within the text against the three Lipton-Doty principles outlined above.